Meeting the Challenge: - The Council of Independent Colleges

From Accreditation to Validation: CIC’s First Half-Century
CIC is the only national organization today that
focuses solely on providing services directly to independent
colleges and universities. To fulfill its mission, CIC provides
ideas, resources, and programs that help institutions
improve their leadership expertise, educational programs,
administrative and financial performance, and institutional
visibility. CIC’s growth is testament to the need for such
an organization. Since 1990, CIC has nearly doubled its
membership, expanding far beyond the small and somewhat
isolated colleges that comprised its charter members. Today,
CIC institutions are drawn from across the spectrum of
independent higher education, including selective liberal arts
colleges, medium-sized private universities, religious colleges,
historically black colleges, and single-sex institutions.
This is the history of an organization and a history
of its motivating ideas. The ideas have made the organization
distinctive among associations of higher education, giving its
members the professional development, resources, and tools
they need to show the American public how crucial small
colleges will always be in the ongoing challenge to produce
an educated citizenry.
“The Noise You Hear is Progress”
CIC got its start in the years after World War II as an
organization of colleges trying to help themselves. It was not
an advocacy group, but instead enabled like-minded college
leaders to share ways of raising money and gaining regional
accreditation.
In December 1955, K. Duane Hurley received a
letter from the Ford Foundation in his office at Salem College
in West Virginia. The foundation had just announced a $210
million initiative to supplement faculty salaries at 630 private
colleges, whose enrollments were burgeoning as soldiers
returned to school on the GI Bill. Salem College, Hurley was
informed, was to be one of the recipients.
CASC/CIC Timeline
1955
Frustrated by the inability to
attract funding due to his college’s
lack of regional accreditation,
Duane Hurley, then-president of
Salem College (WV), organizes
a meeting for leaders from
institutions in the same position.
64