Meeting the Challenge: - The Council of Independent Colleges

Welch Suggs
The president, in his fifth year at Salem, was far from
elated. Salem was a small college affiliated with the Seventh-
Day Baptist Church and was just beginning to professionalize
its administration. The college was not accredited by the
Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, and the Ford
Foundation had said it would grant funds only to colleges
with regional accreditation. Hurley contacted the foundation,
where an officer told him with deep embarrassment that the
foundation had intended to make the grant to another Salem
College, a women’s college in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
The experience epitomized Hurley’s deepest
frustration as a college president. Small colleges like his
were respectable educational institutions—Salem had
graduated four United States Senators and two West
Virginia governors—but meeting the benchmarks required
for regional accreditation had never been a need or a
priority. Now, Salem, like many small colleges, needed the
imprimatur of a regional accreditor to receive money from
foundations, corporations, and other sources. But to qualify
for accreditation—by having “a strong curriculum, sound
teaching methods, library facilities, and financial solvency,”
as summarized by a New York Times writer—they needed to
raise money and spend it on improvements to meet those
standards. Hurley and others termed this the “vicious circle”
in which small colleges were trapped.
Shortly after the Ford Foundation episode,
Hurley and two staffers identified 125 colleges in the same
position as Salem: lacking regional accreditation but having
credits approved by state departments of education, state
universities, or other accredited colleges or universities. He
wrote to them asking for accounts of any experiences similar
to his own that he could share with foundation officers and
invited them to discuss ways they could work together to
improve their common situation.
He received an enthusiastic response, and scheduled
a meeting in conjunction with a conference of the North
1956
The first meeting of the college officials
who would form the Council for the
Advancement of Small Colleges is held at
the Palmer House, Chicago. Alfred T. Hill is
named Executive Secretary of CASC.
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