Meeting the Challenge: - The Council of Independent Colleges

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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. 65
From Accreditation to Validation: CIC’s First Half-Century Geographic distribution of CASC colleges as of November 1, 1957 Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools. The meeting was held on April 9, 1956 at the Palmer House hotel in Chicago. Representatives from 80 colleges, as well as foundation and association staffers, showed up for two sessions titled “The Colleges Look at Themselves” and “Industry Looks at the Colleges.” Apologetic construction signs at the Palmer House read “The Noise You Hear Is Progress,” and the attendees adopted that phrase as their slogan. The group decided they needed a self-help organization. In barely a day, a set of committees organized by Hurley came up with a name, a purpose, membership qualifications, and personnel. His choice was the “Fund for Forgotten Colleges,” but the group decided instead to call itself the Council for the Advancement of Small Colleges. Its mission was to preserve and enhance the small college as a vital component of higher education in the United States. The Council would be a service organization designed to help colleges improve their educational programs, thus enabling them to obtain accreditation. Hurley served as the first president of the group, but CASC’s board of directors decided the following month that a full-time staff member was needed. Alfred T. Hill of the Council for Financial Aid to Education was named Executive Secretary and assumed his duties on September 1, 1956. 1958 First edition of The Directory of Small Colleges is published. 1959 McGraw-Hill publishes The Small College Meets the Challenge. CASC places “Small Colleges: An Untapped Resource” in The New York Times. 66
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Meeting the Challenge: America’s
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Meeting the Challenge: America’s
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John R. Thelin is University Resear
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Thanks also are due to all the tale
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Preface Richard Ekman The Council o
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Small by Design: Resilience in an E
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John R. Thelin Enrollment, Public a
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John R. Thelin The long-run demogra
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John R. Thelin at the age of 40 so
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Meeting the Challenge: - The Council of Independent Colleges

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