9:42 p.m. - 2005-12-01
Brief History of Peabody College of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn., USA, Concluding Part 2.
Brief History of Peabody College of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn., USA, Concluding Part 2.By Franklin and Betty J. Parker, bfparker @frontiernet.net.
Outwardly harmonious, there were inner Peabody-Vanderbilt tensions. With more women than men students during the 1920s-50s, Peabodians felt discriminated and snobbishly belittled for their professional education courses by Vanderbilt liberal arts professors, some of whom gladly taught for extra pay in Peabody 's large summer school. Peabodians sensed that Vanderbilt wanted to separate its graduate courses from them and that Vanderbilt deans and faculty disdained Peabody's teacher education mission and belittled its academic standards.
Vanderbilt's short-lived Education Department (1930-34) caused apprehension at Peabody. It was headed by Joseph Kinmount Hart (1876-1949), a progressive educator from the universities of Chicago and Wisconsin who had written A Social Interpretation of Education, 1929, and other textbooks. Hart's liberalism caused student disturbances. He ended his Vanderbilt career with bitterness and vague threats of a lawsuit.
More fruitful was the Joint Universities Library (JUL), dedicated December 5-6, 1941, outgrowth of a 1935 study of library needs of adjoining campuses of Vanderbilt, Peabody, and Scarritt College for Christian Workers (a Methodist college founded in 1892, later an adult education conference center). JUL was renamed in 1984 the Jean and Alexander Heard Library.
An overview of Peabody presidents since Bruce R. Payne, with Conkin's assessment of each, helps explain events that led to the 1979 Vanderbilt merger. Peabody's first President Bruce R. Payne (1911-April 21, 1937, died in office) was succeeded by Sidney Clarence Garrison (1887-1944), Peabody's second president during 1937-44, eight years. Garrison was a North Carolinian, a graduate of Wake Forest College, a high school principal and county superintendent. He was an M.A. degree graduate of Peabody College, 1916; served as a World War I captain; earned the Ph.D. degree from Peabody, 1919; taught educational psychology at Peabody where he was also a dean. "Garrison was not Payne," wrote Conkin; "he was an interim president." (Conkin, pp. 252-253).
President Henry Harrington Hill (1894-1987) was third president during Peabody's boom years, 1945-60 (16 years) and interim president, 1962-63 (total of 18 years). A North Carolinian, Hill received the B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Virginia and the Ph.D. degree from Columbia University. He was a teacher, principal, and school superintendent in Arkansas; an education professor and dean at the University of Kentucky; was school superintendent in Lexington, Kentucky; St. Louis, Missouri; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Hill was cautious, moderate, and an expert at building consensus (Conkin, p. 265). In 1951, through a foundation grant, Hill hired four high profile division chairmen: Harold R. W. Benjamin (1893-1969) to head Foundations of Education; Willard E. Goslin (1899-1969) to head Education Administration; William Van Til (1911-) to head Teaching and Curriculum; and Nicholas Hobbs (1915-83) to head Guidance and Development. Hobbs, who later helped Peabody secure its prestigious and well funded John F. Kennedy Center for Research on Education and Human Development, was later also a Vanderbilt provost.
Felix Compton Robb (1914-97), fourth president during 1961-66, from Alabama, had a Vanderbilt M.A. degree, took education courses at Peabody where he became President Hill's assistant and heir apparent, and received a Ph.D. degree from Harvard's Graduate School of Education. Conkin characterized Robb as charismatic and idealistic but, when cracks appeared in Peabody's finances was "not a forceful or decisive leader" (Conkin, p. 296).
John M. Claunch (1906-90), fifth president from August 1, 1967, through 1973, six years, from Louisiana, was a graduate of Austin State Teachers College, Texas (B.A., 1928); and the University of Texas (M.A., 1937; Ph.D., 1956). He had been director of Dallas College, an adult education mainly evening college, established by Southern Methodist University. Stronger candidates had warily declined the Peabody presidency. Conkin called Claunch's appointment a "disastrous decision," adding that he was "rigid, insecure,�authoritarian" (Conkin, pp. 311-312).
Claunch chafed at endless studies and reports to keep Peabody College afloat, clashed with Nicholas Hobbs over the Kennedy Center, opposed faculty independence, and was critical of student protests against military action in Vietnam.
John Dunworth (1924-) was Peabody's sixth and last president during 1974-79, five years, when merger occurred. Born in Los Angeles, Dunworth was an Ed.D. graduate of the University of Southern California and a successful dean of Ball State University's Teachers College, Indiana. Conkin characterized him as "Charming, vain, an expert at self promotion�[he] worked well with faculty" and "in other times, other circumstances, might have been a popular president" (Conkin, p. 330).
Vanderbilt's Chancellor [Bennett] Harvie Branscomb (1894-1998) and Peabody President H. H. Hill had cooperated in a joint two-year Master of Arts in Teaching program, funded by the Ford Foundation, 1952-55, with subject content courses taught at Vanderbilt and education courses at Peabody. When Peabody College declined to continue, Vanderbilt added to its own small teacher certification program a special Ph.D. program to improve college teaching, with professional courses taken at Peabody College.
A May 1962 study by visiting educator John Dale Russell (b.1895) recommended a more integrated University Center for Nashville higher education institutions but stopped short of recommending a Vanderbilt-Peabody merger. Vanderbilt never fully embraced the plan, which was nursed along through the 1970s by a 1969 Ford Foundation grant.
The 1962 plan was Peabody's last chance to affiliate with Vanderbilt from a position of strength. In the 1960s Vanderbilt grew in enrollment and endowment; Peabody went into slow decline. Cooperation in courses and library facilities continued. But changing economic conditions accentuated the two institutions' different histories, missions, faculty and student backgrounds, experiences, and attitudes. Vanderbilt students reflected their parents' more affluent elitism and conservatism. Peabody students reflected their parents' less affluent, rural, egalitarian, and working class backgrounds.
The 1970s recession, inflation, rising energy and other costs caused college of education enrollments to decline nationally. Peabody lost 30 faculty (1970-72), had unused facilities, and some Ph.D. programs faced loss of accreditation. By 1974, Peabody reduced its music and accounting programs; eliminated some business education, home economics, and modern language programs; sold its Demonstration School; and eliminated some arts and science courses. Peabody undergraduate enrollment dropped from 1,200 in 1972 to 800 in 1976; graduate enrollment declined to about 1,200. Peabody officials searched for ways to survive.
In August 1978 Peabody's last President Dunworth began unpublicized merger talks with Vanderbilt officials. Not wanting to irritate already apprehensive Peabody faculty, students, and alumni, he wanted merger talks to reach resolution before Peabody interest groups organized resistance. Dunworth wanted a strong Peabody to arise from a merger but knew that faculty outside the disciplines of education and human development would not be kept. Dunworth held merger talks during September-December 1978 with Vanderbilt Chancellor Alexander Heard (1917-) and Vanderbilt President Emmett B. Fields (1923-).
Absorbing Peabody was less attractive to Vanderbilt officials in August 1978 than it had been during 1914-50. Yet Vanderbilt needed Peabody's programs in education, physical education, accounting, music education, and in some psychology areas. Vanderbilt also needed Peabody's cooperation in Medical Center research, student counseling, student health, band, choir, joint athletic teams, the Joint University Library, and dormitory space.
Vanderbilt's President Fields' hard-line thoughts on merger included scaling down Peabody College to an educational policy study center or guaranteeing the existing college of education for eight years, after which Vanderbilt could convert it to whatever purposes it wished. Vanderbilt would take over Peabody's total assets, merger costs would come from Peabody's endowment, and Peabody's future earnings would have to cover its ongoing costs.
Such hard options led Dunworth to interrupt negotiations with Vanderbilt in December 1978 and to look for merger possibilities outside of Nashville with either Duke University of Durham, North Carolina, or George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
A new factor then emerged. Under court order in 1977 the formerly largely black Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial University in Nashville merged with the Nashville campus of the University of Tennessee, the latter mainly an evening college for commuting students. The resulting mainly black Tennessee State University (TSU) had tried but failed to develop a doctoral program in education first with Memphis State University and then with Peabody College.
In January 1979, TSU representatives spoke with the Tennessee State Board of Regents (which governs state colleges) about a possible Peabody�TSU union. Nashville citizens, most of whom saw a Vanderbilt-Peabody merger as manifest destiny, were shocked to read on February 13, 1979, of a possible Peabody-TSU connection. Public opinion varied. Despite racial concerns, a Peabody-TSU merger was more acceptable than having Peabody College leave Nashville. A Peabody-TSU merger was also tolerable to those who wanted a lower cost Nashville public university in competition with higher cost Vanderbilt.
When, on March 10, 1979, the Tennessee State Board of Regents voted 11 to 1 for a Peabody-TSU connection, Vanderbilt trustees quickly reconsidered. A Peabody-TSU merger would mean black students at a state-owned Peabody College next to Vanderbilt University. Also, a state-owned Peabody College might have to give up cooperative programs with a private Vanderbilt University.
On March 17, 1979, Vanderbilt Chancellor Heard and Trustee Board chairman Sam M. Fleming (1909-2000) decided to offer formal terms which were presented to Peabody College trustees on March 19, 1979. After six hours of debate, Vanderbilt's offer was accepted. On April 27, 1979, Vanderbilt and Peabody College trustees signed a "Memorandum of Understanding." On July 1, 1979, Peabody College of Vanderbilt University became Vanderbilt's ninth school.
In the merger, Vanderbilt absorbed $11 million of Peabody College's endowment, retained over $9 million after merger expenses, and allotted $8.5 million of that $9 million for continued Peabody College support. Peabody College of Vanderbilt University was responsible for teacher education and teacher certification programs; kept its undergraduate degree programs in elementary education, early childhood education, and a master's program in library science (dropped in 1987); kept its Ed.D. program; offered the Ph.D. program through Vanderbilt's Graduate School; and kept its prestigious and well funded John F. Kennedy Center for Research on Education and Human Development.
The new Peabody College of Vanderbilt University gave up its liberal arts component and ended its undergraduate degrees in physical sciences, social sciences, and human development (except educational psychology); and gave up its master's degree programs in art education and music education.
Peabody College faculty who lost jobs in a scarce job market voted "no confidence" in President Dunworth and staged a symbolic march on the Peabody College of Vanderbilt's administration building. The 40 staff employees let go received a parting bonus of five percent of annual wage for each year of service, or up to 75 percent of their annual pay. Many found jobs at Vanderbilt.
Non-tenured faculty received one year's pay plus $2,000 for relocation. Tenured faculty could either teach for a final year or receive severance pay of one year's salary and also collect a bonus of two percent for each year of service and one percent for each remaining year until retirement. For a few of these near retirement, this amounted to paid leave plus a sizable bonus. Vanderbilt helped find new or temporary positions for those whose jobs were lost.
The Tennessee branch of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) condemned the dismissals but the national AAUP took no action. In a show of solidarity, a small Vanderbilt faculty group urged Vanderbilt to retain all tenured former Peabody College faculty who, by August 24, 1979, had signed waivers (some still jobless). By 1980, five dismissed faculty members had not found jobs. Two untenured faculty filed grievances; one initiated legal action but settled out of court.
Peabody faculty and staff, dedicated to their mission, proud of their history, and saddened by the necessity for merger, cooperated with dignity and grace. President Dunworth resigned May 1, 1979, with undisclosed severance pay. Peabody College's Psychology Professor Hardy C. Wilcoxon (1921-96) was acting dean until the October 1980 appointment of new Dean Willis D. Hawley (1938-).
Vanderbilt, which added Peabody College's 1,800 students to its over 9,000 students, gained 58 acres, 16 major buildings, dormitory and apartment space, and a president's home in what some called Nashville's greatest real estate transaction. Peabody College's property was then valued at over $55 million.
As a gesture of good will, Vanderbilt committed $700,000 per year for ten years to Peabody College of Vanderbilt University's operating budget. Peabody College of Vanderbilt University student tuition costs inevitably rose by 10 percent.
Admirers, pondering why Peabody had lost its independence, conjectured, ironically, that Peabody's very success in preparing educational leaders during 1914-79 had contributed to its own demise. Its own best graduates had become influential presidents, deans, leading professors, researchers, and education writers who had strengthened less expensive public colleges of education as Peabody competitors. Wise observers knew that the time was long past for the survival of a private single purpose high cost teachers college amid widespread cheaper state university colleges of education.
Vanderbilt Chancellor Heard said at the merger signing (April 27, 1979) that after seven decades of cooperation Vanderbilt and Peabody needed each other, that Vanderbilt was in the business of higher education, that the precollege schooling of its entering students needed improvement; that because Peabody College had the expertise to prepare better teachers, who in turn prepared better entering students, Vanderbilt needed Peabody, and that Peabody needed Vanderbilt's strong university base; that the risk each institution took in working together was worth taking because of the success both could achieve together.
Acting Dean Hardy C. Wilcoxon during 1979-80 knew that Peabody College of Vanderbilt University had to "sharpen its focus as a professional school." Like all Vanderbilt schools, Peabody College had to pay its own way from tuition, research grants, and fundraising. It also had to pay its share of total plant operating costs, personnel costs, and other services.
H.C. Wilcoxon, graduate of the University of Arkansas (B.A., 1947, and M.A., 1948) and Yale University (Ph.D., 1951), was psychology professor, University of Arkansas (to 1966), a George Peabody College for Teachers faculty member from 1966, and acting dean of Peabody College of Vanderbilt University during the merger, 1979-80.
Wilcoxon's successor was Dean Willis David Hawley (1938-) from October 15, 1980 to l989. He came to Vanderbilt in August 1980 to teach political science and to direct the Center for Education and Human Development at Vanderbilt's interdisciplinary Institute for Public Policy. Born in San Francisco, he earned the B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. He taught political science at Yale University (1969-72) and co-directed Yale's training of secondary school teachers. He taught political science at Duke University (1972-80) and directed its Center for Education Policy. He was on leave from Duke (1977-78) to help plan the cabinet-level U.S. Department of Education under U.S. President Jimmy Carter.
Under Dean Hawley and amid a national surge of public education reform (inspired by A Nation at Risk, 1983, and other national reports critical of public education), Peabody had by 1983-84 upgraded its undergraduate and graduate programs, added new faculty, become proficient in using computers and telecommunications to enhance teaching and learning, and moved Peabody into national leadership in applying the new educational technology to improve public school teaching and learning. Peabody's scattered educational technology components were placed in a Learning Technology Center to assure better research and to secure grants to improve learning and public school teaching.
Hawley stated in 1986: "Peabody, more than any other school of education and human development, [is] national in scope and influence." He cited Peabody as "America's School of Education" because "we are arguably better than anyone else at linking knowledge to practice." After a 1987 self-study on Peabody's mission, Hawley wrote that "Peabody's central mission is to enhance the social and cognitive development of children and youth," focusing on the handicapped, and to transfer that knowledge into action through policy analysis, product development, and the design of practical models.
A self-study in 1987 led Peabody to close its 60-year-old Library School. Reasons given for its closing were: it had been understaffed, student enrollment had not grown, school librarians had become computer-based learning facilitators, and American Library Association standards would require adding faculty. A two-day celebration in May 1987 honored Peabody's Library School leaders and alumni.
Willis Hawley left the deanship after nine years (1980-89). He became University of Maryland's education dean on July 1, 1993. Reflecting on Peabody's ten years as Vanderbilt's ninth school, he said: To make it the best U.S. school of education and human development, Peabody had improved two-thirds of its programs, collaborated with Fisk University on increasing the number of minority teachers, added new faculty, and increased its capacity to serve and influence educational policy makers and practitioners.
Peabody had established the Center for Advanced Study of Educational Leadership, the Corporate Learning Center, the Learning Technology Center, and strengthened and broadened the mission of the John F. Kennedy Center for Research on Education and Human Development. It had increased student aid and increased external research and development funding at an annual rate of 20 percent. In educational technology research and learning, he said, "we can claim to be the best in the country."
Hawley listed the following among Peabody College of Vanderbilt University's achievements up to 1989: The U.S. Department of Education had awarded Peabody College and Harvard University a joint 5-year $2.5 million grant to study effective leadership in kindergarten through grade 12 school systems. The grant funded a National Center for Educational Leadership, housed at both Peabody and at Harvard, to study the leadership styles of school principals and school superintendents.
Apple Computer had donated computers, with equipment and software matched by Peabody, to improve math, science, and language arts teaching in a Nashville middle school. Besides better middle school learning, multimedia presentations showed prospective teachers how to apply educational technology in the classroom. Peabody was one of a six-member Southeast research university consortium testing and evaluating new educational technology programs in teaching and learning.
Peabody College received a four-year $80,000 grant for 20 educators to develop and evaluate computer-based instruction to improve learning by children with disabilities. The 20 teachers so trained, in turn, were resource educators for other teacher education institutions, thus stimulating ongoing programs. Said a Peabody special education professor directing the research: "We're on the forefront of computer-based instruction and one of the leading institutions on technology as applied to teaching children with disabilities."
For three consecutive years, Peabody College was named as having the "top choice" program to prepare guidance counselors. The judges (618 high school guidance counselors) most often named Peabody College of Vanderbilt University as having the best program for undergraduates from among 650 respected four-year colleges, public and independent, listed in Rugg's Recommendations on the Colleges for 1990, 1991, and 1992.
James William Pellegrino (1947-) was the second dean of Peabody College of Vanderbilt University, 1992-98. He had been acting dean at the University of California, Santa Barbara, before joining Vanderbilt as holder of the Frank W. Mayborn Chair of Cognitive Studies. "I inherited a financially stable and intellectually robust institution," he said in the fall of 1992 (enrollment was over 1,500 [870 undergraduate, some 630 graduate students]). His goals were to so undergird Peabody's instructional programs with innovative technology that they would be "uniquely superior" and set a standard for other universities.
Dean Pellegrino said Peabody was developing a college-wide blueprint to improve learning in U.S. schools. That blueprint included continued collaboration with school leaders and teachers in Nashville and elsewhere, focusing on Peabody-developed innovative educational technology. Besides continued collaboration after September 1992 with Nashville schools, Peabody also joined the U.S. Education Department-sponsored alliance to promote the six (later raised to eight) national education goals.
During 1993-96 Peabody's historic Social-Religious Building (renamed April 30, 2000, see below) was renovated and expanded by 50,000 feet at a cost of $15 million to make it Peabody's center for educational technology research and development. Its aim was to use creatively computers, interactive video and audio, fiber optics, and satellite systems to improve learning and enhance teaching. The building retained the main auditorium and housed Peabody's central administrative offices, the Department of Teaching and Learning, and the Learning Technology Center. It had built-in capabilities for multimedia presentations, productions, and conferences, and also a visitors center.
Peabody College's second Dean James William Pellegrino, who remained as research professor, was succeeded by third Dean Camilla Persson Benbow (1956-) from August 1998. She was former interim dean of Iowa State University College of Education and an authority on academically talented children. Early in her deanship the Social-Religious Building was rebuilt and renamed (April 30, 2000) the Faye and Joe Wyatt Center for Education, to honor the retiring Vanderbilt University chancellor and his wife, under whom the 1993-96 building renovation occurred.
Noting that in the 1990s through 2002 Peabody College of Vanderbilt University has annually been voted among the best U.S. graduate schools of education, Conkin ended his book with: "Peabody�has enhanced the reputation of its host [Vanderbilt]." He sees a realization of "Philip Lindsley's 1828 dream of a great university in Nashville, with one of its colleges dedicated to the training of teachers," and lauds as reality "Chancellor Kirkland's dream�of a great university center in Nashville." (Conkin, p. 409).
As Peabody graduates (1956) we (reviewers of Conkin's book) know that Peabody was and remains an inspiring institution of higher education; that it faced greater financial challenges and class and race divisions than its northern and western counterparts; that it has risen phoenix-like again and again to produce educational leaders for the South, the nation, and the world; that it proudly carries into the twenty-first century George Peabody's 1852 motto, "Education, a debt due from present to future generations." END of Part 2. End of Manuscript.
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9:18 p.m. - 2005-12-01
Brief History of Peabody College of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn., USA, Part 1 of 2 Parts.
Brief History of Peabody College of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn., USA, Part 1 of 2 Parts.
By Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker, [email protected]
Paul K. Conkin, Vanderbilt University's distinguished history professor, is perhaps best known for his earlier Conkin, et al. GONE WITH THE IVY... (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), to which his 2002 Peabody College: FROM A FRONTIER ACADEMY TO THE FRONTIERS OF TEACHING AND LEARNING is a worthy companion volume. As 1956 graduates of Peabody College we were touched by his dedication:
"I dedicate this book to the corps of Peabody-trained teachers. From the first thirteen young women who enrolled in a new State Normal College in December 1875 to the present, thousands of women and men, teachers or prospective teachers, have come to Peabody to gain needed skills in their chosen calling. They have eschewed wealth or the lofty status that too often attaches to high incomes. They have left Peabody, not only well prepared to teach or to assume leadership positions in education, but with a heightened idealism and a stronger commitment to a life of service. More than anyone else, they embody the Peabody ideal."
This book is a multifaceted history about schooling in frontier Nashville before Tennessee became a state (1796) and before and after it became the "Athens of the South." It is about why each of the predecessor Peabody educational institutions was founded, about their leading officials, what they did right, wrong, neglected to do, the consequences and events leading to and since the 1979 merger of neighboring Peabody and Vanderbilt.
The book is about Massachusetts-born merchant-banker-philanthropist George Peabody's (1795-1869) Peabody Education Fund (1867-1914, hereafter PEF), first U.S. multimillion dollar foundation, and about his intent to uplift the Civil War defeated South through public education. It is about how the PEF's legatees--Peabody Normal College (1875-1911) and George Peabody College for Teachers (1914-79)--embraced George Peabody's motto: "Education: A Debt Due from Present to Future Generations," about how they became in turn the South's pioneer model private teacher education institution, and how their successor Peabody College of Vanderbilt University has increased its leadership among teacher education institutions.
The story begins in 1779 when Virginia-born and North Carolina-reared James Robertson (1742-1814) explored the western part of North Carolina, now Tennessee. He led many Scots-Irish families to the frontier settlement of Nashborough, later renamed Nashville. From the North Carolina legislature of which he was a member James Robertson secured a land grant and a charter for Davidson Academy (newly named Davidson County included Nashville). He found and persuaded Presbyterian minister Thomas Craighead (c.1750-1825) to be both church pastor and academy principal.
Thomas Craighead was a graduate of the College of New Jersey, which became Princeton University in 1896. Founded by "New Light" Presbyterians to train ministers, the College of New Jersey's President John Witherspoon (1723-94), a signer of the Declaration of Independence, inspired many of his graduates with missionary zeal to preach and teach on the frontier.
Davidson Academy and its successors, Cumberland College and the University of Nashville, reflected Scottish reformer John Knox's (c.1514-72) desire that universal literacy spread reading and understand of the Bible.
Davidson Academy (1785-1806) was headed by Principal Thomas Craighead who also headed for three years to 1809 its rechartered successor, Cumberland College (1806-26). Educator James Priestley (1760-1821) succeeded Craighead as Cumberland College's president from October 24, 1809, to February 4, 1821 and was in turn succeeded by President Philip Lindsley (1786-1850), under whom Cumberland College was rechartered as the University of Nashville (November 27, 1826, to 1875).
The change of name to the University of Nashville was partly to avoid confusion with a Cumberland College in Kentucky, partly by the availability of a federal land grant to institutions of higher education. There was also pride in Nashville's growing importance. President Lindsley envisioned a University of Nashville as an umbrella embracing professional schools and academic departments.
By scholarly eminence and vision alone, Conkin wrote, Lindsley deserved a chapter by himself: "Philip Lindsley's University of Nashville first justified the reputation of Nashville as a center of higher education in the South�. It was his Princeton of the West." Philip Lindsley in 1835 first called Nashville the "Athens of the West." (Conkin, p. 47).
Philip Lindsley was succeeded as University of Nashville president in 1850 by his physician son, Dr. John Berrien Lindsley (1822-97), chancellor during 1850-72, who was succeeded in turn by Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith (1824-93) as chancellor during 1872-75.
Financially pressed and occupied by Union troops during most of the Civil War, the University of Nashville hosted several schools and departments, some short-lived. Most successful was its medical school, 1850-95, which graduated a total of 1,699 physicians and was the second largest U.S. medical school during the Civil War.
The University of Nashville also had a law department (1854-72); a school of agriculture and mechanic arts (1872-75); a school of civil engineering (1872-75); a military institute (about 1854-59); and the still existing preparatory school, Montgomery Bell Academy, partly endowed by wealthy Nashville iron manufacturer Montgomery Bell (1769-1855).
The University of Nashville's Literary Department, comparable to a college of arts and sciences, was nearly defunct in 1875. How it became Peabody Normal College (1875-1909) requires mention of George Peabody's career and philanthropic motive. Born poor 19 miles from Boston, he had four years of schooling and was apprenticed in a general store for four years. In 1811 his father died in debt with the family forced out of their mortgaged home to live with relatives. Two weeks later a great fire in Newburyport, Massachusetts, where young Peabody worked in his older brother's store, ruined all business prospects. These events led the17-year-old to migrate to Georgetown, D.C., where he opened a dry goods store (1812).
Peabody served in the War of 1812 where he met older fellow soldier and Maryland merchant Elisha Riggs, Sr. (his son founded Riggs National Bank, Washington, D.C.). Riggs took Peabody at age 19 as junior partner in Riggs, Peabody & Co., a Baltimore-based firm which imported dry goods for resale to U.S. wholesalers. Traveling widely in the South as a merchant, Peabody also made five European buying trips during 1827-37.
On his fifth trip to London, February 1837, Peabody was also an agent to sell abroad Maryland's $8 million in bonds to finance the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. The Panic of 1837 soon forced Maryland and eight other U.S. states to stop paying interest on their bonds, angering foreign investors.
Peabody helped ease investors' anxiety by publicly urging officials in Maryland and other defaulting states to resume interest payments retroactively. When interest was resumed and it became known that rather than burden the Maryland treasury Peabody declined his $60,000 commission for selling the bonds, he won public thanks from Maryland's legislature and governor and respect in London banking circles.
Peabody privately bought many state bonds when their value was low and reaped profit when interest payment resumed. Remaining in London from 1837 onward he founded George Peabody & Co. (1838-64), a London-based banking firm, which sold state bonds to finance U.S. canals, roads, and railroads. He bought, sold, and shipped iron and steel rails for U.S. railroads. He helped sell the bonds that financed the Mexican War and was a director of and investor in the Atlantic Cable Co.
Ill and overworked, he took as partner in 1854 Boston merchant Junius Spencer Morgan (1813-90), whose son, John Pierpont Morgan, Sr. (1837-1913), began as New York City agent for George Peabody & Co. On retirement, 1864, unmarried, without a son to carry on, George Peabody withdrew his name. The London firm continued as J.S. Morgan & Co., Morgan Grenfell & Co., and continues as Deutsche Morgan Grenfell. George Peabody was the founding root of the banking house of J.P. Morgan.
Peabody early supported his mother and siblings. He restored them to the family home (1816) and paid for five of his younger relatives to attend Bradford Academy, Bradford, Massachusetts. When his17-year-old nephew asked his financial help to attend Yale College, Peabody replied from London (May 18, 1831, his underlining):
Deprived, as I was, of the opportunity of obtaining anything more than the most common education, I am well qualified to estimate its value by the disadvantages I labour under in the society [in] which my business and situation in life frequently throws me, and willingly would I now give twenty times the expense attending a good education could I now possess it, but it is now too late for me to learn and I can only do to those who come under my care, as I could have wished circumstances had permitted others to have done by me.
Determined to endow helpful institutions, his philanthropy included seven U.S. Peabody libraries; Peabody museums at Harvard (anthropology), Yale (paleontology), and in Salem, Massachusetts (maritime history); professorships at an academy and several colleges; publication funds to two historical societies; aid to Civil War veterans, their wives and orphan children; and funds for a charitable hospital in the Vatican, Italy.
His two largest gifts were: $2.4 million for housing London's working poor (begun 1862), where 34,500 low income Londoners (white, black, others) currently live in 17,183 affordable apartments; and a $2 million PEF to aid public education in the embittered, impoverished former Confederate states. In May 1866 Peabody went for advice to statesman Robert Charles Winthrop (1809-94), who helped choose the original trustees and also presided over the board of trustees.
Winthrop, descended from Massachusetts Bay Colony's early governor John Winthrop (1588-1649), was a Harvard graduate (1828), Speaker of the Massachusetts State Legislature, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives (1847-50), and was appointed to fill Daniel Webster's U.S. Senate seat. A respected national figure no longer seeking public office, Winthrop directed the PEF trustees during 1867-94.
Winthrop pondered how to use the relatively small income from a $2 million fund to stimulate public schools for white and black children in twelve poverty-ridden, Civil War-ravaged states (West Virginia was added because of its poverty); how to convince defeated, resentful southern parents, taxpayers, and political leaders that permanent tax supported public schools could help renew their economy and uplift their lives; how to attract and train better teachers; and how to spread public elementary and secondary schools to strengthen a new South and the nation.
Winthrop found a workable plan and its able administrator in long-time friend Barnas Sears (1802-90), then president of Rhode Island's Brown University. Massachusetts-born Barnas Sears was a Brown University graduate (1825), studied at Newton Theological Seminary (Massachusetts), was ordained a Baptist minister, was a Colgate University (New York) professor (1831-33), studied in German universities, was Newton Theological Seminary professor and later its president, succeeded Horace Mann (1796-1859) as Massachusetts Board of Education secretary (during 1848-55), and was Brown University president (1855-67).
Winthrop met Sears by chance in Boston, March 13, 1867; asked Sears how the PEF might carry out its mission; was impressed by Sears's remarks; shared Sears plan with the trustees; and backed by the trustees persuaded Sears to become the PEF's first administrator (1867-80).
Sears planned through grants to strengthen existing public schools in larger towns to serve as models for smaller communities; to establish new public schools where needed; to make PEF-aided schools permanent tax-supported public schools under state control; to require aided schools to meet nine or ten months a year; to have at least one teacher per 50 pupils; and to require local citizens to match PEF contributions, if possible, by two or three times the PEF amount.
Sears's rising scale of financial aid as enrollments rose was pure pump priming, using small grants for their matching and levering effect and requiring legislative responsibility and permanent state support. Moving to Staunton, Va., Sears wrote, spoke, and traveled widely.
Sears's aims were to use the fund's limited resources to establish, first: tax supported elementary and secondary public schools and create a model teacher training college for the South in Nashville; second: to establish teachers' institutes (short term training for practicing teachers) and long term professional teacher training normal schools, a task furthered by the fund's second administrator J.L.M. Curry (1825-1903) during 1881-1903; third: to establish rural public schools, furthered by the fund's third administrator Wycliffe Rose (1862-1931) during 1907-14.
Sears saw Nashville, Tennessee, as the ideal place for a normal school as a model for the South. Noting failed proposals in the Tennessee legislature to establish a state teacher training normal school in 1857 and 1865, Sears offered in 1867 $1,000 annual PEF grants if Tennessee would establish one or more normal schools. Legislative bills for a state normal school failed in 1868, 1871, and 1873, even though Sears in 1873 offered PEF grants of $6,000 annually to match annual state funding.
Disappointed at not getting Tennessee legislative cooperation and not wanting to lose Nashville, Sears in 1874 offered the University of Nashville trustees $6,000 PEF annual support for a normal school in place of their moribund Literary Department. Glad not to spend state funds, the Tennessee legislature, aided by the then new Tennessee Governor James Davis Porter (1828-1912), amended the University of Nashville's charter to establish State Normal School on the University of Nashville campus, which opened December 1, 1875, with 13 students and ended the first year with 60 students.
State Normal School (1875-89), officially renamed Peabody Normal College (1889-1911), was cost-free to selected students with promise as future teachers. During 1877-1904, 3,645 of the most promising applicants from the South received PEF scholarships of $200 annually during 1877-91 and $100 annually plus railroad fare during 1891-1904. Alfred Leland Crabb (1883-1979, of George Peabody College for Teachers) later noted that these 3,645 Peabody scholarship teachers in their time formed an important core of educational leaders for the South.
Unable or unwilling to offer state aid, the Tennessee legislature defeated appropriation bills for the State Normal School in 1877 and 1879, leaving funding solely to the PEF until 1881. Disappointed, Sears and the PEF trustees considered moving State Normal School from Nashville to Georgia, whose legislature agreed on state support if the fund continued its $6,000 annual contribution. But Georgia's Constitution required that any such school be state controlled as part of the University of Georgia at Athens. This requirement irked Sears and the PEF trustees, who wanted state aid but opposed state control.
Threat of a move from Tennessee prompted Nashville citizens to guarantee $6,000 by April 1880 to keep the Normal School in Nashville. Stung into action, the Tennessee legislature gave the Normal School $10,000 annually (1881-83), raised to $13,300 annually (1883-95), and raised again to $23,000 annually (1895-1905). In all, Peabody Normal College got $555,730 from the PEF (1875-1909) and $429,000 from the Tennessee legislature (1881-1905).
State Normal School (1875-89) and Peabody Normal College (1889-1911) had three presidents: first, President Eben Sperry Stearns (1819-87) during 1875-87. Born in Massachusetts and Harvard educated, Stearns, under Massachusetts Board of Education Secretary Barnas Sears, was the second president of Newton Normal School, Massachusetts (the first U.S. normal school).
William Harold Payne (1836-1907) was the second president during 1888-1901. He had held the first professorship of education in the U.S. at the University of Michigan during 1879-88. James Davis Porter, third president during 1901-09, was a Tennessean, a University of Nashville graduate (1846), a lawyer, Tennessee House member, Confederate officer, and Tennessee governor (1874-78).
The Peabody Normal College years (1875-1911) coincided with the rise of state normal schools as the chief agency to prepare elementary and secondary school teachers. After 1910, state normal schools were increasingly replaced by state colleges of education, a changeover which coincided with the PEF's dissolution in 1914.
George Peabody's February 7, 1867, founding letter permitted the PEF trustees to dissolve the fund after 30 years and to distribute its principal. The trustees (who included Theodore Roosevelt and John Pierpont Morgan, Sr.) resolved on January 29, 1903 to give most of the PEF's principal to found George Peabody College for Teachers. On January 24, 1905, they committed $1 million (later raised to $1.5 million) to transform the Peabody Normal College into George Peabody College for Teachers, contingent on matching funds from Nashville, Davidson County, Tennessee, and other donors; and on relocating from south Nashville to Twenty-First Avenue next to Vanderbilt University for added academic strength.
A problem arose when Georgia State Commissioner of Education G.R. Glenn, PEF acting administrator in 1903, argued in his annual report that because public education in the South lagged behind national levels, the fund's principal should be used in a campaign to raise local public school taxes. But fear of losing PEF assets led Peabody Normal College alumni to secure petitions supporting the creation of George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville as successor to Peabody Normal College. After a year-long deadlock on the issue, the PEF trustees confirmed that George Peabody College for Teachers would indeed succeed Peabody Normal College, with a new campus next to Vanderbilt University.
South Nashville property owners objected to moving Peabody Normal College from their area and began court action. President James D. Porter also preferred south Nashville but the PEF trustees' endowment power determined the Vanderbilt University location. President J.D. Porter acquiesced, was compensated by a pension from the Carnegie Pension Fund, and helped secure the legislation that permitted transfer of assets from the University of Nashville's Peabody Normal School to George Peabody College for Teachers.
By June 1909 President Porter also helped secure funds required to match the PEF's $1.5 million endowment: $250,000 from the Tennessee legislature, $200,000 from the City of Nashville, and $100,000 from Davidson County. President Porter resigned on August 4, 1909, and George Peabody College for Teachers was incorporated on October 5, 1909.
Vanderbilt University, next to which George Peabody College for Teachers buildings were being erected, was chartered in Nashville August 6, 1872, as Central University of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Its founder, Methodist Bishop Holland N. McTyeire (1824-89), needing building funds, visited Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877) in New York City in February 1873. Their wives were cousins and had been intimate girlhood friends in Mobile, Alabama (this was Cornelius Vanderbilt's second wife, his first wife having died).
Bishop McTyeire told Cornelius Vanderbilt of higher education needs in the South and particularly of Central University building needs in Nashville. Cornelius Vanderbilt, whose wealth came from ferry boats, steamship lines, and railroads (New York Central, 1867), gave Central University in Nashville $500,000 on March 12, 1873, later doubled to $1 million, leading to the renaming of Central University to Vanderbilt University on June 6, 1873.
Vanderbilt University's second Chancellor James Hampton Kirkland (1859-1939) wanted to make Nashville a great university center. He also knew that George Peabody College for Teachers' endowment was initially greater than Vanderbilt's endowment. Wanting a Vanderbilt-Peabody College connection similar to the successful Teachers College of Columbia University, Kirkland deeded Vanderbilt land to George Peabody College for Teachers, about which some contention later resulted.
Kirkland's hoped-for ally in making a Vanderbilt-Peabody connection was Johns Hopkins University President Daniel Coit Gilman (1831-1908), the South's most respected higher education leader and an influential PEF trustee. Kirkland urged in 1900 and 1901 that Gilman, about to retire as Johns Hopkins president, become Peabody Normal College president and help form a Vanderbilt-Peabody connection. Gilman adroitly sidestepped involvement, declining to give a major address in Nashville in 1900 and also declining to head Peabody Normal College in its last years.
George Peabody College for Teachers' (1911-79) first President Bruce Ryburn Payne (1874-1937) during 1911-37 cooperated academically with Vanderbilt but adamantly kept Peabody independent as the South's leading teacher training institution. Born in North Carolina Bruce R. Payne was a graduate of Trinity College (later renamed Duke University), was principal of Morganton (North Carolina.) Academy, did graduate study at Trinity College and at Teachers College of Columbia University (M.A., 1903; Ph.D., 1904), was professor of philosophy and education, College of William and Mary, Virginia (1904-05); and was University of Virginia professor of secondary education and psychology and summer school organizer.
Payne assembled a first-rate faculty, modeled the new Peabody campus on Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia architectural plan (a quadrangle of columned buildings dominated by a Social-Religious Building with a commanding rotunda), and raised an additional $1 million for the new campus.
An example of Payne's fund raising: banker and PEF trustee J.P. Morgan, Sr., had promised $250,000 toward George Peabody College for Teachers buildings when needed but died. Payne went to New York City to request the funds of Morgan's son-in-law, Herbert Livingston Satterlee (1863-1947). Satterlee hesitated because Morgan had not left written evidence of his promised aid. Payne felt he had failed in this fund raising until Satterlee, checking with Morgan's son (J.P. Morgan, Jr.), released the promised amount.
The PEF trustees dissolved in 1914 and distributed their total assets of $2,324,000 as follows: $1.5 million to endow George Peabody College for Teachers; $474,000 to education departments of 14 southern universities ($40,000 each to the universities of Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana [State]); $6,000 each to Johns Hopkins University and to the universities of South Carolina, Missouri, and Texas; $90,000 to Winthrop Normal College, South Carolina (now Winthrop College), founded by PEF trustee President Robert Charles Winthrop.
Recipient state universities of Georgia, Mississippi, Florida at Gainesville, North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and others named their college of education buildings after George Peabody. George Peabody-named elementary and secondary schools exist in the southern states his fund benefited; along with a Peabody Avenue and Peabody Hotel, both in Memphis, Tennessee; and Peabody Hotels in Orlando, Florida, and elsewhere.
Payne, like Kirkland, was a strong administrator with a vibrant personality. Their relations were polite but strained by Payne's determination to keep Peabody College independent yet cooperative in cross-listed courses and programs. Kirkland was elitist and an educational conservative while Payne, concerned for mass education, was egalitarian in the spirit of the democratic educational philosophy of his Columbia University mentor, John Dewey (1859-1952).
Payne and his successors made and tried to keep Peabody a unique mini-university. Besides the professional preparation of teachers, it graduated students in liberal arts, science, music, physical education, art, and library science; and had a demonstration elementary school for teachers-in-training, a Knapp farm for rural studies, and a school survey research unit used widely in the South. Peabody's unresolved fiscal problems in the late 1960s and early 1970s resulted in the need for some kind of merger in the late 1970s.
End of Part 1. Concluded in Part 2.
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