The story below is a preview from our March/April 2017 issue. For the full story, Subscribe today, view our FREE interactive digital edition or download our FREE iOS app!
Roanoke College and Hollins University reach a milestone in 2017 and getting there hasn’t always been easy.
There remains to this day some dispute about whether both Roanoke College and Hollins University are the same age, 175. They were both founded in 1842, but Hollins was an “institute” and a “seminary” before finally becoming Hollins College in 1911, the first chartered women’s college in Virginia.
Roanoke College history department head Mark Miller and his wife, Linda, the school’s archivist, bring up the point in casual conversation, then smile that “it doesn’t really matter, does it?” and move on to the next topic. Hollins, however, has been far more sensitive to the point over the years, perhaps due to its 19th and early 20th century financial struggles and its difficult battle for accreditation in the 1930s.
Regardless of the fine points of the argument—if you want to call it that—the fact is that Hollins and Roanoke are the Roanoke Valley’s two prominent liberal arts colleges and neither is in the City of Roanoke. Roanoke College is firmly in the center of Salem and Hollins is in … well, Hollins, a division of Roanoke County, an area named—as the school was—for a couple of prominent benefactors.
In recent years, both schools have outstripped expectations and traditional roles. Hollins’ goal initially was to produce competent wives, who could hold up their end of a discussion while simultaneously cooking a scrumptious beef burgonionne for 20. Quiet Roanoke College has become anything but during the past 20 years and has had a flurry of impressive growth—including a lot of new, big buildings—of late. That means a steady stream of alumni gifts and spectacular fund-raising success.
Mike Maxey took the reins at Roanoke College in 2007 after Nancy Gray accepted the presidency of Hollins in 2004. Both were the 11th presidents of their schools (not counting interim appointments). He had never been—nor even aspired to—a presidency. Gray accepted the presidency of women-only Converse College in South Carolina five years earlier, basically to “see if I could be a college president,” she says now. She became convinced of the value of women’s colleges.
Maxey had been brought in by President Norm Fintel, whose legacy was expansion and fund-raising, because he showed promise in that regard. He was good at it, but as important, he was roundly liked and respected, so his appointment to the top spot was enormously popular.
“The first big fund-raiser in 1989,” he says, “helped define” what was coming for Roanoke. “It was far and away the biggest we’d ever done.” Programs and faculty reached heights never before imagined. “It made us see ourselves differently,” he says. The college “was in great shape when I got here,” and it has improved almost exponentially since then.
Nancy Gray has seen considerable advancement for women in our culture, but despite “more women in law, medicine, Congress,” there is “still the invisible ceiling that has not been broken.” Women are underrepresented in the STEM disciplines, she says, and Hollins is intent on making a difference there. Women’s colleges—Hollins specifically—make a difference “by instilling confidence and leadership” in their graduates.
She has also seen a questioning of the value of college, especially when escalating costs are considered. “How do you pay for it? Is it worth [the cost]?” she asks. “We have to make the case in a stronger and more profound way than ever” as a college intent on producing leaders.
The Batten Institute at Hollins, which was begun under interim president Walter Rugaber in 2001, has been wildly successful in training women for business leadership. Hollins, generally, is “preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist, technology that’s not yet there.”
Gray earned considerable statewide—and perhaps national—recognition for Hollins’ performance during the deep recession of 2008 and beyond. Maxey calls it “one of the great stories of Virginia” financial sophistication.
Gray likes to quote former President John A. Logan Jr. (1961-1975) with an observation that could equally apply to Roanoke College: “Hollins never had any money, but always found a way.”
Hollins University
Charles Lewis Cocke knew from the time he was a teenager that he wanted to concentrate his life’s work on the “higher education of women in the South.” By the time he was 25 in 1846, the Richmond math instructor had been appointed principal of the four-year-old Valley Union Seminary in Botetourt Springs, the original name of the site of the present campus. He showed up with a wife and 16 slaves in tow and almost immediately established a school for the area’s slaves, teaching them to read.
The original co-educational institute was established by Rev. Joshua Bradley in 1842. In 1851, Cocke closed the school’s men’s department, and in 1852, established the Roanoke Female Seminary. Three years later, it was renamed Hollins Institute (after donors John and Ann Halsey Hollins).
Hollins College became Virginia’s first chartered women’s college in 1911 and by 1958, it was offering graduate programs. Hollins achieved university status in 1998.
Cocke’s educational philosophy, basically, was based upon the “Southern sensibility that a lady was to be trained to submit to the order of men.” He also wrote that “young women require the same thorough and rigid mental training as that afforded to young men,” which is considerably closer to the modern Hollins. Under Cocke’s presidency, “The school became the first in the United States to begin a system of elective study, and it was the first to establish an English department under a full professor,” according to a 1932 Time magazine article.
Hollins struggled financially—though not academically—well into the 20th century, and before the Civil War used slaves to maintain and build a good bit of its campus, a sore point to some today. Cocke’s 45-year-old daughter, Matty, took over the presidency upon Cocke’s death at 81 in 1901, the family actually owning the school outright at that point. Matty Cocke, Virginia’s first woman college president, hated fund-raising and the school had no endowment because it was owned by her family. That meant financial hardship.
In 1932, after considerable wrangling, the Cockes released the school to a board of trustees and Matty Cox resigned. The school was then accredited.
In 1960, Louis Rubin instituted the Hollins writing program, which was to become the hallmark of the school’s national reputation. The writer-in-residence program, one of the nation’s first, was established a year earlier. In 2008, Hollins opened the Jackson Center for Creative Writing.
Hollins has produced Pulitzer winners Annie Dillard, Natasha Trethewey (also U.S. Poet Laureate), Mary Wells Knight Ashworth and Henry S. Taylor. Other writing grads of note are sportswriter Mary Garber, Man-Booker Prize winner Kiran Desai, “Goodnight Moon” author Margaret Wise Brown and noted author Lee Smith. More recent master’s degree grads include author/journalists Beth Macy (“Factory Man” and “Truevine”) and Roland Lazenby (more than 60 books, including his latest “Showboat: The Life of Kobe Bryant”).
Hollins, which has neither a team nickname nor a mascot (the only college in the country with neither), has won 18 individual national horseback riding championships, two team national championships, and four individual national high point rider championships.
Roanoke College
Roanoke College’s first president, David Bittle, was a thick, bearded man with piercing bright eyes, who looked more like a Mormon than a Lutheran. He once rode to Wytheville and drove a small herd of cattle back to Salem because food was running out for the students. President Mike Maxey loves to tell that story because he sees it as a measure of a man who wanted this small mountain college to succeed.
The school was founded in 1842 as Virginia Institute and was located near Staunton. Eleven years later, the Virginia General Assembly gave it a charter as Roanoke College, and Bittle, an original founder, accepted the presidency. His leadership was so strong that Roanoke was one of the few Southern colleges to remain open during the Civil War.
The early presidents were activists: Julius Dreher (1870s-1890s) was an internationalist who brought in students as varied as Choctaw Indians, Mexicans, Japanese and Koreans; John A. Morehead concentrated on expanding the physical plant in the 1910s; Charles Smith (1920s-1930s) expanded course offerings, majors and electives and boosted the size of faculty and students (to 200 for the first time).
“The college struggled in the 19th century and peaked in the early 20th,” says Mark Miller, author of the college’s history, “Dear Old Roanoke.” The school was established by Lutherans in an area that had few of that faith. “It was their attempt to move south,” he says, but “the [Lutheran] enrollment never had a significant impact on that population.” He says that “some remarkable early presidents kept the doors open” in the face of the near-impossible.
But by 1911, Roanoke “had reached a pinnacle, ranking as one of the elite group of colleges in the South, with Sewanee and Richmond College.” Enrollment was 220 and the faculty full of Ivy Leaguers. But that took a turn when academics at Roanoke began telling the truth about the Civil War, about slavery, and a third of the board resigned … Roanoke was “brought to its knees by 1920.” The affiliated prep school was jettisoned in 1920. Thus began “a century of rebuilding,” says Miller.
“The first 75 years,” says college archivist Linda Miller, “it was hand-to-mouth just to keep going. There was fund raising the whole time. … David Bittle and Julius Dreher would go north where the money was, local critics saying they didn’t want the Yankee money.”
A bright light shone on Roanoke briefly when in 1939 Pop White’s “Five Smart Boys” made the Final Four of the National Invitational Tournament in basketball, the original version of the NCAA tournament. Roanoke later (1970s) won national titles in lacrosse and basketball, but the NIT success marked it for many years.
The major push toward national recognition, though, started with Perry Kendig in the 1960s when enrollment took a leap from 800 to 1,250 and the faculty jumped to 65. Kendig was well-known for his support of the arts and a major regional award in the arts is given in his name annually.
In 1930, women showed up at the all-male school, primarily because the stock market crash put college out of reach for far more people than previously and it was already too expensive for most. Through World War II, women controlled much of life on the campus. WWII also was the death knell for a vigorous football program, the loss of which is lamented to this day.
In 1964, the college’s first black student, Frankie Allen, a soon-to-be All-American basketball player, enrolled. Norm Fintel’s presidency was marked by record-setting raising of funds to expand the campus, which resulted in Olin Hall, Bast Center, purchase of the Roanoke County Courthouse and acquisition of the old Elizabeth College campus. The library was overhauled and named for Fintel and his wife, Jo. Fintel, says Miller, “organized a more modern” college … “a proper college” and scholarships evolved from need-based to merit, which brought in high-end students. The academic comeback was underway.
In the 1990s, President David Gring added the Belk Fitness Center, Colket Center, Sutton Commons and renovations in several areas. Roanoke earned a prestigious Phi Beta Kappa chapter in 2002. Gring pushed for more interaction between students and faculty and created the Summer Scholar program. Sabine O’Hara’s brief term had a focus on integrative learning and establishing the undergraduate research assistant program. Kerr Stadium was also completed. “An aging 1960s complex was transformed,” says Mark Miller.
Near the end of the 20th century, two national scandals involving former Roanoke students—John McAfee (1967 graduate) and John Mulheren (1971)—erupted when Mulheren was implicated in the Ivan Bosky scandal. Mulheren’s conviction was overturned and he remained a central supporter for years (his wife remains on the board). McAfee, a computer kingpin who amassed a fortune, ran for president (Libertarian, lost nomination) in 2016. He ran afoul of the law in Belize earlier, causing all kinds of difficulty, though he was never charged or convicted.
Mike Maxey took a job under Norman Fintel 35 years ago and finally rose to president, a job he never aspired to, he insists. But most involved with the college considered him the perfect choice at the time. His term began in 2007 and its impact has been of considerable measure: an intellectual inquiry core curriculum with 80 courses; Lucas Hall re-opened and four residencies were renovated. The Cregger Center, a mammoth athletic and entertainment complex, opened.
Before he retires (“in four or five years”) he fully intends to extend that record of achievement, one that has marked Roanoke for some time now.
... for more from our March/April 2017 issue, Subscribe today, view our FREE interactive digital edition or download our FREE iOS app!