Insight

Institutions such as Jacksonville State University have historically been the backbone of education in Alabama. Growing out of a frontier desire to educate children for something better than what their parents had and expanding as the desire to educate their own became a commitment to educate others, JSU can trace its origins to the antebellum academy movement that gave a little community in the foothills of northeast Alabama male and female schools and forged ties between town and gown that remain strong today.

This commitment survived the Civil War, and during Reconstruction the seeds sown before the conflict bore fruit. In 1873, Jacksonville made its bid "TO BECOME A GREAT EDUCATION CENTER" by combining a "polytechnic School of high grade for young men" with the "Jacksonville FEMALE ACADEMY for young Ladies" and creating Calhoun College. "Two fine schools under one administration," the announcement boasted, "offering all the advantages, and escaping the risks of the mixed school system" — risks, one might add, well known then as now.

An important part of the New South community boosterism of the late 19th Century was an emphasis on educational advantages a town could offer potential residents and investors, so it is hardly surprising today to find in southern villages "college" streets where there is no college and "university" avenues without a university anywhere around. However, Calhoun College survived, maybe even flourished, and so in 1883, when the Alabama Legislature finally got around to acknowledging that there was a need for teachers trained as teachers, it was not only logical, it was natural for representatives down in Montgomery to put a State Normal School in Jacksonville and for Calhoun College, in effect, to be absorbed into the new institution.

Despite the fertile ground in which to plant a college, the State Normal School at Jacksonville stumbled for a while, largely because keeping presidents was no easy task. Four chief administrative officers came and went during its first decade. But then the school was turned over to local leaders and the names that would someday grace campus buildings began to appear at the top of the administrative chart: Forney, Daugette, Cole.

Looking at the school from a modern perspective one would think the whole thing was run on a shoestring, and one would be pretty close to right. State support was irregular and generally insufficient, a precedent set early and followed to this day. At the turn of the century the faculty consisted of seven teachers (counting the president, whose predecessor had once ridden a bicycle to a nearby community to recruit students — one who attended after selling the president a colt to cover board and tuition).

Still proposing to offer the advantages and escape the risks of a "mixed school system," the school kept students of both sexes close and carefully controlled, with particular emphasis on the "proper dignity and behavior" of the young ladies — the theory being that the best way to regulate the behavior of the boys was to limit and control their access to the girls. This approach was not entirely successful then and has been largely abandoned today. As has, I might add, the suggestion by the then-school gardener that a more effective strategy would be to cut down all campus shrubbery.

During the first three decades of the 20th century, the Normal School grew rapidly. In 1929, as part of the educational reforms of Gov. Bibb Graves, the institution became Jacksonville State Teachers College, offering a 4-year degree and all that went with it. That same year the City of Jacksonville sold city school land and buildings to the college, thus beginning the relationship between local schools and the teacher training institute that continues today. When the money arrived from Montgomery, the college built a state-of-the-art classroom and administrative building and named it for the man behind it all — thus making Jacksonville State one of a number of colleges that honor in bricks and mortar one of the state's most progressive governors who also happened to be a top officer in the Ku Klux Klan — such was and is the irony of politics in Alabama.

Politics threatened the college during the 1930s when the Great Depression took away school funding and politicians began to think of higher education as a luxury the state could ill afford. Arguing that there was a teacher surplus, some legislators pushed to consolidate teacher training programs, and though Jacksonville's was one of the best in the state, it took a concerted effort by local leaders and legislators to keep the college open and independent.

Behind this effort and essential to its success was Dr. Clarence William Daugette, president of the college. Assuming the post in 1899, Dr. Daugette guided the institution into the 20th century, overcame the challenges brought on by World War I, oversaw the expansion of the 1920s, and helped Jacksonville State weather the economic and political problems brought on by the Great Depression. During this time he learned, as any successful college president had to learn, the ins and outs and pitfalls of Alabama politics. He defended his school and its students with vigor and intelligence, and when he died in August 1942 he left behind a vibrant institution that was already in the process of preparing itself for the conflict that would soon engulf the world.

World War II presented particular challenges, especially with so many men going into the service instead of attending college. But in 1942, Dr. Houston Cole was named president and Jacksonville State Teachers College entered a new era. Cole was an able administrator and as politically savvy as any chief executive officer in the state. Cultivating contacts in Montgomery, particularly alumni in the Legislature (the most prominent of which was Charles "Pete" Mathews), Dr. Cole guided the college as it expanded its offerings, added a graduate program and took in the first wave of the "Baby Boomers" (just as it had absorbed the post-World War II G. I. Bill influx). It was also under his administration that the International House and its activities became a model of cross-cultural cooperation and education.

And so it followed, quite naturally if you keep it in the context of the rapid expansion of higher education in the 1960s, that Jacksonville State College (its new name in 1957) became Jacksonville State University in 1966. Thus began the transition that continues to the present.

It was more than a change of letterhead on the stationary, for to be a university (as opposed to a college) administration and faculty had to accept the responsibility of teaching at a higher level, doing research to support that teaching, and serving the greater community that supports and sustains the institution. Carrying out these responsibilities is an ongoing process and one at which Jacksonville State has excelled. Today, JSU offers more specialized courses and degrees, uses technology in ways never envisioned when "college" was dropped and "university" added, and serves constituencies that were never part of the original plan.

Nevertheless, while looking back over 125 years of history, it is good to consider the philosophy set down by Dr. Cole as JSC began to become JSU.

"This institution aims at excellence by promoting in its students a balance between facts and thought, between work and play, and between knowledge and character. It would equate life with beauty, achievement with happiness, and civic action with freedom's demands."

Not a bad philosophy then.

Not a bad philosophy now.