Presidents

Stability and Growth: Harvey Warren Cox's Presidency

Harvey Warren Cox
1875-1944

President 1920-42

In 1920, the Druid Hills campus of Emory University comprised half-a-dozen buildings, dirt roads that turned to mud in a soaking rain, and an incalculable number of pine trees. The nearest stop for the trolley line was nearly a mile away, at what is now the corner of Briarcliff Road and the Byway. Emory College itself had come to Atlanta only the previous year, venturing away from an eighty-six-year history in Oxford. All of the schools except the theology school were running annual deficits, causing even Asa Candler to throw up his hands and declare that he would give no more until the debts were cleared.

Since 1914, when the Education Commission declared Atlanta the winner in what amounted to a Methodist sweepstakes for southern cities eager for a university, Bishop Warren Candler had carried the heavy burden of the chief executive office of chancellor, in addition to his regular duties for the church. Having failed several times to get the board to relieve him of his charge, he finally threw down the gauntlet in June 1919: "It seems clear to me that some younger, wiser, and stronger man, who can give himself wholly to the work of the institution, is now needed for chancellor," he wrote. The board at last saw the light and relented.

In February 1920, Professor Franklin N. Parker agreed to serve as acting chancellor, but only for a year. Deciding to find a full-time president to take over the greater part of administrative work from the chancellor, the trustees the following June prevailed on Candler to accept once again the now-diminished role of chancellor, making Parker acting president until they could find a permanent one.

They found him in a Midwesterner transplanted to Florida. Harvey Warren Cox, born and raised in Birmingham—Illinois, not Alabama—had received his B.A. degree from Nebraska Wesleyan and an M.A. from the University of Nebraska, before earning another M.A. and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard. Landing at the University of Florida, he taught philosophy there from 1911 to 1916, when he became also dean of the University of Florida's Teachers' College. When the United States entered World War I, he took on the additional role of district supervisor for the southeastern operations of the Student Army Training Corps, the precursor to the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC).

No doubt all of this training and experience led the list of credentials that impressed the Emory trustees when they offered Cox the presidency in 1920. But equally appealing, certainly, was Cox's demonstrated commitment to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, which he would serve in later years as a lay leader of the North Georgia Conference, president of the denomination's Educational Association, delegate to three general conferences, and chair of the Finance Committee of the General Board of Higher Education. His name had been placed in nomination for the Emory presidency by Isaac C. Jenkins (1896C), pastor of the Methodist church in Gainesville, Florida, where Cox taught Sunday school.

In Harvey Cox devotion seems to have been the spur of administrative efficacy. A latter-day Wesley, he brought to Emory a brilliant gift for organizing and an unassuming manner that wisely took the long view, and he used these gifts not only to set the young university on an even keel but also to chart its course into the wider academic world.

To keep a close eye on fiscal matters and rein in the deficit, President Cox set up his own office next to the treasurer's office in the Physics Building (now Callaway Center South). He announced that each school would have to balance its budget, and that the University would break ground for no new buildings until there was enough endowment income to keep them in operation. Hearing this good news, in 1923 Asa Candler gave Emory another million dollars and the next year added another fifty-five acres. Within four years of his arrival, Cox's meticulous attention to the income, operations, and endowment of the University had balanced the books. In the first five years of his administration, the campus grew from 95 to 160 acres, the student body doubled (from 900 to 1800), the budget grew from from $40,000 to $900,000, and total salaries for the small faculty increased by by $75,000 overall. It was an impressive start.

With the financial tangles straightened out, Cox moved his office down the hall in 1924 to be close to the registrar and the dean of Emory College, the better to attend to academic affairs. That year Emory appeared for the first time on the approved list of universities recognized by the Association of American Universities—a kind of accreditation by this prestigious group, not membership in it (that would come in 1994). Five years later, in 1929, Phi Beta Kappa installed a chapter at Emory, the third in Georgia after those at the University of Georgia and Agnes Scott College.

In a curious twist to the curriculum, Cox oversaw the division of the undergraduate program into a "lower division" and an "upper division," or what amounted to a junior college for the first two years of undergraduate work, clearly differentiated from the last two years. The curriculum required a very broad education in the first two years, enabling specialization in last two. According to the President's Report of 1928-29, this scheme would put the horse before the cart, preventing students from specializing first and then "spattering around in the last two years in a lot of unrelated subjects," while at the same time allowing them to concentrate in a special area when they are "more mature and more alive to its value."

In 1928, at the same time the Emory College curriculum was being divided in Atlanta, the University launched a junior college in Valdosta, Georgia; the following year the old campus at Oxford, which had operated as a preparatory school called the Emory University Academy since 1919, became home of the new Junior College at Oxford (now Oxford College of Emory University), under the deanship of H. A. Woodward (1901C). Thus all three campuses could offer the same curriculum for the first two years, making the transition to the last two years in Atlanta easier.

Not content to build up Emory alone, in 1931 Cox began to work with the president of Agnes Scott College, J. R. McCain, to plan a consortium of institutions that would complement rather than compete with one other. Announced at the University's centennial in 1936, the consortium sought to raise $ 7.5 million campaign. In three years, by the time of its chartering in 1939, the consortium—called the University Center in Georgia—would raise $10 million, with great help from the Rosenwald Fund. Initially established to facilitate cross-registration and interlibrary lending among the six founding institutions—Emory, Agnes Scott, Georgia Tech, Columbia Theological Seminary, the Art Institute of Atlanta, and the University of Georgia—the consortium was viewed as nothing less than the first step in creating a kind of mega-university for the state. Although the University Center would soon depart from this unrealizable ambition, the consortium—renamed in 1997 the Atlanta Regional Consortium for Higher Education, or ARCHE—would grow to number eighteen institutions and become a powerful advocate in behalf of higher education in the state.

Meanwhile, in 1922, the Emory Board of Trustees at last had consented to Warren Candler's repeated pleas for release from the chancellorship, so that he could fulfill contracts on three books he had pledged to write. The board proposed to elect Cox chancellor, but he, believing that the office of chancellor was too exalted for the work he was doing, requested that he continue to be called "president," and that the office of chancellor be abolished. It would not be filled again until Cox's retirement in 1942, when it would be revived as a kind of senior statesman position, which the trustees elected him to fill.

By then it was appropriate to recognize the statesmanship Cox had exercised in leading the University through its first great period of transformation. Finding less a university than a congeries of dean-led schools with little sense of coherence or collaboration, Cox forged a sense of collegiality among the senior officers and helped to nurture an institutional identity by various means: through the inauguration of Charter Day, which celebrated Emory's refounding, as it were, as a university; through the establishment of traditions that persist to this day, such as the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols; and through simple decisions like pooling the hundreds of individual endowment funds into a single fund to simplify investment.

By 1926 Cox had brought Emory to the point of envisioning a campaign to raise capital and to systematically add buildings to the campus. In February of that year, the University announced the beginning of a $10 million fund-raising campaign, the largest ever undertaken in the South to that point. With a slogan of "$10 Million in Ten Years," the effort had a variety of aims, including the addition of new monies to the endowment. In that year, Emory's endowment totaled $2,946,890. By contrast, Harvard University's was $69,689,840, Yale's $41,641,983, the University of Rochester's $25,500,000, Cornell University's $19,900,000, The Johns Hopkins University's $19,295,199, and Princeton's $14 million.

Fueled by great optimism and civic pride throughout Atlanta, the University raised $750,000 within a year. Unfortunately, the advent of the Great Depression in the very middle of this campaign soon derailed much of it. Plans for an arts center—designed to be built along what is now Dowman Drive, south of where the current Administration Building stands—were folded into the construction of Glenn Memorial Church. Since the dedication of the church in 1931, that building has thus borne a somewhat ambiguous ontology, functioning as "Glenn Memorial Church" whenever church functions are scheduled, and as "Glenn Memorial Auditorium" when University functions are scheduled. It was, thus, Glenn Memorial Auditorium in which the endowed Flora Glenn Candler Concert Series was inaugurated in 1966, but Glenn Memorial Church in which the funeral for Flora Glenn Candler was held in 1968 The confusion—and the inadequacy of the arrangement for the performing arts—has persisted for more than seven decades.

The Great Depression hit the campus hard in other ways. To keep the University solvent, Cox was forced to cut expenditures by nearly 30 percent between 1931 and 1935. Goodrich C. White, who was then dean of Emory College and would succeed Cox as president, recalled later that Cox's dedication to the faculty was never more tried or more evident than at this time.

The only time I ever saw him [Cox] give way to feeling was when he had to announce the imminent necessity of a salary cut, and the faculty had responded with a spontaneous expression of loyalty and confidence. He broke down then; and for some minutes he could not speak. The faculty whose interests were so deeply his had shown that they believed in and trusted him. That broke him, where difficulties and problems never could. In every crisis, great or small, his poise [was] unshaken, his courage undaunted his decision unfailing.

Fortunately federal relief efforts began to pull the country out of the pits; in 1937 faculty salaries were back to their earlier levels, and an annuity plan had been established.

By 1940 and the beginning of his third decade at Emory, President Cox had overseen the University's opening of the Wesley Memorial Hospital (now Emory University Hospital) on campus (1922); the merger of the School of Nursing with Emory in 1923 and its move to the campus, along with the opening of the Florence Candler Harris Home for Nurses—Harris Hall (1929): the incorporation of the former Carnegie Library Training School of Atlanta as a graduate division of librarianship within Emory's graduate school (1925); and the establishment of junior colleges in Valdosta, Georgia (1928), and at the Oxford campus (1929).

Late in 1941, already succumbing to the illness that would kill him a few years later, President Cox announced his intention to retire before the next academic year. Ill much of the winter quarter, and unable to fulfill his duties, he nevertheless was able to attend the Charter Day celebration January 25, 1942. But for the rest of the year, Vice President Goodrich White oversaw the administration, and when, in May 1942, the trustees elected Cox to the newly defined position of chancellor, they also elected White to succeed Cox as president. As chancellor, Cox became ex-officio a member of the board and its executive committee, without administrative responsibilities, and was charged with "supervising the University's relations with the Church and the public at large."

Cox carried out these duties as best he could for the next two years, while taking pains to stay out of the way of his successor. He died on July 27, 1944, after weeks of confinement to home and hospital. In a memorial tribute addressed to the trustees four months later, President White had this to say:

I worked with him closely for many years and I loved him. There was in him as little of self-seeking as in any man I ever knew. No one, I suspect, will ever fully understand some of the problems with which he wrestled during the early years of the University and during the depression years which followed. . . . He was a great soul. We miss him."

Cox's own summation of his legacy may be summed up in a report he made to the alumni toward the end of his administration:

Our most pressing job was to place the entire academic program upon such a sound basis that an Emory diploma would carry prestige wherever sound scholarship is recognized and valued. . . . Its accomplishment means that we have created a good university. But with this accomplishment our work had only begun. . . Our next job was to create a great university.