Presidents

Goodrich C. White, the Mayor of Mudville

Goodrich C. White, 1908 College
1889-1979

President 1942-1957
Chancellor 1957-1979

In photographs, the trailers nestled under the loblolly pines, about where Longstreet Hall now stands, have the air of an R.V. park in summer. Wash hangs on clotheslines stretched from trailer to tree. A young woman—a student's wife—standing half-inside the door of a phone booth holds the receiver away as she shouts for a neighbor some trailers down to come take a call. One can almost smell the cook fires and imagine a nearby lake where the campers could go boating and fishing. The only sign that this is not a campground is the plank sidewalks stretching from trailer to trailer to keep feet above the mud—as clear a sign as any that this is a boomtown. This is Trailertown, and the time is fall of 1946.

Just two years earlier, as World War II entered its last phase and Allied armies pushed out from Normandy in France and on up the Pacific chain of islands toward Japan, enrollment at Emory had dropped to fourteen hundred in all the schools. Now, thanks to returning G.I.s and the generosity of a thankful government, enrollment had soared to thirty-five hundred. In two years more it would reach almost four thousand. For a campus with housing sufficient for only several hundred, the times called for drastic measures: the administration ordered up a hundred used trailers from the government's atomic labs at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and thirty-one prefab buildings to house married students and their young families. Three large, wooden buildings that had served as army barracks were shipped in and put up, almost overnight, across the railroad tracks, along the current Michael Street, to house nearly four hundred more single students who, according to Thomas English's history "shivered in winter and baked in summer." The barracks became known as "Lower Slobbovia," and the married student housing, out Clifton Road, was dubbed "Mudville."

The "mayor" of Mudville, was Goodrich C. White, who had become president just four years earlier. An Emory graduate (1908 College), White had come to the presidency by an inexorable logic after spending all but six years of his adult life at Emory.

Born in Griffin, Georgia, in 1889, White entered Emory College young and graduated at eighteen. He filled his undergraduate years with accomplishment: election to DVS honor society, editor of the Phoenix, star athlete in the intramural program, debater, and outstanding student. After his graduation, he worked for a brief stint on the staff of the Methodist Publishing House, in Nashville, before earning an M.A. degree in psychology at Columbia University and teaching for a time at Kentucky Wesleyan College (English and psychology) and Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia (psychology and education). At last, presumably having seen enough of the world at large, he returned to Emory College in 1914, just as the Southern Methodist church was deciding that Emory should move to Atlanta.

White managed to get in a few years of teaching psychology before he was called to serve the army in 1918-19, as a lieutenant in the psychology division of the Army Medical Corps. By the time he returned from the service, as an associate professor of psychology, he could unpack his bags in Atlanta, not Oxford. The College had moved in with the rest of the University. Picking up where he had left off, he soon found the need for further training and took a leave for a time to earn his Ph.D. degree at the University of Chicago in 1927. Then it was back to Emory for good.

A genial-looking man who shared many of the interests of President Cox—an insistence on raising the academic stakes in Druid Hills, and activity in many capacities as lay leaders in the Methodist Church—White soon caught the attention of the president, who appointed him dean of Emory College when Howard Odum left for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he would become famous as a sociologist of the South. Six years later Cox appointed White dean of the graduate school as well, giving him purview over all the arts and sciences at Emory for the next nine years. In 1938, as the University grew increasingly complex, Cox tapped White to serve as vice president, and White stepped down from the College deanship, continuing to lead the graduate school until his election by the board to succeed Cox in 1942.

Few presidents in Emory's history since James Thomas have been called on to serve during such cataclysmic times. White had to deal with not only the massive disruptions caused by World War II but also the student drain resulting from the Korean War. And, then, on the other side, he had to build quickly and effectively to accommodate the floods of new students at the end of each of those wars. In order to attract the large number of new faculty required to teach the returning G.I.s, White got approval from the trustees to build or purchase 114 housing units in homes or apartment buildings next to the campus—along Haygood Drive and North Decatur Road—in order to offer low-cost housing to the new faculty.

At the same time, White kept before the University the need for academic excellence, which he knew would come only at a high price. In 1944, after a decade and a half of economic depression and the drain of war, White had the temerity to propose to the board a ten-year campaign to double the University's assets, which then stood at $20 million (including $7 million in endowment). Just seven years later he would report the successful attainment of that goal.

The building program alone is staggering to contemplate. Major construction during White's administration included the Whitehead Pavilion in the hospital (1946); the Rich Memorial Building (1947); Gilbert Hall and Thomson Hall (1947); a new field house (1949); the Alumni Memorial Building (1950); the Geology Building (now Geosciences, 1950); the Biology Building (now Tarbutton Hall, 1951); the History Building (now Bowden Hall, 1951); the Basic Sciences Building (now Psychology, 1951); Wesley Hall (1951); the Woodruff Memorial Building (1952); the Administration Building and Longstreet and Means Halls (1955); Bishops Hall (1957); three fraternity houses; and the University's first parking deck. His administration also undertook a renovation of Candler Library at a cost of $400,000—exactly what it had cost to build the library in 1926. About half of the University standing when White retired in 1957 had been built in the last eleven years of his presidency.

But the real building of the University filled other dimensions. The years of his administration saw the college faculty grow from 62 to 160 and college enrollment climb from 700 to 1700. He strengthened the business school and saw the law school enrollment grow from 39 in 1941 to 170 in 1957. The theology school grew to become the largest seminary in Methodism, doubling its faculty and quadrupling its student body.

Some of the most dramatic changes occurred in the health sciences, as the University brought the medical school administration out of downtown, at Grady Hospital, to quarters in Druid Hills. The growing complexity of the health sciences persuaded the trustees to establish a separate committee of the board to oversee the medical center (later named the Robert W. Woodruff Health Sciences Center). Perhaps most significant was the creation of The Emory Clinic in 1952. Beginning with seventeen physicians who organized themselves as a private practice under the direction of the dean of the medical school, the Clinic enabled physician-faculty members to earn their living by seeing patients on the campus, while devoting at least a quarter of their time to teaching and research. Paying for the facilities they used and contributing a portion of their income to the operation of the medical school, the Clinic members helped to stabilize the finances of the medical school.

In 1954, with a gift of $1 million from Robert Woodruff, construction began on the five-story Clinic building across from the hospital. Opened in 1956, this building provided space for the Clinic members, whose number by then had grown to 34 and would grow in the next ten years to 104. Dr. J. Elliott Scarborourgh, the Clinic's new director, would be memorialized by this building and would become one of two Emory leaders to have an Atlanta Gas/Light Company "Shining Light Award" erected in his honor (the other was Henry Bowden, longtime chairman of the Board of Trustees).

The political difficulties of establishing The Emory Clinic are easy to forget in these days of HMO's, hospital mergers, and "third-party payors." But the mid-1950s did not look kindly on "corporate medicine," especially if community physicians viewed it as giving an unfair advantage to one group of doctors. Added to this political barrier was the suspicion generated by the move of the medical school administration to the Druid Hills campus, away from Grady Hospital. Some faculty accused the University of abandoning its commitment to caring for the indigent of Atlanta. President White and Dean Arthur Richardson of the medical school led the University in a protracted and complicated public conversation, at the end of which the city of Atlanta had satisfied itself that Emory had surpassed its contractual commitments to Grady and would continue to do so.

The Clinic has undergone several reorganizations since the 1950s, and Emory continues to provide the bulk of the medical service to Grady through its training programs for hundreds of medical residents. Still, many of the same issues that confront Emory administrators in the health sciences occupied much of the time of President White and his team.

Not surprisingly, given White's long stewardship of the graduate school, he initiated planning during the Second World War for the University to begin offering doctoral degrees. "The work of a true university," he said, "is the spirit of investigation, of inquiry, of creative scholarship. This spirit enriches and vitalizes the teaching process itself. Without it teaching is apt to become sterile and lifeless." Determined to make his alma mater a "true university," he set his sights on two of Emory's areas of greatest strength, the related fields of chemistry and biochemistry.

White did not want to do things by half-measures, though. It took several years after the war before the first Ph.D. degree, in chemistry, was awarded in 1948. Additional programs came on line only gradually. In the next eleven years, Emory awarded only fifty-eight more doctoral degrees. Still, by 1957 the University had begun Ph.D. programs in English, history, philosophy, political science, and psychology. In addition, Emory had launched two interdisciplinary divisions to grant the Ph.D. across departmental lines—the Institute for the Liberal Arts, established in 1952, and the Division of Basic Health Sciences. Emory was only the third university in the nation—after Harvard and Stanford—to bring the health sciences together in this way.

One measure of the growing importance of graduate programs at Emory was the proportion of graduate degrees to the total number of degrees awarded. In 1957, at the last Commencement over which White presided, graduate degrees comprised 60 percent—408—of the 675 degrees awarded. Only 179 students graduated from Emory College that year, and a smattering of undergraduates received nursing and business degrees.

If the internal curriculum of the University showed increasing signs of movement toward research, other developments during White's administration pushed in the same direction from other sources. In 1956 Emory acquired the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center from Yale University for the price of a dollar. The center's transfer from its home in Orange Park, Florida, in 1965 to new facilities on the Emory campus would establish a powerful and nearly unique research arm of the University. Likewise, the federal government's decision in 1947 to locate the Centers for Disease Control next to Emory brought to Clifton Road the foundation on which Emory would build a school of public health in the 1990s. (Meanwhile, in the 1950s, as the CDC's move to Clifton Road suffered delays, Robert Woodruff intervened with his golfing partner President Dwight Eisenhower to facilitate establishment of the new CDC campus.).

In other ways White evinced throughout his administration a gigantic pragmatism and a keen sense for the ripe opportunity. Elected president six months after Pearl Harbor, White sought out the U.S. Navy to help keep enrollment afloat. In July 1943 Emory launched its V-12 training program, bringing to the campus 626 navy apprentice seamen and marines for a basic curriculum and an accelerated premedical course. Under his watch, the college and business school curricula were merged for the duration, and the law school cut its regular course offerings in favor of evening courses. With faculty members going off to war, White called up professors emeriti from retirement and enlisted many instructors for overtime teaching.

Despite these hardships, the war did not prevent Emory from growing. In 1944, the Board of Trustees approved the merger of the Atlanta-Southern Dental College with Emory, transferring to the University all of the dental school's equipment, property, and endowment as well as its 3,693 alumni. That same year, the nursing program in Emory University Hospital became a school, rather than a training program, and began granting degrees rather than certificates. As if to cap the University's intention to come out of the war stronger than ever, White that year brought to the campus Emory's chapter of the Society of Sigma Xi, the national scientific research honorary society.

Perhaps the greatest instance of White's practice of pragmatic opportunism was the decision to open Emory College to women. The University had had women students almost from its first days in Atlanta. The first woman law student enrolled in 1917, and the theology school began admitting women in 1922, graduating its first woman in 1938. Even Emory College had enrolled a number of women (some three thousand had graduated from the entire University by 1953), but admissions were sporadic and depended to a great extent, apparently, on the whims of the administration and the ability of women students to find housing nearby—the University had no women's dorms other than Harris Hall for the nursing students. Even Gordon Stipe, the registrar, admitted at one point that he didn't know what the policy was.

Whatever the informal policy was, the University was hampered by a formal agreement with Agnes Scott College not to admit women full-time to undergraduate liberal arts programs. As part of the arrangement establishing the University Center in Georgia in 1939, the member institutions had agreed to complement each other's programs, not to compete with each other. Why this should have meant that Emory could not admit undergraduate women while Georgia Tech and the University of Georgia could, is anybody's guess at this late date. But it took some negotiation by President White to change the agreement. At last, in the fall of 1953, with the approval of Emory's Board of Trustees, Emory College admitted its first sizable class of women. It was no coincidence that the Korean War had begun just the previous year, and President White was facing once again a campus drained of its student body by the armed services. Women, exempt from the draft, made up the difference.

The late forties and early fifties were a time of great consolidation and enhancement of programs at Emory, guided in large part by President White's articulation of the mission of Emory: "[A]ll our planning for the University's development," he said, "grows out of a deep sense of obligation and opportunity for service. The conviction that our Southern region needs and is entitled to the best in education is fundamental in our thinking. Every reference to the ‘University's needs' rests upon an attempt to see clearly the needs of the community and our responsibility in relationship to those needs."

During White's administration, the University established the Office of Community Education Service, which in time became Evening at Emory. Seeing that Emory had little reason—or hope—to compete with Georgia Tech, White closed Emory College's engineering department. With a growing school of journalism nearby at the University of Georgia, White closed the journalism department as well. This latter move especially brought howls of protest from faculty, alumni, and students. Seeing little reason for holding onto Emory's campus in Valdosta—where the state had made Georgia State Women's College coeducational as Valdosta State College, competing strongly for a limited student population—White persuaded the Emory trustees to give the Valdosta campus to the state in 1953. The campus was incorporated into what is now Valdosta State University.

That White had begun to move the University onto the national scene in a powerful way is attested by his service in national bodies. President Harry Truman tapped him to serve on the President's Commission on Higher Education in 1946. In 1952, as if in ratification of his long career, White was elected president of the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa—the first Southerner ever elected to that position.

A great friend of Charles Howard Candler Sr. and Robert Woodruff—each of whom gave the University some $10 million during White's administration—Goodrich White was a fearless innovator and fund raiser. In 1951, having led the University in successfully doubling its assets to total $40 million, he challenged the board to double them yet again—to raise another $40 million in the next ten years. When he retired six years later, the University's net worth stood at $52.5 million, with $28 million in endowment.

Yet it was not in the growth of assets or the concreteness of programs that White found the source of worth of his university. A profoundly religious man, he summed up his educational creed in terms borrowed from his Methodist faith: "No stable basis can be found for life and for the education that seeks life's ennoblement except in belief in the supreme dignity and worth of the person, in human freedom and in the law of love."

White's creed would be tested severely in the years immediately following his retirement. Indeed, the decade leading up to it offered the University ample opportunity to put that creed into practice. If the White administration had one weakness, it was the inability to respond more vigorously in challenging the social status quo. In particular, the structures of segregation being dismantled by the civil rights movement of the late forties and fifties had led many otherwise progressive southern educators to accept a philosophy whose history dated to the educational activities of the white Atticus Haygood and the black Booker T. Washington.

Separate but equal had become the norm. While Emory administrators might do all they could to encourage excellence in institutions like the Methodists' Paine College for African-Americans and, closer to home, Morehouse College, Atlanta University, Spellman College, Clark College, Morris Brown College, and the Interdenominational Theological Center—all historically black institutions—that benign intention somehow did not suggest to the well-meaning that Emory's doors should be opened to all races. In fact there were legal restrictions that made it difficult, if not impossible, to admit African-Americans as students to Emory. The University would at last take measures against those restrictions, but not before another presidential administration passed.