Schools

Oxford College

Although the idea of moving Emory to Atlanta had first been broached by a new trustee shortly after the Civil War (a suggestion quickly squelched), the decision in 1915 to move the College to Atlanta left the original campus in an ambiguous position. What to do with it?

Alumni sentiment strongly favored hanging on to the Methodist "shrine," and in anticipation of the College's relocation in 1919 the trustees established Emory University Academy, a preparatory school. From 1915 until 1919 the prep school and the College operated together on the campus, but with the College's move the academy took over. It could not sustain itself, however. And somewhat like their forebears, who took the failure of the Manual Labor School as a sign to start a still more challenging enterprise, the trustees decided to add to the faltering academy a junior college. The campus required extensive renovation after more than a decade of relative neglect. But in September 1929, under the deanship of Hugh A. Woodward (1901C, '29G), Emory-at-Oxford opened its classrooms to sixty-three students in the academy and 101 students in the junior college.

Emory-at-Oxford, as it was then known, may have achieved a unique distinction in 1947, when it was accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools as a four-year junior college, offering the last two years of high school and the first two years of college. Still largely a men's school, with only a few women attending as day students, the college took a stride toward gender equity in 1955, when the completion of Haygood Hall provided campus housing for women for the first time. By 1964, when the trustees decided to name the new school Oxford College, the high school component had been eliminated, enrollment had risen to 426, and the faculty numbered thirty-four.

Over the next thirty-five years new facilities and technology would make Oxford College of Emory University both attractive in its own right and strongly integrated with the Druid Hills campus. Classrooms with capabilities for videoconferencing made it possible for students on the two campuses to attend classes "together" electronically, while electronic mail, Web sites, and digitized library holdings would bring the research university to the old Oxford buildings. With access to the resources of a major university, yet with an intimate campus of some 145 acres housing six hundred students, Oxford College is unique in American higher education. Competing regularly in both academics and athletics with top-tier four-year baccalaureate colleges, Oxford recruits strongly in the Southeast but draws students from around the country. More than 90 percent of its associate degree graduates continue on to Emory College.

Source:  Hauk, Gary S.  A Legacy of Heart and Mind:  Emory Since 1836.