Berea College: An Illustrated History

5. Bristling with History

W HEN William J. Hutchins became Berea’s fourth president in July 1920, he stepped into a history that reflected significant changes in the understanding of Berea’s story. Under the leadership of William G. Frost, Berea had focused on the “uplift” of southern mountain people, and in 1911 the trustees had voted to amend the college’s constitution and designate Appalachia as Berea’s sole field of service. The institutional story presented at Hutchins’s inaugural showed a college whose founding was at once radical, altruistic, and dedicated to serving poor students, white and black, through education. Frost had added to this mission a focus on a specific region, Appalachia . In 1920 Berea’s five academic departments promised to meet the vast and immediate social, economic, and educational needs of a region that had been largely ignored in America’s march to progress. Hutchins recognized the seriousness of Appalachian problems, and he quickly devised his own solutions for meeting these challenges . For Hutchins the answer to Appalachia’s situation was not a collection of schools with a college department, but a true college . This college, Hutchins believed, would prepare young mountain people to teach in newly emerging high schools, to serve rural populations as extension agents and qualified nurses, and to beautify homes and communities. Frost’s romantic view of Appalachia promoted the mountains as the birthplace of such luminaries as Daniel Boone, Abraham Lincoln, and Alvin York. The prospect of finding similar heroic types in the mountains had been Frost’s encouragement to Berea’s supporters that the college was worthy of their donations. For Hutchins, however, the real heroes at Berea were the students themselves. He reasoned that these young people had overcome the tremendous obstacles of poverty, ignorance, 103 Bristling with History William J. Hutchins, 1920–1938 Perhaps you and we may help to bring the day when our mountain men may prove their chivalry by giving their women the good time, which comes with culture and with leisure to read and laugh, to sing glad rather than “lonesome” tunes, and to dream dreams which need not wait for heaven for realization. william j. hutchins and neglect just to achieve an education. Moreover, these same graduates were willing to sacrifice their new status by returning to the mountains to improve the lives of their home communities. Berea, in Hutchins’s view, would not be known for its famous graduates, but for the dozens of apparently ordinary young men and women quietly doing extraordinary things in service to others. To achieve this end, Hutchins reorganized Berea’s administration and curriculum in such a way that Frost was convinced that his successor had abandoned the student in the “coves and hollers.” Hutchins was equally convinced that mountain students were now ready for a college, an institution of higher learning specifically adapted to serve a higher purpose—Christian American citizenship. The administration of William J. Hutchins is notable for its achievement in articulating the needs of young mountaineers and laying the foundation for Berea as a college rather than a collection of allied schools. “Billy Hutch” Born in Brooklyn, New York, in July 1871, William James Hutchins was the oldest son of the Reverend Robert Grosvenor Hutchins and Harriet P. (James) Hutchins. Educated at Oberlin College from 1888 to 1890, while his father served Oberlin’s Second Congregational Church, William finished his undergraduate education at Yale in 1892. Upon completion of his studies at Union Theological Seminary in 1896, Hutchins was ordained a Presbyterian minister . He then accepted the pastorate of Bedford Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn, where he served from 1896 until 1907. After a distinguished tenure at Bedford, Hutchins returned to Oberlin in 1907 as professor of homiletics in Oberlin’s School of Theology.1 “Billy Hutch,” as he was called by his fellow theologues, enjoyed a singular popularity at Oberlin. In addition to teaching in the theological school, Hutchins taught a required undergraduate course, Freshman Bible. “Whole generations of Oberlin students ,” observed his son Robert Maynard Hutchins years later, “had their college courses wrecked because at the very outset they studied under Professor Hutchins. . . . His popularity and effectiveness were such as almost to amount to unfair competition .”2 Taking leave from Oberlin, William Hutchins served in the YMCA National b e r e a c o l l e g e 104 Anna Murch Hutchins poses with her sons, Robert (standing), William (seated, right), and Francis (center). William J. Hutchins addressed...