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chapter 8 crisis and sUrvivaL This institution has only just got its neck out of a noose that came mighty close to complete strangulation. A little more, and there wouldn’t have been anything left. —H. Robinson Shipherd, July 23, 1930 The depression has reduced our resources to a hand to hand fight to provide food, fuel, books, work, scholarships and instructors. —John Wesley Hill, February 12, 1933 in no place have i ever heard so much nasty gossip and scandle [sic]. The entire college campus seems to be alive with it. —J. Samuel Guy, July 21, 1930 President H. robinson shipherd issued his annual report to the Board of Directors at its meeting on June 2, 1930, characterizing the strike as “a carefully organized conspiracy of teachers, who for reasons more or less selfish exploited the enthusiastic idealism which is conspicuous in this student body.” The breaking of the strike purged the campus “organism of poisonous bacilli which had been too long accumulating,” preserving “the fundamental principles of academic law and order.” Clearly the victors in this struggle were going to write the history of the event. The president also reported that the university spent $415 in dealing with the strike. A total of 155 college students, about one-third the enrollment, withdrew because of the turmoil. As a result only half as many students graduated in 1931 as in 1930.1 The board voted to drop the lincoln Memorial Academy and its support for the Ellen Myers school. shipherd fully approved, noting that the county was capable of supporting public schools and that the continuance of both institutions had been a sore spot in efforts to achieve accreditation. ironically, there is no indication in Ezra Gillis’s reports that this was so. Berea College retained its academy, making it the largest component of the college well into the 1940s. The Southern Association had no difficulty with colleges that maintained primary or secondary schools, as long as adequate and separate facilities and teachers were crisis and survival 162 used for each component. lincoln Memorial University dropped its associated schools primarily to save money.2 One of Shipherd’s first tasks was to find replacements for dismissed and resigned faculty members. Determined to secure the best teachers, he traveled that summer to Harvard and Columbia to interview junior faculty and recent graduates . for the time, John Wesley Hill supported this effort as part of the continuing move to gain accreditation. shipherd found men and women “with the right biological background, the right training, the right experience, the right interest, and the right family.” Eleven of the university’s twenty-four faculty members were brand new in the fall of 1930. one-third of the faculty, old and new, held a Ph.D., nearly one-third held a master’s degree, and almost all the rest held a bachelor ’s degree. one among the twenty-four had earned no more than an associate degree from a junior college.3 The university’s finances became more troubled as the Great Depression deepened. The hiring of new faculty and the construction of additional faculty housing contributed to a large budget deficit. The withdrawal of one-third of the students also hurt the institution financially. Lincoln Memorial University suffered a loss of more than eighty-six thousand dollars in the academic year 1928–29, and of more than forty-nine thousand dollars during 1929–30. At shipherd’s insistence, C. P. Williams worked out a budget to enable the university to meet southern Association standards, but Hill argued it could no longer afford to do so. There was no immediate prospect of association acknowledgment; “we are bleeding white without the slightest chance of realizing our ambition,” he wrote. The board agreed that retrenchment was the only course of action. The executive committee, under Morison’s guidance, took the lead in cutting teacher salaries by 25 percent as well as slashing administrative costs. robert l. Kincaid, who joined the board at the June 1930 meeting as a reward for supporting the administration during the strike, played a large role in the retrenchment process. He admired shipherd’s academic goals but thought the new president had no idea of “the handicaps which face us financially.” Shipherd quickly learned and pitched in to do what he could. After making cuts in all departments and administrative units, he announced to Hill that the budget had been reduced by about seventy thousand dollars.4 initially, shipherd and Hill had...

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