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East Carolina University
East Carolina University
East Carolina University
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East Carolina University

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East Carolina University was founded by the State of North Carolina in 1907 as a teacher training school meant to provide professionally trained faculty for schools in the eastern part of the state. Within two decades, the school matured into a teacher s college. Although coeducational from the start, the vast majority of the student body early on was female. Following World War II and the gender transformation of higher education resulting from successive GI Bills, East Carolina emerged with increasing balance as the male student body grew to match the female population on campus. In subsequent decades, East Carolina continued to expand academically, emerging as a research university with a medical school and a dental school. Today, ECU is a leading producer of K-12 teachers in the Southeast as well as a leader nationwide in training practitioners of family medicine. The impressive development of East Carolina has flowed from its embodiment of the school s ethic of service to the local community and, in the broadest context, the best interests of humanity.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 7, 2013
ISBN9781439644119
East Carolina University
Author

John Allen Tucker PhD

John Allen Tucker, PhD, is a professor of history and the university historian at ECU. Arthur Carlson is the university archives specialist at J.Y. Joyner Library at ECU.

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    East Carolina University - John Allen Tucker PhD

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    INTRODUCTION

    The founding father of East Carolina Teachers Training School, former governor Thomas Jordan Jarvis (1836–1915), fully grasped the significance of the institution’s beginning when he observed, This school comes nearer to being the people’s school than any other in the state . . . [It provides] the greatest service to the greatest number of people . . . We can never begin to calculate the value it will be to North Carolina.

    Having retired from an exceptional career in political office, Governor Jarvis spent his final decades in his adopted home, Greenville, playing a leading role in transforming the small but thriving tobacco town on the Tar River into a progressive center of educational distinction. Working with state senator James L. Fleming (also a Greenville resident), Jarvis contributed his priceless political connections throughout the state to the cause of having legislation enacted to provide for the school and to have it located in Greenville. Jarvis also played the leading role in selecting the architectural style of the campus—Spanish Colonial—reflecting his service as minister to Brazil. Finally, Jarvis presided over the selection of the first president of the training school, Robert Herring Wright (1870–1934), and a number of the charter faculty. When the school opened in the fall of 1909 to a class of 123 students (104 women, 19 men), there was no doubt that the eastern part of the state had entered a new and profoundly promising age.

    Led for more than two decades by Wright, a native North Carolinian devoted to excellence and progressive approaches to education, the training school rapidly filled a variety of needs with year-round instruction of both aspiring and in-service teachers. The result was a degree of cultural and educational enrichment for eastern North Carolina that continues even as the school advances into its second century.

    Belief in the progressive power of education vis-à-vis the problems challenging humanity was integral to the service ethic prevailing at the institution. Confident elation over the new experiment is evident in virtually all that the school and its students did, including hosting lectures, staging dramatic performances like The Mikado and Hiawatha, founding literary societies, gardening, attending chapel talks, hiking, participating in social activities sponsored by county clubs, and myriad other activities that complemented classroom learning. So many of East Carolina’s later strengths—especially in drama, music, science, the humanities, and the social sciences—have clear beginnings in the multifaceted work of the training school. Documentation for these many contributions appears in the Training School Quarterly (TSQ), a set of well-edited volumes relating the theories and practices of the first decade of the school. Fortunately, the TSQ took advantage of newly developed cameras and provided considerable primary source material in the form of photographs.

    A truly revolutionary aspect of the training school was its coeducational nature. In the early 20th century, most institutions of higher education in North Carolina were not coeducational and would not be so for decades to come. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for example, did not fully provide for coeducation in all of its academic programs until 1963. Rather than coeducation, the norm was a separate but equal division wherein women went to schools such as Woman’s College (later, University of North Carolina at Greensboro). East Carolina, then, was a leader in that its doors were open from the start, in theory and practice, to both men and women.

    Early on, women prevailed in the student body and in the faculty. East Carolina’s leaders, from Wright forward, respected their student body and were convinced of the importance of education for women. In music, art, drama, sports, literature, social sciences, sciences, and the study of history, East Carolina’s early development and the foundations first laid were provided by its female student body, which consistently proved itself capable of virtually any challenge. Even with the introduction of the pirate motif in the 1934 Tecoan, credit must go to the editorial staff of the annual, including the editor, Frances Harvey; the business manager, Kathryn Hines; and the sponsors, Mrs. E.W. Harvey and Mrs. G.A. Hines.

    The impressive professional contributions of the training school to regional education soon led to its recognition as a teachers college, East Carolina Teachers College. This recognition occurred shortly after passage of the 19th Amendment, which empowered women with the right to vote. On few campuses, public or private, was this political transformation more deeply understood and appreciated than at East Carolina. In the 1920s and 1930s, East Carolina was providing opportunities for a fully capable part of society that otherwise faced restrictions and regulations blocking advancement (if not absolute entry and accommodation). The very openness of the teachers college to innovation and opportunities is readily evident in the optimistic joy so frequently captured in photographs from those decades.

    While male enrollment at the school increased throughout the 1930s, it was only with post–World War II GI Bills that a gender transformation of the campus occurred. Proximity to military bases in the coastal region plus a campus on which the majority of students were female made East Carolina an attractive option for aspiring first-generation college students. The male presence grew annually, with the 1950s and 1960s being pivotal decades in the school’s transformation, first from a teachers college into a four-year liberal arts college, and then from a college into a university with a variety of professional programs adding to the core strength in education.

    Many of these developments occurred following a period of crisis in leadership. In 1945, Pres. Leon Meadows, Wright’s successor, was convicted of embezzlement and sentenced to prison. John D. Messick, born and raised in eastern North Carolina, was hired as president in late 1947 and retained the position for the next 12 years. During the Messick era, East Carolina regained its bearings in terms of campus collegiality, integrity, and progress. Messick contributed significantly to the institution by bringing in a younger leader as part of his team: Dr. Leo W. Jenkins, dean of the college. Messick and Jenkins labored selflessly in support of the college and its role of service to the larger community. When Messick resigned in 1959, Jenkins emerged as the clear choice on campus and in the community.

    Jenkins understood well

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