Ken Dobson's Queer Ruminations from Thailand
Search this site
  • Life in Thailand
  • Queer Issues in Thailand
  • Queer Christian Issues
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Stories

MacMurray College Closes Forever

3/29/2020

2 Comments

 
Picture
MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Illinois will be closing down after 174 years.  The news came today (as I write this on March 28, 2020).  It had been anticipated.  The board of the college cited declining enrollment, lack of rising competitive costs, and lack of sufficient endowment as the causes for there being “no viable financial path forward.”  This semester, ending in May, will be the last.  The 400+ students and 100+ faculty and staff will have to find other places to study and work.

MacMurray was founded by the Methodist Church as a college for women.  It accepted men in 1955, and became fully co-ed in 1969.  Its prominent programs were education, music, and a wide range of liberal arts and sciences.  At one point Mac was thriving, with 1700 students.  Its American Colonial architecture was excellently rendered.  The center of the campus was its administration building for a hundred years, and then the Annie Merner Chapel with its grand Aeolian Skinner pipe organ became the college’s icon and gathering place for important services and concerts.

It is tempting to become nostalgic.  MacMurray has an important place in our family’s history as my mother’s and cousin’s alma-mater, as the place I typed my doctoral thesis in Jacksonville’s first computer lab, and the place our 1958 high school graduating class had its Junior and Senior prom, and baccalaureate service.  I was on stage in the music hall at the age of 5 and doing a piano recital or two ten years later.

Yes, well, everyone in town has memories of Mac. 

Jacksonville was known as the Athens of the West for a few decades because it was (among other credits) the place where there were 2 colleges, 2 academies, the state’s first public high school, a school for the blind, a school for the deaf, and at least 2 commercial colleges.  No town in Illinois, I contend, matched Jacksonville’s educational record until the big cities and state universities began to evolve.  MacMurray was a major contributor to the town’s high regard.

Now MacMurray joins the growing list of degree-granting institutions of higher education going out of business in the USA at the rate of more than 100 a year.  In addition to the reasons for closing that the Mac board mentioned in its public announcement is the fact that the type of education small liberal arts colleges provide is going out of fashion.  That, rather than costs, is what I’d like to discuss now.

Liberal arts education was developed over 150 years to educate community leaders.  Bachelor’s degrees were thought to be foundational, preparing graduates for professional education to follow.  Only a few courses, mostly added in the middle half of the twentieth century, were to prepare graduates for jobs.  But college life was also very much about leadership training.  With a college education followed by a professional education, a physician or lawyer, for example, was also a valuable community leader ready to augment those who rose due to their family influence or in public esteem to offices such as sheriff, mayor, fire chief, or president of the bank.
​
Leadership nurture is a tedious, labor-intensive undertaking.  It’s easier when the trainee has leadership talent and intuition to begin with.  But even for those so endowed the process of discovering one’s most effective style of leadership can be difficult.  That is why college life for a small liberal-arts college can be both challenging and rewarding.  Being small, college functions can involve about everybody as a leader somewhere along the way.  There’s no better leadership education than experience.  In colleges, students are on their own to run student organizations such as campus newspapers, intra-mural teams, sororities and fraternities, and sometimes even choirs and dramas.

Leadership skills are acquired both inside and outside of classrooms.  They include arts of persuasion, political organization, project management, social infrastructure, and personality discernment.  Big institutions give a few students chances at leadership, but small campuses pull just about every willing volunteer into a quick learning curve.  What’s more, big institutions expect high results which involve narrow focus.  If you’re a football player in a big university even academic work takes second place.  On a small campus, in one year, a student can be on a sport’s team, foreign language club, religious organization, and also have a campus job.

I lament the passing of each and every small college.  I’m sorry for the community traditions that will be displaced, for the level of esteem that a college brings to a town, and for the students who tend to bring a town to life.  Most of all I am sorry for the shifts in educational focus away from character development.

We can see the debilitating effect of having people promoted into positions of power who do not have character to match.

So, on this unhappy occasion, let’s give thanks to the United Methodist Church for giving us MacMurray College for 174 years, with 170 graduating classes of women and men who can ride horses as well as sing and preside at council meetings, who know how to calculate equations and enunciate quotes of Euripides, who have read widely and critically, and who have made the world a better place.    
2 Comments
Todd Gresick
8/20/2020 11:46:02 pm

Dr. Dobson, I was intrigued by your post about the memories of your years at MacMurray. You know doubt were acquainted with Robert Glasgow (my organ teacher at the U of Michigan) who had previously taught at MacMurray from 1951-62. He spoke often about the chapel organ, about the installation and voicing, particularly Herbert Pratt, who spent countless hours making sure that the organ was finished to "jewel-like perfection" - Glasgow's own words! I was fortunate to have attended Dr. Glasgow's recital when he was awarded the Honorary Doctorate and will never forget his brilliant performance, and the sounds that he evoked from this one of a kind gem of an instrument. I have great concern about the future of the chapel and organ, as I can't imagine its removal from the space for which it was created.

Reply
kenneth dobson
10/5/2020 06:38:22 am

Todd Gresick: I missed your reply on August 20 to my March 29 blog. Just today, October 5 I received word that the MacMurray campus will be sold at auction on November 12. I do remember Robert Glasgow although I was not his student. My high school friend was one of the first male students at Mac. I was his page-turner for his junior organ recital. He played his senior recital on the Aeolian Skinner in Annie Murner Chapel. I played that organ, too, a couple of times when nobody was there. I loved organ music although I was remarkably ungifted. My area was voice, it turned out. Robert Glasgow was legendary in his own time. (If you see this reply and wish to respond please note my email is kdobsoninsiam@gmail.com)

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Author

    Rev. Dr. Kenneth Dobson posts his weekly reflections on this blog. 

    Archives

    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Copyright © 2023 Rev. Dr. Kenneth Dobson