A great friend of America's liberal arts and
church-related colleges completed his life's journey in this
centennial year of the founding of the University of Chicago
where, in 1933, he studied for one of the first doctorates
in higher education and formed a life-long association with
the school's dynamic leader, Robert Maynard Hutchins.
McGrath matriculated at his hometown University of
Buffalo in 1923, when its liberal arts college was two years
old and 750 students were roaming the 75 acres of the former
Erie County poor farm. The previous year, Samuel P. Capen,
a luminary in the history of American colleges and
universities and first president of the American Council on
Education had come to Buffalo as chancellor. Capen invited
McGrath to help him administer the growing institution and
over the following two decades the young assistant recalls,
"I got a good solid grounding in every phase of college
operation under the supervision of the country's leading
theoretician on the subject."
His Buffalo experiences prepared the way for service as
United States Commissioner of Education and afforded
opportunity to become a post-presidency confidante to Mr.
Harry Truman and Mr. Dwight Eisenhower. He framed the
prophetic 1947 report of the first Presidential Commission
on Higher Education, helped build the Navy's famous wartime
V-12 college training program and directed its off-duty
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study program, which served as a model for later high school
equivalency and external-degree programs.
After World War II, he served as dean of the college of
liberal arts at the University of Iowa and president of the
University of Kansas City before moving to Teachers College
at Columbia University where, with support from the Carnegie
Corporation, he focused on the plight of small liberal arts
campuses and the distinctive values they contributed to the
life of the nation. These small-often church-related-schools,
as California-based journalist Edwin Kiester Jr. noted, were
always the focal point of McGrath's personal and abiding
credo: For nearly five decades "he [preached] the gospel
that the prime objective of higher education should be
teaching; that the welfare of the student should be
uppermost; that the development of character and a
responsible citizenry are more important than the mere
transmission of knowledge-and that all this flourishes best
in the intimate atmosphere of the small liberal arts
college."
In his "third" retirement-he left Columbia at age 65 and
Temple University at age 70-he settled as director of the
program in liberal studies at the University of Arizona and
with support from the Lilly Endowment conducted a study of
49 colleges and universities affiliated with the Southern
Baptist Convention. His closing years were devoted to
encouraging Christian colleges and universities to affirm
their "special purpose" and distinctive calling. In an
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article for Faculty Dialogue five years ago, McGrath
summarized his convictions on the matter:
The church-related college is peculiarly
equipped by its philosophy, its faculty, and by the
closeness of its community life to take the
leadership in restoring to a central position in
all of American higher education the treatment of
values as an indispensable element in the society
of learning. . . .
If these institutions fail forcefully and
unmistakably to reassert and implement their
spiritually oriented central mission, they will
have lost the one element in their character which
provides genuine distinctive among the larger
company of competitive institutions of higher
education, and if capitalized upon could assure
their continued vitality and growth. More
significantly, the entire American society will,
without question, continue to degenerate, and the
humane principles that have animated our culture
will be further weakened while the forces of
materialism, secularism, and opportunism will
dominate the social enterprise.
Honored with degrees and awards from more than 50
colleges and universities and numerous professional
organizations, Earl McGrath's abiding legacy is his clarion
call to the community of Christian educators to "seize this
fugitive opportunity . . . and awesome responsibility" to
restore in American education a central focus on spiritual
commitments which vouchsafe renewal of the life of the
nation.
It is with deep gratitude that we bid the Honorable
Earl James McGrath farewell. He guided the Institute for
Christian Leadership in its inception and generously advised
us during our years of service. The comfort of having a
friend may be taken away, but not that of having had one.
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