The story
History
Rollins College is Florida's fourth oldest post-secondary institution, and has been independent, nonsectarian, and coeducational from conception. Lucy Cross, founder of the Daytona Institute for Young Women in 1880, first placed the matter of establishing a college in Florida before the Congregational Churches in 1884. In 1885, the church put her on the committee in charge of determining the location of their first college in Florida. Cross is known as the "Mother of Rollins College." Rollins was incorporated, organized, and named in the Lyman Park building in nearby Sanford, Florida, on April 28, 1885, opening for classes in Winter Park on November 4 of that year. It was established by New England Congregationalists who sought to bring their style of liberal arts education to the frontier St. John's basin. A commemorative plaque listing the names of the founders was dedicated 1 March 1954 and is displayed in historic Downtown Sanford.
Early benefactors of Rollins College included Chicago businessman Alonzo Rollins (1832–1887), for whom the college is named. Rollins made substantial donations to enable the founding of the college, and was a trustee and its first treasurer.
Another early benefactor was Franklin Fairbanks of St. Johnsbury, Vermont. Fairbanks was president of Fairbanks Scales, a founder of Winter Park, a donor to Rollins College, and a trustee.
In March of 1936 during a visit to Central Florida, U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt was conferred an honorary degree in literature at the Knowles Chapel on campus. Other U.S. presidents who have visited the campus include Calvin Coolidge (1930), Harry Truman (1949), Ronald Reagan (1976; prior to his 1980 election), and Barack Obama (2012).
Firing of John Andrew Rice and required loyalty pledge
President Hamilton Holt decided to require all professors to make a "loyalty pledge" to keep their jobs. In March 1933, Holt fired John Andrew Rice, an atheist scholar and unorthodox teacher, whom Holt had hired, along with three other "golden personalities" (as Holt called them), in his push to put Rollins on the cutting edge of innovative education, for refusing to sign the loyalty pledge. The widely publicized case was investigated by the American Association of University Professors, which censured Rollins. It is known as the "Rollins College Case" among historians of tenure. The four fired faculty quickly founded experimental Black Mountain College, with a gift from a former Rollins College faculty member.
Okinawa statue
In October 1994, the school made international headlines when the government of Japan, per the request of its Okinawa Prefecture, asked for the return of a statue that was taken as war loot after the Battle of Okinawa in 1945 by Clinton C. Nichols, at that time, a lieutenant commander in the United States Navy and a Rollins alumnus. Nichols had presented the statue of Ninomiya Sontoku, a prominent 19th-century Japanese agricultural leader, philosopher, moralist, and economist, to then-President Hamilton Holt, who promised to display the statue permanently in the main lobby of the Warren Administration Building. The statue was returned to Okinawa in 1995 in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. In addition to providing the school with a replica of the original statue, the government of Okinawa and Rollins pledged to develop additional cooperative projects between the college and Shogaku Junior and Senior High School, the Okinawan school where the original statue has been placed.
Kairis case
On March 31, 1998, the body of Jennifer Leah Kairis, a sophomore student, was found in her Ward Hall dormitory room by a residential assistant. Kairis, who had attended a fraternity party by a chapter on campus hours before she had died, was both legally intoxicated and had a large amount of prescription drugs in her system. At first, the assistant medical examiner at the Orange County coroner's office ruled Kairis' death as a homicide. However, that conclusion was quickly changed after Shashi Gore, the county's chief medical examiner ruled that she had died as a result of an accidental prescription drug overdose. Kairis' parents, who always believed their daughter was raped and murdered by her college boyfriend, requested a lengthy state investigation into their daughter's death due to their belief that the Winter Park Police Department botched the case. On March 4, 2004, Bruce Hyma, the Miami-Dade County chief medical examiner and expert toxicologist hired by State Attorney Lawson Lamar ruled that Kairis had committed suicide via a prescription drug overdose. The seven-year investigation was officially closed on April 13, 2005.
Olin Electronic Research and Information Center
The Olin Electronic Research and Information Center was also established in 1998 with a second gift of US$2.7 million from the F.W. Olin Foundation ($5.42 million today). The center features the latest technology, including computer stations, color printers, scanners, audio and video digitizers, compact discs, videodiscs, and videotapes. These tools facilitate creativity as students pursue research questions, prepare multimedia presentations, and create Web pages.
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Origins as a "Carnegie Library"
Olin Libraries' collection is one of the oldest and most extensive in Central Florida, dating back (1909-1951) to its Carnegie Library founding as one of the original 14 Florida libraries funded by Andrew Carnegie. The original collection, at the founding of Rollins College in 1885, consisted of one Christian Bible and one dictionary. According to Cohen (2006), Carnegie's "donation of 108 libraries to colleges in the first two decades of the twentieth century assisted 10% of the institutions of higher learning in the United States. Carnegie had a preference for colleges and universities that served African-American students, which Rollins College president William Fremont Blackman noted the school did in a letter to Carnegie appealing for a library in 1904:
The fact that it is the only college in the country, North or South, in which the grandchildren of abolitionists and confederate soldiers, in about equal numbers, sit together in the same class-room and play together on the same athletic field, and learn thus to understand, respect and love one another;
Blackman's request consisted of $35,000 in total ($1,254,167 today): "$20,000 for a fireproof building, $3,000 for books, and $12,000 as an endowment for the continued purchase of books" ($716,667, $107,500 and $430,000 today respectively). Blackman received a response from Carnegie's secretary James Bertram that noted the request was too general for consideration, and that Carnegie would need a profile of the university before consideration. Little progress was made for over a year, when Blackman again wrote to Carnegie, noting the university's need for a library. Trustees and friends of the university wrote to Carnegie on Blackman's behalf, including W.W. Cummer, a trustee from Jacksonville who served on the board of the city's new Carnegie Library. A letter dated 22 June 1905 and written from Carnegie's home in Scotland brought the welcome news of the offer of a library. Carnegie offered $20,000 ($716,667 today) for the construction of a library provided that the same amount would be raised for the library's upkeep. While grateful for Carnegie's proposal, Blackman was uneasy with its terms because the amount of funding required to match Carnegie's offer would put a strain on those who had donated to start the college's endowment fund of $200,000 as well as paid a debt of $30,000 ($8.24 million combined today).
In a January 1906 letter Blackman wrote to Carnegie expressing concern about meeting the conditions for the gift, noting that the college had a large debt that took "considerable self-sacrifice on the part of our friends". That summer, another Florida college, Stetson University, was awarded $40,000 ($1,433,333 today) for a library from Carnegie. Upon learning this Blackman again wrote to Carnegie, seeking to amend the original terms of the agreement to match the amount that Stetson was awarded. He was turned down, but a year later was able to notify Carnegie that the school's trustees had been able to match the $20,000 necessary for the gift to be awarded. Bertram wrote to Blackman to inform him that Carnegie had "authorized his Cashier...to arrange payments on Library Building, as work progresses, to the extent of Twenty Thousand Dollars." ($794,732 today) The library, to be named Carnegie Hall, was dedicated on February 18, 1909.
The building had over 8,000 square feet of space, and was the school's first dedicated library building. It served as a library from 1909 until 1951. In addition to its function as a library, Carnegie Hall also served as the school's post office. Since the library was moved from Carnegie to the newly built Mills Memorial Library, it has also housed a bookstore, admissions office, faculty offices, and human resources office.
From Wikipedia’s article on Rollins College, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5