Faculty and Staff Numbers
The growth of an independent office of admissions typified the growth of the administration generally. In 1938, there were a president, a treasurer, and their two secretaries. Even Blackwell did not devote all his time to his office, since he regularly taught classes when in good health. Dean Hall Canter taught a full course load, so his duties as dean were only occasional. The trustees had expected Moreland to teach at least one course when he was hired to be president, as he did himself, but the press of business made that impossible. After the Second World War the administrative officers were the president, treasurer, dean, and registrar; the treasurer and dean were also full-time teachers. By the mid-1950s, there were still as few as six administrators, some of whom still taught as well. (There were two deans by then-one of the faculty, one of students-and an assistant to the president.) The lack of office space probably accounts for this modest growth. Lodged in quarters of their own after the conversion of the library, the administrators budded and branched to correspond with the growing numbers of students. By 1967, there were eleven chief administrative officers, plus thirty-two minions, secretaries, and sundry house carls. None of these lists count the librarian, a position with faculty status, nor the college physician, nor the anonymous and essential corps of maintenance men, who keep the school running.
A rise in the corps of instruction followed the growth of the student body. Only at the end of the Blackwell era-1937-did sociology, in the person of J. Paul McConnell, make its appearance. Between the wars, the faculty remained virtually the same size and remarkably identical in personnel. In 1946-47, there were twenty-four members of the teaching faculty (not counting physical education). Of these, nine had been on the staff before 1926, and six more had been hired between 1930 and 1940. Of the twenty-four, twelve were alumni of the college, and an additional seven came from colleges within the state (three of whom graduated from the University of Richmond). Only two of the twenty-four came from northern schools: Wesleyan and Lehigh. Thirteen of the faculty had earned doctorates. Of the twenty-four, just one-third (eight) had entered the service of the college in 1946 with the expansion of the student body.
By the mid-fifties, the faculty had grown to thirty-nine. The proportion of alumni and doctorates (or equivalent) remained about the same. Nineteen alumni were on the faculty, and there were twenty-one men with doctorates.
The end of the Moreland presidency (1967) saw a faculty of fifty-five full-time teachers, half of whom (twenty-seven) had the doctorate or equivalent. The proportion of alumni had fallen to under half: nineteen. Half of all the faculty had come to the college since 1959. The large proportion of relatively new members of the faculty may have contributed to the willingness of the faculty to change a curriculum that had been in place since 1947. Interestingly enough, when the curriculum was last changed, in 1946, half of the faculty had been at the college for about the same length of time, eight years.
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Reprinted from Professor James Scanlon's Randolph-Macon College: A Southern History 1825-1967