FLOYD GREENLEAF - in Passion For The World

In
FOR
A HISTORY OF
SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTIST
EDUCATION
FLO Y D GREENLEAF
Pacific Press" Publishing Association

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Designed by Tim Larson
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Vintage photos supplied by author
Copyright © 2005 by
General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists
Department of Education
Silver Spring, Maryland.
Printed in the United States of America by

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Photo credits: Except for those listed below, all photos in this book were
furnished by the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, Office of Ar-
chives and Statistics:
w. W. Prescott (page 38): Ellen G. White Estate.

Classroom building, Adventist International Institute of Advanced Studies
(page 384): Photo by the author.
School of Theology, Sahmyook University (page 387): Photo by the author.
Plaque at Montemorelos University (page 420): Photo by the author.
Zaokski Seminary (page 445): Photo by the author.
Group photo of Faith and Learning Seminar (page 512): General
Conference Department of Education.
ISBN: 0-8163-2114-0
05 06 07 08 09 . 5 4 3 2 1
A NOTE TO THE READER
The abbreviation, AST, appearing in the end notes, represents the

General Conference Office of Archives and Statistics. The abbrevia-
tion, RG, identifies the specific Record Group number where informa-
tion is located.
I have omitted references of sources for most of the historical back-

ground that appears in many chapters. For these passages containing
general information that is part of the common domain I have depend-
ed extensively on general college history texts. An Encyclopedia of
World History, William Langer, ed., was my standard source for names,
dates, and incidental information. A Chronology of Seventh-day Ad-
ventist Education, 1972 edition, Walton 1. Brown, compiler, is the
source for names and dates pertaining to Adventist education.
The names of denominational administrative units, especially Gen-
eral Conference divisions, sometimes vary inconsistently even in the
papers the divisions published. The names in this book are the most
prevalent forms of nomenclature in use at the time when they appear
chronologically in the narritive.
CONTENTS
Foreword
PART ONE
The Beginning Years, 1872-1920
Chapter I The Head, Heart, and Hand .............................................................. 16

Chapter 2 A New Direction ....................................................... ........................ 36
Chapter 3 Schools With Special Missions ........ ........ ................. .......... ...... ........ 53
Chapter 4 The Movement of 1897 ................... .......... ......................................... 80
Chapter 5 Bridging the Atlantic ....................................................................... 104
Chapter 6 Circling the World ........................................................................... 124
Chapter 7 On the Frontiers in the Christian World .............. ........................... 149
Chapter 8 Frontiers in Africa and Asia ............................................................ 171
Chapter 9 The Administrative Agenda ............................................................ 200
PART TWO
The Interim Years, 1920-1945
Chapter 10 World Challenges During the Interim ..................... ... .................... 225
Chapter II The Interim Years in Asia ............................................................... 249
Chapter 12 Latin America and the Caribbean in the Interim ........................... 272
Chapter 13 Debate Over Accreditation .............................................................. 299
Chapter 14 Trends Toward Modernization ................................. .......... ............. 324
PART THREE
Years of Fulfillment and Challenge, 1945-2000
Chapter 15 From Colleges to Universities ............................. ............................ 353

Chapter 16 Higher Education in Asia and the Pacific ....................................... 375
Chapter 17 Higher Learning: Europe, Africa, and Latin America ................... 401
Chapter 18 Adventist Education in Adverse Climates ...................................... 432
Chapter 19 Academic Freedom and State Aid ................... ... .......... ................. .460
Chapter 20 Challenges of Modernization ........................... ..... .......................... 491
Heads of Seventh-day Adventist Education
Bibliography
Index
FOREWORD
Tucked against a knoll on the outskirts of Pune, India lies Salisbury

Park, a small Seventh-day Adventist community whose old stone
church and gabled buildings belie an unusually persistent English am-
bience. It was early summer when we drove over the crest and circled
around to one of the larger buildings. Already the dusty soil lay brown
and thick on the drive. Before we came to a stop we couldn't help but
notice the flowers and shrubbery and the old trees that towered above
the walkways, all emblematic of an attempt by an older generation to
decorate the enclave with nature's best and to make it homey.
We spent a couple of hours wandering, talking, and paradoxically, even
reminiscing about this place that we had never seen. We were in gentle
competition with the clock, but as we turned to go our driver suggested that
we visit the far side of the community, away from the buildings.
"There's a cemetery that you might be interested in," he said. "You
should see it."
Of course we would go, and in a few moments we were wandering
among the headstones, many of them set in place decades ago. The
names stood out, most of which my inflexible North American tongue
could not pronounce, but easier ones as well like Cherian and Lowry,
both Indian and Caucasian, buried together on the edge of Salisbury
Park. It was a quietly moving experience, walking among those mark-
ers and contemplating the convictions that led people from such diver-
gent origins to dedicated careers and finally to the same resting spot.
On our way back among the trees and walkways we passed by the
sign, Salisbury Park.
"By the way," I asked, "Where did the name come from?"
"The missionary."
Yes, I should have known. The missionary. Homer R. Salisbury,
more commonly H. R. Salisbury. I had met him before. He was the one
who, by the time he was twenty-seven, had put in a stint of teaching in
South Africa and completed a course of study in London. He was the
young biblical language and church history teacher at Battle Creek Col-
9
IN PASSION FOR THE WORLD
lege. He was the one who, before his thirtieth birthday, linked up with
others to make Battle Creek College the center for Adventist elemen-
tary education even while older and wiser heads warned that it was a
madcap idea.
Salisbury was the one who publicly contradicted General Confer-
ence dignitaries with statistics showing that the expense of running
church schools did not drain money from more conventional and more
traditional church projects as they had darkly warned. And at the same
time, notwithstanding their pessimism and his public contradiction, he
was the one who retained their respect. He was the one who at age
thirty-one went to England to establish the forerunner of Newbold Col-
lege. He was the one who sent Washington Foreign Missionary Semi-
nary off to a productive start.
And Salisbury was the one who went to India in 1913 to take charge
of the tiny, embryonic Seventh-day Adventist church. Two years later as
he sailed back to that field aboard the S. S. Persia, German torpedoes hit
his ship. Salisbury was the one who gave his life belt to a fellow passen-
ger. And Salisbury was the one who died in the Mediterranean, only
forty-five years old. A stunned General Conference conducted a memo-
rial service in Takoma Park on January 22, 1916 and four weeks later the
Review carried his life sketch. When the Oriental Watchman Publishing
House published Images in 1993, a pictorial history commemorating the
hundredth anniversary of Adventism in Southern Asia, Salisbury was
the one the Indian editors honored with a full-page portrait.
H. R. Salisbury. Yes, I knew who he was. Some time before the
Mediterranean swallowed him up, he poured out his soul in an untitled
poem expressing the compelling burden of his heart. "Stir me, 0 stir
me, Lord," he wrote, "I care not how;"
But stir my heart in passion for the world;

Stir me to give, to go, but most to pray;
Stir, till the blood-red banner be unfurled
O'er lands that still in heathen darkness lie,
O'er deserts where no cross is lifted high.
Stir me, 0 stir me, Lord till all my heart

Is filled with strong compassion for these souls;
10
FOREWORD
Till thy compelling 'must' drives me to prayer;

Till thy constraining love reach to the poles,
Far north and south, in burning, deep desire;
Till east and west are caught in love's great fire.
This book is about Seventh-day Adventist education. It is also about

purpose, conviction, dedication, commitment, and mission. Whether it
was the commitment that propelled the ox carts through the African
wilderness to Solusi or the mission of the Lorna Linda University Med-
ical Center Heart Team, a single thread weaves it way through the tap-
estry of Adventist schools-the conviction to reach the hearts as well as
the minds of the people of the world. In a sense Adventist education
fulfilled Salisbury's stirring.
As my research revealed the story which this book recounts and the
chapters took form on the screen of my monitor, I was constantly aware
that I was also searching for an apt title. It was not until I was in the
final stages of the manuscript that Salisbury's words struck me as the
very phrase for which I was seeking. By itself, A History of Seventh-
day Adventist Education would have been an accurate description of
the book, but Salisbury's phrase, In Passion for the World, encapsulates
the raison d 'etre of Adventist education and gave life to the title. And
so the title, In Passion for the World: A History of Seventh-day Adven-
tist Education.
I have written from the viewpoint of a participant in Adventist edu-
cation. I attended Adventist schools and spent my career in denomina-
tional classrooms. At various times I found opportunities to visit many
Adventist campuses. As helpful as these experiences were, it was nec-
essary to research extensively before writing this book. As my study
unfolded, three distinct periods of Adventist education emerged. The
first was the era of origins, extending from the nineteenth century be-
ginnings until about 1920, the years when the first generation of schools
appeared and the church took its first steps toward organizing a system
of education. The second period, from about 1920 to approximately
1945, or the end of World War II, I have called the Interim, a time of
notable expansion, but primarily of solidification and wrestling with
the issues of maintaining an identifiably Adventist system of schools.
The third period, 1945 to the beginning of the twenty-first century, was
11
a time of fulfillment and challenge, when spectacular growth and

struggles with problems were at times divisive and overpowering, and
tested the mettle of Adventist education.
I have tried to describe both the narrative and the primary issues of
Adventist education. In order to provide a setting, I have also included
essential historical background about the regions of the world where
Adventist workers established schools. It is instructive to remember
that denominational education did not just happen, but in some way
related to the history and the socio-political environment everywhere it
went. While the narrative is interesting in itself, it is understood best as
it furnishes the stuff of which the issues are made. Either one without
the other would make an incomplete book.
This book is not a critique of Adventist education. It is largely a
positive view of what took place, but, as the story develops, readers will
learn that not everything that occurred in Adventist education was pos-
itive. On balance, the account is positive in part because education it-
self is a positive activity, a venture to better the human condition. In the
case of Adventist education "better" takes on a significantly spiritual
meaning, and that aspect of the account becomes fundamental to the
book. Recurring themes crop up and at the risk of becoming repetitious
I found it necessary to repeat them at appropriate junctures not only for
the sake of emphasis but because they are inherent to the story and the
issues themselves.
My acknowledgments begin with thanks to the General Conference
Department of Education for financial support of this project. Hum-
berto Rasi, at the time the director of the department, planted the idea
for the book and furnished valuable counsel at various junctures of its
production. His associates, Garland Dulan, who succeeded him as di-
rector in 2003, and Enrique Becerra and John Fowler also gave me ex-
tensive time and help. Andrea Luxton, who joined the department in
2003, also provided help. John Fowler deserves special thanks for ar-
ranging a research trip through Asia.
My leading source of information was the General Conference Of-
fice of Archives and Statistics where Bert Haloviak, director, and his
assistant, Eucaris Galicia, showed generous support for my research.
Tim Poirier, vice director of the Ellen G. White Estate, also made ma-
terials in that facility readily available. Alan Hecht, director of the Re-
12
FOREWORD
bok Memorial Library at the General Conference, and his assistant,

Anne Muganda, provided much help in locating and utilizing second-
ary sources.
Many persons gave me research materials. Enrique Becerra, General
Conference Department of Education; Dae Yun Cho, Sahmyook Nursing
and Health College; Gordon Christo, Spicer Memorial College; Daniel
Chuah, Hong Kong Adventist College; Justus Devadas, Department of
Education, Southern Asia Division; Karen and Paul Essig, Lakpahana
Adventist College and Seminary; H. G. M. Fernando, Seventh-day Ad-
ventist High School, Kandana, Sri Lanka; R. S. Fernando, retired worker,
Sri Lanka; John Fowler, General Conference Department of Education;
Bert Haloviak, Office of Archives and Statistics, General Conference of
Seventh-day Adventists; Julian Melgosa, Adventist International Insti-
tute of Advanced Studies; Liberato B. Moises, Adventist University of
the Philippines; Robert Nixon; Office of Legal Counsel, General Confer-
ence of Seventh-day Adventists; Richard Osborn, Pacific Union College;
Humberto Rasi, General Conference Department of Education; Vicente
Rodriguez, retired educator, Cuba; Marvin Robertson, retired educator,
North America; Beverly Rumble, General Conference Department of
Education; Edison Samaraj, Oriental Watchman Publishing House; Mil-
ton Siepman, retired educator, Africa; and Masaji Uyeda; North Asia-
Pacific Department of Education.
I am especially indebted to my many interviewees, whom I have
listed in the bibliography. Some of them were members of institutional
faculties or offices of education who demonstrated kind hospitality
during my tour of Asia to gather information and helped to make the
trip profitable.
lowe many thanks to Humberto Rasi, Gary Land, Richard Osborn,
Gordon Christo and Milton Siepman for their critiques of the manu-
script.
Despite my attempt to prepare a reliable account of Seventh-day
Adventist education, errors may appear. For them I am responsible.
13
THE BEGINNING YEARS,
1872-1920
The nearly fifty-year span from 1872 when the first denominational
school was founded on to 1920 was a period of beginnings for Seventh-
day Adventist education around the globe. Wherever the church estab-
lished a presence, local leaders were prone to set up printing presses,
emphasize health-care, and if possible, offer some level of education.
In 1872 Ellen White published the first of her many statements that
described the character of Adventist education. Her counsel placed de-
nominational schools in the middle of nineteenth century educational
reform but spelled out criteria that gave Adventist education a unique
stamp and a unifying rationale. By 1920 every major field around the
world operated its own school to train church employees, thus educa-
tion became the primary factor in denominational self-perpetuation.
The beginning years were years of struggle. Ellen White provided
the foundational principles of Adventist education, but societies of the
world formed the context in which these ideals found applications. Im-
plementing the principles was sometimes clumsy and characterized by
debate over organization, identity and purpose, but in 1920 a system
existed, albeit young and somewhat faltering.
Seventh-day Adventists emerged from World War I facing a new
and uncertain world in which their task of spreading the biblical gospel
had become extremely more complicated. One of their most carefully
guarded tools was an education system that had successfully passed its
first tests, thanks to the tenacity and faith of hundreds of teachers and
institutional leaders who had founded a sisterhood of colleges in North
America and a generation of training schools around the world, most of
which were supported to varying degrees by lower schools.
How well the new system worked depended in part on how well the
founders had conceived their task.
15
THE HEAD,
HEART, AND HAND
For many Seventh-day Adventists

it has become almost second nature
to think and talk about their schools.
But it has not always been so. For
nearly a decade after 1844 disap-
pointed believers continued to hope
that Jesus would still return to this
earth very soon, too soon to worry
about such mundane matters as edu-
cation.
Martha Byington broke out of this
mold in 1853 when she began a
church school for the children of five
A monument reminds Adventists of the first
church school that their spiritual pJrehears
organized in /853 at Buck's Bridge in upstate
New York. Martha Byington, the teacher, was
the daughter of John Byington, who later be-
came thefirst president ofthe General Conference. The Buck's Bridge school lasted on~1'
three years.
16
THE HEAD, HEART, AND HAND
families in Buck's Bridge, New York. The school lasted three years
with a different teacher each year. This first known experiment in Ad-
ventist education occurred seven years before the Seventh-day Adven-
tist denomination organized, hence there was no such thing as official
support. Parents were on their own to organize schools spontaneously
if they wanted them badly enough.'
A year after the Buck's Bridge school began, twenty-six-year-old
Ellen White bore her third son, and with motherhood on her mind she
admonished parents in the columns of the Review and Herald to take
the behavior of their children more seriously. "Parents stand in the place
of God to their children," she said, "and they will have to render an ac-
count." Two examples which she pointed out for specific attention were
Sabbath observance and reverence in church. Her article, "Duty of Par-
ents to Their Children," did not ask for formal education, but she issued
a clear call for parents to teach their children deliberately in the home,
an activity that she later tied closely to schools and learning. 2
Three years later her husband James became more explicit in a
three-part article beginning in the Au-
gust 20 issue of the Review. Inspired
by a writer in the Michigan Journal of
Education who blistered the public
schools for sometimes leaving children
unattended and permitting vulgar be-
havior and profane language on school
premises, White warned Adventist
readers that their children should be
separated from those poisonous influ-
ences. Sabbath keepers should employ
teachers for their children, he said.
"What if it be extra expense?" he
wanted to know. "Will parents push
their dear children into channels of
vice, for the sake of a few shillings?" James White. technically the first
He urged both mothers and fathers to president of Baffle Creek College al-
spend more time with their children, though he never claimed the title. He
exerted a profound infiuence on the
consciously educating them in the ear(v policies of thefirst Seventh-day
home if they did not have a teacher.3 Adventist college.
James White knew from experience what he was talking about when
he laid the initial burden of education on parents. He had begun his
career as a school teacher. When his articles appeared in 1857 the By-
ington school at Buck's Bridge had already closed. Meanwhile, other
classrooms had opened in Jackson, Michigan and Northfield, Vermont.
In Battle Creek several abortive attempts to start a church school alter-
nately raised and dashed the hopes of those whose convictions were
similar to White's. In 1858 John Fletcher Byington, who had taught the
third and final year at Buck's Bridge, tried to make a go of it again in
Battle Creek, but he only lengthened the list of frustrations.
During the 1850s and 1860s there were other experiments with Ad-
ventist schools, all short lived. Their sketchy details only tantalize us to
wonder what really happened. All of them combined did not represent
a movement. They were tentative and unsteady. James White looked
skeptically upon these erratic ventures, despite his earlier encourage-
ment. He and his wife practiced what they preached by hiring private
teachers for their boys as long as their purses would allow it.
If Adventists had little to show by way of schools, they would have
to admit that as a people they had devoted only little time thinking
through the issue of why they should invest in educational enterprises.
Since the first issues ofthe Present Truth and later the Review appeared,
printing had been the primary institutional concern of Adventists, and
after 1866, they added health. Education was a family matter, not a re-
sponsibility of the church.
In urging venturesome members to open small church schools,
James White was advocating primary education for children, not a
training program for church employees. When it came to preparing
ministers he was not enthusiastic. He was prone to tell young men as-
piring to the ministry to read and study on their own.4 Adventist histo-
rian Emmett K. VandeVere has observed that "until the early 1870's,
the one clear lag in the budding denomination was its neglect of ad-
vanced education. For twenty years the denomination's finest asset, its
youth, had gone relatively undeveloped and unharnessed."5
But these circumstances and attitudes were about to change. In 1860
Adventists organized themselves into an official church and the Battle
Creek community grew larger, becoming an Adventist center. In 1868
the Battle Creek Church hired Goodloe Harper Bell, a former student
18
of Oberlin College, to teach school for a year. The next year he contin-
ued, independently. Word traveled the Battle Creek grapevine that, un-
like his predecessors, he knew what he was doing. It appeared that he
might be breaking the spell.
Bell's so-called Select School that began in 1868 aroused enough
attention in Battle Creek to prompt James White to wonder out loud if
the denomination needed an official school after all. Although they
talked about it, neither he nor the church's leaders realized any material
progress for three years, but in April 1872 he and his wife began urging
the Battle Creek church to consider a denominationally sponsored
school.
From the congregation the idea went to the General Conference,
where a three-man committee headed by the church president, George
I. Butler, conveniently decided to adopt Bell's Select School as the first
official Adventist school. Bell merely kept on doing what he had been
doing, but when classes began on June 3, 1872 in the room above his
living quarters on the corner of Kalamazoo and Washington streets,
the big change was the assurance that he now had official support. 6
Given the haphazard history of Adventist schools since 1853, Ellen
White was not content to allow this latest venture to die, starved by the
lack of solid backing. Although she and her husband and seventeen-
year-old son, Willie, left Battle Creek on Sunday, June 23, 1872 on a
trip of unknown duration to California, she took with her the burden of
Bell's classroom.
When the Whites left Battle Creek they had every intention to spend
the next weekend in California, but stops in Missouri and Kansas de-
layed them. When they reached Denver, Colorado, they were already
nearly three weeks behind their original schedule because of traveling
to places they had not planned to visit; nevertheless, they disrupted
their travel plans even more by deciding to remain in the home of El-
len's niece and family, the W. D. Wallings, who owned a lumber busi-
ness west of the city.7
It was from this resting place in Denver that Ellen White spelled out
her ideals of Adventist education, received from an earlier vision. On
July 22, a month after she left Battle Creek, she began her thirty-page
statement, "Proper Education," which appeared first as Testimony No.
22 to the church, a statement of her visions pertaining to education, and
19
later as six installments in The Health

Reformer, running from December
1872 to September 1873.
"It is the nicest work ever assumed
by men and women to deal with youth-
ful minds," she began. Ranging from
primary to higher education, some-
times not distinguishing which level
she was describing, she presented an
overarching view of what Adventist
schools ought to be. Training differed
from education, she declared, compar-
ing the first to conditioning people to
obey certain commands as though
they were beasts of burden. She de-
Ellen G. White, whose essay in 1872, scribed such people as "well drilled
"Proper Education," spelled out the soldiers," but not educated to think for
fundamental character of Seventh-
day Adventist education. She pro- themselves, to make decisions on their
duced hundreds of pages of inspired own and to use their God-given capac-
counsel on ~\'hich Adventist teachers
and school administrators based ities to become individuals of princi-
pIe, qualified for any position in life. 8
their decisions and charted their pro-
grams. Among their God-given gifts stu-
dents possessed individuality that El-
len White warned teachers never to violate, but rather to exploit to the
advantage of the person. In a similar vein, discipline was to be redemp-
tive, and educational methods were to encourage success rather than a
sense of failure.
Another gift was personal health which Ellen White believed was
jeopardized by poor heating and ventilation in schools, benches that did
not fit the shape of the human body, and long, unimaginative daily pro-
grams that burdened rather than inspired students. Cultivating the
health of students was to be a fundamental of Adventist education.
Education began in the home, Ellen White went on. Parents were
responsible for establishing basic values which students brought to
school. One of these essential perceptions was to be a high esteem for
physical labor. Well-organized schools should not only provide oppor-
tunities for work; but require it.
20
Another cardinal point was balance. "The world is full of one-sided

men and women," she charged, "who have become such because one
set of their faculties was cultivated while others were dwarfed from
inaction." Mental health and old-fashioned work were related almost
synergistically. "In order to preserve the balance of the mind," she de-
clared, "labor and study should be united in the schools."
Anticipating that some might doubt the wisdom of requiring stu-
dents to take time out from their study to work, she stated emphatically
that they would not shortchange their professional goals. "Young men
should not enter upon the work of explaining the Scriptures and lectur-
ing upon the prophecies when they do not have a knowledge of the
important Bible truths they try to explain to others." This was not all.
"Ignorance will not increase the humility or spirituality of any pro-
fessed follower of Christ. The truths of the divine word can be best
appreciated by an intellectual Christian."
Ellen White suffered no illusion about the differences between the
principles she was advocating for Adventist schools and those that were
common at the time. "We are reformers," she said. She warned that
Adventists could not compensate for all the mistakes of the past but
they could design a form of education consistent with their faith.
Appropriately, "Proper Education" first appeared in The Health Re-
jhrmer for it was as much a discussion of health as it was of curriculum.
The term wellness was not yet a part of the American lexicon, but the
concept was a foundational element in Ellen White's view of education.
The practice of mixing work with study was to become a recurring
theme in Adventist schools around the globe.
Already forty-four years old when she wrote from her niece's home
in Denver, the author of "Proper Education" often enlarged on her sem-
inal essay during the remaining forty-three years of her life, even to the
point of publishing books on the topic of education, but she did not
deviate from her original advice. Her 1872 statement was a landmark in
the history Adventist education. 9
Reform in American Education

As important as Adventists regard Ellen White's opening call for
change in education, it would be remiss to see her as a lone voice call-
ing for reform. In many ways she reflected the change taking place
21
around her. During the nineteenth century, especially after the Ameri-
can Civil War, the United States was awash with change that left Amer-
ican schools and the philosophy behind them in flux.\O
At the root of reform was the notion that education should be demo-
cratic in character rather than elitist. Noah Webster contributed to an
American style of education by publishing the first distinctive Ameri-
can textbooks that promoted patriotic sentiments, earning him the title
of "Schoolmaster of the Republic," but his leading claim to fame was
his dictionary that standardized American English, the medium in
which education was to be communicated to students.
It was left to William H. McGuffey to purify American primary
education by writing a series of readers that preserved generic Chris-
tian values and human virtue and portrayed them as patriotic behavior.
Nineteenth-century Americans fed their minds on his homespun wis-
dom which helped to create an American mentality that was at once
Protestant and Caucasian.
Horace Mann, however, introduced the idea that to match American
needs, education was to be public and cheap, ifnot free and open to all.
As Secretary of Education in Massachusetts for twelve years beginning
in 1837 he initiated a movement to create a tax-supported, compulsory
elementary school system. He also instituted the first recognizable
teacher-training program. By 1850 many of his ideas had material-
ized.
Mann's reforms touched elementary education as nothing had be-
fore. American schools had traditionally been a concern of religious
bodies, but Mann's proposals began the transition that eventually led to
a secular, tax-based, democratic system allowing students to proceed
from grade one to university degrees. This change was anything but
sudden. A public system crowned by state universities did not come
until after the Civil War, and not until the third decade ofthe twentieth
century did American secondary education assume its own peculiar
shape.
Perhaps this slow change derived in part from the fact that although
the United States Constitution declared the states to be responsible for
education, churches had traditionally assumed the responsibility of op-
erating schools and time was necessary to generate a tradition of public
education. During the early nineteenth century the majority of Ameri-
can colleges were religious institutions, many of them an aftereffect of

the Second Great Awakening. In spite of these religious roots, college
degrees were based on studies in the classics-Greek and Latin lan-
guages and ancient philosophy. Anything that smacked of science or
technical learning was categorized as professional or vocational and
not worthy of a status equivalent to a college degree.
Daring thinkers not only raised questions about the practicality of a
classic education in a democratic society, but experimented with change.
Oberlin College in Ohio was a hotbed of shocking innovation. The
school's founder announced that education should serve not only the
intellect but the body and heart as well, a view that sounded much like
later Adventist pronouncements about educating the head, the heart,
and the hand. In 1833 Oberlin became coeducational, threw out "pa-
gan" classics in favor of biblically-based instruction as the foundation
of a college education, introduced manual labor as part of the curricu-
lum, and taught dietary reform.
But this flirtation with change did not endure and by the last third of
the century Oberlin returned to a less radical program. Other schools
implemented similar ideas, but reform did not take a firm hold until
after the Civil War. By that time voices of reform were also suggesting
that higher levels of instruction should become more practical to suit
the needs of a broadly developing American society.
Even a cursory glance at American life furnished convincing evi-
dence that the United States was becoming more urban and industrial,
and because of immigration, increasingly cosmopolitan, while at the
same time it was developing new needs in mass agriculture as a result
of pushing westward into virgin lands of the West. In this post-Civil
War environment reformers said that training for a profession should be
elevated to the level of a college education, even replacing the classics.
The framers of the United States Constitution left education in the
hands of the states to regulate, but in 1862, even before the post-Civil
War industrial surge set in, Congress passed the Morrill Act which as-
sisted in integrating vocational instruction into existing schools and
granted public land to the states for the purpose of establishing agricul-
tural and mechanical colleges and to offer specialized training in the
sciences. The result was to begin to revolutionize American education
by supporting the high school as a feeder for colleges and universities
23
and legitimizing professional and practical education on a level equally

prestigious as an education in the classics. In time research programs at
both private and state universities, and post-baccalaureate degrees be-
came a commonplace in American education. The leading impact of
reform was a democratization of education in both form and content by
building a system that theoretically provided everyone with a chance to
learn. Public education tended to equalize American life.
On its face, reform in American schools was well underway when
Ellen White wrote her 1872 statement. She was aware of what was tak-
ing place in American education and many of the ideas she espoused
were echoes of what educators were already saying. She knew that not-
withstanding all of the progress toward reform and democratizing edu-
cation, the actual condition of elementary education was far from the
ideal. The little red schoolhouse had become an American temple, but
inside those one-room shrines teachers imposed rigid and harsh sched-
ules that silenced and immobilized children. Physical amenities were
primitive and unhygienic, and learning was by rote. Ellen White was
not off the mark when she told Adventists in "Proper Education" that
"we are reformers." She was calling for change with an Adventist twist
to serve Adventist purposes.
A New College at Battle Creek

By the time the Whites completed their journey to California, Good-
loe Harper Bell was enjoying more success with his school than he had
ever known. A large enrollment forced him to divide his students into
morning and evening classes. In December 1872 the number became
even larger and he moved into the church. I I
When the school year opened in 1873 the school committee replaced
Bell with Sidney Brownsberger, a twenty-eight-year-old owner of a
master's degree from the University of Michigan. After more than a
hundred students registered for the winter term in December 1873 the
new principal herded his flock from the church to a steam-heated loca-
tion in the new Review and Herald publishing building. The facuity
also grew. Besides Brownsberger, Bell stayed on to teach, Uriah Smith
conducted biblical studies, and translators from the publishing house
offered instruction in languages. Talk of a permanent college was mak-
ing the rounds.
24
By now unquestionably committed to the idea of a college, James

White was nevertheless ambivalent about events as they unfolded. In
March 1873 he and his wife returned to Battle Creek from California to
attend the General Conference session where he introduced a motion to
establish a school to train denominational workers. In November 1873
the General Conference announced it had collected $52,000 in cash
and pledges to build a college. Together James and Ellen White pledged
$3,000.
Although the Whites wanted a worker-training school, they were
less sanguine about the prospects of a college in Battle Creek. James
unsuccessfully argued that the Adventist community was not ready for
the responsibility of accommodating an institution that could easily at-
tract hundreds of students. The question of location also provided the
stuff for more debate. A serious reading of Ellen White's "Proper Edu-
cation" would lead to the conclusion that a rural location would be nec-
essary for the school, but the final decision of a campus site weighed
more heavily on other considerations.
Denominational luminaries envisioned a cluster of institutions in
Battle Creek, one of which would be the college. The church's pocket-
book could not afford a 160-acre farm which was available by a nearby
lake, and church leaders let a chance slip by to purchase a fifty-acre
plot. In the end they settled on a twelve-acre estate in Battle Creek for
which they paid $16,000. Promptly they sold off several acres for house
construction lots, reducing the college campus to seven acres or less.
Ellen White wept when she heard the news. She knew that in their
haste to acquire a convenient location church leaders had scuttled her
counsel to establish a school that brought labor and study together.
At a meeting of the college board in the fall of 1874 Ellen White,
newly returned from California, read her statement about proper edu-
cation, emphasizing the combination of labor and study. By his own
admission, Brownsberger knew nothing about the kind of education
she proposed. His master's degree was in the classics, and he felt un-
qualified to establish a work and study program.
The college board responded with less than half a loaf. It regarded
Brownsberger's academic pedigree to be too valuable a commodity to
discard in favor of someone who was ready to innovate. Besides, the
imposing, three-story brick building which would house the new school
was nearing completion.

With a compromise to begin
the college with a custom-
ary curriculum to which in-
dustries would be added af-
ter further study, the school
board proceeded with plans
for the academic program.
The school's charter permit-
ted instruction from elemen-
tary grades through college
level. Although a complete
college program was not in
place when classes began in
September 1874, Uriah
Smith, editor of the Review,
announced in February 1875
that the name of the new
The original building of Battle Creek College was school was Battle Creek
dedicated in January. 1875. Later. other additions College.
to the campus enabled the school to become a Understandably, Ellen
boarding institution and to broaden its offerings.
White felt betrayed by the
turn of events, but she and her husband continued to support the fledg-
ling college and to work for its success. School indebtedness dimin-
ished to less than $6,000 by 1880. Under Brownsberger's leadership the
number of programs increased to include a commercial department, a
teacher-preparation course, and a theology program. Classes in foreign
languages and health were also available, with a young Dr. John Har-
vey Kellogg joining the teaching faculty in addition to his duties as
medical director at Battle Creek Sanitarium. In 1879 the college grant-
ed its first degrees and two years later enrollment climbed to 490.
These were undeniable marks of a dynamic institution, but the
school was not without its shortcomings which in one way or another
related to the failure to design a school following Ellen White's "Proper
Education" model. Realistically, it was probably more than anyone
could reasonably expect that an inexperienced faculty could effectively
produce such an institution with a smooth program overnight. With ap-
26
propriate commitment it was doable, but it would take time and ample
trial and error.
Militating against industrial education was the fact that few Adven-
tists were qualified to teach in a college in the first place, and they were
not ready to launch an experiment with a reform program combining
labor and formal classes. Adventist historian A. W. Spalding recounts
that the college board eventually voted to install limited opportunities
in industries that the tiny campus could accommodate, but Browns-
berger could not bring himself to implement the action.'2 Goodloe
Harper Bell, with experience at Oberlin College where students had
worked, was the leading supporter of the labor-and-study ideal that El-
len White advocated, but his voice was frequently lost in debate be-
cause he did not hold a college degree.
Planting the school on a small plot of ground was not the only aspect
of the college that undercut "Proper Education." From the outset Ellen
White urged that classes in Bible should not supplant studies in the
"sciences," as she called all other academic courses, but the Bible should
be central to all instruction. At Battle Creek College biblical studies
were left hanging as a curricular appendage.
In the spring of 1877 Ellen White conducted a week of spiritual em-
phasis on the campus, during which she stressed the importance of
Bible study. "The college at Battle Creek," she reported in a written
account of her visit to the campus, "was established for the purpose of
teaching the sciences and at the same time leading the students to the
Saviour, whence all true knowledge flows. Education acquired without
Bible religion is disrobed of its true brightness and glory."13
An effective management of student life was also difficult. Because
neither a cafeteria nor dormitories existed the administration could
successfully supervise student activities very little beyond the class
schedule. For much of the time students fended for themselves in a
small community of perhaps six or seven thousand citizens.
Facing these circumstances, the faculty who were reluctant to de-
sign a work and study program found themselves facing innovations of
another kind. College officials clamped down with strict social restric-
tions, extending a strong arm into students' off-campus activities. They
denied men and women students the privilege of socializing and threat-
ened them with severe reprisals if they violated the rules. To maintain
27
this social code the school had to depend on the cooperation offamilies
with whom the students lived. The result was not always satisfactory,
but the school held the upper hand.
In an attempt to monitor students, especially during the evenings,
the administration instituted a proctor system which required a few
selected fellow students to keep a wary eye out for suspicious behavior
anywhere they could see it and report their findings to school authori-
ties. This ill-fated system disintegrated when the students themselves
rebelled after discovering that an especially aggressive proctor was us-
ing the system to conceal his own questionable extra-curricular activi-
ties at night. Even with the proctor system gone, the college still im-
posed strict controls. Some expulsions occurred.
Food service was another problem. To investigate a point in nutri-
tion in his physiology class, the ever inquisitive Dr. Kellogg contracted
with a group of six male students to limit themselves to only two meals
a day consisting of no more than a pound of cooked food per meal. The
experiment was to last four months.
One of the six, D. W. Reavis, a Missouri farm boy who later be-
came a church spokesman for religious liberty, confessed to "a con-
stant, unappeased appetite," but admitted that Kellogg proved his
point that one could maintain good health on smaller amounts of
food than were commonly believed necessary. After this experi-
ment Reavis helped to organize a Boarding Club, a group of stu-
dents contributing to a fund to buy food which a community mem-
ber would prepare for them. Such clubs became a common means
for students to arrange their meals. 14 The college bulletin repeatedly
described in the best possible light the lack of college-owned hous-
ing and the absence of an effective food service for students, but for
all of the explanations, most students and thoughtful Adventists saw
the situation as a weakness.
In all fairness Ellen White had not called for dormitories or cafete-
rias in "Proper Education." Her statement was an elaboration on ideas,
ideals, and beliefs. She did not comment on the specific details of ad-
ministration as they might affect building design, the size of the cam-
pus, the number of teachers needed to constitute a faculty, and similar
issues. She referred to long hours of restricted activity for children, not
the precise amount of time a child should remain in a classroom. She
28
spoke of the need for ventilation, fresh air and light, not the ratio of
window space to the square footage of a classroom. She declared the
benefits of agricultural labor and study, not a specific number of hours
students should work or the amount of land needed to accomplish des-
ignated jobs.
Applications of the principles she enunciated were all matters that
school planners and administrators would have to infer. Notwithstand-
ing her lack of enthusiasm for the location of Battle Creek College,
many of her reforms were possible on the tiny campus. The school
could be heated and ventilated well, and by good planning teachers
could develop daily programs to comply with ideas in "Proper Educa-
tion."
It was at the post-elementary levels of instruction that the major
breakdown occurred and it took only a short time to demonstrate the
school's deficiencies. Despite the absence of specificity in "Proper Edu-
cation," even casual readers could justifiably doubt the feasibility of
combining extensive manual labor with study in a day school such as
Battle Creek College. Also, depending on the community to maintain
the institution's social code was precarious at best.
Battle Creek College: an Experiment

As the first test case in Adventist philosophy of education, Battle
Creek College produced mixed results. From the day it had opened in
1874 the school was an experiment in Adventist education. Although
the Whites and other founders were not in doubt about the institutional
mission to prepare church workers, the curriculum did not square up
well with the church's employment needs, which rendered the school's
purpose somewhat unclear.
Ellen White's "Proper Education" implied that Seventh-day Adven-
tists should establish a new kind of elementary school. A teacher-prep-
aration curriculum at the college, called by its nineteenth-century term,
the "Normal course," attracted a large number of students, but nearly
all of them opted for public school teaching when denominational
church schools failed to materialize. With their slender resources, the
majority of Adventist congregations probably did not see their way
clear to initiate small schools and employ a cohort of newly educated
teachers. Students could easily interpret the circumstances to mean that
29
at Battle Creek College they could prepare for a job, but not necessarily
with the church.
In his motion before the 1873 General Conference session, James
White called for a school that would train workers with language com-
petencies to spread Adventism among non-English-speaking people.
But the language classes floundered for lack of interest by the students.
Rather than degree programs, White and other church leaders envi-
sioned abbreviated, intensive courses to prepare employees for a vari-
ety of assignments in different places, but productivity was low. Also,
a program to prepare men for pastoral ministry fell below expecta-
tions.
During the 1870s two emphases characterized Adventist education.
The first was a continued neglect of elementary schools in favor of the
college. The second was curricular, a traditional college degree in the
classics in spite of the proclaimed purpose of preparing denominational
employees. In spite of this deficiency, the records show that scores of
Battle Creek students found their way into church work.
The school also maintained an administrative fiction in the presi-
dency. Emmett K.YandeVere has pointed out that James White was rec-
ognized as the dejure president until 1880, but he protested, explaining
that he was not a college-educated person and should not hold the job.
His travels, his frequent illnesses and his church administrative duties
as well as his obligations to the denominational publishing enterprise
prevented him from exercising direct authority over the daily college
program, although he strongly influenced financial practices, discipline
and new programs. White may have been de jure, but Brownsberger
was the de facto president. 15
Brownsberger's lack of compatibility with the theme of "Proper Ed-
ucation" proved to be his undoing. Losing his grip on his program, he
did not complete the 1880-1881 year, but resigned in the spring. In mid-
May the board appointed an acting president for the remaining weeks
of the academic year.
Not all of Brownsberger's woes were of his making. No one ques-
tioned that one of the primary objects of the school was to prepare
workers, but no one seemed to know how to make it a priority item on
the school's agenda or how to formulate a college program to fulfill the
ideals of "Proper Education." Still a young man when he became head
30
of the denomination's first college, Brownsberger clung to what he

knew best, the pattern of the classic education, but as time transpired,
he found himself increasingly in agreement with Ellen White's philoso-
phy. As the president of Healdsburg College the next year after he left
Battle Creek, he found renewed energy to implement the aspects of
education that had eluded him in Michigan.
What appears to have disturbed Ellen White was that neither the
school administration nor the board generated the resourcefulness
to go the extra mile in trying to inaugurate the principles of a dis-
tinctive Adventist education. When the college president expressed
his reluctance to implement a manual labor program, the board re-
peatedly appeared disposed to acquiesce to his inaction to save his
academic pedigree for the school rather than to hold him account-
able.
Brownsberger may have ended his career in Battle Creek on a dis-
couraging note, but despite the flaws of the school, the college was far
from a failure. No one could deny that the institution had at least par-
tially fulfilled its purpose. Students of the 1870s entered church em-
ployment, some of them becoming recognized church leaders. While
pointing out weaknesses at Battle Creek College, especially in disci-
pline, Ellen White declared in 1880 that the school "would be one of the
greatest means ordained of God for the salvation of souls." This was
not only a prediction, but a present reality. "We have seen a good work
done in the salvation of many who have come to our college," she
said. 16
The Alexander McLearn Debacle

Before the college board could turn the school around, matters wors-
ened. Brownsberger's departure opened up a search for his successor,
but no satisfactory candidate was in sight. Small wonder that when the
recently converted Dr. Alexander McLearn appeared at a June 1881
camp meeting, Adventist leaders believed that they were blessed by
divine intervention. McLearn was fifty years old, a product of Newton
Theological Seminary, and held a D.D. degree. He was an experienced
clergyman who knew his profession well and he brought the necessary
academic credentials to Battle Creek College, the anticipated training
center for pastoral careers.
31
James White reacted immediately. "We should be pleased to see

him holding a position of importance in the cause," he wrote in the
columns of the Review.'7 In July the college board appointed him presi-
dent to succeed Brownsberger. Spalding observes that "no greater mis-
take could they have made."18
McLearn's strong will was exceeded only by his unfamiliarity with
Adventist mores. By December Battle Creek College was in shambles.
The faculty were divided, the students in open rebellion, and the com-
munity in an uproar. McLearn's exemplary sermons did not compen-
sate for his fights with Goodloe Harper Bell, the acknowledged founder
of the school, or for the fact that he pitted students against the tradition-
alists by relaxing the social code.
Only days before McLearn took office, Ellen White had warned that
because of the difficulties at the college, tongues were wagging in Bat-
tle Creek and emotions were running high. 19 In December 1881 she re-
turned to the campus from California to attend a General Conference
session, and from the desk in College Hall she read a fifteen-page in-
dictment of college leadership. The faculty had lost control of the stu-
dents. Criticism from the community was rife. An effective manual
labor program was absent. But her chief complaint was the loss of in-
stitutional vision. The purpose of the school was lost. Instead of placing
biblical instruction first and emphasizing ministerial education as was
originally intended, school administrators were still promoting a tradi-
tional college education.
Ellen White did not disparage general knowledge or urge its removal
from the curriculum, but she saw the distinctiveness of Adventist educa-
tion emerging from the centrality of biblical studies. "God's purpose has
been made known that our people should have an opportunity to study
the sciences and at the same time to learn the requirements of His word,"
she repeated in 1877. "Biblical lectures should be given; the study of the
Scriptures should have the first place in our system of education."20
At the vortex of the conflict were Bell and McLearn. The new pres-
ident's liberalizing policies, especially affecting the social code, were
the particular target of Bell's antagonism. When the board responded
by seeking a truce between the warring factions ofthe faculty, the stu-
dents produced an impasse by throwing their weight into the battle,
primarily in support of McLearn.
32
Until this point in the struggle the board, led by Uriah Smith, stood
by McLearn, the established leader of the college, who could not have
been unaware that his days were numbered. A peace proposal from the
board turned the tables by favoring Bell. Shortly, the trustees asked for
resignations from McLearn and a couple other faculty members.
Though officially dismissed they kept on with their duties anyway and
the board practically washed its hands from the crisis, leaving the
school to rock on unsteadily to the end of the year.
During her visit to the college in December 1881 Ellen White read
both praise and censure for Bell. After he suddenly left the college in
February 1882, the battIe subsided. At the end of the school year
McLearn also left. In vain the board sought for a new president. Finally,
in September 1882, George I. Butler, the General Conference president,
announced that Battle Creek College was c1osed. 21
The first chapter in the history of Adventist education ended ten
years after Ellen White published "Proper Education." Facing the ruins
of BattIe Creek College in 1882, a few discouraged Adventists issued a
failing grade to Bell and Brownsberger, and to Uriah Smith as well, the
acting board chairman whose dark role in the debacle was anything but
exemplary.
But Ellen White was less reactive. To Bell and Brownsberger and
their experiment she gave an incomplete instead of a failing mark. In
her statement to Adventist leaders in December 1881, nine months be-
fore the college shut down, she indicated that she was already thinking
in terms of an Adventist system of education and its distinctive charac-
teristics. Her eye was on the future.
At the time Adventists were experiencing an educational stirring. Be-
fore McLearn had finished his year at Battle Creek, Brownsberger was
already in California to head Healdsburg Academy, which developed al-
most immediately into Healdsburg College and later, Pacific Union Col-
lege. In his new role he demonstrated that even the most devoted protago-
nist of classic education could convert to a worker-preparation program
that included dormitories and industrial education. Also, within weeks af-
ter he left Battle Creek, Bell journeyed to Massachusetts, founding South
Lancaster Academy, a school that would become Atlantic Union College.
The break at Battle Creek College was both philosophical and prac-
tical. Bell and Brownsberger were frequently at opposite ends philo-
2-IPFTW.
33
sophically, but they worked together because of their commitment to a

higher goal, the belief that Adventist education could and should be ef-
fective and beneficial to the church at large. During the years these two
men led the school it was never so far from the ideals of "Proper Educa-
tion" that Ellen White and other church leaders completely lost hope.
Although they were obviously disappointed in Battle Creek College,
they always saw the school in the context of what it could become.
The McLearn experience also taught Adventist educators that estab-
lished leadership and even the most revered members of college boards
are not always the source of reliable advice and wise decision. Within
two months after James White recommended Alexander McLearn for
a position of authority, Ellen White buried her husband in Oak Hill
Cemetery. He did not live to see the havoc that his poor judgment helped
to cause. It was a bitter lesson, but from that experience Seventh-day
Adventists learned that the philosophical and spiritual commitment of
institutional leaders was never to be taken for granted.
Wise heads among Adventists saw the first ten years of their experi-
ence in education as a time of groping, often learning by trial and too
much error. It was an education in itself. Adventists looked back upon
their Great Disappointment in 1844 as the occasion that prompted them
to question what went wrong with their understanding of Scripture.
Somewhat analogous to that experience was the closure of Battle Creek
College, an institution into which they had poured their money and on
which they had built their hopes. This time they knew what had gone
wrong. Their most serious challenge lay in finding someone to repair
the damage.
II nformation about early Adventist schools is scarce. Two sources are Walton 1. Brown,
compiler, Chronology o/Seventh-day Adventist Education (Washington, D. c.: Department
of Education of the General Conference, 1972), pp. 7, 8 and E. M. Cadwallader, History 0/
Seventh-day Adventist Education, 3rd ed. (Lincoln, NE: Union College Press, 1958), pp. 5-8.
Two other valuable summaries are Mary Kelly-Little, "Development of the Elementary
Schools of Seventh-day Adventists in the United States." M.A. thesis, University of Washing-
ton, 1932, and George Ashlock, "The Establishment of White Seventh-day Adventist Ele-
mentary Schools in the United States, 1853-1900." M.S. thesis, University of Tennessee,
1959.
2Review and Herald, September 19, 1854.
'Ibid., August 20, 27, September 3, 1857.
'Emmett K. VandeVere, The Wisdom Seekers (Nashville: Southern Publishing Associa-
tion, 1972), p. 16. This history of the evolution of Andrews University has furnished much of
34
the material in this chapter. Other invaluable sources are the essays in George R. Knight, ed.,
Early Adventist Educators (Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews University Press, 1983).
5/bid. p. 15.
6/bid., p. 18.
7Arthur L. White, Ellen C. White, v. 2, The Progressive Years (Washington, D. c.: Re-
view and Herald Publishing Association, 1986), pp. 341-343.
sEllen White's 1872 statement, "Proper Education," may be read in its entirety in Testi-
monies to the Church, v. 3, pp. 131-160.
9For a summary of Ellen White's evolving philosophy of education, see George R.
Knight's "Ellen G. White" in Early Adventist Educators, pp. 26-49.
100ne can summarize reform in American education from any reputable textbook dealing
with the history of education or even standard college American history textbooks. For a
short synopsis see George R. Knight, "The Transformation of Education," in The World of
Ellen C. White, Gary Land, ed. (Washington, D. c.: Review and Herald Publishing Associa-
tion, 1987), pp. 161-175. Also useful is Knight's Myths in Adventism (Washington, D.C.: Re-
liThe story of the transition from the Select School to Battle Creek College is told well by
VandeVere, ibid., pp. 18-26. See also A. W. Spalding, Captains of the Host (Washington,
D.C.: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1949), pp. 443-447, and Arthur L. White,
ibid., p. 375.
12Spalding, ibid., p. 449.
IJEllen G. White, ibid., v. 4, p. 274. For a succinct description of the curriculum at Battle
Creek College during the Brownsberger years, see Joseph G. Smoot, "Sidney Brownsberger"
in Knight, Early Adventist Educators, pp. 78-82.
14D. W. Reavis' account of the proctor system and eating habits at Battle Creek are found
in his memoir, / Remember (Washington, D. c.: Review and Herald Publishing Association,
n.d.), pp. 85-90.
15VandeVere, ibid., p. 27,29. This detail about White's presidency of the college seems to
have been either lost or ignored by church chroniclers. The Seventh-day Adventist Encyclo-
pedia lists Brownsberger as the first president of Battle Creek College, beginning in 1874.
16 Ellen G. White, ibid., pp. 419, 423. See Smoot, ibid., for a balanced view of Brownsberg-
er's developing philosophy of education.
17James White's statement is quoted in Arthur L. White, ibid., v. 3, The Lonely Years, p.
188. There is some question about McLearn's conversion. Arthur L. White says in ibid., p.
188, that "McLearn only recently had been baptized as a Seventh-day Adventist." VandeVere
in ibid., p. 42, categorically denies that McLearn was ever baptized as a Seventh-day Adven-
tist. Spalding, in ibid., p. 15, says Adventist leaders welcomed McLearn as "an educator who
had recently joined their church," which clearly implies baptism. Richard Schwarz in Light
Bearers to the Remnant (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 1979),
pp. \30, 131, declares that McLearn never became a Seventh-day Adventist.
ISSpalding, ibid., p. 450.
19Arthur L. White, ibid., p. 189.
20 Ellen G. White, ibid., v. 5, pp. 21-36; Arthur L. White, ibid., pp. 187, 188.
21 VandeVere provides a colorful description of the Bell-McLearn struggle in ibid., pp.
42-47. He writes another very similar account in Rugged Heart: a Story of George I. Butler
(Nashville, TN: Southern Publishing Association, 1979), pp. 55-6\.
35
2
A NEW DIRECTION
Battle Creek College remained empty for the entire 1882-1883 aca-
demic year. Few, if any Adventist leaders, doubted that their experi-
ment in education needed a new direction, but probably everyone had
questions about how to take the first step. Finally, in July 1883, with
only weeks before a new academic year should begin, the board asked
W. 1. Littlejohn, pastor of the Battle Creek Tabernacle to take charge of
the school. I
George I. Butler, General Conference president and chair of the col-
lege board, trusted him because of his strong leadership in bringing
order to the SOO-member church that had largely sided with McLearn
and the students in the recent controversy. The Battle Creek commu-
nity knew Littlejohn as a college-educated person committed to church
teachings and loyal to denominational leadership. He was not Advent-
ism's leading intellectual but church leaders viewed his scholarship as
solid and reliable. 2
Although Littlejohn was handicapped by blindness, during his two-
year stint as president he enjoyed at least the beginning of a turnaround
for the college. Starting with an enrollment of only eighty in 1883, the
number of students rose to more than 280 before the year ended. Cur-
36
A NEW DIRECTION
ricular reVISIon emphasized denominational service. By November

1884 a hundred students had gone from the college into church employ-
ment. These were not college graduates with degrees in hand; rather,
they were primarily students who had completed short, intensive courses
in accounting, colporteuring, and other skills.3
Ellen White had scolded the college administration in December
1881 for prolonging students' education and encouraging them to
spend years in their studies. "We have not many years to work," she
said. 4 The new look in career preparation was a response not only to
her criticism but to the desire by many other church leaders for short
worker-preparation courses.
Littlejohn also tackled the question of supervising student life, a prob-
lem which had harried the previous two college administrations and
made them vulnerable to community criticism. The new president used
his influence as the immediate former pastor of the Battle Creek Taber-
nacle to extract written agreements from the congregation to support the
college and to respect denominational leadership, thus closing the door to
the widespread discord that had erupted from the church during the
McLearn episode. Students and faculty also signed similar contracts.
To a degree the partisanship among Battle Creek Adventists was
rooted in a haunting doubt about Ellen White's special role in the church
at large. Reestablishing among them a commitment to her leadership
was a major aspect of calming the turbulence in the community. Little-
john played a vital role in promoting Ellen White's ministry by submit-
ting articles to the Review in her defense even before he assumed the
presidency of Battle Creek College. 5
Wringing promises of cooperation from the Adventist public in Bat-
tle Creek was only part of the plan to reorganize student life. By the
beginning of Littlejohn's second year a small dormitory was ready for
about thirty young women whose homes were not in Battle Creek. Male
students lived in college-owned houses or other private homes. The
college also began to provide food service, in fact, the new administra-
tion required all students, whether residents ofthe community or living
in college housing, to eat in the cafeteria located on the ground floor of
the dormitory. Students were charged the cost of two meals a day.6
All of these changes in management notwithstanding, the conun-
drum for Littlejohn and the board continued to be the manual labor
program. With no exception, Ellen White regarded the centrality of

biblical studies in the curriculum as the centerpiece of Adventist edu-
cational reform, but from the outset
she had promoted manual labor as a
means to maintain physical health
and mental alertness. In December
1881 she urged college leaders to ac-
quire land connected with the col-
lege on which to establish farming
and other projects that would enable
the faculty to combine labor and for-
mal classwork.7
But access to land eluded college
leaders. Repeatedly during Little-
john's two-year presidency, the board
voted to install small-scale industries
and shops on the campus. Limited at-
W W Prescott. president of Battle
tempts followed to integrate manual
Creek College. 1885-1894. brought dis- labor into the curriculum, but in spite
cipline to both academic and student of the rhetorical forcefulness of board
life. He became the first General Con-
ference secretary of education in 1887
actions, the president seemed almost
and later served in editorial and ad- as helpless as Brownsberger to make
ministrative positions of the church. He these changes.
briefly headed Avondale College in
Australia.
Despite this failure, Littlejohn
satisfied Adventists that their ven-
ture in higher education was both effective and supportable. By the end
of his two-year administration he brought peace to the troubled com-
munity and made sufficient modifications in the program to restore
confidence in the school and its purpose. In July 1885 he returned to the
pastoral ministry, leaving Battle Creek College in the hands of William
Warren Prescott, a young editor-publisher from New England.
Prescott's Reforms at Battle Creek College

The similarities between the new president and Brownsbeger were
striking. Prescott was only thirty years old, about the same age as
Brownsberger when he took over Battle Creek College in 1874. Ironi-
cally, Prescott's college degree was in the classics, as was Brownsberg-
38
A NEW DIRECTION
er's, which had been a source of curricular problems. Prescott also held
a master's degree, but it was a conferred rather than an earned creden-
tial. 8
But contrasts between the new president and those he followed were
equally striking. Prescott brought a more powerful personality to the
campus than any of his predecessors and the effect was almost instan-
taneous. His were years of progress on several fronts, but it was an
uneven growth and not always what he wanted. A case in point was the
ongoing problem of how to design a satisfactory manual labor program.
Additional buildings during Prescott's first year provided more class-
rooms and space for vocational instruction, but this yet unrealized fea-
ture of Adventist education continued beyond the grasp of the faculty
despite persistent board recommendations to institute it.
Like Brownsberger, Prescott did not know where to begin, but he
was willing enough to try and to improvise ifhe needed. He inspected
other institutions where the work and study plans appeared to be suc-
cessful, but all of his attempts were futile at Battle Creek. To make
matters worse, parents resisted the idea. Eventually students took the
issue into their own hands and organized a massive debate about man-
ual labor which resulted in striking it from the curriculum.
But students did not easily stymie Prescott. In place of a productive
manual labor program the college required students to work a mini-
mum number of hours caring for the school plant. This compromise
was only a part of what Ellen White had envisioned, but it was better
than nothing at all. For all of her admonition and the best intentions of
the college board and institutional leaders, the question of an effective
blend of work and study was the nemesis of all presidents of Battle
Creek College.
The demise of the manual labor program led to consequences that
Prescott wished he could have avoided. To burn up student energy and
to promote health he set up a gymnasium in the basement of an addi-
tion to the main building and required students to spend one class pe-
riod per day doing exercise routines. For their part, students were more
interested in intramural games, primarily baseball and football. Some-
times the events became extramural.
A local journalist reported one hotly contested game in a Battle
Creek newspaper, which in time reached Ellen White's desk in Austra-
39
lia. Prescott soon received a reprimand from her, warning against

"matched games." Duly chastised, the president agreed to alter the
school's recreation program, but he wanted to know what she meant by
matched games. In a clarifying statement Ellen White explained that
she did not intend that students should play no games at all, but that
recreation should have a productive objective, and games producing
sharp competition and high-pitched emotions should not be on the
schedule.
By some measurements, the most profound impact Prescott had on
the character of BattIe Creek College was the discipline he injected into
student life. While still upholding strict institutional prohibitions on
courting he focused on other more positive aspects of campus living to
promote order and decorum. By the time he reached the campus in
1885, enrollment had regained its pre-1882 levels, and he determined to
reorganize student life by providing adequate institutional housing and
to improve the food service. Two years into his presidency women stu-
dents had a new dormitory that also housed expanded dining facilities.
The older women's boarding hall underwent remodeling and became a
men's dormitory.
Acquiring ideas from other private schools that had successful
dormitory organizations, Prescott and his wife and another staff
member developed the notion of school homes which students were to
treat with as much dignity and respect as their own houses. In the
cafeteria they would learn the etiquette of refined dining as a large
family, including assigned seating and the services of hostesses. Pa-
ternalistically, Prescott and his wife set the example by dining regu-
larly at a table in the center of the cafeteria where all students could
see them.
For Battle Creek these changes were revolutionary. They did not
stop at the edge of the campus but exerted a far reaching influence on
Adventist education at large. "It was a plan," states Gilbert M. Valen-
tine, Prescott's biographer, "that would eventually characterize Adven-
tist schools around the world as Prescott proteges from Battle Creek
took the idea to new schools and colleges."9
Another aspect of student life was the spiritual atmosphere of the
campus. Pursuing the idea of a school home, the president required all
students to attend daily worships in the chapel. He was the usual speak-
40
A NEW DIRECTION
er. Frequently he also led the Friday vespers and Sabbath afternoon
"social meetings," a term describing gatherings devoted to personal
public testimony. Each evening the directors of the school homes pro-
vided a twenty-minute silent period intended to encourage personal
meditation and prayer. Prescott's wife, Sarah, commonly known as Sa-
die, sometimes conducted evening worships and spent many hours
mixing with students. During the Prescott presidency scores of stu-
dents were baptized.
Reform in Biblical Studies

As his years at Battle Creek College advanced, Prescott became in-
creasingly sensitive to Ellen White's challenge to make biblical studies
central to all curricula. The 1888 General Conference session at Min-
neapolis furnished the impetus for change which Prescott wanted. A
new understanding of righteousness by faith and a view of Jesus and
His substitutionary death as the focal point of all Christian belief and
doctrine swept through Adventism, causing many to feel that they had
poorly comprehended the meaning of Christianity. Ellen White's dic-
tum that young men should not try to explain the Scriptures to others
before they thoroughly understood them themselves took on new mean-
mg.
Although Prescott's positive reaction to this new theological empha-
sis was not immediate, he shortly grasped its impact. Two and a half
years after Minneapolis he organized the first churchwide gathering of
educators and church leaders at Harbor Springs, Michigan to discuss
the implications of theology on curriculum planning. About 100 at-
tended to hear A. T. Jones and John Harvey Kellogg join the president
of Battle Creek College in presenting a thoroughgoing review of Scrip-
ture as well as to discuss its applications to education. Ellen White also
took a leading role at the conference.
Ten years later P. T. Magan, who attended the Harbor Springs meet-
ings as the history teacher from Battle Creek College, wrote that the
beginnings of an "educational reformatory movement owe their birth
to this gathering."loThe results of the discussions were detailed recom-
mendations for a four-year ministerial training course and a four-year
sequence of history classes that presented history from a biblical per-
spective. The plan also proposed a series of college-level Bible classes
41
that covered the entire Bible and all Adventist doctrines with Christ as
the central figure.
Church leaders had commonly urged young preachers to enter pas-
toral work with only abbreviated preparation. For years Battle Creek
College had sought to compensate for ministerial deficiencies by offer-
ing inservice sessions, but the Harbor Springs recommendation for a
four-year ministerial course elevated pastoral training, which was seen
as professional education, to be equivalent to a college degree and gave
the church its first systematic approach to preparing ministers.
The teachings of A. T. Jones and E. 1. Waggoner, who had cham-
pioned the cause of righteousness by faith at Minneapolis, now
found their place in all college studies. In effect, these history and
Bible classes that the Harbor Springs convention recommended
were equivalent to what North American colleges and universities
would later term general education, a core program that provided a
common breadth to all degrees. The recommendations about the
centrality of the Bible also made biblical studies a generic issue in
Adventist education.
For more time than Prescott hoped these recommended changes
were only on paper, but even in that form they were more than Adven-
tist education had previously experienced. In order to make room for
biblical studies in all curricula at Battle Creek College other classes
would have to go, most notably the classics. From 1891 to 1894 a fired-up
Prescott urged his teachers to integrate the Harbor Springs recommen-
dations into their curricula, but they were reluctant, motivated by a fear
that they would weaken the higher education quality of their program.
Bible classes remained optional until 1894 when curriculum planners
added Bible to existing programs without dropping anything, thus
lengthening rather than revising them.
In 1894 Battle Creek College became twenty years old. Prescott
dominated the second of those two decades and brought about dra-
matic change in Adventist education. Building upon what his immedi-
ate predecessor had accomplished, he edged the school forward, but not
as rapidly as he wanted nor as far as Adventist ideals contemplated. He
inspired a professionalism that Adventist education lacked before he
settled in Battle Creek. He was a member of professional organizations
and he consulted other colleges and encouraged his faculty to learn
42
A NEW DIRECTION
from them. With a view of raising academic standards he sent selected

faculty to a recognized teachers' college for advanced preparation. Un-
der his leadership traditions and practices began that gave a distinctive
character to Adventist schools for years to come. Although the campus
had practically given up on vocational education and a viable ministe-
rial preparation program still awaited the church, a new direction was
clearly in sight.
Adventist leaders knew that shortcomings still plagued Battle Creek
College, but to the non-Adventist public, the school was something of a
showpiece. In May 1891, two months before the historic meeting at
Harbor Springs, a three-man delegation from the Michigan State Board
of Visitors inspected the campus. Their report to the state superinten-
dent of public instruction was short, but filled with applause for Prescott
and his faculty.
Since the day Brownsberger confessed that he knew nothing about
a manual labor program school leaders chaffed under the conscious-
ness that they had not fulfilled one of the most salient aspects of edu-
cational reform expected of them. Perhaps the visitors from the state
of Michigan assuaged their guilt by praising the cleanliness of the
school and the commitment of students to the ideals of the institution.
They did not overlook the fact that students had a sense of ownership
because they contributed so many hours to the general upkeep of the
campus.
Church leaders fretted because the Bible was not central, but the
visitors noted that Scripture "in some form is extended through all the
grades from the most elementary to the most advanced. It is a feature,
so far as our experience goes, that is unique ... At first sight it might
appear that Battle Creek College is endeavoring to bring the Theologi-
cal School down into the College and Preparatory School grades."
Members of the college board and other church leaders were un-
happy with the curriculum, claiming that the presence of the classics
produced a secular atmosphere and an emphasis on mundane values.
The three men who probed the campus were not impressed with the
academic rigor of the program, but they admitted that the students were
not shortchanged. They observed that "the students of this Institution
will never learn from their instructors the modern ideas of the power of
money. In this respect the School cannot be said to belong to this age."
43
The Board of Visitors pointed out that a long-standing issue in

American education was to determine how much instruction in Chris-
tian morals a school could impose on students without violating their
individual rights. Their one-day visit was only a glimpse of how Battle
Creek College faculty dealt with this question but they saw enough to
comment that "a closer inspection of their experiment may prove that
they are solving [it] for us all."
A final observation expressed a characteristic of Adventist schools
that has never ceased to amaze North American accrediting bodies
through to the twenty-first century. In appropriate ecclesiastical termi-
nology the Board of Visitors quipped, "When we learned the meager
salaries the Institution could afford to its instructors, we felt that the
age of the martyrs had returned.""
The report may have been gratifying in some respects, but Adven-
tist leaders realized that they measured their schools by a different set
of values and purposes than those the state superintendent of public
instruction understood. As much progress as Battle Creek College had
enjoyed, in their view it still fell short. During the 1890s events were
closing in around the Michigan campus that foreshadowed a climax to
the struggles over the feasibility of the Adventist philosophy of educa-
tion at Battle Creek College.
The Sutherland Era at Battle Creek College

By the time Prescott vacated his office in 1894 in favor of George W.
Caviness three other Adventist colleges were in operation, all to the
west of Battle Creek. Healdsburg College in California, begun in 1882,
Union College in Nebraska in 1891, and Walla Walla College in 1892
were all creating their own versions of Adventist education. In addi-
tion, South Lancaster Academy in Massachusetts, operating since 1882,
was gaining a reputation in the East.
The Michigan school dwarfed the others as measured by enrollment,
but the most conspicuous difference was that none was cramped onto a
tiny campus as was Battle Creek. No one claimed that anyone of these
four schools was a perfect representation of "Proper Education" and its
later elaborations, but all of them were developing programs that Battle
Creek College seemed unable to accomplish. Also, in matters of mak-
ing the Bible central to all study, in vocational education, and in short
44
A NEW DIRECTION
worker-preparation courses some students could find opportunitIes

more to their liking elsewhere than at Battle Creek. By the mid to late
1890s both students and church leaders were making comparisons
among the schools which did not always leave Battle Creek in the most
favorable light.
What Emmett K. VandeVere calls the "Revolution of 1897" was the
first step that brought matters to a head on the Battle Creek campus.
Because Caviness did not aggressively pursue change church leaders
became disenchanted with his leadership. Before the end of his third
year he resigned, making room for E. A. Sutherland, a young, ener-
getic man who had already served three years as president of Walla
Walla College.
The board selected Sutherland specifically to reform Battle Creek.
His success was astonishing. In rapid order curricular change finally
eliminated the classics course, the Bible became central to the curricu-
lum in reality as well as on paper, and an eighty-acre farm a mile from
the campus developed into a place where students could engage in
manual labor. Lecturers from non-Adventist mission projects and other
schools where manual labor was integrated into the program stimulated
students' loyalty to the concept of combining work with their commit-
ment to missionary service.
There were more changes. A revival lit new spiritual fires among the
students. Since 1874 hundreds of workers had left the college to hold
down denominational positions, but the rate picked up sharply under
Sutherland even though enrollment declined. Educating church em-
ployees became the major objective of the school. A revamped teacher-
preparation course became the source of a wave of church school teach-
ers who were rewarded with opportunities to work in Adventist
elementary schools that mushroomed prolifically around the circle of
Adventism.
Sutherland cooperated closely with A. T. Jones and Dr. John Harvey
Kellogg in reorganizing the school to resemble the original ideas in
"Proper Education." From the beginning days of Battle Creek College
Kellogg's primary burden was to carry out the aspects of Ellen White's
philosophy of education that pertained to health and hygiene, including
diet and the manual labor component of the curriculum. But he saw
Battle Creek Sanitarium as a legitimate fulfillment of the labor princi-
45
pIe and depended increasingly on student labor. He viewed the college

farm with mixed feelings because it would drain off some of his work-
ers. Jones' target of reform was biblical studies, including ministerial
education. 12
But in Sutherland the board got more reform than it bargained for. It
was not long before some Adventists began to raise their eyebrows
when looking at some of his changes. To express his concurrence with
the idea that students in Adventist schools should have agricultural
work, he, with a couple of colleagues including P. T. Magan, personally
plowed up the part of the campus used as an athletic field to make room
for a garden. The new president scorned some academic procedures,
which resulted in the neglect of students' records and a rejection ofbac-
calaureate degrees as unnecessary academic baggage for church work-
ers.
Prescott had sent several faculty to recognized schools for advanced
studies in elementary education, but Sutherland did not see the issue in
the same light. The reform-minded president dismissed the elementary
education faculty because he believed the very ones Prescott had spon-
sored at the University of Buffalo and other places were tainted by ex-
posure to non-Adventist philosophies.1 3
With somewhat of a condescending air toward other Adventist col-
leges the president wanted to develop Battle Creek College into the
advanced Bible school for the church. Accordingly, he unofficially
changed the name of the school to Training School for Christian Work-
ers, but the new designation did not stick.
The school paid a price for these changes. Enrollment dropped about
200 after Sutherland's first year. By the end of his second year the cur-
riculum no longer conformed to the school's charter. Even Ellen White
intimated that the president tended to extremes, although she saw the
basic direction of reform as beneficial.
Meanwhile, both Sutherland and P. T. Magan, the dean of the col-
lege, were planning to move the school to a location more congenial to
a genuine manual labor program. Their desire to relocate stemmed at
least partially from a growing concern in church administrative circles
about the general atmosphere in Battle Creek where many felt institu-
tionalism was smothering the spiritual vitality of the church. The two
educators looked upon the prospective move as the school's salvation.
46
A NEW DIRECTION
Adventist Educational Philosophy and Berrien Springs

In a rapid sequence of actions Kellogg agreed to buy Battle Creek
College and the General Conference in session voted on April 12, 1901
to move the school. In July, sixteen freight cars moved the equipment
and records of the school to Berrien Springs in the southwestern corner
of Michigan. On a 272-acre plot on the bank of the St. Joseph River
they reestablished the college, renamed Emmanuel Missionary College
to convey the new spirit of the campus.
It is difficult to separate the move from Battle Creek to Berrien
Springs from Ellen White's philosophical statements about education,
upon which she continued to elaborate. In 1900 her son, Willie, ob-
served that during the preceding two years she had written more than
in all her previous experience about the principles of education, the
importance of Bible study in schools and combining labor and study
with agriculture as the foundation of Adventist schools.'4
While in Australia during the 1890s her staff organized her writ-
ings about education for publication. In 1901 some appeared as sec-
tion three of volume six, Testimonies for the Church, which reiterated
many of the ideas she had broached nearly thirty years earlier. But her
writing showed the evolving effect oftime and experience as she cau-
tioned school administrators to maintain financial integrity of their
institutions and discussed the spiritual character of school homes.
Neither of these issues existed when she wrote "Proper Education" in
1872.
Ellen White's teachings about education did not emerge from a state
of prophetic isolation. While she left no doubt that divine revelations
inspired her writing, she also read contemporary literature for informa-
tion and additional ideas. In 1899 she wrote from her Australian home
at Sunnyside to her son, Edson, to send some of her books to her from
Battle Creek, among them a set of Bible commentaries and other vol-
umes that, in his judgment, would be helpful to her, adding, "I would
appreciate Horace Mann."'5 Specifically which of Mann's works she
owned she did not say.
In 1899 Horace Mann had been dead for forty years; meanwhile,
social sciences had developed and pragmatism had become the prevail-
ing educational philosophy. Ellen White did not indicate how much she
derived from nineteenth-century educational thought, but from her
47
reading she better understood the principles of education that she first
espoused in "Proper Education" and was able to elaborate more rele-
vantly upon them and give a peculiarly Adventist shape to educational
philosophy. Ideas that Adventist schools held in common with Mann
included moral values as part of classroom instruction, the inherent
right of every person to an education, the participatory character of
classroom activities, and the uplifting benefit society received from an
educated public. Adventist educators of her time were able to recognize
both the similarities and differences between her pronouncements and
contemporary philosophy.
She urged the proliferation of church schools, which had become
much better defined entities within the church. She relied on the ex-
ample of the school farm in Australia to support her descriptions of the
role of a labor program. Expressed in the vocabulary of her time are
ideas about mentoring, the democratic nature of education demonstrated
by a policy of open admissions, and the social responsibility of Adven-
tist schools in preparing people to enter private society.16 She had come
to realize that not every student would, or should, become a denomina-
tional employee.
In 1903 Ellen White published Education in which she explained
how biblical principles should pervade an entire curriculum. Prepared
for a non-Adventist reading audience as well as church members, it
became the most widely read treatise on Adventist education circulated
by Seventh-day Adventists. For decades it was the foundation of col-
lege classes dealing with principles of Christian education. A later vol-
ume, Counsels to Parents and Teachers, published in 1913, was in-
tended primarily for church consumption. What she published near the
end of her life about education reveals that her ideas evolved into a
much more comprehensive-but not contradictory-view of education
than when she wrote "Proper Education" in 1872.
There is little question that Ellen White and the Adventist commu-
nity agreed that the location of Emmanuel Missionary College would
enable Sutherland and his faculty to produce a school more nearly like
her descriptions than what the institution at Battle Creek had turned out
to be. By the time the college moved, her philosophy about education
had crystallized in its broadened form. For her, relocation was a philo-
sophical issue that overrode all other considerations.
48
A NEW DIRECTION
Since 1898 Sutherland had urged a change in location but Ellen

White had demurred. But at the 1901 General Conference session she
threw her weight behind the proposal to move, even though she real-
ized that student enrollment would probably decline even more in a
new location and that the sale of Battle Creek College would bring in
little money to pay for a new beginning. Describing Battle Creek as
"too congested," she urged the delegates to "get an extensive tract of
land, and there begin the work which I entreated should be commenced
before our school was established here."I?
Transferring the college was more than a philosophical question.
During an early morning conversation with P. T. Magan on the day the
vote occurred, Ellen White intimated that "great things will soon be
happening in Battle Creek."18 Delegates to the General Conference ses-
sion who voted that same day to move the school had already approved
proposals that would reorganize the administrative structure of the en-
tire church. Transferring the college was the first step in dismantling
the institutions at Battle Creek and moving the church headquarters
elsewhere. A new era for Seventh-day Adventists was in the making.
Reincarnating Battle Creek College as Emmanuel Missionary Col-
lege also ended direct supervision of the school by the General Confer-
ence. Actually, the General Conference began to relinquish its legal
control in 1899 as the board struggled to liquidate institutional debt.
Finally, in 1906 the final step was taken to name what would become
the Lake Union as the parent organization.
Between 1882 and 1892 four other major Adventist schools opened
their doors in North America, but the focus of Adventist attention had
remained on Battle Creek College. This first Adventist school had be-
gun as an enterprise by the General Conference, and as long as it ex-
isted in Battle Creek, it always operated in the shadow of church lead-
ers who treated it paternalistically as theirs to maintain. Other Adventist
schools did not experience a similar relationship, although Union Col-
lege operated as a General Conference institution for thirteen years
after its founding. 19
Realizing all of this, perhaps Sutherland had a measure of justifica-
tion to suggest that Battle Creek College should be officially at the top
of the pack. But the facts disclosed that while Battle Creek College may
have been a General Conference school, pragmatically, it was really a
49
Union College opened its doors in 1892. This school has the distinction of being the only
Seventh-day Adventist college in North America which began as a four-year. degree-
granting institution and has occupied its original site during its entire history.
regional institution. Seven years before the move to Berrien Springs

451 of its 716 students originated in Michigan and another 151 came
from six neighboring states. 20 With concentrations of Adventists grow-
ing in other parts of the country additional schools became necessary.
As a relocated college, Emmanuel Missionary College relinquished its
preferred status and functioned on a more nearly equal footing with the
other major Adventist schools in North America.
Even though clouded by its erratic history, Battle Creek College
played an important role as the first leading venture in Adventist educa-
tion. The fact that reform was always on the surface indicated that the
school did not live up to its original billing. No one knew this better
than Ellen White; however, she also saw the school for its positive con-
tributions and she praised Sutherland and Magan for their attempts at
change. "You are not to think that you have made a failure in the school,"
she told them.21
In the main, the philosophical debate that engulfed Battle Creek
College turned on the question of its Adventist character, defined by the
50
A NEW DIRECTION
three issues of the centrality of the Bible in its curricula, preparation of

church workers and an organized agricultural labor program. The re-
formers held the conviction that an agricultural setting that offered la-
bor opportunities to students was the best environment for a school that
trained workers, primarily ministers, teachers and office workers such
as bookkeepers and city mission workers. Influential leaders did not
believe that lengthy courses were necessary for these prospective
church employees.
Attempts to provide industrial and agricultural work were spasmod-
ic, but the students were not all idling their time away. Many worked at
Battle Creek Sanitarium and the Review and Herald Publishing Asso-
ciation, and a large number helped to maintain the school itself. Some
argued that labor was, indeed, a part of life at the college. While this
was true, it was also true that the students' labor was not a component
of the college program as Ellen White described it, which made all of
the difference to those who promoted reform.
Adventist education was both pragmatic and idealistic. Hardly any
educational program could have been more pragmatic than the belief
that education should emphasize health and working skills which are
critical for physical survival. Adventist educators in the nineteenth cen-
tury were not the only ones who believed in this principle, but they
taught it within the context of a divine plan of redemption, and thus the
pragmatic character of education became idealistic. Nothing could have
been more philosophically idealistic than basing an education on the
belief that humans need spiritual redemption because they have fallen
from the perfect state in which God created them and that schools are
to serve the mission of the church-spreading the good news ofredemp-
tion-rather than to become ends in themselves.
In 1901 a major chapter in the debate over Adventist philosophy of
education ended, but questions still remained. The expanding horizon
of the Adventist world presented a demand for an ever-widening circle
of schools, and as events were to unfold, the story of Battle Creek Col-
lege was only an introduction to a never-ending discussion about how
best to fulfill the meaning and purpose of denominational schools.
lVandeVere, The Wisdom Seekers, p. 48. This volume is a major source for the material in
this chapter as is Knight's Early Adventist Educators.
51
2Arthur L. White, Ellen G. White, v. 3, The Lonely Years (Hagerstown, Md: Review and
Herald Publishing Association, 1984), pp. 220-223.
)YandeYere, ibid., p. 50.
4Ellen G. White, Testimonies to the Church, v. 5, p. 22.
5Arthur L. White, ibid., 222, 223.
6YandeYere, ibid., p. 49, 50. Arthur L. White, ibid., p. 223.
'Ellen G. White, ibid., p. 23.
8For information about Prescott's years as president of Battle Creek College see Yande-
Yere's Wisdom Seekers and Gilbert M. Yalentine, The Shaping ofAdventism (Berrien Springs,
Mich: Andrews University Press, 1992), pp. 1-83.
9Yalentine, ibid., p. 28.
'OThe Review and Herald, August 6, 1901, carried Magan's statement which is quoted in
large part in YandeYere, Windows, p. 172.
"YandeYere includes the complete report in ibid., pp. 125-127.
'2Richard Schwarz casts doubt on Kellogg's support of Sutherland's reform at Battle
Creek College. See his John Harvey Kellogg, M. D. (Nashville, TN: Southern Publishing
Association, 1970), p. 97.
IlYandeYere, ibid., p. 81.
'4Arthur L. White, v. 4, The Australian Years, p. 450.
'5Letter 243, 1899, p. 2, EGW Estate.
'6Her entire discussion is found in Ellen G. White, Testimonies., v. 6, pp. 126-218.
'7Arthur L. White, ibid., v. 5 The Early Elmshaven Years, pp. 92, 93.
'81n ibid. Arthur L. White quotes this statement from the Founders' Golden Anniversary
Bulletin, 21, of Andrews University.
'9Everett Dick, Union, College of the Golden Cords (Lincoln, NE: Union College Press,
1967), p. 26.
2°YandeYere, ibid., pp. 58, 59.
21Ibid., p. 91.
3
SCHOOLS WITH
SPECIAL MISSIONS
From the beginnings of Adventist education above the elementary

level the question of ministerial education was the driving factor in the
design of schools. Battle Creek, Union, Healdsburg and Walla Walla
colleges and South Lancaster Academy were all founded with the de-
nominational worker in mind, mainly but not limited to ministers. On
these campuses the general Adventist student as well could acquire an
education, and in this sense they were generic schools.
But in facing a multi-faceted world Adventists found it necessary
to develop a variety of educational institutions for specific clientele.
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century schools with specific missions
included correspondence schools and institutions for immigrant chil-
dren, mission schools in the American South for both Blacks and
Whites, and professional programs for ministers, physicians, and per-
sons entering health-related fields. While ultimately all of these schools
held to the same essential philosophy as the generic institutions, their
immediate purposes were more specific and conversely, less general.
Ministerial Education
Although it came about gradually, a denominational sensitivity for
53
professionalism began to emerge roughly coincident with the founding of

Battle Creek College. In the mid-1870s Adventists were still a tiny group,
but leaders with foresight realized that publishing and health-care enter-
prises could not function without professionally trained personnel. Simi-
larly, a more education-conscious leadership sensed that zeal alone was
not enough to qualify a person to preach. Not everyone concurred but
leading lights in the church admitted that too many Adventist ministers
lacked the professionalism which the public associated with men of the
cloth. In a short time ministerial education became a prime concern.
James White, who early on had been content to allow aspiring min-
isters to teach themselves the skills of the pulpit, saw matters differ-
ently by the mid-1870s. His was the strongest voice promoting Bible
institutes for ministers where they could hear some of the denomina-
tion's leading personalities lecture on prophecy and practical questions
in the pastoral profession. Sometimes these gatherings coincided with
general church meetings, such as the General Conference in session;
sometimes the meetings convened at the college.
One of the early assemblies took place in conjunction with the dedi-
cation of the newly constructed Battle Creek College in 1875. About
150 responded to a general invitation to attend the month-long meet-
ings. 1 Another occurred in the spring of 1877 in Oakland, California
and featured Uriah Smith as the primary speaker with both James and
Ellen White also discussing biblical and professional issues. 2
A similar institute in November 1879 paralleled the General Confer-
ence session at Battle Creek. The lecture topics suggested that Adven-
tist ministers lacked more than a familiarity with biblical issues and
that lecturers did not intend to let the 112 attendees get by lightly. Be-
sides the usual biblical instruction, teachers drilled the pastors daily on
such rudimentary matters as penmanship, English grammar, rhetoric
and "elocution." John Harvey Kellogg, the twenty-seven-year-old di-
rector of Battle Creek Sanitarium, took his turn with presentations on
health reform, hygiene and physiology. 3
The issue of ministerial education gathered momentum in the 1880s.
Willie White confided to W. W. Prescott in 1888 that many Adventist
preachers were deficient in good judgment but even so, some confer-
ence presidents and members of denominational committees opposed
plans to improve the professionalism of ministers through education. 4
54
SCHOOLS WITH SPECIAL MISSIONS
White was not alone in his misgivings. In 1889 his mother called
publicly for an "intelligent, educated ministry, not novices." Because of
a progressively upward trend in educational standards generally, min-
isters will face challenges, she went on. "Too much haphazard work has
been done, and minds have not been exercised to their fullest capacity."
She further urged "higher ideas of education and of employing more
trained men in the ministry."5
In the same statement she urged that selected young men "could, if
so counseled by our leading brethren, enter the higher colleges in our
land, where they would have a wider field for study and observation.
Association with different classes of minds, an acquaintance with the
workings and results of popular methods of education, and a knowl-
edge of theology as taught in the leading institutions of learning would
be of great value to such workers, preparing them to labor for the edu-
cated classes and to meet the prevailing errors of our time." While vis-
iting Norway two years earlier in 1887 she participated in a resolution
expressing the same counsel. 6
The implications of this advice were profound. Church educators
could rightly infer that Adventist education did not exist in a vacuum
and that administrators of Adventist colleges could not provide all the
advanced studies that their faculty would need. As levels of scholar-
ship heightened and professional studies became more academic, lead-
ers of denominational schools could anticipate increased dependence
on institutions with recognized reputations to supply their profession-
al needs. Ellen White's advice was the denomination's first official
recognition that education in reputable non-Adventist schools would
be necessary to educate some denominational leaders. Translated into
twentieth-century terms, it meant graduate education and terminal
degrees.
With his Dartmouth education Prescott did not need to be convinced
about professional enhancement. In response to Willie White's recom-
mendations he inaugurated a rigorous in-service curriculum for minis-
ters at Battle Creek College that would last the equivalent of two quar-
ters.7 Known as the Ministers' Bible School and sometimes called an
institute, this program amounted to an abbreviated seminary. Instruc-
tion began in the winter of 1889 with twenty-week classes in biblical
languages, church history, church governance, logic and civics, besides
55
several classes in biblical studies. Administratively, the Ministers' Bi-

ble School was not part of Battle Creek College but a separate entity
controlled directly by the General Conference.
More than 150 registered for the first set of classes, with later figures
reaching as high as 300. In 1893 the college erected a new annex to
house the institute. This unexpectedly high enrollment indicated that
many Adventist ministers not only recognized how professionally defi-
cient they were, but that they intended to quench their thirst for profes-
sionalism in spite of negative attitudes in some circles.
Prescott planned the Ministers' Bible School well, but it was doomed
on two counts. It got off to a bad start when the faculty immediately
began feuding over theology, incited in part by Prescott's openly favor-
able stance on E. 1. Waggoner's and A. T. Jones' beliefs about righ-
teousness by faith. After Prescott brought Waggoner to the campus to
teach, Uriah Smith and Dan T. Jones, the General Conference secre-
tary, supported by the former church president, George I. Butler, cre-
ated a wall of opposition that aroused far more animosity than biblical
understanding.
Ellen White calmed the storm, but after she learned about the plans
to build additions to the college plant she spoke out disapprovingly. She
had no quarrel with the classes but disagreed with the decision to pour
more money into college buildings when other fields needed schools.
Construction on what came to be known as the North Addition contin-
ued, however, since her advice arrived on Prescott's desk too late to
stop the building project. Prescott had felt comfortable with the insti-
tute because he believed that a twenty-week period of concentrated
study met her definition of short courses that she had proposed for min-
isters from the beginning, but she pointed out that Prescott intended the
institute for pastors already in the field and that the classes kept too
many pastors away from their congregations for long intervals. Churches
were suffering. 8
Professional education to upgrade Adventist ministers already in
pastoral positions halted after 1896, two years after Prescott left Battle
Creek College. By that time a much more developed ministerial cur-
riculum was evolving at the college, and other Adventist schools were
also turning out ministers, but these programs did not help the pastors
who were already employed and needed professional upgrading. The
56
problem of how to educate a professional ministry continued to plague

Adventist leadership for nearly forty more years until a formal semi-
nary began.
Schools for Immigrants

Another serious education issue related to the shiploads of immi-
grants who sought a new life in North America after the American
Civil War. Many of them came in response to promises from railroad
operatives to resettle them on cheap land in the Midwest. Among Ger-
man and Scandinavian colonies in that region of the United States Ad-
ventists generated sizeable communities, in fact, they constituted the
larger part of church activity in states from Kansas to the Dakotas. Im-
migrants conducted church services in their own languages and fre-
quently held separate camp meetings. 9
In 1885 a string of schools for Germans and Scandinavian minori-
ties sprang up in Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and Ottawa, Kan-
sas. Among others, two prominent Adventist names associated with
these schools were L. R. Conradi and 1. G. Matteson. All of these
schools shared a common abortive end, but they brought the interna-
tional flavor of the church home to Adventists in the United States.
When the Ministers' Bible School began in 1889, separate classes for
German, Scandinavian, and French pastors also met. Two years later in
1891 the programs for German and Scandinavian students moved to
Union College where each section was known as a department. Battle
Creek College housed the French students. 1O
Most of these students spoke English in addition to the languages
preserved in their homes, but many of them were losing command of
their family tongues and needed language instruction to evangelize
among the communities fed by an immigrant flow that showed no sign
of slowing down. Some of the faculty for these language groups at
Union College prepared themselves by study in both Denmark and
Sweden. The different ethnic groups lived in segregated dormitory
space at Union and the library accessed holdings for each language.
Practically speaking, Union College was to be several colleges in
one. 11
This arrangement did not function as effectively as its designers
hoped. Segregation ofthe student body into language groups was never
This photo. taken/rom a metal etching. shows Hutchinson Seminary. the boarding school
for Danish-Nor",,'egian students in Hutchinson. Minnesota. The seminaries/or Adventist
students from Scandinavian and German immigrant communities offered both second-
ary and post-secondary classes. but declined during the 1920s and disappeared by the
mid-1930s.
meant to be complete but nevertheless, its net effect was to fragment
the college. Encouraged by Ellen White, concerned church leaders be-
gan plans to establish three new free-standing institutions, one for each
language group. In 1910 the Union College programs for immigrant
students ended.
Clinton Theological Seminary in Missouri for Germans, Hutchin-
son Theological Seminary in Minnesota for Danish and Norwegian
students and Broadview College in Illinois for Swedish speakers all
opened as predominantly secondary level institutions but they also of-
fered post-secondary courses in worker-training programs. Although
their programs were never completely exclusive of English, over the
years these schools offered hundreds of Adventists of immigrant heri-
tage an opportunity to preserve their cultural roots and to receive an
education to work among their own people while at the same time help-
ing them to accommodate to America. 12
These schools reached their zenith in the mid-1920s but faded rap-
idly. In 1925 Clinton merged with Broadview; three years later in 1928
Hutchinson followed suit, creating a multi-language campus at Broad-
view College. This consolidation lasted until 1934 when all the post-
secondary courses moved to Emmanuel Missionary College and Broad-
view became a secondary school. Immigrant schools vanished.
58
The strongest factor in their decline was the diminishing number of

immigrants who stopped coming during World War I and never resumed
their pre-war level after the conflict ended. New immigration laws dur-
ing the 1920s further choked off the flow of newcomers. Particularly dev-
astating to Clinton Theological Seminary was a virulent anti-German
sentiment in the United States during the war. The schools also faded in
part because most of the younger generation tended to assimilate into
American life. A shrinking constituency ended the need for separate
schools which had already lost much of their European identity.13
Concentrated in eastern Canada and the New England states, with
small pockets elsewhere, the French-speaking constituency in North
America was smaller than either the German or Scandinavian. The
original French department at Battle Creek College eventually moved
to South Lancaster Academy and in 1914 to Buena Vista Academy (lat-
er known as Oshawa Missionary College) in Ontario, Canada where its
support dwindled. Similar to the other immigrant programs, it ended in
the 1930s. Small Russian departments operated temporarily in acade-
mies in the north central states. 14
Origins of Oakwood College

One minority group that Adventists could not overlook was the
African-American population, officially freed from slavery but still a
victim of deep-seated prejudice and hemmed in by institutionalized
segregation. In 1891 Ellen White addressed the General Conference
session in the Battle Creek Tabernacle with a call she entitled "Our
Duty to the Colored People," arguing that the plight of American Blacks
cried out for relief. 15
But the next year a train of events began that made any attempt to
fulfill this appeal even more difficult. Beginning in Louisiana in 1892,
a race-relations debate erupted, finally reaching the United States Su-
preme Court in 1896 as the Plessy v. Ferguson case. By an 8-1 decision
on May 18 the justices issued the "separate but equal" doctrine, which
stated that the Louisiana law prescribing accommodations for Blacks
to be equal but separate did not violate the United States Constitution.
The case arose from public transportation, but shortly the ruling found
applications in nearly every aspect of American life. Pragmatically, the
court's ruling made segregation the law ofthe land.
59
One of the most notorious examples of segregation was education.

In 1895 Edson White, the older of the two sons of James and Ellen
who survived into adulthood, responded to his mother's appeal by start-
ing small schools for African Americans as part of his ministry in
Vicksburg, Mississippi. Enrollment reached nearly a hundred. 16
But bigger things were also happening for African Americans.
Moved by Ellen White's urging and the advancements of Adventism in
the American South that had been underway since the 1870s, the Gen-
eral Conference Committee commissioned O. A. Olsen, president of
the General Conference, George Irwin, who directed church work in
the South, and Harmon Lindsay, one of the founders of Battle Creek
College, to locate a site for a school for Blacks.
The year was 1895. After the three men scoured Tennessee, they fol-
lowed the suggestion of C. M. Kinney, the first Black ordained as an
Adventist minister, to proceed to a farm in Huntsville, Alabama, where
they found 360 acres shaded in part by beautiful oak trees but also cov-
ered with underbrush that had gotten out of hand. The large mansion
was in disrepair and slave cabins still stood nearby. The men bought the
property after the real estate agent's mother, who had been a patient at
Battle Creek Sanitarium, helped to reduce the price by a thousand dol-
lars.
Dubbing the place Oakwood, Olsen and Irwin went to work to con-
vert the farm into a boarding school. The two men literally donned
their overalls, mixed mortar, repaired and plastered walls in the dete-
riorating mansion, remodeled and added new rooms, plowed fields, and
cleared out the overgrowth to make way for crops. Others pitched in,
among them Solon Jacobs from Iowa, who became the first principal.
A visit to Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute in Alabama con-
firmed their conviction that they should integrate a heavy component of
vocational education into the program.
Even before school officially began, Jacobs' son and daughter were
already teaching night classes. When school officially started on No-
vember 16, 1896, the school had four serviceable buildings and a fac-
ulty of four. Sixteen students showed up. Within a couple of months
enrollment rose to thirty-eight, including fifteen day students. Some of
the early enrollees came from Edson White's school in Vicksburg. Stu-
dents attended classes in the morning and spent the afternoon working
60
for tuition, room, and board. Agriculture and construction trades filled
the young men's schedules; the young women devoted their time to
skills in homemaking and gardening.
Not all the neighbors were happy about these events. The idea of a
school for Blacks on the outskirts of a town of about 15,000 opened up
old, festering wounds. Still fresh in the memories oflocals were images
of Reconstruction and northern carpetbaggers. In their eyes Jacobs fit
that description well, but he gave his edgy neighbors pause for thought
when he organized his students to help them out of their difficulties on
their farms. Prejudice slackened off.
The print shop at Oakwood Manual Training School. In addition to a productive agri-
cultural program. this institution offered industrial education, including training in
printing.
By 1899 Oakwood Industrial School was offering two-year diplo-

mas for students who completed the formal curriculum, but the stress
was still on agriculture and skilled trades, including blacksmithing.
New buildings went up, erected largely by student labor. The campus
became a monument to student diligence.
When the new century turned, dormitory students at Oakwood
numbered more than fifty. Nearly half as many again had to be turned
away for lack of room. In 1904 the institutional name changed to Oak-
61
wood Manual Training School and thirteen years later it became a two-
year college. 17
Louis A. Hansen, who helped to establish Adventism in the South,
noted that during the early years of the century Oakwood's farm pro-
duced thousands of bushels of vegetables and other food, including sor-
ghum, all of which helped to stock the school's larder. But the success
of the school was not measured by its agricultural output, as productive
as it may have been. By 1918, Hansen states, nearly all of the Black
church workers were graduates of Oakwood. Ten out of fourteen grad-
uates in 1914 entered denominational employ. By 1917 an impressive
number of African Americans had continued their studies in medical
missionary education. From the outset there had been little doubt that
the school was there to stay.18
An Appraisal of Schools for Minorities

Compared to generic institutions in Michigan, California, and
other places, schools for minorities in the nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries differed by their focus on a narrower constituency
rather than a narrower purpose. The two objectives of providing an
education in an Adventist context and training workers were para-
mount at Clinton, Hutchinson, Broadview, and Oakwood. All four
schools inaugurated vocational education, but the agricultural pro-
gram at Oakwood was the most noteworthy and productive. Found-
ers of the German school at Clinton advertised the seminary as an
industrial school, but its vocational achievements fell far short of its
original billing.
Providing schools for immigrant groups and descendants of Black
slaves attested to the conviction that principles of Christian education
were not alien to concerns such as social acceptance and upward mo-
bility. Emmett K. VandeVere has reminded us that while the schools
for immigrants did not endure, they were successful because they
denominationalized a generation of European newcomers to the Unit-
ed States, cultivating a sense of belonging to something in their new
land.
Adventist schools for immigrants were not unique. During the years
that Union College housed the German and Scandinavian departments
nearly 13,000,000 immigrants disembarked in United States ports. In
62
1910, the year that the three Adventist institutions for European immi-
grants opened their doors, close to fifteen percent of the United States
population was foreign born, the highest proportion during the twenti-
eth century. By this time the majority of newcomers came from east-
ern, southern, and central Europe and settled in urban centers in Amer-
ica.
In the open society where they found themselves it was not unheard
of for resourceful immigrants to form their own schools, but some did
not attend school at all. Americans viewed these conditions as an op-
portunity. Helped by compulsory-attendance laws, public schools be-
came one of the most effective mechanisms to Americanize the chil-
dren of the millions who were flocking to this new land.
Adventist immigrant schools achieved a similar end but by different
means. Their purpose was to denominationalize students while Ameri-
canizing them. By providing a forum in which immigrants could retain
a modicum of their traditions they enabled new citizens to practice and
promulgate their faith in a bi-cultural setting. L. H. Christian, a mem-
ber of the Scandinavian community when the Adventist immigrant
schools operated, points out that a large proportion of students became
prominent denominational workers.
If this is true about settlers from Germany and Scandinavia, an even
stronger case can be made for Blacks at Oakwood. Regarded at the
time as the flotsam and jetsam of American society, Blacks in the South
had made little progress after their emancipation, in fact, some saw
their condition worse in some ways in the 1890s than before the Civil
War. Ron Graybill, church historian and one-time member of the White
Estate, suggests that race relations were visibly worse during the early
years of the 1900s than when Edson White first docked the Morning
Star in Vicksburg in 1895. 19 Not only did Oakwood's original program
conform well to Ellen White's 1872 statement, "Proper Education," few
could deny the social impact from its concentration on both formal and
vocational education.
In the Adventist world itself, the spread of denominational education
into the Black population of the American South represented more than
just a new school. In the Adventist mind it was something akin to es-
tablishing a mission in the West Indies or perhaps Africa. After a trip
through Tennessee and Alabama in 1904, which took her to Oakwood
63
Industrial School, Ellen White wrote that "efforts should be made to

educate and train colored men and women to labor as missionaries in
the Southern States of America."20 Her twenty-eight-page message
closed with an appeal to which she gave the title "The Needs of a Mis-
sion Field."
While she applied the term "missionary" to all witnessing ventures,
in a series of ten articles written during 1895 and 1896 Ellen White
portrayed the South as a mission field where the predominant ethnic,
climatic, and social characteristics differed from those with which Ad-
ventists generally were familiar. It was a field, she said, where the work
may be too "taxing or debilitating" for some.
After landing in Vicksburg, Mississippi in 1896 to begin a medical
missionary program, Louis Hansen and his wife found sanitation and
other conditions primitive at best. "Needing a fountain syringe, we
supposed that all we had to do was go to the drugstore and buy one," he
wrote. "But there was no drugstore, and ifthere had been one, the foun-
tain syringe would have been an unknown item."21
The needs Ellen White described were as real as though the region
lay on the opposite side of the globe. Near the turn of the century she
appealed to the church to give more spiritual attention to the people
of the South, referring to them as "our neighbors."22 About the same
time she stated that because of slavery and its aftermath many people
in the South were as "ignorant as the heathen."23 In a special message
concerning literature for the South, she cautioned publishers to pre-
pare books wisely. "The South is a world of its own," she reminded
them.24
Ellen White sometimes applied her descriptions of the South to the
White population, sometimes to the Black, and sometimes to both, but
the ring of her appeal was unmistakable: Blacks had suffered at the
hands of White authority, and it was time to stop pointing fingers of
blame and go to work to undo the mischief that more than two centu-
ries of shameful treatment had inflicted. Education would be a key fac-
tor. The church's obligation was as clear as the calls from the farthest
corners of the earth and just as "missionary."
Visualizing the South in this manner belied the fact that the Sev-
enth-day Adventist Church in the 1890s and early 1900s was a creation
of the American North. In a sense, the South, although politically con-
64
nected to the rest of the country, was Adventism's nearest and first mis-
sion and Oakwood Industrial School, born in the heartland of racial
prejudice, was as much an educational beacon as were Adventist schools
in non-Christian lands.
The Self-Supporting Movement

Seeing the American South as a mission field also provided a
context for schools for Whites. Following the Reconstruction period
after the Civil War the governments of southern states furnished
only scant money for public education. Illiteracy was rampant among
poor Whites. It was a textbook opportunity for "missionary" en-
deavor in the Ellen White sense of the word. During her visit through
the South in June 1904 as she churned up the Cumberland River
aboard the Morning Star, she spotted a 400-acre farm near Nash-
ville, Tennessee that she recommended for a school, despite its me-
diocre land.
The land was bought and an independent corporation, the Nashville
Agricultural and Normal Institute, was organized as its legal owners.
Plans for the school began immediately. The enterprise was to be sepa-
rate from direct denominational control, a self-supporting institution,
but would function in cooperation with the church rather than as a rival
project. Among the first board members was Ellen White herself. Re-
putedly this was the only occasion when she consented to serve as a
board member of any Adventist school.
E. A. Sutherland and P. T. Magan from Emmanuel Missionary Col-
lege were among the search party for the land. They and Emmanuel
Missionary College were suffering from a serious case of mutual dis-
enchantment, partly because Sutherland encouraged reform faster than
his constituency could acclimate to it. Tension was high as the school
year drew to an end in 1904, and both men resigned to cast their lot
with the gaining movement to establish self-supporting schools in the
South. With them went a band of nine faculty and students from EMC,
equally interested in becoming a part of the experiment. Among them
were Bessie DeGraw and Nellie Druillard, both of whom became leg-
endary figures in the story of Madison College and Sanitarium, as the
self-supporting institution on the Cumberland River came to be
known.
3-IPFTW 65
This experiment near Nashville was not the first Adventist school
in the South. A dozen years before Sutherland and his entourage fled
Emmanuel Missionary College, G. A. Colcord from Oregon, equally
committed to missionary adventure, opened a small school in
Graysville, Tennessee, hardly more than a hundred miles southeast of
Nashville. By the time the Nashville Agricultural and Normal Insti-
tute organized, Graysville had become a boarding institution with an
adjacent sanitarium and was the recognized worker-training institu-
tion in the South. In 1916 the school moved to a large farm east of
Chattanooga and became Southern Junior College, another generic
institution.
But the Nashville Agricultural and Normal Institute did not seek to
duplicate or compete with Southern Training School at Graysville or its
successor, the junior college. It aimed at a completely different student
market, mainly the poor, semi-literate rural population of the South,
mostly in the mountains, for whom better health and improved agricul-
tural methods were critical. Sutherland believed that these people could
not afford a formal education but were willing to work for it.
Sutherland became the first president of the Nashville Agricultural
and Normal Institute in 1904. Only eleven students were on hand for
the opening day of classes, an inauspicious beginning and not even a
shadow of the impact the school would have on the South. Ellen White
explained that this campus would become a hub of training for teachers
who would fan out over the southern states, establishing similar small-
er schools in which agricultural instruction would be a priority topic in
addition to Bible study and health.
Time demonstrated the proof of the Sutherland-White pudding. A
sanitarium went up and a nursing program began. Smaller units sprout-
ed up elsewhere, thirteen by 1909. Eventually forty campuses in the
hinterlands of the South patterned themselves after the Madison model.
The programs were all similar, coordinating formal learning with large
components of agriculture and an emphasis on health. During the 1920s
the Madison campus launched college-level courses.
In 1915 P. P. Claxton, United States Commissioner of Education,
complimented Sutherland and his colleagues at Madison for their con-
tributions to the well-being of the American South. Declaring that one
of the great needs of the region was schools tailored to the conditions of
66
Thefirst board of Nashville Agricultural and Normal Institute posed for this picture in
1904. Seated. left to right: W C. White. Ellen C. White. Mrs. J. E. White. J. E. White.
Standing. leli to right: C. C. Crisler. P. r Magan. Minnie Hawkins. Nellie Helen Druil-
lard. W E. Sutherland. Sarah Mclnterfer.
the people they served, he said that the teachers of the rural schools
"have discovered and adapted in the most practical way the vital prin-
ciples of education too often neglected."25
The Madison experiment was only one of several practical adapta-
tions of education in the South, but it was Adventism's contribution in
resolving a national dilemma. Even though it appeared to be a nostrum
for the educational ills of the South, some church leaders viewed it with
misgiving. As an independent institution, Madison subsisted on dona-
tions and other money the school generated through its own enterprises.
While grateful for the benefit Madison was to the church, some Adven-
tist leaders suspected that many donors gave funds to the self-support-
ing program rather than to officially designated projects.
Sutherland never intended Madison to be anything but an institution
that supported the church. He visualized small self-supporting units
throughout the South as mission projects that would establish an Ad-
67
ventist presence in many places where traditional evangelistic methods

would have been ineffective. He knew the church could not afford to
operate these units, but in 1908 the local conference voted to assist
Madison with a $19,500 appropriation. Despite this show of cordiality,
it was ironical that Sutherland and his associates, who deliberately de-
signed the program not to drain funds from denominational coffers, did
not enjoy the full approbation of Adventist leaders.
Part of the problem was philosophical. The chemistry of Madison's
autonomy and Sutherland's commitment to reform produced less than
a stable mix. It was almost unavoidable that some interpreted Madison
as more orthodox to Ellen White's philosophy of education than de-
nominationally owned schools. Sutherland's loyalty to the church was
never in question, but an undercurrent of suspicion evolved between
the self-supporting establishment and the church over the theology of
education.
A General Conference committee appointed to study this ambigu-
ous relationship recommended in 1915 that the official church and self-
supporting institutions work more cooperatively in fund raising, man-
agement, and student recruitment. The Autumn Council of that year
adopted the recommendations and relations improved. At the world
convention of Adventist educational leaders and teachers at Colorado
Springs, Colorado in 1923, a representative ofthe self-supporting move-
ment argued persuasively about the role the self-supporting institutions
played in satisfying the needs of the South, which he described as an
economically disadvantaged region. His report received equal billing
to reports from other world fields, but the reality of separateness con-
tinued to haunt both sides of the dichotomous situation. Teachers were
free to shuttle back and forth from denominational to self-supporting
schools, but the time they spent in the Madison system did not accrue
for retirement benefits.26
It was well into the post-World War II era when changed economic
conditions overtook the self-supporting establishment. Southern Junior
College, which became Southern Missionary College in 1944, was
flourishing with a growing system of secondary feeder schools. A ris-
ing standard of living throughout the South reduced the demand for
self-supporting schools and increasingly, the self-supporting schools
assumed the academic character of their denominational counterparts.
68
Conferences took over the management of some self-supporting schools

while others closed. Falling on hard times, Madison College itself de-
faulted to denominational control, but in 1964, after one year of new
management, its post-secondary program ended while it continued as a
denominational day academy for the Greater Nashville areaY
The self-supporting concept declined but did not die. By 1970 only
a handful of secondary schools remained a part of the movement, but
they were stronger and continued to attract a loyal clientele. With Mad-
ison College gone these schools continued as less expensive alterna-
tives to denominationally owned academies and became a part of the
feeder system to denominational colleges.
A new wave of independent schools appeared in the late 1970s, but
they bore only token if any relation to the mission mindedness of the
original self-supporting movement born on the banks of the Cumber-
land River in 1904. Motivating many of the new campuses were sepa-
ratist theological goals that were deliberately competitive to the de-
nominational establishment and which inflicted a divisiveness to the
North American church.
Health Education
Another major strand of Adventist education appearing in the nine-
teenth century consisted of a variety of professional programs in health
and medicine at Battle Creek. All of them revolved around Ellen White
and Dr. John Harvey Kellogg. 28
Both of these leaders envisioned a combination of health ministry
and evangelism as the gospel in action. From 1864 onward Ellen White
issued a steady stream of messages promoting this idea. In 1876 a
youthful Dr. Kellogg, recently graduated from Bellvue Hospital Medi-
cal College in New York and newly appointed medical superintendent
of the Western Health Reform Institute, took immediate steps to fulfill
her advice. While Battle Creek College was the recognized school to
prepare denominational workers, Kellogg began to convert the Health
Reform Institute into a parallel center for education in health sciences.
Officially changed to Medical and Surgical Sanitarium, the institution
became popularly known as Battle Creek Sanitarium.
As a member of the instructional faculty of Battle Creek College,
Kellogg offered courses in health and hygiene and taught private class-
69
Posing infront of Dr. J. H. Kellogg's home in Battle Creek is thefirst group of Seventh-
day Adventist physicians to graduatefrom the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor after
taking pre-med at Battle Creek. The date was 1895. This curricular sequence was the
forerunner of American Medical Missionary College, founded at Battle Creek, also in
1895.
es to students interested in entering medical school. Always a dynamic
presenter, he stirred up enough interest in health to announce in 1877
that the sanitarium would begin a School of Hygiene. He left little doubt
about his purpose to unite medical care and evangelism. "Sickness is
everywhere," he said, "and there is no more successful method of re-
moving prejudice than to be able to enter the sickroom and relieve the
afflicted."29
Between seventy and eighty students enrolled for the twenty-week
course which began in January 1878. In addition to general treatment
and remedies for illness, students studied anatomy, physiology, chem-
istry, physics, and "mental philosophy." Immediately, talk started about
the possibility of offering medical degrees, but Kellogg quashed such
ambitious rhetoric, explaining that his course was not a school of med-
70
icine. Medical schools commonly lacked effective instruction in hy-

giene and only at best, his graduates might be able to teach such classes.
Hundreds of students went through the School of Hygiene during the
few years that Kellogg kept the course going. Many of them spent en-
tire careers in medical missionary work, which was in keeping with
Kellogg's original intentions.
Although Kellogg received most ofthe accolades, others assisted in
developing health education programs, among them Dr. Kate Lindsay.
After a short career in nursing, she enrolled in the University of Mich-
igan School of Medicine, graduated at the head of her class in 1875 and
joined the medical staff at Battle Creek. Known as Dr. Kate, she and
Kellogg convinced the sanitarium board to establish a school of nurs-
ing in April 1883. An anemic response prompted a second call for stu-
dents in October. Meanwhile Dr. Kate, the acknowledged founder of
the nursing program, doubled the length of the course to six months,
and after the first cohort of students graduated, she increased it to two
years.
Kellogg had little to do with the Nursing School, leaving Dr. Kate
and another physician, Ann Stewart, to conduct most of the classes.
Ever mindful of the ideal of medical missionary work, Lindsay left
Battle Creek in 1895 to join the medical staff at Claremont Sanitarium
in Cape Town, South Africa.
But an impatient Kellogg was not satisfied with these successes. In
1888 he and his wife initiated another project, a School of Domestic
Economy, which corresponded to later home economics courses. The
twenty-five week course was designed for girls and focused on per-
sonal hygiene and homemaking skills including cooking and tailoring
according to principles of health.
Kellogg intended to repeat the course twice annually, but the Health
and Temperance Missionary School which he inaugurated the next year
absorbed the School of Domestic Economy. In effect, this new mission-
ary training program also revived the former School of Hygiene and
combined it with a growing denominational interest in combating alco-
hol and tobacco. For ten years the Health and Missionary School turned
out practical nurses, health lecturers, experts in healthful cooking, and
other personnel trained to promote physical well being. Specific courses
lasted up to a year. The purpose was to provide evangelistic and health
71
education workers for the growing number of treatment rooms and

clinics outside the United States as well as inside, particularly the
American South.
Through these educational activities as well as medical care that the
sanitarium offered, Kellogg developed an international reputation as an
apostle of healthful lifestyle. A list of patients and guests at the sani-
tarium included national politicians, captains of industry, and leading
personalities in a variety of professions and in the arts and sciences.
An Adventist School of Medicine

Kellogg's crowning educational act came in 1895 when he created a
school of medicine, American Medical Missionary College. The idea of
educating Christian physicians had been in the making for more than
twenty years. In 1872 Ellen White issued a call for doctors who would
practice their profession in the spirit of reform that had motivated the
church to establish the Western Health Reform Institute. Thirteen years
later she described the work of a physician as critical to the total min-
istry of the church. 3D
During the years between these two statements Kellogg promoted
medicine, first by teaching pre-med classes informally for students
planning to attend medical school and then offering a more organized
pre-medical course. By 1885 he had prepared about twenty students to
enroll in schools of medicine. Frequently these Adventist medical stu-
dents spent their summers working at the sanitarium, which was a
means for them to maintain a connection with the denominational
health-care program.
One of Ellen White's primary concerns was the spiritual aspect of
medical ministry. It troubled her to encourage students to study medi-
cine at secular institutions where she felt they would risk maintaining
their commitment to Adventist principles of health reform. In 1889 the
church announced a plan to give financial assistance to medical stu-
dents, both men and women, who would commit themselves to a career
in medicine, but the response was small. Suddenly in 1891 matters
changed when thirteen men and seven women signed a pledge to sup-
port health principles that Ellen White propounded and promised after
graduation to engage in medical ministry as the General Conference
prescribed. After completing pre-med courses at Battle Creek, they en-
72
tered medical school at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, about

seventy-five miles east of Battle Creek. 3'
Battle Creek Sanitarium provided a large dwelling in Ann Arbor
that served as a rooming house for Adventist medical students, super-
vised by a small staff. On Sabbaths they conducted their own Sabbath
school and church services, and during off hours on week days they
acquired clinical experience by engaging in medical missionary work.
Church leaders from Battle Creek kept a paternalistic eye on the medi-
cal students, reminding them of the ideals of medical ministry and their
obligation to the church.
In addition to furnishing the home, the sanitarium paid the tuition
and fees for those in this cohort of future physicians who could not af-
ford the cost of a medical education. The church had never gone to
comparable lengths to educate ministers. This show of support was a
tacit message that the church regarded medical ministry to be crucial to
Adventism and, despite its high price, was willing to spend the funds
necessary to promote it.
To provide additional clinical experience for medical students Kel-
logg founded a dispensary in Chicago in 1893. About 700 received
medical attention during the first five weeks of its operations. A second
dispensary broadened medical students' training even more, but de-
spite these successes, church leaders led by Ellen White were still ner-
vous about the medical education itself.
In June 1895 the denominational agency in charge of health, the
Seventh-day Adventist Medical Missionary and Benevolent Associa-
tion, decided the time had come to establish a Seventh-day Adventist
medical school. Events moved rapidly. The next month, in early July,
the Illinois legislature granted a charter to American Medical Mission-
ary College, frequently abbreviated to AMMC. Kellogg was its presi-
dent. Plans called for a four-year course divided between Chicago and
Battle Creek Sanitarium. On October 1, 1895, about four months after
the initial decision, forty-one medical students began their studies in
the new school.
Although Ellen White had been urging for a viable medical ministry
led by physicians consecrated to Adventist principles of health reform,
to some extent Kellogg derived his inspiration for medical missionary
work from his acquaintances in New York, primarily George D.
73
Dowkontt. An English-born doctor who had devoted his life to interna-

tional medical missionary efforts, he headed the International Medical
Missionary Society, an organization that influenced many medical stu-
dents to work in New York City missions similar to those Kellogg later
established in Chicago. By 1894 Dowkonnt's society sent more than
eighty doctors to India, Africa, and China.
Hardly had American Medical Missionary College begun before
church leaders detected what they regarded as ominous danger signs. A
year after the school opened, Kellogg dropped "Seventh-day Adven-
tist" in favor of "International" in the title, "Medical Missionary and
Benevolent Association." In 1898 he announced that AMMC was
unique in that it was the only school of medicine in the United States
whose purpose was to produce medical and philanthropic workers
without sectarian control.
While its drift away from denominational control was becoming
more apparent, American Medical Missionary College continued to
function with moral support from the church. But by 1907, the year that
Kellogg's membership in the church ended, the church ceased to recog-
nize it as a Seventh-day Adventist institution. Excellent performance
by graduates of AMMC on the Illinois State Board examinations helped
to pave the way for the school's admission to the Association of Amer-
ican Medical Colleges, but administrative problems developed, and in
1910 it closed, officially merging with Illinois State University. During
its fifteen-year life more than 185 students graduated with medical de-
grees.
Since its founding in 1866 the Western Health Reform Institute and
its successor, Battle Creek Sanitarium, had been driven by a vision for
a ministry of medical care based on health reform. Kellogg capitalized
on these ideas to build a many-faceted institution, but both to its advan-
tage and disadvantage, the future of the institution lay very much in his
hands. His indefatigable leadership and his stature in the medical world
were undeniable blessings to the sanitarium as it metamorphosed al-
most inexorably into an educational center.
That the church could lose such a critical institution pointed in part
to organizational flaws. As the church evolved after its founding in
1860, semi-independent organizations developed to oversee categories
of activities, such as production and distribution of literature and Sab-
74
bath schools. After 1901 these semi-independent units, with the excep-
tion of Kellogg's International Missionary and Benevolent Association,
became departments of the General Conference. Under the aegis of this
powerful entity Kellogg gained legal control of the sanitarium and its
educational ventures and built an empire of health work that rivaled the
size of all other denominational enterprises combined. As his relation-
ship with the church deteriorated, General Conference leaders could do
little to prevent what had been intended to be an educational center for
health and medical ministry from becoming an independent, private
project.
Kellogg's defection from the Seventh-day Adventist church was a
drama that partially played against the backdrop of denominational re-
organization and the church's removal from Battle Creek. Ellen White
had noted the direction of Kellogg's life and profession, and in 1904
threw her support behind negotiations for a resort hotel near Redlands,
called Lorna Linda. A bargain price of less than $40,000, only a frac-
tion of its value, was enough incentive to make the Southern California
Conference the owner of the estate which conference leaders planned
to convert into a health-care institution.
In November 1905 the newly transformed estate went into operation
as Lorna Linda Sanitarium. A nursing school was also part of the insti-
tution. The next year the nursing school separated from the sanitarium,
broadened its offerings to include missionary training, and took the
name College of Evangelists. W. E. Howell, president of Healdsburg
College, became president of the new school in Southern California.
Almost immediately a few church leaders, Ellen White among them,
anticipated a denominational medical school. Recalling the unlikely
circumstances surrounding the purchase of the Lorna Linda property,
she told a camp meeting audience in Los Angeles in 1907 that God had
accomplished the purchase even though "rivers of difficulties were full
and overflowing their banks." Her urging continued with a special mes-
sage to the 1909 General Conference session, specifically calling for an
educational center to concentrate on training nurses and physiciansY
That same year the school changed its name from College of Evan-
gelists to College of Medical Evangelists and received a charter to offer
academic and professional degrees including nursing, medicine, and
dentistry. The first class of medical students enrolled during the 1909-
75
1910 year and in 1914 the first class of physicians graduated. Mean-
while the sanitarium and the college merged under a single administra-
tion and the board turned to physicians to lead the expanding medical
college. Drs. George K. Abbot and Wells A. Ruble, both graduates of
American Medical Missionary College, served as president of CME
from 1907 to 1914.
Questions about management of the medical school were crucial to
church deliberations after 1909 when it became evident that more than
a nursing school was in the future of Lorna Linda. It was clear that the
Southern California Conference, in whose name the property was orig-
inally purchased, could not afford the kind of institution Ellen White
described. In a series of actions during 1910 the Pacific Union Confer-
ence in North America pledged its financial support to the medical
school and agreed to participate in its management. The General Con-
ference would be the official parent organization and would also bear
some financial responsibility. In a single phrase, Lorna Linda became a
General Conference institution subject to direct church control. That
status has never ended.
Distance Education: a Correspondence School

A denominational correspondence school added to the diversity of
Adventist education in 1909. The roots of this enterprise reached back
to Goodloe Harper Bell, who returned to Battle Creek in 1884 after two
years in South Lancaster, to engage in editorial work, to write, and to
teach privately. Among his projects was a correspondence school. To
accompany his lessons and to inspire his students in their home study
he published a small journal, The Fireside Teacher.33 Correspondence
classes were also among the offerings of Walla Walla College, begin-
ning in 1897. Students had a choice often different classes spread across
Bible, language, history, and psychology. The purpose of Walla Walla's
enterprise was to enable students to acquire basic education before en-
rolling as college students.34
Frederick Griggs, head of the General Conference Department of
Education, founded the denominational correspondence school in 1909
after attending an educational conference where reports of success by
correspondence schools motivated him to establish a similar program
for the church. In July of that year he launched the school with W. E.
76
Howell as principal. Within three months more than sixty students en-
rolled. At first known as the Correspondence School, it soon became
the Fireside Correspondence School, reminiscent of Bell's Fireside
Teacher. It was no accident that the first two principals and the first
president who headed the correspondence school until 1946 had taken
correspondence courses under Bell in Battle Creek.
Griggs did not see a school of correspondence as competition to
existing schools. "We have workers in all parts of the world," he told
the 1918 General Conference session, "who desire to continue their
studies in connection with their work, as well as thousands of parents
and young people whose circumstances forbid their attending one of
our resident schools, but who desire to pursue their education under
Christian teachers."35 At the time Griggs reported an enrollment ex-
ceeding 1,600.
This new venture was hardly a year old before it raised questions
about valid credit. At the 1923 Colorado Springs Convention C. C.
Lewis, second principal of the Fireside Correspondence School, re-
called that the founders of correspondence classes did not intend to
provide an introduction to college as was the case of the Walla Walla
correspondence classes, but an alternative to traditional education.
But, "at the same time," he said, "it was inevitable that sooner or later
some who had studied by correspondence would present themselves
at our resident schools and desire credit for work they had done
through correspondence." In 1910 the General Conference Educational
Convention approved correspondence credit at face value; five years
later a General Conference policy permitted students to take one half
of their college or secondary graduation requirements by correspon-
dence. 36
Similar to many other features of Adventist education, the corre-
spondence school was an Adventist version of an idea already in prac-
tice. In 1923, when C. C. Lewis spoke at Colorado Springs, the Univer-
sity of Chicago had a thirty-year tradition of correspondence classes
and the University of Wisconsin enrolled 20,000 students in 500 differ-
ent correspondence classes. Griggs predicted in 1918 that Adventist
students were only beginning to realize the possibilities of the Fireside
Correspondence School, a statement that the long history of that insti-
tution fulfilled more successfully than anyone imagined.
Adventist Specialized Schools-an Evaluation

The success of the first generation of specialized schools in Adventist
education was uneven. From twenty-first century hindsight perhaps one
of the most puzzling questions was the inability of educators and church
leaders to implement a productive ministerial education program on par
with the image that the profession evoked. While pastoral training may
have been central to Adventist education, church leaders themselves dif-
fered on the issue of appropriate preparation. Because the demand for
ministers was high in an evangelistically oriented church, expediency
often outweighed professional training, and many Adventists entered
pastoral work without the background that ideally they should have had.
Historically, the new medical school probably attracted the most at-
tention not only because of its connection with the "right arm of the
message" but also because it represented the most ambitious educa-
tional venture of the church. But not to be overlooked was the impor-
tance of education for minorities, especially African Americans, which
expressed social implications that were in keeping with the ideals of the
global mission that was developing in a church, which, in the years sur-
rounding the turn of the century, was still emerging.
IVandeVere, Wisdom Seekers, p. 25.

'Arthur L. White, Ellen G. White, v. 3, The Lonely Years, pp. 56-58.
llbid., pp. 127, 128.
4Valentine, Shaping of Adventism, pp. 42.
'Ellen G. White, Testimonies to the Church, v. 5, pp. 528, 529, 584.
6For a description of the Norwegian resolution see Arthur L. White, ibid., 368, 369.
'Valentine, ibid., 49-52.
8Valentine's and VandeVere's accounts of the institutes have provided the substance for
these passages about the Bible institutes at Battle Creek College.
9Everett Dick, Union. College of the Golden Cords (Lincoln, NE: Union College Press,
1967), p. 4.
IOBrown, Chronology, pp. 11-l3.
liE. M. Cadwallader, A History of Seventh-day Adventist Education, pp. 277, 278; Dick,
ibid., pp. 26, 327.
I'Marley Soper, "Unser Seminar," Adventist Heritage (Summer 1977), pp. 44-54; L. H.
Christian, Sons of the North (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press Publishing Association,
1942), pp. 170-182; Virginia Steinweg, Without Fear or Favor (Washington, D.C.: Review
and Herald Publishing Association, 1979), pp. 79-88.
nSoper, ibid.
14 General Conference Bulletin, 1913, no. 4, p. 59, 1922, no. 6, p. 142.
15Ellen White's appeal appeared first in leaflet form. It became a part of The Southern
Work (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1966), pp. 9-18.
78
16See Ron Graybill, Mission to Black America (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press Pub-
lishing Association, 1971), pp. 44, 45, 100, for an interesting description of Edson White's
night schools in Vicksburg.
"Brown, Chronology, p. 140; the SDA Encyclopedia, v. 2, 1996 ed., p. 233; Schwarz,
Light Bearers, pp. 242-244; and Charles E. Dudley, Sr., Thou Who Hath Brought Us ...
(Brushton, NY: TEACH Services, Inc., 1997), pp. 184-190.
'8Louis A. Hansen, From So Small a Dream (Nashville, TN: Southern Publishing Asso-
ciation, 1968), pp. 152,207; Dudley, ibid. For a broad view of Oakwood College, see Adven-
tist Heritage (March 1996). The entire issue is a centennial memorial of the school.
'9Ronald D. Graybill, E. G. White and Church Race Relations (Washington, D.C.: Re-
2°Ellen G. White, Testimonies to the Church, v. 9, p. 199. A description of her visit to
Oakwood is found in Arthur White, Ellen G. White, v. 5, p. 347.
21 __________ , Southern Work, p. 93; Hansen, ibid., pp. 14, 15.
22White, Testimonies to the Church, v. 7, p. 56.

2] Ibid. , p. 224.
24 __________ , Counsels to Writers and Editors (Nashville, TN: Southern Publishing Asso-
ciation, 1946), p. 146.
25Hansen, ibid., pp. 182-190.
26Ibid.; Merlin L. Neff, Invincible Irishman (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press Publish-
ing Association, 1964), pp. 59, 72, 73; E. C. Waller, "The Rural Schools of the South and their
Present Needs," Proceedings of the Educational and Missionary Volunteer Departments of
the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists in World Convention. Washington, D.C.:
Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1923.
27 For general information about Madison College, see Ira Gish and Harry Christman,
Madison: God's Beautiful Farm (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press Publishing Association,
1979). Other details are found in Arthur White, ibid., v. 5, pp. 340-347, and VandeVere, Wis-
dom Seekers, pp. 104-118.
28The major sources for this passage about health education are: Dores E. Robinson, The
Story of Our Health Message (Nashville, TN: Southern Publishing Association, 1965), pp.
236-402; Richard Schwarz, John Harvey Kellogg (Nashville, TN: Southern Publishing As-
sociation, 1970), pp. 95-108; Richard A. Schaeffer, Legacy, Daring to Care: the Heritage of
Loma Linda (Lorna Linda, CA: Legacy Publishing Association, 1990), pp. 125-155.
29 Robinson, ibid., p. 241.
l°These two messages may be read in their entirety in Testimonies to the Church, v. 3, pp.
165-185, and v. 5, pp. 439-449.
11 For summaries about the Adventist school of medicine, see Robinson, ibid., pp. 249-
402, Schwarz, ibid., pp. 103-107, and Schaeffer, ibid., pp. 150-155.
12EIlen White's message is published in full in ibid., v. 9, pp. 173-178.
11AIlan G. Lindsay, "Goodloe Harper Bell: Teacher," in Early Adventist Educators,
Knight, ed., p. 65.
!4Cadwallader, ibid., p. 266.
15Frederick Griggs, "Report of the Department of Education to the 1918 General Confer-
ence Session," Record Group 51, General Conference Archives and Statistics. Hereafter this
source will be cited as RG 51, AST.
36C. C. Lewis, "Relation of the Fireside Correspondence School to Our Colleges
and Academies," in Proceedings, p. 397.
79
4
THE MOVEMENT OF
1897
Battle Creek College and its sister institutions were products not
only of the church and Ellen White's philosophy of education but also
of nineteenth century United States. It was only natural that Adventist
colleges reflected many of the specific reforms with which educators
were experimenting at the time. Similarly, the state of education at
lower levels in North America formed a context for Adventist primary
and secondary schools. To understand this educational milieu is one of
the keys to an understanding of the evolution of Seventh-day Adven-
tist education.
North American Education, a Context for Adventist Schools

Nineteenth century America was geographically large, culturally di-
verse, but intellectually unfulfilled. While settlers were still taming the
western wilderness, moneyed classes were creating blue-blooded cul-
tural enclaves in eastern cities. The country hungrily adopted the tech-
nology of the Industrial Revolution before 1850 but nearly self-destructed
in a violent civil war because different regions could not agree on a
philosophy of nationhood. The rest of the civilized world viewed this
new country whimsically, condescendingly, and sometimes warily.
80
THE MOVEMENT OF 1897
American schools mirrored these conditions. Education was not

well defined. Colleges issued degrees, mainly in the classics, but other
than saying that college-bred people were well educated, few knew
what degrees in the classics were good for in a society that had limited
intellectual traditions. Agriculture was the prevalent means of liveli-
hood, but during the latter half of the century the country rapidly in-
dustrialized. How well one could argue the niceties of classical philoso-
phy in the office of a factory owner or a railroad magnate became
irrelevant.
How students arrived in college classrooms in the first place or how
they prepared for a life work was not an organized process. Schools and
curricula, built on a system of neatly arranged grades, were uncommon
until late in the nineteenth century. The high school, which became
almost synonymous with teenagers during the twentieth century, was
still an institution of the future during most of the nineteenth.
Since the early phases of the Industrial Revolution children were part
of the labor supply, sometimes working ten hours a day to bolster fam-
ily income. Farms were equally guilty in devouring juvenile energy.
The concept of childhood and adolescence as pre-adult phases of life
that deserved specific treatment was not an idea that very many had
considered. For the entire nineteenth century American society expect-
ed children to have jobs at least by the time they became teenagers.
They could attend school to learn what they could until it was time to go
to work. The emphasis was on the work, not the learning experience.
Secondary schools existed, frequently called academies, but they
were mainly in the Northeast and served society's upper crust. By the
1870s a smattering ofpublic high schools with selective admissions and
elitist curricula catered to middle-class, urban families. The public high
school as it came to be known had not yet arrived.
But changes were gestating. One of the first signs ofthis embryonic
movement came in 1852 when Horace Mann pushed a compulsory
school-attendance law through the Massachusetts legislature, the first
in the United States, but it applied to elementary-age students only.
Other states followed. Enforcement was less than exemplary, but it was
a beginning.
A combination of smitten consciences and scientific awareness cre-
ated the greatest impetus for change. Darwinian evolution and its ex-
81
planations of the origin oflife gave rise to a wave of investigation about

the human organism as something to be understood scientifically, not
just theologically. The nature ofthe human mind and how to educate it
had always been a question of philosophical curiosity, but even though
many Christians denied it and Adventists would later face off against
it, evolutionary theory claimed to wield scientific clout and hence its
impact on social issues was profound.
During the latter half of the nineteenth century the social sciences
were born and philosophies about human development emerged. Rely-
ing on the earlier philosophy of the French Jean Jacques Rousseau, the
Swiss Johan Pestalozzi, and the German Friedrich Froebel, a genera-
tion of educators in the United States led by John Dewey debated the
nature of childhood, children's needs, and their role in society, all of
which spawned new educational practices.
By the late 1890s a pragmatic trend in American education, known
as progressive education, became the prevailing philosophy. It was a
broad rubric that sheltered differing and sometimes contradictory ideas,
but the common notion was to reject fixed principles of education and
integrate more practicality into education in order to satisfy both per-
sonal and societal needs. It did not impact every classroom immedi-
ately, but it gathered momentum and until the mid-twentieth century it
was the impelling force in shaping classroom methods and teaching
techniques.
Progressive education saw children as individuals in their own right
who had interrelated social, physical, and psychological needs that were
peculiar to their age. On the strength of this belief, activists urged policy-
makers to use governmental regulatory authority to protect children.
During the forty years straddling the turn of the century a genre of
social legislation spread across Europe and the United States, among
which were child labor laws that forbade children to be exploited in the
labor market.
The practical effect of these changes was to create a class of idle
young. Lawmakers were quick to see that if children could not work
they should be in school. By 1900 more than thirty states followed
Massachusetts by enacting compulsory school-attendance laws. Ten
years later the states had organized about 200,000 school districts to
oversee the public schools.
82
The quality of education and the content of curricula varied enor-

mously among these educational fiefdoms. Ostensibly the states con-
trolled education, but in reality the fate of schools lay in the hands of
powerful local leaders, who were often the principals and teachers
themselves. Despite their contrasts, schools developed commonalities,
among them a trend to classify students better according to grades and
to develop an articulated sequence of teaching materials appropriate to
each grade level. By the turn of the century a majority of American
children attended school; however, only a fraction remained after age
fourteen and a still smaller number graduated from high schools.
With respect to high schools, in 1893 the Committee of Ten, ap-
pointed by the National Education Association to study education, rec-
ommended a uniform curriculum for all secondary students in the
United States. The standard fare consisted of English, history, mathe-
matics, science, and foreign language. College presidents dominated
the committee-the president of Harvard chaired the group-and it was
clear that in advocating such a bookish curriculum they were thinking
of high schools as a preparation for college while reformers viewed
high school more practically as a place to learn skills in homemaking
and job training.
As a part of a new mood of national awareness and readiness for
war, Congress passed the Smith-Hughes Act in 19l7, which provided
federal money for agricultural, trade, industrial, and home economics
education for teenagers above fourteen. Probably inspired as much by
the prospect of receiving government money as the new ideas them-
selves, the next year the National Education Association conveniently
changed its collective mind about the recommendation from the Com-
mittee of Ten. The NEA's Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education
now endorsed health, vocation, citizenship, ethical character, home
membership, worthy use of leisure, and a command of basic academic
skills (literacy and mathematics) as the seven broad curricular objec-
tives of high schools. The NEA also recommended a variety of curri-
cula to meet the variety of needs that teenagers brought with them to
high school. Classes in health, physical education programs, and voca-
tional education courses appeared.
Public secondary education in the United States was a relatively new
phenomenon and its purpose and character were left to innovation. By
83
1920 the high school was well on the way to achieving its identity as an
American institution but it was not yet a completely defined tradition.
It had long since become a public, tax-supported service and commonly
offered multiple tracks that gave teenaged students an option for col-
lege preparation, or as an alternative, courses in business, agricultural,
mechanical, or industrial education. The college preparation track
closely resembled the curricular recommendation from the Committee
ofTen, but the high school diploma was also an admission ticket to the
world of work.
Protagonists of change thought their progress had moved with gla-
cial slowness, but looking backward forty years from circa 1920 they
could point to laws that took children out of the labor market, required
them to attend school, and made school a more inviting and practical
place. Within the schools themselves the curriculum had dramatically
changed to become a saner treatment of childhood and youth.
It was within this state of flux that Seventh-day Adventists developed
their elementary and secondary schools. In the United States much of the
new thinking about educational purposes emerged from the Protestant,
democratic, and pragmatic character of North American society to which
Adventists believed they were special couriers of a redemptive message.
As different as they planned their schools to be, in time they came to re-
alize that the spiritual values that their separateness embodied did not
mean they should ignore either the educational reform taking place
around them or the immediate needs of Adventist children or teenagers.
All of this held true for the generic Adventist college, schools with spe-
cial missions, and elementary and secondary schools.
Ellen White had written in 1872 that until children were eight to ten
years old they should run free as lambs, implying that only after that
age should they be in school, the nature of which she described in
"Proper Education." Her essay did not deliberately instruct Adventists
to establish schools, but no one could read her climaxing comment,
"we are reformers," without realizing that she was advocating Adventist
primary education in addition to higher levels of schools. For twenty-
five years the response from the Adventist world was close to inert.
Schools that produced workers were the educational priority for the
church; church schools as educational projects of individual congrega-
tions were rare.
84
As the progressive education movement gathered strength, some Ad-

ventists expressed a growing consciousness that they were neglecting the
education of their young. Sporadic attempts to establish church schools
punctuated the early 1880s. In the columns of the April 14, 1885 Review
S. N. Haskell, one of the founders of South Lancaster Academy, called for
students to attend the New England school where one of the institutional
goals was to prepare teachers who could conduct summer schools for Ad-
ventist children. The purpose of these summer classes was to inculcate
spiritual meaning into the students' education before they returned to
their district public schools in the autumn. Teachers had already held suc-
cessful summer schools in Vermont, New York, and New Hampshire. 1
The summer schools were not church schools in the full sense ofthe
term but they were harbingers of a trend. Three years later Ellen White
mildly chastised the church leaders for not establishing church schools
in several large California cities where Adventists were becoming more
numerous. Later from Australia she penned one of her most quoted
counsels regarding the education of children. "In some countries," she
wrote, "parents are compelled by law to send their children to school.
In these countries, in localities where there is a church, schools should
be established if there are no more than six children to attend."2
There was little question that the United States fulfilled that descrip-
tion. This time enough Adventists heard what she said to make a differ-
ence. During the ten years before 1895 the denomination established
eighteen church schools. Two years later what some have called the
Movement of 1897 began at Battle Creek, which marked the real start
of elementary education for Seventh-day Adventists.
The Movement of 1897 Begins

The Movement of 1897 emerged from the confluence of a number of
forces. During the 1890s Ellen White's counsel became more explicit.
She no longer regarded it only as a piece of good advice to encourage
churches to establish schools, she saw it as an obligation devolving
upon the shoulders of Adventist parents. Among those who took her
seriously was E. A. Sutherland who became president of Battle Creek
College in the spring of 1897. Energetic and promising, he was only
thirty-two years of age but already had three years of experience as
prcsident of Walla Walla College.
85
_...-""'" ,.
This torn photo pictures the faculty of the elementary school at Battle Creek College in
the 1890s. Frederick Griggs is standing on the right in the rear. The teacher-preparation
course that these faculty offered was one of the strongest programs at the college.
At the same time Frederick Griggs, two years younger than Suther-
land and a teacher at Battle Creek since 1890, returned to the Michigan
campus from the University of Buffalo where he had taken advanced
studies in education. At Battle Creek College he was charged with the
responsibility of establishing the first genuine teacher-preparation pro-
gram for Adventists. 3 Other supporters were P. T. Magan, dean of the
college and the same age as Griggs, and twenty-six-year-old Bessie De-
Graw, a graduate of Central Missouri State Teachers College with brief
experience as a high school principal and teacher at Walla Walla Col-
lege. 1. E. Tenney, an older faculty member, served the college as a
public relations officer.
DeGraw offered most of the classes in teacher-education, but Suther-
land taught history of education. Both drew heavily on Ellen White's
advice to establish church schools. During the spring and summer of
86
1897 calls arrived at the college from northern Michigan, Indiana,

Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin for teachers to open church schools. In
October Sutherland asked for student volunteers to interrupt their edu-
cation to teach. 4
Among the eight or ten that agreed to venture out were Bertis Wol-
cott and Mattie Pease who were experienced public school teachers that
had enrolled in Battle Creek College to recycle themselves as teachers
in Christian schools. They went to Pennsylvania and Indiana, but Maud
Wolcott, a nineteen-year-old cousin of Bert is and native of Battle Creek,
unaccustomed to the rigors of rural life, volunteered on nothing but
conviction. Winter arrived by the time she was ready for her assign-
ment, which took her through fifteen-foot snow drifts to Bear Lake,
Michigan where settlers were still clearing forests to create new farm-
land. In this unlikely place she spent the next six months teaching in a
home school while living in a small room in the farmhouse. The walls
of her room were papered with pages from The Youth s Instructor. Heat
came from a small wood stove.
More than a half century later the young teacher recalled both her
fright and her determination. After meeting the family that formed the
nucleus of the school, "I sat in their midst and smiled at them," she said.
"Tears ran down my cheeks. Half the night 1 spent in tears." She was to
teach in the front room of the farmhouse, and when she faced her thir-
teen rural students on the first day she began with a song, "Let the
Sunshine In.''
Young Maud Wolcott learned that education was a two-way thor-
oughfare, even for teachers. She ice skated with her students and joined
their snowball fights. "They gleefully taught the city girl to ride horse-
back, to glide across frozen lakes on an iceboat, and to enjoy the unique
experiences of the nearby maple sugar camp," she remembered. "Equip-
ment was homemade: tables, benches, and a blackboard supplemented
by old-fashioned slates and limited paper supplies. 5
Others wrote similarly about hardship and deprivation. Mattie Pease
held classes in one end of a church in the coal mining region oflndiana.
Bertis Wolcott conducted school in a dwelling that also served as a
mini-dormitory for students who came from a nearby town. Furniture
and other equipment were improvised. Wages were small, ranging from
five to fifteen dollars a month. 6
87
Despite these discouraging beginnings the church school movement

spread to the west coast where churches depended on either Battle
Creek or Healdsburg College to prepare teachers. Alma McKibbin be-
gan reluctantly in Centralia, California in September 1898 in a small
room added on to the church building. A three-year drought had re-
duced the countryside to dust and people were destitute. Farmers had
sold their horses to the soap factories because they could not afford to
feed them.
After starting to school on opening day McKibbin returned three
times to her room to pray before she mustered enough courage to make
the mile walk to her classes. Thirty-six students crowded into twenty
seats. Her equipment was all portable: a Bible, a notebook, and a pen-
cil. She had a broken table for a desk and the students all drank from a
common tin dipper. One student was older than the teacher. 7
As primitive as these schools were, Sutherland and his colleagues
saw them as monuments to Christian education. The four schools in the
Battle Creek region during the 1897-1898 academic year multiplied to
fifteen the next year and to sixty the third year. By 1900 Adventists in
North America were operating 220 elementary church schools. 8
This Adventist church school in Grand Island. Nebraska in 1917 suggests that teachers
were innovative and able to keep their pupils busy with a wide variety of learning ac-
tivities.
88
This success was not without its snags. A third of a century later A.
W. Spalding recalled that the Movement of 1897 faced "strong preju-
dice within the church." Only a few believed in the possibility of a
church school system but many were "convinced of its folly," he said. 9
The chief doubters were the members of the General Conference Com-
mittee. The church's leaders summoned Sutherland, Magan, and Griggs
to a lecture that essentially blamed them for diverting money from
more needy causes, primarily missions outside the United States, to
establish elementary schools.
But this show of authority did not intimidate the young leaders of
the Movement of 1897. Sutherland kept up a steady correspondence
with Ellen White in Australia who responded encouragingly to counter
the pressure from the General Conference. "There should be schools
established wherever there is a church or company of believers," she
told Sutherland. "Too much is centered in Battle Creek."lo
Sutherland and company were not the only ones to receive a verbal
shellacking from the General Conference office. As a twenty-seven-
year-old Hebrew and church history professor at Battle Creek College,
H. R. Salisbury, had watched the Movement of 1897 unfold. Sixteen
years later in 1913, after a teaching career in South Africa and England
and then as secretary of the General Conference Department of Educa-
tion, he could not resist telling the world church in session that he and
his colleagues had been right after all about promoting church schools
even if they had not acted with the good will of some of their col-
leagues.
"Twelve years ago ... I was told that if educators advocated the
starting of these schools throughout this country," he said, "the money
required ... would greatly reduce our mission offerings, and retard our
work in foreign fields." After producing statistics which showed that
exactly the opposite had occurred, he concluded that "this proves that
the success of any department which is a rightful part of this organiza-
tion will in no way retard the work of any other department, when each
is doing its own appointed work."11
As committed to elementary education as the young faculty at Battle
Creek College were, they were not unanimous. Griggs, who was head
of both the secondary and teacher-preparation programs, envisioned a
two-year course for prospective church school teachers. He could toler-
89
ate a few volunteers who interrupted their studies to answer calls such
as those in 1897, but he regarded a regular practice of sending out un-
prepared teachers as unprofessional and ultimately damaging to stu-
dents and schools.
Sutherland defined teacher-preparation differently. He favored a
teacher-education program consisting of abbreviated, intensive courses,
a practice that Ellen and James White had urged for ministers from the
outset of Battle Creek College. The mushrooming church school move-
ment could not wait for new teachers to complete a two-year curricu-
lum. Sutherland also mistrusted teachers who were "tainted" with
secular ideas. While Bessie DeGraw had graduated from a state teach-
ers' college, she had cleansed herself by attending Battle Creek Col-
lege and had been part of the Sutherland reform program at Walla
Walla. In contrast, Griggs and some colleagues in teacher-education
had attended the University of Buffalo for the express purpose of
studying the leading educational trends of the times and adapting them
to Battle Creek.
Within two years the clash of philosophies climaxed. Sutherland's
reform program allowed scant room for notions imported from Buffalo
or any other secular place, and at the end of the 1898-1899 school year,
Griggs left Battle Creek to become principal of South Lancaster Acad-
emy. His colleagues who had also been part of the study-leave program
at Buffalo left under pressure as well, some of them to conduct church
schools. While the incident had some of the makings ofa purge, it was
a rather bland one. Sutherland and Griggs parted company, but neither
sacrificed his convictions, and until their deaths in the 1950s they both
cast long shadows in the continuing development of Adventist educa-
tion.J2
The Start of an Adventist Curriculum

The Movement of 1897 and its ensuing events raised the crucial
question of an Adventist curriculum. Typically in the latter half of the
nineteenth century the states provided study guides for schools and
encouraged teachers to follow them, but in the end the teachers them-
selves or principals decided class content. As the century advanced the
curriculum itself broadened to include more practical classes, but class-
room techniques did not always follow apace. One of the more popular
90
contemporary theories held that the mind grew through exercise much
as a muscle develops; accordingly, teachers obliged their students with
interminable drill from textbooks. The amount of rote knowledge that
children could amass became the measurement of achievement.
Ellen White described such children as well trained but not well
educated. From the beginning she also had advised that the Bible must
be central in all instruction from the college through all of the descend-
ing learning levels. Adventists interpreted her words variously. At one
extreme were those who taught that the Bible should be the only text-
book. At the other were those who believed that biblical instruction
should be the most important aspect of a curriculum that otherwise
virtually duplicated what was taught in the local public school.
Most Adventist educators were somewhere in between, but they dif-
fered among themselves and groped for solutions to the problem of how
to construct a biblically centralized curriculum. The answers came
from two sources, the teachers who daily grappled with the problem in
the classrooms and authors who produced textbooks.
Adventist teachers realized that their schools were to be different,
meaning biblical, spiritual, practical, and still remain academically re-
spectable, but the Movement of 1897 caught them ill prepared. Mary
Kelly-Little, a Seventh-day Adventist graduate student at the Univer-
sity of Washington in the early 1930s, described the response by Ad-
ventist teachers as a revolution in education. "It represented a complete
break with the prevailing methods and curricula of the times," she
wrote.iJ Bible and nature were central and teachers developed activities
around the study of these two topics that embraced the entire range of
subject matter.
Statements by the teachers are graphic descriptions of their own
struggles to innovate a biblical curriculum. "[W]e had so few books,"
Maud Wolcott described her year at Bear Lake, Michigan, "but this led
us to a thorough knowledge of the Bible, music, and practical things.
The pages of nature, God's first book, were spread around us on every
side ... Healthful living was a prime subject. Teaching cooking, I ex-
perimented in making buckwheat light bread instead of pancakes."'4
More than thirty years later her husband, A. W. Spalding, defended
her attempt to teach everything from the Bible. She taught reading from
the Bible, he said. For spelling, she chose biblical words. Students prac-
91
ticed penmanship by copying texts of Scripture. To add variation to

arithmetic classes, she developed problems of measurement of biblical
objects, such as Noah's Ark and the New Jerusalem. To make math
practical, she asked her students to measure the woodpile and the mar-
ket value of potatoes the autumn harvest had brought in. "She may
have been frightfully unscientific, but she managed to create a varied
interest in the Book of books," Spalding commented. 15
Alma McKibbin, who had planned from her childhood to be a
teacher, was under no illusion about her lack of readiness to teach in
an Adventist school. She was also conscious of the curricular dilem-
ma that she and her peers faced. "If I knew how to teach a church
school, you would not need to ask me," she told the pastor of the Cen-
tralia, California church in 1898 when he requested her to become the
local church school teacher. "I would be pleading with you for the
privilege. The task is spiritual work. The principles are so different
from public school teaching that I do not know how to carry them out,
and there is no one to teach me. There are no textbooks of any kind,
no course of study, no educational leaders, no one to give a bit of ad-
vice or counsel."16
McKibbin's recruitment as a teacher resembled a military conscrip-
tion rather than a voluntary commitment. The pastor refused to listen
to her protests and the school board tersely handed her an ultimatum
describing the terms of her eight-grade classroom. "Do not use public
school books that teach evolution or have myths or fairy tales in them.
Do not double grades, and above all things do not get behind the public
schools in any subject."
Confronted with such herculean tasks, she used Our Little Friend,
Gospel Primer, Christ Our Saviour, and the Bible. She took her stu-
dents outside to construct relief maps on the ground. They dug out bod-
ies of water and molded dirt into mountain ranges. Each night she wrote
a nature lesson and two Bible lessons. One of her students spent Sun-
days gathering specimens for nature classes.
In her school among Indiana coal miners Mattie Pease used gospel
readers and Ellen White's writings for reading, mission reports in the
Review for geography, conference statistical reports and the story of
Solomon's temple for arithmetic. On the first day of classes in Bertis
Wolcott's Pennsylvania church school students brought whatever
92
books the family happened to have, some of which their grandparents

had used. "There were scarcely two of a kind, except their Bibles,"
Wolcott, said, "so that was the book we were compelled to use the
most."17
Teachers in the Movement of 1897 and their immediate successors
demonstrated their talents to innovate, but leaders of Adventist educa-
tion could never expect to design an effective system by depending on
improvisation. Conditions did not always remain as grim as the first
generation of teachers described them, but curricular standardization
did not develop immediately.
Adventist Textbooks
Actually, Adventist educators had entered the business of textbook
writing as early as 1881, sixteen years before the Movement of 1897
began. A set of guides and course outlines for college-level Bible classes
appeared in 1883 to assist teachers who were largely left to their own
devices, but the needs of the elementary school posed the most acute
problem in defining Adventist curriculum.
Goodloe Harper Bell was the first to produce a textbook, A Natural
Method in English, published by the Review and Herald in 1881. The
uniqueness of Bell's book lay in his explanation that the natural method
of learning proper English was to derive the rules of grammar induc-
tively from a variety of examples. His book was so popular that it sold
out within a few months. He later expanded on the original edition and
prepared manuals to accompany the text. 18
Always an educator, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg wrote First Book in
Physiology and Hygiene in 1887, a book intended for children. He made
the spiritual implication of his topic clear. "Ought we not to take such
care of our bodies as to keep them in that perfect and beautiful condi-
tion in which our kind and good Creator gave them to us?" he asked.
The title of his text betrayed his intentions to produce at least a second
book, which, indeed, he did in 1894, appropriately entitled Second Book
in Physiology and Hygiene.
By the time he rewrote his manuscript he apparently realized that
physiology, even as simply as he described it, belonged to more ad-
vanced levels of instruction. He aimed his second edition at students at
high elementary or secondary levels. In neither book did he explicitly
93
advocate vegetarianism, but discussed some of the adverse effects of a

diet of flesh foods and indicated that vegetable foods provide all of the
nutritive elements that humans need. In light of his animated debates
with fellow Adventists about a meat diet, Kellogg showed remarkable
restraint in his textbooks. 19
Before the Movement of 1897 began, James Edson White wrote The
Gospel Primer to raise money to finance his river boat mission to the
Black population of the South. He designed the book as a teaching tool
for illiterates. The small book was reminiscent of McGuffey's Reader,
beginning with the alphabet, each letter illustrated by a biblical word,
followed by simple versions of Bible stories. Widespread sales provided
White with funds; meanwhile, the book found its way into some of the
early Adventist church schools, among them Alma McKibbin's class-
room in California. 20
Coincident with the emphasis on elementary education that began at
Battle Creek came a veritable library of new textbooks. Between 1896
and 1898 Goodloe Harper Bell published Bell's Language Series, a
five-volume set beginning with language lessons from nature and rev-
elation, proceeding with grammar, rhetoric, and ending with English
and American literature. This set went beyond the elementary level to
introduce advanced students to Christian principles of evaluating good
literature. Eliza H. Morton, a former teacher at Battle Creek College,
wrote Elementary Geography in 1900, following the next year with
Advanced Geography.
E. A. Sutherland took time from his administrative duties to author
Bible Reader in 1900, which went through two revisions by 1904 with
co-author Bessie DeGraw. The books were total adaptations from the
Bible and were written for the beginning reader. "God made a man,"
the first lesson began. "God made Adam. Adam was a man." As the
pupils progressed through the year they sometimes read about the natu-
ral conditions of the earth, always with a biblical twist. "Men wonder
where coal comes from. I can tell. The waters ofthe flood covered large
trees with rocks. These trees made coal, and we burn the coal today,"
Sutherland and DeGraw informed their young readers.
In 1901 Sutherland also prepared The Mental Arithmetic For the
Home and School. He relied upon recent trends in math instruction to
determine the level of difficulty integrated into his text, but he decried
94
the content found in public school texts, such as deriving math prob-
lems from tobacco farming and the production of alcoholic drinks. He
regarded his book as part of a reform by presenting practical problems
that would edify the elementary-age student.
Arithmetic problems Sutherland found aplenty from building con-
struction, tithe-paying, sales of Adventist literature by colporteurs, hu-
man anatomy, healthful living habits, and biblical objects and stories.
"In each half jaw there are 3 teeth called grinders, or molars; how many
molars in a full set of 32 teeth?" he queried in Lesson XX. In a lesson
about chronology he derived a dozen questions from the stories of Noah
through Jacob, complete with Bible texts for reference. In a ten-page
sequence he took students through a school construction project, in-
structing them how to measure out a scaled floor plan and to calculate
the cost of lumber and other building materials. 21
Marion E. Cady, president of Healdsburg College and a graduate of
Battle Creek College and former science teacher at Union College, pub-
lished Bible Nature Studies in 1901, a book that brought a spiritual
quality to the study of nature. He did not intend his book to be a text for
children but a manual for teachers and parents. Among its features were
an index of scriptural verses about nature, profuse biblical references in
the text, and a culminating view of the earth made new. Mattie Pease
remembered that this book gave her much needed help in preparing
nature classes. 22
Realizing that some teachers did not offer Bible classes because they
had no instructional materials, and convinced that without Bible classes
Adventist schools would have no reason to exist, Alma McKibbin let
some of her colleagues copy her Bible lessons by hand. "At last Profes-
sor Cady insisted that I have my lessons printed," she said. "And so
once more I must do what I did not know how to do-write books and
publish them. The Healdsburg College Press printed my first books at
my expense." McKibbin tied the first copies together with a shoestring.
They became the first Bible textbooks for Adventist schools. Orders
came as far away as Australia. 23
In larger Adventist centers church school teachers worked no less
assiduously to revolutionize their curriculum. Mrs. H. B. Noland, su-
pervisor of the Battle Creek elementary school, designed a curriculum
that integrated woodwork, agriculture, home-making arts and sloyd 24
95
into a schedule of traditional classes. Students studied English, physiol-

ogy and geography from books by denominational authors Bell, Kel-
logg and Morton. A traditional history book was part of the program,
but the teacher emphasized religious liberty and other issues to make
the study relevant to Adventist children.
Arithmetic problems came from calculations in gardening and
woodwork. Constructing models of Moses' tabernacle was a favorite
project for sloyd. In their cooking classes the children prepared their
own meals by using some of the vegetables they grew in their garden-
ing classes. They also earned small amounts of money from their agri-
cultural work which helped them to pay for tools that they used in gar-
dening.25
Sarah Peck, a Battle Creek-trained teacher who had begun schools
for children in South Africa before becoming a literary assistant to El-
len White in Australia, left one of the most detailed explanations of the
line of reasoning teachers followed in creating a biblically centered
curriculum, the case in point being geography. Writing in 1899, she
described how she had divided the general topic into six subsections
and then scoured the Bible and Ellen White's writings to find geo-
graphical terms.
The shape of the world, its surface features and seasonal cycles, the
symbolic meaning of geographical terms in prophecy, changes in na-
ture that sin had caused, and any other comment from the Bible or El-
len White about the earth became legitimate objects of study in her
geography classes. In order to understand the implications of the gospel
commission, human geography also became a part of class discussion.
Students drew their own maps and learned the essential characteristics
of the countries of the earth. "Do you think that ... the light that the
Lord has given us caused the study to be of an inferior nature?" Peck
asked rhetorically. "Science itself became magnified and beautified,
when seen through the powerful microscope of God's Word," she
said. 26
Not all of the first generation of Adventist textbooks were as bibli-
cal as Peck described the study of geography, but authors demon-
strated that they would go to great lengths to derive curriculum con-
tent from the Bible and denominationally oriented information. Very
early in the twentieth century church school teachers had at their dis-
96
posal a selection of books concentrating on Bible and reading but

extending to math, health, and nature study, and in the next decade,
science.
As well-intended as these first textbooks were and as much work as
they represented, perceptive Adventist educators saw that they were
inadequate. "Little had been accomplished in the publication of text-
books until after ... 1906," Frederick Griggs, the executive secretary
of the General Conference Department of Education, remembered in
1909.21 If denominational schools were to be successful, authors would
need to produce material more precisely sequenced for the elementary
grades. Between 1907 and 1912 the True Education Reader Series, au-
thored primarily by Sarah Peck, but assisted by Katherine B. Hale and
M. E. Cady, standardized reading in Adventist church schools. During
the same years Alma McKibbin's four-volume series of Bible Lessons,
to which four other advanced
volumes were added, became the
accepted Bible textbooks. In
1908, 1910, and 1913 Cady re-
vised his original nature studies
book into three volumes for the
fourth, fifth, and sixth grades.
With Griggs' support, com-
mittee work on these textbooks
began in 1903. Sarah Peck, one
of the leading elementary educa-
tors on the Pacific coast, took
personal command of textbook
revision. By 1907 four educators
had spent much of their own
money and vacation time to de-
sign books for the readiness lev-
els of each elementary grade, Alma McKibbin wrote some of the first text-
books for elementary school Bible classes,
putting "the crib low enough for which church schools as far away as Aus-
the lambs to reach," Peck said. tralia and other countries also used. Later
During the 1920s McKibbin and editions and revisions were part of the ele-
mentary school curriculum as late as the
other authors further refined the 1940s. Pictured here in 1964, she peruses
Bible textbooks. Speaking at Col- some of her early work.
4-I.P.F.TW
97
orado Springs in 1923, Peck admitted that teachers had too long been
using "wonderful, but altogether too mature" books, including Ellen
White's writings, to teach reading.28
Although they were quickly outmoded, the earliest books were the a
first step in developing a defined Adventist curriculum. Revisions and
improvements followed almost immediately, and while not perfect,
they were a quantum leap in both professionalizing and developing an
identity in Adventist church schools.
The textbook revisions of 1907 and onward were also an implied
acknowledgment that the first teachers who restricted students exclu-
sively to the Bible had misunderstood Ellen White's counsel to make
the Bible "central" in Adventist education. Central and exclusive were
not equivalent terms. In the curriculum that included the new textbooks
the Bible was not the only source of content but it remained at the heart
because it formed a framework to understand knowledge. Less than a
decade after the Movement of 1897 Adventist teachers had developed
sufficient professional skills to produce these textbooks. The term
"worldview" was yet not a part of the Adventist educational vocabu-
lary, but curriculum designers sought to construct a biblical context in
which students would understand information and comprehend them-
selves as Seventh-day Adventists. 29
Not only was the practice of using the Bible as the only textbook
extreme, Adventist educators also concluded that it would be too much
to expect Adventist books to be the exclusive academic diet in denomi-
national education. In 1916 M. E. Cady wrote that the "larger propor-
tion of the text-books used in all schools are secured from regular text-
book publishers."3o
Notwithstanding the prevalence of non-Adventist textbooks, the
identity of denominational education continued to go beyond books to
values and responsibilities, broadly categorized as Christian and related
to the home. Cady wrote that parents were expected to report weekly
evaluations of their children from a list of forty-six items pertaining to
home duties, personal hygiene and health, and self-paced spiritual ac-
tivities, ranging from getting out of bed promptly in the morning to
studying Sabbath School lessons. The link between the home and the
school had been a part of Ellen White's thinking since she published
her first article about parents' duties toward their children in 1854, but
98
from the vantage point of the twenty-first century questions arise about
how intrusive elementary schools could reasonably be.
A major point in Adventist elementary education reform was to de-
lay formal education until children were older than the customary age
for them to begin school. When reporting to the world convention of
educators in 1923, Sarah Peck declared that while revising textbooks a
decade and a half earlier the four authors discovered their work to be
easier when they designed their manuscripts for pupils whose parents
had followed Ellen White's advice to keep children out of school until
they were eight or ten years old. Failure to follow this counsel, Peck
said, was a departure from the faith.
While Ellen White had, in fact, given parents such counsel, she did
not regard it with such inflexibility as her friend described it. In April
1888, she not only criticized denominational workers in Oakland, Cali-
fornia for not establishing a church school for their children, but advo-
cated a kindergarten to direct young minds in the right way.
The kindergarten movement, attributed to Friedrich Froebel in the
1830s, had not yet made much of an impact in the United States, but the
idea was known. Of course a kindergarten was not to be construed as a
formal classroom, yet it was a place where education would begin. The
implication is clear that in Ellen White's view some level of education
was appropriate for children of pre-school age.
Sixteen years later during a discussion by the board members of the
local church school in St. Helena, California about their policy to deny
admission to children under ten, Ellen White not only suggested that
seven- or eight-year-old children should attend the school but startled
them by saying that some children as young as five were ready for edu-
cation. Having children in school, she pointed out, was better than leav-
ing them to run the streets with no control, which was the practice
among some families in the community.31
At first sight Ellen White's later statements appear to be a contradic-
tion of her earlier advice to allow children to run as free as lambs until
they were eight or ten. The context of her "free as lambs" remark in
1872 indicates that ideally, parents would be teaching their children at
home, how formally she did not explain, but a deliberate educational
program was to be in effect. "Parents should be the only teachers of
their children until they have reached eight or ten years of age," she
99
had said. ''As fast as their minds can comprehend it, the parents should
open before them God's great book of nature." (Italics supplied.)32
Taken in context, Ellen White's advice over the years enunciated the
principle that all children differ from one another and readiness for
formal education is determined not by blanket rules but by understand-
ing the individual child. She excoriated poorly ventilated and poorly
equipped schools that restricted activity which growing children needed
for health and physical balance. To be free as lambs did not equate to
lack of supervision or the absence of all learning experiences. If parents
were to be teachers, they would have to teach, but by not fulfilling this
duty, schools became a necessity. With a curriculum that was becoming
increasingly accommodating to children's needs and with nature study
a key element in the study program, which in itself presupposed exten-
sive outdoor activity, schools ceased to be the damaging environment
for young children that Ellen White had once perceived.
A Look Back at the Movement of 1897

The Movement of 1897 and later events constituted a defining mo-
ment in Adventist education. Teachers and leaders in education were
compelled to think about elementary knowledge and academic skills in
a manner that heretofore had lain beyond their ken. The first schools
held little in common with public education at the time, and, it might be
observed, had little in common with each other except that education
was to reflect the conviction that the Bible was the Word of God and the
basis for all belief.
Many of the first church schools were clumsy at best but they func-
tioned anyway and inspired an ever widening horizon of confidence.
Given the number of those early schools, the first wave of educational
literature was prolific and creative, but it was also the product of nov-
ices. From out of this unlikely mix teachers emerged who, by trial and
error, forged a curriculum based on a pragmatic balance between their
professional skills and their ideals. In less than two decades after the
first volunteers left Battle Creek College to initiate the Movement of
1897, an identifiable elementary system of schools was in operation.
The two decades following the Movement of 1897 not only identi-
fied Adventist elementary education, they also contributed to the devel-
opment of secondary education. That elementary education did not ad-
100
equately prepare students to enter college was a given, but in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries American education lacked a
well-articulated college preparation program. The public high school
filled the gap between the elementary and tertiary levels, but even by
1920 the public high school was not a completely matured concept.
By defining Adventist elementary education, the church school
movement determined the upper limit of elementary schooling in the
Adventist world, and thus provided an academic beginning point for
Adventist secondary schools. Denominational colleges with their lon-
ger history had already established their own entry levels, thus defining
the upper limit of secondary education.
Perhaps the most important aspect of the Movement of 1897 was
the soul that it breathed into Adventist education. Until the advent of
the church schools, Adventist officialdom saw education more as a
means to prepare denominational professionals than a method to
evangelize the young, in spite of Ellen White's advocacy of saving
children to the church. Although the church had officially encouraged
church schools, educators sometimes received only begrudging sup-
port from many influential church leaders. Nevertheless, the contin-
gent of young educators at Battle Creek College persisted in enlarg-
ing the circle of education to include children as well as students
preparing for denominational employment.
Adventist leaders had long strategized to devote their money to
evangelism. They visualized projects in medicine and public health,
literature production and distribution, and powerful preaching as meth-
ods to reach the public with the gospel, but the Movement of 1897 set
in motion a chain of events demonstrating that the education of the
young was one of most successful evangelistic tools the church pos-
sessed.
It had been a long way from Maud Wolcott's Bear Lake school on
the northern Michigan frontier in 1897 to the system that existed in
1920. It was the spirit of ministry that she and others like her exempli-
fied that had kept the Movement of 1897 alive. The young nineteen-
year-old neophyte remembered that she was "ever besieged by eager
children" and had no privacy except in her stark, second-story room
with its improvised wall paper and wood stove. "It was there, perhaps,
that I learned to be a mother-teacher," she saidY
101
Similarly, Alma McKibbin symbolized the pulsating soul of Adven-

tist education. After she had become a recognized personality in de-
nominational circles, Pacific Union College named a newly erected
building in her honor and invited her to the campus for its opening. She
was overcome with emotion and nostalgia. As she stood to receive her
well-earned accolades she confessed she could not see the beautiful
architecture or the nicely equipped classrooms. "I saw that little old
room at the rear of the Centralia church with its bare rafters and the
studding and the nails on the side where the boys and girls hung their
coats and hats, and the tin dipper and the water pail and the broken
stove that smoked," she said. 34
Above all, the Movement of 1897 was a labor of love.
ICadwallader, ibid., p. 286.

2Ellen White, Testimonies to the Church, v. 6, p. 199.
'Arnold C. Reye and George R. Knight, "Frederick Griggs: Moderate," in Adventist Edu-
cators, Knight, ed., pp. 185, 186.
4Cadwallader, ibid., p. 292; Mary Kelly-Little, ibid., pp. 18, 19,27.
5Maud Wolcott Spalding, "Volunteers of '97," Journal o/True Education (June 1953), pp.
8-10.
6Cadwallader, ibid., p. 295; Kelly-Little, ibid., p. 19-22.
7Mary Hunter Moore, They That Be Teachers. pp. 12ff, quoted in Cadwallader, ibid., pp.
296,297; Alonzo Baker, My Sister Alma and I (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press Publishing
Association, 1980), pp. 47-50.
8Cadwallader, ibid., p. 290.
9S palding's comments cited in Cadwallader, ibid., p. 302.
1DFor a description of this debate between Sutherland and church leaders, see Warren S.
Ashworth, "Edward A. Sutherland: Reformer," in Early Adventist Educators, pp.165, 166; H.
R. Salisbury, "Report of the Department of Education to the 1913 General Conference," RG
51, AST.
IISalisbury, ibid.
12Arnold C. Reye and George R. Knight, Early Adventist Educators, p. 192; VandeVere,
Wisdom Seekers, p. 81.
L1Chapter Ill, "The Movement of 1897," of Mary Kelly-Little's M.A. thesis provides an
insightful description of the personalities and nature of the early curriculum development in
Adventist church schools. Cadwallader, ibid., chapters XXXVlIl and XXXIX also furnish
valuable information. Alma McKibbin's Step by Step (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald
Publishing Association, 1964) is a short memoir of this phase of Adventist education.
14 Maud Wolcott Spalding, ibid.
15Spalding's January, 1931 Review and Herald article cited in Cadwallader, ibid., pp. 301-
303.
16Alonzo Baker, ibid., p. 47-51.
17Kelly-Little, ibid., pp. 20-23.
18Kelly-Little, ibid., p. 13.
102
19J. H. Kellogg, First Book in Physiology and Hygiene (New York: Harper and Brothers,
1887, 1888), p. 10; and Second Book in Physiology and Hygiene (New York: American Book
Company, 1894), pp. 29-31.
20J. E. White, The Gospel Primer (Battle Creek, MI: International Tract Society, 1895).
21Walton J. Brown provides a chronological list of books pertaining to Adventist educa-
tion in Chronology, pp. 238-250. For comments on BelJ's English series see Allan G. Lindsay,
"Goodloe Harper Bell: Teacher," in Early Adventist Educators, Knight, ed., pp. 67, 68. E. A.
Sutherland, The Bible Reader, Number One, rev. ed. (Berrien Springs, MI: Advocate Publish-
ing Co., 1903); and The Mental Arithmeticfor Home and School (Battle Creek, MI: Review
and Herald Publishing Association, 1901).
22M. E. Cady, Bible Nature Studies (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press Publishing As-
sociation, 1901); Kelly-Little, ibid., p. 23.
2JMcKibbin, Step by Step, p. 80; Baker, ibid., p. 57.
24 SIoyd was a contemporary term for handicrafts which usually referred to wood carving
but could include cardboard construction.
25Kelly-Little, pp. 28-31.
26Union Conference Record, July 28, 31, 1899.
27 General Conference Bulletin, 1909, no. 6, p. 79.
28Reye and Knight, ibid., pp. 186, 187; General Conference Bulletin, 1909, no. 6, p. 79;
Sarah E. Peck, "Textbooks For Our Church Schools," Proceedings of the Educational and
Missionary Volunteer Departments, pp. 414-422. See Brown, Chronology, for specific publi-
cation dates of textbooks.
29George Knight devotes an entire chapter to the question of an Adventist curriculum in
Myths in Adventism (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1985),
pp. 139-151. Regarding the question of textbooks, see Warren S. Ashworth, "Edward A.
Sutherland: Reformer," in Knight, Early Adventist Educators, p. 169.
JOM. E. Cady, "Seventh-day Adventist Schools on the Pacific Slope," M. A. thesis, Uni-
versity of California, 1916, pp. 18, 19, 117.
J1Peck, ibid., p. 419; Cadwallader, ibid., p. 288; Arthur White, Ellen White, v. 5, pp. 312-
317. See also Ellen White, Selected Messages, v. 3, pp. 214-226 and Review and Herald, April
24, 1975.
J2EIlen White, Testimonies, v. 3, p. 137. Italics supplied.
)JMaud Wolcott Spalding, ibid.
J4Cadwallader, ibid., p. 298.
s
BRIDGING
THE ATLANTIC
As it developed in North America, Adventist education as a move-

ment became a paradigm for Seventh-day Adventists in the rest of the
world. No specific school served as the model, but because North
Americans constituted the majority of Adventist workers around the
world and they took their ideas about education, organization, and gen-
eral methodology wherever they went, they dominated the church and
its educational institutions worldwide. Of course, adaptations of the
paradigm were frequent, necessary and expected, but a North Ameri-
can shape was always visible.
Early "Missionary" Activity

It was no accident that education and mission movements of Seventh-
day Adventists developed a close relationship. Adventists understood
"missionary" with a broad meaning, someone who engaged in the
work of carrying the gospel to other people. The word "missionary" as
it appeared in the name of the denomination's first school of medicine
at Battle Creek and later in names of other educational institutions
such as Emmanuel Missionary College was a deliberate choice of
words. These names expressed an underlying purpose of Adventist
104
BRIDGING THE ATLANTIC
education-to prepare people formally to carry the gospel. In that sense,

all students preparing to become church workers planned to be mis-
sionaries.
Over time, however, the term more often identified people who trav-
eled to another country or at least left their native environment to work
elsewhere. Adventists conceived the idea of a global mission movement
in the early 1860s. In 1874, the same year that Battle Creek College was
born, 1. N. Andrews sailed with his two motherless children for Swit-
zerland. He was the first Adventist worker from the United States on an
official assignment outside North America and is called the first Ad-
ventist missionary.1
But Adventist mission work in Europe was already under way be-
fore Andrews went to Switzerland. M. B. Czechowski, a Polish immi-
grant to the United States who accepted Adventist teachings about
1850, preached unofficially in central and eastern Europe for a dozen
years before his death in 1876, organizing groups of Sabbath keepers
with whom church workers later made contact. One of his converts,
James Erzberger from Switzerland, traveled to the United States in
1869, was ordained to the ministry, and returned to his homeland the
next year, preceding Andrews by four years.
Erzberger was the first ordained Adventist minister in Europe. Un-
like Czechowski, he labored with a valid credential but he had no spe-
cific assignment. As defined by the broader meaning of the word, he
was a missionary because he carried the gospel, but the church views
Andrews as the first missionary, partly because he went with an offi-
cially designated task and partly because he left his native environment
to work in a field that was foreign to him. As an Adventist presence
spread around the world the term "missionary" became increasingly
linked to service beyond one's homeland.
Church leaders, especially James White, envisioned Battle Creek
College as a place to promote missions and to educate missionaries. At
White's urging modern languages were part of the curriculum, which
he thought would equip students to become workers in other countries.
Several practical problems combined to thwart this plan. To train some-
one to use a second, learned language competently in preaching, writ-
ing, and publishing required more time than the short courses which
the Whites encouraged. Because the church lacked trained language
105
teachers the school depended on translators employed at the Review

and Herald Publishing Association as part-time teachers. But students
showed little interest in language study and the classes floundered. 2
Until a generation of fluent linguists appeared the church found it
more practical to rely on speakers of languages who had converted to
Adventism to conduct mission work. Through the nineteenth century
the most prominent Adventist workers to non-English speaking peoples
outside North America were not the products of an educational pro-
gram to prepare Adventist missionaries, but were immigrants to the
United States or native speakers from immigrant stock.
L. R. Conradi, a German immigrant who converted to Adventism
after arriving in the United States, returned to lead Adventist work not
only in Germany but widely throughout eastern Europe as well. 1. G.
Matteson, who became an Adventist nine years after emigrating to the
United States from Denmark, published the first non-English Adventist
paper in 1872, and in 1877 began a productive eleven-year career in his
native country and Norway.
O. A. Olsen, Norwegian-born but brought to the United States when
five years old, returned to Scandinavia in 1886 from where the church
called him to become General Conference president in 1888. Frank
Westphal, born into the German-speaking immigrant community in
Wisconsin, began pioneering the spread of Adventism among German
colonies in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile in 1894. In 1901 his brother,
Joseph W., followed him in the same territory.
These breakthroughs were significant for Adventists, but English
was still the lingua franca of Adventism. South Africa, Australia, New
Zealand, India, and English-speaking enclaves in Argentina, Chile,
Central America and the Caribbean were some of the early targets of
missionary endeavor.
In 1889 and 1890 Stephen Haskell, accompanied by twenty-two-
year-old P. T. Magan, conducted a world tour of Adventist missions, a
trip that Arthur White declares opened Haskell's eyes to the impor-
tance of schools in countries outside the United States. Speaking at the
General Conference session in March 1891, Haskell pointed out that it
was necessary to educate church workers in their home environments
rather than to send them elsewhere where they would lose touch with
their roots. Two days later W. W. Prescott disclosed that numerous calls
106
for schools were coming to the General Conference, one of them from
Australia. The combined Adventist membership of that island and New
Zealand had already reached 700. 3
Until approximately 1920 the spread of Adventist schools beyond North
America was a four-pronged movement. The first was in Europe where
national workers either established their own schools or quickly took
charge of them from missionary founders. The second prong extended
into Australia, South Africa, and South America where England, the
Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal had taken their language and customs to
create substantial colonial extensions of European life and culture.
The third and fourth prongs represented Adventist education on the
mission frontiers, one penetrating lands populated by Christianized,
non-Caucasian people, the other to what Adventists commonly called
"heathen" peoples because, for the most part, they were non-Christian
and westernized only to varying degrees. The four prongs were not
sequential but rather differing aspects of the Adventist educational
movement. However, a flow of workers developed first from Europe
and then from colonial extensions of Europe to the frontiers.
Adventist Education in Scandinavia

No less than in North America the beginnings of Adventist education
outside the so-called "homeland" abounded with poignancy, dedication,
and sacrifice. Sweat and
tears were common. A
case in point was the
church at Jerslev, Den-
mark. In 1893 this con-
gregation began a church
school that decades later
claimed to have the old-
est, continuous record of
any Adventist church
school in Europe.
On the eve of its Scandinavia was the location ofthe earliest Seventh-day
sixtieth year L. Mark Adventist schools in Europe. This church school in Jer-
Hamilton, education slev. Denmark held the distinction of sixty years of con-
tinuous operation when L. Mark Hamilton visited the
secretary for the North- school in 1953.
107
ern European Division, visited the old school, calling it a shrine and
confessing that he felt he should have left his shoes at the threshold. "To
me this was holy ground," he said. When he asked the old timers in the
church about their sacrifices and struggles over those sixty years, "their
memories somehow failed them," he observed. "Those trials of faith
and finance appeared singularly dim and unimportant.'>4
Schools in Europe began as early as 1883, first in Denmark and later
Norway, partly as a result of the work of 1. G. Matteson. During her
European ministry, 1885-1887, Ellen White encouraged Adventists to
establish schools in Scandinavia to educate church workers. Sometimes
the courses were short such as a single, six-week class in Stockholm,
Sweden that Matteson and 1. M. Erickson taught for prospective col-
porteurs. 5
One of the obstacles to solid educational beginnings in Scandinavia
was a small church membership. A paucity of students made separate
training schools for Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes impractical. This
circumstance, combined with cultural and linguistic similarities among
the three groups, seemed to justify a single regional school, but enough
differences among the national groups prevented effective integration.
Adventist education in Scandinavia advanced, but before 1920 its prog-
ress was erratic.
A permanent educational program for Scandinavia began in 1888
when a mission school opened in Copenhagen, Denmark for the pur-
pose of preparing colporteurs and other workers. The following year a
dozen students gathered in the same city to begin the Philadelphia Mis-
sion and Colporteur School which continued for five years before trans-
ferring to Frederikshavn on the eastern coast near the northern tip of
Denmark. 6
At this site Scandinavian workers dedicated a new school on August
31, 1894. Classes began in October with sixty students. Known as both
Frederikshavn Hojskole and Frydenstrand, it was the recognized insti-
tution for Adventist students from all three Scandinavian countries,
and thus the first Adventist union school in Europe, although union
conferences had not yet become a common administrative entity with-
in the church.
This experiment in a joint school for all Scandinavian students last-
ed only four years. In 1898 it closed for five years. Its revival in Copen-
108
hagen in 1903 began another uncertain phase. Within a year it moved

twice, returning eventually to Frederikshavn where it once again be-
came the Frydenstrand school. Meanwhile, Swedish Adventists took
matters into their own hands and established a separate school, Nyhyt-
tan Mission School at Jarnboas, on an old estate about 120 miles west
of Stockholm. The intention was to admit Finnish students as well.
Total enrollment of both Swedish and Finnish students was only fifteen
the first year, a weak showing but enough to keep classes going.
A year later the school became Nyhyttan Industrial School, a typical
denominational title, but in this instance the change was a signal that
the school's leading purpose was to provide a practical education rather
than to train workers. A low enrollment forced a one-year closure in
1905, but the school rebounded the next year, reverting to its original
name which designated it as a missionary school. Briefly, Nyhyttan
became an all-Nordic school, enrolling students from Norway, Den-
mark, as well as Sweden and Finland. Students were mature adults and,
as a later director of the school described them, enrolled for the "ex-
press purpose of going out as Bible-workers and ministers."7
The location of the school was idyllic. The buildings occupied a
prominence overlooking a valley through which a river flowed from the
central Swedish watershed to Milar Lake, the large body of water west
of Stockholm. Thick pine and birch forests covered most of the 500-
acre estate. "Nature seems to speak to us in her sweetest tones," calling
students "to listen to her benediction of peace," Swedish Conference
President S. F. Svenson said rather romantically. During the summer
months the school plant doubled as a sanitarium. Enrollment was not
large, but encouraging. Forty-two attended the 1908-1909 year, most of
whom entered denominational work as colporteurs after the school
year ended. 8
It was with encouraging news from Nyhyttan that delegates to the
Scandinavian Union met at Orebro, Sweden in 1908. Inspired by the
need for permanency in their schools, the Norwegian and Danish con-
ferences agreed to join in a union school at Skodsborg, the site of a
large health-care institution that occupied a former royal estate near
Copenhagen.
This action left little time to prepare for the new school year, only
weeks away. When classes began in October the teachers and students
109
found themselves in rented space. Before the year ended enrollment

reached thirty-four from Norway, Denmark, and Iceland. But events
showed that the move to Skodsborg was as impermanent as the schools
at previous locations. A new school building went up on the sanitarium
grounds, but within five years classes moved to still another site, Nae-
rum, where the school remained until 1930.
The year 1908 was a turning point in Adventist education for Scan-
dinavia. After establishing a school at Skodsborg church leaders no
longer attempted to house students from all countries in one institution
but separated them into more practically managed groups. Because of
the close similarities in their language, Norwegian, Danish, and Icelan-
dic students could attend one school with minimal problems. This com-
promise served the Scandinavian Union until 1921 when the Norwe-
gian constituency grew large enough to support a separate school.
Less workable was the combination of Finnish and Swedish stu-
dents on a single campus. At best it was an arrangement of convenience.
Long a pawn in Swedish and Russian rivalry over control of the Baltic,
Finland had been a Swedish possession for years, enabling Finns to
absorb Swedish language and culture. In the first decade of the twenti-
eth century between fifteen and twenty percent of the Finns spoke
Swedish but their country at the time had switched hands and was part
of the Russian Empire. In an enrollment of forty-two at Nyhyttan in
1908, four students came from Finland and one from Russia. Continu-
ing this Finnish connection, during the years 1913-1917 the school or-
ganized a special department for students from Finland although some
Finnish students attended the Adventist school in Germany.
"We had to be content with a small Finnish department in the Swed-
ish school," a Finnish worker later recalled, but in 1918, a year after the
country gained its independence, the Finland Mission established its
own school at Hameenlinna, eighty miles north of Helsinki. It was a
beginning, but a tiny one beset with years of struggles for survival
while the constituency grew sufficiently large to support a well devel-
oped institution. 9
The beginnings of Adventist education in Scandinavia was a story
of secondary-level instruction designed to prepare denominational
workers. Primary education barely existed. A school in the Vesteralen
region of Norway, north of the Arctic Circle, operated from 1892 to
110
1918. In 1909 Denmark reported two church schools, one of them at

Jerslev. The priority for education was to produce denominational em-
ployees who would participate in some phase of evangelism.
L. Mark Hamilton measured the success of the Jerslev, Denmark
church school not only by the number of workers who began their edu-
cation there but also by the large proportion of students who remained
members of the church. But the Jerslev case was a rarity in Scandina-
via. Of the dozen union conferences in Europe in 1920 the Scandina-
vian Union was the fourth largest with nearly 7,500 members spread
among more than 170 churches, but they operated only three church
schools with no more than a hundred students. The vision ofthe church
school as a learning center for Adventist children and thus a branch of
evangelism had not caught on.
M issionsseminar Friedensau
A regional school that served a multinational constituency had been
necessary in Scandinavia, but its shortcomings were increasingly ap-
parent and as the Adventist population grew, schools for single national
groups became more feasible. By contrast, in Friedensau, Germany one
institution became an international hub for education in central and
eastern Europe.
Founded as Missionsseminar Friedensau in 1899, the school claimed
its roots in a school that began in Hamburg ten years earlier. It was
there that a small colony of twenty-five Adventists settled in 1889 to
establish the International Tract Society, a branch of the Imprimerie
Polyglotte, the Adventist press in Basel, Switzerland. This new publish-
ing venture was international, specifically serving Russia and produc-
ing Adventist literature in several eastern European languages. Simul-
taneously, the group began a training school to prepare workers to sell
the materials that the Hamburg branch produced.
Located sixty miles upstream from the mouth of the Elbe River,
Hamburg was Germany's leading port city in the north and a strategic
site for a printing establishment, but after a decade of activity, church
leaders realized that it was not a suitable place for a training school for
ministers. In 1899 the German Conference purchased a ninety-three-
acre estate near Magdeburg, about a hundred miles southeast of Ham-
burg, to which they moved the schoo1. 1o
111
The main building at Missionsseminar Friedensau. Germany. near Magdeburg. one 0/

the most productive Seventh-day Adventist training schools/or church workers and mis-
sionaries prior to World War I.
Called Klappermuhle because it included an old water mill and farm

buildings, the estate quickly became known as Friedensau and the
home of a thriving Adventist center. Events moved with surprising
speed. In October 1899 a food factory began operations. The next
month Otto Lupke started classes with seven students and in January a
nursing school opened its doors.
An Adventist community, reminiscent of Battle Creek without the
publishing house, was evolving on the old Klappermuhle estate. Build-
ings were going up, including a sanitarium, begun in March 1900. The
solid structures were unquestionable indications that the German Ad-
ventists intended to remain in Friedensau a long time, but their expec-
tations became undeniable in 1902 when they staked out a cemetery,
prima Jacie evidence that they believed they would be there even after
they died. Obviously, they would sooner or later need a burial place, but
they delayed that eventuality as long as possible by emphasizing a
healthful lifestyle by gathering regularly on the sanitarium grounds for
sessions of gymnastik. The total Friedensau program integrated the no-
tion of well ness with spirituality and education.
112
The emphasis on health was not a passing whim. Otto Lupke de-
clared that from the beginning the aim of Friedensau's founders was to
establish an industrial-missionary school that educated students for
medical missionary work. They were consciously following Ellen
White's advice, but legal restrictions also made health a necessary part
of the program. Because various states in the German Empire, espe-
cially Prussia, did not recognize Seventh-day Adventists as a denomi-
nation the church could own no property. The German Society for the
Promulgation of Health-reform was the legal entity through which the
German Union held Friedensau's land and buildings.
Nursing education received a strong emphasis. The health food en-
terprise, a nursing home for the aged, and the sanitarium were impor-
tant items on the Friedensau agenda. In less than a decade all three of
these institutions became income-generating enterprises whose finan-
cial values far exceeded the amount of original investment. These sta-
tistics provided encouragement to German leaders, but Lupke steadily
maintained that Friedensau's primary aim was education, and that
health-related institutions played a supporting, not the primary role in
preparing ministers and nurses for denominational service.
The school was an economic success but students commonly found
themselves in financial trouble. It was routine for them to complete
their studies with a debt of $\00 to $125, a formidable amount at the
time which they could not expect to pay back from their slim earnings
as denominational employees. To alleviate this situation conference
presidents awarded bonuses to newly hired graduates after each year of
service if their labor was satisfactory. This practice enabled new work-
ers to liquidate their debts in two or three years and also kept the school
from accumulating a backlog of uncollectible accounts.
Life at Friedensau was for the hardy. Until new buildings went up
holes in the roof of the original buildings let in the snow and rain. Stu-
dents ate their meals in a workroom that doubled as the drying room for
the laundry. The forenoons were for studying and classes; in the after-
noons students worked, sometimes until night. The curriculum includ-
ed practical lines of work, including agriculture, homemaking, wood-
working, tailoring, blacksmithing, farm work, and forestry.
Graduates lost little time entering denominational work. By 1903,
only four years after Missionsseminar Friedensau began operations,
113
many alumni had gone to German East Africa as missionaries. At the

end of the first decade of operations 350 students had graduated from
the program, all of whom engaged in some form of missionary work. In
1911 thirty-nine Friedensau graduates were serving as missionaries in
eight countries scattered over five continents including North America.
Nineteen were in German East Africa. German-trained nurses streamed
from the sanitarium to the mission fields where German workers com-
monly labored.
While Adventist education in Scandinavia seemed to move inexora-
bly toward separation into national groups, the international character
of the Friedensau program was deliberate. This characteristic had actu-
ally begun in Hamburg where students from Russia, Switzerland, Hun-
gary, and Scandinavia enrolled. In addition to German-speaking Eu-
rope, Lupke recognized that the school served Slavic Europe as well, an
area that stretched from the Baltic to the Balkans and farther east into
Russia. He foresaw that Friedensau graduates would also serve in Ger-
man and Dutch colonies in Africa, Asia, and Australasia.
In 1907 the school established a Russian department to accommo-
date students from that field. Of the 140 students enrolled in 1908, a
dozen were non-Germans. In 1909 students enrolled not only from
Russia, but from western Europe, Scandinavia, eastern Europe, the
Balkans, and the Middle East.
Besides denying the church the right to own land and buildings, the
law required students to attend public schools until they were fifteen
years old, which effectively proscribed church schools for Adventist
children. This restriction also precluded a teacher-preparation course at
Friedensau. From the outset Adventist schools in Germany limited
themselves to professional training.
The peak of Friedensau's activity was a pre-World War I phenome-
non. It enjoyed economic prosperity, rapidly becoming the Adventist
center for central and eastern Europe and one of the most productive
and well-known educational institutions in the Adventist world for
training denominational workers. It provided a location for German
camp meetings; in connection with the 1911 summer gathering the
General Conference Committee conducted one of its sessions on the
campus. But in 1914 the tide shifted. With the outbreak of World War I
Germany found itself fighting a two-front war. The imperial govern-
114
ment conscripted ministerial students and commandeered part of the

campus to house wounded soldiers. In 1917 the school closed.
Friedensau did not recover easily. In October 1919 regular classes
resumed, but enrollment did not reach prewar levels. Partly as a result
of the war the school lost much of its international character. In the af-
termath of war a vanquished Germany forfeited its colonial holdings
which had furnished a ready-made destination for Friedensau gradu-
ates entering mission service. German East Africa, the most favored
mission field for Missionsseminar alumni, was particularly hard hit.
All missionaries except one in that field were German, and when Brit-
ish forces occupied this colony during the war Adventist workers were
interned, which halted church work. Permission to resume mission ac-
tivities after the war was slow in coming; meanwhile ministers from
South Africa patched the church together until permanent arrange-
ments repaired the damage. 1I
Ironically, church growth also contributed to decline at Friedensau.
German Adventists inherited other mission fields for which they could
educate workers, but the rapidly increasing membership in Germany
resulted in reorganizing the German Union into three unions, each with
its own training school by 1921. Following this organizational shuffle
Friedensau became the institution of the East German Union rather
than the school for all of German-speaking and Slavic Europe.
Adventist Education in France and the Latin Union

One ofthe contradictions of Seventh-day Adventist history occurred
in the very region where 1. N. Andrews planted the first official mission
in Europe. It was in response to a burst of interest in Adventism that he
and his colleagues established a press and administrative offices in Ba-
sel, Switzerland. An impetus for growth and organization radiated
throughout Europe, but actual gains were meager in what came to be
known as the Latin Union, or those countries whose culture and lan-
guage derived from Latin antecedents. In this region of Europe Adven-
tist workers concentrated their first efforts in western Switzerland,
northern Italy, and adjacent portions of France.
The history of Adventist education in Latin Europe revolves around
the struggle to begin, and once started, to maintain institutional perma-
nency. For nearly two decades after Andrews' arrival in 1874 efforts to
115
establish education in this region were non-existent; for more than a

decade beginning in 1892 they were ineffectual. Among the known at-
tempts were schools in several Swiss communities: La Chaux-de-Fonds
in 1892 and 1895, Peseux in 1893, Le Chateau de Perles in 1896, and
Geneva in 1901. 12
The school at Perles was a boarding institution which Swiss Adven-
tists established after several fathers chose imprisonment over paying
fines for not sending their children to school on Saturday. The school
drew both German- and French-speaking students among whom was
eight-year-old Jean Nussbaum. His mother regularly took in laundry to
pay fines because he did not attend school on Sabbath. No one could
foresee it, but in a striking twist of irony young Jean, who had to leave
home to maintain his freedom of conscience, later became a Paris phy-
sician who befriended popes and world leaders and exerted a towering
influence in religious liberty matters in Europe."
B. G. Wilkinson, the newly elected president of the Central Euro-
pean Conference, was the main force behind a school in Geneva, which
opened in 1901 as a ten-week course for students above seventeen years
of age. The following year he became the first head of the Latin Union
and transferred the school to Paris, at the same time broadening the
curriculum to include math and science and lengthening the course to
twenty-four weeks, lasting from October 1902 to April 1903. Three
other teachers assisted him.
Although Wilkinson's Geneva and Paris schools produced seven
church workers, they did not constitute an established institution.
Permanent ministerial training was an elusive thing that appeared
as an outgrowth of nurses' education, which started at the Basel
Sanitarium in 1895. Nine years after this institution began, it relo-
cated at La Ligniere, an estate near Gland, Switzerland, about
twenty miles from Geneva. Here, with an established educational
program in place, albeit in nursing, the school almost immediately
expanded by adding ministerial training. Under the title of the Latin
Union School, classes began in 1904 with Jean Vuilleumier the first
principal.
It was a small beginning. "Our little union school at Gland, Switzer-
land, is filling a long-felt want," L. P. Tieche, president of the Latin
Union, reported to the General Conference five years after the institu-
116
tion began. Although the Latin Union included Italy, Belgium, Portu-
gal, Spain, and parts of North Africa, it was clear from Tieche's de-
scription that the school was intended for French-speaking Europe.
"The future success of the work in France depends in a large measure
upon the proper training of our young people," he said. "I am certain
that there are brighter days before us in the French field."14
But advancement was slow even though Tieche characterized the
training school as "prospering" as it finished its ninth year. Enrollment
reached forty-six and included students from nearly every country in
the Latin Union besides England, Germany, and the United States.
"This school has already furnished the field with a number of young,
efficient workers," Tieche said. Wartime pressures forced the school to
close temporarily in 1914; after reopening two years later, it closed
again in 1918. 15
Compared to Tieche, H. H. Dexter, president of the French-Swiss
Conference, was less sanguine about education in the Latin Union
when he reported to the General Conference session in 1918. Over-
whelmed by the skeletal condition of the Latin Union in the final months
of World War I, he declared that Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal all
needed schools and complained that the Latin Union had no secretary
of education. The union had only one school at Gland, he lamented,
where the medium of instruction was French and all students had to
learn that language to attend.
For two years after the war what remained of the Latin Union School
drifted to Nimes, France for one year and back to Gland for another
year before settling in 1921 at Collonges-sous-Saleve, a village strad-
dling the French border on the outskirts of Geneva. The school itself
was located above the town on a slope leading up to a near perpendicu-
lar rock cliff. Students had a panoramic view of Geneva, the Jura
Mountain range across the valley, and Lake Leman, where the Rhone
River began its serpentine course to the Mediterranean.
Here the school, renamed Seminaire Adventiste du Saleve, would
remain. It was a spectacular location, but it lacked the opportunities for
work that were typical of Adventist campuses. Nevertheless, seventy-
six students enrolled for classes in 1921, an encouraging omen after
thirty years of moving from pillar to post. Dexter's call for schools in
other countries in the Latin Union would not be fulfilled for many years
After more than twenty years 0/ truncated efforts to establish a permanent school in
southern Europe. church leaders moved their small training center/rom Switzerland to
this site at Collonges-sous-Saleve. France. a location with a panoramic view overlook-
ing Geneva.
to come, but the choice spot under the Saleve had finally become a per-
manent home for the school that served the French-speaking constitu-
ency in the Latin Union.
Similar to Scandinavia and Germany, Adventist education in this
field was limited to a worker-training institution. Adventist elementary
church schools were virtually unknown in France and the Latin Union.
Compulsory primary education in France assured a relatively high rate
of literacy, and, according to Tieche, Adventist families had no prob-
lems keeping their children out of school on Sabbath, but this privilege
appeared to be more the result of attitudes of civil authorities at the mo-
ment than a national policy. It was enough, however, to cause church-
sponsored elementary education to appear unnecessary.
The Roots of Newbold College in England

To its advantage England shared the lingua franca of the church,
which made it easy for many prominent Adventist personalities to work
in the United Kingdom. For nearly twenty years well-known leaders
such as J. N. Loughborough, M. C. Wilcox, S. N. Haskell, W. A. Spicer,
and E. J. Waggoner, were associated with the Adventist church in Eng-
118
land. Membership languished despite this distinguished leadership. In

1897 when W. W. Prescott, only three years out of the presidency of
Battle Creek College, added his name to the list of denominationallu-
minaries as superintendent of the Adventist church in England, the
number of Adventists had crawled up to 590 since 1878. Less than a
year after his arrival Prescott organized the British Conference and
became its first president.
This small, slow-growing Adventist community hardly justified a
prediction for a bright future. Operating funds were minuscule. The
only institution was a small publishing house. Circumstances were less
than encouraging for a school, but education was in Prescott's blood,
and shortly he inaugurated an evening school in London and later, an-
other school in Surrey.16
No one envisioned either of these schools as the start of an enduring
institution. Each lasted only a few months and appeared to have been
something akin to a field school of evangelism, a school following pub-
lic meetings for the purpose of training workers for additional evange-
lism. Prescott explored possibilities for a permanent school, raised
funds for it, and led the British Conference to vote an official approval
for an institution to prepare missionaries, but he returned to the United
States in 1901 before fulfilling his goa\.
It was left to H. R. Salisbury, teacher of Hebrew and church history
at Battle Creek College, to found the school that eventually became
Newbold College. Under his direction classes began at Duncombe Hall,
North London, in January 1902, following some months of planning.
The institution may have been permanent, but its location was not.
During the next nine years it moved four times: in 1903 to Holloway
Hall, also in North London; in 1905 to Manor Gardens, Holloway; in
1907 to Stanborough Park in Watford; and finally in 1910 to new fa-
cilities on the Watford estate. In the midst of this shuffle it acquired the
name of Stanborough Park Missionary College.
All of these locations were in the Greater London area of South
England. As long as the school remained in London itself before mov-
ing to Watford it bore little resemblance to the traditional ideal of Ad-
ventist schools. It was situated in one of the largest cities in the world
where a student labor program revolving around agriculture was not
even a consideration. In fact, the school had no industries at all nor any
119
student housing. Students lived wherever they could find a room. In ef-
fect, this early edition of England's training school was a day school.
However, there were mitigating factors. For the most part students
were mature rather than youngsters; some were married and they seized
the opportunity to become colporteurs. Finding London to be a lucra-
tive market for denominational literature, many earned enough to pay
their entire expenses by spending Sunday on the streets selling papers.
This arrangement bode well for the school because cash flowed into
institutional coffers while the school did not have the financial burden
of maintaining a cafeteria and hostels.
With the move to Stanborough Park in Watford the school developed
more of a traditional Adventist identity, but it ended the financial con-
venience of a day school in the city. At Stanborough Park the school
provided housing, but students faced financial problems. Some contin-
ued in literature sales, but transportation back and forth to London on
Sunday absorbed so much of their earnings that colporteuring ceased
to be a profitable venture. Others found work in the press and a new
food factory, but student income lagged and many ended the academic
year in debt.
For Principal H. C. Lacey, who took charge of the school when it
moved to Stanborough Park, arranging enough work for students to
pay for their education was his most serious problem. No matter the
problems, prospective students were clamoring to enroll; the school
could accept only about half of those who applied. Because the essen-
tial outlook was positive, church leaders laid plans for a set of buildings
that would transform the school into a worker-training institution for
the British Isles.
Considering its tentative beginnings and its uncertain development,
Stanborough Park Missionary College enjoyed surprising success.
Similar to Friedensau, it developed an international reputation and a
solid commitment among its students to missionary service. Lacey
characterized the institution as a combination of an intermediate school
and a college that offered extensive language study because graduates
would be working in many non-English-speaking fields. Between 1905
and 1909 attendance averaged about seventy-five, mainly from the Brit-
ish Isles but also from continental Europe, Africa, and North America.
By 1909 fifteen workers had gone from the school to French-speaking
120
Canada, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Argentina, Egypt, India, and

British East Africa. Thirty of the workers in the United Kingdom were
former students.
Without question Stanborough Park Missionary College was not
cast in the mold of a traditional Adventist training school. Its proximity
to a large city was contrary to the generally accepted Adventist ideal of
establishing schools in rural settings; further, it had no industries or an
agricultural program. Nevertheless, it benefitted from circumstances
that few other training schools enjoyed, the proximity of nearby Lon-
don churches in which advanced ministerial students could gain in-
valuable experience as acting pastors. A half dozen congregations were
turned over to the school as ministerial training labs. The story of the
English training school during its early years demonstrates that a suc-
cessful worker-preparation program could function in a suburban envi-
ronment when one of its leading purposes was to reach the masses of
the city. In unique ways Stanborough Park experienced an awareness of
Adventist responsibilities to urban populations.
Church activity picked up in England after the formation of the first
conference in 1898. Four years later the British Union organized; by
1920 membership reached nearly 3,500. With the advent of a small
sanitarium in Stanborough Park in 1912, nursing education became an
another option for students. "Already there is an increased demand for
nurses training," W. 1. Fitzgerald of the British Union said in 1913.17
A growing problem for students at Stanborough was official recog-
nition of their education. The church readily accepted the credentials of
the school's graduates who became denominational workers, but an in-
creasing tendency of students to attend the Adventist school for a pre-
university education made official recognition of Stanborough Park's
program desirable. To accommodate these students the school added
courses in 1915 to prepare them for the London University Matricula-
tion and Intermediate Examinations in Arts and Sciences.
Like all Adventist schools in Europe, Stanborough Park suffered the
effect of World War I. Military conscription cut deeply into potential
enrollment and the number of students stagnated at about the same
level it had reached when the school moved to Watford in 1907. As the
end of the war neared, the burden of preparing workers for mission
service also weighed heavily on the school. Vast portions of Africa,
121
including German East Africa, had fallen under the responsibility of

the British Union, raising the importance of Stanborough Park Mis-
sionary College as a center for workers for much of the British world.
In 1919 the British Union added 163 acres to the school's campus
and the program enlarged to include agriculture and other small indus-
tries. By 1920 enrollment in the secondary and limited post-secondary
departments mushroomed to more than 200. Despite the slow begin-
ning of Adventist education in the British Isles, at the beginning of the
post-World War I era Stanborough Park emerged as the strongest of all
Adventist schools in Europe.
Impact of Early Adventist Education in Europe

Although the original impetus and undergirding philosophy for Ad-
ventist schools emanated from North America, the first generation of
Adventist schools in Europe performed an important function in the
developing history of Seventh-day Adventist missions. Bridging the
Atlantic with Adventist education was a mission movement in itself
The schools in Scandinavia originated as institutions primarily to serve
the fields in which they were located. By contrast, institutions in Ger-
many and England developed an international influence as educational
centers for missionaries as well as workers for local service. After its
re-founding at Collonges in 1921, Seminaire Adventiste du Saleve as-
sumed a similar role, preparing workers for French-speaking popula-
tions in Europe, Africa, and the Americas.
Typically, the colonial configuration of the world fields beyond
Europe helped to determine which schools would become primary
sources of missionaries. These were not strict jurisdictional lines, for
the dictum "from anywhere to everywhere" was the modus operandi
that the Adventist missionary movement followed. However idealis-
tic that motto sounded, it was a matter of common sense to recruit
missionaries whose native language and citizenship would facilitate
travel, residence, and missionary activity in a given colonial region.
The significance of these trends lies in the fact that participating in
and even managing Seventh-day Adventist missionary activities was a
responsibility that many shared. For decades Adventist speakers and
writers referred to the "homeland," which more often than not meant
North America, but the record shows that there was more than one
122
homeland. Missionaries of European origin regarded their native coun-

tries as the homeland as well, and in those few instances when it oc-
curred, they regarded themselves as missionaries even when they went
to North America. By becoming international centers Adventist schools
in Europe fostered a tradition of global exchange. From their begin-
nings they contributed much to the concept of internationalism upon
which the church thrived.
'The best source for summarized data about leading personalities in Adventist history is
the Seventh-day Adventist Encyclopedia.
2VandeVere, Wisdom Seekers, pp. 31, 32.
lArthur White, Ellen White, v. 4, p. 13.
4L. Mark Hamilton, "A Shrine at Jerslev," Journal of True Education (June 1953), pp. 28,
29.
'Brown, Chronology, pp. 10, II; Delafield, White in Europe, pp. 193, 194; C. Gilund,
"East Nordic Beginnings," Journal of True Education (June 1953), p. 30.
6See accounts about Scandinavia in General Conference Bulletin, 1909, no. I, p. 6; ibid.,
no. 8, pp. 119, 120; ibid., no. 9, p. 126; The Advent Survey, Sept. 1932, pp. 5, 8; C. Gilund,
ibid.; Brown, Chronology, pp. 12-14,94, 180; Statistical Reportfor 1920.
7The Advent Sur very, Sept. 1932; p. 8.
8General Conference Bulletin, 1909, no. 8, p. 119.
9The Advent Survey, Sept. 1932, p. 5.
'OJohannes Hartlapp, ed. Chronik Friedensau. (Friedensau: Theologishe Hochschule,
1999) is the best source of information about the German school. See also Wilhelm Muller,
"Friedensau-Citadel of Faith," Journal of True Education (June 1953), pp. 31-33; General
Conference Bulletin, 1909, no. 2, pp. 26, 27; ibid., no. 6, p. 84.
"/bid., 1918, no. 7, p. 101.
11Th is description of the schools in French-speaking Europe depends on Robert Gerber
and J. C. Guenin, Journal of True Education (June 1953), pp. 18, 19; General Conference
Bulletin. 1909, no. I I , p. 165; ibid., 1913, no. 6, p. 98; ibid., 1918, no. 9, p. 132; Brown, Chro-
nology, p. 159.
11Gertrude Loewen. Crusader for Freedom. (Nashville: Southern Publishing Associa-
tion, 1969), pp. 25-27.
'4General Conference Bulletin, 1909, no. II, p. 165.
"/bid., 1913, no. 6, p. 98.
'6Adventist education in England is summarized from Valentine. Shaping of Adventism,
pp. 97-108; A. J. Woodfield, "Rise and Progress of Educational Work in England," Journal of
True Education (June 1953), pp. 26, 27; General Conference Bulletin, 1909, no. 3, p. 30; ibid.,
no. 6, pp. 83, 83; ibid., no. 7, pp. 95,96; ibid., 1913, no. 6, p. 97; ibid., 1918, no. 7, p. 100;
Brown, Chronology, p. 136; Statistical Report, 1920.
I7General Conference Bulletin, 1913, no. 6, p. 97.
6
CIRCLING
THE WORLD
Beginning in the 1890s Adventists established a galaxy of train-

ing schools in South Africa, Australia, and South America. The
long presence of England, Spain, and Portugal in these lands had
created substantial extensions of European culture so that schools
bore some identifying marks of their European counterparts. Events
in denominational education were dramatic. Comparisons are not
easy, but in some respects founders of Adventist schools discovered
it to be easier going in the English colonies for a variety of reasons.
Literacy rates were higher, the original cultural setting of Advent-
ism was more similar to English society than to Latin, and eco-
nomic development was more advanced.
As they evolved, Adventist schools in the various Anglo regions
resembled each other because of their common British context. Institu-
tions in Latin America were also similar to each other because Latin
traditions prevailed. Each of these two broad regions formed large
blocks in which Adventist workers could establish similar practices,
develop lines of exchange and communication, and cultivate mutual
support.
124
CIRCLING THE WORLD
South Africa's First Adventist School

It was in South Africa that Adventists founded the denomination's
first permanent worker-training school outside the United States, Cla-
remont Union College, the forerunner of Helderberg College. Adventist
education in this English colony owed its start to Peter Wessels, scion
of Dutch settlers in the Orange Free State, who gave abundantly from
the fortune that had fallen into his hands from the sale of family land
containing diamond mines. Young Wessels began independently to ob-
serve the seventh-day Sabbath in 1885; soon thereafter he made contact
with Adventists and became a member. With others of his family he
visited Battle Creek, attended the college, and returned home deter-
mined to establish a cluster of like institutions in South Africa.'
In Claremont, a suburb about a dozen miles from Cape Town, a
three-story structure went up, large enough to accommodate 120 stu-
dents. Although Wessels was Dutch the school was in English territory
and the plan was to serve both language groups with primary and sec-
ondary education and a one-year missionary course. About sixty-five
enrolled when school opened in February 1893.
Although the enrollment was only slightly more than half of what
the facilities could accommodate school leaders maintained a rosy out-
look because of Wessels' largesse which appeared to be limitless. One
of the early students recalled that at the outset the school's benefactors
donated enough money so students did not have to pay fees. This gen-
erosity was both a blessing and a curse. The school depended on this
money instead of establishing a work program, but when the flow of
funds slowed, the school began a financial reversal. Many ofthe locals
viewed physical labor with a certain disdain, which militated against
the traditional Adventist practice of integrating labor and academic ac-
tivities. 2
Another negative issue centered on the problem of reconciling the vo-
cational character of Adventist education with the academic purpose
common to all British land, that of preparing students for external exami-
nations which were tests for either recognition of secondary education or
matriculation in a university. This question was a clash between the pur-
poses of Adventist education and the European system of standardized
testing. It lay far beyond Wessels' deep pocket, and was exacerbated by
the fact that about half of the original enrollment was non-Adventist.
125
Main~v because of the largesse of Peter Wessels. Seventh-day Adventists in South Africa
built Claremont Union College. the first college outside North America. It began classes
in /893.
Years would pass before Adventist educators discovered how to
make them compatible; meanwhile, some South African parents chose
to send their children to traditional schools because they desired an
education geared to these external examinations. The net effect was a
consistently lower attendance at Claremont than the school's founders
had hoped.
Yet the school made an impact. Its program included some student
labor, although on a small scale, and a missionary-preparation course.
Students who enrolled in this program were often unconcerned about
external examinations because their careers with the church did not
require an officially recognized academic credential. Even with these
denominational characteristics Claremont's program at first was pri-
marily nonsectarian.
These mixed conditions did not prevent church leadership in South
Africa from regarding the school as a training institution, but it was a
role that grew with time. After Claremont's twenty-fifth year of opera-
tion Education Secretary Frederick Griggs referred to the institution as
a worker-training school. Between 1909 and 1913 the South African
126
CIRCLING THE WORLD
Union offered a denominational position to every graduate, most of

whom accepted. "There has been an increasing spiritual awakening in
the educational department of our work," stated the South African
Union report to the General Conference. 3
The general program was a matter for the school to decide, but be-
yond its control were severe economic problems that descended on
South Africa in the wake of the Anglo-Boer War. This conflict, fought
out between 1899 and 1902, climaxed nearly a century of friction be-
tween British authority in the Cape Colony and the Boer (Dutch) re-
publics of Transvaal and Orange Free State. The aftermath of war pro-
duced a deep economic depression that nearly destroyed Claremont
Union College. Many students stayed away because the school had no
genuine industry in which they could earn money to pay their fees,
which reduced institutional revenue.
Claremont's indebtedness reached $10,000, a daunting sum for
such a small school whose meager treasury could barely stay abreast
oftaxes and interest. Only the flinty action of the South African Union
leaders averted disaster. In 1911 church workers pledged to payoff
the debt, thus shifting the burden away from the school to sacrificing
individuals. Within two years they had liquidated more than 40 per-
cent of the debt. 4
Part of the strategy for financial revival called for a brush manufac-
turing industry operated by student labor, a plan that, if successful,
would have helped to resolve the absence of industrial education and at
the same time provide additional revenue for the school. As good as the
idea was, it was too little and too late.
Plans for financial recovery could not prevent yet another problem,
the threat of urbanization creeping ever closer to the campus from Cape
Town. Convinced that city environment spelled anathema to their
schools, South African Adventists decided it was time to move, an ac-
tion that Griggs announced to the 1918 General Conference.
Demolition workers tore down the twenty-five-year-old buildings
that were a monument to Wessels' generosity. The school sold some of
the remains, but as many construction materials as possible went to the
new location, a former Zulu mission at Spion Kop, near Ladysmith
in Natal, almost a thousand miles away. The reborn institution, South
African Training School, opened in 1919, "established on a farm, after
God's own plan," a General Conference Department of Education re-

port stated in 1922 with an obvious tone of relief. Enrollment improved,
but hovered around 100. 5 Only time would tell whether this move was
truly advantageous.
Avondale College at Cooranbong, Australia

In some respects no school in the Adventist world attracted more
attention than Avondale in Australia, the institution which its historian,
Milton Hook, calls the "experiment on the Dora."6 In October 1888
Australasian Adventists voted to establish a school in Melbourne, but
two and a half years later when Stephen Haskell reported his world tour
to the General Conference session the plan had not yet materialized.
The request from Australia for a school still lay before the delegates in
Battle Creek. Five days after Haskell spoke they voted to open "as soon
as practicable, an English Bible school" in Australia which would be
the first phase of a permanent school for students of all ages.?
In December 1891, only months after the General Conference ac-
tion, Ellen White and her son, Willie, steamed into Melbourne, Austra-
lia on a mission that her grandson-biographer describes as specifically
intended to help establish the new school, but historian Emmett K.
VandeVere suspects that other motivations were also at work. Follow-
ing the 1888 General Conference session the church divided into two
theological camps, one that actively promoted the teachings of righ-
teousness by faith and the other that looked askance at this new empha-
sis as though it were heresy. Ellen White was in the first group. To
diffuse the volatile attitudes between the two factions, General Confer-
ence President O. A. Olsen scattered the major proponents of both
groups. Ellen White went to Australia; E. 1. Waggoner took a position
in Great Britain; Prescott went on a world tour; and Uriah Smith, who
had stood firmly on what G. I. Butler called the old pillars of the faith,
traveled to the Middle East. 8
It was true that Ellen White demurred when the General Conference
Committee requested her to go to the island continent in the South Pa-
cific, but in the end she went in recognition of the authority of the Gen-
eral Conference. Once in Australia she took advantage of every opportu-
nity to design a school that fulfilled her expectations of "Proper
Education." Her attempts to reform Adventist education in the United
128
CiRCLING THE WORLD
States had produced much less than ideal results, she believed, and she
was bent on developing the Australian school into a showcase. Six years
later, in 1897, with the institution already in operation, she wrote that "no
breezes from Battle Creek are to be wafted in. I see I must watch before
and behind and on every side to permit nothing to find entrance that has
been presented before me as injuring our schools in America."9
The events from 1891 to 1897 demonstrate how meticulously she
watched "before and behind." Two weeks after her arrival in Melbourne
delegates to a session of the Australian Conference voted to proceed
with the school. Eight months later on August 24, 1892, a completely
American faculty began classes in rented quarters in Melbourne. Dur-
ing the two years this Bible school functioned, more than a hundred
students, including some from New Zealand, attended to train as col-
porteurs and Bible workers. The courses were short.
Less than a year and a half after the school in Melbourne opened, a
search for a rural location began. The committee finally settled on the
1,500-acre Brettville estate near Cooranbong. The land bordered Dora
Creek, not far from the Australian east coast about 750 miles north of
Melbourne in New South Wales. The price was attractive but the colo-
nial Department of Agriculture reported that the land was "sour."
Viewpoints wavered but Ellen White insisted that the soil would pro-
duce, and by the end of 1894 the union committee, fatigued by both
searching and debate, decided to follow her advice and purchased the
1,500 acres.
Subduing the land was the special project of the Industrial Depart-
ment, the first organized unit of the school, which Milton Hook de-
scribes as "a euphemism for twenty to twenty-five valiant young men
engaged for the most part in land-clearing."10 Teachers and students
lived in Healey's Hotel in Cooranbong, which the Australasian Union
rented. Ellen White and others lived in tents on the property. A new
sawmill on Dora Creek cut logs into lumber and in August 1895 the
first fruit trees went into the ground.
The settlers were literally hacking the school out of the woods and
appeared to be winning the battle against the soil, but they faced other
problems. A legal fight erupted over the title to the land and the court
ordered the school to pay nearly $2,000. Since 1892 Australia had been
suffering a debilitating economic depression and money was hard to
5-IPFTW.
129
come by. Neither the school nor the Australasian Union had the funds
to pay the judgment. Eventually a different law firm extricated the
school from this setback, but Avondale's financial woes were not over.
Money was still scarce. Two members of the South African Wessels
family provided $7,500, two-thirds of which was a loan; the General
Conference allocated $3,000; and Ellen White gave $1,000. The build-
ing plan was under way.
W. C. Sisley, an Adventist builder who had served as a consultant to
denominational projects in England, Denmark, Germany, and South
Africa, arrived to draft construction plans. Early on, the union commit-
tee decided to call the school Avondale College, a name that gave way
to Avondale School for Christian Workers even before the institution
formally opened. When classes actually began in April 1897 only ten
students registered, but within six weeks fifty enrolled. The staff num-
bered seven, including C. B. Hughes as principal and the veteran Ste-
phen Haskell as the leading Bible teacher.
The school grew rapidly. In 1898 enrollment reached seventy; by
1900 it topped a hundred. By that year two dormitories, a central
building for classes, and "The Chapel" comprised the campus. A
community church served the growing colony of Adventists. Also on
the grounds was "Sunnyside," a home built for Ellen White. When
enrollment climbed to 200 in 1905, students and faculty joined to
erect another building to house the additional students and the cafete-
ria. Before 1910 the Australasian Union and the school added the
Avondale Health Retreat, a health food factory, and a printing press
to the Adventist center. In 1913 the elementary school moved into its
own building.
There were no loafers at this 1,500-acre experiment on the Dora.
During the school's initial phases all teachers and students put on their
work clothes for a three-hour, afternoon work shift in the kitchen or
laundry and shops, or in agricultural assignments. Besides the fruit
orchards the school operated a small dairy and poultry farm and an
apiary. In late 1898 and again in April 1899. government dignitaries
visited the campus. Meanwhile, in February 1899 a fruit expert, writ-
ing in The Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales, commended the
success of the school's orchards. For the founders of the institution it
was a pleasant irony that only four years had passed since the colonial
130
CIRCLING THE WORLD
Students at Avondale Schoolfor Christian Workers, some time before 1908. This school
became the best source 0.( missionaries to the South Pacific islands.
Department of Agriculture had warned that the land was unsuitable for
farming.
Arthur White records that half of the first students were under six-
teen years of age. Besides Bible, the original curriculum included do-
mestic science, which translated mainly into cooking, baking, and food
canning, and classes in history, English, speech, penmanship, math,
physiology, geography, and music. To these classes faculty later added
nature study, bookkeeping, Latin, Greek, science and "pedagogics."
After the dedication of the church in 1897 Ellen White was ebul-
lient, declaring that the Avondale School for Christian Workers was the
best "in every respect" among denominational schools." Adventists
generally acknowledged that more than any other educational center,
the Australian school fulfilled the ideas she spelled out in her 1872
statement and later writings.
Avondale became a symbol of Adventist education. It was there that
Ellen White wrote prolifically about the philosophy of education, much
of it under the title, Education, a book published in 1903. It was to the
131
Australian campus that W. W. Prescott journeyed in 1895 after editing

Christian Education, a small volume about education assembled from
Ellen White's writings. In 1897, after his frequent and lengthy conver-
sations with her during the previous two years, he compiled a second
collection, Special Testimonies on Education.
By 1900 most of the original founders of Avondale School for Chris-
tian Workers were gone, leaving the school in other hands. Fourteen
years after its founding, the institution became Australasian Mission-
ary College, reflecting the responsibility that the school held in prepar-
ing workers for the South Pacific islands. The original resolution at the
1891 General Conference approving a school for this field contemplated
an institution in which students from Polynesia would enroll. During
the early years enrollees came from Tasmania and New Zealand, but it
was the sense of mission to the smaller islands of the South Pacific
rather than actually serving them as a constituency institution that
gripped the Australian school.
The name change was well deserved. "Can you imagine a Seventh-
day Adventist mission school or mission hospital in the Pacific Islands
without the influence of Avondale College?" wrote Pele T. Alu years
later. '2 An example of the school's commitment to missions was Alu's
home, Tonga, a set of islands lying 2,500 miles east of the school, where
Avondale graduates began arriving in 1904. The first was Ella Boyd, a
teacher. The E. E. Thorpes and the G. G. Stewarts followed in 1912, the
H. L. Tolhursts in 1915, and the B. E. Hadfields in 1919.
All exemplified the spirit of mission that Avondale imbued its stu-
dents, not only for Tonga, but for the rest of the South Pacific as well.
In the Solomon Islands workers from Australia helped G. F. Jones es-
tablish schools, one of which produced Kata Ragoso, a son of a chief
who became one of the most well known Adventist national leaders
among the islands before World War II. For some, the commitment of
mission demanded supreme sacrifice. Pearl Tolhurst, wife ofH. L. Tol-
hurst, was the first former Avondale student to die in mission service, a
victim of the 1918 world epidemic of in flu en zaP
Within a decade after Avondale officially opened, two other worker-
training schools for Caucasian students sprouted up in Australasia.
About fifteen miles east of Perth, the most populous center in the south-
ern corner of Western Australia, Darling Range School began in 1907
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CiRCLING THE WORLD
as a secondary school. The founder, H. R. Martin, began with a dona-

tion of one pound in Australian currency with which he bought an axe,
a grindstone, and a digging fork, and started to hew out the school on
land given by Charles E. Ashcroft, an early Australian convert to Ad-
ventism. With his tools Martin built what would become West Austral-
asia Missionary College, and later, Carmel College.
About 3,500 miles to the east, midway in North Island, New Zea-
land, Pukekura Training School admitted its first students in 1908. Four
years later it moved 200 miles south and successively became Oroua
Missionary School, New Zealand Missionary School, and Longburn
College. Both Darling Range and Oroua remained secondary-level in-
stitutions. 14
In 1918 Frederick Griggs referred to the schools in Western Austra-
lia and New Zealand as "subordinate" institutions, while Australasian
Missionary College, the "principal" training school, had received rec-
ognition by the government as a secondary school. Plans were on foot
to introduce "full college work" at Cooranbong, but that step would not
come for many years. In 1920 Australasian Missionary College en-
rolled more than 220 students, the overwhelming majority in the ele-
mentary grades. Of its thirty-five graduates that year thirty-one entered
denominational employment. Membership in Australasia slightly ex-
ceeded 8,000, an increase of more than 7,000 since the first Bible school
began in Melbourne. Few could doubt that education had played a key
role in this growth. IS
River Plate College

Adventist education in South America began in Argentina, the larg-
est of the countries in the southern half of the continent known as the
cone. During the latter half of the nineteenth century and into the twen-
tieth millions of European immigrants settled in this region. Spaniards
and Italians were the most numerous, but there were also substantial
enclaves of German farmers and English entrepreneurs. 16
Since his arrival in Argentina in 1894, Frank Westphal, the mis-
sion director, concentrated first on the English and German popula-
tion. An increasingly common topic of conversation among his fellow
workers was the need of a school to train workers. Their talk assumed
a more urgent tone in September 1898 after Luis Ernst, a Spanish- and
133
German-speaking Uruguayan showed up, unannounced, at an annual

gathering of church members in the province of Entre Rios, Argentina,
declaring he had arrived to attend school. I7
While young Ernst was surprised to find no school, Westphal and
his colaborers were somewhat chagrined but interpreted his arrival
as a signal that they should delay the school no longer. Although non-
Adventists and even some church members scoffed at the idea of a
school in the middle of wheat lands of Entre Rios, farmers donated
land, money and time. Some came as far as 300 miles to work on the
project, located in the rural community of Diamante. During the next
year and a half economic depression and locusts plagued the 250-
member Russo-German constituency, but they built their school any-
way. In April 1900 classes began.
Preceding this school Adventist workers had made a few halting at-
tempts at Adventist education in Argentina. Beginning in 1893 there
had been small schools in Buenos Aires; another in Crespo, near Dia-
mante; and two colporteur-training courses in the neighboring Santa Fe
Province, the first in Chaco in the north and the second in Las Tunas,
less than a hundred miles from Diamante. This last venture, begun in
1898 by N. Z. Town, is the date taken for the actual founding of the
Argentine training school, called Colegio Camarero after it began op-
erations at its new location. Town's courses formed the nucleus of the
curriculum which was an ungraded assortment of classes intended to
prepare literature salesmen. Not until Walton C. John arrived in 1908
did the school have an experienced educator as principal. Organiza-
tionally, 1908 was a turning point for Colegio Camarero.
The names of many of the early students-Santiago Mangold, George
Block, Ignacio and Pedro Kalbermatter, and Luis Ernst-were not only
evidence of the bi-cultural society which the school served but they
were "elderly," as Professor John described them. With the admission
of children, curricular change was necessary, which resulted in orga-
nizing the school into an academy, a term that North Americans under-
stood as a secondary school. The institutional name changed to Colegio
Adventista del Plata, often shortened to CAP or its Anglicized form,
River Plate College.
The early curricular experience at CAP illustrated an issue common
to many Adventist schools in their initial phases. Church leaders, fac-
134
CIRCLING THE WORLD
Colegio Adventista del Plata in Entre Rios Province. Argentina. soon after its founding.
Often called CAP. it was the first Adventist training school in South America.
ing a dearth of workers, often encouraged short courses without the

niceties of academic credit and degrees. The purpose of instruction
was to equip men and women for immediate employment: selling lit-
erature, occupying practical positions and in some cases, even pastor-
ing churches.
Parents tended to see Adventist schools differently, more as replace-
ments of state schools where their children could receive an education
in Christian surroundings. As an alternative to public education, in
their view Adventist schools were to offer a curriculum of equivalent
substantive quality.
Fulfilling both expectations produced varying degrees of tension.
One set of critics objected to the secular academic baggage that slowed
the "cause" while a second band of critics complained that without le-
gitimate academic integrity Adventist schools would become a laugh-
ingstock and would shortchange students. In part, this issue character-
ized the debates about the program at Battle Creek College and also
contributed to the curricular struggles in the Movement of 1897 with its
ensuing experiments in denominational textbooks.
This question was especially pronounced in Argentina. Speaking to
the 1909 General Conference, 1. W. Westphal, director of Adventist
missions in South America, confessed that besides unsatisfactory con-
ditions in the physical plant, the school had suffered from inadequate
teaching since its beginning. After Professor John's arrival "the work
135
of the school has been more thoroughly organized, systematized, and

graded," Westphal said. 18
Before John's arrival the school was notoriously deficient in equip-
ment. Westphal wanted to "incorporate" with the government, mean-
ing receiving official recognition, the equivalent of accreditation, but
he confided to General Conference Secretary W. A. Spicer in 1908 his
doubts that the government inspector would approve a school without
such rudimentary items as maps, charts, or a library.19 While John up-
graded the school he also reshaped the school to conform to Argentine
national standards, which he said, were similar to those in the United
States. A six-grade elementary curriculum followed by a four-year mis-
sionary course became the academic design of the school.
There was good reason for the similarity in education between
Argentina and the United States. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento,
Argentine president from 1868 to 1874, had once been a teacher. He
was also an admirer of Horace Mann and an ardent believer in his
educational reforms in Massachusetts. During his administration he
employed more than sixty North American primary teachers to start
elementary schools in Argentina. By the end of his presidency the
number of Argentine elementary schools exceeded 1,600 and enroll-
ment figures dwarfed comparative statistics from all other Latin
American countries. Sarmiento regarded education as his greatest
gift to his country.20
By the time Adventist schools appeared, Argentina had developed
its own tradition of education which established a relatively high stan-
dard of effectiveness. But the Argentine system was imperfect and
many prospective students were left out. 1. W. Westphal noted in 1913
that most of the students who enrolled at CAP came without any educa-
tion and that two or three years of instruction were not enough to pre-
pare them for productive service to the church.
After five years of the new academic regimen that Walton C. John
inaugurated, Colegio Adventista del Plata had produced only one can-
didate for the ministry, but it was turning out canvassers, teachers and
nurses. Prospective nursing students simply transferred to the other
side of the campus to River Plate Sanitarium for their professional
training. The minimum entry level for nursing students was an eight-
grade education.
136
CIRCLING THE WORLD
Continuing the colporteur-oriented program that N. Z. Town estab-

lished in Las Tunas in 1898, about ten to fourteen booksellers went out
from the school each summer, some grossing as much as $400 and
earning scholarships to pay for their education. By 1913 those early
classes begun by Town in 1898 had evolved into extra-curricular insti-
tutes during which Max Trummer, the German-born head of literature
sales and a graduate from the German program at Union College,
drilled both men and women in the art of salesmanship. From the earli-
est years literature production played a major role in South American
Adventism. Westphal attributed much of the success of this program to
students.
According to John, Adventist students were also making a name
for themselves in professional teaching. After completing their stud-
ies at the Adventist school, some enrolled at the state normal school
to prepare for teaching careers. One of them, Camilo Gil, found em-
ployment back at River Plate College as the Spanish teacher, a posi-
tion with more than ordinary importance as the school sought to edu-
cate German-speaking students in Spanish literacy. By 1913 Argentine
Adventists could also report the beginning phases of a church school
system, only three schools, but each with an enrollment between thir-
ty and forty.21
H. U. Stevens, a former teacher from Union College with a mas-
ter's degree from the University of Chicago, became director of CAP
in 1912, followed by 1. S. Marshall in 1919. As the leading Adventist
educational center in South America, Colegio Adventista del Plata
had grown from its original forty acres to 160 and recorded an enroll-
ment of 170 by 1920. Stevens and Marshall honed the academic offer-
ings into four programs: teaching, secretarial, ministerial and Bible
workY
This growth had not taken place without struggles. Hordes of lo-
custs sometimes wreaked havoc on crops that were to furnish both food
and income for the school. During the early years financial reversals in
the national economy nearly brought the program to a standstill. 1. W.
Westphal, who kept a searching eye on financial matters, admitted that
indebtedness sometimes reduced the net worth of the institution below
its investment value. Meanwhile, Chilean Adventists, who were ad-
ministratively part of the same mission field as Argentina, were also
working against formidable odds to establish a school in their territory,

an effort that would dilute whatever support the central office could
give to the Argentine campus.
The Chilean Training School

The Chilean project began when a convert from the German com-
munity donated land in Pua, near Concepcion in southern Chile, on
which Adventists worked intermittently from 1902 to 1906 to found a
school. Frank Westphal, who spent the years 1900-1904 in the United
States, returned to South America in 1904 to find the Chilean school in
stalemate. Now assigned to Chile and administratively responsible to
his younger brother, he bent all of his efforts to make the new school
work.23
Similar to Argentina, the motivation for the Chilean venture was
to train colporteurs. In 1906 elementary classes began with six stu-
dents. Long conversations between the Westphal brothers produced
as much financial support as the South American treasury could sup-
ply, but advancement for the Chilean school was slow. During its
early years it was as much a mission school as a training institution.
Children made up the majority of the enrollment, many coming from
English and German homes. Some students were Indians from nearby
reservations. Teachers conducted their classes in English, German,
and Spanish.
Argentina and Chile split a Thirteenth Sabbath overflow offering in
1912 with one-third devoted to the financially starved school in Pua. In
the same year faculty added a three-year secondary curriculum and a
three-year colporteur course. By 1913 enrollment reached fifty and the
principal reported that the school was successfully turning out colpor-
teurs. After his tour of South America in 1916, W. W. Prescott described
the Spartan campus as generously as honest words would allow, but he
observed that "this school ought to have better facilities, and we hope
that they can be provided in the near future."24 In 1918 the school be-
came Chilean Adventist College, sometimes called the Pua Training
School; two years later its enrollment reached fifty-six, only five of
whom were secondary students.
These modest successes enabled the school to continue but it bal-
anced uncertainly between success and bare survival. Its poor show-
138
CIRCLING THE WORLD
ings in enrollment and finances were not so bad as to cause its closure,
but church leaders in the parent organization, the Austral Union, with-
held their full confidence. General Conference Education Secretary W.
E. Howell visited the campus in 1920, only to offer a pessimistic view
of the school's future at Pua. Within months plans were on foot to move
the campus northward to an improved location near Chillan where a
warmer climate, a nearer constituency, and better land spoke of a more
promising future. 25
In some respects the Argentine and Chilean schools paralleled each
other. Both schools sprang from German origins and even though the
trend toward an Hispanic atmosphere was inevitable, faculty at both
schools were obliged to hasten the process. On a visit to South America
in 1910 L. R. Conradi, General Conference vice president in charge of
Europe, noted that Principal John at River Plate College was "compe-
tent to give Spanish instruction," and that the eighty students were
chiefly German and Spanish.26 By 1920 both the Chilean and Argentine
schools had shed much of their original German character to become
predominantly Hispanic.
But the existence of two training schools in a single union confer-
ence raised administrative questions. Conventional wisdom concluded
that the sister republics of Chile and Argentina needed only one institu-
tion. Church leaders in South America sometimes speculated that the
Chilean school should merge with the Argentine campus. But it was the
lack of denominational workers in Chile, not Argentina, that originally
convinced 1. W. Westphal that that country needed a school, and the
best way to remedy the deficiency was to follow the common Adventist
practice of training workers in schools in their territory if at all possi-
ble. Even though Chile and Argentina shared a common border, a com-
mon official language, and a cultural heritage, nearly a thousand miles
separated the constituencies that supported the schools. It was unreal-
istic to suppose that Chileans would, in large numbers, cross the An-
dean cordillera and hundreds of miles of rolling plains to attend the
Argentine school.
A small constituency that was unable to shoulder the financial re-
sponsibility of a school caused slow growth at Pua, which in turn
spawned many headaches and second thoughts for church leaders, but
the purpose of the school was to correct that problem by preparing
139
church workers to increase the church population. Hanging on to the

small, poorly equipped school in the face of grim circumstances seemed
to be the best alternative for church leaders. The move from Pua that
began in 1920 was the pivotal moment in the history of the Chilean
school. Once settled into its new location it began a development into a
strong and productive institution.
Brazil College
Establishing a training school in Brazil was also a lagging process.
Adventist penetration of Brazil began in 1892, and similar to Argenti-
na, the movement began among the German colonists in southern Bra-
zil where colporteurs had sold Adventist literature. In 1896, at the be-
hest of H. F. Graf, the Adventist leader in southern Brazil, William
Stein, a bilingual Brazilian citizen of Swiss-German descent, began
what was called the International School at Curitiba in the southern
state of Parana. It offered instruction in both Portuguese and German.
A year later Stein and his wife moved to Gaspar Alto, about 125 miles
farther south in the state of Santa Catarina, to teach at another school
that more clearly filled the role of a training school. Known as the
Brusque School, it developed into a small boarding institution on a
sixty-acre plot. 27
Neither of these schools enjoyed a long life. The founders of the
Brusque School may have intended it to be a center for training work-
ers, but in 1903 it gave way to a third institution at Taquari, 250 miles
still farther south in Rio Grande do SuI. Here the familiar pattern of
forming an Adventist community around institutions was in process. A
small publishing enterprise turned out both German and Portuguese
literature and a self-supporting physician set up practice in a modest
clinic. The leading personalities of these endeavors were exclusively
German: H. F. Graf and John Lipke, both German-born immigrants to
the United States; F. W. Spies, American-born with literature sales ex-
perience in Germany; and William Stein.
To many the training school in Taquari appeared promising. Lipke,
the teacher and a former student at Battle Creek, described it as an in-
dustrial school with a two-year course to train teachers, ministers and
Bible workers. Its program was also typically Adventist-classes in na-
ture study, physiology, geography, arithmetic, music, grammar and
140
CIRCLING THE WORLD
writing, sewing and other hand work. Students paid $4.60 a month for
tuition and meals and worked four hours daily on the thirty-acre plot
which housed a stable, barn and apiary.28
One of the major issues in developing a central school to train Bra-
zilian workers was the need to generate a Portuguese-speaking con-
stituency. Church leaders recognized that the heavy emphasis on the
German community was only a phase that would eventually bow to the
greater needs of the rest of the nation, but effecting that transition re-
mained more problematical than it was in Argentina or Chile. After
attending a meeting of workers at Taquari in 1906, W. A. Spicer wrote
that the "keynote of the conference meeting was the carrying of the
truth to these Portuguese-speaking peoples." "German people were
urged with all diligence to acquiring that tongue," he observed. "Our
work in Brazil must turn to the Portuguese."29
The first signs of a move in that direction appeared the next year as
the Adventist community at Taquari began to break up. The press
moved to Sao Paulo, which was not only a transfer out of German sur-
roundings, but into the large southern metropolis that perceptive Ad-
ventist leaders saw as an emerging Brazilian emporium. In its new lo-
cation at Sao Paulo the press continued a bilingual policy with a
growing stress on Portuguese. The school continued in Taquari for
three years until 1910 when church leaders sold the property, which, for
the time being, closed down the worker-preparation program. 3D
Like the Brusque experiment in training workers that began in 1898,
the Taquari school lasted less than ten years. The practical effect of the
shutdown was akin to a bridge-burning strategy because it ended the
practice of training German workers and forced mission and union
presidents to concentrate on the forthcoming central school where they
would educate the Portuguese population.
However, as widely acknowledged as was the need for a school, Bra-
zilian church leaders did not feel compelled to act before they thought
they had a sufficient base of support. Without openly saying so, they
were inferentially saying that before re-establishing the school, Brazil
would have to wait until the Portuguese-speaking constituency was
large enough to furnish sufficient students to fill a training school. But
the training school would furnish workers to build the constituency,
and so the impasse continued.
141
It was in the midst of this debate that Conradi visited South

America, observing that as workers became more capable in Portu-
guese, the Portuguese-speaking membership increased. 3' F. W. Spies,
head of the Adventist church in Brazil, admitted that the Brazilian
constituency was too scattered to support a school, but that the plan
was to found an institution in the vicinity of Sao Paulo. For "several
years," he said, which probably meant since the close of the Taquari
school, church leaders had prepared prospective workers by fre-
quently gathering young men for short courses. Because the Brazil-
ian literacy rate was only sixteen percent, the education of a corps of
Portuguese-speaking denominational employees would not be a
quick processY
Explain their wait for a school as they would, some believed that
they had waited long enough. Among them was Spies' own wife, Iza-
dora, who stood up in a workers' meeting in 1914 to chide her co-labor-
ers for postponing the moment of truth. "Let us not hesitate," she
urged. 33 Her words fired up the ministers who immediately set about to
end the delay. About fifteen miles from Sao Paulo the group found a
parcel of land without mail service, electricity or water. It was acces-
sible by oxcart, at least in the dry season. Believing that this location
fulfilled Ellen White's counsel that Adventist schools should be isolated
from the distractions of the cities, they purchased the property and went
to work.
The opening day ofthe new school arrived on May 6, 1915. Eighteen
students enrolled in classes and a labor program, both of which were
barely evolving. The school's development followed the pattern of
Avondale: the first students lived in primitive conditions, in this case,
tents, and participated in conquering the land and erecting the build-
ings. Under the direction of 1. H. Boehm, who with his wife, managed
the construction, housing, and food service, the workers dug clay to
burn bricks for construction, cut lumber, dammed up a stream, and
installed a hydraulic ram to pump water. Their first buildings were
barns, sheds and chicken houses, but before the livestock arrived, the
students and workers moved in. After constructing dormitory space
they developed the farm.
A party of General Conference dignitaries toured the site in late
December, eight months after construction began. Among them was
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CIRCLING THE WORLD
W. W. Prescott who described the place in laudatory terms reminiscent

of Australia's Avondale School for Christian Workers which he had
witnessed at a comparable stage of development. By the time of
Prescott's visit students were occupying the partially completed build-
ings. Prolific fruit orchards and gardens provided an abundant food
supply and the scenery was pleasant. Plans called for living quarters for
more than seventy students, but construction advanced only on a pay-
as-you-go schedule, which slowed progress but avoided indebtedness.
Prescott obviously liked what he saw. 34
The training schools at Brusque and Taquari had functioned in
relative obscurity, but in Sao Paulo the developing campus created a
stir. The idea of an industrial institution was new to Brazilians who
saw the enterprise as somewhat of a curiosity, but they were willing
to help. The agriculture director of the state and the head of the local
horticulture station were both friendly, giving a variety of seeds and
about 1,400 ornamental and fruit trees to develop the campus. To
store food for a herd of imported Wisconsin cattle Boehm built two
silos, a novelty that Brazilians had never seen. Directors of the nearby
annual state fair regularly requested the school's farm manager to
send samples of silage to demonstrate effective methods of feeding
cattle.
Two years after its beginning, the school faced a stir of a different
kind when a military contingent arrived on campus to investigate
gossip that the school was really an ammunition factory to help revo-
lutionists. Playing into the hands of the rumormongers were many
years of unrest, caused by army generals who were out of control and
fighting each other to settle old personal accounts. After the begin-
ning of World War I, the situation became even more complex be-
cause of pro-German attitudes among the German colonists in south-
ern Brazil that ran counter to the pro-Allied stance of the government.
The leading personalities at the school could not conceal their iden-
tity. John Lipke, superintendent of the Sao Paulo Mission, shared
teaching responsibilities with Paul Hennig, the secretary of the Brazil
Union and a former teacher at the German Seminary in Clinton, Mis-
souri. The 1. H. Boehm couple hailed from the German Adventist
community in Kansas. This obvious German presence was a ready-
made target for whisperers.
143
After the soldiers searched the campus and found no ammunition,

the faculty invited them to stay for a chapel service featuring the school
choir that sang a number of hymns, including Psalm 46, "God is our
refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble." The soldiers replied
with their own rendition of the national anthem, then left the school as
friends and in peace. 35
Oliver Montgomery, president ofthe newly organized South Ameri-
can Division, was duly impressed after a visit to the campus in 1916.
"The establishment of this training school marks the beginning of a
new era for the work in Brazil," he said, voicing not only his, but the
opinion of his colleagues as well. Enrollment statistics bore them
OUt. 36
In the early matriculations more female students showed up than the
school planners expected, forcing male students to live in the attic of
the unfinished main building, but this inconvenience only served as a
stimulus to hurry student housing. The second year thirty-five enrolled,
and fifty-six registered for the third year. Nineteen became student col-
porteurs after the third year. In 1920 enrollment reached 125; by that
time the school had produced thirteen denominational workersY
The pioneer character of the school was unavoidable, but in 1919
Thomas W. Steen and his wife, Margaret, experienced North American
educators, arrived to inject as much academic advancement into the
program as the still simple circumstances would allow. Church leaders
in Brazil regarded the new principal's work as a reorganization. One of
the first moves was to shorten the cumbersome name from Seminary of
the Brazil Union Conference of Seventh-day Adventists to a more suc-
cinct Adventist Seminary. A new wave of construction added dormi-
tory space. E. C. Ehlers, whose parents entered missionary service
from Hamburg, Germany, joined Hennig as Bible teacher. Margaret
Steen taught music, and Mrs. W. E. Murray, husband of the secretary of
education in the South Brazil Union, conducted the normal program. In
1922 the first class graduated and the following year the institutional
name changed again to Brazil College. 38
From its beginnings in Brusque, Adventist education in Brazil had
been uncertain and sometimes truncated, but nearly twenty years after
the first school, Izadora Spies' urgent call had struck a responsive chord,
and the results were permanent.
144
CiRCLING THE WORLD
Parallels Among Adventist Schools

A number of parallels characterized Adventist institutions in North
America and Europe, the Anglo colonies and Latin America. In addi-
tion to the usual purposes of educating church workers and preserving
Adventism in the minds and hearts of students, these Adventist schools
represented the philosophy spelled out by Ellen White, but to varying
degrees. Most of them functioned in rural settings, incorporated stu-
dent labor into their organized programs, and made the Bible central in
their curricula. By blending physical labor into the learning process
and sometimes providing instruction in lines of ordinary work that
people customarily did not associate with formal education, Adventist
schools demonstrated that even menial tasks had an inherent dignity
and value. Hence, what the Adventist world understood as training
schools for denominational professions the public often knew as indus-
trial schools.
Adventist schools were not the first to promote vocational educa-
tion, but their participation in a movement to raise it to the level of
formal education contrasted sharply with traditional philosophy that
justified education on the basis of academic reasons. Adventists could
not take all the credit, but sooner or later this pragmatic aspect of
education caught the eye and the respect of thinking individuals.
Frederick Griggs noted in 1909 that the practice of integrating agri-
cultural programs into formal education was gaining ground. Agri-
cultural studies were becoming more common in both the United
States and Europe. In France and Belgium classes in basic agriculture
were mandatory.39
There were contrasts as well as parallels among Adventist schools,
such as the plight of elementary education. Church schools developed
unevenly. In 1918 Griggs stated that eleven church schools were oper-
ating in Brazi1. 40 Two years later his successor, W. E. Howell, noted
church schools "here and there" during his visit to South America,
but lamented that they did not figure prominently in the educational
program. In Australia and New Zealand Adventists established a
moderate number of elementary schools that evolved into a small sys-
tem of Adventist schools, but the practice did not catch on in South
Africa or Europe. Primary education eventually flowered in South
America, but as a movement, it trailed worker training schools by
145
more than two decades. A similar lag period had occurred in the
United States.
One of the most striking contrasts between Adventist education in
North America and the movement in Anglo colonies and Latin America
was the difference in its highest level of instruction. In the United States
by 1920 it had become a practice to design ministerial training as a col-
lege degree, which placed ministerial education on a par with tradi-
tional college degrees.
At the same time no denominational institution outside the United
States was classified as a four-year, post-secondary institution as mea-
sured by North American standards, which meant that beyond North
America Adventist schools tended to prepare ministers less formally.
They offered mixed curricula, usually consisting of secondary-level
courses, to which they added worker-preparation classes appropriate to
the maturity and competence of the students. The practice of defining
professional education academically as a degree belonged to a later
period.
A common characteristic of Avondale College and Claremont Union
College and it successor, South African Training School, was their
proximity to vast, non-Caucasian mission territories. The primary role
ofthese institutions was to be worker-training schools for white-skinned
constituents, but they were also to serve as training centers for mission-
aries to sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania.
The first schools in South America held a similar role. Europeaniza-
tion had penetrated much of this continent but in the Amazon water-
shed and the Andean spine lived many pre-Columbian tribes who
maintained their ancient customs, some scarcely touched by civiliza-
tion. Others lived under a veneer of Christianity. Preparation of mis-
sionaries in large numbers for these regions was not an immediate out-
come of training schools in South America, but in time their graduates
entered the hinterlands.
Like Friedensau and Stanborough Park, Avondale College quickly
became a missionary-producing institution, but schools in South Africa
and South America developed more slowly and would not become pro-
ductive sources of missionaries for years to come. Meanwhile, mainly
from North America, workers shouldered the responsibility of taking
the gospel to peoples in the jungles and the mountains.
146
CIRCLING THE WORLD
With the spread of Adventist schools into westernized countries de-

nominational education became a part of a world movement. In this
process the North American paradigm underwent changes, but not rad-
ical ones. Differences in culture and rates ofliteracy existed from coun-
try to country, but education in all of these regions was essentially
western. A broad understanding of educational values and purposes
underlay all schools. It was in the third prong ofthe spread of Adventist
schools that even more dramatic developments occurred.
I The story of Adventist education in South Africa is summarized from SDA Encyclope-
dia, 1995 ed., v. I, p. 686, and v. 2, p. 865; Helen M. Hyatt, "Christian Education Begins in
South Africa," Journal of True Education (June 1953), pp. 38, 39, 63; General Conference
Bulletin, 1909, no. 7, pp. 98, 102; ibid., 1913, no. 16, pp. 244, 245; Frederick Griggs, "Report
of the Department of Education to the 1918 General Conference Session," RG 51, AST;
Brown, Chronology, pp. 10-15.
2Hyatt, ibid.
JGeneral Conference Bulletin, 1913, no. 16, p. 244.
4General Conference Bulletin, 1909, no. 7, p. 98; 1913, no. 16, p. 245.
;Ibid., no. 3, 1922, p. 74; Griggs, ibid.
"Milton Hook, Avondale: Experiment on the Dora (Cooranbong, New South Wales, Aus-
tralia: Avondale Academic Press, 1998) provides the best history of the school. For an ab-
breviated account, see Hook, "Avondale College," in Seventh-day Adventists in the So!l1h
Pacific 1885-1985, Noel Clapham, ed. (Warburton, Victoria, Australia: Signs Publishing Co.,
1985), pp. 146-165. Arthur White's Ellen White, v. 4 contains many details about the founding
period of the school. For an insightful glimpse of the early years at Avondale, consult George
R. Knight's "Early Adventist Education in Australia: A Report of Recent Research," Journal
of Adventist Education (April-May 1982), pp. 10, 11,45,46.
'Arthur White, ibid., p. 13.
8VandeVere, "William Warren Prescott," in Knight, Early Adventist Educators, pp. 125,
126.
9Cited in both Arthur White, ibid., p. 304 and Knight, ibid., p. 41.
10 Hook, "Avondale College," in Adventists in the South Pacific, Clapham, ed., p. 150.
llArthur White, ibid., p. 322.
12Pele T. Alu, "The Influence of Avondale College in the South Pacific," in Avondale and
the South Pacific: 100 Years of Mission, Barry Oliver, et. aI., eds. (Cooranbong, New South
Wales, Australia, Avondale Academic Press, 1997), p. 25;
lJLeonard P. Tolhurst, "Pastor H. L. Tolhurst: A Reminiscence of His Life and Contribu-
tions to the Development of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the South Pacific," ibid., pp.
67-82; Eric Were, No Devil Strings: the Story of Kata Rangoso (Mountain View, CA: Pacific
Press Publishing Association), pp.7-43.
14General Conference Bulletin, 1909, no. 8. p. 113; Brown, ibid., pp. 75, 126; SDA Ency-
clopedia, 1995 ed., v. I, pp. 294, 295, 955, 956.
I;Griggs, "Report of the Department of Education to the 1918 General Conference Ses-
sion," RG 51, AST; Statistical Report, 1920.
147
16For early descriptions of the Argentine school see reports in the General Conference
Bulletin, 1909, no. 13, p. 198; ibid., 1913, no. 12, p. 183; ibid., no. 20, pp. 315,316. Walton
Brown, "Young Man With A Satchel," Journal of True Education (June 1953), pp. 22,46. See
also Frank Westphal, Pioneering in the Neglected Continent (Nashville, TN: Southern Pub-
lishing Association, 1927), pp. 44-50.
17lbid.
IS General Conference Bulletin, 1909, no. 13, p. 198.
19F1oyd Greenleaf, The Seventh-day Adventist Church in Latin America and the Carib-
bean, v. I, pp. 103, 104.
2°Hubert Herring, A History ofLatin America, 3rd ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968),
p.727.
22Statistical Report, 1920; Greenleaf, ibid.. v. 2, p. 23.
2J Sources for the narrative of the school in Chile are ibid., pp. 26-28, 104-107; General
Conference Bulletin: 1909, No. 13, p. 196; 1913, No. 20, p. 316; Statistical Report, 1920; RH,
July 8, 1916; Brown, ibid., p. 76;.
24RH, July 8, 1916.
25Greenleaf, ibid., v. 2, pp. 26-28.
26RH, May II, 1911.
27Ruy Carlos de Camargo Vieira, Vida e Obra de Guilherme Stein Jr. (Sao Paulo, Brazil:
Casa Publicadora Brasileira, 1995), pp. 148-156; F. H. Westphal, "Preaching the Truth in
Brazil," The Home Missionary (July 1895), pp. 134-135; articles in RH: October 6, 1896,
April 6, 1897, April 20, 1897, June 21 and 28, 1906; Brown, ibid., 16, 17, 110.
2sRH, June 6, 1907.
29 Ibid., June 21 and 28, 1906.
30lbid.. October 15, 1908.

Jl/bid., May 25,1911.
32General Conference Bulletin, 1909, no. 14, p. 206; ibid., 1913, no. 14, p. 215.
»John H. Boehm and Gedeon de Oliveira, "It Was an Ammunition Factory," Journal of
True Education (June 1953), pp. 20,21.
34RH, February 10 and 16, 1916; ibid., February 22, 1917; ibid., July 25, 1918.
35Boehm and Oliveira, ibid.
36RH, February 22, 1917.
37Ibid.; ibid., July 25, 1918; January 29 and August 5, 1920.
3sGenerai Conference Bulletin, 1922, no. 9, p. 215; Brown, ibid., p. 110; RH, August 5,
1920.
4°lbid., 1918, no. 3, p. 41.
148
7
ON THE FRONTIERS IN
THE CHRISTIAN WORLD
The first decade of the twentieth century was pivotal for the church.
Administrative reorganization, dismantling Battle Creek, reestablish-
ing the church headquarters in Washington, and the Kellogg debacle
were salient events, but frequently lost sight of is the missionary awak-
ening that swept through the church and its effect on Adventist educa-
tion. The consciousness that Adventism was a global movement that
had a crucial dependence on education weighed heavily on members of
the General Conference Committee who gathered in Gland, Switzer-
land in May 1907 for their biennial session.
Since the General Conference session in 1905 church leaders had
been traveling the world, and part of the baggage they brought back
was a multitude of requests for workers. H. R. Salisbury said the situa-
tion "rivaled anything that had been before demanded ofthem."1 It was
not merely the lack of personnel to fill missionary positions that chal-
lenged the committee, but the needs for workers in regions where cul-
ture, climate, and social habits were alien to western minds and bodies.
Besides schools in the United States, institutions in Australia, Germa-
ny, and England were furnishing missionaries, but the task was over-
whelming and the members of the General Conference Committee re-
149
alized the church was

unprepared to respond effec-
tively to petitions for workers.
In the face of unprecedented
requests, the committee voted
to convert Washington Train-
ing College, which had been
operating only three years, into
Washington Foreign Mission-
ary Seminary that would offer
classes especially designed to
prepare workers for "heathen"
lands. It was to be an institution
controlled but not operated by
the General Conference. The
committee tapped Homer R.
Salisbury, who had just com-
pleted six years developing the
school in England, to be the
president of the revamped
H. R. Salisbury and wife. Lenna Whitney Salis-
bury. He headed the first training school in Washington schooI.2
England before becoming president of the The new missionary school
Washington Foreign Missionary Seminary in in Washington was highly tout-
1907. He died in 1915 when the ship on which
he was sailing was torpedoed and sank of! the ed around the Adventist world.
Egyptian coast. Its courses were demanding
and left no time for students to
work for pay as in the generic institutions; consequently, Missionary
Volunteer societies, also created at the Gland meeting, raised a hundred
scholarships for students to attend the seminary. Students enrolled with
a general appointment to serve as missionaries. They did not all take the
same classes, but tailored their program according to the needs of their
appointments and how well prepared they already were. General Con-
ference personnel served as advisors to make sure students enrolled in
the right classes.
The program included pastoral training and Bible instruction, sup-
plemented by Greek and Hebrew. Classes in French, German, Spanish,
Chinese, and Hindi were available, indicating the missions that the new
150
ON THE FRONTIERS IN THE CHRISTIAN WORLD
seminary targeted. A hybrid nurses' course more similar to a program

in public health than hospital or sanitarium nursing offered instruction
in tropical medicine, general diseases, dietetics, hygiene and physiolo-
gy. Orientation to non-Western societies and some industrial training,
especially in printing, rounded out the curriculum.
The new seminary paid little heed to traditional academic matters.
It admitted people with only limited education on equal footing with
college graduates and offered no academic credit. Only a mile from the
General Conference office building, the school operated under the
watchful eye of church leaders who might interrupt students' prepara-
tion to send them away "almost at a moment's notice," Salisbury said,
to respond to an especially urgent cal1 from a remote corner of the
earth.
Not everyone went to a distant or "heathen" land. Some entered the
ministry in North America. Before two years elapsed seminary stu-
dents had gone to Norway, China, Bengal, North India, South India,
Burma, Australasia, British Guiana, Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala, and
Jamaica. "We have them here under tentative appointment for every
continent as wel1 as the islands of the sea," Salisbury explained. "I trust
we may duly appreciate what it means from this time on to send of our
best by scores."3
The seminary received accolades from General Conference leaders,
but it turned out to be a wel1-intended experiment that lasted only seven
years. During that short period about ninety mission appointees went
out, nearly thirty in 1913 alone, the majority of them to Asia and Latin
America. At the close of the 1913-1914 school year the seminary ended
its operations and the school reverted to its original charter as a liberal
arts institution, renamed as Washington Missionary Col1ege. The For-
eign Missionary Seminary as a separate school may have dropped out
of sight, but at the time church leaders had the understanding that it
would continue functioning as a department of the restored college.
Only speculation can answer why the seminary was short-lived.
Preparing for mission service did not lose its luster, but a mood to con-
vert the ungraded school into a college was gathering momentum. It
was commonly recognized that classes at the seminary were of post-
secondary quality, which induced delegates to the 1913 General Con-
ference session to vote to redefine the seminary as a two-year col1ege
151
with the option of becoming a four-year institution. The action put an

end to the ungraded courses and effectively destroyed a notion persist-
ing from the beginnings of Battle Creek College that quick, practical
results from short courses without academic trappings were the best
method to prepare for a denominational career.
No matter the high hopes that so animated Salisbury, the new semi-
nary was ambitious and concentrated, perhaps too much so. But he
admitted that part of the dilemma the church faced was the need for
better educated workers to lead Adventist missions. The seminary cur-
riculum was intended to provide the improved education, but expecting
students to become conversant with Hebrew and Greek Scripture, to
learn a foreign language, and to develop a utilitarian knowledge of both
nursing and printing, all in a short course, presupposed extreme cram-
ming even by those with exceptional learning skills. The two ideas of
short courses on the one hand and thoroughness on the other did not
square well with each other and it is likely that the unrealistic level of
expectations for the seminary was quickly manifest.
Another possible factor in the seminary'S demise was an ever in-
creasing consciousness that a key to successful missions was to develop
competent national workers rather than to depend indefinitely on North
American or European missionaries. From the earliest days missionar-
ies with foresight advocated the education of natives in order to supply
workers for mission fields. In this broad scheme of self-support, train-
ing schools in the missions themselves became progressively more im-
portant than seminaries for missionaries. The need for missionaries
would continue as the frontiers of missions expanded; nevertheless, the
first generation of missionaries was aware of the fundamental validity
of self-support and promoted it.
Washington Foreign Missionary Seminary also attempted to isolate
the education of missionaries from the mainstream of Adventist educa-
tion in a manner similar to medical education. No one doubted that
missionaries needed some specific preparation but it was questionable
that the total package of missionary education was so different that it
required a separate institution. The mission movement was almost syn-
onymous with Adventism, and while it depended on education to sur-
vive, it survived best when it became part of the mainstream of church
activity rather than separating it into a unique institution.
152
For whatever reasons, Washington Foreign Missionary Seminary

did not endure, while the principles of missionary education became an
inherent part of generic institutions. Following the example of Em man-
uel Missionary College, itself founded for the express purpose of pre-
paring missionaries as broadly construed, other Adventist institutions
adopted the word "missionary" as part of their names. In time the prac-
tice spilled over from North America to schools from Europe to Asia
and Australia, which evidenced a denominational recognition of the
missionary character of Adventist education.
Adventist Education in Jamaica, West Indies

One of the closest frontiers for Adventist education was the West
Indies, almost next door to the United States. Beginning in the seven-
teenth century this region had been the scene of bitter rivalry among
Spain, Holland, France, and England who competed for island hold-
ings. Corsairs engaged in frequent shootouts and sailed with impunity
on Caribbean waters. In this international melee Jamaica fell to the
English in the mid-seventeenth century and became the center for
stepped up buccaneer activity and slave trade. Eventually the island
developed into a prime sugar-producing colony which British planta-
tion owners turned into rich profits at the expense of their Black
slaves.
To a lesser extent other colonial islands in the Lesser Antilles that
arched down from Jamaica to the coast of Venezuela shared this his-
tory. The abolition of slavery by the British in 1834 brought legal free-
dom to the Blacks but prosperity eluded them. To complicate matters,
the sugar industry fell on bad times. Personal incomes sank.
The first Adventist workers who dared to venture into this exotic but
plagued region were colporteurs in the late 1880s. In short order they
fanned out from British Guiana to the east coast of Central America.
The most prosperous field was Jamaica where they found a few readers
who soon began observing the seventh-day Sabbath on their own.
When A. 1. Haysmer and his wife, the first permanent Adventist mis-
sionaries, arrived in 1893 they found a handful of Sabbath-keepers suf-
fering from endemic poverty.4
Membership growth was slow at first, but more encouraging in Ja-
maica than the rest of the English-speaking Caribbean. Talk about
153
schools picked up in 1898 with the arrival of a twenty-two-year-old

Battle Creek graduate, George F. Enoch, who complained that the qual-
ity of Jamaica's schools was poor and that they violated the North
American principle of separation of church and state. Churches in fact
did operate schools with tax money and teachers took the liberty to
instruct students according to the beliefs of the church which happened
to house the school. At times Adventist children suffered because of
their beliefs. Enoch's answer to this situation was to establish Adventist
schools.
Haysmer, who after a dozen years in Jamaica, was about to return to
the United States in 1905, did not disagree, but was less a crusader. A
few church schools began. To the General Conference session that year
he spoke encouragingly about the nearly 1,100 baptized members on
the island, scattered about in twenty organized churches and nine com-
panies, but he also admitted that "the extreme hard times" in Jamaica
had forced churches to close their schools because they did not have
money to pay their teachers. The students reverted to the government
schools that Enoch found so unsatisfactory.5
But practically while Haysmer was speaking Enoch spearheaded a
move to establish a training school for the English-speaking West In-
dies, which, he glowed, would train workers for such far away places as
Africa. The reason for his optimism was Willowdene, an old sugar
plantation at Bog Walk near Kingston that the Jamaica Conference
bought to convert into a school. Enoch predicted it would become a
veritable forest of fruit-producing tropical trees and that the prospec-
tive school could not only sell fruit but manufacture and export Panama
hats.
Compared to the size of membership in other locations, Haysmer's
figure of 1,100 appeared to be a constituency large enough to support a
small training school, but not so in Jamaica, not even with the collabo-
ration of other English-speaking fields in the West Indies. But Enoch's
rosy outlook won the day and in what had become a typical Adventist
venture, 1. B. Beckner, president of the Jamaica Conference, and a
group of fourteen students moved to the school site in 1906 to clear the
land and begin instruction as soon as was feasible. C. B. Hughes, who
had experienced similar conditions at Australia's Avondale, arrived the
next year to start classes, but it became painfully clear that Enoch had
154
built an air castle. Willowdene's land was not suitable for the kind of
farm that he and others dreamed of.
In 1907 Enoch transferred to India and the school moved to the
507-acre Riversdale, another estate near Kingston, which renewed
hope for a dairy farm, vegetable gardens, and coconut groves. The
1909 enrollment of thirty-six included nine girls. Students came
from as far away as Barbados and Panama, but only three were able
to pay the $8.40 monthly fee. The rest depended on work, which
meant that the school would have to produce salable items to avoid
giving a free education to its students. Although Hughes cultivated
the good will of officials in the agricultural department of the colo-
nial government, he was working against an unforgiving economy.
With rhetoric that was a model of understatement, he described Ja-
maica as "poverty stricken," acknowledging "perplexities peculiar
to our work," and forecasting "much hard labor" before the school
would be ready.6
At issue was more than a depressed economy. Geography, commu-
nication, and ethnic differences all militated against a viable parent
organization to support a training school. In an effort to organize the
growing church in the Greater Caribbean, church leaders threw the
entire region together in 1907 under the title of the West Indian Union.
This entity was geographically fragmented into islands and small coun-
tries that sprawled from British Guiana in the southeast corner west-
ward across the Caribbean to Central America. Politically, some of the
populations were independent, some were colonies. Collectively they
spoke French, English, Dutch, and Spanish.
The first president of this conglomerate was thirty-year-old Urbanus
Bender, commonly called U. Bender. He was not long in discovering
how impracticable his job was. Because direct communication among
many of the separate fields did not exist he spent an inordinate amount
of time on the water and sometimes found it necessary to travel via
New York to make connections from one island to another. By 1913 his
energy was depleted and he left the field, making room for Haysmer
who returned from Alabama to replace him.
Steadily the language areas of the West Indian Union broke away
into separate missions, finally leaving hardly more than a phantom or-
ganization. In 1918 Haysmer gave way to G. A. Roberts, president of
155
the Jamaica Conference, who found himself presiding over the formal
demise of the West Indian Union the next year.
In 1911, Bender, only four years into the decline of the West Indian
Union and beset with organizational problems and a diminishing finan-
cial base, notified the General Conference that he had closed the school
at Riversdale. The shrinking West Indian Union could not afford the
operating subsidy that the institution required. At least for the time be-
ing, Oakwood Manual Training School in Huntsville, Alabama served
the English-speaking fields of the Caribbean. In 1913 Oakwood's en-
rollment reached about ninety, "principally from the Southern States
and the West Indian Union," the school's report said.7
But this was a makeshift solution that turned out to be as unwork-
able as the schools at Bog Walk and Riversdale. Haysmer let the issue
lie, but immediately upon becoming West Indian Union president, Rob-
erts organized a school board to resurrect the school, even rehiring
Hughes as principal.
Hughes and Roberts set about to repair the Riversdale property until
a virtual injunction came from General Conference Assistant Secre-
tary 1. L. Shaw who spoke not only with authority from the church
headquarters but also from experience as a former principal of Clare-
mont Union College. Church leaders in Washington had soured on the
Riversdale estate and insisted on a new location for the school. They
also disagreed with Hughes' intention to pattern the revived program
after the Huntsville model, advising instead a more traditional school
for workers with less emphasis on training for ordinary jobs.
Hughes had never intended to relegate the worker training program
to second place in the curriculum. He confirmed that preparing work-
ers would be the leading purpose of the school, but also made the point
that the church should provide an education for Adventist students even
if they did not plan to enter denominational employment. Resolving the
question of a new location took more time than coming to a meeting of
the minds on the issue of curriculum, but Roberts and Hughes finally
found space to rent in Mandeville, fifty miles west of Kingston at a
higher and more liveable elevation where they began classes in 1919.
With this move the previously truncated plan for a West Indian
Training School passed its final test. Membership in Jamaica was on
the increase and school enrollment also rose commensurably. More
156
than eighty students completed the third year. A better balance between
the number of students who depended on labor and those who could
pay at least part of their way improved the school's financial condition.
In 1922 the formation of the Inter-American Division eliminated many
of the administrative misadventures that had previously weakened the
Caribbean church, and a stronger organizational structure supported
the school. West Indian Training School had finally begun its journey
to become Northern Caribbean University.
Compared to other educational movements on Adventist frontiers,
the conditions surrounding the origins of West Indian Training School
were unique. Although a British holding, Jamaica was relatively close
to North America, which brought influences from both the British Em-
pire the United States upon it. Adventists could view Jamaica as similar
to the American South. Kingston, Jamaica's capital, was closer to the
growing Adventist population in parts of the South than to the corners
of the original West Indian Union. Jamaicans had emerged from slav-
ery only a generation before the emancipation of North American
slaves, and like the Blacks in the southern states, they suffered acute
poverty. In both Jamaica and the American South education became a
means of preparing a former slave population to occupy its legitimate
place in society. Besides their role as institutions to educate denomina-
tional workers, both Oakwood and West Indian Training School played
a part in that movement.
F. A. Stahl and the Indian Movement in Peru

From the South American republic of Peru came a dramatic se-
quence of events during the early years of the twentieth century that
became one of the most publicized stories of Adventist education. To
some extent, this riveting experience emerged from the history of the
country itself. Driven by stories about a hoard of gold in a fabled moun-
tain kingdom, in 1522 Spanish conquistadores climbed into the Andes
to confiscate all the wealth they could lay their hands on, successfully
wrenching the land from its Inca rulers and subjecting the indigenous
peoples to Spanish authority. In the process accompanying curates bap-
tized the mountain dwellers into a nominal practice of Catholicism.
To govern this region the Spanish crown set up a viceroyalty head-
quartered in Lima. It brooked little variance from the official line,
which, in practical terms, meant that the landowners, the army, and the
church collaborated in a governing triumvirate of power. The halls of
the viceregal capital where officialdom circulated glittered with opu-
lence. Independence in 1824 eliminated the authority of the Spanish
crown but changed little else except that Peruvians spent much of the
nineteenth century scuffling among themselves to stabilize their newly
founded republic and floundering to establish a viable economy.
These developments brought no rewards to the descendants of the
pre-Columbian peoples who still inhabited the Andean highlands,
many ofthem concentrated around Lake Titicaca. Reduced to illiteracy
and poverty, they lived in silent subservience in a system that had closed
around them.
Adventist missionaries as well as some native South Americans
speculated about the need to enter Peru and even ran reconnoitering
sorties into its largest cities, but until 1906 their efforts were erratic and
they all departed with the same story-religious intolerance made open
evangelism impossible and clandestine meetings necessary. The Peru-
vian constitution forbade public worship except for Catholic services.
A smattering of Adventist believers, mainly in Lima, were left on their
own, but when a liberal-minded judge ruled that non-Catholic worship
in an unmarked building was a private gathering and thus did not fall
under the constitutional prohibition, the wall of isolation cracked. 8
F. L. Perry and his wife, the first permanent Adventist workers, ar-
rived in 1906. In spite of the consensus that Peru was destined to be a
hard field, Perry began his ministry with public meetings and literature
distribution. Some papers were dropped off in the Lake Titicaca region.
By 1908 word came down from the mountains that Manuel Camacho,
an Aymara Indian convert near Puno on the northwestern shore of the
Lake, was conducting a school for his fellow tribespeople and he want-
ed help. He was one of the few Indians who had been able to escape the
unpromising circumstances of Indian life. Besides speaking both Ay-
mara and Quechua, languages of the two leading Indian tribes in the
region, he also held a teacher's certificate that he had acquired in schools
on the western slope of the Andes.
Help was soon on the way. Inspired by stories drifting out of South
America, F. A. Stahl and his Swedish-born wife, Ana, both graduates
of the nursing course at Battle Creek, paid their own travel expenses
158
from Ohio to South America to begin work in La Paz, Bolivia. In 1910,

a year after their arrival, they transferred to Lake Titicaca and immedi-
ately laid plans for a mission station consisting of living quarters, a
building for Camacho's school, and a clinic. The mission linked educa-
tion and health as parts of a single movement. Stahl's successful travels
around the Lake, treating ailments and injuries and conducting classes
in hygienic living helped to build confidence in Camacho's school.
Construction of the mission went slowly with Indians carrying con-
struction materials on their own shoulders from Puno twenty-one miles
south to La Plateria, the site of the clinic and school. By 1912 Stahl re-
ported that the mission was near completion. Newspapers in the region,
particularly in Puno, lauded the Stahls' medical work and the school as
symbols of modernization and social advancement. This recognition
triggered an angry reaction from the bishop in Puno who saw La Plat-
eria as a threat to his longstanding control over the Indians. In March
1913 he precipitated an attack on the school and landed several Indian
converts, including Camacho, in the Puno jail.
Repercussions shook all of Peru. At the same time, liberal politi-
cians were seeking to amend the national constitution by striking pro-
visions that recognized Catholicism as the state religion and prohibited
non-Catholic worship. Their efforts coincided with a reform movement
at the University of San Marcos to liberate the Indians from their sub-
servience. After his release from jail Camacho himself met with the
Peruvian president to discuss these events and the issues at stake. The
upshot was support for a proposal to revise the constitution that passed
both houses of the Peruvian Congress in September and October 1913.
Two years later the proposal survived a tumultuous session of Congress
to pass its second reading before becoming law.
Camacho and Stahl had not conspired to revise Peru's constitution,
but their activities had given substance to the arguments for change.
From time to time hostilities continued against La Plateria, but the law
was on the side of the mission. With the aid of Indian assistants, Ana
Stahl added school teaching to her medical activities. Appeals for
schools from Indian villages around Titicaca descended on La Plateria
where attendance reached more than a hundred.
In 1916 John Howell, a young teacher from the United States, ar-
rived to take over the school at La Plateria. In short order he acquired a
159
Peruvian teacher's license, which gave him authority to appoint teach-

ers. By the end of the year he had established eight schools in the Titi-
caca area, all headed by Indian teachers. During the summer off-season
they gathered at La Plateria for additional preparation. The school was
evolving into a training center, although it was not advanced to the
point of becoming an official Adventist training school.
Before the end of 1916 Oliver Montgomery, the new president of the
South American Division, visited La Plateria and organized the Titi-
caca Mission with Stahl as superintendent and Howell as secretary-
treasurer. Conducting clinics and schools was their leading activity. In
less than two years under the new Titicaca Mission the number of
schools rose to nineteen with an enrollment measured in the hundreds,
most of them at outstations.
This was the period of the Broken Stone Mission, an oft-repeated
account of an Indian chief who asked Stahl for a school but wanted a
means to identify the teacher who would eventually arrive. Stahl
broke a stone in two pieces, gave one part to the chief and assured
him that the promised teacher would bring the other halfwith him for
identification purposes. The actual matching of the stones never oc-
curred, but the story persisted in Adventist circles that the teacher and
the chief matched the stones to fulfill Stahl's original promise, creat-
ing an unfounded myth. Stahl lost his half during an Indian raid, and
by the time he sent the promised teacher the Adventist movement
around Lake Titicaca was so well known that no identification was
necessary.
At best no one could call the outstation schools anything but primi-
tive. They were devoid of equipment and the seats were only mud or
stone elevations around the inside wall. But primitive or not, the schools
were symbols of advancement and the Aymaras kept coming. Instruc-
tion was in Spanish. The schools also became gathering places for
Stahl's clinics.
Both the local and national government were taking notice of the
positive effects of the combination of medical and educational work.
Soon after the constitutional revision went into effect local dignitaries
wanted to organize La Plateria into an official town as an example of a
community that functioned according to Christian principles. As good
as this sounded, Adventist mission leaders demurred, realizing that the
160
Pomata Mission Station in the Lake Titicaca region of Peru where John Howell and F.
A. Stahl established scores of schools for the Aymara Indians. The stark landscape was
typical at the high elevations of this region.
negative inference on the previous centuries of Catholic rule was obvi-

ous and would stir up animosity rather than serve as an inspiration.
By 1918 Peruvian leaders in Lima came to regard the school at La
Plateria as a model school and invited three Adventist missionaries to
explain to the government the methods their teachers used in their
schools. At the same time the chairman of a congressional committee
sought out the head ofthe Inca Union to gather information about train-
ing Indian teachers.
There was little wonder why members of the Peruvian government
and Congress were impressed. Occasionally, individual Indians broke
out of the caste system that doomed them as a race, but the Titicaca
Mission was developing a program that trained Indians to educate
themselves and improve their own well being. By the end of 1918 In-
dian teachers were in charge of twenty-five of the twenty-six schools
within a ISO-mile radius of La Plateria. Leaders ofthe Titicaca Mission
claimed they could have ten more schools in operation if they had the
teachers. Adventists believed that it was not simply coincidental that
two more reform bills were pending in the Peruvian Congress, one of
which would allow Protestants to form associations to own property
and carryon religious activity.
6-I.P.FTW
161
A training school was an obvious need, but for the time being it was
beyond the purse of the Titicaca Mission. Consequently, La Plateria
filled that role. Even though its elementary program did not include
actual professional education, in 1918 General Conference Secretary of
Education Frederick Griggs referred to the school as a training center,
but immediately qualified it as one for Indian students only.
After his visit to Lake Titicaca in 1920, W. E. Howell, who had
replaced Griggs, wrote that he was "overwhelmed" by both the
needs of the region and the accomplishments of Adventist schools in
the mission. During the four years since John Howell took charge of
the education program the number of schools had soared to forty
with fifty-six teachers, most of whom were Indian. Adventist mem-
bership stood at 2,000. The school had proved itself as the evange-
lizing tool.
In 1921 the education movement spread to the Quechuas, a neigh-
boring group of indigenous people who for years had been agitating
Titicaca Mission for schools. Of the 130 calls for new schools that inun-
dated the mission in 1921, sixty originated from this tribe, but the mis-
sion managed to fill only two of these requests. E. H. Wilcox, the new
superintendent of the mission described the "school work" as "one of
the biggest problems we have to deal with."9
In 1922 the long anticipated training school became a reality. Cole-
gio Adventista del Titicaca opened near Juliaca, about thirty miles
north of Puno and fifty miles from La Plateria. Its three years of sec-
ondary level instruction was a quantum leap from the six-grade pro-
gram that La Plateria offered. Although the new training school did not
claim La Plateria as its antecedent, no one could deny that a connection
existed.
One of the important elements of Adventist education among the
Peruvian Indians was its spontaneous beginning. Missionaries built on
what Manuel Camacho himself began, and they continued to oversee
educational planning and to manage La Plateria, but they could not
personally head all of the schools. The success of the program around
Lake Titicaca depended on the development of Indian teachers.
A major reason for relying on the Indians was the rarefied air in the
Andean highlands. Missionaries suffered respiratory and related prob-
lems they developed after continuous life at elevations exceeding
162
12,000 feet. After the 1918 General Conference Oliver Montgomery

found Titicaca Mission in an "embarrassing" condition because of nu-
merous health problems among the missionaries, some having spent
months at a time recuperating in more congenial climates. Some of the
families at Titicaca Mission were missionaries from Argentina, such as
the David Dalingers, the Pedro Kalbermatters, and the R. A. Nelsons,
but they also suffered from the inhospitable environment of Lake Titi-
cacao
In only few locations did health care and education become as close-
ly coupled as at Titicaca Mission. Schools and clinics each benefitted
from the success of the other. Both instilled a sense of personal worth
and dignity in students and patients. The Stahls consistently taught a
hygienic life style, a supplement to the school curriculum that was an
early version of a public health program. They ministered to the im-
mediate needs ofthe body, providing relief from suffering that a people
living on the edge of society had come to regard as normal. The schools
themselves were a parallel movement, bringing light to the mind. Dur-
ing the early years the Stahls' medical efforts probably drew more at-
tention than the Indian schools, but education grew to be the primary
mission activity.
The experience of F. A. and Ana Stahl among the Titicaca vil-
lages inspired the establishment of the Stahl Center for World Ser-
vice at La Sierra University where a museum memorializes their
work and perpetuates their ideals of service. Directed by Charles
Teel, Jr., research at the Center has concluded that Adventist educa-
tion changed the fabric of Titicaca society by helping to abolish a
feudal and abusive system.
The missionary couple had not deliberately planned or foreseen this
political outcome, but they arrived at an opportune moment. Immedi-
ately prior to their arrival, during the final years of the nineteenth cen-
tury and the early years of the twentieth, many thinkers in South Amer-
ican countries exhibited increased sensitivity to such matters as
personal freedoms, justice, and social equality and their agitation was
forcing a liberalizing trend. Stahl's clinics demonstrated a compassion
where previously there had been very little, and Adventist schools
showed that an education with sincere motives could make a differ-
ence. The impact on the Peruvian constitution did not result from hob-
163
nobbing or lobbying for special favors, but the Stahls stimulated honest
thinking by observant Peruvians who wanted their country to become
part of the twentieth century. IO
Adventist education among the Aymaras had developed well enough
to inspire similar ventures in the neighboring Andean republics of Ec-
uador and Bolivia. Also, the Stahls transferred to the jungles surround-
ing the headwaters of the Amazon in northern Peru where they tried to
replicate what they had done at La Plateria, but education for indige-
nous peoples in all of these locations remained only a shadow of the
dimensions it achieved in the Titicaca Mission.
The South Pacific

Another frontier of Adventist education presented itself in Fiji, a
large island group in the South Pacific lying about 2,000 miles
northeast of Sidney, Australia. Europeans learned of these islands in
the mid-seventeenth century, but not until the nineteenth did they
begin regular contact, and then to exploit sandalwood resources.
Missionaries quickly followed, but their influence did not immedi-
ately put an end to the barbarities that erupted among people that
practiced cannibalism. Out of this chaos Cakobau, a local chief,
emerged as the Fijian king. In 1874, only three years after he had
risen to the top, he and the chiefs under him requested the British to
annex their land. In the process Cakobau agreed to adopt Christian-
ity and Fijians discarded their war clubs in favor of trading oppor-
tunities.
In the peaceful era that followed, Christianity, albeit somewhat
diluted, became the accepted way of life. About 120,000 people
lived in Fiji when the first Adventist missionary arrived in 1891. The
native Fijians numbered approximately 100,000, or possibly less,
while the rest of the population was mixed, with no more than 3,000
Europeans, mainly English, controlling the country and about an
equal number of Polynesian immigrants as laborers. Thousands
more indentured workers from India worked on the sugar and fruit
plantations. 11
John I. Tay was the first Adventist to set foot in Fiji. Five years later,
in 1896, 1. E. Fulton, originally from Nova Scotia but educated in the
United States, arrived. Except for one year, he spent the next ten in Fiji
164
and had already begun a school for Fiji-

an youth when he wrote that "the educa-
tion of the native youth for missionaries
has been the aim of all successful mis-
sionary efforts in all denominations,"
adding that "the strength of the white
missionary has been quite largely di-
rected toward educational work."12
Although he was not openly calling
for a local training school, his hint was
hardly concealed and expressed a view
that differed from opinions heard at
Avondale School for Christian Workers.
From Sunnyside, her home on the Avon-
dale campus, Ellen White was urging
church leaders to bring natives from the J. E. Fulton. a pioneer worker in the
South Pacific who established one of
islands to the Australian school for an the first schools to educate islanders
education. The plan was to send them in their own environment rather than
back home as trained workers. to send them to Australia.
Her advice was feasible in parts of the South Pacific, but when Fiji-
ans tried to follow her advice they encountered more obstacles on their
way to Australia than they could overcome. Wesleyan missions con-
trolled education in Fiji, and local chiefs collaborated with them to re-
quire a special permit for Fijians who wanted to leave their home towns.
The colonial government would not overrule these local ordinances. In
addition, the New South Wales government in Australia would not per-
mit Fijians to enter the country unless they had a competitive grasp of
English. Rather than entangling students in reams of red tape, Fulton
advocated an advanced school in Fiji, but even for that option to suc-
ceed, changes would have to occur in both the colonial and local gov-
ernment.
Facing these restrictions, Fijians at Avondale were a rarity. In 1901
E. H. Gates, president of the Australasian Union, personally took a stu-
dent from Fiji to Australia, but the young man was a son of an English
plantation owner, not a Fijian. Two years later some "Bless the Lord"
responses came from the audience at the General Conference session
when Gates announced that the Fijian governor had softened enough to
165
Seventh-day Adventist schools became a commonplace in the South Pacific islands. This
school at Nukualofa on the island ofTongatapu. Tonga. included both native and Caucasian
students.
allow "another" native to go to Avondale. In 1905 two Fijians were
studying in Australia, but by that time Fulton's suggestion of a training
school in Fiji was beginning to materialize, partly because membership
was rISIng.
By 1905 about 200 Sabbath observers, not all of them baptized
members, worshiped at various places in Fiji. Fijian literature was flow-
ing from the Australian press, and a monthly church paper gave a sense
of unity to members on the islands. Gates told the delegates to the Gen-
eral Conference session that workers in Fiji had acquired about 500
acres of land for an industrial school which would become an educa-
tional center for prospective workers for other Pacific islands. Fulton
called for General Conference support, saying he could put everything
in operation for $1,500.
Classes in the new school began in 1904 at Buresala on the island
of Ovalau. Avondale graduate S. W. Carr was principal. Five years
later a girls' school opened as well. In 1908 the General Conference
Committee observed that Fiji had ten churches and 133 baptized
members, which amounted to the best showing of any place in the
166
Pacific islands. "The training school work has been the great factor in
Fiji, developing successful native laborers," the committee minutes
said. 13
Enrollment did not rise encouragingly, but church leaders kept the
school alive and viewed it as an integral institution in the South Pacific.
In 1909 thirty students enrolled; in 1920 the figure dropped to twenty.
It was a small beginning, but isolated as it was, this humble school on
a distant island would develop into Fulton College, one of the major
Adventist educational centers in the South Pacific.
Planting a School in the Philippines

The borders of the Australasian Union, which included the South
Pacific islands, also swung north to encircle the Philippines where Ad-
ventism arrived late as compared to other major regions in Asia. This
archipelago remained as an Oriental vestige of the Spanish Empire un-
til 1898 when it became the property of the United States as one of the
spoils of the Spanish-American War.
But the end of the war did not bring peace. Many Filipinos, already
fighting the Spaniards, regarded both Spanish rule and American oc-
cupation with equal hatred, and it was not long before shooting broke
out between Philippine guerrillas and the Americans. Before the Unit-
ed States Army could squelch this new outbreak it lost more than a
thousand men chasing insurrectionists through the jungles. The Philip-
pines were only half subdued in 1901 when a civil government headed
by W. H. Taft, a future United States president, imposed an American-
ization process that transplanted the United States public school system
in the Philippines, complete with English language instruction and
North American teachers. By 1920 school attendance reached about a
million. By that time the majority of the teachers were Filipinos, many
of them educated in the United States.
Although political conditions in the Philippines were inviting,
Seventh-day Adventists did not run opportunistically to the islands
immediately after the United States took possession of them. Nor did
the Philippines attract missionaries from Australia in the same way as
places like Fiji, Tonga, and the Cook Islands. During his scouting visit
to the Philippines in 1905, G. A. Irwin, president of the Australasian
Union, reacted cautiously to the mixed conditions he found. 14
167
After more than four centuries of Spanish hegemony, the Philip-

pines were nominally Catholic, but the southern part of the archipelago
was Muslim and in other regions many mountain tribes were "hea-
then," using the jargon of the time. Estimates placed illiteracy at sev-
enty-five percent in Manila and nearly ninety percent in other areas.
Following the war, Protestant missionaries from many denominations
pounced upon this new field, organized an evangelical society, and di-
vided up the islands into ecclesiastical spheres of influence. American
dollars, which were paying for an infrastructure of roads, communica-
tion, and education, kept the economy hot; even six years after the war
in 1905 inflated war prices hung on and showed no sign of subsiding.
For most Adventist workers with less than modest earnings the cost of
living was out of reach.
At Irwin's urging, a small Adventist beginning occurred, but for
three years it reached hardly anyone outside English-speaking circles.
This changed in 1908 when the L. V. Finsters arrived who aimed their
efforts at the Filipinos themselves. Success was slow. Not until 1911 did
Finster baptize anyone, but he followed the ceremony with classes to
train the new converts to conduct personal evangelism. By 1912 Ad-
ventists claimed about a hundred baptized Filipinos.
In 1909, even before any Filipinos became members, 1. E. Fulton
suggested that the church should have a school in the Philippines. The
quickening pace of church growth after 1913 was all the inspiration
Finster needed to convert his early classes into formal education. In
1917, with the help of three teachers, one of them a Filipino, he launched
a twelve-grade school at Pasay on the fringe of Manila, next to a small
Adventist publishing house. Thirty-six students enrolled, a third of
them girls. They met on the ground floor of a small building above
which in the second story the male students lived while the girls lived
in a separate building. The ubiquitous Adventist work plan was also
part of the program with students building furniture, working in gar-
dens, and erecting houses.
Growth at the new Philippine Academy was meteoric compared to
other institutions on the frontiers of Adventist education. The school
began with three teachers and added three more the second year after
enrollment jumped to eighty. By the time the first class graduated in
1920 the school had registered an estimated 180 students and employed
168
a faculty of ten. Hardly before anyone realized it, Philippine member-

ship grew to about 2,200, and the training school became one of the
largest outside North America.
A Comparison
Similarities characterized education on these Adventist frontiers in
Jamaica, Peru, Fiji and the Philippines. Although beginning at different
times, by 1920 the idea of an Adventist training school was a firmly
established aspect of mission activity. Education also began as one of
the leading evangelistic tools of the church. In some cases the school
was the primary method of creating a denominational presence and
developing an effective mission. Also common to all four countries
was the tendency by the public to view education as a movement of
social uplift.
The Christianization process had advanced to varying degrees in
all of these mission frontier countries and, as a rule of thumb, ac-
quaintance with Christian traditions worked to the advantage of Ad-
ventism and Adventist education. But the Christianity already exist-
ing in these countries was not always a blessing. To some extent,
workers suffered prejudice in all of these fields but only in Peru did it
turn violent. It was a singular irony that the stiffest opposition to Ad-
ventist education occurred where it was most closely linked to hu-
manitarianism, but in the end the combination of education and hu-
manitarianism in Peru directly influenced structural change in the
political establishment.
With the similarities there were differences. Unlike Jamaica, Peru
and Fiji, the Philippines were a holding of the United States and there
is little question that Adventist education benefitted from the American
occupation. Of all the frontiers of Adventist missions, schools advanced
most rapidly in these islands where it was part of a deliberate and well
funded effort by the United States to raise the literacy level of Filipi-
nos.
'General Conference Bulletin, 1906, no. 21, p. 361.

2This description of the Foreign Missionary Seminary is summarized from General Con-
ference Bulletin, 1906, no. 21, pp. 361-363; ibid., 1909, no. 6, p. 79; ibid., no. 20, pp. 325,326,
344; ibid., no. 21, pp. 361-363; 1913: ibid., no. 20, p. 3\0; General Conference Committee
Minutes, February 20, 1913 and March 16, 1913, AST.
169

'The sources for this account of the West Indies are Greenleaf, The Seventh-day Adven-
tist Church in Latin America and Caribbean, v. 1, pp. 48, 143, 166, 176-178. See also, Gen-
eral Conference Bulletin, 1905, no. 4, p. 19; ibid., 1909: no. 20, pp. 339,340; 1913: ibid., no.
5, p. 79.
51bid, 1905, no. 4, p. 19.
6Ibid., 1909, no. 20, p. 240.
7Ibid., 1913., no. 5, p. 79.
8This account of Adventism in Peru relies on F. A. Stahl, In the Land ofthe Incas (Moun-
tain View, CA: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 1920); Review and Herald articles pub-
lished from letters of missionaries between 1906 and 1921; also General Conference Bulletin,
1909, no. 21, pp. 355,356; 1913: ibid., no. 12, p. 184; ibid., no. 14, pp. 211, 212; ibid., 1918, no.
3. p. 41; no. 5, pp. 66, 67; and Greenleaf, ibid.,v. 1. pp. 115-120,304-311. E. H. Wilcox, In
Perils Oft (Nashville, TN: Southern Publishing Association, 1961), a memoir of the Titicaca
region, provides valuable insights but no chronological data of the period under study.
9RH, October 20,1921.
10 Stahl Center for World Service, La Sierra University.
II For this section on the South Pacific see Missionary Magazine for the following articles:
J. O. Corliss, "Missionary Work in the Pacific Islands," (April 1898), pp. 118-122; Allen
Moon, "Our Work in Polynesia," (April 1898), pp. 115-118; J. E. Fulton, "The Fijians," (May
1898), pp. 163, 164; J. E. Fulton, "School Exercises In Fiji," (November 1898), pp. 414,415; E.
H. Gates, "A Trip Through Fiji," (June 1900), pp. 255-258; J. E. Fulton, "Missionary Labor in
Fiji," (February 1902), pp. 64-66; General Conference Bulletin, 1901, no. 1, p. \0; ibid., 1903,
no. 9, pp. 141, 142; ibid., 1905, no. 3, p. 9; ibid., no. 2, p. 16; 1909: ibid., no. 8, p. 113; ibid., no.
16, p. 262; ibid., 1913, no. 10, p. 150; General Conference Committee Minutes, April 22,
1908, AST; Statistical Report, 1920.
12Fulton, "School Exercises in Fiji," Missionary Magazine (November 1898), p. 414.
13General Conference Committee Minutes, April 22, 1908.
"The information about the beginning of education in the Philippines comes from Gen-
eral Conference Bulletin, 1905, no. 6, pp. 13, 14; ibid., 1909, no. 8, pp. 114, 115; Spalding,
Christ's Last Legion, pp. 103, \04,526; Brown, Chronology, p. 147 ;"The Philippines," Mis-
sionary Magazine (June 1895), pp. 213, 214; Statistical Report, 1920.
FRONTIERS IN AFRICA
AND ASIA
Perhaps to the North American Adventist there was little if any

difference between frontier missions in non-Caucasian countries
that had been Christianized and missions in non-Christian lands.
But as demanding as were the tasks that lay within the Christian
community, even greater challenges faced Adventist education
among non-Christian peoples. At times exotic beyond expectation or
primitive beyond imagination, life in these distant corners of the
earth intrigued the Adventist world and pulled a generation of work-
ers from their comfortable western surroundings to live on the other
side of the globe. Many spent their lives in their adopted lands.
Stories about these pioneers forged a stock-in-trade view of Adventist
mission life that lingered for decades in the Adventist mind. The picture
of a European type, living in a small home with little furniture, meager
food, and no plumbing, or garbed in jungle attire, standing beside a pic-
ture roll, teaching a group of half naked listeners approximated more
often than not what Adventists saw in their minds' eye when they heard
the word missionary. To a great extent this popularized image of Adven-
tist missionary life owed its existence to missionary activities on the
frontiers, some of them in non-Christian parts of the world.
171
The picture was at least partially valid, for there were indeed cases
of primitive living and teaching groups of listeners in the wilderness
where missionaries created islands of civilization in remote locations.
But the view was not universally true. Ancient and rich cultures char-
acterized some non-Christian regions although the masses often lived
in poverty and illiteracy. Many missionaries lived in urban locations
but they lived simply.
At its heart the Christianizing process was a matter of teaching as
broadly understood, and education was informal as well as formal. Ad-
ventist schools figured prominently in missionary activity. Although it
bore an Adventist stamp, education took on new forms wherever mis-
sionaries went in non-Christian lands. A respect for change and im-
provement in personal well being and in living conditions formed the
practical impact of the message of salvation through Christ.
Solusi-an Adventist Legend

Few projects grabbed the imagination of Adventists as dramatically
as Solusi Mission in Africa. Its story became an Adventist legend, prob-
ably, as educator and author E. M. Cadwallader has explained, because
Solusi was the first mission "established by Seventh-day Adventists
among a primitive, pagan people."1 Africa had also been the location of
the first so-called Adventist college outside North America, partly be-
cause of the generosity and vision of Peter Wessels. It was he and his
brother, John, who urged the church to carry the gospel to the "Kaf-
firs."
Heralding Christianity to Black Africa was part of the colonial pen-
etration of Africa that Europeans began as early as the mid-seventeenth
century. Until the nineteenth century the movement of civilization pro-
ceeded slowly. Dutch and British settlers were the early rivals in the
south, but through the nineteenth century Germans, Portuguese, Bel-
gians and French joined the colonial movement.
Outsiders were no strangers to Africans. For centuries Muslim ad-
venturers had pushed into the interior from the north and east, traffick-
ing in slaves, gold, agriculture, and native products and establishing
Arab communities, some of them hundreds of miles inland from the
coast. Indian traders were also common along the east coast. For Afri-
cans, the Europeans were only another alien element whose primary
FRONTIERS IN AFRICA AND ASIA
economic activities during the nineteenth century were slave trading,

cattle raising, agriculture and mining. Free-wheeling entrepreneurs
trekked far into the interior to establish mining concessions and to
found communities where Africans could buy trinkets, fabrics, tools
and household goods. Many settlers staked out personal holdings to
exploit the agricultural potential of the continent. Moved by religious
idealism, mission societies followed this economic activity by import-
ing Christianity.
It was in this setting that the Wessels brothers donated $15,000 to
buy land for a mission among their neighbors to the north. An inter-
view between A. T. Robinson, president of the South Africa Confer-
ence, and Cecil Rhodes, head of the British South Africa Company, led
to an acquisition of 12,000 acres ofland near Bulawayo in Matabele-
land, later known as Southern Rhodesia, which became the Zimbabwe
of the late twentieth century.
The land itself was a gift, but Adventists were to pay an annual quit
rent of about $60 in order to keep it. Rhodes negotiated the deal on the
heels of his crushing defeat of the powerful Matabeles. Doling out land
was part of his empire-building scheme to colonize the region with
W H. Anderson, a graduate of Battle Creek College. and his wife and daughter stand
before their mud house at Solusi Mission. Anderson was the first teacher at Solusi, the
earliest Seventh-day Adventist educational mission among" heathen" peoples.
Europeans. Missionaries, he believed, would be much more effective

than militia in subduing the land and bringing peace to warring
tribes.
As missionaries to this part of Africa, Adventists were late comers;
both Protestant and Catholic missions had been in the back country for
decades. A group of seven Adventist workers ventured out in 1894 to
claim the land that Rhodes offered and establish the mission. Traveling
as far as the train from Cape Town would take them, they completed
their 1,500-mile journey by oxcart. The party included Peter Wessels
and two former students of Claremont Union College, Fred Sparrow
and I. B. Burton. The next year a second group arrived, also having
plodded by oxcart for several weeks to begin mission operations. In this
second party were W. H. Anderson and his young wife, fresh from
Battle Creek College, who recalled that as they passed through Bechua-
naland natives begged them to stay and establish schools among them.
"Day after day, and over and over again, we were compelled to turn a
deaf ear to the entreaties for teachers," he said. Anderson knew that
Africa was ready for an educational movement. 2
The work began at Solusi Mission in 1895 with a physician, A. S.
Carmichael, treating the sick and G. B. Tripp serving as general super-
visor. Gradually Anderson began teaching the local people whose lan-
guage was not yet reduced to written form. Students were mature men.
Tribal leaders were reluctant to allow women to enroll in school be-
cause they feared that education would generate a spirit of indepen-
dence and would ruin traditional African home life.
Less than a year after Anderson began his teaching, the Matabeles
rebelled against Rhodes' empire-building plans. The missionaries fled
to Bulawayo while friendly tribespeople protected their homes and be-
longings during the five-month siege. When the mission staff returned
in September 1896 they picked up where they had been interrupted.
Attendance at church services rose, but trouble fell upon them immedi-
ately.
A post-war famine became both a scourge and a blessing. Food pric-
es soared and survival was difficult, but it provided a chance to teach
agriculture with special meaning. Solusi workers turned the mission
into a vegetable farm that kept their pantries filled. The surplus they
sold in Bulawayo for much needed cash. The famine and its attendant
174
disease produced a population of young orphans whom the missionar-

ies took in. These victims of war and hardship shared the homegrown
food and became eager students in the school. Shortly they developed
into the first generation of native African teachers. But disease took its
toll. Before the end of 1896 five workers died. Among them were Tripp,
the mission director, and Carmichael, the physician.
Whatever the difficulties, the missionaries had no intention of leav-
ing. In 1899 F. L. Mead, who had replaced Tripp, organized two nearby
missions, one with a school at Umkupuvula, about twenty-five miles
from Solusi. Other outstations sprouted up. Teachers were natives who
had finished the third grade level course at Solusi. "These out-schools
were well filled," Anderson wrote. "Our native boys would teach school
in one village during the forenoon, and then walk two miles to another
village to teach there in the afternoon, returning home at night about
sunset. Thus our work was expanding in every direction." Founding
schools where students could learn the gospel became the evangelistic
method in Africa. 3
Solusi itself rapidly developed into a central training station for the
Adventist community in Black Africa. Outstation schools implemented
a third grade education similar to the original program at Solusi. The
courses in satellite locations were preparatory for the most promising
students who continued their studies at Solusi. Inspired by these suc-
cesses, missionary teachers founded other similar schools. One of the
earliest was Somabula Mission, begun in 1901 by F. G. Armitage and
his wife, who scouted the region by oxcart for several weeks before set-
tling about 200 miles northeast of Solusi near the town of Gwelo.
In 1903 Anderson ventured into Batongaland, a region that became
Zambia, the home of tribes so brutal and vicious that even David liv-
ingstone himself years before had doubted that anyone could change
them. Anderson's purpose was to honor his promise to Lewanika, king
of the Barotses, that he would establish a school among them. At first
resentful of the incursions of the Whites into Africa, the Barotse king
changed his mind after traveling to London as a royal guest at the coro-
nation of Edward VII. Anderson's four-month, 300-mile odyssey near-
ly cost him his life, but he recorded a claim to a 5,000-acre tract that
became Pemba Mission, later known as Rusangu Mission, a school pat-
terned after Solusi.
175
After about two decades of operation, Solusi's campus consisted of

a brick classroom building with a corrugated iron roof, blackboards
fashioned from linoleum painted black, and a couple of maps. Arranged
among the campus flower beds were a church, dormitories, a kitchen
and dining room, living quarters for Whites and African workers, a
store, a blacksmith shop, and a tool shed. A herd of cattle produced
milk and butter, flocks of hens furnished eggs, and 300 acres of culti-
vated land bore fruit and corn. Nearby Bulawayo was a market for
many of the farm products. Besides their work in the school industries,
many students sold literature to pay their expenses. Among the gold
mines in Southern Rhodesia they found many who bought something
to read even if they were illiterate.
The instructional faculty included one White teacher assisted by
two African teachers. Already Black Africans were assuming the re-
sponsibility of training educators. "The natives are far more efficient as
laborers for their own people than is the European, who can never un-
derstand the working of the native mind," Anderson observed. 4 English
was the medium of instruction for several reasons. The school was in
English-held territory, and very early Africans with an eye for their
own future realized that advancement depended on their competence
in English. Missionaries preferred English because they had difficulty
learning African vernacular.
In 1910 Solusi traded 4,000 acres of its land for territory on which
to establish Inyazura Mission, the first mission in Mashonaland. By
1917 the Solusi system grew to more than a thousand church mem-
bers. The several training schools in what was called South Africa
enrolled nearly 700 prospective African workers. More than 3,000
pupils studied in the outstations. These schools were crude by any
standard, but they were a beginning and better than nothing for the
illiterate tribespeople who attended. Among Adventists Solusi be-
came the example of a successful educational mission in a primitive
setting.
Anderson and fellow workers referred to schools in Africa as train-
ing schools, but these centers were not comparable to training schools
as the West knew them. Curricula in the African schools were rudi-
mentary at best. For the time being they were training schools for an
illiterate society. Not until the general level of literacy rose in Africa
176
did Solusi and its system of outstations develop an instructional pro-

gram at the secondary level, and later, post-secondary.
Europeans may not have been strangers to Africans in the nine-
teenth century, even deep in the interior, but in the late nineteenth cen-
tury the sub-Saharan continent was still an uncivilized land. Yet,
change had impacted many Africans. Some of them burned with re-
sentment, regarding Christianity as merely another commodity that
Whites peddled along with cloth, pots and pans. However, in growing
numbers others became keenly aware that education was a means to
enjoy at least a small measure of the comforts that the Whites had.
Adventist missionaries brought with them Ellen White's instruction
to mesh an agricultural program with education, especially in rural and
economically disadvantaged areas and, if necessary, to carve self-
supporting institutions out ofthe wilderness. Also, they were to educate
church workers within the context of their own culture. If Avondale
School for Christian Workers in Australia, emerging simultaneously
with Solusi, exemplified her advice as applied in Western society,
Solusi was the prime illustration in a non-Western, primitive area.
The decision to use education as a means to spread the gospel was
not original with Adventists. Other denominations had already imple-
mented these ideas in Africa before Solusi existed and Adventists ben-
efitted by their experience. Among the notable examples was a Church
of Scotland industrial mission in neighboring Nyasaland where one of
its students, James Malinki, earned a teacher's certificate in 1890. Ten
years later he established a chain of schools for fellow Africans which
he turned over to Seventh-day Adventists after he converted to Advent-
ism. Among them was what became Malamulo Mission.
Until 1920 Malinki served as a supervisor of all Adventist village
schools in Southern Nyasaland. 5 His influence in evangelizing his home
country was extensive. "In Nyasaland, we have a training school as
large as one of our colleges in America," W. H. Anderson wrote in
1919. "We are developing workers as fast as we can; yet we are abso-
lutely unable to supply the great, insistent calls that are multiplying all
about US."6
The practice of establishing Adventist schools spread to other parts
of Africa. Completely independent of the Solusi system was Waterloo
Industrial School, begun in 1909 in the British protectorate of Sierra
Leone on the southwestern shore of Africa's hump. It functioned as a

training center for West Africa. In the same year, about 500 miles east
of Cape Town near Grahamstown, Maranatha Mission School opened.
Eight years later it relocated a hundred miles northeast in Butterworth
and became Bethel Training School which began graduating students
from its theology department in 1920.7
Cecil Rhodes' argument that missionaries would be effective carri-
ers of civilization proved true. Bulawayo, thirty-five miles from Solusi,
was a community of 7,000 Europeans in 1898, an unquestioned civiliz-
ing influence but hardly a model of Western values and culture. By
contrast, Solusi was a school that transformed Africans into teachers
who radiated out among the villages. While they taught Adventism
they also taught literacy and instilled a sense of personal worth and
dignity. Developing Solusi from a raw mission to a training school had
taken only about four or five years, including the interruptions caused
by war and famine. If Solusi played a significant part in African Ad-
ventism, it also had figured in the development of Africa itself
Adventist Education Enters China

No less important to the movement of Adventist education were
early schools in China. By the nineteenth century this land was losing
its grip as the dominating influence in the Orient. Similar to Africa,
European entrepreneurs were active in China, wringing concessions
from the imperial government to sink mines, build railroads, and lease
seaports. In the face of Western military superiority China lay almost
prostrate. During the last years of the nineteenth-century, European
governments from Russia to England parceled out the country into
spheres of influence in which they arrogated special political privileges
to themselves. Japan also joined the scramble. Christian missionaries
followed their flags, often making it difficult for Chinese to distinguish
between what was political and what was religious.
To fall prey to foreign intrusion was a bitter pill for a people whose
ancient culture had produced poets, artists and philosophers, contem-
poraneous with the Old Testament. By the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury the Chinese were in a contentious mood, exasperated not only
with foreigners but with their own imperial government which ap-
peared powerless to defend them against outsiders. In 1900 their pent
178
In 1902 this first group of Seventh-day Adventist workers settled in Hong Kong to learn
Chinese. The next year, Ida Thompson, seated second from right, began a school for
girls in Canton, the first Adventist school in China. It eventual(v became what is now
Hong Kong Adventist College.
up anger flared, especially against Christianity. In the ensuing Boxer

Rebellion about 200 missionaries lost their lives.
Two years later in 1902 the first Adventist missionaries, 1. N. An-
derson, his wife, and wife's sister, Ida Thompson, arrived from the
United States, landing in Hong Kong to learn the language before set-
tling in the interior. Before the end of the year another contingent of
North American workers arrived. The tiny band of Adventist workers
had little money. Thompson was in China, thanks to the generosity of
the North American Wisconsin Conference which had put her on its
payroll. Two years after her arrival she opened a school for girls in
Canton, a city of2,500,000 in southern China, about a hundred miles
north of Hong Kong. The Wisconsin Conference also agreed to sup-
port her school, and in turn, she named it Bethel Girls' School after
the secondary school that had recently been established at Bethel,
Wisconsin. 8
179
In a house with freshly whitewashed walls, newly painted wood-

work, and tile floors that were scrubbed until the white grout showed
again, instruction began on May 25, 1904. Any girl could attend who
provided her own books and desk and promised to study. Twenty-five
came the first day. Because she could not teach in Chinese, Thompson
hired a young Chinese woman educated at the local Baptist mission to
translate. That first morning Thompson started with a prayer followed
by teaching the song, "Jesus Loves Me." Adventist education in China
had begun.
There were no teaching materials in Chinese, but like her prede-
cessors in the Movement of 1897, Thompson and the Baptist teacher
depended on the Bible as the central textbook. The class schedule
ran six full days and on Saturday for only an afternoon, which the
teacher devoted exclusively to Bible study and spiritual activities.
Seventh-day Adventist education proliferated rapidly in China. On the island of Amoy

this school began short~v after Ida Thompson's school in Canton. The photo underscores
the growing trend during the ear~v twentieth century in China to provide education for
girls.
180
As the students became more familiar with biblical matters, the

Sabbath afternoon sessions merged with regular Sabbath services.
By the end of the first year the students had memorized the entire
gospel of Mark.
Thompson's vision of establishing a girls' school was only a tiny
straw in the wind of change that was arousing China from its isolation-
ism. An imperial decree abolished the old Confucianist system of edu-
cation in 1901, replacing it with instruction in western arts and sciences.
In less than a decade, education for females, previously unheard of, was
a growing trend. Another encouraging sign was a prohibition in 1902
of the practice of binding women's feet.
Once the new measures set in students flocked to Chinese schools
that offered courses in teaching, commerce, industrial education, and
military training. Thousands of government-sponsored students also
attended universities in Europe, the United States, and even Japan. In
1908 four Chinese women enrolled at Wellesley College in Massachu-
setts at government expense, one of the earliest cases of Chinese wom-
en studying abroad. Speaking to the General Conference session in
1909, Thompson called these developments "the index finger, pointing
out to us what is before us, and that now is our time to work for the
women of China."9
Notwithstanding these omens of modernization Thompson had
faced trying times in establishing her school. Old customs did not re-
verse themselves overnight. Society had long denied girls an education
and regarded women as subservient wives whose primary duty was to
bear children. Thompson estimated that not one woman in a hundred
could read. Not all Chinese looked kindly to anyone who upset their
ancient practices and finding someone from whom to rent or buy a
house for a girls' school had not been easy.
But Adventist education continued to grow and to benefit from mod-
ernization. In 1911 a republic replaced the Chinese imperial govern-
ment, making it easier for new ideals to seep into the country. Changes
in education were part of the ethos of the times. Mission schools dem-
onstrated that a foreign presence in China could be committed to social
uplift rather than a symbol of exploitation. Soon after her arrival in
China in 1919, Adelaide B. Evans, wife of I. H. Evans, president of the
Far Eastern Division, talked with an elderly man whose twin grandsons
181
were attending school. "That is the great thing," he stated, reflecting a

mood of pride in the new trends. 1o
In 1906 the missionaries bought the Baptist Academy in Canton.
They equipped a dormitory for twenty girls and set aside one room as
a prayer room. Enrollment rose to seventy, and to accommodate this
increase, Thompson employed two teachers and a cook. Within a year
after Bethel Girls' School opened, Edwin Wilbur, another Adventist
missionary, began Yick Chi Boys' School, also in Canton. This school
soon closed, but reopened in 1915 as SamYuk Middle School.
Similar to Adventist schools in Africa, the original purpose of Ad-
ventist schools was to convert students to Adventism rather than pre-
serving Adventist children to the church-at first there were no Adven-
tist children to preserve-but they also prepared workers. Schools
provided the first effective opportunity for Adventists to reach the
masses and education became the leading evangelistic method in Chi-
na. "Every foreign worker in China must be an educator," Dr. A. C.
Selmon, an Adventist physician in China, declared in 1909. 11 With her
experience in school work Thompson became somewhat of a denomi-
national authority in Chinese education. "We believe the school work
to be one of the most effective means of carrying this gospel to the
Chinese," she said. 12
It was from the elementary and mission schools that the church real-
ized membership gains. Teachers taught reading from the Bible and
song books, and improvised lessons in geography, physiology and
arithmetic. Girls practiced sewing and weaving, and mature men and
women learned to write Chinese characters and prepare materials to
teach the gospel.
By 1909 Adventist schools numbered about ten, found in each prov-
ince where missionaries had established a presence: four in Honan
Province, 800 miles north of Hong Kong; a boys' school in Fukien
Province, on the southeastern coast opposite the island of Taiwan; and
five schools in Kwang Tung Province, immediately north of Hong
Kong. One of the boys' schools in Kwang Tung functioned as a Bible
training school which produced six Chinese workers by 1909.
In less than a decade after the founding of Bethel Girls' School the
Adventist population grew enough to require a school for Adventist
children. More advanced training schools also became a matter of
182
concern. Between 1909 and 1913 one of the schools in Honan moved
three times, eventually settling in Shanghai where it became the rec-
ognized training center for Mandarin-speaking Chinese. In 1919 it
began offering post-secondary classes and assumed the name Shang-
hai Missionary College. In 1922 the original schools in Canton, Beth-
el Girls's School and Sam Yuk Middle School, merged to form a sin-
gle training school in South China. where Cantonese was the
prevailing language.
The reputation of Adventist schools spread. In Hunan Province, 500
miles north of Hong Kong, a son of an Adventist pastor became one of
the earliest second-generation workers after attending school in Shang-
hai. C. P. Lillie, a missionary visiting Adventist groups in the same
province during 1918, spoke of several promising students also attend-
ing the training school in Shanghai. 13
The girls' schools likewise had an effect. In Mrs. B. L. Anderson's
school for girls on the island of Amoy about 1,000 students enrolled
during the ten years after its founding in 1909. But it was at Bethel
where Adventist education began that denominational schools recorded
some of their striking successes for women. Among the students were
young slave girls, daughters of well-to-do Cantonese, and mature wom-
en. One, aged sixty, learned to read, gave up her tobacco, and became
a dedicated Christian. Another, an estranged wife of a magistrate, over-
came her hatred of foreigners, learned to read, stripped her home of its
images, and became a teacher in an Adventist school.
Also at Bethel a young widow of an Adventist worker continued her
dead husband's commitment to the ministry by training as a Bible
worker. Girls from Bethel broke with tradition by becoming colpor-
teurs and were among the first Adventist students in China to earn edu-
cational scholarships. Adelaide Evans noted in 1920 that "more and
more, too, the girls of the better classes are going to school, and learn-
ing how to help the children of their own land."'4
Frederick Griggs separated Adventist schools in China into four cat-
egories: schools for the children of missionaries and English members,
training schools for nationals, elementary schools conducted by church-
es for native children, and mission schools for the public. By 1916 the
number of the elementary and mission schools in China reached 118
with an enrollment of 5,000. Denton E. Rebok, the young American
183
secretary of education for the South China Union, reported about a

hundred schools in his field in 1918. By 1920 seven Adventist training
schools operated in China with a reported enrollment of 844. Five of
the seven offered the equivalent of a full secondary curriculum. At
Shanghai Missionary College nine students were classified as post-sec-
ondary.J5
The mediocre quality of Chinese education gave an opportunity for
Christian mission schools to provide an improved system of learning.
Compared to other Christian bodies, such as Roman Catholics with
their fifty institutions in Shanghai alone, Adventists made a very small
impression. "Our plans are not yet matured, our schools are few, our
teachers are wanting, our courses of study are crude ... but we have
made a beginning," Thompson said. J6
Although new education philosophy motivated Chinese schools,
adopting western teaching methodology was not rapid. Rebok discov-
ered in his South China schools that students created a deafening roar
by studying out loud, even shouting. Examinations were unheard of In
response to a specific question by Rebok, a student began to repeat the
textbook, word-for-word. Rebok remonstrated, but the teacher ex-
plained that the student would eventually have to arrive at the answer
since it was somewhere in the book and Rebok would simply have to
wait for it.
Whatever their flaws, Adventist schools were a growing enterprise
in China. While direct evangelism was gaining ground as the medium
for membership growth, education had earned its spot as a tool ofprog-
ress for the church. By 1920 Adventist schools in China enrolled more
students than in any other country outside North America. Also, the
foundations of a permanent educational system were underway.
Singapore Training School

Within the orb of China was Singapore, a British colony on a small
island at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula. In 1819 the British
East India Company founded a trading post on the island, which was
then under the control of a Malay sultanate. With this toehold in Malay-
sia the English commanded the Straits of Malacca, the shortest sea
route from India to the Orient. In 1867 Singapore became a crown col-
ony. Chinese merchants were the most numerous of a population of
184
entrepreneurs who gravitated to the city from other locales, including

Europe, the Arab world, India, Malaysia, East Indies and Southeast
Asia. Caucasians brought Christianity, Islam claimed a large number of
followers, but Buddhism was the leading religion. By the turn of the
century Singapore had become the home of a cosmopolitan population
and a wealthy entrepot of Southeast Asia.
Adventists made only inconsistent gestures toward Singapore
until 1904 when G. F. Jones and his wife, former missionaries to the
Pacific islands, moved to the city. Accompanying them was a col-
porteur. E. H. Gates, president of the Australasian Union, regarded
Singapore as a "wicked city," but nonetheless an especially strategic
and opportune location to spread the gospel. The recently arrived
workers agreed. Scarcely had they begun their work before they
spoke in terms of a medical outreach and a printing press. "Our la-
borers there are kept exceedingly busy," Gates wrote. i7 Among the
first converts were Chinese, Ceylonese, and Europeans, symbolic of
the international character of the city. Two years after the Joneses
arrived, Singapore became the headquarters for the newly formed
Malay Mission. 18
Typically, the workers' vision did not stop with intentions to estab-
lish a publishing center. In 1905 they began a church school. Two years
later it assumed the name of Eastern Training School, whose small but
certain existence formed the foundation for a training school that
opened in 1915 with eighty-two students. Almost overnight this school
became the center of a ring of mission schools in Sumatra, Java and
Borneo, and similar to Philippine Academy, it suffered immediate
growing pains. By its third year the newly named Singapore Training
School enrolled 142 students and increased its faculty to six, but it was
still short handed.
"Already," Frederick Griggs wrote in 1918, "22 students have gone
from this school into the work of our cause as canvassers, teachers,
ministers and Bible workers."19 The school did not maintain the spec-
tacular growth it showed during its first years, but it remained a perma-
nent fixture in Southeast Asia. From its original location the school
moved twice by 1920, the last transfer to Serangoon Road where per-
manent buildings went up for what would become Southeast Asia Union
College.
185
Korea
Another example of a major step in Adventist education came out of
Korea, called Chosen after 1910 when Japan began its thirty-five-year
occupation of the country. The cultural heritage of this geographical
appendage of China was mostly a mixture of Buddhist and Confucian
tradition. Its nineteenth century history was checkered with conflict.
Koreans repeatedly braced themselves against Chinese and Japanese
interference and systematically sought to uproot Christianity, which
had gained a substantial foothold. In 1895 Korea gained a short-lived
independence.
In 1905 the W. R. Smiths arrived as the first Adventist missionaries
and remained for twenty years to lay the foundations for education,
publishing, and a widening circle of churches. "As most of you know,"
Smith told the 1909 General Conference session, "we have a small
school at Soonan, in a building 60 x 12 feet." Crammed into those 720
square feet were a school for boys, a school for girls, a "little printing
press," and a dispensary for Dr. Riley Russell, who was less than a year
out of medical school. The combined school enrollment was about a
hundred. 20
Smith's description of the "small school" that he had begun two and
a half years earlier could hardly have been less auspicious for what
would become Sahmyook University with more than 5000 students,
the largest school in the Adventist world at the end of the twentieth
century. Soonan, the original home of this venture, was a suburb of the
northern city of Pyongyang. The school began in December, 1906 as
Euimyung School, a school for boys. Two years later Smith started a
girls' school, and after another two years, the two merged to become
Chosen Industrial School.
The development of this training school was relatively rapid. When
the Chosen Conference organized in 1917 the school added a two-year
ministerial course; two years later, following the formation of the Cho-
sen Union Mission, the institution changed its name to Chosen Train-
ing School, a secondary level school. By 1920 its enrollment reached an
estimated 124.
The original building in Soonan was a donation by the govern-
ment with the condition that Adventists conduct a boys' school. At
the time, Frederick Griggs noted, Korea was also feeling the influ-
186
ence of modernization, and the school made it possible for Adventists

to reach the people. He also credited the school with being a "large
benefit to the ... rapidly growing Chosen Conference" by producing
church workers.2I
Among these denominational employees was K. O. Lee, who at age
twenty-five was one of the first two Korean nationals to become a bap-
tized member. Immediately after his baptism he enrolled in the Soonan
school, became one of its teachers in 1908, and later, head of the mis-
sion where the training school was located. After fifteen years of church
presence in Korea, the Adventist community grew to more than a thou-
sand, organized into a union mission composed of three smaller mis-
sions. Similar to the Adventist community in China, Koreans also
turned to education as a means to reach the public. In 1920 the twenty
churches in Korea operated twenty-two schools.
Educational practices from the earliest days at Soon an were clearly
born out of Adventist tradition, but they were new to Korea and in some
instances, set precedents for educational change in the country at large.
Among the firsts for Korea was education for girls as well as co-educa-
tion, a break from Confucian tradition. Dormitory life for students was
another precedent, and the school was also among the first to promote
the dignity of labor by integrating vocational training into the curricu-
lum.
Meiktila, an Experiment in Burma

Probably in no other country in the Orient did Adventists enjoy more
immediate benefits from the winds of modernization than in Burma.
Upper Burma was mountainous, drained by the Irrawaddy and other
rivers that washed a huge delta southward into the Indian Ocean. The
country's neighbors, India, China, and Siam, later called Indochina,
had been intermittent threats to Burmese autonomy, but it was to the
British that Burma lost its identity during a series of nineteenth century
wars. By the mid-1880s it had become a tribute-paying protectorate in
the British Empire.
The story of Adventist education in Burma revolves around one
man, Robert Bruce Thurber, who with his wife, entered the country in
1909 on a mission to establish a school. He brought five years of experi-
ence in Adventist schools in Ohio and Michigan. His destination was
187
Meiktila, 300 miles north of Rangoon in central Burma within the

drainage basin of the Sittang River.22
According to Thurber, the Chinese and Indians were the dominating
agents of change in Burma, perhaps even more influential than the
West. In Meiktila a group of educated Burmans concluded that Bur-
mese men must learn to work if the country was to hold its own in a
changing world. About the same time they learned about Adventist phi-
losophy of education, including the dignity of labor, from a government
worker who had studied briefly with Adventist missionaries. Teaching
skilled trades was contrary to the educational traditions of Burma, but
inspired by their convictions and the prospects of a technical education,
they formed an association, elected officers, raised money, and asked
Adventists in Rangoon to establish a school for them. Adventist leaders
saw their request as an opportunity to establish an Adventist presence.
Thurber began cautiously, knowing that he had agreed to provide a
vocational curriculum. "We deceived no one," he wrote, "nor expected to
do so; for the natives generally know what the chief purpose of the mis-
sionary is. We would do just as we agreed ... Yet we would all the time
hope and pray and work to the end that some boys would see in passing
the greater good of the heart education that Christianity affords."23
Thurber hired a Chinese woodworker, brought in two Burmans to
teach in the vernacular, and began classes with twenty boys ranging in
age from eight to twenty-five. Enrollment quickly rose to thirty. De-
spite support from the locals, Thurber soon ran out of money and he
and other workers staged a fund raising campaign to buy land and build
a school with shops that would produce a self-supporting program. Two
years later he moved into a new school building on the shore of Meik-
tila Lake. Others buildings went up, creating a boarding school with
more than a hundred students.
Except for vocational training in Burmese jails, Meiktila Technical
School was the only school in the country where students could learn a
skilled trade. They studied Burmese and English in the morning and
spent their afternoons in the trades classes, making furniture, shoes
and products from cane weaving. Some of their work reached govern-
ment offices. Most of the students were Burmans, but Chinese, Indians,
and Eurasians also enrolled, as did Karens, a mountain people of Bur-
ma with their own language.
188
After five years Thurber knew that his program faced serious fi-
nancial problems and would not survive without change. He had al-
ready rejected an offer of a government subsidy after studying the
experience of mission schools of other Christian bodies that had ac-
cepted government grants-in-aid. The support he turned down was
indeed tempting; it would have amounted to half the cost of the build-
ings and teachers' salaries, but the condition for this money was a
government-outlined curriculum that prepared students for external
examinations but did not allow time for classes with biblical content.
Courses of study, textbooks, and teachers' qualifications all fell under
government control.
Thurber tried to maintain the school's independence by developing
a self-supporting school that offered technical and Christian education.
Students taking courses in trades skills did not pay tuition, in fact, the
school paid them a small wage for their work. Only those students who
enrolled in what Thurber called the "literary" curriculum paid tuition.
The school was dependent on these student fees and sales of its indus-
trial products for income.
As hard as Thurber worked the school fell short of government stan-
dards and thus remained unrecognized. After five years he could no
longer avoid the truth that "the school was slowly sinking." Meanwhile,
the idea that Burma would benefit from an emphasis on vocational edu-
cation became a national topic, prompting a conference in Rangoon to
discuss the issue. The meetings resolved nothing but broke up with
educators resigned to what they deemed the impossibility of integrat-
ing technical education with the prescribed government curriculum.
This impasse ended after the district commissioner of education un-
expectedly visited Meiktila Technical School. After examining the en-
tire campus he concluded that Thurber was doing "just what that con-
ference in Rangoon said couldn't be done."24 The government Education
Department almost immediately offered official recognition to Meik-
tila, urging Thurber to take public money. After negotiating conces-
sions allowing him to continue teaching skilled trades in place of some
academic subjects and to withdraw from the arrangement at the end of
any school year, he accepted the government's offer. The grants-in-aid
that Thurber's program received paid half of the teachers' salaries and
enabled Meiktila to continue.
189
Meiktila served the primary purpose of providing a technical educa-

tion to Burmese young men but it also offered enough traditional cours-
es to function as an Adventist training school. Leaders in Southern
Asia viewed it as the chief Adventist educational center in Burma. In
1918 Griggs noted that during the nine years since it began about sixty
students had been baptized. Some of them left for additional study in
India. Others went farther into the mountains among the Karens to
teach in village schools that Adventist missionaries began in 1915. By
1920 enrollment at Meiktila Technical School reached 155 and a school
for girls had also opened in the same community.
The Meiktila experience is one of the earliest cases of Adventists
confronting the issue of government subsidies to sectarian education.
Two decades earlier the gift of land which became Solusi Mission had
raised a storm of protest in some Adventist circles. Some religious lib-
erty leaders claimed that accepting the donation was a breach of the
principles of separation of church and state. Arguing that God impress-
es men in high places to assist His work on earth, Ellen White settled
the debate by advising in favor of the gift, explaining that the cry to
reject the land came from a distorted understanding of the issue.
Grants-in-aid were also a form of government support but they rep-
resented a different question. They were sustained financial support of
sectarian schools from the public treasury, and probably a clearer case
could be made against them, at least as North Americans understood
the circumstances. But Thurber was in Burma, not the United States.
Further, the British colonial government did not actually prohibit class-
es with biblical content; instead, it prescribed curricular controls that
made additional instruction of any kind so difficult as to be infeasible.
Thurber did not oppose government money as a violation of the
principle of separation of church and state, but rather on the principle
that Adventist schools were not to implement curricula that had no
room for Bible classes, which would have deprived them of their de-
nominational identity. Only when he received assurances that Meiktila
could retain its character as an Adventist school while receiving grants-
in-aid did he accept government money.
In 1914 when Thurber made his decision, Adventist policy-making
was primarily a process based on North American experience. At that
time the question of accepting government support for education was
190
not an issue in North American politics, hence, there were no North

American precedents to follow, but in principle, Adventist leaders
sought to avoid any connection with governments that could threaten
denominational freedoms whether or not an immediate danger exist-
ed.
Adventist schools contemporary with Meiktila were institutions
with simple purposes-to prepare workers to engage in some form of
evangelistic activity, but Meiktila had begun as a response to a public
request and from its inception its objectives were mixed. Thurber un-
apologetically pursued a dual purpose. By his arrangement with the
British colonial government he showed that it was possible for sectarian
schools to accept public money, but the circumstances indicate that
government education leaders rationalized their support for Meiktila as
a school that fulfilled a public service rather than as support of an Ad-
ventist training school.
From the vantage point of the twenty-first century Thurber's deci-
sion to accept grants-in-aid looms large, but in 1914 it was not an ep-
ochal point in the history of Adventist education. It remained only an
innocuous footnote in Adventist history, practically unnoticed in his
memoir, In the Land a/Pagodas, published in 1921 as part of the read-
ing fare for the entire denomination. No one foresaw the political and
social complexities facing Adventist education in years to come and
that the issue of government subsidies would appear time and again in
the Adventist world, becoming progressively more thorny as Adventist
schools spread around the globe.
Adventist Schools in India

One of the daunting tasks of Adventist missionaries was to establish
schools in India. Often called the subcontinent, the India of the nine-
teenth century was a much larger land than the India of the late twenti-
eth century. It lay across the underside of Asia, stretching from the Is-
lamic Middle East to the Buddhist Orient while bulging upward against
China on the north. It was home to hundreds of millions, divided into
many ethnic groups, each speaking its own language and maintaining
its own cultural heritage. Islam and Hindu were the two major reli-
gions, but many Buddhist traditions survived from India's ancient past.
The population divided into castes, ranging from the Brahmins, heirs
191
of a wealthy and cultured past, to the illiterate, squalid untouchables.

More so than in most parts of Asia, India was the place where the
East and the West met. Under the manipulative control of the English
East India Company, a quasi-governmental agency, this congeries of
peoples step by step fell into English hands. England annexed some
portions of India but left others as client states. In 1858 the English
Parliament handed over the governing authority of the East India Com-
pany to the crown, but little changed. English domination typically
meant little interference in local matters but total control of larger is-
sues, including economic affairs. Restiveness was common among
Hindu and Muslim, who were sometimes mutually suspicious, but
joined in resentment over colonial policies. English retribution for lack
of compliance with colonial authority was usually swift and sometimes
brutal.
But England's harsh paternalism had its brighter side. In India dur-
ing the late nineteenth century there were universities, hospitals, rail-
roads and telegraph lines; nevertheless, it was still an undeveloped
country. Literacy among the male population was low by Western stan-
dards, probably no more than ten percent, and among women, less than
one percent. Yet the emblems of Western culture were having their
impact. Indians in small numbers were edging into the system. Some
became middlemen and manufacturers, and a small professional mid-
dle class evolved.
It was in 1892 that Adventist colporteurs began selling literature in
India's large cities. In 1895 Georgia Burrus, the first permanent Adven-
tist worker, arrived in Calcutta, the largest center in northeastern India.
Before the end of the year others joined her and the following year they
opened a school for girls in the mission house in which they lived. 25
Accounts differ, but in rapid succession missionaries started other
schools in Calcutta and a school for missionary children. These small
ventures bore a striking humanitarian character-one was an orphan-
age, another a kindergarten. Twenty years after Burrus' arrival, work-
ers had established boarding schools, industrial schools and mission
schools from the Himalayas to South India.
Visiting these schools was the purpose of General Conference Sec-
retary of Education H. R. Salisbury'S four-month tour of Asia prior to
the 1913 General Conference session. "In India we now have a score of
192
boarding-schools and village schools," he summarized after his trip,

"with an attendance of nearly nine hundred students." This figure in-
cluded Meiktila Technical School. About two-thirds of the enrollment
were day students. 26
Although missionaries were in charge of the larger schools, for good
reason they depended on Indians who did most ofthe teaching. Student
enrollment was too great and the variety of languages too numerous to
expect missionaries to teach effectively, although some of them had
become proficient in the vernacular. Salisbury counted schools in six
languages besides English and Burmese. Some schools, such as those
at Panvel near Bombay and at Karmatar in Bengal, were educational
centers surrounded by outstations where Indian teachers conducted vil-
lage schools.
Although some schools were segregated between boys and girls, in
others the enrollment was mixed, both ethnically and in gender. In the
first school Salisbury visited, girls outnumbered boys by two and a half
times. Students were Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and in some instances,
Jewish. The chief men of the village appeared not at all concerned about
this mix; they welcomed Salisbury with speeches of appreciation for
the school.
But a sense of brotherhood was not powerful enough to surmount
the caste system. At Kalyan near Bombay, Indian teachers conducted
two schools to accommodate different castes. In this community mis-
sion workers had access to only one building for a school; significantly,
the higher caste occupied it while the lower caste met under a tree. At
the school in the Himalayan community of Garhwal the L. 1. Burgesses
provided separate food preparation and eating areas for students of dif-
ferent castes. Here, Salisbury observed, the daily teaching of the Bible
"has begun to drive out the darkness of superstition and ignorance from
the hearts of the boys."27
At Mussoorie, also in the Himalayas, Edith E. Bruce operated a school
intended for both the Anglo-Indian community and European children.
It offered a curriculum that met the requirements for external examina-
tions. As teachers discovered elsewhere in the British Empire, integrat-
ing Bible and vocational classes and a student labor schedule into an es-
tablished program was not easy, but they succeeded well enough to
become the testing site for the Trinity College examination in music.
7-IP.F.TW 193
The proliferation of Adventist schools between 1896 and 1915 un-

derscored two trends that characterized Adventism in India. The first
was a recognition that formal preaching was a peculiarly Christian ac-
tivity, not as well suited to introduce biblical teachings in non-Chris-
tian societies as was education. This same aspect of Adventist educa-
tion was also apparent in other countries where literacy rates were low.
In these regions many native people experienced enough exposure to
education to associate the skills of Western culture with personal en-
hancement and social advancement. Thus Adventist schools became a
vehicle to convey not only biblical teachings and spiritual conversion
but basic education as well.
That many Indian people accepted Adventist schools primarily as a
means to acquire an education rather than to adopt Christianity became
obvious at the Bengali school in Karmatar. At first the parents of the
fifty or more Muslim and Hindu students seemed more willing for their
children to associate with each other for the sake of education than to
listen to instruction from the Bible. But biblical topics and Christian
practices were part of the educational package, and in time their objec-
tions vanished and some opened their doors to Christianity.
The second trend in Adventism in India was its fragmented charac-
ter, which became obvious as each of the Adventist schools functioned
separately instead of part of an overall administrative structure. With a
paucity of members scattered over the subcontinent, language and eth-
nic differences tended to isolate regions from each other with each lan-
guage area representing a mission in itself. Oversight of India rested
first in the hands of the General Conference and later the Asiatic Divi-
sion. Changes in this arrangement occurred only when membership
constituted a critical mass sufficiently large to justify regional and local
church organization.
Adventist education reflected these conditions, which had long been
a cause for concern. After visiting much of the world field between
1907 and 1909, Frederick Griggs characterized Adventist school work
in India as "desultory," and called for permanent schools in Tamil-
speaking South India and also in Burma, which at the time, was part of
the Greater Indian field.
The first steps to turn the "desultory" nature of Adventist education
around occurred in 1910 with the formation of the India Union Mission,
194
which became an administrative umbrella for smaller missions com-

posed of geographic clusters of language groups. With this beginning
of regional administration came concepts of additional organization,
including training schools for workers.
Among the early workers in India to reach the conclusion that edu-
cation was the preferred method of evangelism were G. G. and Bertha
Lowry, who sailed for India in 1909. They settled in Tamil-speaking
South India where the momentum of Adventism had shifted from the
Bengali area around Calcutta. In the same year that the Lowrys ar-
rived, 1. S. James, leader of Adventist missions in South India, estab-
lished a school at Nazareth, which became the leading school in the
region until Lowry established the South India Training School at Co-
imbatore in 1915.
Also in 1915 I. F. Blue, a former professor at Union College in the
United States, founded the Indian Christian Training School at Luc-
know in North India, the seat of the India Union Mission. Workers
viewed Lowry's and Blue's schools differently, the one at Lucknow as
an institution for the entire India Union in contrast to Coimbatore as
the educational center for South India.
Whatever status the two schools had, circumstances favored South
India Training School. It was the only Adventist school in the entire
country where Indians could earn a secondary education. The first
year's enrollment at Coimbatore outnumbered the Lucknow students
three to two; the second year with forty-three students South India
nearly doubled the Lucknow enrollment. The improvised conditions of
the school plant at Coimbatore could hardly accommodate this growth
and Lowry began a search for a new location. After the close of the
1917 school year he moved to rented quarters in Bangalore where he
remained until he could erect buildings on a permanent location about
six miles from the center of the city.
Two major changes marked the move to Bangalore: a new principal,
E. M. Meleen from North America, replaced Lowry, and the teaching
staff separated boys and girls into different schools, a policy that re-
mained until coeducation at that level became an acceptable practice.
From opening day onward the program in South India was a blend of
Anglo and Indian effort. Lowry made certain that some of his staff
were Indian. While teachers used vernacular languages for all classes
195
in the lower standards, they taught in both English and vernacular in

the middle levels. English was the exclusive medium in the upper, or
secondary standards.
In 1920 South India Training School tentatively began offering post-
secondary classes, a simple, one-year course to train ministers. Enroll-
ment was fifty, thirty boys and twenty girls. This figure represented a
drop from previous levels, but enrollment was beginning to divide
among six other schools in the South India Mission that attracted a
combined total of nearly 300 students. Among them was another school
at Nazareth. These schools were developing stronger programs and un-
doubtedly some students were remaining in local centers rather than
traveling to Bangalore. Taken as a whole, Adventist education in South
India revealed that the concept ofa system of feeder schools supporting
a central training school was taking shape.
Events were not as kind to Indian Christian Training School at Luc-
know. Hardly had operations begun when illness struck the principal,
forcing him to withdraw while an interim replacement kept the new
program going. Meanwhile, little optimism developed for the intended
union training school as it could not overcome a consistently low en-
rollment. Other schools in North India were developing into competi-
tors rather than feeder schools. Adventist educator E. W. Pohlman has
suggested that language problems appeared to be more difficult to re-
solve in North India than in South India, which contributed to the lack
of growth at Lucknow. For a combination of reasons the school closed
in 1919 after only four years of operations. Following this shutdown
Adventist schools in North India shuffled from place to place and fre-
quently changed their names. These unsettled conditions allowed South
India Training School to emerge as the leading Adventist educational
enterprise in India. This development had not been deliberate, but no
one can dismiss G. G. Lowry's foresight as mere happenstance. It was
he who seized the opportune moment to begin a defined training school.
Once taken, that step proved to be a turning point for Adventist educa-
tion in India. A central publishing house and a central church adminis-
tration were already in place. Within five years after it began, South
India Training School injected a strong element of organizational unity
to the church by becoming the most prominent educational center to
train personnel for all of Adventism in India.
196
A Review of Adventist Education Until 1920

By 1920 Adventist education had spread from its North American
origins to nearly every major world field where the church maintained
a presence. In remote regions it had spawned training schools apropos
to the cultural level of each society. In most undeveloped lands educa-
tion served as a leading evangelistic tool to reach the public, which was
a contrast to developed, Christian societies where preaching was the
prominent means to convey the gospel.
In undeveloped countries classrooms became congregations and
preaching gave way to the more intimate practice of teaching. Playing
into the hands of Adventist missionaries and other Christian bodies as
well was the intellectual and social ferment of the times that produced
a mood of acceptance, even eagerness at times for a Western education.
Yet Adventist schools did not enjoy universal approbation. Some native
people resented Adventist education because of its sectarian character
and also because it appeared to be part of a larger imperial movement.
Even after their exposure to Adventist education some Africans chose
to retain their ancient traditions, some Chinese stuck by Confucianism
and some Indians remained Hindus. But teachers would argue that edu-
cation gave people a choice to accept Christianity and that it would be
unrealistic to suppose that every student would adopt it.
That the evangelistic goals of Adventist education sometimes rode
on the coattails of a colonial movement that was not religious in itself
did not seem to worry Adventist missionaries, in fact, they often cast
themselves in the context of a movement of social uplift. Principles
such as education for women, the dignity of work, and self enhance-
ment were part of early Adventist educational concepts on the frontiers.
Adventist schools may have imperfectly exemplified these notions, but
they contributed to the abolition of caste, recognition of gender equal-
ity, and the destruction of ethnic walls of separation. Even in the face
of centuries of tradition, thinking people in non-Caucasian lands could
not deny the validity of these principles.
One of the key issues for Adventist educators was preventing the
needs of social uplift from blurring the Adventist identity of their pro-
grams. Thus, Adventist education embodied not only social benefits
and fostered personal well being, but associated these blessings with
the redemptive mission of Christianity. With a compelling sense of
197
mission they inculcated the conviction that native students bore the re-
sponsibility of educating their own people. It was the purpose of Ad-
ventist schools to prepare couriers of this gospel who would take these
ideas with them.
On this point schools on the frontiers did not differ from schools in
North America or anywhere else. To prepare workers had been the
prime objective of Adventist education since James and Ellen White
prodded Battle Creek College into existence. While the idea of prepar-
ing workers was central, the conditions were different. A six-year ele-
mentary curriculum at Solusi bore little substantive resemblance to a
baccalaureate degree from Walla Walla College, but the two were alike
in depending upon similar commitment and engendering similar spiri-
tual goals.
Only the earliest of Adventist training schools beyond North Amer-
ica were twenty-five years old by 1920; most of them were considerably
younger, and others just beginning their history. Yet they all demon-
strated an evolving sophistication with the passage of time and by 1920
some were venturing toward post-secondary status. In part this trend
resulted from rising educational standards in their home countries as
well as an intensifying belief that Adventist workers needed a constantly
improving education.
By 1920 more than 3,700 students attended training schools outside
North America. More thousands attended mission schools, outstations,
and church schools. Although Adventist education was far from a ma-
ture movement, its formative days were over.
IE. M. Cadwallader, A History 0/ Seventh-day Adventist Education, p. 194. Besides

Cadwallader, for this passage about Solusi I have relied on W. H. Anderson, On the Trail
0/ Livingstone (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 1919); Arthur
L. White, Ellen White, v. 4, The Australian Years, pp. 183-186; A. W. Spalding, Christ's
Last Legion, pp. 377, 378; Alberto Sbacchi, "Solusi: First Seventh-day Adventist Mis-
sion in Africa," Adventist fleritage (Summer 1977), pp. 33-43; Brown, Chronology,
p. 167.
2Anderson, Trail o/Livingstone., p. 43.
)Ibid., p. 144.
4Ibid., p. 334.
'For a novelized account of Malinki's life, see Josephine Cunnington Edwards' Malinki
a/Malawi (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 1978).
6Anderson, ibid., 344.
7SDA Encyclopedia, 1995 ed., v. I, p. 194; v. 2, p. 311.
198
8For these paragraphs about China, see Ida Thompson, "Bethel Girls' School." With Our
Missionaries in China, Emma Anderson, et. af. (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press Publish-
ing Association, 1920), pp. 43-63; Anna Lee, "To the Dragon Gate, Adventist Schools in
South China and Hong Kong, 1903-1941," Adventist Heritage (Spring 1983), pp. 52-60; Gen-
eral Conference Bulletin: 1909, no. 5, pp. 66-68; "History of Hong Kong Adventist College,"
Hong Kong Adventist College Catalog, 2001-2003.
\DEmma Anderson, Missionaries in China, p. 304.
IIGeneral Conference Bulletin. 1909, no. 5, p. 68.
12Ibid., p. 67.
IJAnderson, ibid., pp.91-94, 294.
14Ibid., p. 304; Herbert Ford, For the Love of China: The Life Story of Denton E. Rebok
(Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 1971),54.
15Ibid., p. 57; Frederick Griggs, "Report of the Department of Education to the 1918 Gen-
eral Conference," RG 51, AST; Statistical Report. 1920.
17General Conference Bulletin. 1905, no. 3., p. 10.
18The information about Singapore comes from General Conference Bulletin, 1905, no.
3, pp. 9,10; ibid., 1909: no. 6, p. 262; ibid., no. 8, p. 113; ibid.. 1913, no. 10, p. 154; ibid.. 1918,
no. 3, p. 42; Statistical Report, 1920; Brown, ibid., p. 169.
19 Griggs, ibid.
20Generai Conference Bulletin, 1909, no. 10, p. 147. For other data about the beginnings
of Adventist education in Korea, see ibid., no. 6, p. 8; ibid., no. 16, p. 262; ibid., 1913, no. 5,
p. 71; "Report of the Department of Education to the 1918 General Conference Session," RG
51, AST; Statistical Report. 1920; Brown, ibid., p. 154. Also, SDA Encyclopedia, 1994 ed.,
v.IO, p. 917; website, www. syu.edu as of April, 2002.
2lGriggs, ibid.
22For information about Adventist education in Burma, see Robert Bruce Thurber, In the
Land ofthe Pagodas (Nashville, TN: Southern Publishing Association, 1921); General Con-
ference Bulletin: 1909, no. 17, p. 277; ibid., 1913, no. I, p. 169; ibid., no. 12, p. 181; Review and
Herald, May 15, 1913; "Report of the Department of Education to the 1918 General Confer-
ence Session," RG 51, AST.
2JThurber, Land of Pagodas, p. 139.
24Ibid., p. 261.
25The beginnings of Adventist education in India is a summary from George Roos Jen-
son, Spicer Memorial College . .. A Dynamic Demonstration of an Ideal (Pune: Oriental
Watchman Publishing House, 1965), pp. 1-35; Edison Samaraj, ed., Images 1893-1993: the
Seventh-day Adventist Church in Southern Asia (Pune: Oriental Watchman Publishing
House, 1993),passim; Edward W. Pohlman, "First the Blade, then the Ear," unpublished edi-
tion Spicer Memorial College, (published version in Eastern Tidings, September 15, 1945);
General Conference Bulletin: 1909, no. 6, pp. 80, 81; ibid., no. 17, p. 273; ibid., 1913, no. II,
pp. 171, 174; Review and Herald, May 8,15, 1913; Brown, ibid., pp. 17,18,20,22,23,27,28,
172; Statistical Report, 1920.
26RH, May 8,1913.
27lbid., May 15, 1913.
199
9
THE ADMINISTRATIVE
AGENDA
In 1920, as Seventh-day Adventists stood at the gate of the post-

World War I era it was apparent that Adventist education had reached
a milestone. Since 1872 it had fashioned its own shape, and an admin-
istrative structure evolved that was assuming the dimensions of a
world system. Some of the events were hit or miss, but in the main,
these developments were not just a coincidence. Although contrasts
separated schools around the world, a remarkable similarity connect-
ed them, deriving more from philosophical ideals than objective
realities.
Chief among the unifying influences was the General Confer-
ence Department of Education, itself an office that evolved within
the system while at the same time developing patterns of control
and accountability for educators. Like much of Adventist history,
the roots of this process were in Battle Creek. Who was responsible
for guiding the newborn education movement was a question that
the Battle Creek Church thrashed out in 1873 after Goodloe Harper
Bell's Select School became a success. The congregation gave mor-
al support to the school but requested the General Conference to
accept responsibility for its operations.
200
THE ADMINISTRATIVE AGENDA
The reason for this action was a prevailing conviction that because
the school was to train workers for denominational employment, the
General Conference should control it. It would thus become the official
Seventh-day Adventist school, authorized to prepare church employ-
ees, not merely the creation of a single congregation.\
The Educational Society and Secretary of Education

Soon after the Battle Creek school became a college the General
Conference organized the Educational Society to handle affairs of edu-
cation. The immediate purpose of this body, incorporated as a legal
entity with stockholders in March 1874 with James White as president,
was to own the fledgling institution and to become its constituency to
which the board was answerable, but its practical function was a supra-
board of the college. Naturally, the General Conference Committee ex-
pected the school to fulfill the needs of the young denomination and
from time to time voiced sentiments about educational philosophy and
issued statements that amounted to attempts to control the school
through both the board and the Society.
Enough educational activity was astir by 1887 for the General Confer-
ence Committee to persuade W. W. Prescott to fill a newly created post,
secretary of education. Two years later the General Conference session
voted to ask the education secretary to supervise all church schools and
to appoint assistants in the conferences at his discretion. These actions
were the first steps in the swing of authority away from the Educational
Society into the hands of people whose primary duty was education and
who, in some cases at least, were experienced in the profession. 2
Although Adventist education was still embryonic, the actions of
1887 and 1889 were none too soon. In 1882 other training schools be-
gan in California and New England, raising questions about relation-
ships among schools and ultimate accountability. Ellen White had been
urging churches to establish schools for children since her original ad-
vice in 1872, but they were a rarity with only a few in operation by
1887. In the 1880s South Lancaster Academy in Massachusetts began
to publicize itself as a center to train teachers, which supplied some
impetus to the notion of church schools.
As secretary of education, Prescott was not the head of a General
Conference department. No department existed. He functioned more
201
as an advisor or supervisor-at-Iarge and liaison between the General

Conference officers and the field. He took his new responsibility seri-
ously, although he did not have much time for his new role since he was
president of Battle Creek College, and remained so for seven years after
his appointment.
Prescott gave his attention to the training schools-colleges and
academies-while the colleges assumed the task of designing teacher-
preparation courses and advising the few elementary schools that were
in operation. While still president of Battle Creek College, Prescott also
became president of Union College in 1891 and Walla Walla College in
1892, but principals on each campus actually ran those two new schools.
This administrative arrangement was only temporary; each school
soon installed its own president. 3
Prescott left Battle Creek College in 1894, and three years later he
dropped educational work altogether to fill other church administrative
positions. With his departure the office of secretary of education nearly
disappeared. The job of keeping tabs on Adventist education fell to L.
A. Hoopes, the thirty-eight-year-old General Conference secretary who
had taught briefly at the University of Nebraska and Union College.
Though he was no alien to education, his appointment suggested that
watching over Adventist schools was only a matter of coordination that
one could do as a sideline to a full-time job. 4
Hoopes could take little credit for the rapid growth of Adventist
schools during his four years of benign neglect. Hardly had he settled
into his office in 1897 when the Movement of 1897 began in spite of
resistance in the General Conference. Four years later the number of
church schools in the United States exceeded 220 and training schools
had sprouted up in Europe, South Africa, Australia, and South Ameri-
ca, besides other mission schools in Africa and India. An educational
movement was underway that required more attention than a part-time
coordinator would or could give it.
From Educational Society to Educational Department

The organization of Adventist education underwent a thorough
shakeup beginning in 1901, many of the events culminating at the three
General Conference sessions of 1901, 1903, and 1905. Delegates gath-
ered in Battle Creek for the 1901 session in a mood to reform, sensing
202
that they faced an organizational crisis affecting the entire denomina-

tion. Before leaving town they completely overhauled the church ad-
ministrative structure. One of their prime targets was the traditional
method of handling church activities through incorporated societies or
associations headed by presidents who had become little "kings," to use
Ellen White's term.5
A. T. Jones, president of the Educational Society at the time, hardly
qualified as a little king because leading personalities in the schools
were prone to seek advice directly from Ellen White, the acknowledged
source of Adventist educational philosophy. The powerhouses in
Adventist education were Prescott, Kellogg, and Sutherland. All were
reform-minded and threw their full weight to effect change, but each
with his own theme.
Prescott's main concern was to make sure that the Bible would be
the center of all curricula, Kellogg hoped to design education around
health, and Sutherland sought ways to ignore academic trappings and
incorporate agriculture as the fundamental element in an education
program that trained missionaries. All disagreed with one another on
some questions, but all three found considerable common ground and
ample support from Ellen White on which to base a rationale for the
stands they took. Of the three, Prescott was the most scholarly and well
versed in Ellen White's statements about education.
It was one of the last significant actions of the outmoded Educa-
tional Society at the 1901 General Conference to act on a proposal to
move Battle Creek College. Moving the school was a matter of reform
itself. It touched off a slate of other actions advocating more church
schools, financial integrity of all schools, improved supervision by lo-
cal school boards, appointment of conference superintendents of edu-
cation, more thorough preparation of prospective teachers, and more
emphasis on foreign language instruction and premedical courses in
the training schools.
The most telling blow was to organize the Educational Department
as the overseer of Adventist education. In effect, this action replaced
the Educational Society whose authority was limited to Battle Creek
College; it also revived the office of secretary of education that Prescott
once held. The new department was intended to be a standing commit-
tee directly responsible to the General Conference president instead of
203
a semi-independent, incorporated body with property-owning rights

headed by a corporation president.
Two days after the 1901 session ended, in the quieter atmosphere of
a conference room, the new General Conference Committee, led by A.
G. Daniels, appointed 1. H. Kellogg to chair the Educational Depart-
ment, assisted by P. T. Magan as secretary. The original list of depart-
mental duties consisted of seven items, five of which posed no ques-
tions: the responsibility to be the "reference" point in all matters of
education, to promote plans for education, to act as a book committee,
to advise about teacher-preparation courses, and to serve as an interme-
diary among the schools.
After a lengthy exchange, however, the committee flatly rejected the
sixth proposal that the department should supervise the reorganization
of Battle Creek College in its new location in order to assure the church
that it would be a school to train missionaries. Similarly, the committee
threw out the seventh proposal asking the department to take on gen-
eral supervision of church schools and conference schools.
The actions of 1901 were only a partial prescription to cure the or-
ganizational ailments of Adventist education. The General Conference
had gained direct access to denominational education, which most
leaders regarded as an improvement, but the Educational Committee
was still in the hands of people who could give only part-time attention
to their new responsibilities. Kellogg, as the mover and shaker in a
mind-boggling succession of educational and medical projects in Battle
Creek, and Magan, as the dean of the new Emmanuel Missionary Col-
lege, which was still on the drawing board, were both very busy al-
ready, but as members of the new department, each had thrust another
iron in the fire. How much the General Conference could expect from
these men was open to question.
Another aspect of the 1901 actions defined the relationship of the
General Conference to Adventist schools. The General Conference
Committee designed the new Educational Department as an umbrella
under which Adventist education would function. Basic relationships
among schools, promotion of education, definitions of categories of
Adventist schools, and broad curricular matters, including books, were
the department's realm. All of these were essentially policy items. The
Educational Department deliberately chose not to have direct supervi-
204
sory contact with schools, which restricted the function of the newly
created department to a global policy-making and advisory role. This
status differed from the previous Educational Society, which as the le-
gal owner of Battle Creek College, possessed the right to become ad-
ministratively intrusive.
Kellogg's and Magan's tenure as chairman and secretary of the Edu-
cational Department lasted one year. Prescott succeeded Kellogg, with
Sutherland as secretary, but again, both were gone after another year.
Such fluidity elicited skepticism in place of the high hope surrounding
the Educational Department when it began. By the time of the General
Conference session in 1903 it appeared that the education movement
had escaped reform after all.
Meanwhile, Adventist schools were appearing at a quickening pace,
and persuasive voices were debating the strength and the flaws of the
new order. Discussions at the 1903 General Conference session began
innocently enough with a report about the need for missionary zeal to
permeate Adventist schools when M.
E. Cady, president of Healdsburg Col-
lege, seized the floor to criticize the
state of affairs in education. Without
expressing a lack of confidence in the
philosophy of Adventist education, he
lashed out, "I am persuaded that what
we need more at this time than a study
of the principles is a study of organi-
zation."6
Because other issues crowded into
the General Conference sessions, leav-
ing no time to plan for education, Cady
pressed for a convention of education
leaders to discuss problems of curricu-
lar cohesion and rational development As president of Healdsburg College
and one of the first union directors of
of institutions. Little had happened in education in the United States, M. E.
education, he went on, excoriating the Cady supported Griggs' organiza-
practice of naming a college president tional plans, wrote textbooks for
lower instructional levels, and by
or some other prominent person al- 1916 earned a master's degree in
rcady holding another position as head education.
205
of the Educational Department. He doubted that "we have any man that
has broad enough shoulders to take charge of these different lines of
work."
Pointing out that, unlike other church programs, education was under-
represented in denominational councils, Cady called for more members
from education on the General Conference Committee. "The Educa-
tional Department," he said, " is the supply department for the work of
the third angel's message. You look to our institutions, to our colleges,
to our academies, for young men and women to go out and fill the calls
that come from foreign fields and from this country also."
Cady's blistering indictment was honest but not acrimonious. He
pointed no accusing finger, but admitted he shared responsibility for
the chaos in education. He also wore two hats, he said, one as a college
president, the second as secretary of education in the Pacific Union and
it was to be expected that he would favor the college. Immediately after
he finished speaking the meeting adjourned.
Days later recommendations reached the floor that embodied all of
Cady's suggestions. The document precipitated a prolonged discussion
over the essence of the goals of Adventist educators. After reaching a
meeting of minds, Daniells and the promoters of change compromised
to give the General Conference president another year to make the ex-
isting Educational Department productive. L. A. Hoopes, who had left
the General Conference in 1901 to become president of Union College,
replaced Prescott as chairman of the Educational Department, and
Frederick Griggs, principal of South Lancaster Academy, became sec-
retary. According to the organizational formula, the secretary, not the
chairman, would be the sparkplug of the department.
Daniells kept his word, allowing this latest arrangement one year to
prove itself before elevating Griggs to be chairman of the department,
a choice filled with irony. A decade earlier at Battle Creek College
Griggs had been one of Prescott's disciples both in organizational mat-
ters and in seeking ways to professionalize the institution. He, with
several other college faculty, had attended the University of Buffalo to
acquaint himself with current educational practices, but Sutherland as
a reform president of Battle Creek College regarded him as tainted and
made him an unwelcome member of the staff. Knowing that ifhe stayed
at Battle Creek he would waste his time, Griggs left, spending the in-
206
tervening years as principal of South Lancaster Academy where he put

his ideas to work and developed a reputation in his own right.
Griggs and an Adventist System of Education

When becoming chairman of the Educational Department in 1904,
Griggs took with him the responsibilities of running the department
which he had done as secretary. With his backing, a proposal to sharp-
en up the organizational framework for Adventist education went to the
1905 General Conference. The document described a sixteen-grade
system of education composed of primary schools, intermediate
schools, and colleges and laid down a string of specific policies rather
than the usual platitudinous recommendations which General Confer-
ence delegates hoped church leaders and educators would follow.
It was evident that the age of Kellogg, Prescott, and Sutherland was
over. Kellogg was on the threshold of defection from the church,
Prescott was weighed down with General Conference responsibilities,
and Sutherland, whose reforms had
gone sour at both Battle Creek and
Berrien Springs, had forsaken denom-
inational employment to found a self-
supporting system of education in the
American South. Griggs, the professor
purged from Battle Creek, had re-
turned to discover himself to be the
leading voice in Adventist education.
For the first time Adventists found
themselves grappling with the concept
of a denominational system of educa-
tion. This idea was at the heart of the
1905 actions, "a harmonious system of
education," the document described
it.7 Insofar as possible common books During the years from 1904 to 1918
Frederick Griggs was one of the
and examinations and curricular uni- strongest voices in Seventh-day Ad-
formity would be a key in unifying ventist education. He became the
Adventist schools, but even more cru- leading designer of a rational orga-
nization of denominational schools
cial would be manuals that spelled out and urged a serious upgrading of
Adventist philosophy of education and teachers' credentials.
207
methods of operating schools. Presiding over this structure would be a

twenty-five-member Department of Education with representatives
from all the world fields. Delegates approved the proposal with no
amendments.
Two years later in 1907 Griggs left South Lancaster Academy to be-
come the first full-time chairman of the Department of Education. In
1909, the title of chairman disappeared and the head of the department
became secretary of education. With this last change the General Confer-
ence Department of Education reached the basic form it would retain.
Putting a rational organization of Adventist education into effect
had not been easy. It began uncertainly, as part of the general church
reorganization in 1901. In one fell swoop delegates to the 1901 General
Conference session revamped the entire denominational infrastructure,
but votes did not automatically create smoothly running systems. Some
actions did not go far enough, others were misguided. In their over
zealous mood to do away with kingly power that had been accumulat-
ing in Battle Creek, reformers even abolished the title of president of
the General Conference, substituting instead the term "chairman" of
the General Conference Committee. This, the church soon decided,
was too much. Without any doubters, the church needed time to settle
into its new format and to effect additional change.
The years immediately following 1901 were a time for new prece-
dents. Adventists in South Africa and Australia had experimented with
departmental organization, but North Americans did not know how the
new church departments were to function. They were not only
unacquainted with departments, they feared them as tools of over-
centralization. That the new Educational Department floundered dur-
ing its first years was not surprising, given the newness of the idea and
the powerful individualism of leading personalities in education.
Also, a new level of church administration, the union conference,
became the standard administrative unit in the reorganization package
of 1901. Until a modus operandi evolved that accommodated this new
layer of administration, no one could foresee how the new system would
work. Daniells hoped that the unions would translate into a new era of
Adventist administration. During the organizational discussions at the
1903 General Conference he and W. C. White were the most vocal pro-
moters of the new unions in the United States as the regional focal
208
points of administrative authority which would free the General Con-

ference to function as the mission board for the denomination. This did
not mean that the world headquarters had abdicated leadership, but its
role would become more advisory rather than directly involved in de-
tails oflocal interest. 8
The practical upshot of this process was to grant union presidents in
North America a de facto status unlike that of their peers in the rest of
the world. In some respects North American union presidents presaged
the modern division president. As the General Conference withdrew
from its direct supervisory role in education, the responsibility for op-
erating the major training schools and colleges landed on the doorsteps
of the unions. Probably no one foresaw in 1901 that in time the major
educational institutions in North America would become symbolic not
only of the education system that the 1905 recommendations envi-
sioned, but also of the new, practical authority vested in the unions as
well.
In 1903 General Conference officers were beleaguered with prob-
lems of moving the church headquarters from Battle Creek to Wash-
ington, D. C. Daniells, Prescott, and W. A. Spicer spent inordinate time
working out the details of this relocation and raising money to make it
possible.
The educational system was only evolving and still experimental
when Griggs took full-time charge of the Department of Education in
1907. In spite of the firmness of the policies voted in 1905, these new
actions were still ideals to be achieved and to a great extent the viabil-
ity of the system depended on how effectively Griggs managed it. Even
before he moved to Washington, assistants in education were appear-
ing, though, as Cady pointed out in 1903, their help was frequently
weak.
Nevertheless, all of this was a beginning. By 1900 five state confer-
ences in the United States had appointed superintendents of education.
Practically overnight the unions appointed their superintendents. By
1920 leaders of education were the rule in North American conferences
rather than the exception. As the discussion of organization unfolded
and schools appeared in other parts of the world, divisions and unions
outside North America created the office of superintendent of educa-
tion and by 1920 official leaders of education held office in Argentina,
209
Australasia, China, England, Germany, India, Japan, Korea, Peru, the

Philippines, South Africa and the West Indies.
Redefinition of Schools
A mix of several issues surfaced during the organizational debates
affecting education. For years beginning in 1901 denominational lead-
ers discussed a clearer definition of Adventist schools, which involved
graded instruction and the purpose of different categories of schools.
By implication, these discussions also involved the importance of an
integrated agricultural work program in Adventist education, an idea
that had been a vital part of Ellen White's original pronouncements in
"Proper Education" as well as in her later statements.
At the turn of the century church schools, intermediate schools, and
training schools were the terms describing what developed into ele-
mentary, secondary, and post-secondary institutions, but during the
early years of the century a clear distinction separating each of these
levels was lacking. The provisions voted at the 1905 General Confer-
ence reflected an attempt to correlate Adventist schools to popular edu-
cational models by changing the terminology to primary schools, inter-
mediate schools, and colleges. The first category would carry students
through seven grades, intermediate schools were to offer grades eight
through ten, and colleges consisted of grades eleven through sixteen.
These were not rigid lines of demarcation but rather rules of thumb,
which led to confusion. Adding to the vagueness was the Adventist
academy, which was a non-degree-granting training school with a sec-
ondary-level curriculum whose graduates were presumably ready for
denominational employment.
By 1913 more changes were evolving. Because of the lack of precise
definition, many church schools tended to increase their offerings up-
ward to include eight grades, and some intermediate schools were also
extending themselves upward as far as the twelfth grade, at the same
time calling themselves academies. At the 1913 General Conference
session resolutions relating to upgrading buildings and teaching equip-
ment encroached on the definitions of the schools themselves, that is,
the number of grade levels in each category of schools, which in turn,
would determine which students were expected to attend what schools
and the curricula they would study. Also in question was the use of
210
specific terms to describe categories of schools. For example, an inter-

mediate school that had expanded upward to include twelve grades
might be categorized as an academy on par with a traditional academy
that functioned as a training school, but the purpose of the two would
differ.
The waters were murky and the debate was prolonged and punctu-
ated with considerable disagreement. Below the surface of the verbal
exchanges were implications of territoriality. Conference and union
leaders were concerned about the impact of the proposals on their
fields and wanted to offer as much education as they could for stu-
dents in their own constituencies. While delegates reached no conclu-
sions about how to classify Adventist schools, it became clear that
there was an upward trend ofthe demarcation lines among the schools
and that the secondary level was carving out its own niche between
the primary school and the college with cutoff points at grades nine
and twelve. Part of the reason for the upward movement was the de-
sire to permit local church schools to retain students through the
eighth or tenth grades until they were old enough to leave home and
live in a dormitory.
By 1920 secondary education became a more clearly defined body
of class work and demarcation lines hardened enough to designate
"academy" as the accepted term describing an Adventist secondary
school, although intermediate schools continued primarily as projects
of local church constituencies. Junior colleges had also entered the
scene as post-secondary schools distinct from degree-granting institu-
tions. In this settling process, academies were losing their role as rec-
ognized training schools.
The New System and Adventist Tradition

These changes affected the Adventist philosophical tradition of ag-
ricultural projects integrated into work and study programs. As early as
1901 the church tagged the intermediate schools as agricultural, but as
the concept of a secondary-level boarding academy grew, agricultural
programs shifted away from intermediate schools which were usually
operated as day schools by individual congregations. Academies in-
cluded agricultural work programs, but the size of both dairy and pro-
duce farms varied from one institution to another.
211
How much land would be necessary for agricultural projects was

debatable. Of the fifty-three colleges and secondary schools in North
America categorized as Adventist "educational institutions" in 1920,
the amount of land averaged 180 acres per school, admittedly enough
to carryon a sizeable agricultural program. But of more importance
was the fact that fourteen, or more than a fourth of the institutions in
North America, reported holdings ofless than twenty acres, three with
no land at all.
Adventist educational institutions outside North America averaged
even less acreage. Seven ofthe forty-two schools in the world fields had
no land, and an additional eighteen had less than ten acres, but a work
program of some sort gave Adventist schools a distinctive stamp. Even
on the small campuses some agricultural projects were possible.
The original purposes of an agricultural program were to provide
activity for students in order to avoid an excessively bookish mentality
and to give prospective denominational employees practical training
that would be useful in reaching people at their own social level. Agri-
cultural know-how would also benefit missionaries in establishing
farming projects at institutions in underdeveloped regions of the world
where food production was the leading means of livelihood. But Ellen
White also promoted the idea of training in skilled trades, such as spe-
cialized lines of construction work and small scale manufacturing.
As the case of Meiktila Technical School in Burma demonstrated,
programs of student labor did not always require large acreage to exert
their practical educational value. Small manufacturing enterprises also
grew into businesses that supplied schools with supplemental income.
It became a judgment call to determine what a given school should
emphasize and the amount of land needed to implement a labor pro-
gram. An absence of an extensive agricultural project comparable to
the one at Avondale did not mean that a school was rejecting the prin-
ciple of student labor. On its twelve-acre campus Washington Foreign
Missionary Institute stressed practical nursing and printing skills rath-
er than agriculture in contrast to Emmanuel Missionary College with
its 400-acre farm. Both institutions legitimately claimed to prepare
mISSIOnarIes.
As important as Ellen White regarded an agricultural labor pro-
gram, she did not lay down a single philosophical formula for all
212
Adventist schools. In 1907 she explained that there was "no exact pat-
tern" for schools. 9 Although she advocated that training schools were
to be free from urban influences, she also enunciated the principle of
taking education to the communities where students lived in large
numbers.
In 1903, while the debate about defining Adventist schools was heat-
ing up, she advised pastors to establish church schools in cities for fam-
ilies who could not leave urban areas or send their children to training
schools. "And in connection with these schools," she added, "provision
is to be made for the teaching of higher studies, where these are called
for."10 The three landless secondary schools in North America in 1920,
Harlem and Temple academies in New York City, and Boston Interme-
diate Church School, were well within this instruction, as were the
seven city schools scattered from Hawaii to China to India.
Rather than an agricultural program, the single, most weighty con-
cern was a biblically based curriculum with a view of training students
for service. Schools were to serve the ultimate purpose of the church,
which was to fulfill the commission to spread the gospel.
Conventions for Educators

A series of educational gatherings also helped to crystallize the
education movement and nurture the idea of a system. At a meeting in
College View, Nebraska in 1903 educators agreed that each union
conference should own and operate a training school, preferably at the
college level. Intermediate schools were to be the property of local
conferences, and individual churches would assume responsibility for
primary schools. In addition, the Educational Department recom-
mended to reincarnate itself as the Department of Education with new
organization to represent the world field more adequately. I I
Three years later representatives from all categories of schools in
both North America and Europe met again at College View to outline
an Adventist curriculum encompassing the first through the sixteenth
grades. Motivating this gathering was the belief that Adventist educa-
tion was a continuum and that students everywhere should move from
one grade to the next at a more or less uniform rate which would permit
them to advance through elementary and secondary levels anywhere
they happened to be and be able to enter post-secondary training schools
213
at the same or a similar point in their academic careers. Marked differ-

ences persisted in the classrooms, however, causing problems in pro-
moting students. In 1908 principals of advanced schools convened to
iron out these wrinkles and to discuss improved curricular articulation
among all levels of instruction.
Personnel from academies and colleges met in 1910 and 1912 to de-
fine an Adventist college, to strengthen instruction in Bible and the
sciences, and to prepare guidelines for libraries at training schools. In
1911 education superintendents gathered to address the needs of ele-
mentary education, specifically to improve methods of supervising el-
ementary schools, to develop uniform testing of learning, and to estab-
lish standards of teacher certification.
These organizational decisions formed a basis for Adventist schools
around the world. Representatives from European schools participated
in the educational council in 1906. Griggs' penchant for organization
led him to a biennial session of the Asiatic Division in 1917 to introduce
the newly adopted educational policies and to pattern the administra-
tive structure of Adventist schools in the Orient after the North Ameri-
can model. After the meeting S. L. Frost, secretary of education for the
division, took the new order to other parts of Asia.
As important as the notion of system was to Griggs, he was not ad-
vocating strict uniformity around the world. Although he lauded the
actions in Asia for basically following the North American model, he
was quick to recognize that "our school curricula throughout the world
should be adapted to the school system of each country. There has been
a strong tendency in the past to conduct our school work in all parts of
the world upon the American plan of organization. This is not always
wise, and we are pleased to see our schools thus adapting their work to
meet the educational conditions of the country in which they are situ-
ated."'2
Institutes for teaching and administrative faculty were not new to
Adventist education. As early as 1888 Prescott gathered thirty delegates
to a teachers' convention to discuss how to integrate Bible into the cur-
riculum. The centrality of biblical studies was the theme at the 1891
convention at Harbor Springs, Michigan. Three years later in 1894
Prescott continued the same discussion, adding general professional
qualifications of teachers to the agenda.
214
The organizational debates following the 1901 General Conference

overshadowed teachers' meetings, but instructional and administrative
faculties continued their gatherings. By that time specializations deter-
mined the agenda and who should attend a given meeting. Education
itself was the topic in 1917; Bible and history teachers met in 1919; and
management of dormitories was the theme in 1920.
The net effect of education councils and teachers' institutes was to
generate a sense of ownership among educators in a system they helped
to build. Griggs worked hard at cultivating a participatory mood. Gath-
erings especially for teachers provided a forum to discuss professional
issues. Recommendations for organization usually passed through an
approval process, but they originated in the field of education rather
than in the offices of general church administration. The underlying
spirit was to encourage educational reform and progress among the
educators themselves and to institutionalize recommendations through
a ratification process that reached the top ofthe administrative scale of
the church.
Institutional Indebtedness
A concern over institutional finance also fueled the debate about
education. When Seventh-day Adventists turned the corner into the
twentieth century many institutions were so deeply in debt and mari-
nating in red ink that denominational stability was threatened. The
causes for school debts and the amounts of the obligations varied from
place to place, but typically, school administrators from the late 1880s
through the 1890s depended on borrowed money both to start institu-
tions and to meet day-to-day costs, a financial management practice
that Arthur White calls "irresponsible."13 It was unavoidable that eco-
nomic dislocations in the United States during the 1890s also made
matters worse and contributed to financial uncertainty.
Indebtedness spread to schools in South Africa, Australia, England,
Scandinavia, and Germany, but the schools in the United States were
the primary culprits. Union College and Battle Creek College bore the
largest financial burdens. Defaults on land deals in the aftermath of its
original construction nearly buried the school at Lincoln, Nebraska,
while at Battle Creek building expansion followed by a sharp decline in
enrollment during Sutherland's presidency brought the church's first
215
college to its knees. Loans were the easy answer for schools, but with
most of their income deriving from rock-bottom tuition rates, schools
were hard put to keep up with their financial promises.
Ellen White advised that tuition should provide operating expenses
and that if necessary, tuition should go up to cover costs. Salary cuts
for teachers and donations even by teachers themselves were other op-
tions to meet expenses. Whatever school administrators did, she
warned, they should devise an "entire change" in their "demoralizing"
practices of financial management. 14 Estimates differ, but by 1900 the
total school debt reached around $330,000 with an annual interest rate
exceeding $16,000. It was a moment of gloom. "I believe it almost
came to be a settled fact that those debts never could be paid," P. T.
Magan reflected. "It was practically impossible for our schools to con-
tinue to run."IS The majority of the schools could not even pay the in-
terest on their loans.
From Australia came Ellen White's offer to donate the profits from
her recent manuscript, Christ's Object Lessons, to help pay school
debts. She asked the Pacific Press and the Review and Herald Publish-
ing Association to circulate the book at cost and salesmen to forego
their commissions. The General Conference organized the Committee
on Relief of the Schools with S. H. Lane, president of the board of the
Publishing Association, as chairman and P. T. Magan as secretary.
The campaign began in 1900 and advanced quickly. At the 1901
General Conference session Magan reported more than $57,000 to ap-
ply to the debts. Two years later, Daniells told the General Conference
session that debt reduction approximated $200,000. It soon reached
$300,000.
The sale of Christ's Object Lessons was a blessing but it was a bail-
out rather than the new administrative policies that Ellen White advo-
cated, and as might be expected, indebtedness recurred. By 1906
twenty-one leading schools carried nearly $140,000 in debts, which
amounted to about 21 percent of their assets. By 1911 this ratio had
worsened to more than 43 percent, or a half million dollars of debt.
Daniells was displeased with the financial direction of Adventist
education and proposed a systematic fund-raising campaign to help the
schools. Already in effect was the fifteen-cent-a-week plan which had
originated in North America, calling on each member to give that
216
amount above tithe to support denominational missions. Daniells pro-

posed raising the weekly quota to twenty cents and to devote the extra
five cents to eliminate institutional debts. Schools whose financial ob-
ligations exceeded more than half of their assets would receive help
first. In order to receive aid schools could not add to their debts or in-
crease their operational expenses. If schools found it impossible to
function they were to close. The debt relief plan applied to sanitariums
and publishing houses as well as schools and was to go into effect on
July 1, 1913.
The General Conference Committee went to the 1913 General Con-
ference session primed with facts and arguments to see their proposal
through, but for the delegates it was a heavy dosage of strong medicine.
Twice they referred it back to the committee on finance before it finally
passed. The bone of contention was the original wording that made the
General Conference responsible for the financial integrity of schools in
the United States and Canada. In the end delegates left the proposal
intact except for transferring the burden of accountability from the
General Conference to the North American Division working through
its unions. The General Conference would collect the money but turn it
over to North America for distribution. This detail was a not-so-subtle
reminder that the North American unions, not the General Conference,
had control over the schools within their territories.
The action also hinted that unacceptable debt ratios were more than
a question of efficient management. The preamble to the new twenty-
cent-a-week plan admitted that denominational leaders had not care-
fully laid out a rational scheme of financial support for any of their in-
stitutions, which was an implied admission that to expect schools to
rely totally on tuition income was not realistic.
Meanwhile, school debts had swelled to more than $750,000 but
remained at 43 percent of institutional assets. Three years later, at the
end of 1916, schools had lowered their debts while increasing their as-
sets, resulting in a debt ratio of 23 percent. Encouraged by the success
of the twenty-cent-a-week plan and inspired by the burgeoning needs
of missions, the Autumn Council of 1917 raised the goal to twenty-five
cents a week and earmarked one dollar in twenty-five for the five senior
colleges and the nine junior colleges and academies qualifying as mis-
sionary training schools. The importance of the new medical school at
Loma Linda became obvious when the council voted to give it an

amount equal to all other schools combined.
When reporting to the 1918 General Conference, Griggs spoke with
evident optimism about the impact of the fund raising and of additional
plans to provide a regular operating subsidy to the major schools in
North America. School finances were moving in the right direction,
which, it was hoped, would enable schools to invest in improved facili-
ties.
But tight financial conditions would not go away. Operational losses
continued as schools tried to comply with the Adventist tradition of
supplying equipment for industrial training in addition to meeting or-
dinary costs. In April 1919 the General Conference Committee agreed
to new proposals doubling the amount of subsidies to training schools
beginning in January 1920.
Adventist educators in North America began the post-World War I
era not yet having found the key to manage their schools without
losses. Publishing houses sold tangible products priced according to
a profit-making market; sanitariums sold services connected to phys-
ical survival for which people were willing to pay, but the leading
articles that Adventist schools sold were values, knowledge, and prep-
aration for mostly denominational jobs that offered enormous spiri-
tual satisfaction but small remuneration. The salable products of the
church's schools were intangible. Also, they were priority items for
only a narrow market. The price tag was minimal which kept institu-
tional income low.
From the beginning, the argument for an integrated student labor
program was to train well rounded Adventist workers, but it took more
time to recognize its accompanying virtue-it frequently provided
schools with additional operational income. Developing and refining
Adventist education, even before 1920, presupposed substantial sums
of money to provide an academically defensible system of schools, but
the schools themselves were economically incapable of generating their
own capital. It was a hard and long delayed lesson of Adventist educa-
tional economics that tuition income alone is insufficient to operate a
school for the Adventist public. By 1917 denominational policy ac-
knowledged for the first time that systematic subsidizing was neces-
sary, but the subsidizing program itself remained undefined.
218
No matter how committed Adventist parents were to church-

sponsored education, for years a consciousness that Adventist schools
faced a steep uphill struggle haunted denominational educators. Ever
since Ellen White's "Proper Education" in 1872 Adventist statements
pertaining to education frequently contained the goal of not allowing
denominational schools to fall behind in the "common branches," which
betrayed a sense that the established public education system had set
the standard for achievement and Adventist schools were the ones that
had to measure up. Public education was tax-supported and cheap for
the consumer, and in spite of the argument that their children needed a
biblically centered education many parents chose the less expensive
option-public schools-and depended on active church membership
to maintain their spiritual values.
1. H. Evans, president of the North American Division, confided to
the delegates at the 1918 General Conference that only 50 percent of
Adventist youth attended Adventist schools. Even that figure reflected
enrollment increases after a calculated campaign had bolstered atten-
dance by more than 27 percent during the 1916-1917 academic year.
Adventist school facilities, Evans argued, were already large enough to
accommodate the growing number of potential students from the en-
larging Adventist population. The problem was how to induce students
to attend. But when he suggested that the church should find means to
allow every Adventist of school age to enroll in a denominational
school, he predicated his appeal on the need for more denominational
employees rather than the need of young Adventists for a Christian
education.
The tension between these two purposes had always been present in
Adventist education and would always remain. Both purposes were le-
gitimate, and while not mutually exclusive, either one could become
overbalancing if allowed to ignore the other. By 1920 it had become
evident that Adventist education depended on both purposes. The
church could not prosper without programs to prepare students for de-
nominational employment, but it was also vital to recognize that an the
Adventist constituency viewed church-sponsored education as an op-
portunity to the general students who simply wanted an Adventist edu-
cation. The problem was how to devise a way to deliver education to
both groups of students in an affordable manner.
219
The Debate Over the Number of Colleges

Although the Educational Department after 1901 deliberately re-
jected a supervisory role over schools, church policy and financial
needs sometimes involved the General Conference in detailed deci-
sions. Church leaders were appalled by institutional indebtedness. In
part they blamed the schools for engaging in unbridled competition for
students, sometimes pitting secondary schools against colleges in the
same union. At the same time these schools vied for money and were
quick to incur debt to remain in operation. Some complained that North
America had too many schools.
Motivated by the dual need to prevent schools from undercutting
each other with costly duplication of programs and to lessen debt loads,
delegates to the 1913 General Conference session voted controls, among
them recommendations to reduce Adventist senior colleges in North
America from five to three. The other training schools would become
junior colleges. The proposal singled out Mount Vernon College in
Ohio to revert to a twelve-grade secondary school and permitted Wash-
ington Foreign Missionary Seminary the option of becoming a senior
college at an undetermined time in the future, whenever the school
deemed it appropriate to resume its pre-1907 status. The proposal also
redefined the role of secondary schools.
Before the proposal went to the General Conference session the
heads of the colleges had agreed to the plan, but it sparked stiff opposi-
tion, especially from the Columbia Union president whose territory
was home for both Mount Vernon College and the Foreign Missionary
Seminary. Pointing out that prospects for a college to emerge from the
Seminary were indefinite, he declared that the plan snatched a college
from his territory and alleged that if implemented, the proposal would
increase rather than reduce debt. The final decision rested with the
North American Division.
As a college Mount Vernon had experienced indifferent success. In
1893 it had started as an academy, but began to offer college degrees in
1905. Until 1912, fewer than a half dozen students had graduated from
four-year programs. The school was heavily in debt. Meanwhile, the
Seminary, despite its non-academic program, was offering the equiva-
lent of college classes and attracting relatively large enrollments. It was
obvious that the prospects for a successful college were greater in
220
Washington than Mount Vernon, Ohio. Over the reluctance of the union
president, in 1914 Mount Vernon lost its college standing, but the Co-
lumbia Union retained a four-year college by hastily rechristening the
Foreign Missionary Seminary as Washington Missionary College, a
degree-granting institution beginning with the 1914-1915 year.16
The Beginning Years in Review

By 1920 Adventist education had met a plethora of organizational
issues. Philosophically, denominational educators had wrestled with,
among others, the essence of a church-related system, the application of
philosophical uniformity in the context of global diversity, and the rec-
onciliation of spirituality to secular professions. Pragmatically, they
had dealt with problems of viable organization, curricular continuity,
fiscal integrity, relationships to government controls over education,
and professional qualifications of faculty.
The need for church-related graduate education had also come up.
The Battle Creek College bulletin for 1881-1882 advertised M.A. and
M.S. degrees, but it became painfully evident that the statement was an
imprudent and unilateral expression of presidential hope rather than
reality. Battle Creek did not actually issue graduate degrees and the
bulletin dropped the matter. After discussing how to improve the qual-
ifications of teachers, those attending the 1894 teachers' institute out-
lined a denominational teacher-preparation program leading to doctor-
ates, a proposal that died aborning.17
By 1920 Seventh-day Adventists founded a broad spectrum of
schools, the diversity of which indicated the important role that the
church saw for education. Not only was education per se an integral
part of their program but the presence of a biblically based curriculum
in a variety of educational ventures became the central identifying
mark of denominational schools. It was a philosophy that had universal
applications.
The early struggles of Adventist education were bittersweet. In 1920
Adventist schools were still searching for their own professional iden-
tity, but they had already produced a couple of generations of church
workers, some of whom were approaching the final years of their ca-
reers. Graduates of Adventist schools had circled the globe. Measured
in terms of denominational purposes, they had accomplished much
221
with little. Humble but respectable beginnings in Adventist education

marked the years from 1872 to 1920; the next two and a half decades
would show how substantial those foundations really were.
'YandeYere, Wisdom Seekers, pp. 18-22.

2The General Conference action cited in Cadwallader, History of Seventh-day Adventist
Education, p. 285.
lYandeYere, ibid., pp. 66,67; Cadwallader, ibid.. p. 311; Valentine, Shaping ofAdventism,
pp.45-49.
'Sources for the discussion about organization of the Department of Education are ibid.,
chapters 1-8; Cadawallader, ibid., pp. 310-314; Reye and Knight, "Frederick Griggs: Moder-
ate," Early Adventist Educators, pp. 184-204; Brown, Chronology, pp. 187-230; Richard
Schwarz and Floyd Greenleaf, Light Bearers: A History ofthe Seventh-day Adventist Church
(Nampa, 10: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 2000), pp. 253-256; Walton J. Brown,
"Education-Eden to Eden," Journal of Adventist Education"' (October-November 1982),
pp. 5-7,45; General Conference Bulletin, 1901, no. 1, ext. 9, p. 207, ext. 14, p. 305; ibid., 1903,
no. 8, pp. 114, 115; ibid., no. 12, pp. 177-185; ibid., 1905, no. 4, pp. 19,20; ibid., 1909, no. 15,
pp. 221-225; ibid., 1918, no. 2, pp. 26,27; General Conference Committee Minutes, 1901.
51 have depended on the following sources for the passage about the issues in education,
1901-1920: General Conference Bulletin, 1901, no. 11, ext. 9, p. 207; ext. 10, p. 219; ext. 14,
p. 306; ibid., 1903, no. 12, pp. 177-186; ibid., 1905, no. 4, pp. 19,20; ibid., 1909, no. 15, pp.
221-225; Statistical Report, 1920.
6For Cady's entire speech, see General Conference Bulletin, 1903, no. 8, pp. 114, 115.
7/bid., 1905, no. 4, pp. 19,20.
8See General Conference Bulletin, 1903, no.5, p67; no. 7, pp. 100, 101; no. 10, pp, 158-
160; no. 12, p. 180.
"Knight, Early Adventist Educators, p. 45.
'OReview and Herald, December 17, 1903.
II For summaries of meetings of educators see Frederick Griggs, "Report of the Department of
Education to the 1909 General Conference Session," RG 51, AST; H. R. Salisbury, "Report of the
Department of Education to the 1913 General Conference Session," RG 51, AST; Griggs, "Report
of the Department of Education to the 1918 General Conference Session," RG 51, AST; "Teachers'
Meetings-1917-1968," RG 51, AST; Ya1entine, Shaping ofAdventism, pp. 43,44, 74, 75.
'2Griggs, ibid.
11Arthur L. White, Ellen White, v. 5, p. 198. For further information concerning institu-
tional finances, see White's entire chapter, pp. 198-208; Spalding, Christ's Last Legion, pp.
42,43; General Conference Bulletin, 190\, ext. 10, pp. 209-211; ibid., 1903, no. 2, p. 19; ibid.,
no. 12, pp. 183-186; ibid., 1913, no. 20, pp. 330, 331; ibid., 1918, no. 2, p. 26; no. 4, p. 58; Gen-
eral Conference Committee Minutes, January 21,22, 1913; November 5, 1917; September 22,
1918; February 18, 1919; April30, 1919, AST.
14Arthur L. White, ibid., p. 199.
'5General Conference Bulleting, 190\, no. 1, ext. 10, p. 209.
'6The Mount Vernon story is derived from YandeYere, Wisdom Seekers, p, 131; General
Conference Bulletin, 1913, no. 6, p. 95; ibid., no. 20, p. 311; ibid., no. 21, p. 324.
17For comments about these two skirmishes with graduate education, see Vande-
Vere, ibid., p. 41; Valentine, ibid., p. 44.
THE INTERIM YEARS,
1920-1945
For Adventist education the twenty-five years from 1920 to 1945
were an interim separating the establishment of the first generation of
training schools from a later era when they would become institutions of
higher education. Simply put, the interim was the age of the training
schools, which ringed the globe in 1920. Commitment to an overarching
philosophy that produced similarities in curriculum and organization
held these institutions together in a newly conceived and still developing
system that had the makings of a global organization but was still skel-
etal. The schools shared commonalities but were not uniform because
they reflected the societies in which they functioned and addressed cul-
tural needs around them. During the interim years the original schools
fleshed out and experimented with genuine post-secondary education,
new schools organized, and education spread to additional regions.
While these trends represented an accomplishment of new goals
for Adventist educators and helped to give shape and definition to the
newly born system of denominational education, church educators
encountered new challenges in carrying out their agenda during this
quarter-century.
The period began with the world trying to settle down after World
War I, but problems were everywhere. The equation of international
power changed. Public moods shifted. Countries spent two decades
coping with economic problems left over from the war that contributed
to the most serious financial dislocations the world had seen. Some
countries experimented with new political systems that were not al-
ways congenial toward ecclesiastical activities. Old political sores kept
festering and finally, an even worse war broke out.
All of these conditions impacted Seventh-day Adventists. The
war of 1914-1918 engulfed the world church, and its institutions faced
223
recovery at nearly every turn. Restoration and growth were difficult

in the international tensions that marked the 1920s and 1930s. New
expectations in academe brought unanticipated complexities to issues
of internal management of a global system of Adventist education. In
1945 the church faced another round of rehabilitation from war while
at the same time its educational institutions were poised to launch a
wave of change that was unthinkable only a decade earlier.
WORLD CHALLENGES
DURING THE INTERIM
As a context for Adventist education in Europe and English-speaking

countries during the interim years, denominational schools spent much
of the period redefining themselves in a modernizing world. Outside
the United States the training school had become the single most im-
portant educational venture, and while church leaders focused on it as
a worker-preparation institution, schools at lower levels also underwent
dramatic change.
Developments in Enrollment and Institutions

Most of the growth in Adventist education between 1920 and 1945
occurred at the elementary level. Enrollment in primary schools in-
creased from 23,500 to 123,500, or more than five times. This rate ex-
ceeded the growth in the Adventist population which tripled during the
same period to reach 576,000. Most of the increase took place in the
fields outside North America where elementary enrollment ballooned
from 6,000 to more than 100,000. In its totality, Adventist education
grew more rapidly outside North America during the twenty-five years
after1920, but the bulk of denominational education at the secondary
and post-secondary levels still existed in North America.!
8-IPFTW.
225
Between 1920 and 1945 elementary enrollment in North America

improved from 17,500 to 23,000, increasing the average size of elemen-
tary schools from twenty-four to twenty-eight students. The Movement
of 1897 and its aftermath brought wide attention to Adventist elemen-
tary education in North America, which by the end of World War I had
developed many of its own textbooks and curricular materials. By 1920
Adventist educators had drawn the general profile of elementary educa-
tion, but they continued to revise curriculum and teaching tools as
much as was financially practical for a small system.
In the United States one of the leading trends in education at large
during the 1920s was the emergence of the defined high school as the
standard secondary educational unit, the step that bridged the gap be-
tween elementary school and college. Related to this development was
the growing practice to rely on colleges for training in professional
careers, although vocational high schools and trade schools continued
to emphasize technical education. These movements had been under-
way since the nineteenth century but did not achieve their ends until
after World War I.
Adventist education reflected these trends. Denominational second-
ary schools, or academies, inherited their general character from the
habit of visualizing schools as institutions to prepare students for a
denominational profession. By 1920 North American Adventists oper-
ated thirty-six free-standing academies that offered grades nine through
twelve. Most of the enrollees were pre-college-age students, but many
of the schools also offered vocational or professional courses, prompt-
ing church leaders to regard them as training schools and many of their
graduates as readily employable.
Long before 1945 this view changed. The academy lost its reputa-
tion as a training school by stressing college preparatory classes and
evolving into the Adventist version of the typical North American high
school. By the end of World War II the number of North American
academies grew to sixty-three, fifty of them free-standing as either
boarding or local day schools. Thirteen functioned as the secondary-
level component of colleges.
In the United States Adventist education did not develop a counter-
part to the vocational high school or trade school. Even after academies
became college preparatory schools they continued to offer vocational
226
WORLD CHALLENGES DURING THE INTERIM
education and frequently required their graduates to complete a mini-

mal amount of this so-called non-academic credit, but these classes
were usually only introductory courses echoing the denominational
tradition of providing instruction in selected practical skills instead of
complete programs to prepare students for the skilled labor market.
Most boarding academies also offered a variety of labor opportunities,
many of them in agriculture and small-scale industries.
Increasingly during the years after 1920 what used to be vocational
education at the secondary level shifted to the college campus. In the
North American Adventist community a general broadening of post-
secondary curricula took place to accommodate this change as well as
new programs in professional education. The number of sixteen-grade
colleges also increased. Motivated largely by apprehensions about in-
stitutional indebtedness, the General Conference Department of Edu-
cation attempted in 1913 to limit North America to three, sixteen-grade
colleges, but "the suggestion did not meet with hearty approval," North
American President I. H. Evans recalled with wry understatement. 2
Church leaders were not convinced the schools were graduating
enough prospective denominational employees; consequently, they
preferred expansion rather than constriction. The idea of a complete,
college-level training school in each union carried the day over the
recommendation from the Department of Education. It was evident that
the desire by leaders in the conferences and unions for a steady flow of
future workers overrode their financial worries.
Five colleges offering grades thirteen through sixteen were in op-
eration in 1920; by 1945 the number climbed to eleven, including Ca-
nadian Union College in Alberta and the self-supporting, independent
Madison College in Tennessee. Atlantic Union College matured to se-
nior college status in 1922 and Madison followed in 1937. The other
four, Canadian Union, Oakwood, La Sierra, and Southern Missionary
colleges, appeared in quick succession between 1943 and 1945. The
three seminaries for immigrant groups shrank out of sight by 1934
while junior colleges remained at Keene, Texas and Oshawa, Ontario,
Canada.
During the years following 1920 the North American Adventist
intermediate school, or junior academy, also found its identity. In
early Adventist education any school was "advanced" if its program
227
extended beyond the elementary level; consequently, intermediate

schools became advanced institutions along with academies and col-
leges. However, with clearer definitions developing during the orga-
nizational years after 1901, the intermediate school became an exten-
sion of the local church school. It offered limited secondary classes
but ordinarily not beyond grade ten. An urban church, or perhaps two
or more churches, usually organized intermediate schools that they
often called junior academies. By 1945 fifty-eight of these intermedi-
ate schools served municipal congregations in Canada and the United
States.
The growth of Adventist education varied from field to field around
the world. As the largest single segment of the world-wide program,
North American schools served as the testing grounds for many educa-
tional techniques and curricular materials, but other fields developed
their own niche in the denominational schema. To systematize the
global program, the terms elementary, secondary, and college, as de-
fined in the United States, became the measuring rod to ascertain
equivalent instructional levels in all Adventist schools, while the de-
sign of curricula and the institutions themselves conformed to the edu-
cational standards required in the countries in which the schools were
located.
In Adventist jargon, the term "training school" carried over from
earlier years to describe all institutions that prepared students for de-
nominational employment, regardless of their instructional level. In
1920 Adventist post-secondary education outside North America ex-
isted only in England and China with a total of thirty-three students.
By the end of World War II this level of classes proliferated to twenty-
six of the 128 Adventist training schools in the world fields and the
number of college-level students grew to 1,570.
Struggles in Europe
But the story of Adventist education during the twenty-five years
following 1920 is more than numbers; it reflects the economic and po-
litical turbulence of the era. As the period unfolded in Europe there
were setbacks as well as accomplishments. The importance of these
events emerges from the relationship of education to the church's larger
world program.
228
Adventist education in Europe had begun in the northern half, most-

ly in the northwestern quadrant of the Continent, and schools in that
region remained stronger than in southern Europe. Before World War I
they were influential in the denomination's budding mission program.
European Division President L. H. Christian attributed this influence to
the fact that European powers in that region had accumulated an enor-
mous amount of global wealth, transplanted their culture to many re-
mote places, and controlled much ofthe world's traffic. Even though the
Seventh-day Adventist church was born in the United States, he saw
European ascendancy as a major power behind the spread of Advent-
ism. 3
Christian visualized the best days for European Adventists as in the
future. "Before the war," he told the 1922 General Conference session,
"Europe trained and sent out many workers into the home and foreign
fields. In the course of a short time, we should be able to do this again,
as our training schools are started.''4 He foresaw a strengthened educa-
tional program that followed old colonial lines, especially in Africa.
European countries had cast long shadows around the world, and Chris-
tian anticipated that in order to spread the gospel, means and money
would once again stream from Adventists living in continental coun-
tries to the rest of the colonial world they already controlled.
There were others who shared Christian's views. J. F. Simon, educa-
tion secretary in the European Division, reminded his colleagues that
during the first two decades of the twentieth century Germany had
produced 1,000 missionaries and England, 200. He lamented that only
640 of an estimated 20,000 Adventist youth in Europe were enrolled in
training schools in 1922, but predicted a renewal in mission training.
"A reformation is sweeping a part of Europe today," he said, "and it has
come about through the work of our schools."5 With a new campus in
Collonges, France, and new schools emerging in Germany, it momen-
tarily seemed that conditions bode well for a new beginning.
These optimistic phrases did not express the reality of Europe whose
woes did not slacken with the end of the war in 1918. Economic trou-
bles, followed by the rise of totalitarian regimes with bellicose policies
frustrated the rehabilitation of Europe which dragged on, deep into the
post-World War I era. "Europe stands bleeding and staggering by her
appalling loss," Christian said in a much different tone in 1926, eight
229
years after the war.6 Hope that Adventists could simply resume their
activities was dulled; nevertheless, Christian clung to his vision of a
restored worker-training program in Europe. His hope was not entirely
misconceived. Between 1922 and 1930 Northern Europe sent out 122
workers to Africa and other lands, and more than a hundred went from
Seminaire Adventiste, many of them to French-speaking Africa.?
Seminaire Adventiste and Newbold College

Despite repeated expressions of the need for additional trammg
schools in southern Europe, Seminaire Adventiste in Collonges, France
continued as the sole training school for Latin Europe. After the forma-
tion ofthe Southern European Division in 1929 the French school func-
tioned more or less as a division educational center, at times offering
work in Italian and Spanish, and even Yugoslavian and German.
Enrollment in the French training school hovered just above the 100
mark, increasing only slowly during the 1920s and 1930s, which re-
After several relocations, the training school in England took the name of Newbold Mis-
sionary College in 1931. In 1946 it settled on an estate in Binjield, near Bracknell, Berk-
shire, west of London. Pictured here is Moor Close, the estate manor, which became the
ludie,/ residence hull.
230
f1ected sluggish membership growth in the region of Europe the school

served. In 1940, after wartime restrictions made it impossible for Ital-
ian students to travel to the French campus, a small school opened in
the Italian Mission headquarters in Florence, but the war hampered its
growth. In 1945 it enrolled only thirteen students.
In Scandinavia, part of the Northern European Division, Adventist
education continued uninterrupted during the twenty-five years after
1920, with two schools rebuilding at new sites. From a generally rising
level of educational expectations came the conviction that Adventist
workers needed improved academic and professional preparation. By
1930 leaders in Northern Europe voted to establish a senior college in
England where graduates from all other schools in the division could
earn a college degree.
The following year Stan borough College relocated and changed its
name to Newbold Missionary College. H. L. Rudy, the division educa-
tion secretary, regarded the baccalaureate degree essential for workers
going from Europe to Africa, and a knowledge of English equally im-
portant. "Newbold Missionary College naturally suggests itself for se-
nior standing in view of these and other considerations," he declared,
addressing educational leaders in Northern Europe in 1932.8 His view
of Adventist education turned out to be more optimistic than realistic.
Fulfillment of his hope was long in the making, a delay that belied a
general underestimation of the herculean tasks that Adventist leaders
faced following World War I.
In 1945 schools in France and England, and some in Scandinavia
were still reporting enrollments exceeding a hundred and continued to
furnish workers for European countries and the world fields. They all
had begun to offer post-secondary classes, but while their accomplish-
ments were encouraging they were not outstanding. Faced by mounting
hardships during the interim years and the uncertainties of World War
II, these institutions held their own and did not close, as did Adventist
schools elsewhere on the Continent.
Progress and Setbacks in Germany

In Germany, Missionsseminar Friedensau, closed during the last
year of World War I, resumed classes in 1919. After World War I Ger-
man Adventist membership rose rapidly, and with the creation of three
231
As a result of rapid membership growth in Germany, Seventh-day Adventists established

schools in each of the three German unions. At Marienhoehe, immediate~v south of
Frankfurt, this property was purchased for a worker-training school. Under political
pressure it closed during the era of national socialism, but reopened after World War I/.
Picture taken about 1968.
German unions in 1920 came two additional training schools, the first
at Kirchheim, near Stuttgart to serve southern Germany. In 1924 it
moved to Marienhohe in Darmstadt, near Frankfurt. The second was in
the Rhineland at Neandertal, near Dusseldorf, which served the west-
ern part of Germany. Combined enrollment of all three schools reached
nearly 500 by 1930.
The development of national socialism in Germany gave rise to new
problems, and while G. W. Schubert, president of the Central European
Division, described the "present government" as positively as he could
to the 1936 General Conference session, his generous words could not
mask the threat that the new totalitarian regime posed. In 1934, two
years before he spoke, Neandertal closed in the face of political pres-
sure, and in 1939 Marienhohe shut its doors. After these two casualties
Friedensau again became the sole training school for Germany, a role it
fulfilled until 1943 when, for the second time, the German army com-
mandeered the school to use as a military hospital. In 1945, at the end
232
of World War II, German Adventists were prostrate with a shattered

church organization and no school.
One of the major developments in Europe after 1920 was the spread
of Adventist education to the eastern parts of the Continent. The schools
were small and often operated erratically, but they were the beginning
of denominational traditions of education that led to larger accomplish-
ments after World War II. Because of its eastern location, before World
War I Missionsseminar Friedensau attracted more students from East-
ern Europe than any other Adventist institution on the Continent. Hos-
tilities that broke out between Germany and Russia in 1914 caught
forty Russian students at the German school with no place to go. Under
the protecting hand of L. R. Conradi, president of the European Divi-
sion, they remained on the campus, sequestered as it were, until after
the war when they returned home, well educated to become church
workers.
Adventist Education Enters Eastern Europe

Conradi was quick to explain the experience of Russian students at
Friedensau as evidence of providential leading, but with growing mem-
bership in both Germany and Russia, the German school could not
continue as the training school for all Adventists from the eastern Bal-
tic to the southern Balkans. By 1922 educational stirrings-small, short-
term classes-were taking place in Poland, Latvia, Yugoslavia, and even
communist Russia, and by 1925 classes also started up in Romania and
Czechoslovakia. In 1926 the Russian school grew encouragingly to
thirty students.
Institutul Biblic, founded in Moldavia in 1925 in northeastern Ro-
mania, was an especially important event for Adventists in that coun-
try. Romanian Adventists numbered only about 2,000 in 1920, but a
rapidly growing membership proved the country to be a productive
field for conversions. By 1930 only in Germany and Russia were Ad-
ventists more numerous. In 1931, with estimates as high as 10,000 Ad-
ventist children eligible for school, Institutul Biblic moved into a new,
sleek masonry building in central Romania near Brasov in the Transyl-
vanian Alps. Adventists enjoyed their new facility for only a decade
before the occupying German army confiscated the plant in 1941. Ro-
manian Union leaders obtained authorization to conduct a school in the
233
capital city of Bucharest, but the back of Adventist education in Roma-

nia was broken.
The other small efforts in Adventist education in Eastern Europe
coalesced in three countries, Poland, Latvia, and Yugoslavia. Poland,
for centuries trampled upon by military campaigns from both the east
and west and often the victim of territorial dismemberment, emerged
from World War I again with redefined borders and multiple language
groups from which Adventists drew their membership. Begun in
Warsaw in 1926, the Polish training school moved the next year to
Bielitz in the southern part of the country to begin again on a farm
that allowed an agricultural program to supplement the worker-training
classes.
Leaders of the Polish Union School had their hands full. The variety
of languages made instruction difficult. Besides Polish, students spoke
Czech, German, Russian, and Ukrainian. The school settled on Polish
and German as media for the classroom, but pressure to teach in other
languages was always present. Public suspicions of Protestant educa-
tion and an unfriendly government that threw heavy tax burdens on the
school added to their problems.
"Perhaps no school in this [Northern European] Division has had
the difficulties that our Polish school has experienced," H. L. Rudy
observed in 1932.9 After 1926 it closed and reopened twice before World
War II forced its third and final closing in 1939. Enrollment was consis-
tently low, but after six years of operations it had prepared thirty-six
church workers.
In Riga, capital of the Baltic republic of Latvia, Advent Missionary
Seminary operated several small industries in addition to its worker-
training program, which led the government to recognize it as an in-
dustrial school. Latvia and Estonia furnished most of the students, but
a small number also came from Lithuania. Enrollment in 1930 was
seventy-three, but typically the school matriculated few students, a cu-
mulative total of about 330 during its first decade. By 1932 more than
eighty of its ninety-one graduates had entered some phase of church
work. In what was an oft-repeated story in Europe, the outbreak of
World War II, which in the case of the Baltic republics included their
absorption into the Soviet Union, ended the sixteen-year life of Advent
Missionary Seminary.
234
One of the many attempts to establish Seventh-day Adventist education in eastern Eu-
rope after 1920 was this small school in Zagreb. Yugoslavia. This photo shows students
in 1936 gathered in the dining hall. which doubled as a classroom.
In Yugoslavia a tiny school limped along from the 1920s until 1931
when it became the Yugoslavian Training School in Belgrade. The
next year Yugoslavian church leaders reestablished it in the Yugosla-
vian Mission headquarters. Fourteen students enrolled in 1935; in
1940, twenty-nine. Two years later it closed, another fatality of the
war.
Events in Europe only partially fulfilled aspirations for a rejuvenat-
ed Europe and the resumed role of Adventist education as a source of
denominational workers for the world fields. In Germany and Eastern
Europe Adventist education suffered acutely. In 1945 the educational
institutions in Germany were gone, and schools in Romania as well as
those in Finland, Latvia, Poland, and Yugoslavia were either not func-
tioning or reduced to a shadow of their prior operations, which had
been small from the start. In Russia Adventist education hardly had a
beginning and with hardening lines of domestic policy under commu-
nism, a formal school was only a wish. The collapse of training schools
in Germany and Romania and the stillborn attempt in Russia dealt se-
vere blows to the church, for membership growth in these countries
235
was the most robust in Europe following World War I. These growing
constituencies could have supported effective schools.
Advancements in Australia and New Zealand

Australasia, a region that lies afloat in the South Pacific below the
Asian mainland, also shared many of the political and economic set-
backs that characterized the twenty-five years following 1920, but Ad-
ventist education in this region developed a hardy independence and a
strength of its own. Three related trends were preeminent: the role of
Australasian Missionary College as the principal educational institu-
tion in the field, the development of an elementary and secondary edu-
cation system, and the establishment of training schools in the South
Pacific islands. Also of importance was English as the leading interna-
tionallanguage in the region.1O
Central to the expansion of Adventist education in the South Pacific
was Australasian Missionary College. From the days of its inception,
this institution's overriding objective was to prepare church workers,
many of whom intended to have a mission career in the South Pacific.
The urgency of mission opportunities among the islands overshadowed
any desire for official institutional recognition, but events inexorably
pushed the school in that direction. The first indication took place in
1936 when the Council of Public Education in the neighboring state of
Victoria recognized the college's teacher education program.
This action came late, for professional education courses had been a
part of the school's curriculum for years. In 1921, the General Confer-
ence Statistical Report categorized these classes as post-secondary; af-
ter 1924 the same source listed Australasian Missionary College as a
fourteen-grade school, and in 1936 a sixteen-grade institution. What-
ever the classification of the professional courses, Australasian church
leaders consistently referred to the school as one of the five secondary-
level institutions in the division. During the 1920s and 1930s the num-
ber of students enrolled in these professional courses fluctuated, but
usually did not exceed the secondary enrollment which remained the
largest sector of the campus.
Although the Victoria Council of Public Education recognized the
teacher-preparation program in 1936, the school did not become a de-
gree-granting institution. The professional education studies were
236
taught at a level of difficulty appropriate for post-secondary classes, but

the program in its entirety lacked the breadth of a baccalaureate degree
curriculum, thus it constituted professional training rather than a pro-
fessional degree.
Students validated their professional competence with certificates
after passing public examinations in their fields. The school gained ad-
ditional stature during the late 1930s when business and accountancy
students recorded some of the highest examination scores in Australia
and New Zealand. Access to these external tests, combined with recog-
nition by the state of Victoria for the teacher-preparation course, gave
graduates from professional courses at Australasian Missionary Col-
lege something that roughly corresponded to an accredited post-sec-
ondary education as measured by educational standards in the United
States. But because the programs did not lead to degrees, the Austral-
asian school lacked official senior college status.
Regardless of the technical standing of the school, as the decade of
the 1930s wound down, little question remained that the Cooranbong
campus was considerably more than a secondary school. In 1946 E. B.
Rudge, president of the Australasian Division, declared that the "home
field" in his division had a senior college and two junior colleges, refer-
ring first to Australasian Missionary College and secondly to the two
secondary schools, West Australia Missionary College in Carmel and
New Zealand Missionary College in Longburn.
The reputation of the Cooranbong campus as the "pattern school"
also hung on. It was an image that General Conference Education Sec-
retary W. E. Howell, who took office in 1920, repeated as he called for
educational reform among Adventists. E. E. Cossentine, a former prin-
cipal at both the Australian and New Zealand campuses, was nothing
short of effusive when describing the state of Adventist education in
Australasia in 1930 and how much the Australasian Division depended
on its own schools for workers.
Recalling that enrollment in the three major institutions approxi-
mated 500, Cossentine ventured that nearly all of the students were
"preparing to give this message." "Hardly any of our workers come
from outside our division," Cossentine went on. No more than a half
dozen North Americans were left in Australasia. No one could visit the
Australian school, he said, "without realizing the divine wisdom that
carried us to that secluded place where we have been able to train so

many missionaries for our island work."11
At the end of World War II, Rudge estimated that the schools in the
Australasian Division had produced about a thousand church workers,
some of whom occupied positions in the General Conference and other
parts of the world. Church leaders harbored no doubts about deriving
their money's worth from Australasian Missionary College and its sis-
ter institutions.
Paralleling the development of training schools in Australasia was a
movement to establish elementary church schools. Australasian educa-
tor Trevor Lloyd attributes the elementary program to Ellen White's
nine-year ministry in Australia, spanning the 1890s, when she lived on
the Avondale campus and wrote profusely about education. Although
Australasian Missionary College began as a worker-training school,
about a third of its students were elementary level, thus the traditional
primary school movement as well as what would become higher educa-
tion began at Cooranbong. By 1906 Adventist elementary schools
spread to every state in Australia. In 1902 New Zealanders established
their first church school at Ponsoby in South Island.
Teachers taught in small quarters, frequently in a room attached to
a church, and improvised their curricula and instructional materials
similarly as had the teachers in the Movement of 1897 in the United
States. As Sarah Peck showed in her account of the development of a
geography curriculum based on the Bible, teachers attempted to use the
Scripture as the source for a wide range of substantive class work. Some
of these early Australasian schools depended on Alma McKibbin's first
published textbooks. 12
By 1921 Adventist congregations in Australia, New Zealand, and
Tasmania, at the time called the "home" territory of Australasia, oper-
ated twenty-seven church schools with 725 students. Almost all of the
thirty-six teachers for these small enterprises were home grown in the
training schools, primarily Australasian Missionary College. These
numbers were not large, but Adventist membership in the three home
fields was about 7,300, a figure comparable to North American mem-
bership in the mid-1870s when elementary education was still hardly
more than an occasional topic of conversation. Adventist elementary
education in North America began only after a circle of training schools
238
had opened and nearly a generation of students had passed through

Battle Creek College. In contrast, the Australasian church school move-
ment began and developed simultaneously with the training school in
Cooranbong.
The parallel development of elementary schools and a training
school in Australasia contributed to the concept of an educational sys-
tem linking all Adventist schools together. As the two tracks devel-
oped, comparatively quickly a flow of students began with the boarding
schools in New Zealand and West Australia drawing students from
their regions and in turn feeding the enrollment at Avondale.
Australasians did not find it easy to finance their church schools.
Between 1917 and 1921 teachers' earnings increased one-and-a-half
times, causing some alarm among Australasian Union leaders who re-
alized that if churches raised tuition commensurably, the cost of Ad-
ventist elementary education would become prohibitive. The solution
lay in a three-way cooperative arrangement. Local congregations as-
sumed responsibility for a third of the cost of their church schools, the
conference paid another third from tithe paid by church-operated res-
taurants, and the Australasian Union paid the final third from operating
gains of its institutions. By 1922 the plan produced better equipment
and more qualified teachers.
This financial system was more than a stopgap; it was an innovation
unique in the Adventist world, founded on the notion that the entire
denominational program formed a single system and shared the same
financial base. "Australasia is to be congratulated on having solved the
perplexing problem of the proper support of church schools," W. E.
Nelson, General Conference education secretary, commented in 1936.
"These schools are subsidized from the profits of the food industry."13
As the Adventist population increased in the Australasian home
fields church school teachers cautiously began offering secondary-level
classes. Developing out of this experimentation was the intermediate
day school. In 1931, after a teaching career extending back to early
World War I years, William Gilson became education secretary of the
Australasian Division and led the movement to develop secondary day
schools which also prepared students for external examinations.
Even with the strong financial support that Australasian schools en-
joyed, the system did not grow as rapidly as might be expected. By
239
1941 the elementary and intermediate schools consisted of 1,200 stu-

dents, only a forty percent increase in about two decades. By the end of
World War II additional growth was only slight. Part of the problem
stemmed from the lack of a professional program on the Cooranbong
campus for secondary teachers, a deficiency deriving from British
higher education which did not accommodate Avondale's students in
its examination system to validate secondary teachers. Too many in-
structors in Adventist secondary day schools found themselves teach-
ing classes for which they had no college-level preparation. For students
whose academic future rested on their success in public examinations,
this deficiency posed a serious problem in Australasia and would not be
resolved until later in the post-World War II era.
The South Pacific Islands

It was in the South Pacific islands that Adventist education made
some of its most notable advancements in the Australasian Division. In
1901 the General Conference assigned the task of furnishing workers
for this oceanic field to the field itself, which in practical terms meant
that Australians and New Zealanders would form the pool of nurses,
teachers and ministers. From Australasian Missionary College and
Sydney Sanitarium, located about a hundred miles from the college,
these workers flowed in large numbers to Pacific outposts where they
established schools and clinics in a manner similar to the missions be-
gun by Stahl in Peru.
By 1920 Fiji, a centrally situated island group in Oceania, was al-
ready one of the leading locations for Adventist missions and schools.
Education picked up elsewhere during the 1920s, ranging across 7,000
miles of water from Papua, British Guinea, in the west to Pitcairn Is-
land in the east. The first inroads were not always easy, but by 1922 C.
H. Watson was able to tell fellow Adventists that "there is not now any
place where we may not enter with the advent message.''14 Before the
decade ended it was evident that producing missionaries was not the
exclusive domain of the school in Australia. Fijian workers from Bure-
sala Training School were filling positions as far away as Papua and
native islanders staffed the thirty-nine schools in the Solomon Islands,
home of a "strong training school." Plans for Adventist education were
on foot in the New Hebrides. Samoans were asking for a school, and a
240
teacher was already in India, preparing to take charge of a school for

Indian immigrant laborers in Fiji, which opened its classes in 1930 at
Suva on the main Fijian island.
The 1920s brought steady upgrading of facilities and personnel until
the training schools in Fiji and the Solomon Islands achieved secondary-
level status. Not to be overlooked was the school in Tonga which passed
through several phases until a boarding institution opened in 1921.
Steady increases in enrollment and employment of professional teach-
ers led to official recognition by the Tongan government in 1937.
Together with Europe the Pacific islands suffered from World War
II. Many but not all Adventist schools were within the ring of the war.
Mission workers evacuated Tonga while native Paul Fua took over the
training school. Not so fortunate was Put Put Training School in New
Guinea where no one had a chance to save the campus. Invading forces
devastated the buildings, which had been in operation only since 1936.
Besides destroying tangible property of the denomination, the war also
snuffed out lives of some educational workers.
As military action moved northward out of the South Pacific, more
nearly normal activities resumed. Losses had occurred but official sta-
tistics show that as a whole, the system of Adventist elementary educa-
tion actually grew during the war. In 1945 ten of the fifteen island mis-
sions were operating 299 church schools for nearly 6,000 students. The
Solomon Islands alone accounted for 185 schools.
The twenty-five years after 1920 witnessed dramatic change in Ad-
ventist education in the South Pacific. Although Watson said in 1922
that mission workers could enter most of the region uninhibited, four
years later in 19261. E. Fulton, president of the Australasian Division,
declared that evangelism was beset with a "dense wall of heathenism"
and "impenetrable night."ls Freedom to preach and teach did not auto-
matically translate into immediate civilization or easy conversions.
However, fifteen years later in 1941 the rhetoric was noticeably
different. Civilization still had not penetrated every nook and cran-
ny of the Pacific, but island governments were establishing educa-
tional standards of their own and requiring Adventist schools to
hew the line. E. B. Rudge did not complain about this turn of events,
in fact, he admitted that these requirements had lifted the standard
of Adventist schools. After citing an enrollment of 5,000 in the is-
241
land schools, he confessed that "more and more we are coming to

recognize our dependence upon ... the successful education of the
native youth."16
Homer O. Stilson, an Adventist medical officer in the United States
military serving in the South Pacific, wrote during the last year of the
war that in those regions where European workers had left, indigenous
teachers educated in Adventist training schools had held the church
together. The war had not been pleasant, but it showed how far Adven-
tist schools had progressed and that the sense of dependence on indig-
enous leadership that Rudge acknowledged had come none too soon.
Helderberg College
World War I left its scars in more places than Europe. An example
was German East Africa where prior to the war Missionsseminar Frie-
densau had furnished enough workers to establish sixteen mission sta-
tions. During the war German and British military units battled each
other fiercely in this colony. Estimated losses were as high as 60,000
among the African population. Fighting units even dug trenches across
Adventist mission grounds and blew up mission buildings. In the ter-
ritorial shuffle after the war German East Africa became Tanganyika,
a British trust territory in which Adventist missions were the responsi-
bility of the British Union and Stanborough College.
Meanwhile, the school in South Africa continued to fill a significant
place in Adventist education. Church leaders in South Africa hailed its
move from a suburb of Cape Town to a rural site at Spion Kop in Natal
in 1919 as a moment of progress, but a new set of problems at this loca-
tion became even more thorny than the original ones causing the trans-
fer. The new issues were mainly financial. The school could not shake
its debts, which African Division President W. H. Branson called "stag-
gering," and its agricultural program, once deemed so important, be-
came an additional financial drain following several droughts. By 1926
the school's property shrank to about a fifth of its original 2,200 acres.
Another nagging problem was its thousand-mile separation from the
heart of South Africa, which increased operational expenses of the
school. 17
Instead of progress at Spion Kop, the school maintained only a pre-
carious existence. It took only eight years to convince church leaders to
242
move again, this time to a 400-acre farm in Somerset West, thirty miles
from Cape Town. At this new location the school became Helderberg
College. While in Natal, Spion Kop College began to offer post-
secondary classes, but enrollment never reached expectations, and only
thirty-two students graduated. Following the school's renewal near
Cape Town, students began showing up in record numbers. The first
year enrollment shot up from seventy-seven to 134 with the number of
post-secondary students nearly doubling.
After only two years at Somerset West, the school was producing
enough graduates to fill most current needs for church workers, which
also reduced Africa's dependence on missionaries. Branson calculated
that more than half of the White employees in the African Division
were products of Adventist education in South Africa.
The move to Somerset West also proved to be an antidote for debt.
Utilizing student labor extensively, school administrators built much of
the campus by 1936, but "only as funds have been available,"General
Conference Secretary of Education W. E. Nelson said. "Not a shilling
of debt of any kind."'8 By the end of World War II enrollment reached
275, about half in the secondary grades, but more than seventy enrolled
in college-level courses.
The turnaround at Helderberg had been impressive, but not trouble-
free. The school offered a junior college course, which prompted more
than a third of the graduates to migrate to the United States to complete
their education and earn a degree. Many of them did not return. In an
attempt to stanch the flow of workers out of the country Helderberg
faculty tried to redesign the theology program to integrate it with
degree-completion programs in North American schools, but their ef-
forts were unsuccessful. The notion of trans-oceanic affiliations was
pre-mature.
The pivotal question with which Helderberg was dealing was its lack
of degree-granting authority. In order to earn an official degree or to
enroll in a university, graduates of Helderberg would have to pass ex-
aminations from a recognized institution such as the University of
South Africa, which presupposed a curriculum designed to prepare
students for the tests. But Helderberg's programs of studies were to
equip students for denominational employment, and until faculty found
a way to fit worker-training and external examinations into a single
243
study track, diplomas from the Adventist school commanded no offi-

cial recognition.
Ruth Gorle, English teacher at Helderberg, showed that through per-
sistent and disciplined self-paced study, graduates of Helderberg could
break this mold and earn graduate degrees from recognized universi-
ties, but it was too much to expect everyone to follow that course. For
students seeking a career in the ministry, a recognized degree was not
critical, at least at the moment. Thus for the time being the lack of rec-
ognized degrees was only onerous rather than a threat to the church.
However, educational aspirations of students were rising along with
society's progressively higher expectations in professional education,
which in time would force the issue.
Changes at Solusi
Adventist education spread through Africa along the lines of church
growth and organization, first moving northward from its beginnings
in South Africa. Penetration southward from northern regions of the
continent also occurred as European countries and their African colo-
nies were paired in the same administrative division of the General
Conference, but Solusi Mission had given the English-speaking south a
head start in reaching Africa's interior. During the years following
World War I it continued to be the showcase training school for the
continent.
Several indicators pointed to Solusi's success, one of which was the
employment of national workers. Soon after the school started, Afri-
cans began to take their places among the faculty of the school. By the
1930s about a third of the staff were Solusi alumni, the others were
graduates of Helderberg or workers from the United States.
Solusi's program remained at the elementary level, but it evolved
beyond basic educational skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Young women in the first four instructional levels, Standards I-IV, took
village crafts and introductory classes in homemaking, and later could
elect a three-year homemaking course. All male students in the lower
standards trained in agriculture, construction, metalwork, and wood-
work, acquiring enough skill to become self-supporting workers among
outlying villages. In the early 1930s formal teacher-evangelist courses
began for students who had passed Standard IV. This three-year pro-
244
gram emphasized professional preparation in religion and teaching be-

sides more industrial education.
These accomplishments in Adventist education-evangelism were
not without distractions. Solusi could not shed its reputation in Adven-
tist circles as a school that spawned questions about the relationship
between sectarian institutions and government. The debate began when
Cecil Rhodes' original gift of land triggered sharp discussion among
church fathers in Battle Creek. As time progressed the school pros-
pered and fears of government intrusion appeared unfounded, partly
because Rhodes was happy to leave education for Africans in the hands
of missionaries who operated schools. He never intended to interfere
with school policy.
This laissez faire attitude changed after World War I as the Rhode-
sian government became more paternalistic and issued regulatory poli-
cies. Inspectors began periodic visits to Solusi and outstation schools,
eventually making annual stops. School leaders and church officials
did not believe that this probing threatened them inasmuch as they prof-
ited from government grants-in-aid that followed successful inspec-
tions. This money was a boon that helped to keep Solusi financially
afloat and also bore part of the construction cost of new buildings when
the school upgraded its program to become the central training school
for the Zambesi Union.
About 1940 the situation became more complicated. In keeping with
its policy of increased involvement in education, the Rhodesian gov-
ernment began erecting its own schools and employing teachers. In
public schools salaries were higher, working hours fewer, and respon-
sibilities less demanding. Teachers trained at Solusi readily saw that
teaching positions in government institutions offered a more lucrative
professional career than church employment and took advantage of the
opportunity.
Adventist mission schools could not compete against these odds.
The impact was both immediate and negative, and the practical effects
amounted to a curricular crisis at Solusi and an employment problem in
church administration. Evangelism in Africa at the time revolved
around mission schools, and Solusi's only program, the evangelist-
education course, was the source of evangelistic workers for much of
the south-central part of the continent. However, beckoned by better
245
pay and easier working conditions, enough Solusi graduates opted for
jobs in public schools to reduce significantly the number of potential
church workers.
Solusi found itself educating teachers for the government system,
and depending on government grants-in-aid for survival, which planted
question marks in the minds of some Adventists. They argued with
some logic that, in effect, Solusi had become a government training
school. The issue was debatable, for Solusi remained above all a con-
tributor to the well being of the church, which, in turn, contributed to
the well being of Africa. All of this had been a goal of the mission from
its beginning and had been compatible with Rhodes' objective, which
explained why the church received the gift ofland in the first place. But
some believed that Solusi was diluting its peculiar Adventist mission.
At stake was not how to relate to an intrusive and hostile government,
but rather how to untangle some of the strings that were tied to finan-
cial help from a friendly one. It was a question that Solusi would not
resolve until well into the post-World War II era.
As the earliest educational experiment in Africa, Solusi was a mod-
el for other training centers, some making their appearance before
World War I. Following the organizational model of North America, E.
D. Dick, education secretary for the African Division beginning in
1926, implemented a division-wide policy of designating one school in
each of the six unions as a central training institution and lesser schools
as preparatory centers. Because Solusi was the largest and most prom-
ising school in the Zambesi Union it became the central institution for
a union that sprawled over much of south-central Africa, including
Northern and Southern Rhodesia, the Congo, and the Bechuanaland
Protectorate.
By 1930 each of the six unions in the African Division had a train-
ing center similar to Solusi, the major ones at Malamulo in Nyasaland,
Bongo in Angola, Gitwe in Urundi (Rwanda and Burundi), and Bethel,
which had moved from Grahamstown to Spion Kop in South Africa
when the European school relocated at Somerset West. It would trans-
fer back to its original location in 1937.
When reporting to the 1926 General Conference session, W. E.
Howell, General Conference secretary of education, described the im-
pact of African schools on church membership as "Pentecostal." Given
246
the rates of church growth at the time, his superlative was not an exag-
geration. Four years later W. H. Branson referred to "hundreds" of
graduates of African training schools who were teaching and evange-
lizing among their own tribes. '9
Enrollment in mission schools exceeded 14,000 in 1930; in 1941 it
approached 26,000. At one mission school more than 400 students were
baptized in a single year. By the end of World War II about fifteen
training schools were scattered across Africa from Tanganyika in the
north to Natal in the south and on to the hump of West Africa. The
majority of these schools enrolled students by the hundreds. The larg-
est, Malamulo, had nearly 700 students.
The Interim in Brief

During the interim years Adventist leaders commonly described de-
nominational education in terms of advancement and progress. In Eu-
rope some campuses closed because of the trial by fire through which
they passed before and during World War II, but institutions became
more numerous in the United States, Africa and Australasia. By 1945
Adventist schools in these fields represented the full range of denomi-
national education-the most elementary to the most advanced. Espe-
cially in Africa and the South Pacific the frame of reference for educa-
tion was evangelism. Denominational leaders consistently measured
their success by the numbers of baptisms and church workers that the
schools produced.
The growth of the educational movement in Africa was spectacular
during the interim years, which Adventist leaders could interpret as a
demonstration of the widespread hunger among Africans for personal
advancement as well as an indication of evangelistic success. Similar
attitudes characterized the South Pacific although the numbers were
smaller. While missionaries still maintained control in Africa and the
South Pacific, by 1945 natives had assumed much of the teaching re-
sponsibility in individual schools. The shift of authority from the Cau-
casian to the non-Caucasian was well under way.
I The statistics in this and the following paragraphs about schools in North America and
the world fields have been adapted from Statistical Report, 1920-1945.
247
J For Christian's views on this topic, see General Conference Bulletin, 1922, no. 9, p. 217,
no. 13,293; 1926, no. 3, pp. 9-15.

4Ibid., 1922, no. 9, p. 217.
5Ibid., no. 15, p. 380.
6Ibid., 1926, no. 3, p. 9.
7 For education in Europe, see Ibid, 1922, no. 5, p. 118; ibid., no. 9, p. 217; ibid., no. 13, pp.
293,318; ibid., no. 15, p. 380; ibid.. 1926, no. 3, pp. 9, 14; ibid., 1930, no. 2, pp. 37,45; ibid.,
no.5, p. 82; ibid., no. 6, p. 105; ibid ., no. 7, p. 115; ibid., no. 14, pp. 250, 251; ibid., 1936, no.
3, pp. 168-170; ibid., 1941, no. 2, p. 41; Statistical Report, 1920-1945; The Advent Survey,
October 1930, pp. 3,4; ibid, September 1932, the entire issue devoted to Adventist education
in Europe; Hartlapp, Chronik Friedensau, pp. 20, 34; Yugoslavian Training School Bulletin,
1977-1978; Brown, Chronology, pp. 114,131, 160.
8The Advent Survey, September 1932, p. 3.
9Ibid., p. 2.
IOSources for Australasia are General Conference Bulletin. 1922, no. 14, pp. 326, 327;
ibid., 1926, no. II, p. 21; ibid., 1930: no. 12, p. 208; ibid., 1936, no. 7, p. 149; ibid., 1941, no. 9,
pp. 219,220; ibid., 1946, no. 4, p. 92; Statistical Report, 1920-1945; W. E. Howell, "Report of
the Department of Education to the 1926 General Conference," RG 51, AST; Brown, ibid., pp.
66,70,75,98, 126; Homer O. Stilson, "Mission Schools Carry On," Journal of True Educa-
tion (February 1945), pp. 12, 13; Trevor Lloyd, "Church Schools," in Seventh-day Adventists
in the South Pacific 1885-1985, Noel Clapham, ed., pp. 168-185; Milton Hook, "Avondale
College," ibid., pp. 146-165; Oliver, Barry, Alex Currie, and Doug Robertson, eds. Avondale
and the South Pacific. passim.
I I General Conference Bulletin, 1930, no. 12, p. 208.
12 Union Conference Record, July 28, 31, 1899; Alonzo Baker, My Sister Alma and I,
p.57.
"Ibid., 1922, no. 14, p. 327.
15Ibid., 1926, no. II, p. 21.
16Ibid., 1941, no. 9, p. 220.
17This passage about Africa is summarized from General Conference Bulletin., 1926, no.
7, p. 23; ibid., 1930, no. 4, p. 75; ibid., 1936, no. 7, p. 148; ibid., 1941, no. 2, p. 40; Statistical
Report, 1920-1945; Southern African Division Outlook, August I, 1932, p. 5; ibid., November
I, 1935, p. 2; "Report of the Department of Education to the 1926 General Conference Ses-
sion," RG 51, AST; memorandum, 1938, RG 51, AST; Interview, Milton Siepman, January 8,
2002; Cadwallader, History of Seventh-day Adventist Education, pp. 194-203; Drusilla Her-
togs, Ruth Gorle. Makhumalo: Mother of Teachers (Published by the author, no date); Brown,
ibid., p. 105, 107.
19Howell, "Report of the Department of Education to the 1926 General Conference," RG
51, AST; General Conference Bulletin, 1930, no. 4, p. 25.
248
11
THE INTERIM
YEARS IN ASIA
To understand the story of Adventist education in Asia one must see

it as part of Western penetration into the East. Military action reached
only the western fringes of this part of the world during World War I,
missing the dense populations in the Asian heartland, but the conflict
helped to stimulate urges of national consciousness that fermented,
yeastlike, wherever western civilization had spread during the years of
imperial expansion. Similar to North America, Europe, and the South
Pacific, Adventist education in Asia bore the marks of the human con-
text in which it existed. During the interim years the training schools
in Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia played important roles in Adven-
tist education, but most of the headlines came from China, the Philip-
pines, and India.
Adventist Education in China during the Interim

The experience in China presents a unique chapter in the story of
Adventist education. While two world wars and the Great Depression
were the dominant politico-economic events in Western countries dur-
ing the first half of the twentieth century, China struggled with its own
troubles, severe internal turbulence that rendered the country nearly
249
prostrate. Persistent agitation by a young and ambitious generation of

reformers brought about the demise of the Manchu dynasty. China be-
came a republic in 1911, but a very unsettled one as warlords, national-
ists, and communists fought among themselves for hegemony. China
was an ancient land undergoing struggles for nationhood, and these
see-saw struggles produced waves of competing sentiments that swept
alternately across China for much of the time after the 1920s until the
communist revolution settled the matter following World War II.
The leading figures in these events were Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-
shek, and Mao Tse-tung. The first two married sisters from the wealthy
Soong family, Christians by persuasion and friends of Dr. Harry Miller,
a career Adventist medical missionary to China who also served as
president of the China Division during the 1930s. Sun Yat-sen led the
Kuomintang, the Nationalist party, and while not a communist, he al-
lowed communism to gain considerable influence in his party during
1923 and 1924. After Sun's death in 1925 Chiang Kai-shek emerged as
China's acknowledged leader and by parrying communists and smash-
ing opposition from fratricidal warlords remained so to the end of
World War II. Communism's flirtation with popularity ended in 1935
when Mao, the leader of the communist movement, finally retreated
with his followers to northwest China, quietly waiting for a more op-
portune moment to grab power.
Weakened by internal disorder, China became easy prey. In 1931
Japan occupied Manchuria and in 1937 invaded and ravished the east-
ern fringe of China. For the time being Chinese communists and Na-
tionalists buried the hatchet to fight their common enemy. Much of the
western world had been at war for two years when Japan's attacks in
1941 on the holdings of the United States and other western powers in
the Pacific sucked Europe and America into the Asian maelstrom.
During the twenty-five years after 1920 China progressively adopted
elements of western life although internal conditions did not reflect a
wholesale acceptance of occidental culture. No part of Adventist edu-
cation better reflected these new moods in China and the debilitating
international political scene than the major training school in China. In
1919, barely ten years since its founding, it had already moved from its
original location in Honan Province to Nanking and then on to Shang-
hai where it assumed the name of Shanghai Missionary College and
250
THE INTERIM YEARS IN ASIA
began offering college-level classes.]

S. L. Frost, education secretary for
the Far Eastern Division, disclosed in
1922 that in the three years since the
college had operated in Shanghai en-
rollment had grown to new levels and
that 171 of the 270 students were earn-
ing nearly all of their educational ex-
penses in school-owned industries. Of
the remaining students a large per-
centage earned a part of their expens-
es, some as much as three-fourths.
These figures were impressive, but
D. E. Rebok, president of the school,
determined to improve them by add-
ing agricultural training as a key part
Denton E. Rebok began a lengthy ca-
of Adventist education in China. In reer in Seventh-day Adventist educa-
1925 church leaders in China moved tion in China during the World War I
the school back to Nanking and years. He reestablished the training
school near Nanking and introduced
changed its name to China Missionary a strong agricultural and industrial
Junior College, a move that they ex- program. He later served as presi-
plained was an attempt to promote dent of the Theological Seminary in
Washington. D. C.
both rural education and industrial
training in keeping with traditional Adventist philosophy. In Shanghai
industrial training was a successful part of the program, but the school
was not rural. Under Rebok's direction students on the Nanking cam-
pus raised tons of strawberries to be shipped to the Shanghai market,
produced metal beds for numerous commercial customers, and ran a
thriving print shop and operated other enterprises in food processing
and weaving.
The industrial and agricultural character of the school at Nanking
proved to be its savior from political problems that were brewing.
Communist influence in the Kuomintang revived in 1930, and with it
came an attempt to implement an accreditation program requiring all
schools to register with the government and to eradicate non-Chinese
elements from their curricula, including Christianity. As a gesture of
patriotism, all students were to participate in what approached adora-
251
tion of Sun Vat-sen, generally regarded as the father of republican

China.
Adventist schools refused to comply. Pressure mounted, and just as
the issue was about to snap, Dr. Harry Miller, president of the China
Division, explained to one of his patients, H. H. Kung, who was Chi-
ang's minister of labor and industry, why China Missionary Junior
College would close rather than buckle under the new restrictions.
Kung advised Miller to reorganize the school as an industrial training
institution registered with the ministry of labor and industry rather
than to continue as an entity subject to the ministry of education. Im-
mediately the school redefined itself, jettisoned its name in favor of
China Training Institute, but continued its program unchanged and
unmolested.
By and large the crisis was over, but not all Adventist schools fared
as well as China Training Institute. Some temporarily closed. In an
unanticipated gesture of helpfulness, the ministry of education advised
one Adventist "middle school" that if it followed denominational tradi-
tions of practical education it could continue its operations unham-
pered. In 1936 Miller told delegates to the General Conference that
practical education had not only saved the central training school but
many lesser institutions as well from government restrictions while at
the same time affording an opportunity for hundreds of Chinese stu-
dents to earn an education.
The traditional image of an educated Chinese was a cultured person
educated in Confucian principles who led a reflective and sedentary
life aloof from the masses, but China Training Institute catered to the
poor, some of whom went from the school to become physicians and
professionals with graduate degrees. The school promoted human dig-
nity in a different manner and demonstrated that academic achieve-
ment and physical labor were not mutually exclusive. The proof was not
only in the tangible products that came from the campus, but also in the
school's uplifting impact on students.
This concept of education was something new for China, and influ-
ential Chinese took notice. Hardly had the initial crisis with govern-
ment registration subsided when Madame Chiang personally asked
Paul Quimby, religion and history teacher at China Training Institute,
to join the Kuomintang as a special advisor to the government on edu-
252
cational matters. To fulfill her request would require him to work full-
time for the government.
Quimby resisted, realizing that an alien, a Christian no less, joining
the Kuomintang was diametrically opposed to the prevailing Chinese
mood to purge the country from foreign influences, but Miller urged
him to join the Nationalist government anyway to help resolve deep-
rooted problems in Chinese education. Quimby's reluctance evaporated
when Madame Chiang remonstrated, "Mr. Quimby, you are from Chiao
Tou Chen [China Training Institute]. You know the answers to these
problems. That's why you are here."2 She later confided to him that be-
ing a Christian herself and with her husband's partiality toward Chris-
tianity, she wanted Christian principles to become a part of Chinese
education.
Miller later related that China Training Institute lent one of its pro-
fessors to the government for three years and a dozen more Adventist
educators could find immediate employment in government schools if
they were available. He was not exaggerating. In 1935 Chiang offered
Miller and the China Division a completely endowed school to operate
for the government. It was now the doctor's turn to demur.
But before Chiang could make good on his offer international events
caught up with him. The Japanese invasion of China in 1937 targeted
Nanking, the seat of Chiang's Kuomintang. China Training Institute
was also a probable target, only miles from Nanking on the railroad
leading to Shanghai. Quimby, who had returned to the college as pres-
ident, closed the school, leaving it to the invaders who reduced the cam-
pus to rubble, killing three Chinese workers. Although the physical
plant was gone, the immediate reaction of the China Division was to
reestablish the faculty and classes in Hong Kong jointly with the South
China Training Institute.
The South China school was the newest edition of Canton Training
Institute, which was a descendant of the first girls' school and a boys'
school of the Ida Thompson era. Known as Canton Training Institute,
it functioned as one of several middle schools in the shadow of the col-
lege at Nanking. By 1935 it became one of the larger Adventist schools
in China. The South China Union, the largest union in the China Divi-
sion, assumed control of the institution and changed its name to South
China Training Institute. To protect it from the turmoil in much of
253
China, in 1937 it moved approximately 150 miles south to the British

crown colony of Hong Kong.
At the time of this move the destroyed college from Central China
joined the South China school at its new site. Although this was sup-
posedly a joint operation of two schools with the title of China and
South China Training Institute, for practical purposes it was a single
institution. This arrangement continued in temporary quarters until it
occupied a new campus on a forty-acre plot at Clear Water Bay in the
New Territories northeast of the city of Hong Kong.
The desired protection in the British colony lasted only three years.
After the Japanese captured Hong Kong in 1942, school authorities lost
little time separating the two institutions and moving them to safer lo-
cations. While the former Nanking school followed the Nationalist gov-
ernment to Chungking to join the West China Union Training School,
the old Canton section transferred back to nearby southern China where
it remained until after the war, functioning under its resumed title of
South China Training Institute.
During most of these wartime years about a hundred students grad-
uated, a living testimony to the leadership of James Wang, who, with
help from fellow Chinese P. T. Ho and C. I Meng as well as missionary
T. S. Geraty, kept the school going. Between 1945 and 1950 two at-
tempts to revive the school at its old Nanking campus failed. In the
wake of the communist revolution in China, church activity disap-
peared and the school became only a paper entity with a dissolved con-
stituency, but Chinese Adventists kept its memory and traditions alive
as part of the South China Training Institute, reconstituted in Hong
Kong as the sole survivor of Adventist schools in China.
In 1945 Adventist education in China could look back on more than
forty years of history. The first schools were evangelistic tools to reach
the public, but with the development of post-secondary education in
Shanghai in 1919 and an evangelistic program based on formal lectures
and preaching, the leading purpose of Adventist schools metamor-
phosed into worker-training institutions whose primary products were
teachers and ministers.
China was a country whose vast geography and vernacular differ-
ences separated the people into regional groups, but Adventist educa-
tion embarked on its post-World War I era with remarkably strong
254
traditions. Calamitous events or not, it not only survived, but grew. In

1920 Adventist membership exceeded 3,500 with the largest concen-
trations in southern and central China, but small numbers of mem-
bers lived in Manchuria and in the northern and western regions of
the country. More than seventy of the eighty-three Chinese congrega-
tions operated church schools. Six schools offered enough advanced
courses to be classified as training schools, one of which was Shang-
hai Missionary College, a unifying element in this fractured land and
only one of two Adventist post-secondary institutions outside North
America.
In 1930, with approximately 10,000 members, China separated from
the Far Eastern Division to become the China Division. By 1940 Chi-
nese Adventists approached 20,000, scattered among nearly 300 con-
gregations that maintained 116 church schools. Despite the war and the
occupying Japanese army, Adventists in China operated seventeen
training schools, including a nursing school, a correspondence school,
a school in Shanghai for Russian members, and a secondary school for
children of missionaries.
The Adventist educational movement in China benefitted from the
services of some of the church's better educators. Harry Miller, though
first and foremost a physician, was a man of versatile talents who never
lost sight of education as a critical part of the church. D. E. Rebok gave
twenty-three years of his career to China, much of which he spent as
president of the training school at Nanking. Quimby's skills propelled
him into government circles. Frederick Griggs, one of the denomina-
tion's foremost personalities in education, served as president of the
China Division from 1936 to 1938.
Philippine Academy Becomes Philippine Union College

Compared to China, successes in the Philippines were paradoxically
similar and different. When Philippine Academy at Pasay on the out-
skirts of Manila opened its doors in 1917 Adventist training schools
outside North America had been in operation for twenty-five years, but
the late arrival of the Philippine school did not prevent its swift rise to
prominence. It soon became one of the leading Adventist schools not
only in Asia but in all of the world fields. Students flocked to the tiny
four-acre campus. The school began with thirty-six students in a twelve-
255
grade curriculum. Three

years later the first class
graduated and by 1922
enrollment reached 230. 3
In order to keep pace
with a rapidly growing
student body, school ad-
ministrators pursued a
continual building pro-
gram. After five years of
operations the school ex-
panded to accommodate
250 students, including
dormitory space for a
hundred students and fa-
cilities for a library, cha-
Philippine Union Academy was one of the most rap-
id(v growing training schools outside North America.
pel, labs, and food service,
Just four years after its beginning it graduated this besides faculty housing.
.first class of secondary students. In the 1930s it be- Some limited industries
came the first Seventh-day Adventist degree-granting
institution outside North America.
provided student labor op-
portunities.
As good as all ofthis sounded, I. H. Evans, president of the Far Eastern
Division, confessed that not a single school in his field was adequately
equipped with library materials, science labs, or even buildings. Never-
theless, there was no let up in growth at Philippine Academy or the expan-
sion of its program. In 1925, only eight years after founding day, church
leaders authorized the school to become a junior college. The two-year
phase-in began the next year. After two complete years as a fourteen-
grade training school, total enrollment, including elementary and second-
ary students, reached 319, which lifted the institution to fourth among the
ninety-four Adventist training schools outside North America.
From the beginnings of Adventist presence in the Philippines, a rap-
idly increasing constituency fed the growth of the training school. In
1925 when the academy ascended to college status, church membership
in the Philippines exceeded 6,000 and was accelerating. The Philippine
Union claimed the highest baptismal rate of any union in the Far East-
ern Division. At the same time, the division, with more than 19,000
256
members, ranked third in size among the denomination's seven divi-

sions, and in a moment of ebullience with an eye on the need for work-
ers throughout his field, Division Education Secretary S. L. Frost
wished out loud that all of the training schools in his field could make
the transition to colleges.
Frost's exuberance was not far off target, at least as it affected the
Philippines. During the four years before 1930 membership in the
American-held islands nearly doubled, prompting I. H. Evans to predict
that this trend would soon make the Philippines one of the largest
unions in the Adventist world. The pressure for a steady and certain
supply of workers was one of the keenest needs of the field.
Philippine Junior College was not long in outgrowing its four-acre
plot in Pasay. The idea of relocating the school in a rural setting on a
larger campus with additional facilities became progressively more
plausible. In anticipation of this eventuality the Philippine Union pur-
chased a sixty-five acre rural plot in Baesa in Caloocan City, again near
Manila. School administrators stretched the investment value of every
dollar of General Conference assistance by relying heavily on student
labor to build a new campus.
In 1931 the school moved to its new site. The next year, before the
smell of newness had hardly worn off, Philippine Junior College re-
ceived approval to become Philippine Union College, the first Adven-
tist institution outside North America to achieve senior college status
and degree-granting authority. Only fifteen years had elapsed since the
school began in 1917.
The first graduates from four-year programs received their de-
grees in 1935. Pride in the school was evident. With a tinge of tri-
umph W. P. Bradley, secretary of the Far Eastern Division, told the
1936 General Conference session that Philippine Union College was
a senior college offering general and professional courses with the
largest college enrollment of any resident school outside North
America. W. E. Nelson, General Conference education secretary, re-
marked that "the greatest educational progress has been made in the
Philippines" when commenting about Adventist schools in the Far
Eastern Division. 4
Actually, the only four-year degree available was a bachelor of sci-
ence in education, but it was enough to give the new college an edge
9-IP.FTW.
257
over all other Adventist institutions in Asia in teacher-preparation pro-

grams. The net effect was to recognize Philippine Union College as the
center for advanced education for the Far Eastern Division.
This role became the burden of college President L. M. Stump when
he appealed to students during an assembly talk to look beyond the
Philippines for likely careers of church service. Thirty students pledged
to become missionaries and formed the first foreign mission club in the
short history of the school. The school "is becoming a base from which
workers can be sent to other fields," Bradley said. s On the eve of World
War II post-secondary enrollment climbed to 145, the largest of all Ad-
ventist colleges outside North America and nearly double the size ofthe
school next in line. It was still the only four-year post-secondary Ad-
ventist institution beyond the United States.
During the years from 1917 onward the evolution of Philippine
Union College overshadowed all other educational news coming out of
the islands, but Filipino Adventists did not overlook education at other
levels. In 1922 S. L. Frost intimated that elementary schools were ap-
pearing, only three at the time, but enough to be a straw in the wind
indicating that Adventist education was spreading throughout the Phil-
ippines. By the time the central training school became a senior college
in 1931, three academies were also in operation. In the north Northern
Luzon Academy evolved from an elementary school, and East Vi sayan
Academy on the island of Cebu and West Vi sayan Academy on Iloilo
served Adventists in the central Philippines. All three schools func-
tioned as training centers as well as feeder schools for Philippine Union
College.
By 1940 these three schools reported a combined secondary enroll-
ment of nearly 300 besides hundreds more elementary students. In ad-
dition, ninety elementary church schools dotted the islands, attracting
more than 2,600 pupils. Nearly one church in every four supported a
church school. The heavy emphasis on teacher-preparation courses at
PUC had paid off.
But by 1940 other issues were looming in the Philippines. Observers
of events in the Orient saw Japanese military incursions on the Asian
mainland as omens of trouble for other strategic sites, especially the far
extremity of the Pacific rim of defense for the United States in which
Manila was the key. Tension turned to shooting in December 1941,
258
eventually forcing Americans into a retreat. Philippine Union College

passed into local hands. With the help of Filipino faculty, Reuben G.
Manalaysay held the school together, continuing classes until peaceful
times returned except for the school year of 1944-45.
The thriving educational establishment in the Philippines was in
part a byproduct of the United States presence in the islands. One of the
major objectives of public policy was to educate Filipinos for self-gov-
ernment, which included preparing Filipino teachers for Filipino
schools. Adventist practice paralleled this trend once Adventist mem-
bership became large enough to warrant a training school. Adventists
in the Philippines also benefitted materially from American control of
the economy and from democratic principles that became a part of
Philippine life.
The hegemony of the United States was not the only explanation for
the hurried advancement of Adventist post-secondary education in the
Philippines. Adventist leaders in the Philippines were North Ameri-
cans, but they were quick to point out that Filipinos were apt students
who needed only a taste of education to whet their appetite for profes-
sional life. Since Philippine Academy had become Philippine Junior
College nationals had served the institution in substantial numbers. By
the mid-1930s when the school became a senior college, they were in
the majority, even serving as religion teachers to prepare a Filipino
ministry. When nationals took over the college during the war, it was
not a case of turning the school over to rank novices. Anglo leadership
returned to the college after the war, but the Manalaysay presidency
was a harbinger of future trends.
Japan's Threefold Educational School

Elsewhere in the Far Eastern Division Adventist schools sometimes
faced steep uphill struggles. Unlike the Philippines and China, Japan
had a high literacy rate but this achievement proved to be no advantage
for Christian education of any stripe. The imperial government had
preempted the field with a system of primary schools that offered effec-
tive education in Japanese culture which left little room for interlopers
such as Adventist schools. 6
Adventist education in Japan began in 1897 but the first training
school did not open until 1908 near Tokyo. This enterprise remained
259
small before closing in 19l7. Two years later it reopened, seemingly

with a rejuvenated program, but growth was still slow. "Our ... school
work in Japan is not large," S. L. Frost acknowledged in 1922. "We
have one training school and one primary school."7 Enrollment was
about fifty, divided into two sections according to gender.
Inspired by a $2,500 donation from a Thirteenth Sabbath overflow
offering in 1924, Japanese Adventists matched it ten times, enabling
them to give the school a new beginning. In 1926 they transferred the
section for male students out of Tokyo to a rural location across Tokyo
Bay, leaving the women's half of the school at its urban site. A rede-
signed program that added post-secondary courses and an agricultural
component brought a new institutional name, Nihon San Iku Gakuin,
or "Japan Threefold Educational School."
W. P. Bradley, division secretary, described the change with exhila-
ration, stating the school was "blazing the way" by introducing some-
thing new in Oriental education-a learning program that incorporated
student labor. Visitors, ranging from farmers and professionals to gov-
ernment functionaries, toured the campus to see, to praise, and to mar-
vel, Bradley said. 8 As encouraging as these courtesies were they did not
overcome the deeply rooted hostility for Christianity that smouldered
in the imperial government. Threefold education was a novelty for the
Japanese but its impact was something less than a revolution in the
government schools.
A laggard rate of membership growth kept development slow at the
training school. "The Japanese people make good Christians, faithful
and true," I. H. Evans stated in 1930, but he confessed that of all the
fields in the Far Eastern Division, Adventists succeeded least in Japan. 9
By 1935 membership barely topped a thousand and school enrollment
was less than seventy-five.
As the imperial government flexed its military muscles in Asia,
problems mounted for Adventist education. In 1910 Japan had annexed
Korea; in 1931 it occupied Manchuria and in 1937 invaded eastern
China. In early 1940 non-Japanese church workers withdrew from
Japanese-controlled regions and national workers shouldered the re-
sponsibility for church and institutional leadership.
Accompanying these military actions were rumblings emanating
from Tokyo that threatened a merger of all Christian bodies into a sin-
260
gle movement, which would smother denominational identity. This

unification occurred in October 1940, but Adventists were one of a
score of denominations that did not comply, leaving the church vulner-
able to intensified pressure. The college struggled to remain alive under
the direction of two successive Japanese presidents, H. Yamamoto and
K. Otsuki, but in 1943 a government decree shut the institution down.
It remained closed until 1947.
Uncertainties in Korea
A near replica of events took place in Chosen, or Japanese-occupied
Korea. Under Japanese controls, the training school in Soonan began
the post-World War I era as Chosen Union Training School. During the
immediate years after 1918 rebellion and student strikes favoring inde-
pendence pockmarked the country. The training school "had to share
with others in the matter of strikes," C. L. Butterfield, superintendent
of the Chosen Union, said, admitting that enrollment dropped during
the disturbances. 1O
By 1922 quieter political times cooled students' fiery spirits and
helped bring on an enrollment revival. Enlarged facilities financed by
the same Thirteenth Sabbath overflow offering that had benefitted San
Iku Gakuin in Japan enabled the Korean school to double its student
housing capacity. By 1930 the school rebounded with more than 250
students, mostly elementary, but with a small post-secondary enroll-
ment.
School growth stemmed from other causes as well. Korean Adven-
tists had endured "sad times," as I. H. Evans reflected on the state of
affairs in Chosen, but membership increased much more rapidly than
in Japan, more than tripling Japanese numbers by 1935. This growth
translated into more students to educate. Also different from Japan was
the Korean practice of maintaining a relatively prosperous system of
lower schools which fostered the idea of a training school for the ad-
vanced students. Adventist leaders were gratified by the number ofKo-
rean students who entered church employment.
But the upward trend in education did not last. In 1931, presumably
because of political pressure from the occupying Japanese, theologi-
cal classes moved from the Soonan campus south to Seoul under the
direct tutelage of Chosen Union personnel. Between 1932 and 1937
261
formal ministerial education stopped altogether, while a secondary

school operated at Soonan. In 1939 ministerial education resumed in
Keijo, the Japanese form for Seoul, and the secondary school moved
to the same city, but enrollment suffered from the interruption. A
year later responsibility for church affairs devolved into local hands
and American and European workers evacuated from Japanese-con-
trolled areas. For two years beginning in 1940 school principals Lee
Sung Eui and Chai Tai Hyun headed the school, but anti-Christian
political pressure forced it shut in 1942. As in Japan, the school re-
mained closed until 1947.
Prosperity and Reversal in Singapore

Of all the training schools in the Far Eastern Division, Malaysian
Union Seminary in Singapore received the least publicity. Serving a
polyglot field extending from the Straits of Malacca to the eastern
shores of the Netherlands East Indies, its enrollment continued to rise
during the 1920s. Students came from Thailand, known at the time as
Siam, from the British-controlled Malay States, and from Borneo, Java,
Sumatra and the Celebes, all parts of the Netherlands East Indies. Eng-
lish became the medium of instruction, although teachers spoke Chi-
nese and Malay in the lower levels.
After a quick and optimistic beginning the school had an up and
down experience. By 1921 enrollment dropped from more than 140 to
sixty-five, but after settling in a permanent site on Upper Serangoon
Road, student numbers picked up. More than 350 enrolled in 1930, a
figure that dropped to fewer than a hundred the next year when the
Netherlands East Indies separated from the Far Eastern Division to be-
come part of the Central European Division. A new school in Dutch-
held Java attracted only a fraction of the lost enrollment.
This erratic experience did not lessen the importance of the school
in the eyes of church leaders, who consistently regarded it as one of the
five major training schools in the Far Eastern Division and deserving of
junior college status. Showing remarkable resiliency, the Malayan
Seminary, as it was renamed, regained its cosmopolitan character and
in 1935 registered about 150 students who spoke thirty-six different
languages, according to W. P. Bradley. Five years later the enrollment
reached a near-capacity 360. Elementary-level courses predominated,
262
but secondary enrollment was encouraging enough to support a small

department to offer one year of post-secondary classes.
Still another blow was about to hit the school. As one of the most
strategic ports in Asia, Singapore was in the direct path of the Japanese
military as it swept down the Asian coast in 1941. In February 1942 the
Japanese flag was flying over Singapore and much of Southeast Asia,
including the Netherlands East Indies. This time the Seminary closed
and European and American workers fled, some of them not in time to
avoid capture and internment. From 1942 to 1945 the school did not
function.
Adventist Education in China and the Far East-a Comparison

Besides the common trials of war, Adventist education in the China
and Far Eastern divisions experienced other changes during the twenty-
five years after 1920. Nationalization succeeded best in the Philippines,
but in all of the main schools local teachers were conducting many of
the classes before the war erupted, including extensive coursework in
religion and theology, regarded as key responsibilities in producing
church workers. According to E. L. Longway, acting president of the
China Division as it emerged from the war, national leadership during
the war was "perhaps the greatest item that should be credited to the
right side of the ledger.""
Because most ofthe schools in China managed to stay on the friend-
ly side of political lines during the war, they remained open and pro-
duced workers, but the Far Eastern Division enjoyed no such luxury. At
war's end this field was suffering badly from Japan to Singapore be-
cause of a dearth of workers. All schools had closed and no graduates
had entered church employ for four years.'2 Record keeping during the
war years was next to impossible, but official denominational statistics
show that elementary education in the Far Eastern Division maintained
its level as measured in total enrollment. By contrast, the China Divi-
sion sustained more than a thirty percent loss. In these two fields trends
of growth in elementary schools occurred before World War 11. l3
Complexities in Southern Asia

Compared to events in the Far Eastern and China divisions, the de-
velopment of Adventist education in the Southern Asia Division was
263
small and quiet, at times almost unnoticed. One reason for its lack of
attention was the long delay between the first denominational schools
and the establishment of a central training school. Adventist secondary
schools were relatively numerous in Southern Asia, but the field did not
establish an official training school until 1937. 14
India was the dominant country in this division which included a
ring of neighbors strung out from Afghanistan in the west to Burma in
the east, and north and south from Tibet to Ceylon. Ethnic, linguistic
and religious differences separated not only the countries but split India
itself into pockets that were as alien to each other as distant nations.
As new Adventist missions appeared in Asia they fused into the
Asiatic Division that sprawled thousands of miles from western India
eastward through China and even Australia and the South Pacific. In
1919 this cumbersome arrangement fell apart, with India and its pe-
ripheral neighbors joining to constitute the Southern Asia Division.
The major missions in India became unions.
As a rule of thumb among Adventist missions, a recognized training
school appeared soon after the church established a toehold, but events
were different in Southern Asia. Membership growth was slow and
schools tended to serve the local mission. Each union developed its
own training school with programs at both the elementary and second-
ary levels. Under this organization the South India Training School
became the educational center for the South India Union although it
was emerging as the strongest educational center for India. E. M. Me-
leen, who had taken charge ofthe school in 1918, spent nearly his entire
six-year principalship developing the new campus at Krishnarajapuram
near Bangalore with other lesser schools in the field supplying students
for advanced work at the union school.
Although South India Training School, or SITS, was a single institu-
tion, it functioned in two parts, segregated by gender. By 1922 it was
offering a limited number of post-secondary classes, although it was
officially a secondary school. Two years later the campus became co-
educational, a mark of changing times in India.
These early years of the South India Training School coincided with
widespread nationalist agitation throughout India which church leaders
viewed with mixed feelings. W. W. Fletcher, the first head of the South-
ern Asia Division, saw the new political trends as a threat to Christian-
264
ity, but he could not varnish over his restrained admiration for the lead-
er of Indian nationalism, Mohandas K. Gandhi, whom he described as
a "quaint and frail figure," a "wonderful spectacle," stirring India as it
had never been moved before and forging a new, intensified national
consciousness. 15
Gandhi was aware of Adventist beliefs and the nature of Adventist
education. During his twenty-year sojourn in South Africa before World
War I he had established Tolstoy Farm, a combination school and ref-
uge for Indians living in Transvaal, where he experimented with a sim-
ple diet, vegetarianism, cross-ethnic education, coeducation, and a pro-
gram combining training in agriculture and skilled labor with
traditional instruction and spiritual development. 16
Without introducing himself as an Adventist, G. F. Enoch, a career
missionary to India, later visited the leader of Indian nationalism,
thinking to impress him with the virtues of practical education as Ad-
ventists practiced them, especially at the South India Training School.
But he could not trick Gandhi. Before he finished his remarks the In-
dian leader interrupted him to ask if he was a Seventh-day Adventist.
Years later the Indian leader visited the Krishnarajapuram campus and
joked that he had experienced the peanut-butter fad with Adventists.
Although Gandhi was congenial and in agreement with many of the
ideals of Adventist education, the political trends he represented made
little or no room for Christianity. He was frequently at odds with Brit-
ish authority. For the time being Adventist leaders found it advanta-
geous to keep some distance between themselves and the nationalist
movement.
By the end of the 1920s India's Adventists recognized the South
India Training School as their most advanced learning center which
continued offering post-secondary classes through the decade. Union
leaders agreed to a resolution in 1929 stating that it was financially
unfeasible for all union schools to offer classes beyond the secondary
level and in their opinion the Krishnarajapuram campus would be the
ideal location to send students for post-secondary work. This resolution
was not an official action establishing a division school but rather a
consensual statement recognizing the preeminence of South India
Training School in what, in effect, was a consortium of supporting
schools. The South India Union continued to manage the school, but
265
the action paved the way to its later official designation as a division
institution.
Official action or not, South India Training School reacted by
eliminating elementary courses and concentrating on secondary and
post-secondary classes. In 1930 only thirty-six enrolled, all officially
secondary students. As the decade progressed, the school's drawing
capacity grew with students registering from all parts of the divi-
sion, including Burma. By 1935 the student body was largely post-
secondary, although still less than fifty. Enrollment was predomi-
nantly male, but women formed a growing part of the school. Since
its early days a dairy, a poultry farm, and a printing press were the
leading industries.
College historian George R. Jenson has pointed out that while en-
rollment was less during these years, the numbers represented actual
growth because students were exclusively in the upper standards, in-
cluding college-level, which constituted a new trend in Adventist edu-
cation in India. This general upgrading and the industrial and coeduca-
tional programs caught the eye of Mysore state government officials
who visited the campus from time to time and encouraged school lead-
ers in their work.
At its biennial meeting in 1937 the Southern Asia Division Council
voted to make official what had become obvious by finally designating
the South India Training School as the division college to train ver-
nacular workers. Appropriately, the management of the training school
passed from the South India Union to the Southern Asia Division. At
the same time the institution took the name of Spicer College to honor
W. A. Spicer, General Conference president from 1922 to 1930 who
spent a brief term in India near the beginning of his career.
This action culminated a twenty-two year evolution. Some of the
leading personalities included G. G. Lowry who established the school,
E. M. Meleen who developed the Krishnarajapuram campus and later,
as a leader in the South Indian Union, continued to shepherd education
in general and the school specifically. N. C. Wilson, president of the
Southern Asia Division, led the division to take the final action. Among
the Indian workers who served the school were L. G. Mookerjee and E.
D. Thomas, the first nationals to become ordained ministers in the
Southern Asia Division. Mookerjee held many positions ofresponsibil-
266
ity, among them religion teacher and

press manager at the training school.
Thomas at one time was an assistant
principal of the school and business
manager.
Enrollment continued to climb af-
ter the school became the division ed-
ucational center, topping seventy by
1940, the majority of whom were post-
secondary students. After a prolonged
search, college and division leaders
moved the college from Krishnaraja-
puram north to a larger and more cen-
tral site on the outskirts of Poona,
which would allow for easier access
and institutional expansion. In 1945 E. D. Thomas. one of the first or-
the school changed its name to Spicer dained native ministers in India. held
Missionary College and the next year leadership positions at the South In-
dia Training School. which developed
it achieved senior college status. into Spicer Memorial College.
The evolution of Spicer College was
above all else a process of emergence, a natural outcome of events and
conditions that favored its growth into its role as the division school.
This process was slow, reflecting small membership increases in the
division. In 1940 Southern Asia was the smallest of all the world fields
with fewer than 5,000 members.
The notion of a divisional system of education that furnished stu-
dents to the top institution was integral to the emergence of the South
India Training School. It became unofficial policy after the 1929 reso-
lution recognizing the de/acto role of the Krishnarapajuram campus as
the leading school in India, a status that received additional strength
when school leaders discontinued instruction in the elementary stan-
dards in order to focus on secondary and college level classes. In this
respect Southern Asia's school was different from all other Adventist
training schools outside North America. While those institutions grap-
pled with the issues of offering instruction at all levels, South India
Training School was the first to concentrate on its primary objective of
preparing church employees by limiting itself to advanced education.
267
In some ways no other field outside North America had better

equipped itself to centralize its adult educational program than the
Southern Asia Division. A multiplicity of ethnic and linguistic groups
had required a multiplicity of schools, and the 1937 action creating a
division junior college also perpetuated the existing practice of restrict-
ing all other schools to elementary and secondary status. At the time
about twenty such schools were scattered throughout the division, many
of them boarding institutions. Some were staffed entirely by Indian
teachers. Five were in Burma, among them Meiktila, which served as
the central training school in that country. One was in Ceylon. Also in
India were several score of church and village schools.
The organization of Adventist education into a workable system did
not mean that the schools had breached the ethnic and linguistic differ-
ences in India's society. The question of how to touch this multitudi-
nous and variegated land with Christianity weighed heavily on the
minds of church leaders. E. D. Thomas described the gargantuan task
to delegates to the 1936 General Conference when he reminded them
that India's overwhelming rural population was scattered among
750,000 villages. "If Jesus at the beginning of His earthly ministry had
begun to visit these villages," he said, "spending only one day in each
village, He would still have to spend 118 years in order to complete His
task."!7
That Adventist schools had played a crucial part in Southern Asia's
evangelism was common knowledge. As G. G. Lowry had envisioned
it, the mission school was the most important vehicle to carry the gos-
pel to India's masses. But the mission schools had not been easy to es-
tablish or to maintain. I. F. Blue, superintendent of the Northwest India
Union, recounted in 1922 that he had "stripped the field" of every In-
dian worker who could teach and even employed some Hindu and Mus-
lim teachers to conduct Adventist schools, mainly for children of church
members or "inquirers."
Village preachers were also teachers who maintained a school dur-
ing the day and preached in the evenings. The schools themselves were
primitive with no equipment, sometimes meeting under a shade tree,
but they accomplished their task. "By serving the community in this
way as teacher and preacher," Blue said, "soon the worker has a little
company meeting regularly for Sabbath school; and after thorough
268
teaching, they are ready for baptism. Little lights spring up in the
way." I8
During the twenty-five years after 1920 this plan remained, but with
it also came a greater emphasis on church schools. H. A. Morrison,
General Conference secretary of education, observed in 1941 that com-
pared to other fields, Southern Asia operated a large number of elemen-
tary and secondary schools. "If evangelism can be promoted by other
means than through the school," he remarked, "the minimizing of the
mission school may be desirable."19
In addition to the system of vernacular schools in Southern Asia,
missionaries utilized Vincent Hill School at Mussoorie in northern In-
dia as a convenient place to send their children rather than returning
them to their horne countries. The school originally catered to the Eng-
lish and Anglo-Indian communities. After operating at two locations, it
moved to Mussoorie in 1922, opening with eighty students. At this
third site, known as Vincent Hill, about 150 miles north of Delhi in the
foothills of the Himalayas, the school outgrew its initial objective and
within five years became a junior college.
Division and union leaders carne to regard Vincent Hill School and
College as a division training school for what they euphemistically
called the English work. Most of the students were elementary, but by
1935 total enrollment surpassed 130 with thirteen college students. Di-
vision President A. L. Ham recalled in 1946 that Southern Asia had
been able to employ nearly all of the graduates from this school.
The Vincent Hill campus grew steadily until after World War II, but
whatever impact it had as a supplier of denominational workers, the
ultimate need was indigenous leadership, which by definition, would
come from the vernacular schools. The post-secondary enrollment at
Spicer had long since exceeded the number of college students at Vin-
cent Hill, and by 1945 the school for the English work began to decline.
In 1951 the college section closed and soon after the curriculum be-
came Americanized. The school no longer prepared English-speaking
workers, but educated children of missionaries.
Adventist Schools in Asia Compared

In many Asian countries where Adventists established schools an-
cient traditions of philosophy and learning were common, and the con-
269
cept of education was not new. But illiteracy was high because native
education and learning were elitist and shut out much of the population.
The Western form of education which Adventists as well as other Chris-
tian bodies brought differed from indigenous customs. The primary
purpose of Adventist schools was to contribute to denominational aims
of spreading the gospel, but an inherent part of its effect was a democ-
ratizing process, making education available to the masses.
Asian countries lacked democratic traditions, but to varying degrees
they accepted some democratic ideals, among them a trend toward so-
cial equality which gradually became more visible during the interim
years. It is safe to conjecture that Adventist schools succeeded in part
in Asia because they contributed to national goals.
Japan did not fit this description well. A system of state education
was already in place when Adventist education arrived, and thus in the
public eye Adventist schools became competitors rather than vehicles
of advancement. In this island nation Adventist education had to sur-
vive solely on the merit of its Christian character.
Irrespective of the differences among Adventist schools in Asia,
during the interim years native leadership rose much more rapidly in
Asian schools than in Black Africa or the South Pacific islands. Like
their counterparts in Europe, Adventist schools in Asia suffered from
World War II, but in 1945 they were no longer the frontier enterprises
that they had been in 1920.
I Information about China has come from General Conference Bulletin, 1922, no. 15, p.
359; ibid., 1930, no. 3, p. 52; ibid., 1936, no. 3, p. 55; ibid., no. 13, p. 260; ibid., 1946: no. 8,
p.185; Hong Kong Adventist College Bulletin, 2001-2003; Statistical Report, 1920-1940; John
Oss, Mission Advance in China (Nashville, TN: Southern Publishing Association, 1949), pp.
187-193; Paul Quimby with Norma Youngberg, Yankee on Yangtze (Nashville, TN: Southern
Publishing Association, 1976), pp. 77-160; Raymond S. Moore, China Doctor (New York:
Harper & Brothers: 1961), pp. 155-161; Herbert Ford, For the Love of China, pp. 53-93, 111-
118; Brown, Chronology, pp. 78, 154.
2Quimby, ibid., p. 100.
) For data about the Philippines, see General Conference Bulletin, 1922, no. 15, pp. 356,
358; ibid., 1926, no. 10. p. 30; ibid., 1930, no. 3, pp. 61,62; ibid., 1936, no. 6, pp. 54,55; ibid.,
no. 7, pp. 134, 149; ibid., 1941, no. 2, p. 40; Statistical Report, 1920-1945; Brown, ibid., pp.
91,138,147,184.
'General Conference Bulletin, 1936, no. 7, p. 149.
llbid., no. 3, p. 54.
6 I have gathered information about Japan, Korea and Malaysia from General Conference
Bulletin, 1922, no. 15, pp. 344,358; ibid., 1926, no. 4, p. 14; ibid., 1930, no. 3, pp. 61,62; ibid.,
270
no. 7, p. 114; ibid., 1936, no. 6, p. 54; ibid., 1941, no. 7, p. 155; ibid., no. 8, pp. 186, 187; ibid.,
no. 9, p. 216; Statistical Report, 1920-1945; Sahmyook University Bulletin, 1999-2000;
Brown, ibid., pp. 154, 156, 169.
8Ibid., 1936, no. 3, p. 54.
9Ibid., 1930, no. 3, p. 61.
IOlbid., 1922, no. 15, p. 344.
II General Conference Bulletin, 1946, no. 8, p. 182.
12lbid. no. 7, pp. 155, 157.

11Statisticai Report, 1920-1945.
14Data dealing with Southern Asia comes from General Conference Bulletin, 1922, no. I,
p. 4; ibid., no. 2, pp. 44-46; ibid., no. 13, p. 303; ibid., 1930, no. II, p. 190; ibid., 1936, no. 5,
p. 101; ibid., 1941, no. 2, p. 40; ibid., 1946, no. 3, p. 53; Statistical Report, 1920-1945; Spicer
Memorial College Bulletin, 2001-2002; Jenson, Spicer Memorial College, pp. 26-72; Sama-
raj, ed. Images 1893-1993, passim; Pohlman, "First the Blade, then the Ear," unpublished
edition, pp. 32-40; R. S. Lowry and M. G. Champion, "A Providence in India," Journal of
True Education (June 1953), pp. 34,35; Brown, ibid.. pp. 172, 181.
"General Conference Bulletin, 1922, no. 2, p. 44.
16An informative source of Gandhi's views are in his autobiography, Gandhi. an Autobi-
ography: the Story of My Experiments with Truth. Mahadev Desai, trans. (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1993 ed.). See particularly pp. 328-340.
18Ibid., 1922, no. 4, p. 88.
19Ibid., 1941, no. 2, p. 40.
LATIN AMERICA AND
THE CARIBBEAN IN THE
INTERIM
Removed from the combat theaters of both world wars but not im-
mune to the impact of war and the Great Depression of the 1930s were
the two sister divisions, South America and Inter-America. In these
two territories educational development contrasted sharply. The Inter-
American Division did not organize until 1922. Prior to that date the
region was in organizational disarray and only after repeated frustra-
tions had church workers been able to establish a single training school
in Jamaica. In 1920 this fledgling institution was still feeling its way.
By the time South American Adventists organized a division in 1916,
training schools were already functioning in Argentina, Chile, and
Brazil, and in 1919 a fourth campus opened in Peru. Although this last
campus originated during the beginning years, it was really a school of
the interim.'
Argentina's Colegio Adventista del Plata

All four South American institutions were called training schools,
but differences in their strength and reputations were inevitable. Co-
legio Adventista del Plata, or CAP, the first training school in South
America, early developed the unofficial standing as the leading school
272
LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN IN THE INTERIM
in the field. It was closest to the managerial hub of Adventist work

and although its financial footing was not prosperous it was better off
than other training schools in South America during its formative
years. In 1926 its future brightened when it became a junior college,
but through the rest of the 1920s and the following decade enrollment
did not increase as school administrators hoped. In 1920 enrollment
stood at 172; twenty-five years later the number of students rose to
287, an increase ofless than sixty percent even though membership in
its supporting constituency, the Austral Union, quadrupled during the
same period.
Fluctuating economic conditions were partly to blame for slow
growth at CAP. Another contributing factor was the habitual departure
of prospective ministerial students from the campus to enter pastoral
work after they completed secondary school. This practice provided
congregations with pastors quickly, but it undercut the primary source
of potential post-secondary students. Sooner or later the Austral Union
would feel the pinch for better educated ministers.
The school enjoyed unique success with its teacher-preparation and
agricultural programs. 1. S. Marshall, principal and president from 1919
to 1934, and his wife Marian, who supervised the teacher training cur-
riculum, began following the government's certification program in
1927. Seven years later when they left the campus, they had pulled
sixty-two students through the government examination process to
earn life teaching certificates in Argentina. During the late 1920s the
school farm gained national acclaim for its dairy and agricultural prod-
ucts.
Church leaders and administrators of Colegio Adventista del Plata
ended the quarter century after 1920 with a debilitating debate about
the school's location. Its founders had deliberately put the campus in
the country where it would serve the surrounding German-speaking
Adventist population, but as church membership increased and the
school became Hispanized, pressure built up to move the institution
closer to an urban center. Repeated criticism argued that students were
staying away from a rural school accessible only by muddy roads.
But other pressures were at work. By 1941 the school had suffered a
string of operating losses and could not afford capital improvements.
As the canons of World War II began firing, a defense-minded Argen-
tine government issued a set of decrees announcing tighter controls

over education. At the time Adventist leaders in South America were
discussing the feasibility of "offici ali zing" the school, which would
make it a nationally recognized pre-professional institution, but the
new regulations raised questions about Saturday classes, military train-
ing as part of the curriculum, and restricting faculty to Argentine citi-
zens. The government also frowned on coeducational boarding institu-
tions.
A plot of land just north of Buenos Aires was being readied for a
new campus for CAP, but faced with a near-impossible political situa-
tion in Argentina if the school proceeded with plans to officialize, some
leading voices in the Austral Union began a campaign to transfer the
school to Uruguay. Church leaders stalemated, however, not being able
to decide between Argentina with its threats and Uruguay, separate
from the heart of the Austral Union. The upshot was a decision once
and for all to remain at the original location in Entre Rios Province, the
least problematic site, away from the capitals of either Argentina or
Uruguay.
The decision was a turning point for the school. Officializing the
school did not occur, but the conclusion cleared the air from the uncer-
tainty that had clouded the campus for years. In 1945 the post-second-
ary enrollment was only twenty-nine, but with the divisive debate be-
hind them, administrative faculty and Austral Union leaders could
concentrate on upgrading the school plant and extending its program to
transform the institution into the school they had been dreaming about
ever since it became a junior college.
Success at Brazil College

While the Argentine school was struggling with its identity, Brazil
Seminary developed a post-secondary program that made it the most
prominent school in the South American Division by 1945. Although
its campus was rural and accommodated a thriving agricultural pro-
gram, it was also close to Sao Paulo, one of Brazil's major cities, which
led some leading denominational personalities to believe that the
school's location was one of the best in the Adventist world. By 1920
enrollment reached l36, mostly secondary students in worker-training
programs.
274
Probably motivated by an economic downturn and the need for more

assurance than the slim financial resources on which the school
depended, Brazil Seminary President T. W. Steen instituted a cash-in-
advance payment plan in 1921. His action aroused widespread skepti-
cism among church leaders in Brazil who warned that it would strangle
enrollment. The upshot was neither as successful as Steen hoped nor as
bad as the critics portrayed it. School authorities made exceptions for
about a fourth of the students who needed to work. Enrollment indeed
dropped somewhat, but the school enjoyed unprecedented financial
well being, which was one of Steen's primary goals.
Whatever the virtues of the cash-in-advance plan, it did not last. It
was almost axiomatic that Adventist schools would incorporate labor
programs and that students should work. The notion of requiring stu-
dents to pay a year's fees in advance appeared to deny a long accepted
philosophy. Further, the origins of Brazil Seminary and the size of its
agricultural projects presupposed that the school needed the students to
work. Within three years the campus was back to the more traditional
practice of providing institutional labor as a means for students to gain
an education.
Through the entire interim between 1920 and 1945, and long there-
after, the training school near Sao Paulo was, in effect, an inter-union
campus, serving Brazil's three unions and depending on financial sup-
port from all of them, although the school was associated more closely
with the South Brazil Union. After 1923 the institution more often went
by the name, Brazil College. During the 1930s enrollment rose and fell
according to the economic fortunes of the country, but gradually it
edged upward. Unofficially it began offering post-secondary classes,
and in 1940 the General Conference Statistical Report listed it as a ju-
nior college, the fulfillment of long standing Brazilian aspirations.
The school's new status symbolized the rising tide of national con-
sciousness that washed over Brazil during the 1930s. A movement
among Brazilian church leaders to split from the South American Divi-
sion and form a separate Brazilian Division got nowhere, but they had
more success in nationalizing Brazil College. From the school's begin-
ning North Americans supervised theological studies. Their language
skills were frequently less than professional and rapid turnover made
for discontinuity. After Brazilian theology teachers took charge in 1931
the program stabilized and the number of ministerial students in-

creased. In 1939 Domingos Peixoto succeeded to the presidency, the
first national to head a major training school in South America. By that
time the faculty was largely Brazilian.
Enrollment at Brazil College caught up with attendance at River
Plate College in the mid-1920s, but the pattern during the 1920s and
1930s showed more fluctuation and fewer students in Brazil than in
Argentina. In the 1940s, however, trends reversed. In 1945 when the
Brazilian school celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of its founding,
more than 500 students registered, nearly 300 in secondary classes and
127 in post-secondary courses. Brazil College had become the largest
Adventist school in South America.
Training Schools for Andean Indigenous Peoples

Most of the issues that the Argentine and Brazilian schools encoun-
tered during the years after 1920 pivoted on the question of making
certain that training programs conformed to Adventist educational phi-
losophy and were productive according to church needs. While these
questions were omnipresent at Adventist schools, at times public prob-
lems became all absorbing. Such was the case in the Inca Union, con-
sisting of Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia.
For some of the Peruvian intelligentsia, the Adventist system of
schools for the indigenous population in the Lake Titicaca region was a
social service, a means to integrate the mountain people into the main-
stream of society. While Adventists acknowledged the legitimacy of
this purpose, for them the schools were an evangelistic tool, a miracu-
lous accomplishment whose crowning event was the opening of a train-
ing school for the Aymara Indians in Juliaca in 1922.
A Thirteenth Sabbath offering that year provided funds for new
construction, and in 1924 the school moved into a new building. Al-
though it was officially an elementary school by North American stan-
dards, Peruvian education authorities classified some of its instruction
as secondary. Enrollment grew encouragingly and from the Aymara
mountain villages came more calls for primary schools than the train-
ing school could handle.
To manage these petitions leaders of the Inca Union and the new
Titicaca Normal School required the requesting villages to furnish liv-
276
The graduating class of 1927. Titicaca Normal School. poses infront a/the main build-
ing. This school represented one of the most dramatic successes in Adventist education
in South America.
ing quarters for teachers and buildings for the schools they wanted.
Additionally, villagers also had to establish an equipment fund equiva-
lent to US$50 and guarantee at least eighty students. The schools also
began charging small fees. Even with these new conditions hardly a
letup occurred in calls for village schools.
By the mid-I920s graduates of the training school were numbered in
double digits, who almost without exception found employment as
teachers in the widening circle of outlying schools, some of which were
in neighboring Bolivia, taught by Bolivians who attended the Titicaca
campus. Especially important to the educational program in the Andes
were the summer sessions when teachers in the village schools gath-
ered for more training. Nearly 290 attended the summer session of
1925-1926. With these figures in their hands, South American church
leaders regarded Titicaca as one of the five training schools in the divi-
sion, although the curriculum and labor program, which included sheep
herding and rug making, differed from those at the Argentine and Bra-
zilian schools.
All of this activity came to a sudden halt in 1928 when Augusto B.
Leguia, Peru's president, accused Titicaca Normal School ofjeopardiz-
ing national unity and issued a decree closing the school. He also threat-
ened the same treatment for all similar schools-meaning Adventist
schools-and proposed that the government should build and operate
Indian schools and require all schools to use approved textbooks. Ad-
ventists interpreted Leguia's actions as an imminent danger. South
American Division President Carlyle B. Haynes declined a full expla-
nation when he reported to the 1930 General Conference session, say-
ing that matters were too sensitive to discuss openly. What he did not
divulge was that he and his colleagues were dealing with an alleged
desecration of the Peruvian flag on the Titicaca campus.
The more Adventists protested, the firmer Leguia became, arguing
that he had not acted in violation of religious freedom, which he ac-
knowledged the Peruvian constitution guaranteed, but to protect na-
tional integrity. He whispered to confidants that he did not intend to
send Adventists packing, but that he had, indeed, aimed his decrees
directly at the training school. In spite of his tough talk, no other Ad-
ventist school closed, although at the time no one knew how far the
Peruvian president would take his threats.
Haynes urged Adventists around the world to pray, and what many
interpreted to be a quick case of divine intervention, a coup d'etat over-
threw Leguia and installed a president who had once been a patient in
the nearby Juliaca Clinic and was sympathetic to Adventists. In De-
cember 1930 the new Peruvian chief executive reopened the training
school while administrators tried to put their program back together.
But the school suffered lingering damage; enrollment plunged to fewer
than fifty by 1932. Recovery was slow but sure, and by 1940 the student
body exceeded 160. Enlargement of the curriculum was also part of the
new growth.
Questions of government controls did not go away. In 1943 the
school faced new demands by inspectors who imposed a prohibition of
coeducation. This time the school did not shut down but modified its
program to arrange a compromise with state officials. By 1945 Titicaca
Normal School had become a leading secondary school in the South
American Division with an enrollment exceeding 230.
Ironically, about the same time Titicaca Normal School closed in
1928, the Bolivian Board of Instruction published a complimentary ar-
ticle about educational methodology at the Peruvian school. Bolivian
278
Adventists read the article, remembering that their students had en-
countered problems crossing into Peru to attend Titicaca Normal
School. After Leguia shut the school down, the Bolivian Mission de-
cided to open its own program to train indigenous teachers for village
schools patterned after those in Peru which Bolivian education leaders
had just praised. A modest beginning at Co llana, high in the Andes, in
1929 drew twenty students, a figure that grew to about seventy the next
year.
Enthusiasm ran high, but church leaders did not conceal their doubts
about the future of a campus staked out at a cold, barren, near-14,000-
foot elevation. Two years after the school opened it moved to Coch-
abamba, a more inviting site at 8,500 feet. This change was an im-
provement, but a war between Bolivia and Paraguay siphoned off
potential enrollment into the army, and economic dislocations sapped
the school's resources. School directors hung on, attracting a gradu-
ally rising number of students and introducing secondary-level classes
in 1938. By the end of the decade the campus established itself as a
training school in its own right with an enrollment of more than 150.
The school's first decade and a half was a study in tenacity for what
would become a major educational institution in South America after
1945.
The Forerunner of Universidad Peruana Union

Also a part of the Inca Union was Instituto Industrial, the forerunner
ofUniversidad Peru ana Union, which began in four rented rooms in the
suburbs of Lima in 1919. H. B. Lundquist, who had been in Peru for
only a year, took the initiative in responding to a need to educate not
only local Adventists but also children of workers. From the first day of
classes, church officials regarded this new enterprise as a training
school, but its first years were difficult, if not disappointing, and a far
cry from the institution it would eventually become. The first year Lun-
dquist offered elementary-level classes to fifteen students; about twenty
enrolled the second year, and thirty-five the third.
Unlike the schools in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, the Peruvian
venture functioned at first without land, but it was known as Lima In-
dustrial Institute. To satisfy the Adventist custom of including labor
opportunities, Lundquist encouraged students to sell literature, but he
279
also equipped a limited carpentry shop. Three years after its founding
the school transferred to a small rural location where agricultural op-
portunities were possible.
After only two years at the school, Lundquist moved on to church
administrative positions, leaving others to resolve the serious problem
of cramped quarters. His successors resolved this matter in 1926 by
relocating again on a seventy-acre site on the edge of Lima. The new
location was large enough to establish a dairy farm, but this improve-
ment did not compensate for another major weakness of the school-its
lack of graduates. Until 1928 only one student finished the complete
course. Similar to students in Argentina, many entered church employ-
ment before completing their studies, only in this case, they did not
even finish a secondary course.
The school also struggled with a small enrollment. In 1928 when the
school began its tenth year only forty students attended. The next two
years brought a turnaround as enrollment more than doubled. It may
have been coincidental, but these were the same years that Titicaca
Normal School was closed. It was apparent that students became more
decisive about their commitment to worker-training courses while un-
easiness concerning the government's attitudes toward Adventist edu-
cation permeated the Inca Union.
Although enrollment rose, when compared to River Plate and Brazil
colleges, the training school in Lima was small. Facilities also were
mediocre at best, but the enrollment surge had a much needed positive
effect. Students tended to remain in school longer, with more of them
graduating-twenty-six between 1928 and 1939. Lundquist observed
near the end of the 1930s that an increasing number of former students
were filling positions of responsibility and the number of imported
workers was diminishing notably, both trends attributable to the impact
of the training school.
The struggles of the Peruvian school during the 1920s and 1930s
underscored the tenacity of South American Adventists to prepare na-
tional church workers. South American Division President P. E. Brod-
ersen confessed to the 1926 General Conference session that mission-
aries from North America could never produce desired results because
they required years to acclimate to life in their new environment and to
learn a new language in which they more often than not communicated
280
imperfectly. "Our schools are our only hope," he said. "The possibility
of successful evangelism for South America lies with our national
evangelists."2
Instituto Industrial had become the recognized training school for
the Inca Union, but hardly had its prospects brightened before they
began to dim. In 1942 the Peruvian Ministry of Education clamped
down with enforcement oflegislation prohibiting coeducation, the same
law that inspectors would apply the next year at Titicaca. Attempts to
petition their way out of this dilemma proved as futile as had earlier
conversations about the closure at Titicaca. In 1940 enrollment reached
235, but by 1942 when the prohibition on coeducation went into effect,
all that was left were some night classes. This crippled program hob-
bled along for two years, finally developing into separate schools ac-
cording to gender. Urbanization of the region surrounding the school
and public works construction projects also reduced institutional acre-
age. It required no insight to conclude that the school's days were num-
bered and it would have to move.
In 1945 both the boys' and girls' schools fulfilled accreditation re-
quirements with the Ministry of Education, at the same time receiving
permission to merge into a single institution and move to a new campus
at Nana, about twenty miles above Lima. The anti-coeducation law still
applied, but in the case of the new school, appropriately known as
Union College, it demanded only separate classrooms and dining fa-
cilities. With a promise of financial assistance from the December 1945
Thirteenth Sabbath offering, school officials began classes at the new
site in the same year.
Developments at Chillan, Chile

Adventist education in Chile seemed to have received a new lease on
life when the training school moved from Pua to Chillan in 1922, but
discouragement soon set in. The Chile Conference was unable to pro-
vide sufficient financial support and the school's labor program was
skimpy. Debate about moving again quickly surfaced, but by 1926 a
firm decision to remain at Chillan scuttled further talk.
J. M. Howell, a firebrand who had begun his mission career as a
teacher in the Titicaca schools, took over the Chilean training school in
1925, immediately setting about to use the variety and quality of farm
281
The Seventh-day Adventist training school in Pua, Chile, began as a school to serve both
German- and Spanish-speaking students. It struggled as one of the poorest schools in
South America until it relocated at Chillan in 1922. This picture shows the school two
years before the move.
products as a means to impress the public as well as the Adventist com-
munity with the values of Adventist education. Within five years he had
turned the school around and established it as a productive source of
denominational workers. In 1933 his successor added post-secondary
classes to the curriculum, but enrollment at this level remained low
even though total attendance topped 300 in 1940.
Militating against the development of a college-level program was
an organizational obstacle. The school originated because church lead-
ers in Chile deemed it necessary to prepare workers for Chile on Chil-
ean soil; however, it became evident during the 1930s that while the
original argument might be strong enough to rationalize the school's
existence, it was not powerful enough to sustain it. The Austral Union
still looked to River Plate College as the primary educational institu-
tion for the union, leaving the Chilean school as more or less a project
of the Chile Conference where membership was perennially sparse. By
1940 it was only 2,500, too small to support an effective training school
on par with CAP in Argentina.
In 1939 an earthquake devastated much of the Chillan campus. For
years the school reeled from the blow, operating in makeshift arrange-
ments with repairs coming slowly. Enrollment held up, however, and
the rebuilt plant featured the most comfortable structures in its history.
In 1944 a two-year ministerial course finally received the backing of
282
the South American Division, effectively ending efforts to send minis-

terial students from Chile to Argentina. Enrollment did not immedi-
ately shoot upward, but the action was a watershed for Chill an, for it
was a tacit acknowledgment that the Austral Union had two training
schools, which, at least on paper, were academically equal.
Elementary and Secondary Schools in South America

While the training schools were becoming well-established institu-
tions in the South American Division, elementary education also grew.
Village schools for indigenous Andean tribes constituted a major part
of this movement, but these projects were deliberately evangelistic in
purpose and thus not of the same character as the traditional elemen-
tary church school for children.
Teacher-preparation courses were staple curricular items at the
training schools, and although not every graduate from these programs
entered denominational employment, it was apparent that South Amer-
ican Adventists intended to educate themselves in their own schools. In
1916 the Austral Union took on the responsibility of translating Alma
McKibbin's Bible textbooks for use among church schools. At the time
only a few schools existed, but by 1925 more than 1,100 students were
attending thirty-eight elementary schools in Brazil and the Austral
Union. The largest number of church schools in South America ap-
peared in central Argentina, including the national capital, doubtlessly
a result of the heavy stress on teacher-training at River Plate College.
During the 1920s and 1930s the idea of Christian education put
down deep roots throughout the division. By 1945 South American
churches operated nearly 190 schools with more than 8,000 students in
addition to the Andean indigenous schools.
The evolution of college-level programs on the central campuses
drew attention to the distinctions between the purpose of training
schools and secondary education, and the need to keep them separate.
Among larger concentrations of Adventists boarding academies sprang
up in the 1930s-Buenos Aires, Argentina; Taquara, Brazil; and Pet-
ropolis near Rio de Janeiro. By 1945 at least seven secondary schools
were functioning in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay.
Taken in its entirety in 1945 Adventist education in the South Amer-
ican Division had spread more broadly and materialized into a better
283
developed system of post-secondary schools than in any division out-

side North America. Its network of elementary schools was among the
largest in the Adventist world.
Striking similarities existed among the education programs in South
America, Africa, and the South Pacific. To use Australasian terminol-
ogy, a westernized home territory characterized all three divisions on
which the church depended for its educated leadership. On the shoul-
ders of the home territories also rested the responsibility of preparing a
corps of workers to reach out to indigenous peoples within their divi-
sions. Education was the major medium for this process, thus the outly-
ing indigenous schools were unmistakably evangelistic ventures. In
contrast with South Africa where a widespread Adventist educational
movement at the secondary and elementary levels did not exist, lower
schools in Australasia and South America developed with the training
schools and created an educational system.
The Educational Setting in Inter-America

In the region that in 1922 became the Inter-American Division train-
ing schools were latecomers to the world of Adventist institutions. E. E.
Andross, the first president of the division, set the tone for education
soon after he arrived in 1922. In rhetoric that few others matched, he
told the 1926 General Conference session that "our hope for the future
of our work in this field lies in the training of a large number of conse-
crated young men and women in our denominational training schools
in the field," adding that the church needed workers "born in the trop-
ics, whose mother tongue is the vernacular of the people, who know
their people as no foreigner can know them, and who are accustomed
to climatic conditions that are often fatal to a foreigner."3
In the English-speaking sectors of the Greater Caribbean Adventist
missions got off to an early start, even thirty years before Andross ar-
rived, but training schools did not follow quickly as they did in other
fields almost as a matter of course. A lack of effective church organiza-
tion and the absence of parent organizations to give financial support to
schools combined to make educational centers nearly impossible. Ad-
ministrative cohesiveness was difficult when vast stretches of water,
undeveloped communication, and different languages separated much
of the region into pockets that for years defied effective organization.
284
One of Andross' greater contributions to Inter-America during his

fourteen-year presidency was a solid organizational and institutional
infrastructure which resulted in productive membership growth and
the establishment of institutions. Once begun, Adventist education de-
veloped rapidly, making up for lost time, as it were, proceeding in the
wake of membership increases among the three major language groups,
English, Spanish and French. Much of the school construction occurred
during the late 1930s and early 1940s, drawing funds from the Adven-
tist purse that some believed should have gone into evangelism.
But Andross had insightfully regarded the expenses of education as
an investment and his administrative legacy paid rich dividends. By
1940 Inter-America's membership became the third largest of all divi-
sions outside North America. At the end of World War II every major
administrative component of the division operated its own training
schoo1. 4
Growth of West Indian Training College

Jamaican Adventists had managed to overcome early organizational
deficiencies of the region to establish a training school in 1915. It had
an uncertain beginning, but in 1920 it was still alive, the only Adventist
school of its kind in the Greater Caribbean. Once West Indies Training
School hurdled its original obstacles, it made remarkable progress. In
1923 the first class of secondary-level students graduated, and the next
year faculty added college-level courses and changed the institutional
name to West Indian Training College. Already at least ten students
had entered denominational employment.
Opportunities for student labor had been the nemesis of previous
educational attempts in Jamaica, but the wife of the conference presi-
dent solved this issue when she embarked on a fund raising campaign
in the mid-1920s. The first $5,000 she scoured up was enough to build
a sheet-metal shop and a bakery, buy a press, upgrade the furniture fac-
tory, and improve the water reservoir.
Her strategy turned out to be not only a blessing for students who
needed to work but a stroke of good public relations as well. Student-
produced commodities made their way into the Jamaican market,
bringing cash to the school and at the same time arousing inquiries
about the campus. "Our ideal has been threefold development, a heart-
285
head-hand education," Principal W. H. Wineland reflected, adding with

a touch of honest pride, "this was a new educational idea for citizens of
the island, but many of them fell into sympathy with our plan, and
seemed to appreciate our educational program."5
Wineland was not overdrawing the situation. Visitors began touring
the campus weekly, some of them influential in Jamaican politics, and
when commencement occurred in 1927 about a thousand attended,
most of them non-Adventists. Even the governor of Jamaica was im-
pressed enough to invite the entire college staff to a special dinner in
one of Kingston's leading hotels.
During the years of the Great Depression the school approached a
financial crisis that threatened its reputation as a unique educational
institution in Jamaica. The school relied on income from the industries
to fund most of its operating expenses, but even with these opportuni-
ties for work, many students were unable to pay for their education.
Student accounts receivable mounted, and in turn the stack of accounts
payable grew. A considerable amount of the blame went to the indus-
tries themselves, since they held extensive receivables from customers.
When R. S. 1. Hamilton arrived on campus in 1938 as president and
chief financial officer, he found the school unable to pay its bills and
some local merchants threatening to sue.
Part of the indebtedness came from church-related loans, which the
Inter-American Division wrote off as appropriations. Hamilton engi-
neered other adjustments in financial policies, essentially taking a firmer
line with both students and customers of the industries. In short order
he turned the institutional financial statement around, and the school
averted financial embarrassment.
It was while the school struggled to maintain its financial integrity
during the 1930s that its identity as a post-secondary institution
strengthened. Earlier, in 1924, with attendance surpassing a hundred
and prospects progressively brightening, the school became a junior
college. This upgrading was part of the strategy to keep both students
and their money in Jamaica by removing the temptation from students
to enroll in a North American college. Jamaicans who traveled to the
United States frequently did not return. But even after institutional up-
grading the number of post-secondary students remained small, only
twice reaching six before 1932. As the country sank into the financially
286
disastrous 1930s, overall enrollment plummeted and cuts in personnel

occurred, but ironically, college-level enrollment rose to unprecedented
double digits. In 1936 the school registered twenty-five college stu-
dents.
By 1945 enrollment was approaching 200 and the reputation of West
Indian Training College as the only institution in Inter-America for
English-speaking students that offered post-secondary courses was
well established. Its industrial auxiliaries had been the financial back-
bone of the institution and remained one of its greatest selling points.
Caribbean Training College in Trinidad

A second training school for the English Caribbean opened in Trin-
idad in 1927. To prepare for this event the Inter-American Division
council created the East Caribbean Union, which would become the
parent organization. Andross estimated that between 700 and 800 youth
in the new union would be eligible to attend.
Following the denominational tradition of involving students in pre-
paring the campus, Principal C. 1. Boyd, a veteran school man from the
United States with experience in Australasia and elsewhere in Inter-
America, led his original faculty of six and a crew of students in land
clearing and construction. The school sprouted from the soil of "La
Realista," a 260-acre estate near Port of Spain that offered only a house
and a couple of sheds for shelter as the work started. For the first year
the labor detail occupied most of the students' schedule, leaving time
for night classes only.
Through the interim years this new school exhibited two major
shortcomings, low enrollment and a lagging construction program that
fell short of campus needs. Andross' hope that hundreds of students
would attend vanished as enrollment remained less than 100 until 1940.
Explanations were many, but the obvious issue was widespread poverty
on the island. The collapse of the sugar industry long before Adventism
reached Trinidad left the population virtually penniless, a condition
that had improved very little before the school opened. Also problem-
atical was the lack of adequate financial support from the East Carib-
bean Union. Although it was the parent organization, it was almost as
new as Caribbean Training College and had not built up a strong finan-
cial base on which the school could depend. Capital funds were hard to
287
come by which showed up in a lack of adequate buildings. After a

dozen years the division education secretary referred to the school as
still unfinished.
Partially compensating for these problems were the managerial tal-
ents of R. S. 1. Hamilton, school director from 1930 to 1938. He left a
legacy of a sound industrial program, financial integrity, and respect-
able academic traditions. By promoting institutional industries and a
variety of agricultural projects, he was able to derive nearly eighty per-
cent of the school's operating budget from auxiliary income, which
lessened the dependence on cash payments by students. It was a prac-
tice that he developed well and took with him when he transferred to
West Indies Training College in 1938.
The school's industries brought popular respect to the campus,
which was an accomplishment in itself. Initially, the school met with
prejudice, but thinking Trinidadians came to realize that the type of
education Caribbean Training College offered was adapted to people's
needs. Trinidad's Agricultural Society conducted some of its meetings
on the campus, and a leading newspaper published congratulatory com-
ments about the labor opportunities the school offered to students.
The primary industry was a broomshop, the only one on the island,
which gave Caribbean Training College a monopoly of the broom mar-
ket and created island-wide attention. It also cultivated support for the
school, which reached the columns of Port of Spain's newspaper, the
Trinidad Guardian, when editors expressed confidence that the college
would not let the island down when a shortage of broom corn threat-
ened the factory during World War II .
Enrollment may have been slim, but Hamilton stretched his dollars
and left the school in 1938 with no red ink on the financial statement.
The school also benefitted from his academic skills and personnel man-
agement. He was the first person with a graduate degree to head an
Adventist school in Inter-America. During the eight years he headed
Caribbean Training College only one change occurred in the faculty,
which brought stability and academic continuity to the campus.
West Indies Training College had quickly risen to post-secondary
status, but Hamilton was content for the Trinidad school to remain a
secondary-level training school and to establish academic respectabil-
ity within that limitation. Not until 1944, six years after he left the
288
The training school in the West Indies was the first Seventh-day Adventist school of its
type in the Greater Caribbean. It was the first in the Inter-American Division to offer
post-secondary classes and developed a reputation as a unique institution in Jamaica.
This photo taken in 1953.
campus, did the college board vote to participate in the British external
examination program. College historian Glenn O. 1. Phillips describes
this decision as among the most momentous since 1927, since it was a
key move in upgrading to post-secondary level the next year.6
Compared to West Indies Training College, progress at Caribbean
Training College was more conservative but it was also more evenly
paced, and by the end ofthe interim years in 1945 the school was on the
threshold of a new and prosperous future.
Educational Ventures in Central America

Most of the English-speaking population in the Inter-American Di-
vision occupied islands in the eastern Caribbean, but a significant num-
ber also lived in a narrow corridor extending along the eastern coast of
Central America and outlying islands from present-day Belize to Pan-
ama. This area had been a destination for early Adventist missionaries,
but not until after World War I was there a large enough constituency
to supply students for a school.
It was in 1921 when West Caribbean Training School opened its
classrooms at Las Cascadas, literally on the banks of the Panama Canal.
10-IPFTW
289
The land and buildings were originally United States government prop-
erty used during canal construction, which the North American gov-
ernment wished to jettison. The Central American Union negotiated a
generous lease for what amounted to a ready-made campus, complete
with faculty housing, recreational facilities, paved roads, electrifica-
tion, sanitation, and water supply.
For Central American English-speaking students there would be
none of the prolonged and anguished working and waiting for financial
support that the schools in Jamaica and Trinidad experienced. After
remodeling the interior of the buildings, the school was ready for oc-
cupancy. Students could sit in their classrooms and watch ships traverse
the canal. Enough land was available for a booming agricultural busi-
ness, and buildings for shops gave students ample opportunity to work.
As a part of the Canal Zone, the school enjoyed a unique financial
blessing-duty-free status. Within five years enrollment at this utopian
campus reached 125.
The old adage "if it's too good to be true, it probably is," never had
a better fulfillment in Adventist education. Within ten years the school
was dead. Loss of its duty-free status was a contributing factor, but
only an annoyance in comparison to termites that chewed the buildings
beyond repair. A rebuilding campaign was not out of the question, but
the telling blow was a decision by Central American Union officers
concluding that their territory was essentially Hispanic, not English,
and that the union needed a training school for Spanish-speaking stu-
dents more than for the English. Helping to convince them were cur-
ricular problems that set in early at Las Cascadas when a growing num-
ber of Spanish-speaking students enrolled, making a bilingual program
necessary and expensive.
In Costa Rica the Central American Union officers found prop-
erty at La Sabana where they transferred the Spanish half of the
Panamanian school in 1927. Two training schools were more than
the union could afford, and in 1931 the Central American Union
voted to close the Panamian campus. While it lasted West Caribbe-
an Training School was a success. From its classrooms came at least
forty graduates, some of them lifelong denominational workers, in-
cluding Linda Austin, who put in an entire career at Caribbean
Training College.
290
La Sabana was only the first stop for the school which eventuated
into Central American Adventist University. Here enrollment stag-
nated and prospects for plant expansion were dim. Five years later the
school moved to Tres Rios near the Spanish colonial city of Cartago,
its location until 1950. During the interim years after 1932 it remained
a secondary school, changing its name to Spanish-American Adven-
tist Academy in 1932 and to Central American Vocational School in
1945.
At Tres Rios enrollment immediately picked up, increasing every
year even during the Great Depression. By 1940 attendance approached
a hundred. Also at Tres Rios the school's ministerial training program
flourished under the leadership of Braulio Perez, a Spanish-born, Ar-
gentine-educated minister with a poetic command of the language and
a predisposition to evangelism, a combination that soon made him one
of the best known personalities in Latin American Adventism and the
speaker of the Spanish Voice of Prophecy.
A Training School is Born in Colombia

Adventist education in Central America symbolized a growing con-
sciousness among leaders in the Inter-American Division that the His-
panic population dwarfed the English and French combined, and that
even though Adventist membership at the time was larger in English
fields, the future ofthe division lay in balanced growth among the three
major language groups. "Our purpose now is to build up strongly the
schools in the Spanish fields," W. L. Adams, division education secre-
tary, wrote in 1938, more than a decade after the Central American
Union established its training schooU
But schools could operate only as rapidly as membership grew and
money allowed, which became obvious as a side issue of the Central
American school. The original decision to move the Spanish portion of
the Panamanian school to Costa Rica included a footnote that desig-
nated the new campus as the educational center for students from Co-
lombia, a republic on the northwest corner of South America that was
geographically half of the Colombia-Venezuela Union, which organized
the year the school transfer occurred. Because the new union was un-
prepared to establish a training school of its own Colombian students
were expected to enroll on the campus in Costa Rica. The idea was well
291
intended but impractical. Similar to Chilean students who resisted

crossing the continent to attend school in Argentina, Columbian stu-
dents did not jump at the chance to travel north into Central America
for an education.
For years Colombia-Venezuela remained the smallest union in Inter-
America with most of the membership in Colombia, but in 1937 with
approximately 1,700 members, classes began for a dozen students in
Medellin, an Andean city 200 miles south of the Panamanian border. It
attracted little attention, moving to a less urban setting in 1938, and
again in 1941 to a panoramic fifty-acre site, still near Medellin, which
would become its permanent campus. By the time of this final move,
the school enrolled about eighty students.
At this location the school assumed a new shape. An experienced
North American construction engineer supervised the erection of a
set of new, brick buildings and the farm yielded a wide variety of
fruits and vegetables. Until its last move, Colombia-Venezuela Train-
ing School was blessed by a faculty with little turnover, which went
far in establishing an effective academic program and attracting a
growing number of students. Former students were already entering
denominational employ when the move took place in 1941. Leader-
ship changes occurred more frequently after that date, but by 1945
enrollment stood at 150, of whom more than 80 percent were secondary-
level students.
Cuba's Antillian Union College

The construction of a new campus in Colombia coincided with
building projects at both Caribbean Training College in Trinidad and
the Spanish-American Academy in Costa Rica. Added to this list of
new school plants was Antillian Union College in Cuba, which moved
from Bartle to Santa Clara in 1940. This spate of school construction
drained funds from other uses, but given the tardiness of education in
the Inter-American Division, it was hardly arguable that the expendi-
tures were extravagant.
Of the five unions in the field, none resembled the makeup of the
entire division more than the Antillian Union, consisting of the largest
islands of the Caribbean with populations representing all three of the
major languages, English, French, and Spanish. A single training school
292
for this union was not even a consideration. Nearby Jamaica already
had its West Indies Training College and during the 1920s and 1930s a
school for each of the Spanish and French populations struggled into
existence.
The Spanish school began in 1922 at Bartle, close to the eastern end
of Cuba. Optimistic talk during the next decade and a half could not
hide real problems at the campus such as limited acreage, inadequate
water, poor soil, and lack of accessibility, all of which had blunted en-
rollment growth. During those first fifteen years the highwater mark
was sixty students. The school began its sixteenth year in 1937 with a
new principal, J. S. Marshall, who, speaking from the vantage point of
a sixteen-year success story of administration at River Plate College,
admitted the unvarnished truth about the impossible conditions at Bar-
tle and urged a change.
Marshall timed his advice well. The division council had just voted
to upgrade to a junior college to serve Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Do-
minican Republic, but the new principal knew that a school with only
four classrooms and no library would never pass muster. He also knew
that the division had earmarked a portion of a Thirteenth Sabbath of-
fering in 1939 to upgrade the school, but money would not fix the prob-
lems at Bartle and he was unwilling to spend another peso for a dying
cause.
Marshall's counsel sank in. By the end of 1939 the Antillian Union
had purchased 150 acres of promising land at Santa Clara, near the
middle of the island, and laid plans for a new campus. Work proceeded
with no delay, and in 1940 classes began at the new site.
Similar to other Adventist schools, the farm brought favorable pub-
licity to the campus. Truckloads of produce were regular contributors
to the food markets in Santa Clara, and in 1945 sixty Cuban school
administrators who were attending an education convention visited the
school to learn what an agricultural program could accomplish.
Marshall stayed on through the entire change, giving the newly
christened Antillian College ten years of administrative stability. From
the moment he had stepped onto the campus in 1937 enrollment began
to climb, and in 1945, with more than 150 students, he added post-sec-
ondary classes to the curriculum. It was the first instance of college-
level courses for Hispanic students in Inter-America.
293
A French-Speaking Campus in Haiti

No such drama accompanied Adventist education in the French-
speaking sector of the Antillian Union. In 1921 Hermanie Roth, sister
of the head of the Haitian Mission, launched a small beginning for eight
secondary students on a fifteen-acre estate near Cap-Hatien on the
northern coast. Six years of virtually no growth followed before adding
elementary classes, which increased enrollment, but the operation re-
mained small. French-speaking teachers were at a premium, and the
school stagnated, even closing during 1929 for lack of adequate faculty.
Four more years of halting operations with an enrollment less than
thirty-five told the leaders ofthe Haitian Mission that they could expect
very little from the school unless they moved to more inviting sur-
roundings.
In 1933 the school moved 130 miles south to the Haitian capital, Port-
au-Prince, where it became a day school and functioned in two urban
buildings, the smaller one serving as a woodshop and a press. The school
also changed its name to College Vertieres. The move brought a rebirth, at
least in terms of attendance. Two years later enrollment went over a hun-
dred. After two more years
during which attendance
doubled, the government rec-
ognized it as a complete sec-
ondary school. Briefly it of-
fered a limited amount of
post-secondary classes, but
for all of its growth, the vast
majority of students were el-
ementary. By 1940 enroll-
ment began to recede and in
Seventh-day Adventist education developed 1945 it dipped to 130.
slowly in Haiti because of widespread poverty
and sparse membership in the French-speaking
The lack of French text-
Caribbean. During the 1930s a small training books and teaching materi-
school occupied rented space in this building in als left the school with an
Port-au-Prince.
improvised program, and
with enrollment decline College Vertieres lost its training school char-
acter. The Haitian Mission, the school's parent organization, was hard-
ly capable of providing necessary support. In 1945 Haiti's membership
294
was the largest component in the Antillian Union, but its tithe income
and mission offerings ranked at the bottom or next to last, revealing
one of the most poverty-stricken populations in the islands.
These obstacles prevented Haitian Adventists from maintaining a
promising educational program, but Herminie Roth, her brother and
sister-in-law, A. G. and Hazel Roth, had stuck by the school for most of
the interim years, exemplifying the tenacious conviction that Adventist
education was going to succeed. As bleak as the outlook was in 1945, it
was a substantial advancement from of its position in 1921, but the
school's prosperous years were still in the future.
Dramatic Break-through in Mexico

By some standards, Inter-America's most dramatic breakthrough in
Adventist education took place in Mexico. In this next-door neighbor to
the United States a bloodletting revolution broke out in 1910, giving the
country a new constitution that among other things, confiscated church
property. Remembering that priests had initiated Mexico's indepen-
dence movement and strong ties to the church had been part of the po-
litical milieu, devout Mexicans viewed this new revolutionary order as
a contradiction of their history. Others saw the revolution as a means of
standing up to their imperious northern neighbor and joked that they
lived under a double curse-their country was far from God and too
close to the United States.
Adventists in Mexico saw little humor in this irreverent candor.
Their missions, including an attempt at education, were beginning
to jell when the conflagration erupted. When the battlefield smoke
blew away, Adventists faced a new political environment in which
official hostility to religion was common, open evangelism was not
possible, and religious education was very difficult. The battle to
draft a constitution ended in 1917, but bands of armed malcontents
stalked the country with impunity until well into the 1920s. Mean-
while, a succession of presidents during more than two decades left
little doubt that they intended to enforce the new constitution as it
affected religion.
Through the 1920s and 1930s Adventists made repeated efforts to
establish a training school in or near Mexico City, but they uniformly
brought indifferent results and always frustration. Several schools for
295
Adventist Mexican-Americans in the Hispanized borderlands of the

United States offered an alternative, but they proved to be impractical.
The most notable venture was a "Spanish Department" at Arizona
Academy during the 1920s, but even the school's invitations to Adven-
tists south of the border brought only a negligible number of students.
In 1935 Adventist leaders in Mexico purchased a large house in McAl-
len, Texas, almost within a stone's throw of the international line, plan-
ning to establish a training school for prospective workers. Before their
hopes materialized the building burned down, leaving the Mexican
church with only the insurance money.
This seemingly impregnable wall barring a successful school began
to crack in 1938 when Raimundo Garza, a recently converted physician
and a professor of medicine in the northern city of Monterrey, began to
speculate about the possibilities of nursing education. He could not dis-
miss the evangelistic potential of his clinic in the basement of the local
church which brought about 5,000 patients in contact with Adventists,
and he with other doctors decided to conduct a brief training course for
nurses to establish similar clinics in other churches. Successful training
institutes in 1940 and 1941 led to a formal request for a bonafide nurs-
ing school.
Meanwhile, the 1940 national election landed a new president in the
national palace who personally viewed religious activities much less
harshly than his predecessors. Garza's reputation and political connec-
tions were crucial, enabling church leaders to put their foot in the door
and request permission to establish a school, which, they openly admit-
ted, would prepare church workers, but with a strong emphasis on agri-
cultural and industrial education. They already had their eyes on a 200-
acre estate in Montemorelos, fifty miles south of Monterrey. Shortly it
was theirs, with approval from the state of Nuevo Leon to begin a train-
ing school.
After a hasty and incomplete construction program, the school
opened in November 1942 with eighty-five students, an astounding
opening enrollment compared to other schools in Inter-America. The
academic emphasis was on ministerial training, but the institution as-
sumed the most innocuous name possible, Agricultural and Industrial
School, and within months the state approved the elementary and sec-
ondary curricula.
296
The impact on the Adventist community in Mexico was profound.

Division President Glenn Calkins wrote that "the building of this school
is the greatest single factor that has ever taken place in Mexico in con-
nection with our work."g After an Adventist presence of nearly a half
century, Mexico finally acquired a genuine training school. No less
than Mexican President Manuel Avila Camacho himself and governors
of two neighboring states visited the school in April 1943 to express
their interest in this project of practical education. Camacho personally
lent a hand to bring in a manager of the dairy farm who would also
teach classes in agriculture.
The very existence of Mexico's Agricultural and Industrial School
signaled the beginning of a new era when political winds would blow
from a different direction and sweep away official resistance to reli-
gious activity that had long been the order of the day. In 1945 the new
school was just settling onto its campus, but in the years to come this
unique venture would become Montemorelos University, one of the
best known institutions in Adventist educational circles.
Review of the Interim in Inter-America

Adventist education in Inter-America was a movement of the in-
terim years. Besides the single training school in Jamaica in 1920,
only in the West Caribbean Conference-consisting mainly of church-
es in Central America-had church schools made an impact. In this
field were ten elementary schools that enrolled 500 students; through-
out the rest of the territory that would become Inter-America only
three schools with sixty-six students were functioning. Twenty-five
years later the number of church schools rose to 131 with more than
180 teachers and nearly 6,000 students. Two secondary schools apart
from the training schools were in operation, New Hope College in
Jamaica and Panama Academy in Panama, both for English-speaking
constituencies.
During the interim years the Inter-American Division established
six training schools, one in each of its unions. Four of the campuses
were in Spanish-speaking regions, thus making good the intentions
of the division leaders to promote a balanced program among the
major language groups within their territory. The seven training
schools in the division constituted the largest number of such insti-
297
tutions in any division outside North America, although only two of

them, the campuses in Jamaica and Cuba, offered post-secondary
classes.
In its twenty-three-year life before 1945 the Inter-American Divi-
sion became the largest field beyond North America, and South Amer-
ica the third largest. In 1945 one Adventist in every six lived in these
two sister divisions. Adventist education had advanced to higher levels
in other fields than in the South American and Inter-American divi-
sions, but each of these two fields had succeeded in establishing an in-
frastructure for a system of education that would achieve unforeseen
productivity in the post-World War II era.
ISources for education in South America are General Conference Bulletin, 1922, no. 9, p.
215; ibid., no. II, p. 251; ibid., 1926: no. 7, p. 12; ibid., no. 8, p. 8; ibid., 1930, no. 9, p. 147;
ibid., 1941: ibid., no. 2, p. 40; Statistical Report, 1920-1945; Review and Herald, May 3, 1934;
February 2, 1939; December 21, 1939; South American Bulletin, April 1927, p. 7; Floyd
Greenleaf, The Seventh-day Adventist Church in Latin America and the Caribbean, v. 2, pp.
22-68,271-300; Brown, Chronology, pp. 76, 77, 79, 81, 83,110, 113.
llbid., no. 10, p. 9.
'The story of Adventist education in Inter-America comes from General Conference Bul-
letin, 1922, no. II, p. 270; ibid., 1926, no. 10, p. 9; Review and Herald, February II, 1926;
May 10, 1928; June 23,1938; August 22, 1940; August 7, 1941; The Inter-American Messen-
ger, June, 1924, p. 3; July 1924, p. 3; Statistical Report, 1920-1945; John E. Weaver, "Obser-
vations and Impressions of Inter-America," Journal of True Education (October 1943), pp. 3,
4,28; Greenleaf, ibid., pp. 69-99, 237-252; Glenn O. I. Phillips, The Making of A Christian
College: Caribbean Union College. 1927-1977 (Port-of-Spain, Trinidad: The College Press,
1977), pp. 9-43; Brown, ibid., p. 75, 76, III, 160, 161, 183, 184.
'Review and Herald, May 10, 1928.
6 Phillips, ibid., p. 43.
7 Review and Herald, June 23, 1938.
8 Glenn Calkins to T. J. Michael, June 21, 1943, AST.
298
13
DEBATE OVER
ACCREDITATION
The interim years between 1920 and 1945 may be called the era of
the Adventist training school. In some regions of the Adventist world
this institution was a well-established entity before 1920, but globally,
the training school was only entering into its own at the beginning of
the post-World War I era. During the quarter century after 1920 the
concept of the training school dominated Adventist education and
church leaders viewed this institution as the key unit in the denomina-
tional school system.
The Complexion of Adventist Education during the Interim

Prior to the organizational movement of 1901-1918 denominational
schools more often than not evolved according to however local church
leaders interpreted Ellen White's advice about education. But an ever-
widening circle of training schools coupled with the rapid growth of el-
ementary education as a result of the Movement of 1897 created a need
for organization. The system existing at the beginning of the post-World
War I era was not perfect, but it represented a serious attempt to provide
both structure and definition to what at the beginning of the century had
been a series of loosely related events in establishing Adventist schools.
299
The changing world environment was already testing the young sys-
tem, and during the twenty-five years after 1920 extensive debate re-
volved around Adventist schools as institutional administrators and
church leaders sought a meeting of the mind on how to perpetuate what
they had begun. Among the major points in their discussions were
questions of how to maintain the Adventist identity of schools, how to
improve the systematization of Adventist education, how to relate to
accreditation, and how to handle graduate study by Adventist teachers.
These issues affected the entire world of Adventist education, but in
North America where denominational schools were more developed
the problems were singularly acute.
Denominational leaders most often gauged the success of training
schools by their impact on the evangelistic objectives of the church, but
there were other considerations. Often neglected was the social impact
of Adventist education, which was partially associated with colonial-
ism, a movement that had opened up vast regions of the world to West-
ern traffic, much of it in places where denominational schools sprang
up. Although colonialism declined during the years between the two
world wars, it did not disappear entirely and remained a force in the
mission program. Missions and missionaries often found their way
paved with the political conveniences that "mother" countries provid-
ed.
While the colonial movement was primarily a spread of economic
and political power, it was also a vehicle for ideas. The Adventist church
was not an imperial power, but the education it established became a
catalyst to mix Western values with non-Western cultures quite apart
from its religious character. The idea of upward social mobility was
inherent to denominational education and obvious to both colonizers
and to many of the colonized. That Adventist evangelistic goals occu-
pied common ground with Cecil Rhodes' view of missionary activity
as a means to spread literacy and to educate indigenous peoples into the
mainstream of the world was hardly a unique coincidence. 1
Besides literacy, Adventist schools laid heavy stress on health, work-
ing skills, and personal well being, all aspects of individual enhance-
ment. The general public saw this emphasis on personhood in a secular
sense, but Adventists most often put it in a religious context, which
made it difficult if not impossible to separate personal development
300
DEBATE OVER ACCREDITATION
from evangelistic success resulting from education. This was especially

true of health. In countries where the levels of education and standards
of living were low, Adventist education thus assumed both a spiritual
and a humanitarian character. Adventist schools were usually more
successful when host countries, either colonial or independent, were
predisposed to accept the social benefits of education-literacy, im-
proved public health, and productivity.
Adventist membership increased notably around the world during
the years after 1920, especially in the developing world where the need
for educated national leaders intensified. The role of Adventist schools
as training schools became critical. Church leaders tended to laud
schools most when high percentages of their graduates entered denom-
inational employment. They ordinarily put these numbers in an evan-
gelistic setting, but they also recognized that educating national work-
ers for leadership was a practical necessity and references to the social
and nationalistic character of this trend were also heard occasionally at
Adventist gatherings.
Through the 1920s the number of students in the world fields who
became church workers was consistently greater than the number of
graduates from training schools because it was common for students to
enter denominational employment before completing their education.
During the 1930s this practice slowed and by 1940 the number of stu-
dents outside North America who became church workers was less
than seventy percent ofthe graduates oftraining schools. 2 It is doubtful
that a single factor caused this trend, but among others, it was a silent
indication that while most students still sought a denominational job,
an increasing number of students entering Adventist schools in all
probability simply desired an Adventist education. The fact that educa-
tion was a means of personal enhancement was setting in.
The fact that the schools were producing more workers but that they
represented a diminishing percentage oftraining school graduates also
raised the question of why Adventist schools existed and how well they
were fulfilling their purpose. It was an issue that was as old as Battle
Creek College. While church leaders believed that the underlying rea-
son for Adventist schools was to prepare church workers, statistics sug-
gest that not all of the students or their families agreed that church
employment was the only justification for an Adventist education.
301
It was plausible for many students to believe that the mission of Ad-
ventist schools was to provide an education for Adventist youth, wheth-
er they intended to enter denominational employment or not. It was not
a matter of students rejecting their religious convictions if they chose to
work elsewhere than for the church, but rather only a question of where
they would fulfill their careers. Ellen White herself referred to the need
to educate Adventist youth to enter private employment. Speaking
about the need to educate all Adventists of student age, she advised
"they all need an education that they may be fitted for usefulness in this
life, qualified for places of responsibility in both private and public
life" (italics supplied). Assuming responsibilities in private life hardly
describes denominational employment.)
Church leaders encouraged all youth to attend Adventist schools,
but it was neither feasible nor wise to demand a commitment to become
a church worker as an entrance requirement to training schools. Al-
though the need for new employees was at times dire, admittedly, the
church could not employ all students who completed courses in Adven-
tist schools. As employment needs broadened in North America during
the interim years, college curricula also expanded, making a wider se-
lection of careers available and increasing the likelihood that students
would enroll in order to earn an education in an Adventist environment
rather than to become a denominational employee. In subtle ways this
question related to the discussions of educational organization from
1901 through 1918. It was also connected to later debates surrounding
accreditation and the identity of an Adventist system of education.
Adventist Education Begins a New Professionalism

When Frederick Griggs moved from the General Conference to
Michigan in 1918 to become president of Emmanuel Missionary Col-
lege, he left behind one of the better organized departments of the
church. He was the prevailing influence in Adventist education during
the organizational years and the face of education in 1918 was primar-
ily attributable to him.
But at the end of World War I the world was not the same place
when Griggs began his organization program. Socially, politically, eco-
nomically and philosophically, arresting change had taken place and
church leaders did not foresee that during the next two and a half de-
302
cades the world would continue to change radically as it passed through

history's severest financial dislocation before plunging into an even
more brutal war than the one from which they were trying to recover at
the moment. At the same time the concept of professionalism took a
quantum leap, which directly impacted education generally. In order to
survive, Adventist education would have to adapt to conditions that no
one had imagined before the organizational movement began.
Beyond the actual mechanisms of organization, one of Griggs' more
noteworthy contributions was to inject a mood of balance into Adven-
tist education. While he was unquestionably committed to Adventism
and its educational goals, he believed that educational needs were basi-
cally human needs that transcended denominational tags and that Ad-
ventist schools and teachers should not isolate themselves from the
broader field of education beyond the church.
Griggs supported the goal of Adventist education to produce church
workers, even encouraging students in 1918 to enter denominational
employ when they were mature enough to handle the work whether or
not they had completed their courses. With some ambivalence, he si-
multaneously urged for greater numbers of college graduates in respon-
sible positions of church work. Griggs' comments demonstrated that he
was willing to acquiesce to present needs, but he taught that college
degrees should embody the improved professionalism that he believed
the church needed. 4
In Griggs' opinion attendance by Adventist teachers at non-Ad-
ventist institutions for advanced studies was a means of assuring of-
ficial approval of Adventist education and its credibility. His view
was an admission that education as a social institution existed prior to
Adventist schools, and that in the economically developed countries
Adventist institutions would have to meet standards which they did
not establish. At the same time he saw Adventist education as unique
and believed that it should remain so, but he also maintained that it
was not incompatible with much of the general body of information
about the human being and instructional techniques which non-
Adventist educators were developing. Denominational teachers could
use instructional materials that have an Adventist character, but psy-
chologically, Adventist students did not learn differently from noo-
Adventists. Griggs taught that it is necessary for Adventist teachers to
303
understand the essential methods of teaching that were basic to all

successful learning programs. 5
From the days of Ellen White's "Proper Education" Adventist edu-
cators aimed to develop a unique curriculum that could stand up under
public scrutiny, but they wanted to accomplish this goal on their own
terms, even ignoring whatever educational controls might get in their
way. Griggs took a different position and successfully persuaded the
General Conference session in 1905 to approve a recommendation from
the Department of Education stating that "our training-schools be ad-
vised to so plan their work that the State examining boards, such as the
Regents of New York, can give credit for any work done in these
schools."6
The implications of this resolution were profound. Griggs was not
proposing that Adventist schools surrender their identity but that Ad-
ventist identity could legitimately accommodate the authority of the
state to control education and that it would be advantageous for de-
nominational schools to comply with standards that the state estab-
lished. The action also implied that students in Adventist training
schools would have the assurance that their education was legitimized
by government authority.
That the same principle applied to schools at lower instructional lev-
els was a given. It was also a given that Adventist schools around the
world would fulfill whatever legal restrictions that governments placed
on them. Progressively more Adventist leaders in education came to
view state control of education as legitimate and compliance as benefi-
cial and just. At the time, in 1905, government approval was the most
powerful recognition that schools could have.
The Appearance of Accreditation in the United States

For most of the Adventist world the 1905 General Conference action
was only a confirmation of accepted practice in the world fields. Ad-
ventists established their schools and continued to operate them through
the interim years as the laws of host countries allowed. Post-secondary
education in the United States, however, faced the growing power of
extra-legal accrediting associations. These bodies were useful to edu-
cation because the states defined college degrees differently; some
states even allowed colleges to establish their own definitions of de-
304
grees. Because states exercised reciprocity in many matters, including

education, it was important for baccalaureate degrees to reach at least a
modicum of equivalency from state to state. Accrediting bodies were
of two categories, regional associations that examined schools within a
cluster of states, and professional or specialized associations that as-
sessed specific fields of study. Under the purview of both accrediting
systems were definitions of minimal levels of academic quality, finan-
cial capabilities of institutions to do what they advertised, and adequate
instructional facilities. The credentials of college teachers thus fell un-
der their jurisdiction. Although their primary target was postsecondary
institutions, they also accredited schools at lower levels. Schools could
function without accreditation, but it became increasingly apparent that
the professional world depended more and more on regional or special-
ized accreditation to validate education.?
Adventists' First Encounter with Accreditation

Adventists first felt the crunch of accreditation at the College of
Medical Evangelists. In 1911 the American Medical Association nearly
killed the school by assigning it a "C" rating, which was the lowest
evaluation a medical school could receive and remain in operation. In
effect, CME was blacklisted and forced either to improve or close. The
expense to upgrade was enormous, prompting some to urge limiting
the school to the first two years and sending students to recognized
schools to complete their medical degrees. 8
This idea collapsed when church leaders reviewed Ellen White's ad-
vice to establish a medical school and to fulfill whatever obligations
were necessary to educate physicians. In 1917 CME rose to a "B" rat-
ing, and five years later acquired an "Pl' rating. Much of the reason for
the "C" rating stemmed from unsatisfactory facilities, but by 1918 the
question extended to student admissions when the American Medical
Association warned that the school should accept students from ac-
credited schools only. The College of Medical Evangelists also felt the
heat from the National Board, the national examination body for physi-
cians, to graduate competent doctors, which by implication, involved
admission of qualified students to medical school.
Immediately the onus was on Adventist colleges to achieve accredi-
tation, but even without this pressure from the medical profession, some
305
schools were already seeking recognition from state universities and

toying with the possibilities of regional accreditation. As early as 1905
Union College received accreditation from the New York Board of Re-
gents and the next year agreed to an affiliation with the University of
Nebraska. At least for the time being, this recognition met the needs of
pre-med students at Union. In 1911 the University of Washington ac-
credited Walla Walla College's secondary schoo\.9 To satisfy entrance
requirements at CME, Adventist colleges sought recognition as junior
colleges, but this remedy worked only temporarily. By 1928 entrance
requirements to medical school increased to three years of college. Two
years later the regional accreditation body for the north central states,
the North Central Association, balked, arguing that degree-granting
institutions that were accredited as two-year colleges were an anomaly
and not in keeping with credible educational practice.
The water became even more muddy when the teaching profession
raised its standards for certification of elementary and secondary teach-
ers by demanding teacher-preparation courses to be accredited. At the
same time nursing schools also required nursing students to take their
preparatory work, either at the secondary or post-secondary level, in
accredited schools.
W. E. Howell, Opponent of Accreditation

Adventists reacted ambivalentIy. For the most part, educators fa-
vored accreditation, but some church leaders harbored doubts. Ini-
tially, they objected because of the high costs of upgraded facilities
and faculty, but beginning in 1918 their attention turned to fears of
losing the Adventist character of education. The strongest warning
came from General Conference Secretary of Education Warren E.
Howell. He had been a member of E. A. Sutherland's first faculty at
Emmanuel Missionary College, president of Healdsburg College,
president of Lorna Linda College of Evangelists, and since 1914, the
assistant secretary in the General Conference Department of Educa-
tion.
After Howell succeeded Griggs in 1918 his office became the launch-
ing pad for a campaign of resistance to accreditation. At his recommen-
dation the annual Spring Council in 1919 passed a resolution which
prohibited Adventist schools from seeking "recognition from higher
306
educational institutions or organiza-

tions outside our denomination." Six
months later at the Autumn Council
the Department of Education back-
peddled to say that Adventist schools
should not "follow the standards of
secular and other educational systems"
except as required by law or to "draw
features of merit" to serve church pur-
poses. 1O
It was obvious that the hard line of
resistance was already softening be-
cause of pressure beyond denomina-
tional control. It was also obvious that
if schools could draw features of merit
to serve church purposes the policy W E. Howell. General Conference
became so open-ended that anyone secretary of education. 1918-1930.
exerted strong pressure to avoid
could rationalize its applications as secular accreditation of Adventist in-
one might desire. The policy to pro- stitutions and graduate study by Ad-
hibit accreditation had turned out to ventist teachers at non-Adventist in-
stitutiuns. However. he aggressively
be no policy at all, largely because of promoted the denominational identity
its impracticality. ofAdventist schools. helping tu estab-
Motivating Howell was a fear that lish the Board olRegents and an Ad-
ventist accrediting system which has
accrediting bodies would require Ad- served as one of the strongest unif.y-
ventist schools to relinquish their dis- ing influences in Adventist educa-
tinctive curriculum which was de- tiun.
signed to inculcate denominational
teachings and to prepare church workers. He and some church leaders
interpreted accreditation as one of the most sinister threats to the
church, believing that the forces of accreditation were conspiring to put
small institutions out of business, especially sectarian schools.
State legislation helped to feed these fears. In 1920 and 1924 Michi-
gan voters quashed attempts to legislate all parochial schools in the
state out of existence. Soon after the first referendum, quick action by
Adventist religious liberty activists and others averted an order to strike
religious instruction from all elementary schools in the state. A similar
and more celebrated case occurred in Oregon in 1922 when the legisla-
307
ture proscribed all private elementary schools. A court injunction

stayed the law, and in 1925 the United States Supreme Court ruled the
measure unconstitutional. 11
Warnings from Howell and the Religious Liberty Department right-
ly referred to these events as dangers to Adventist education, but the
proposed laws also reflected the wave of conservatism sweeping across
the United States after World War I. Understood under the rubric of
"normalcy," this conservative trend gave rise to isolationist policies and
open prejudice toward ethnic and religious minorities. In this reaction-
ary milieu the Ku Klux Klan was reborn. In part, the Oregon legisla-
tion was directed against education by and for Asian immigrants, por-
traying it as un-American. It was during this same period that legislation
restricting immigration contributed to the decline of the three seminar-
ies for German and Scandinavian Adventists in Missouri, Minnesota,
and Illinois.
Howell's apprehensions extended to secular graduate education. He
discouraged post-baccalaureate study as bookish and inappropriate
preparation for Adventist workers, and suggested that in many cases,
secondary education was sufficient to equip denominational employees
for service. Accreditation of Adventist colleges presupposed more Ad-
ventist professors with post-baccalaureate degrees earned at non-Ad-
ventist institutions. Howell believed that almost by definition these
teachers would dilute the purity of Adventist teachings and the ideals of
Adventist education.
Through the decade ofthe 1920s Howell sounded his alarms during
visits to Adventist college campuses, at General Conference sessions,
and at Colorado Springs, Colorado in 1923 where he presided over a
world convention of Adventist educators. At the 1922 General Confer-
ence he delivered a lengthy indictment of the shortcomings of Adven-
tist schools, "How Can We Preserve the Sacred Traditions of Christian
Education?", concluding with an apology for the bluntness of his re-
buke, but at the same time salving his conscience.
At the two-week convention at Colorado Springs the following year
he addressed teachers from around the world six times, each speech
circling back to the burden of his heart-Adventist education had lost its
simplicity and its direction. The powerful constant in his presentations
was his progressively stronger emphasis on the evangelistic purpose of
308
Adventist education and his pleas to

restore the original Adventist identity
to denominational schools.'2
Howell's ardor did not discourage a
small but growing number of educa-
tors from enrolling in graduate studies
either for a master's degree or in some
cases, a doctorate, but they were on
their own and met with suspicion by
many church leaders. One of the most
notorious cases was M. L. Andreasen,
head of the Bible department at Union
College, who left General Conference
President A. G. Daniells standing
alone on the street corner while he Because he believed that the future of
boarded a trolley to attend a graduate the College of Medical Evangelists
class at the University of Nebraska and Adventist higher education was
at stake. P. T Magan became one of
where he was studying for a master's the earliest supporters of accredita-
degree in history. Later in the same tion ofSeventh-day Adventist schools
day while Andreasen listened silently, by regional and specialized accredit-
ing bodies.
Daniells took him to the proverbial
woodshed for his brazenness. But the experience did not change An-
dreasen's mind. In 1922 both he and his daughter graduated on the
same day with master's degrees.13
One of the strongest voices urging Adventist schools to achieve ac-
creditation was P. T. Magan, at the time dean of the College of Medical
Evangelists. Although personally suspicious of accreditation, he ratch-
eted up the pressure on denominational colleges to seek recognition,
but at the same time he continued to accept premed students from un-
accredited campuses in noncompliance with recommendations from
the American Medical Association. He realized that he could not con-
tinue this contradictory practice indefinitely and that Adventist educa-
tion would not survive without accreditation, and in 1926 he issued an
ultimatum-Adventist colleges would either meet the criteria for ac-
creditation or Adventist students would go elsewhere no matter how
determined their expectation to attend the College of Medical Evange-
lists.
309
Howell grudgingly gave way to the inevitable, but he and other lead-
ing lights tried to isolate the evils of accreditation to those academic
programs in which legal or practical ramifications were too strong for
Adventist schools to avoid. In 1926 the Department of Education rec-
ommended that only pre-med and elementary education programs seek
accreditation, and only then after approval by either the General Con-
ference Committee or the committee of the world division in which
schools in question were located. The proposal passed with little or no
discussion. The twofold practical effect was to verify that, in fact, ac-
creditation was necessary but that only a minimal number of Adven-
tists would study in secular graduate schools.
A System of Adventist Accreditation Begins

As reluctant as this action was, it changed the direction of the tide.
Two years later the General Conference created the Board of Regents
as the executive arm of a new entity, the Association of Seventh-day
Adventist Colleges and Secondary Schools. The purpose of this body
was to administer a denominational accrediting program. The new sys-
tem went into effect in 1929, accompanied by the hope that it would
preempt the need for regional accreditation.
In what amounted to a capitulation by Howell, the new rules stated
that each college should have at least eight departments, each chaired
by a professor with "post-graduate work," but not specifying graduate
degrees. In the case of the two-year normal course, however, the teach-
ing faculty were to have at least one year of graduate study and the
head of the program was to own a master's degree. 14 Obviously, be-
cause no Adventist graduate school existed, department heads and oth-
er teachers would have to attend secular institutions in order to qualify
for their positions.
Howell's changed stance was a key to the new educational regimen.
However forcefully he had opposed accreditation since succeeding
Griggs in 1918, he was willing to admit that Adventist education
needed it after all. Because Adventist schools were critical to the
denomination and because legal and professional restrictions were
closing in on education generally, Howell concluded that denomina-
tional schools could not afford to arouse doubts about their legiti-
macy. In 1930 he advocated that Adventist schools should seek
310
recognition "to give them a standing above question in the educa-

tional world."
Howell persisted to argue that public regulation of education de-
prived Adventist schools the freedom they should have "in continuing
to function fully in the service of the third angel's message," but in mat-
ters of adequate buildings and equipment, financial integrity, balanced
curriculum, teachers' qualifications and the size of their teaching loads,
denominational schools could meet accreditation criteria without
"bringing in any of the teaching content that is contrary to our faith,
and without compromising any of the principles held dear by us in the
history of our educational work."'5
General Conference Debates Accreditation

Hardly had the new Board of Regents' accrediting plan begun be-
fore it became apparent that it was no substitute for the regional accred-
iting bodies. The stage was set for further change. In 1930 C. W. Irwin
succeeded Howell as the secretary of education. Irwin brought a pedi-
gree to his new post that made him a near-perfect candidate to handle
the polarization that marked Adventist education. On the side of ortho-
doxy he was the son of former General Conference President George
Irwin, schooled at Battle Creek and for five years the principal of what
became Avondale College, the model school of Adventism. On the flip
side of the coin he was independent enough to complete a master's de-
gree from the University of Nebraska during the 1920s while his prede-
cessor was roundly criticizing graduate education.
Less than a year after Irwin took charge of the Department of Edu-
cation, the Spring Council appointed him to chair a survey commission
to study Adventist higher education and to recommend necessary
changes leading out of the dilemma that had deadlocked the system
during the previous decade. The nine members of the investigating
group were all General Conference personnel including the president
and two vice presidents and six others holding the title of secretary at
some level. Among them was Howell.
The commission's report, delivered in September, 1931, said little
about the spiritual dangers of accreditation and graduate study at non-
Adventist institutions, focusing instead on financial and other practical
matters. Its primary conclusion held that the North American Adventist
311
constituency was too small, measured in both membership and reve-

nues, to afford its existing post-secondary program.
The upshot was a recommendation to divide the North American
Division into five regions with constituencies ranging from 18,000 to
29,000 and to reduce the number of degree-granting colleges from sev-
en to five-one in each proposed region. The plan included six junior
colleges, two in Canada and four in the United States. Outside this
post-secondary system but still a part of the education program were
the seminaries for Scandinavian students, Oakwood Junior College,
and the College of Medical Evangelists. All five senior colleges were to
offer the complete pre-med program and the six junior colleges could
offer pre-med only after achieving accreditation with both the denomi-
nation and regional associations.
Even with these arrangements, the commission admitted that the
size of supporting constituencies for Adventist colleges would be among
the lowest in the country, which spelled financial trouble. Ironically, in
the face of this grim outlook, the commission recommended that the
denomination establish its own graduate school to avoid postbaccalau-
reate studies by Adventist teachers in non-Adventist institutions. '6
A month later the spiritual aspects of the issue resurfaced as the
Autumn Council debated the report extensively, turning from the fi-
nancial questions to leave the number of senior colleges intact and add-
ing caveats to protect Adventist education from secular influences
which leaders feared would seep into denominational schools through
teachers holding secular graduate degrees. The church would recog-
nize compliance with accreditation requirements as an "emergency"
and allow Adventist teachers to earn advanced degrees from secular
institutions only after they were screened to determine their spiritual
readiness for graduate study. Also added was a limitation of pre-med
curricula to the senior colleges and three of the six junior colleges.
Schools were to spend money only from operating gains or donations
when preparing for accreditation and teachers holding doctorates were
not to be called "doctor."'?
Despite its chary tone, this action opened the door to accreditation.
At the time the world was suffering the throes of the Great Depression
and church revenues were sinking. In order to maintain itself, the Gen-
eral Conference was depending on its operating reserves which were
312
rapidly dissipating. Church leaders had good reason for their caution
about finances, but the limitation on spending also was a means to dis-
courage accreditation on pragmatic grounds rather than on spiritual
arguments.
Pacific Union College was the first to acquire denominational ac-
creditation under the terms of the new Board of Regents and immedi-
ately sought accreditation from its regional accrediting body, which it
received in 1933, again the first Adventist college to receive such recog-
nition. 18 W. E. Nelson, PUC's president who navigated the college
through these exploratory waters, succeeded Irwin as General Confer-
ence secretary of education the next year, but once in Washington he
assumed a far more conservative stance toward accreditation than he
had taken as a college president.
Only weeks after moving to the General Conference, Nelson asked
all college presidents to report how much money they had spent to up-
grade college facilities and to help teachers in graduate study, and to
differentiate between the amounts they would have spent anyway and
the amounts resulting from plans to accredit their programs. The presi-
dents submitted some figures but they found the inquiry nearly impos-
sible and their written comments were not instructive to the new educa-
tion secretary. With a tinge of sarcasm Thomas Steen, president of
Emmanuel Missionary College, told Nelson that "no human being now
alive knows the answer," at least as it pertained to EMC. 19
At the 1935 Spring Council General Conference President C. H.
Watson planned to forestall the accreditation movement by issuing a
presidential fiat that reduced the number of Adventist schools approved
for regional accreditation. But William Landeen, president of Walla
Walla College, had been working quietly for accreditation with the
Northwest Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools and before
Watson finished his statement he opportunely announced that WWC
had been approved by its regional association. 20
Landeen's disclosure derailed Watson's proposed limitation, but the
General Conference Committee appointed another educational survey
commission to study thoroughly the operations of Adventist colleges,
including the needs for plant improvements, adequacy of curricula, and
overall costs. A fact-finding committee probed every campus, compil-
ing data about class size, numbers of students per teacher, teaching
313
loads, effectiveness of curricula, library holdings, and a host of other

statistics.
The data unmistakably confirmed the conclusion of the 1931 survey:
the Adventist membership in North America was too small to support
the existing Adventist colleges. As a result colleges were not operating
efficiently. Many classes were too small to justify their existence, which
yielded small revenues and increased operational expenses. The com-
mission also complained that ministerial education in junior colleges
was poor, underfunded on most college campuses, and on the decline
generally.
In summary the report stated darkly that "It is evident that our col-
leges, when rated alongside standards or criteria of the accrediting as-
sociations ... rank well toward the bottom of the list in all of the im-
portant financial factors of amount expended per student, total receipts,
and the proportion of income from subsidies and outside sources ...
That all the accrediting associations are progressively building toward
the favorable development of the larger and stronger institutions, and to
the circumscribing, if not the discouragement, of smaller colleges with
more limited constituencies and financial backing, is suggested, if not
actually in evidence, in the standards and criteria of their recognition
programs."21
The 1931 report of the survey commission appeared to concentrate
on financial aspects of accreditation at the expense of spiritual ques-
tions, but the 1935 report erased the conclusion that spiritual concerns
were really dead. Beginning with a declaration of the "peril" that rec-
ognition brought to Adventist schools, the 1935 commission recom-
mended that because the cost of accreditation would "embarrass the
financial resources of the denomination," and the professional needs of
the church required only two regionally accredited colleges, that only
Emmanuel Missionary and Pacific Union colleges "be authorized to
acquire and maintain accreditation in regional associations."
The report precipitated a wrenching debate at the Autumn Council.
w. H. Branson, General Conference vice president for North America,
confessed that, in his view, the 1931 commission had overreacted in
allowing all Adventist colleges to apply for accreditation. He stated that
accreditation would destroy the principles of Adventist education and
undermine the goals ofthe church. College administrations and college
314
graduates were ignoring the safeguards against these deleterious influ-

ences. Young Adventists were enrolling in secular graduate programs
on their own rather than waiting to be chosen. Avoiding accreditation
would allow colleges to return to the business of preparing missionar-
ies rather than preparing students in the art ofliving, which was a threat
to the identity of Adventist schools.
Speaker after speaker echoed Branson's sentiments. The strongest
remarks came from General Conference President C. H. Watson who
declared that accreditation was necessary for some purposes, such as
implementing a pre-med program, but he would prefer closing CME
rather than to destroy Adventist education by "going worldly" through
extensive accreditation. Several admitted that misgivings and fears had
silently accompanied their consenting votes in 1931, and they were
grateful for an opportunity to undo the wrong they had committed. 22
On the other side of the debate was Howell, six years separated from
the Department of Education, who spoke little but reminded the audi-
ence that while he had strenuously opposed accreditation in previous
years, experience showed that Adventist schools could not survive
without it. He went on record to support the principles of accreditation
with "limitations." He did not spell out what he believed would be ap-
propriate limitations-and no one could read his mind-but his brief re-
marks indicated that he probably realized that to be a defined and de-
fensible system, Adventist schools could not sidestep accountability
and that accreditation was the method of accountability to which Ad-
ventist education would have to adjust in the best possible manner.
Gone were his inflammatory comments about denominational schools
losing their identity and their purpose.
The most vehement observations came from H. H. Votaw, associate
secretary of the Department of Religious Liberty, who disagreed with
the General Conference president with rare bluntness. He argued that if
accreditation was a means to destroy Adventist schools, as many speak-
ers had claimed, the Autumn Council could not justify selecting two
schools for recognition, which allegedly would lead to their spiritual
destruction, and permit a third school to continue its accredited status
while the other campuses remained untainted.
"Let us face the thing," Votaw said, "do one thing or the other. I can-
not see it any other way, between sending boys and girls to hell from
315
three schools or six ... We had better take more time to study before
we vote. I cannot see any connection between any speeches the Presi-
dent of the denomination has made and the report of this commission.
One says it is wrong, and the commission says we will do it for three
schools. If this comes up for a vote I am going to say 'NO' long enough
for my vote to register 'No.' "23 Some union presidents, who were also
college board chairmen, agreed that Adventist colleges needed to con-
form to denominational principles, but admitted their confusion over
the zig-zag route the accreditation process was taking.
The recommendation went back to the commission for restudy, but
the next day the document returned, virtually unchanged. After an-
other plea by Branson, it passed, but with modifications that contained
the seeds of its own demise. Colleges other than Pacific Union and Em-
manuel Missionary could accredit their junior college programs with
regional associations, a decision that
presumably would protect professional
education on all campuses, but it raised
questions about how college adminis-
trations would isolate the impact of ac-
creditation from the upper halves of
their campuses.
The 1935 action lasted less than a
year before the General Conference
Committee reversed itself again dur-
ing the world session in May 1936, this
time opening up the way for accredita-
tion for all denominational colleges.
The action occurred after M. L. An-
dreasen, president of Union College,
and his board chairman informed the
M. L. Andreasen at one time served as General Conference Committee that
principal of the Danish-Norwegian the North Central Accrediting Asso-
Seminary in Hutchinson, Minnesota.
He later became president of Union ciation refused to approve the institu-
College and helped to lead the move- tion as a junior college, which would
ment for graduate study by Adventist have cut the school in half, academi-
teachers and for accreditation of Sev-
enth-day Adventist colleges by region- cally. Because the school offered four-
al bodies. year degrees it would have to apply for
316
accreditation as a senior college or not at all. Lacking accreditation,

Union would lose all of its professional programs. An ad hoc commit-
tee that included Branson, Watson, and 1. L. McElhany, a General Con-
ference vice president, took only one day to recommend granting An-
dreasen's request to apply for full accreditation. Earlier, Walla Walla
College had faced a simi lar situation. It was clear that the 1935 measure
could not work.24
Before the 1936 General Conference session ended F. M. Wilcox,
editor of the Review, addressed the delegates with a parting shot about
the evils of accreditation and graduate study. It was the final hurrah for
the campaign against accreditation. The following year at the world
convention of Adventist educators in Blue Ridge, North Carolina, H. A.
Morrison, who had replaced Nelson as the new secretary of the Depart-
ment of Education, dismissed the issue of accreditation with only a
couple of paragraphs in his prepared address. Admitting in his opening
remarks that accreditation for the sake of prestige could be harmful, he
noted that Adventist colleges were pursuing regional recognition.
"This ought not to affect in any way the objectives or purposes in
these schools," he said. "Yet we must recognize that it adds one more
point of contact with the influences about us concerning which we must
be ever on the alert ... Experience has taught many of us that these
rating agencies are not interested in having us change our objectives,
but are interested in our doing a high quality of work along the lines of
our own choice and in accordance with our own purposes."25
The Aftermath
Questions about the merits of accreditation still haunted the minds
of many but the debate was over. Shortly the number of Adventist se-
nior colleges in North America rose to eight, excluding Oakwood and
Madison colleges which were administratively outside the North Amer-
ican Division. By 1945 all of the Adventist degree-granting institutions
in North America were accredited by their regional associations.
The debate about accreditation was the most acute struggle that Ad-
ventist education had experienced up to that time. The formula for re-
sistance contained several ingredients that produced a potent mix.
Many church leaders believed explicitly that Adventist education was
unique and that the only way to preserve its character was to isolate it
as much as possible from external influences. They viewed accredita-

tion as a menace because it subjected them to control by people who did
not share their convictions.
One of the major points of disagreement was secular graduate edu-
cation, which was unavoidably linked to faculty upgrading. The funda-
mental philosophy of Adventist education was an uncompromising be-
lief in Scripture as the source of truth and the rule of life. This did not
mean that all knowledge is revealed in the Bible, but that discoverable
information is accurately recognized only within the parameters of bib-
lical understanding. By contrast, secular education taught that the prin-
ciples of truth as well as information are discoverable and that inquir-
ing minds must search for them, which implied skepticism, questioning,
and testing while pursuing the search.
Many leading Adventists held that it was improbable if not im-
possible for Adventists to study any academic field in a secular set-
ting without damaging their sense of commitment to a priori beliefs
and that after an inevitable absorption of secularist principles, Ad-
ventist teachers with graduate degrees would contaminate Adventist
campuses. Because of these perceived dangers denominational lead-
ership attempted to control which and how many Adventist teachers
would expose themselves to the inexorable spiritual toxins of secular
graduate study. They watched with alarm when teachers struck out
on their own or when young, unseasoned persons ventured to the
tree of knowledge of good and evil without first passing an official
screen mg.
While no one questioned the uniqueness of Adventist education, a
growing number of Adventist educators believed that there was no
place on earth to escape erroneous philosophical notions. Fallacious
philosophy permeated all levels of intellectual activity, even touching
the man on the street who was as vulnerable to misleading ideas that
were part of a pedestrian life as were students in higher education.
They believed that information in and of itself was neutral, and that the
challenge to gather and to understand knowledge within the spiritual
context of Adventism would strengthen, not weaken faith. For them the
intellectual temptations of secular education were an occupational haz-
ard that required alertness, but the danger did not equate to a prohibi-
tion. There was never a claim that the teaching profession would suffer
318
no casualties at all if Adventists enrolled in graduate programs, but

graduate education did not automatically chill Adventist fervor or pro-
duce apostasy.
Antagonists of accreditation prolifically cited statements by Ellen
White that warned against secular influences and adopting worldly
standards. Supporters of accreditation pointed out that Ellen White's
instruction to meet whatever requirements were necessary to maintain
a flow of Adventist students into the Adventist medical school also ap-
plied to the increasing array of restrictions in other professional fields
of study that were critical to denominational operations. Neither side
convinced the other with its arsenal of historical support. If this aspect
of the debate demonstrated anything, it showed that it was both tricky
ifnot dangerous to quote the founder of Adventist educational philoso-
phy posthumously as though she were present and speaking to a spe-
cific situation.
Much of the debate revolved around the question of balance between
idealism and pragmatism. In the heat of the struggle the General Con-
ference president spoke his conviction to close down the medical school
rather than to submit to worldliness, but P. T. Magan pointed out that
without accreditation Adventists would resort to physicians to lead the
denominational health movement who were schooled entirely in the
atmosphere they sought to avoid. Listeners could not miss the point:
idealism was necessary, but in the matter of professional education, fol-
lowing the principle of a higher good rather than complete withdrawal
from society was crucial to Adventist education.
In part, the debate derived from a collision between two views ofthe
purpose of Adventist education. Some church leaders saw schools pri-
marily as a means to prepare students for denominational employment,
but others, including the students themselves, visualized education
more as a means to prepare for employment anywhere. Only begrudg-
ingly if at al1 did the first group agree with accreditation. They doubted
that church workers needed the extensive academic baggage that higher
education was developing and which accrediting bodies were demand-
ing, and they were prone to oppose accreditation as an interference to
their purposes.
But church workers could not continue indefinitely with these nine-
teenth century norms. Higher education and professional education be-
319
came more academic after 1920 and in order to function credibly Ad-
ventist institutions needed professionals with valid credentials. It went
without saying that Adventist students who simply wanted to study in
an Adventist school for a profession benefited from these circumstanc-
es. Their number was growing and from their point of view accredita-
tion was a means to achieve the assurance that their education was le-
gitimate.
Given the outcome of the struggle, it is easy to tag those who cam-
paigned against accreditation as short sighted and misguided. But when
the debate first erupted accrediting bodies themselves were still evolv-
ing and no one knew how far their influence could or would reach. The
associations did not delineate specifically all the details of what schools
should do to achieve accreditation; they evaluated an institution only
after it applied for recognition. As experience showed, fears that re-
gional associations would proscribe religion in Adventist classrooms
were ill-founded, but Adventist leaders had no assurances at the time
that a biblically based education would meet with approval by profes-
sional educators who promoted secular ideals.
It was undebatable that financial questions also played a key role in
the battle. The cost of facilities and faculties commensurable to the ris-
ing expectations of higher education was severe. Adventist leaders who
conducted the survey commissions of 1931 and 1935 confirmed what
the accrediting bodies were trying to tell Adventist colleges all along:
their financial status was among the weakest in the country and institu-
tions with such precarious economic footing could not afford facilities
to conduct successful post-secondary education as commonly under-
stood, irrespective of religious implications for the church.
One of the great fears that drove denominational leaders was that
compliance with accrediting standards would force them to drain mon-
ey from evangelism to pay for what they thought was unnecessary in-
stitutional change. That the colleges were already financial problems
and inefficiently run, as the 1931 and 1935 surveys showed, only added
to their argument. For many church leaders accreditation jeopardized
formal evangelism, the heart of the denominational raison d'etre.
What appears to be a major misconception, or perhaps a rationaliza-
tion, occurred in 1931 when the General Conference Committee in-
structed the Department of Education to portray graduate education for
320
college teachers as an "emergency" measure which the Adventist pub-

lic was not to construe as an endorsement of secular education or a
blanket approval for study at non-Adventist institutions. It is unclear if
the members of the highest decision-making body in the church really
thought their "emergency" would disappear once the colleges achieved
accreditation or if they sensed that this was truly an ongoing condition,
and that as institutions grew and generations passed, the need for larger
numbers of faculty with graduate degrees would never end.
The emergency myth cloaked denominational approval of accredita-
tion for years. Despite H. A. Morrison's calm approach to accreditation
at the Blue Ridge convention in 1937, a recommendation from that
gathering echoed the exact words ofthe 1931 General Conference Com-
mittee action, referring to the situation as an emergency.
Not often discussed were Adventist attitudes toward state regulation
of education-which were legal provisions-as compared to extra-legal
controls imposed by the voluntary accreditation system. Despite the
flare up during the 1920s to eliminate parochial education in some
states, Adventist leaders seldom questioned the legitimacy of the regu-
latory authority of governments. More often than not Adventists ac-
tively pursued recognition by arms of governments that controlled edu-
cation. Outside the United States Adventist education faced government
intrusiveness, but the difference in the reaction by church leaders turned
on one fact: state controls were legal and unavoidable while regional
accreditation in the United States was voluntary. But voluntary or not,
the system of regional accreditation eventually developed enough clout
to produce an impact that rivaled legal regulation.
One of the amazing chapters in Adventist higher education is its
achievement of accreditation notwithstanding all of its institutional in-
adequacies. There was no more convincing argument that the ideals of
sacrificial Christian service were paramount objectives in Adventist
education than the college faculties who received salaries that were less
than competitive. Also, Adventist school administrators claimed that
without endowments, prestigious faculty, or research labs and libraries,
denominational colleges could produce graduates with respectable pro-
fessional competence to meet the needs of the public workplace as well
as denominational employment. Regional associations agreed that the
work ethic so prevalent on Adventist campuses provided an institu-
ll-IPFTW
321
tional tone in keeping with denominational ideals of commitment and

serVIce.
The debate over accreditation was primarily a North American is-
sue because voluntary accreditation did not exist outside the United
States. The struggle was polarizing and spirited, but after 1936 the de-
nomination set about to acclimate to the practical results of its new
educational imperative, which simply put, meant coming out of its iso-
lation to become a recognized education program while retaining its
Adventist identity. By 1945 when accreditation had become the norm
on Adventist campuses, there was probably no greater acknowledg-
ment that the principles of Adventist education were valid than the
simple fact that regional associations had, after all the doubting, recog-
nized Adventist colleges.
'For a thought provoking discussion of the relationship between Adventist education and
upward mobility, see Malcolm Bull and Keith Lockhart, Seeking a Sanctuary (San Francis-
co: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1989), pp. 254-268.
2Statistical Report, 1920-1945.
JEllen White, Testimonies, v. 6, p. 207.
4Griggs, "Report of the Department of Education to the 1918 General Conference," RG
51, AST; Reye and Knight, ibid.
'For this aspect of Griggs' career see Reye and Knight, "Frederick Griggs: Moderate,"
Early Adventist Educators, pp. 184-204.
"General Conference Bulletin, 1905, no. 4, p. 20.
'The accreditation debate is summarized from Joseph G. Smoot, "Accreditation: Quality
in the SDA College," (Journal ofAdventist Education, February-March 1983), pp. 10, 11,44,
45; William G. White, "Flirting with the World," (Adventist Heritage, Spring 1983), pp. 40-
51; William G. White, "Another Look at Those Pioneers of Adventist Accreditation," Focus
(winter 1978), pp. 10-13; Everett Dick, Union, College of the Golden Cords (Lincoln, NE:
Union College Press, 1967), pp. 153-168; Virginia Steinweg, Without Fear or Favor: the Life
of M. L. Andreasen (Washington, D. c.: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1979),
pp. 94, 95, 134-138; Terrie Aamodt, Bold Venture: a History of Walla Walla College (College
Place, WA: Walla Walla College, 1992), pp. 67-69, 75-76, 81-87; George R. Knight, Myths in
Adventism. (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1985), pp. 37-45;
Michael Bull and Keith Lockhart, Seeking a Sanctuary (New York: Harper and Row, 1989),
pp. 230-243; Walter Utt, A Mountain, A Pickax, A College (Angwin, CA: Alumni Associa-
tion of Pacific Union College, 1968), pp.87, 88; Doris Holt Haussler, From Immigrant to
Emissary (Nashville: Southern Publishing Association. 1969), pp. 89-99; 60 Years of Prog-
ress: Walla Walla College (College Place, WA: Walla Walla College Press, 1952), p. 249.
8Carol Small, Diamond Memories (Lorna Linda, CA: Alumni Association, School of
Medicine, 1984), pp, 15, 16, 139-141.
9Aamodt, Bold Venture, p. 67; Dick, Golden Cords, p. 155.
322
IOGeneral Conference Minutes, April 30, 1919, AST; ibid., October 14, 1919.
"General Conference Bulletin, 1922, no. 3, p. 76; ibid., 1926, no. 9, p. 17; Lloyd P. Jorgen-
son, "The Oregon School Law of 1922: Passage and Sequel," Catholic Historical Review
(UV, 1968), pp. 455-466; Paul M. Holsinger, "The Oregon School Bill Controversy, 1922-
1925," (Pacific Historical Review, XXXVII, 1968), pp. 327-341.
"Howell, "Report of the Department of Education to the 1922 General Conference Ses-
sion," AST; ibid., 1926, 1930; Howell's presentations in Proceedings of the Educational and
Missionary Volunteer Departments of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists in
World Convention. (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1923).
'JSteinweg, Without Fear or Favor, pp. 94, 95. Dick in Golden Cords, pp. 157, 158, names
Howell, not Daniells, as the snubbed visitor.
'4"Standards for Accrediting Colleges," April, 1929, RG 51, AST; "Two-Year Normal
School," ibid.
';Howell, "Report of the Department of Education to the 1930 General Conference Ses-
sion," ibid.
'6"Meeting of the Survey Commission of Board of Regents," September 29,1931, ibid.
'7General Conference Committee Minutes, October 23,25, 1931, ibid.
ISUtt, A Mountain. a Pickax, p. 88.
'9Memo, Nelson to college presidents, September 20, 1934. RG 51, AST. Steen to Nelson,
September 24, 1934, ibid.
2°Aamodt, Bold Venture, pp. 85-89.
21"Report of the Fact-Finding Committee Appointed by the Educational Survey Commis-
sion," October 23,24, 1935, RG 51, AST.
22See the twenty-one-page transcript of speeches, RG 51, AST. For the recommendations
as voted, see General Conference Committee Minutes, October 31, 1935, ibid.
1Jlbid.
24General Conference Committee Minutes, May 25, 26, 1936; Aamodt, Bold Venture,
p. R5.
25Report of the Blue Ridge Educational Convention. August 17-25. 1937. (Washington,
D. c.: General Conference Department of Education, n.d.), pp. 18, 19.
14
TRENDS TOWARD
MODERNIZATION
As the major preoccupation of Adventist education during the 1920s

and 1930s, the debate about accreditation stimulated more than its share
of pros and cons, often overshadowing other administrative questions
that church educators faced. Among the issues were an evolving educa-
tional system, the financial stability of Adventist colleges, denomina-
tionally sponsored graduate education and the development of bacca-
laureate nursing education. In one way or another these matters related
to accreditation, and because Adventist schools in North America were
in the vanguard of denominational education, the aftereffects of these
issues rippled into the world fields.
w. E. Howell's Contributions to Systematization

W. E. Howell's misgivings about accreditation and graduate study
were well known, but his opposition did not mean that he was unfamil-
iar with educational issues or against systematization. He was a disciple
of system and assiduously pursued an Adventist identity for denomina-
tional schools. When he began his career as the General Conference
secretary of education he believed that Adventist schools could best
preserve their identity by isolation from outside influences, but his
324
TRENDS TOWARD MODERNIZATION
twelve years in office taught him that processes of systematization were

by definition organization and that organization, in turn, led to the very
results that accreditation proposed.
Howell undeviatingly held to his view that Adventist education had
three simple objectives that distinguished it from all other learning
programs: 1) to save Adventist children to the church, 2) to prepare
denominational workers, and 3) to pioneer evangelism in non-Christian
and developing countries.' Contrary to the prevailing view among
church leaders, he consistently maintained that the preservation of
Adventist children to the church took precedence over preparation of
workers, although in practical application this distinction mattered
little. To inculcate these ideas into the minds of Adventist educators
Howell widened the practice of conventions, bringing to Adventist
education a sense of a global movement with denominational
identity.
In 1922 Howell's recommendations to the General Conference ses-
sion included a proposal to provide employment security to teachers,
an issue that was within the scope of accreditation issues. The question
had been the leading topic on the agenda of the Department of Educa-
tion during the session and simply read that heads of colleges serve
terms of four years and academy principals for two years, and that
teachers have continuous employment after their third year. Removal
would be possible for "sufficient reasons, and upon due notice."
Immediately after Howell read his proposals, W. H. Branson, at the
time president of the African Division, invited him to "defend his reso-
lutions," but the secretary of education shot back that they didn't need
defense inasmuch as they were based on employment policies already
practiced in ministerial ranks, and that teachers and officers of educa-
tional institutions should have equal opportunity to carry out their
functions. 2
This tart exchange between Howell and Branson indicated the lesser
rank that education personnel occupied in the denominational schema,
a situation that the secretary of education viewed as inimical to system-
atized progress in Adventist education. Delegates to the session ap-
proved the recommendations although the new measures had little im-
mediate impact on actual employment practices. Nonetheless, they
were a beginning of eventual improvement in the status of teachers.
Professional gatherings were another tool Howell used to system-

atize education. Before he succeeded Frederick Griggs, teachers' con-
ventions and institutes had taken place for the most part in North
America, in part because Adventists lacked a critical mass of profes-
sional educators in any single field outside the United States that would
make such gatherings practical. One notable exception to this pattern
occurred in 1916 when Griggs conducted a meeting in Shanghai for
teachers and church leaders in China.
This first teachers' convention beyond North America exemplified
how the systematizing process would take place in Adventist educa-
tion. "The educational field work was organized on the same general
basis as that obtaining in the North American Division Conference,"
Griggs afterwards wrote, but he added that extensive adaptation was
necessary to compensate for cultural differences. 3 The North Ameri-
can model meant that agriculture, other industries, and health educa-
tion were integral parts of instruction. Curriculum design for the pur-
pose of preparing church employees received special emphasis at the
Shanghai meeting, and decisions served as a norm for other countries
in the Far East.
During his years as secretary of education Howell followed the prec-
edents set in Shanghai. In the wake of World War I the General Confer-
ence was deluged with needs to rehabilitate the church in Europe, in-
cluding a rejuvenation of education. Even with these acute conditions
crying for attention, the General Conference Committee sent Howell to
South America in 1920 as a member of a delegation to represent church
headquarters at divisional meetings in March. As a part of the session
he conducted a convention for denominational educators and later vis-
ited the major schools in the field.
At the Autumn Council that year Howell submitted a slate of recom-
mendations which, for the first time, embodied a coordinated approach
to institutional development in the South American Division. At the
same time the Council also passed a similar list of recommendations
affecting Europe, and in 1921 Howell made his belated tour of the Con-
tinent to inspect new and developing schools.4
By 1926 either Howell or his associate, C. W. Irwin, had traveled to
Africa and Southern Asia, both regions where Adventist educators
gathered for the first time in professional meetings. In Shanghai de-
326
nominational teachers and administrators met together again, this time

for the first education convention in the Far Eastern Division. Both
Howell and Irwin also attended separate institutes in Europe in succes-
sive years. During 1926 and 1927 Howell's calendar scheduled him for
five trips outside North America. 5
World Education Conventions

Howell's crowning convention took place from June 5 to 19, 1923
when he brought the entire Adventist educational fraternity together
at Colorado Springs, Colorado for its first world convention. One of
the more substantive presentations came from Sarah Peck, Howell's
associate secretary of education for elementary schools, who de-
clared a need for a complete set of denominational textbooks for
elementary grades. She urged colleges to reorganize the teacher-
preparation curriculum to include more courses in academic subject
areas and to integrate the new curricula into baccalaureate degree
programs.
Among her other recommendations was a request for the colleges
to introduce special courses to prepare better qualified supervising
teachers and education superintendents. Recalling Ellen White's ad-
vocacy of Adventist education, she repeated Howell's point of view
that teachers were as relevant to the mission of the church as were
ordained ministers and suggested that their salaries should reflect that
status.
Administrative flaws in Adventist education as of 1923 were hardly
secrets, but Peck's forthright speech made them common knowledge,
and during the ensuing years the issues about which she spoke occu-
pied a large space on the denominational agenda. But it was apparent
that Howell had other reasons for the Colorado Springs gathering than
to discuss general administrative questions. His globetrotting both be-
fore and after the convention revealed that one of his goals was to cul-
tivate a global system of Adventist education, focusing on his convic-
tions about its distinctively spiritual character.
The leading impact of the Colorado Springs convention was inspira-
tional if not evangelistic. The overwhelming majority of attendees rep-
resented North American entities, but Howell gave delegates from the
world divisions prime time to recount their struggles and to describe
the spirit of sacrifice in their fields, which underlined his opening state-
ment that Adventist education in these regions had been "planted in
weakness, with meager facilities, with slender staffs."6 A retinue of de-
nominational leaders offered encouragement and counsel. The dele-
gates listened to updates on state legislation hostile to private educa-
tion, especially the Oregon School Law, but the central message was
Howell's repeated advice to shun both accreditation and graduate edu-
cation and to maintain the identity of Adventist education by separation
from the world. In Howell's view commitment produced effectiveness,
and both were virtues that superseded formal, advanced training which
he believed was often superfluous.
In 1937, fourteen years and three secretaries of education later,
Adventist educators from as many world divisions as practical as-
sembled at Blue Ridge, North Carolina for their second world con-
vention. Similar to the Colorado Springs meeting, it was predomi-
nantly a North American affair. Again, the question of a distinctive
Adventist education was paramount. But the mentality of the dele-
gates was one of acceptance of the reality of the secular educational
world at large and to define the role Adventist education played in it
rather than to suppose that denominational education should preserve
itselfby isolation. The specific aim was to update the standardization
process in Adventist schools in keeping with educational expecta-
tions of society and curricular trends in general. Accreditation and
graduate education, old nemeses for Howell, received matter-of-fact
treatment from H. A. Morrison, the General Conference secretary of
education. By 1937 accreditation was a given and graduate education
had become a necessity, even at secondary levels of instruction. The
essential attitude was to accept these new conditions of Adventist
education, but some delegates continued to echo Howell's original
concerns.7
Colorado Springs and Blue Ridge were epic moments in espousing
a global view of Adventist education, but the 1937 meeting was the last
attempt to convene delegates from Adventist education at all levels
from around the world. Growth of the education movement raised the
cost of the meetings to prohibitive levels and hostile international con-
ditions made world conventions impractical. The North American
practice of departmentalized gatherings that concentrated on such mat-
328
ters as administration of dormitories, specific academic disciplines, or

levels of instruction such as elementary or secondary spread to the rest
of the world. General Conference representation at these gatherings
kept the idea of a denominational system alive.
The Concept of a Global System

The concept of a global system of education also continued through
means of the denominational accreditation system. After four years in
office Howell observed in 1922 that Adventist education was "ripening
into somewhat settled lines." He recognized that elementary and sec-
ondary schools rested in the hands of local congregations and confer-
ences but colleges fell into a different category. He declared "that they
are in fact denominational and world institutions, and that we must
think of them in world terms ... [I]t seems to me beyond dispute that
their policies should be determined by the responsible body of the
whole."g
By controlling the colleges the General Conference could also de-
termine much of what occurred at lower levels of instruction. There
could be no misunderstanding that Howell intended that the General
Conference Department of Education, contemporaneously known as
the "General Department," would become the educational hub of the
church around which all education revolved.
The formation of the Association of Seventh-day Adventist Colleges
and Secondary Schools and the Board of Regents in 1929 expressed
Howell's conviction about a system. Within a year after the Board of
Regents began, it issued its own criteria for upgrading colleges and
academies to qualify for denominational accreditation. Initially, these
standards were not demanding and applied only to North American
schools, but over time they tightened and in 1954 the purview of the
Association expanded to the world fields.
The impact of the Board of Regents was mixed. The innovation
failed to become a recognized accrediting body as Howell and others
hoped, but even though it was a toothless organization in the eyes of the
larger world of education it was a seminal action in self-policing and
upgrading Adventist education irrespective of rulings by regional ac-
creditation bodies. The Board of Regents' instruments for school eval-
uation constituted a single measuring rod which educational leaders
329
applied to all secondary and tertiary schools, and the Department of

Education used it effectively as a systematizing procedure to establish
Adventist norms in school operations and curriculum.
Ironically, actions by the Board of Regents turned all of Howell's
past warnings about accreditation and graduate education upside down.
Among the first requirements sent to the colleges were criteria estab-
lishing departments headed by teachers with graduate education and in
some cases, graduate degrees.
Howell succeeded in advancing systematization but he did not
achieve the levels he envisioned. His view of Adventist colleges as
world institutions and his goal to place them under General Conference
control was unrealistic. Policies that gave each union in North America
authority over the college in its territory had been in effect since the
early years of the century and had become an ingrained tradition. At-
tempts by the General Conference Department of Education to super-
sede union authority had failed in 1913 when a recommendation to re-
duce the number of colleges met with resistance. Again, as the
accreditation debate peaked in the 1930s, union presidents who chaired
college boards sometimes quietly encouraged college administrations
to seek accreditation in spite of General Conference recommendations
to the contrary.
It is safe to say that Howell visualized North American colleges as
the primary source of international workers and since the General
Conference was in charge of missions, it followed that the world head-
quarters should design a system of education and control the post-
secondary campuses. It is open to question whether Howell or anyone
else was clairvoyant enough to foresee Adventist institutions around
the world maturing into the major centers they eventually became,
reducing at the same time the influence of North American higher
education. From purely a speculative point of view Howell and other
church leaders could not imagine the dimensions of Adventist educa-
tion three-quarters of a century later probably because they believed
the imminence of Christ's second advent prevented such mind wan-
derings. Whatever may have been the case, they had no way of know-
ing that the concept of a system of education as it related to the con-
trol of Adventist higher education would be a major struggle in the
years to come.
330
Regardless of future pitfalls, the concept of a system was unmistak-

ably present in North American post-secondary education nonetheless.
Colleges were not autonomous in matters pertaining to salary sched-
ules and retirement policies. Employees could shuttle from one institu-
tion to another and maintain a single service record as though they
worked continuously for a single employer. Institutional administrators
and church leaders alike assented to denominational teachings and Ad-
ventist mores as part of their operational practices, specifically affect-
ing employment. For the time being the notion of a system, even at the
tertiary level, was stronger than its counter influences.
Persistent Financial Woes

During the interim years persistent financial woes continued to
gnaw on the vitals of Adventist education. The earlier rescue program
based on the profits from a worldwide sales program of Ellen White's
Christ's Object Lessons had benefitted Adventist schools, and a subsidy
plan that in some ways was a denominational substitute for an endow-
ment was furnishing relief money, but in 1920 North American schools
still faced a debilitating debt load.
In Howell's words at the 1922 General Conference session schools
had the reputation of being the "biggest money-sinkers and debt-makers
we have."9 As a preventive remedy he pushed through a policy requir-
ing all schools to operate on the basis of annual budgets rather than the
hand-to-mouth method that had so long characterized Adventist schools.
To advocate his point he cited several cases when colleges and acade-
mies realized sizable savings by simply organizing their annual income
and expenses into a budget.
Admitting that educational institutions inherently had only limited
ability to generate capital, Howell suggested that literature sales by stu-
dents could, in effect, become an institutional industry that would sup-
ply a major source of cash to barren school treasuries. He even pre-
dicted that institutions could liquidate their debts and operate in the
black on the strength of income from literature sales. Howell's sugges-
tions about student colporteurs did not produce a bonanza among sec-
ondary schools and colleges in North America, but for a significant
number of students both in the United States and around the world lit-
erature sales became an effective means to finance their education.
331
Denominational schools beyond the United States were more prone

to function on a pay-as-you-go policy, which resulted in fewer debts but
at the same time prevented them from having as many amenities as
they needed. Schools in North America were prone to borrow funds
and by the time Howell left office in 1930, the combined debt of Adven-
tist schools was approximately $575,000, an increase of more than
$150,000 since 1921 but a decrease since the mid-1920s when institu-
tions owed more than a million dollars.1O
The problem did not stem simply from lack of annual budgets. Gen-
eral Conference Treasurer W. T. Knox observed in 1922 that while debt
ratios improved during the recent half dozen years and school finances
were in better shape, the actual volume of debt was increasing. The
subsidy plan, whose first object was to provide relief from debt, was not
accomplishing its purpose as well as denominational leaders intended.
Institutions tended to use relief funds to pay ordinary operational ex-
penses or even as capital to expand facilities.
The situation worsened during the Great Depression. During the
six years after 1930 schools reduced their debt only marginally while
at the same time writing off more than a half million dollars in uncol-
lectible student accounts. Even after this wholesale cancellation,
schools retained nearly $600,000 in student receivables. Summarizing
these bleak conditions, W. E. Nelson, General Conference secretary of
education, uttered doubt about one of the identifying marks of Adven-
tist education-institutional industries to provide student labor and
bring in cash to the schools. Successful commercial industries de-
pended on skilled workers, he argued, and students, who at best were
part-time workers, graduated about the time they became productive
employees. Nelson believed that school industries were working at a
disadvantage because they were constantly training a large portion of
their workers.
The Great Depression aggravated this situation because more than
ever before Adventist students became more dependent on institu-
tionallabor opportunities to pay for their education. By the end of the
1934-35 academic year students' earnings from campus jobs at all
schools amounted to about half the total charges for tuition, food, and
dormitory rooms. Recognizing that this amount was, for practical
purposes, a subsidy to students, Nelson commented that "We believe
332
that this is a larger amount than it is safe for our schools to supply."11
According to Nelson, operational losses on the campuses occurred
largely in the work sector. Secondary schools and junior colleges were
the leading offenders. Commercial industries on the campuses gener-
ated a degree of cash for schools, but services such as maintaining the
plant and grounds and assisting teachers with their paper work were
outright costs for which the schools paid from tuition revenue, thus
these jobs were expenses for which there was no compensating in-
come. Although no one explained why secondary schools and junior
colleges were more prone to lose money in their labor programs, the
younger average age of the students made productive industrial labor
less likely and employment in services more likely than in senior col-
leges.
The financial health of Adventist schools in North America paral-
leled the United States economy. Severe losses occurred between 1929
and 1936, but the next five years saw denominational education turn
around with annual gains approximating $300,000 for the entire North
American system. Indebtedness decreased and institutional net worth
went up. Except for three academies, all colleges and secondary schools
were debt-free by 1945 and the colleges were commonly realizing op-
erational gains between two and four hundred thousand dollars a year.
"This is a new experience for our educational work," Secretary ofEdu-
cation H. A. Morrison wroteP
Coincidental or not, the opposition to accreditation also followed the
economic patterns of the country. W. E. Nelson nearly drew blood in
1934 when he inquired about college expenditures to upgrade plant and
personnel, but his probing came as the United States economy bot-
tomed out during the Great Depression and habitual losses threatened
the very existence of institutions. Although the accreditation debate at
the 1936 General Conference session revolved around the philosophical
question of maintaining the spiritual identity of Adventist education,
arguments against accreditation lost much of their punch after schools
were able to afford the costs of upgrading their programs. Adventist
campuses were not flush, but during the five years after 1936, schools
spent a half million dollars on equipment and plant improvements, in-
cluding new buildings, all of which were needed anyway, but these
changes helped schools to meet accreditation criteria.
333
Background of Adventist Nursing Education

One of the leading issues in the processes of systematization and ac-
creditation of Adventist education was the development of nursing edu-
cation. This issue was a textbook example of how a field of vocational
education transformed itself into a baccalaureate program. The first nurs-
es' training program was a six-month course that began at Battle Creek
Sanitarium in 1883, but became a two-year program the next year. As
other sanitariums went into operation the common practice was to estab-
lish a school of nursing as an educational appendage of the institution.
The courses were thus under the control of a health-care center rather
than a school and ordinarily required two or three years to completeP
Entrance requirements were minimal, sometimes pegging the entry-
level age around twenty but demanding little academic background,
often no more than an elementary education. The courses included for-
mal classes in health, anatomy, and other pertinent topics, but student
nurses spent the bulk of their time tending patients. Typical to the train-
ing were introductory periods when student nurses worked in domestic
departments, such as housekeeping, laundry, and the dining room and
kitchen.
The purpose of these programs was to prepare nurses for mission
service at a clinic or sanitarium. Entrance requirements frequently in-
cluded screening to ascertain the commitment of prospective students
to missionary work. Classes in religion formed a core which would
prepare future nurses to give Bible studies. This pattern of nursing edu-
cation spread throughout the Adventist world. By 19lO ninety sanitari-
ums operated schools of nursing, forty-two of which were outside the
United States.
These formative phases for Adventist nursing occurred while the
profession at large started to reform itself. Hardly had the twentieth
century begun when denominational nurses felt the effects of change.
A resolution voted at the 1901 General Conference session recom-
mended that all Adventist schools with sufficient equipment should or-
ganize a pre-nursing course based on a cluster of sciences and health-
related topics that would form the skeletal program. 14 Three years later
some states imposed a three-year minimum requirement on all nursing
education programs, which forced Adventist nursing schools in the af-
fected states to meet the new standards.
334
Change was also in the offing for denominational nursing as it

touched the nature of the profession itself. Adventists conceived of
nursing as health-care designed for sanitariums that implemented natu-
ral remedies and alterations in lifestyle, all leading to patients' well
being. Denominational sanitariums around the world followed this
model. It became an integrated part of the church's evangelistic plan.
But health-care in general was moving toward what would become
critical care that included drugs and prescribed medicines and the edu-
cation of professional nurses with clinical experience compatible with
new techniques.
A sanitarium was an ideal setting to fulfill the denominational
purpose of preparing missionary nurses, but hospitals that offered
critical care were becoming more common environments for nursing
education generally. It naturally followed that the kind of nurse typi-
fied by Adventist programs differed from the nurse that other nursing
schools produced. Distinctions also showed up between Adventist
programs in larger sanitariums where a large patient census and a
greater variety of equipment permitted better clinical training than
was available in small sanitariums with a limited number of beds and
equipment.
To compensate for their inadequacies and to cultivate more similar-
ity among Adventist programs of nursing education, nursing schools at
small sanitariums affiliated with larger sanitariums. However, medical
leaders in the church did not as easily settle the question between mis-
sionary nursing as Adventist sanitariums offered it and professional
nursing that hospitals conducted. In 1907 the debate over this issue
broke wide open at the second Medical Missionary Convention when
two leading Adventist physicians read papers that took differing points
of view.
Loretta Kress portrayed the issue as an either-or question: mission-
ary nursing and professional nursing were mutually exclusive and Ad-
ventist nursing schools should remain faithful to their calling. However,
W. W. Worster saw common ground between the two aspects of nurs-
ing. He suggested adding materia medica-classes in the use of drugs
and medicine-to the nursing curriculum, and argued that profession-
alization of Adventist nursing did not translate into a loss of missionary
fervor but simply helped to produce more competent care-givers.
335
Worster's paper opened pandora's box and for decades to come de-
nominational nurses, physicians, and church leaders debated the point
of view he represented and its implications. However committed sani-
tariums were in training missionary nurses, changes in denominational
nursing education were beginning to appear that hinted of Worster's
views. In 1909 the General Conference recognized legitimate differ-
ences between missionary nursing and ordinary nursing by recom-
mending an "advanced" course for nurses in addition to the short pro-
gram for missionaries. The following year a training period of thirty-six
weeks incorporating eight hours of formal classes per week became the
standard in Adventist sanitariums. ls Four years later in 1914 the Gen-
eral Conference recommended that all Adventist schools of nursing
should either reorganize their programs according to minimum stan-
dards as the denomination set forth or close.
The Shift in Nursing Education

At the beginning of the interim years for Adventist education in
1920, denominational nursing had changed but by and large it retained
the essential mold it received at Battle Creek when the first two-year
program started. During the next twenty-five years, however, Adventist
nursing education underwent dramatic alteration that transformed it
from a sanitarium-based course to a college-based program with rec-
ognized academic standing.
The first step in this turnabout occurred in 1922 when Kathryn L.
Jensen, the newly appointed, thirty-year-old assistant secretary of the
General Conference Medical Department, recommended that the De-
partment of Education should recognize the schools of nursing as le-
gitimate parts of the denominational education movement. Addition-
ally, the medical and education departments should study ways to
convert classes in nursing education into college credit.
For the next nineteen years Jensen pressed hard to accomplish her
recommendation. Much of her inspiration originated from sources out-
side the denomination, such as recommendations from the National
League for Nursing-the NLN-which was the most prominent watch-
dog over nursing education after reorganizing itself in 1912 from its
original format as an association for superintendents of nursing schools.
In 1917 the NLN published a standard curriculum for nursing schools.
336
Six years later the Goldmark Report, a historic study of nursing educa-
tion financed by the Rockefeller Foundation, recommended an increase
in nursing programs to five years and academic programs that offered
baccalaureate degrees for nurses.
The Goldmark Report was leading more rapidly than nursing
schools were willing to follow. As for Adventist nursing education, it
found itself wedged into the accreditation imbroglio after other rec-
ommendations from the profession advised nursing schools to accept
into nurses' training only those students who had taken their prepa-
ratory classes in accredited colleges. With this single provision nurs-
ing education not only eliminated the academically unprepared who
had only an elementary education but also joined the medical profes-
sion in promoting general accreditation by regional associations. Re-
peatedly during the struggle over accrediting Adventist colleges,
some church leaders and educators referred to this recommendation
as a compelling reason to support approval by regional accrediting
bodies. 16
Armed with data from professional sources, Jensen spent much of
the 1920s assessing the quality of Adventist nursing and standardizing
curricula. Her colleagues in the Medical Department continued to pro-
mote the concept of missionary nursing, which she also supported un-
equivocally in her assessment instruments by presenting mission ser-
vice as a primary objective of Adventist nursing. But she went farther,
arguing persuasively that professionalization as defined by the NLN
and other nursing associations would enhance rather than threaten Ad-
ventist nurses' training.
As the pendulum swung away from sanitarium-based nursing to-
ward professionalization two major problems confronted Adventist
nursing education. The first was a challenge to continue with their san-
itarium training schools that were becoming outmoded. The upshot
was a diminishing number of Adventist nursing schools. By 1926 the
total shrank to twenty in North America; four years later the figure
dwindled to thirteen with thirteen more in the rest of the world. L. A.
Hansen, an assistant director of the General Conference Medical De-
partment in 1930, commented that standardizing curricula and careful
supervision of nursing programs had benefited nursing schools, but the
reality of fewer, more effective programs also implied that only the
larger Adventist sanitariums were able to compete in the professional-

ization processP
The second problem centered upon affiliations with nondenomina-
tional hospitals to compensate for clinical deficiencies in sanitarium
nursing schools. This question proved to be increasingly thorny. To
meet the standards of professional nursing, Adventist nursing students
spent one or more clinical rotations in nondenominational hospitals.
This affiliation, though necessary for purposes of personal certifica-
tion, forced nursing students out of their Adventist environment and
into the hands of secular instructors.
Church leaders opposed this practice, viewing it similarly as send-
ing academy and college teachers to non-Adventist universities to at-
tend graduate school. They warned that student nurses exposed to edu-
cation in secular medical institutions risked losing their commitment to
the missionary objectives of their profession. Jensen met these warn-
ings by showing from surveys of Adventist nurses that these fears were
unfounded, but they persisted anyway.
Step by step through the interim years nursing education nudged
closer to Jensen's ultimate goal to elevate nursing from its status as
vocational education to an academic field of study worthy of a college
degree. A precursor to baccalaureate nursing appeared first in 1919 at
the self-supporting Madison College which granted a bachelor of sci-
ence degree to nurses who attended a full year of college classes after
completing the three-year nursing course at the sanitarium. Following
extended preliminary study, in 1924 Washington Missionary College
launched the first denominationally sponsored degree programs for
nurses that required five years to complete, three years on the college
campus and two at the sanitarium. This regimen led to a bachelor of
science degree with an emphasis in teaching to qualify nurses as pro-
fessional teachers in nursing schools. 18
Neither ofthese programs equated to a baccalaureate degree in nurs-
ing as appeared two decades later. Instead, they were cooperative ven-
tures between the college and the sanitarium, with the college recog-
nizing the legitimacy of nursing education as partial fulfillment of the
requirements for a college degree. To facilitate the trend toward de-
grees Jensen organized summer institutes for nurses who had com-
pleted their training and already owned nursing certificates. By 1925
338
these classes carried college credit and were opened to general college
students in addition to nurses.
Nurses who completed these summer institutes and degree programs
were known as graduate nurses-nurses with a college degree as dis-
tinct from nurses with only certificates from the sanitarium nursing
schools. The idea of a graduate nurse in denominational circles was not
new; it dated from a General Conference action in 1909 recommending
that the sanitariums in Lorna Linda and Washington should offer a
fourth year of study beyond the nursing certificate to supply graduate
nurses for the Adventist health system. 19
Jensen's innovation was to conduct the additional instruction on col-
lege campuses and to offer college credit. In effect, this program trans-
ferred the graduate nurse program from the sanitariums to the colleges.
From Washington Missionary College summer institutes spread to Pa-
cific Union College in the mid-1930s, and by the end ofthe decade edu-
cators were studying formulas to measure nursing clinical experience
in college credit hours.
When the Association of Seventh-day Adventist Colleges and Sec-
ondary Schools was born in 1928, Jensen formally requested member-
ship for the nursing schools, which had long since come to be known as
training schools. Working partially from standards of professional
nursing education, she was instrumental in preparing criteria for ac-
creditation of Adventist nursing schools which the Board of Regents
approved, and in 1932 nine of the sanitarium nursing schools became
members of the new Adventist education association.
Ten years had passed since Jensen first asked the General Confer-
ence to recognize nurses' training as a part of the denominational edu-
cation movement, but until the actions of 1932 the sanitarium programs
were answerable to the Medical Department. With the Board of Re-
gents now in control, nursing education became a joint effort between
the medical and education departments.
Kathryn Jensen left the Medical Department in 1940, leaving be-
hind a profound impact on Adventist nursing education. For two de-
cades she guided a sanitarium-oriented training program that still bore
its nineteenth-century stamp into the twentieth century of professional
nursing. From the beginning at Battle Creek the philosophy of sanitar-
ium nursing and missionary nursing were nearly synonymous, and
339
some saw the shift to hospital nursing as tantamount to a rejection of a

tried and true denominational principle. But as time passed the larger
Adventist sanitariums took on much of the character of hospitals and
some changed their names accordingly, often calling themselves "sani-
tariums and hospitals." Little doubt remained that this change in insti-
tutional status paved the way for modifications that Jensen advocated.
While promoting scholarly respectability in her profession, Jensen
consistently maintained spiritual integrity as the critical aspect of de-
nominational nursing. With her measured approach, issues such as af-
filiations with nondenominational hospitals, compliance with nursing
standards supported by the National League for Nursing, state registra-
tion, and membership in professional nursing associations never be-
came explosive problems as did the debate over accreditation of col-
leges, even though they were as potentially controversial.
In 1944 the Board of Regents set in motion the final step to convert
hospital-based, professional nursing education into a college program,
or collegiate nursing as its originators called it. In 1946 Union College
instituted the first baccalaureate nursing program, and by 1950 three
other institutions developed similar programs. According to Muriel
Chapman, chronicler of Adventist nursing, these new programs placed
Seventh-day Adventist nursing education ahead of the majority in
North America. Although the Goldmark Report of 1923 recommended
that colleges assume control of nursing education, only a smattering of
schools actually accomplished it. Adventist schools of nursing did not
transfer their programs to college campuses until more than twenty
years after the Goldmark statement, but even at that, Adventist colleges
were at the front of the national trend.
Adventist Nursing Education in the World Fields

Adventist nurses' training in the world fields was also affected by
these trends in the United States, but events in North America did not
dictate the future of nursing in other countries. Many of the programs
outside the United States were simple ifnot primitive, as were many of
the early nursing schools in small American sanitariums. Similar to the
United States, the number of sanitariums outside North America offer-
ing nursing training diminished after the first decade of the twentieth
century.
340
The General Conference action in 1910 that established a thirty-six-

week training year and curriculum also applied to Adventist sanitari-
ums in Europe. Significantly, the resolution did not include sanitariums
in other parts of the world where nurses were in training even though
the ideal of the missionary nurse was the dominant theme around the
world. European and North American nursing schools were seen as
sources of missionaries to the world in contrast to simpler and more
localized programs in regions where educational standards were not as
high. As the concept of graduate nurses evolved in Adventist nursing
education, the Medical Department recommended that larger sanitari-
ums in other countries, Friedensau in Germany and Skodsborg in
Denmark, specifically, should offer a fourth year of "post-graduate"
study.20
During the twenty-five years after World War I advances in medical
technology and practice raised expectations in health care, even in de-
veloping countries, and government regulation of medical practice and
health-care institutions increased. Adventist schools of nursing beyond
North America were not answerable to the Board of Regents, even after
nursing schools in the United States joined the Seventh-day Adventist
Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools, but periodic inspec-
tions by personnel from the General Conference Medical Department
became a tool to spread North American standards as well as to main-
tain a denominational identity in nursing education.
In some cases, among them institutions in Australia, the Philippines,
Argentina, and for a limited time in Shanghai, sanitariums and tradi-
tional training schools were near to each other or even occupied the
same campus, but academic control of nursing was not an issue in the
world fields. With the exception of Philippine Union College, Adventist
colleges outside the United States did not grant degrees during the in-
terim years. Eventually, baccalaureate nursing entered some of the
world fields, but in 1945 the era of college-based nursing education
outside North America was still a thing of the future.
Adventist Graduate Education

Closer to the problem of accreditation than nursing education was
the question of an Adventist graduate school. The idea of postbaccalau-
reate education had been with Adventists since the early years of Battle
341
Creek College, but after 1928 the issue became a part of the debates
about systematization and accreditation. 21
For one academic year, 1881-1882, Battle Creek College under Sid-
ney Brownsberger offered master's degrees to individuals who had
graduated with a bachelor of arts or bachelor of science degree at least
three years previously and had successfully engaged in scholarly pur-
suits. Recipients did not earn the master's degree on the strength of a
formal program of studies but in recognition of the candidate's profes-
sional accomplishments. Brownsberger's sudden exit from the campus
also ended this graduate degree program. A plan to establish a denom-
inational graduate school that offered master's degrees and doctorates
came from the second institute for Adventist teachers in 1894, but noth-
ing materialized. "It was," as Gilbert Valentine says, "an idea born out
of time."22
These truncated attempts did not stop discussion about the matter.
Union College "toyed" with master's degrees, according to college his-
torian Everett Dick, beginning to offer them in 1907. A graduate coun-
cil selected candidates who, as in the case of Battle Creek College, did
not have to complete a prescribed course of study but had to own a
bachelor's degree and demonstrate productive professional skills.
In the main, the denomination functioned almost in a state of denial
regarding the necessity of advanced education. Contemporaneous with
the early years of Battle Creek College Adventist leaders, including El-
len White, spoke often about the urgency to fill the field with workers;
consequently, they favored short courses that hurriedly produced church
employees with hardly any attention to academic baggage. Adventist
education was still in its organizational phase during the first two de-
cades of the twentieth century, but after a mood of systematization set
in, Secretary of Education Frederick Griggs told the 1909 General Con-
ference session that the denomination needed to raise its standards of
education. "It is a fair proposition that a teacher ought to be educated at
least a year or so ahead of those he is to teach," he said. "The trouble is,
we are not graduating enough young people from the higher grades."23
Griggs applied this principle to secondary-level grades, stopping
short of the colleges, but weeks later when he became president of
Union College he left no doubt that he believed that graduate education
was a necessity for college teachers. Describing Union College as the
342
most suitable location for a denominational post-baccalaureate pro-

gram, he received board support to raise an equipment fund to begin
graduate studies for teachers in Adventist colleges.
Griggs' plans went the way of previous attempts to inaugurate an
Adventist graduate degree program, but after the College of Medical
Evangelists began its face off with its accrediting body, educators and
other church leaders could no longer dismiss the issue off-handedly.
The question involved ministerial education as well as the preparation
of college teachers. From the days of James White concern that Adven-
tist pastors should be better educated was the motivation behind a se-
ries of Bible institutes for ministers, which translated into the practice
of relying on inservice training to educate pastors.
This method was too informal to be permanently successful and
during the era of World War I education for the ministry became a mat-
ter of serious concern. Notwithstanding the effort to raise theology to
the level of a college degree, the General Conference found it necessary
in 1913 to recommend that conferences restrict ministerial licenses to
men who had completed a minimum of twelve grades of school. Li-
censed ministers who had not yet reached this level should attend a
training school or enroll in the denomination's correspondence school
to achieve the prescribed education before ordination. The implication
of this action was unavoidable: of the leading professions which church
employment offered-medicine, nursing, teaching, and pastoring-the
ministry suffered the poorest academic preparation.
In 1918 the General Conference adopted a proposal by the Depart-
ment of Education that outlined the content of the bachelor of sacred
theology degree for senior colleges and a two-year ministerial diploma
program for junior colleges. The plan also provided an affiliated status
with a college for ministerial hopefuls who were still in secondary
school, thus giving them a special standing. The fact that, in part, these
measures were intended to help ministerial students avoid military ser-
vice during World War I did not detract from the organizational impact
on ministerial education.
The 1918 action also dealt with the selection process of Bible teach-
ers. An ad hoc committee later proposed that Adventist colleges "ought
to be emphatically Bible schools," with the schools of theology being
"preeminent" in their influence on the entire campus and its organiza-
343
tion.24 The 1919 Spring Council voted its support of schools of theology
that were to grant distinct degrees and would be headed by a dean who
supervised a separate faculty. These schools were to be unique but not
autonomous units of a college. By the beginning of the interim years it
was clear that the General Conference had assumed control of the edu-
cation of Adventist ministers and accorded a role of primacy to minis-
terial education on Adventist campuses.
Shortly after implementing this plan, Emmanuel Missionary Col-
lege initiated an earned master's degree program in theology, confer-
ring five graduate degrees between 1922 and 1925. Again, it was Fred-
erick Griggs, now transplanted on the Berrien Springs campus as
college president, who oversaw this project.
During the 1920s W. E. Howell's opposition to accreditation by sec-
ular bodies and his resistance to graduate education in non-Adventist
institutions became proverbial, but finally concluding that accredita-
tion and graduate education were issues that were not going to disap-
pear in the face of Adventist opposition, he capitulated. If his attitude
accomplished anything, it helped to whip up support for a denomina-
tional graduate school. Discussion about an Adventist graduate school
hypothetically portrayed a program that would offer master's degrees
in a variety of academic disciplines which, it was hoped, would obviate
the growing tendency of denominational teachers to enroll in non-
Adventist schools. An education council in 1929 proposed that in view
of demands on Adventist schools, the church should establish a free-
standing graduate school with eight departments including professional
education and the common disciplines in the arts and sciences.
As a parting word in 1930, in his last report as secretary of educa-
tion, Howell conceded that Ellen White's counsel given more than for-
ty years previously supported the notion of graduate education. "If we
can establish our own graduate school for advanced study by our col-
lege teachers," he elaborated, "it will give us a complete system of our
own, and remove the necessity of attending a school of the world to
maintain a recognized standing in the educational field."25
The commission to survey Adventist colleges in 1931 followed up
with a recommendation that the denomination should establish a pro-
gram offering a master's degree on the campus of a centrally located
senior college. Other colleges might offer post-baccalaureate classes
344
but not post-baccalaureate degrees. For the time being, the report stat-
ed, doctorates were beyond the resources of an Adventist graduate
school.
It took a year for the General Conference to digest this proposal, but
in 1932 the Autumn Council approved a joint recommendation from
denominational officers and the Department of Education to establish a
graduate school of theology on the campus of a senior college. The
graduate degree was to be a master of theology, but students could se-
lect minors in church history, secular history, biblical languages, and
English. This action was a compromise that narrowed the previous rec-
ommendations for a graduate school down to a seminary for ministers
and Bible teachers. Because of the Great Depression funding for the
proposed school was difficult, and a year later the General Conference
changed its mind, voting instead to offer twelve-week summer sessions
in Bible and history.
When thirteen faculty and about forty students gathered at Pacific
Union College in 1934 for the first session of this new academic ven-
ture, the concept of a complete graduate school had shrunk to what the
General Conference called the Advanced Bible School that offered
post-baccalaureate classes but no graduate degrees. In this reduced for-
mat Adventist graduate education continued for two years before the
General Conference consented in 1936 to establish a separate graduate
school on its own campus in the vicinity of Washington, D. C.
The new school would offer graduate work in Bible and religious
history and organize a graduate degree program. In 1937 M. E. Kern,
who held the title of dean of the Advanced Bible School since 1934
became president of the program that had been reorganized into the
Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary. When he assumed his
new post he added a winter quarter to the class schedule. By 1945 a
four-quarter academic year had gone into effect. Meanwhile, in 1941
the Seminary moved into its new quarters, a separate building adjacent
to the General Conference offices. The following year the Seminary
finally authorized the master of arts in religion.
Adventist historian and archivist Bert Haloviak has noted that dur-
ing the first decade of its operations the seminary emphasized programs
for teachers more than evangelism. This trend was not a happenstance.
Kern stated in 1936 that Adventists were rightly "a very active people."
345
In 1934 the long struggle to upgrade Seventh-day Adventist theological education pro-
duced the Advanced Bible School which became the Theological Seminary in 1937. In
1938 Seminary faculty and students gathered for this photograph. Among the faculty,
seated, are Charles Weniger, secondfrom left; M. E. Kern, presidentJourthfrom right;
and M. L. Andreasen, secondfrom right.
But, he warned, "there is a real danger that thorough, reverent Biblical

scholarship shall be sacrificed on the altars of plans and promotion. We
need to focus our attention anew on the searching of the Scriptures."26
That the Seminary provided nutriment for the intellectually under-
nourished ministry became evident. Since the 1920s an internship plan
had kept ministerial recruits in something close to evangelistic per-
petual motion, but in 1944 the General Conference modified this prac-
tice by recommending a balanced program of evangelism and seminary
study leading to the bachelor of divinity degree. This action was a turn-
ing point in the evolution ofthe Seminary, for it broadened the purpose
of the graduate program from preparing well-educated Bible teachers
to include the art of effective congregational pastoring. It also linked
the college ministerial curricula to the graduate programs at the Semi-
nary, forming a single educational chain.
346
In 1946, D. E. Rebok, who followed Kern as Seminary president,

recalled thirteen years of graduate school operations by noting that
more than 1,200 students had enrolled since 1934. Only thirty-four had
earned the master's degree, but the overwhelming majority had benefit-
ted from one or more quarters of intensive study. A survey of more than
150 ministers in nine North American unions indicated that the stress
on higher education was having its impact. More than ninety percent
had completed some college-level education with approximately sixty-
three percent having graduated from college. Rebok summarized the
purpose ofthe Seminary in four parts: to provide professional training
for pastors, to prepare Bible and history teachers, to offer refresher
courses for workers from the world fields, and to give special prepara-
tion to mission appointees.
By the end of World War II the international impact of the Seminary
was undeniable. After the spring quarter of 1946 Rebok announced
that twenty-two percent of the enrollment since the Seminary's begin-
ning came from countries beyond North America. Offering classes to
students from the world fields, he said, was "a means of strengthening
the bonds which bind our worldwide work into a unified, aggressive
movement which must encircle the globe."27
Rebok also voiced what had become almost axiomatic in Adventist
education: centralized control of ministerial education was a self-evident
truth of denominational life that needed no explanation beyond its
own obviousness. "It is only reasonable and logical," he said, "that
every organization or institution should train its own leadership."28
Until the General Conference recommended specific curriculum con-
tent for ministerial education in 1918, the training of ministers had
been fragmented among the institutions and local fields, and from
some points of view, professionally disappointing. To rectify this
problem the General Conference, with the approval of its constituen-
cy, pushed through a denominational model of ministerial education.
By this action the church adopted the policy of centralized control of
pastoral training.29
During the interim years colleges followed the 1918 model im-
perfectly, but by the time Rebok spoke, twenty-eight years later, the
recognized formula included a graduate degree as the standard lev-
el of academic achievement for ministers.30 Rather than an immedi-
347
ate requirement, for practical reasons this policy was a recommend-

ed ideal to which the denomination worked. The corps of Adventist
ministers would not accomplish it even by the end of the century,
but it was no less an ideal which benefitted them enormously. It was
this aspect of leadership training that Rebok referred to as the logi-
cal prerogative of the church, not the undergraduate programs on
the college campuses where most ministers still received their basic,
or introductory preparation. In 1946 no one saw reason to challenge
Rebok's statement, but it was to be a major point of debate decades
later.
The Seminary was a success but it served a narrower purpose than
the educators of the 1920s hoped. It did not fulfill the denominational
need for a broader graduate school, which left teachers in fields other
than Bible, biblical languages, and church history with no other alter-
native than to attend non-Adventist institutions in order to earn aca-
demic credentials that accreditation required. But the Seminary played
an important role beyond its immediate purposes. As a legitimate, de-
nominationally sponsored post-baccalaureate institution it broke the
arguments that lingered in the minds of many who believed that intel-
lectual pursuits hampered the advance of the gospel.
During the interim years from 1920 to 1945 Adventist education
underwent a far-reaching transformation. At the end of World War II
Adventist schools were still only a fraction of the broad educational
spectrum and largely unnoticed by the educational world, but the
struggles of the interim years had developed a new maturity among
them. The debate over accreditation brought legitimacy, financial
burdens forced administrators to develop modernized management,
conventions and gatherings introduced improved professionalism,
baccalaureate education enlarged its circle to include vocational
programs such as nursing, and graduate education provided intel-
lectual respectability. These developments occurred in North Amer-
ica, but in the years to come they would impact the entire world of
Adventism.
ISee Howell's reports to the General Conference sessions of 1922 and 1930, AST, RG 51;
General Conference Bulle/in, 1922, no. 7, p, 162, no. I I , p. 271, no. 12, p. 282.
'Ibid.
348
JGriggs, "Report of the Department of Education to the 1918 General Conference Ses-
sion," AST, RG 51.
'General Conference Committee Minutes, January II, 1920; October 27, 1920; May 25,
1921; The Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, July I, 1920. Howell described his tour in a
series of articles entitled, "School Notes in South America."
sHowell, "Report of the Department of Education to the 1926 General Conference Ses-
sion," AST, RG51.
60 ne can read the entire proceedings of the Colorado Springs gathering in Proceedings
of the Educational and Missionary Volunteer Departments of the General Conference of
Seventh-day Adventists in World Convention. (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Pub-
lishing Association, 1923).
'For a complete account of the 1937 world convention, see Report of the Blue Ridge Edu-
cational Convention. August 17-25. 1937. (Washington, D. c.: General Conference Depart-
ment of Education, n.d.). For a list of meetings of North American educators, see Brown,
Chronology, pp. 231-238 and "Teachers' Meetings, 1917-1968," AST, RG 51.
9Ibid., p. 75.
'OFor information about school finances, see General Conference Bulletin, ibid., no. I, p.
26; no. 3, pp. 75, 76; 1926, no. 3, pp. 13, 14; 1936, no. 7, pp. 147, 148; 1941, no. 2, p. 41; 1946,
no. 4, p. 90.
II Ibid., 1936, no. 7, p. 147.
'2Ibid., 1946, no. 4, p. 90.

'JMuriel Chapman's Mission of Love: A Century of Seventh-day Adventist Nursing (Sil-
ver Spring, MD: Association of Seventh-day Adventist Nursing, 2000), pp. 1-124 is the lead-
ing source for this section about Adventist nursing education.
I4General Conference Bulletin, 1901, no. I, extra no. 14, p. 306.
'5General Conference Committee minutes, June 17, 1909; March 25, 1910.
160ne of the most notable instances was W. E. Howell's admission in his report to the
1930 General Conference session when he included nursing with teaching and premed class-
es as the ones that required accreditation. "Report of the Department of Education to the 1930
General Conference Session," AST, RG5.
"General Conference Bulletin, 1926, no. II, p. 7; Chapman, Mission of Love, p. 79.
'8General Conference Bulletin, 1930, no. 4, p.74.
'9Ibid., 1909, no. 16, p. 243.
2°lbid.; General Conference minutes, March 25, 1910.
21For this account of graduate education I have used General Conference minutes, Octo-
ber 20, 1913; November 20, 1918; April 30, 1919; October 19, 1932; October 24, 1933; June
10, 1936; General Conference Bulletin, 1909, no. 15, p. 223; 1936, no. 8, p. 174; 1946, no. 7,
pp. 166-168; Howell, "Report of the Department of Education to the 1930 General Confer-
ence Session," AST, RG 51; "Meeting of the Survey Commission of Board of Regents," Sep-
tember 29, 1931, AST, RG 51; YandeYere, Wisdom Seekers, pp. 4, 157; Yalentine, Shaping of
Adventism, p. 44; Dick, Union College, pp. 179, 180, 181; Milton E. Kern, "Graduate Work in
Bible and History," (Journal of True Education, December 1940), pp. 6, 7, 30; Bert Haloviak,
"A Brief Sketch of SDA Ministerial Training," unpublished manuscript, 1988, AST; Ronald
Knott, "For a Beginning, 'Most Satisfactory': A History ofSDA Graduate Education," (Jour-
nal ofAdventist Education. February-March 1983), pp. 20-23,38-41.
22Yalentine, Shaping of Adventism, p. 44.
349
23General Conference Bulletin, 1909, no. IS, p. 223.

24 General Conference minutes, Nov. 20, 1918.
25Howell, "Report of the Department of Education to the 1930 General Conference Ses-
sion," AST, RG 51.
27lbid., 1946, no. 7, p. 168.
28Ibid., p. 167.
29General Conference minutes, September 9, 1918.
30For the specific wording of the policy, see General Conference minutes, October 30,
1944.
YEARS OF FULFILLMENT
AND CHALLENGE,
1945-2000
In many ways the years after World War II were years of fulfill-
ment. In 1945 the age of the training school as the typical Adventist
campus in the world fields was in decline and the era of degree-
granting institutions was on its way in. Many of these new schools
depended on North American academic strength at the beginning
of their new status, but before the century ended they were operat-
ing on their own cerebral power. The transition from training school
to degree-granting institution was not always easy or as ideal as the
denomination wanted, but it happened anyway and by the year
2000 Adventists could point to a circle of institutions around the
world that would have been unthinkable a half century earlier.
Graduate education, so long regarded as an intellectual detraction
at best and feared as a secular malignancy at worst, became com-
mon.
In other ways, however, the years after World War II were years of
challenge. The concept of system that Griggs and Howell promoted
so vigorously during the first thirty years of the century encountered
serious tests, not always successfully. By the end of the century the
denomination's 12,000,000 members sprawled unevenly around the
globe, making a centrally administered system difficult. Some be-
lieved a system to be impractical if not impossible. Instead of the
General Conference, the administrative divisions of the church be-
came the key points of management of denominational education. At
the beginning of the new millennium the church and the education
establishment had a full agenda of unfinished business relating to the
issues of system.
351
To maintain an identifiably Adventist philosophy of education in a

world that bore scant resemblance to the nineteenth century when de-
nominational education began formed the crux upon which all other
issues balanced. There was no scarcity of opinions about how to go
about the business of Adventist education, but effective solutions to
problems were increasingly hard to come by. Nevertheless, by the year
2000 Adventists owned one of the largest parochial networks of educa-
tion on the planet and they could say that, after all things considered,
Proper Education had fulfilled itself well.
1S
FROM COLLEGES
TO UNIVERSITIES
Few trends impacted Adventist education as forcefully as the de-

velopment of graduate education. It legitimized Adventist postbac-
calaureate learning and raised the bar of academic achievement. But
it did not happen overnight. The Theological Seminary did not match
earlier recommendations to establish a graduate school for secondary
and college teachers in the arts and sciences, and as events turned out,
the Seminary would be in its second decade of life before Adventists
would feel a substantial effect of denominationally owned graduate
education.
The Seminary Becomes Potomac University

Meanwhile, for many years after its founding, the Seminary played
a dual role for the Adventist ministry. M. E. Kern, Seminary president
from 1937 to 1943, explained to his board in 1940 that his faculty had
divided their classes into two categories, the first, a master's degree
program, and the second, non-credit courses for students who did not
plan to earn master's degrees or were not academically prepared for
graduate study. This second function was essentially providing inser-
vice or continuing education for ministers and Bible teachers.
12-IPFTW
353
The College Bible and History Teachers Council, also meeting at

the Seminary in 1940, concurred with this academic format. D. E.
Rebok reported at the 1946 General Conference session that over a
span of thirteen years, dating from the first summer session in 1934,
only thirty-four students, or less than three percent of the Seminary's
enrollees, had earned a graduate degree. These numbers revealed that
the primary contribution of the Seminary had been to continue the
inservice tradition that began in the days of James White. The natural
conclusion was that the Seminary had not yet made its mark as a
graduate-level institution. I
But change was in the air even as Rebok spoke. General Conference
recognition in 1944 of graduate study at the Seminary as the logical
sequence to undergraduate ministerial education was a step toward an-
other General Conference recommendation nine years later in 1953 to
mandate a master's degree as part of the ministerial internship program.
This new requirement was to go into effect in 1955. The 1953 action also
raised Seminary entrance requirements to ensure that prospective stu-
dents were academically equipped for graduate study and not enrolling
merely for inservice courses. It also recommended a Ministerial Train-
ing Advisory Committee that would determine the content and format
of ministerial education at both the four-year colleges and the Seminary
and would correlate baccalaureate ministerial courses with graduate
education. Taken in toto, these provisions not only established a master's
degree as the standard degree for the Adventist ministry, but they also
tightened the grip of the General Conference on ministerial education.
Reflecting on these changes, Charles E. Weniger, dean of the Seminary,
editorialized that the "Seminary has come of age."2
Ministerial education was finally making up for years of lost time.
The Adventist pastorate in North America was finally on schedule to
reach an academic level that matched the expectations of the Christian
community. Meanwhile, the idea of an Adventist graduate school for
teachers remained in limbo. To handle denominational needs for grad-
uate study in the arts and sciences the Board of Regents placed post-
baccalaureate programs in the hands of college administrations to im-
plement when they deemed necessary. However, before offering
graduate programs colleges were to submit their proposals for approval
by the General Conference. ~
354
FROM COLLEGES TO UNIVERSITIES
Not surprisingly, this haphazard approach to upgrade teachers' cre-

dentials did not work well. It left the serious problem of professional
development dangling and bred a spirit of rivalry among the colleges.
In 1954 the General Conference charged a committee to investigate
and control graduate programs, but activity among the schools and the
teachers themselves was moving too rapidly for denominational bu-
reaucracy to seize the initiative.
Spurred by a reminder that the General Conference Department of
Education had recently recommended five years of study for secondary
teachers and that many states were requiring the same standard for el-
ementary teachers, the 1954 Autumn Council asked the General Con-
ference to "reactivate" the committee on graduate study in order to
provide an Adventist graduate school. At the time, the committee to be
reactivated was less than four months old, which suggested that the
topic had been something less than a priority item. A second commit-
tee likewise accomplished little. 4
The next year General Conference President R. R. Figuhr scrapped
both committees, dumped their open-ended assignment, and commis-
sioned a new committee to investigate the status of and the need for
graduate education and to prepare a specific proposal. The committee
discovered conditions that were probably more acute than anyone sus-
pected. A survey of Adventist institutions disclosed that only about 250
ofthe near 1,100 secondary teachers in North America owned graduate
degrees but that the stream of denominational teachers attending uni-
versities of the land had grown from a trickle twenty years before to a
torrent of 400 by 1955.
It was evident that teachers were not waiting for church leaders to
handpick the spiritually reliable to attend graduate schools of the world.
With a tinge of alarm the editor of the Journal of True Education stated
that a rising number of Adventist youth were going to universities be-
cause they were "unable to understand why it is not permissible, when
so many Adventists are enrolling there for graduate work." These data
left little question that graduate education was a marketable commod-
ity within the denomination. s
At the Autumn Council in 1956 the Committee on Graduate Study
presented its proposal. It called for a university consisting of the Theo-
logical Seminary and a school of graduate studies that would offer
355
graduate degrees in theology and education and later would embrace

other fields. The new university would affiliate with Washington Mis-
sionary College. Because graduate courses were already appearing on
Adventist campuses in the western states a special coordinating com-
mittee would coordinate those programs. 6
For the next two years a profusion of committees worked out the
details for the proposed graduate institution, establishing a new admin-
istration and faculty and selecting the name Potomac University. These
were relatively simple tasks compared to the question of locating the
new campus, a snag on which the university planning group found it-
self impaled for months. Suggestions ran the gamut from erecting a
new university building in Takoma Park to developing a new campus to
which Washington Missionary College would move and serve as the
undergraduate school. Winton Beaven, dean of Potomac University, re-
called that the committee inspected nearly fifty tracts of land but that
"something was wrong with everyone of them ... It went on and on
and on."7
Andrews University Is Born

The answer came unexpectedly when Floyd Rittenhouse, presi-
dent of Emmanuel Missionary College and the newly elected presi-
dent of Potomac University, persuaded the stymied committeemen
in Washington to sell out their present holdings and reinvest on the
Michigan campus. By this time Washington Missionary College was
virtually out of consideration as an affiliated undergraduate institu-
tion because of seemingly unsolvable problems connected with mov-
ing the campus, and no nearby land was available to make an affili-
ation of WMC with the graduate school workable. On October 24,
1958 this now overheated topic reached the voting stage, and dele-
gates to the Autumn Council cast their ballots in favor of moving to
Michigan and integrating Potomac University with Emmanuel Mis-
sionary College.
The decision to transform the Michigan campus into a university
rang with a triumphant tone, but denominational leaders and educators,
regardless of how much work they had already accomplished, quickly
discovered that they had much to learn about creating a university as
understood in American education. Administrative changes were le-
356
gion and new roles had to evolve. Three divisions comprised the new
institution, the college or undergraduate school, the graduate school,
and the Seminary. Until the Berrien Springs campus could be readied
to accommodate the Seminary, Potomac University continued to oper-
ate in Takoma Park as a separate school. The physical and legal merger
of the two institutions did not occur until 1960, only weeks after the
board chose to name the new campus Andrews University, memorial-
izing 1. N. Andrews, the first Adventist who officially worked outside
North America. 8
At the time of the merger, statistics demonstrated that earlier actions
to develop a valid graduate-level campus rather than an inservice and
continuing education agency had yielded results. The anemic showing
of only thirty-four master's degrees granted by the Seminary between
1934 and 1946 grew to more than 850 from the Seminary alone by
1960, and over sixty more from the short-lived graduate school of Po-
tomac University.
As the seat of theological education for the entire Adventist world,
Andrews University became a General Conference institution, no lon-
ger under the aegis of the Lake Union. Until its move from Washing-
ton, the Seminary had operated with its own board, but at Andrews it
became a part of the larger university. One of the sticky issues was to
design an institution that offered an academically respectable program
of graduate studies and at the same time allowed the Seminary to retain
the status of primacy that leading churchmen intended for theology on
Adventist campuses.
The graduate program began with degrees in mathematics, English,
education, history, and religion. During their first visit in 1961, examin-
ers from the North Central Association found ample reasons to doubt
that the institution had become a genuinely integrated university, and
they denied accreditation. Rittenhouse engineered sufficient correc-
tions to achieve preliminary accreditation in 1963, but at the same time
he fell from the good graces of denominational leaders and a few
months later the university board dismissed him. He had been a popu-
lar and respected personality in both denominational and secular cir-
cles, and this abrupt change raised more questions about the university's
administration and governance, prompting North Central to slap the
university with probationary standing.
It was Richard Hammill's thirteen-

year presidency, from 1963 to 1976,
that brought stability and growth to
Andrews University. The new presi-
dent had been a successful college
teacher and administrator, and since
1955 as a member of the General Con-
ference Department of Education he
was a leading participant in all the ma-
jor discussions and committee actions
relating to graduate education.
Forced into another self-study, the
university practically started its ac-
creditation campaign over again, but
by 1968 Hammill's indefatigable ef-
From his office as a General Confer- forts in building an adequate campus
ence associate secretary of educa- and assembling a representative fac-
tion, Richard L. Hammill promoted ulty paid off. Ten years after the vote
the establishment of a Seventh-day
Adventist graduate school and uni- to merge Potomac University with
versity. He served as president ofAn- Emmanuel Missionary College, the
drews University, 1963-1976 and later North Central Association granted full
as a vice president of the General
Conference. He was a leading force accreditation to Andrews' master's
in developing theological education degrees in English, history, mathemat-
around the world and the establish- ics, biology, business administration,
ment of the Geoscience Research In-
stitute. education, and the master of arts in
teaching. The Seminary remained out-
side the purview of North Central but sought accreditation from a theo-
logical association, eventually the Association of Theological Schools
in the United States and Canada.
During the last three decades of the century Andrews University
developed numerous graduate programs and organized component
schools. The number of liberal arts disciplines offering a master's de-
gree diminished, but many departments cooperated with the School of
Education to offer a master of arts in teaching, a professional degree in
secondary teaching with supporting graduate-level work in an academ-
ic field. The dominant trend was the spread of graduate degree pro-
grams to the professions, including physical therapy, nursing, social
358
work, and business administration. The School of Education developed

sequences for both the doctor of education and doctor of philosophy
degrees. In addition to a variety of degrees at the master's level, the
Seminary offered the doctor of ministry, doctor of philosophy, and doc-
tor of theology degrees.
To enhance its ethos as a university, Andrews invested in special
collections. One of the major projects was to establish the Adventist
Heritage Center as a part ofthe James White Library, a department that
housed publications and documents by and about Seventh-day Adven-
tists. By the beginning of the new century the Center had become one
of Adventism's richest sources for information about the denomination
with its more than 30,000 books and theses, a similar number of unpub-
lished records, about 750 linear feet of private papers, and other graph-
ic items, recordings, artifacts, and rare books. It also became part of a
larger entity, the Center for Adventist Research which functioned as a
branch of the White Estate.
Aerial view of Andrews University in 1973. created by merging Potomac University with
Emmanuel Missionary College. thus transforming the sixty-year-old rural college cam-
pus into the denominational center for theological studies.
359
A notable contribution of Andrews University to the academic world

was the Seminary's involvement in archeological digs in the Holy Land.
From these expeditions the university inherited a significant collection
of artifacts displayed in the Siegfried H. Horn Museum, named after
the German-born professor of archeology who began these projects in
1968 at Heshbon. Later professors continued the investigations in Jor-
dan. Helping to coordinate these activities was the Institute of Archeol-
ogy.
The university did not heavily emphasize study in the sciences, but
the Museum of Natural History became the repository for thousands of
birds, mammals, marine life specimens, insects, and botanical items.
Also catering to the denomination's intelligentsia was the Andrews
University Press, established in 1969, which published scores of schol-
arly works in archeology, education, and theology.
Enrollment in graduate studies on the Michigan campus justified the
transfer from Washington. The graduate school at Potomac University
opened in 1957 with about thirty students; seventeen years later in 1974
when Andrews celebrated its centennial, nearly 550 students were en-
rolled in post-baccalaureate programs. Total university enrollment ap-
proximated 2,300. The number of students continued to rise, exceeding
3,000 during the decade of the 1990s.
Lorna Linda University Grows from CME

The committee report in 1956 that set in motion a string of decisions
resulting in Potomac University also recommended separate action
concerning graduate education in the western states. During the late
1950s and into the next decade most of the denomination's attention
centered on Andrews University as the locus of Adventist graduate
education, but simultaneously Lorna Linda University was in the mak-
ing in California. These two graduate institutions developed along con-
trasting lines. Andrews was born from a deliberate plan calling for a
denominational graduate school to supply post-baccalaureate creden-
tials for Adventist teachers. Contrariwise, Lorna Linda emerged almost
by default from the College of Medical Evangelists as an institution of
health sciences. 9
The California school originated as an educational unit authorized
to offer academic and professional degrees, including dentistry. At the
360
time, 1909, the intention was to prepare physicians, but the next year
the school added nursing when Lorna Linda Sanitarium and its nursing
school merged with the medical college. The administration also added
other programs which, by 1941 included medical technology, physical
therapy, and medical radiography. The organizational modus operandi
allowed these programs to function as separate schools with more au-
tonomy than academic departments on a baccalaureate campus, which
meant that administrative structure similar to a university was present
from the beginning.
The programs beyond the School of Medicine did not constitute
baccalaureate education, but all of them developed under the auspices
of an institution that held a college charter. Meanwhile, the academic
character of CME became progressively evident, especially after the
American Medical Association gave its full approbation to the School
of Medicine. The net effect of all of these influences was a drift in the
direction of a health sciences educational center.
This trend was not lost on the administration ofthe College of Med-
ical Evangelists. In 1944 CME proposed to reorganize itself into what
amounted to a university, actually, an institution with separate colleges,
including a graduate school. The General Conference turned the plan
down, labeling it as "inadvisable," although praising the "progressive
spirit" at CME and at the same time recommending a committee to
conduct a feasibility study for a school of dentistry.'o
Movement toward a university speeded up after World War II when
a short-lived graduate school supervised residencies for medical stu-
dents and offered a master's degree in medical science to residents who
completed a thesis. While this program did not endure, the school of
dentistry became a reality in 1953 which added to the administrative
complexity of the institution. Meanwhile, the urge to introduce a tradi-
tional graduate school which would grant post-baccalaureate degrees
and sponsor research gathered momentum. Before the General Confer-
ence would agree to reorganization, however, the 1953 Autumn Coun-
cil requested a blue ribbon committee to study the objectives of the
institution.
Chaired by R. R. Figuhr, General Conference president, the commit-
tee reported at the Autumn Council in 1954 with recommendations that
were a watershed in the history of the College of Medical Evangelists.
361
The document committed the institution to a "spirit of sound research

and a desire to participate in the advancement of knowledge," and
agreed to add a graduate school which would oversee graduate educa-
tion and related research. I I
Because CME was already organized along university lines, deans
or directors headed the component schools which customarily pub-
lished separate bulletins. Faced with the prospects of a university on
the West coast, church leaders addressed their overriding concern
which was to bind all of the separate parts of the institution together in
a manner to preserve its longstanding purpose as a training ground for
personnel to operate the denominational health-care system within the
evangelistic goals of the church. A six-paragraph statement affirmed
this role-a school that prepared professionals both to heal bodies and to
preach the gospel-and directed each of the various schools to include
declarations embodying the essence of these spiritual objectives in its
bulletin.
In 1954 graduate education began by inaugurating a master of sci-
ence in nursing, the denomination's first graduate program in nursing.
Only six years had elapsed since Lorna Linda had begun its baccalaure-
ate nursing program. In 1955 the General Conference approved a rec-
ommendation that authorized CME to offer a doctor of philosophy de-
gree in three basic fields of science taught in the School of Medicine.
The following year the General Conference extended its approval to
include two more doctoral fields. All doctoral programs were to begin
at the discretion of CME's administration. By the 1954-1955 academic
year the institution had become a university except in nameP
From its inception graduate education at the College of Medical
Evangelists focused on sciences relating to health or the medical pro-
fession, although church leaders justified CME's graduate school as a
means to offer graduate degrees to Adventist teachers. The practical
effect of this reasoning was to broaden the purpose of the College of
Medical Evangelists to include science education as well as health in its
offerings. CME was probably better prepared than any other Adventist
institution to enter the field of science education since it could establish
research facilities more easily than four-year colleges, which gave it an
advantage over Adventist schools that contemplated graduate programs
In SCIence.
362
FROM COLLEGES TO UNIVERSlTIES
School of Dentistry, Lorna Linda University. One of the major steps in developing the
College of Medical Evangelists into Lorna Linda University was a new school of den-
tistry that began classes in 1953 and moved into this new building in 1955. This addition
filled a major gap in Seventh-day Adventist health education.
Despite this advantage CME was not the first Adventist school to
initiate postbaccalaureate programs on the West coast. Graduate class-
es began as early as 1940. In 1944 the General Conference noted the
trend and advised schools not to add courses until the denomination
could develop a plan, especially in religion since the Seminary was the
preferred school. The church's first official reaction to graduate educa-
tion came the next year and permitted individual colleges to establish
graduate programs on a supply and demand policy, but institutions
were to acquire approval, program by program, for postbaccalaureate
studies. In compliance with this arrangement, in 1948 Walla Walla Col-
lege received approval to offer graduate studies in biology. With gradu-
ate education in general left more or less to the initiative of individual
campuses, the General Conference concentrated on developing the
Seminary.13
By the mid-1950s agitation about graduate education had come to a
boil in Washington and CME convinced the denomination that gradu-
ate studies at the doctoral level were advantageous in the sciences. The
floodgate for graduate study opened. In 1957 Walla Walla's authoriza-
tion to offer graduate education extended to chemistry and history.
Again, the supporting rationale was to provide graduate study for Ad-
363
ventist teachers. The following year La Sierra College gained approval

to grant master's degrees in education to elementary and secondary
teachers. These gestures were clear indications from the West that the
embryonic Adventist university in Washington, D. c., oriented toward
ministerial education, did not furnish the broader program of graduate
studies that the denomination needed. 14
Events in the West culminated in another series of historic resolu-
tions at the 1959 Autumn Council. The heart of the actions was to grant
university status to the College of Medical Evangelists and to authorize
whatever reorganization was necessary to implement the decision. This
action only made official what had been in operation for some years,
but in addition it created a consortium of "participating colleges"-La
Sierra, Pacific Union, and Walla Walla, in addition to the College of
Medical Evangelists-to coordinate all of the graduate education in the
West according to a rational plan. The central and overseeing responsi-
bility in the consortium belonged to CME, but General Conference
approval was still the ultimate step in governing graduate education.
Church leaders foresaw that this new post-baccalaureate bloc in the
West would overlap the expectations they held for Potomac University,
which had recently found its new home in Michigan, hence geographic
limitations to the service areas of both new universities were neces-
sary.IS The next year CME took the name of Lorna Linda University.
The Merger of La Sierra and Lorna Linda

For several years the members of the consortium cooperated by sub-
mitting their requests for graduate programs for approval, but the edu-
cational water was becoming murky. Instead of functioning as the cen-
tral institution in a consortium, CME competed by offering
baccalaureate degrees and expanding its offerings in general studies
that supported its degree programs at both the baccalaureate and grad-
uate levels, thus preempting the need for corresponding programs on
the college campuses.
As early as 1953 a division of religion became a major component of
the medical college. By 1962 Lorna Linda gained General Conference
approval to grant master of arts degrees in a limited number of tradi-
tional liberal arts disciplines. The university's continuing incursions
beyond the health sciences as strictly defined into the province of the
364
"participating colleges" came to an end when La Sierra College and

Lorna Linda University merged in 1967 with La Sierra becoming the
Riverside campus of the university. With this linkup the evolution of a
medical school into a conventional university was complete. 16
Similar to the merger of Potomac University and Emmanuel Mis-
sionary College, this experiment brought congratulatory reaction, but
the union in California turned out to be a marriage of dissatisfied un-
equals. Each campus was eager to retain enough autonomy to prevent a
genuine partnership. La Sierra campus professors complained because
their salary was considerably lower than their peers on the Lorna Linda
campus. By the late 1980s accreditation problems descended on the
joined schools and university restructuring became a common conver-
sation piece. In part the issue turned on the question of whether Lorna
Linda should be a multiversity or a health sciences university, but the
institution could not easily sweep under the rug the unequal status of
the campuses as revealed in salary differences. By the spring of 1990
the dissolution of the merger appeared to be the most likely solution to
satisfy the regional accrediting body, and following the 1990 General
Conference session the two campuses separated, each pursuing its own
purposes with clearer resolution. 17
To facilitate this separation the Pacific Union agreed to resume own-
ership of the La Sierra campus, which in short order became La Sierra
University. This new entity retained the several master's degree and
doctoral programs in education which it had developed while a part of
Lorna Linda University. But the split was not clean. Before the merger
Lorna Linda had established degrees that arguably were legitimate on
baccalaureate campuses, and following the dissolution it reestablished
its claim to some of these common programs. An awkward situation
developed with two Adventist universities, less than twenty miles apart,
offering virtually duplicate programs in some fields. While the separa-
tion helped to clear the air from issues with the Western Association of
Schools and Colleges, it intensified the rivalry between the neighboring
campuses.
As ill-fated as it was, the merger of La Sierra and Lorna Linda was
in keeping with earlier statements by church leaders that encouraged
the health sciences institution to assume a role in educating teachers.
Failure of the merger did not mean that developing programs of science
365
education was a case of poor judgment. From the day of its founding,
Loma Linda was an educational institution. Master's degrees and doc-
torates for teachers in the sciences were conceivably legitimate pro-
grams. A doctorate in biology, a critical academic field for Adventists,
was and continued to be a part of Loma Linda's offerings after the two
campuses reverted to their individual identity.
But health sciences were at the heart of Loma Linda University,
and its reputation evolved from academic medicine and health, not in
education. To touch the public in matters of health was a product of
its commitment to scholarly investigation. Its celebrated heart team
exported good health and good will to scores of communities around
the world, most notably in developing countries. 18 Although the uni-
versity incited some negative headlines in 1984 when doctors inserted
a baboon's heart in a human baby, the neonatal heart transplant re-
search project matured into one of the world's most successful heart
transplant programs for children. Loma Linda's proton treatment fa-
cility placed the university on the forward edge of technological ther-
apy for cancer.
Repeated investigations into nutrition and health helped Adventists
to validate scientifically much of their teaching about diet. Personnel
from the Loma Linda University Medical Center repeatedly shared
their expertise with hospitals and physicians in developing countries-
India and China, for example-to improve medical training procedures.
In some cases these connections facilitated a medical education for Ad-
ventist students in emerging countries by enabling them to study in
their own universities rather than to spend considerably more money to
enroll in Loma Linda. Exchange agreements with health-care centers
brought physicians from other parts of the world to learn new tech-
niques at the Adventist center in California.
The Meaning and Role of Adventist Universities

The Adventist university was a milestone that denominational edu-
cation did not reach by happenstance. Its place in Adventist education
became a much discussed topic, frequently in the context of how to
reconcile it with denominational educational goals that church leaders
for decades had associated with the virtues of simple and limited
schools. At earlier stages of denominational institutions, they were
366
prone to discourage advanced education on the basis of how they un-

derstood Ellen White's example and counsel, but a newer generation
also quoted her in support of graduate schools and universities. One of
the most oft-cited passages was her statement in 1889 that selected stu-
dents should attend "leading institutions oflearning," which many oth-
ers had also interpreted as counsel favoring postbaccalaureate educa-
tion. 19
Ellen White also advocated a well educated and cultured ministerial
corps, prepared to reach all social strata of the public. This advice took
on new dimensions when church leaders applied it to the late twentieth
century. With increasing clarity Adventist educators had come to see
the unity of knowledge and were quick to point out that possessing in-
formation about the universe, whether in the arts or the sciences, is ul-
timately an intellectual highway to spiritual understanding.
In 1955 Keld J. Reynolds, who was to become the first dean of Lorna
Linda's graduate school, told an assembly of medical students and fac-
ulty at CME that the American university was a blend of professional
training and traditional arts and sciences, and in view of the secularism
invading western education, especially in Europe, the Adventist medi-
cal school had a unique opportunity to inculcate values of faith with
learning. Seven years later he advised his colleagues at Lorna Linda
University that as Adventists were entering into two ventures of gradu-
ate education, "it is imperative that the church know what it is doing.
Before that, it is imperative that we know what we are doing, and why
we are doing it, and what results we hope to achieve."2o
Reynolds admonished universities to keep their objectives always in
focus, reminding them that they were to foster investigative attitudes
and that the intellectual horizons of students must broaden while their
immediate studies became more centralized. He warned against the
temptation of watering down postbaccalaureate study and weakening
the graduate degree.
Richard Hammill, whom historian Emmett K. VandeVere describes
as perhaps the one who had "explored the need for, and the concept of,
a Seventh-day Adventist university more than any of his fellow educa-
tors,"21 caught the essence of a university when he declared it is an in-
stitution dedicated to the discovery of knowledge in contrast to a four-
year college where the primary goal is to transmit information.
367
"University studies," Hammill wrote, "are far different from the

concept held by some that such studies are just an additional year or so
of college. The program of study in a good university must involve an
entirely different approach on the part of both the teacher and the stu-
dent." University students, he elaborated, must not be content just to sit
at the feet of their teachers, and university teachers must not be content
just to read books. Both must reach beyond the borders of what is
known in order to contribute to the body of knowledge about humanity
and the world. Hammill believed that a university is a place for asking
questions and that both teachers and students must learn by constantly
examining and inquiring. 22
Godfrey T. Anderson, for fourteen years president successively of
CME and Lorna Linda University, added that as seekers for truth schol-
ars were the sine qua non of a genuine university. Their search creates
a "priesthood of a scholar," he said, and "all truth is God's truth." In
Anderson's view the "scholar is the enemy of all tricks, all humbug, all
sham, all pretense, all phoniness." Scholars relate to truth with honesty.
"This is the kind of scholarship which makes a university respect-
able."23
Those who initiated Adventism's first ventures into universities
clearly understood the implications ofthe term university in the context
of educational practice in the United States. Before Adventist universi-
ties went into operation the sole academic responsibility of college
teachers was to offer classes, usually so many that to engage in schol-
arly investigations was a rare phenomenon. Faculty pursued research as
personal projects if they pursued it at all. The fact that Adventist teach-
ers seldom conducted serious research substantiated Hammill's asser-
tion that colleges characteristically transmitted information rather than
discovered it.
The generation of Hammill, Reynolds, and Anderson intended to
launch a new era in Adventist education by designing institutions that
would, by policy, support scholarly investigation. Hammill predicted
that instructional loads for teachers would become smaller to allow
time for research. Larger budgets for investigation materials and in-
vestments in libraries would become routine. Publication facilities to
make known scholarly findings by university professors would become
a necessity. This new era would measure graduate degrees by their
368
qualitative difference from baccalaureate classes rather than simply by

the number of hours spent in a classroom. It envisioned graduate stu-
dents and faculty more as a community of scholars rather than a cam-
pus of lecturers and listeners.
Notwithstanding some significant research by faculty at the denomi-
nation's new universities, the campuses did not evolve into research insti-
tutions commonly understood in American education. Postbaccalaureate
education at Andrews, La Sierra, and Lorna Linda universities focused
on preparing professionals in ministry, education, medicine, dentistry,
and health-related fields rather than scholarly investigation. Professors
were teachers first and researchers second.
But in keeping with original intentions the policies of Adventist uni-
versities encouraged scholarly investigations and contributed to those
projects with both time and money. No longer was an Adventist re-
searcher a unique specie. Lorna Linda most nearly achieved the status
of a research university by receiving millions of dollars annually in
grant money for the purpose of scientific studies. 24 These changes pro-
duced a sharp distinction from higher education as Adventists had
known it in the past.
Adventist graduate education did not begin with the advent of
denominational universities, nor did it continue only on those cam-
puses. Even before and continuing through the era of the joint uni-
versity campuses at La Sierra and Lorna Linda, graduate education
at Pacific Union College and Walla Walla College remained but did
not expand. By the end of the 1990s several Adventist colleges in the
United States were offering master's degrees, most often in educa-
tion, but in other scattered fields as well, almost exclusively in fields
of professional studies. Some of them changed their name to univer-
sity, primarily for marketing reasons, but they did not embody an
appreciable advancement in scholarly goals which the generation of
Reynolds, Hammill and Anderson had visualized as appropriate for
a university.
Another question about Adventist graduate education was the extent
to which it resolved the problem of satisfying accreditation criteria by
offering graduate degrees to upgrade the credentials of denominational
teachers. In 1929 W. E. Howell rationalized the original recommenda-
tion for an Adventist graduate-level institution by arguing that the
369
church could select a few of its more promising and dependable educa-
tors and send them to the proposed school to earn master's degrees,
thus meeting the demands of accrediting bodies. Denominational
schools could then continue operating, unhampered, as training schools
for workers.
Events did not allow such a simplistic resolution to the accreditation
problem. More than thirty years elapsed between the recommendation
for a graduate school and its actual launching date. During that time
educational standards veered upward steeply. After World War II and
onward, many Adventist college professors taught on the strength of a
master's degree, but the doctorate become the standard credential and
college administrations turned up the pressure to improve the ratio of
doctorates on their faculties. When the universities went into operation
it had become clear that Adventist education could not afford a broad
spectrum of doctoral programs or even very many respectable master's
degrees in academic fields.
Additionally, to avoid academic inbreeding, accrediting bodies ad-
vocated an institutional faculty representing degrees from diverse in-
stitutions rather than a single university. This unwritten law of accred-
itation made it unwise for Adventist college teachers to depend on one
or even two denominational universities for their degrees. The result
was doctoral programs on only a limited scale at Loma Linda, La Si-
erra and Andrews to meet denominational needs, primarily in theology,
pastoral ministry, education and biology.
The principle of academic inbreeding did not apply to elementary or
secondary schools. Credentials based on graduate degrees from any
accredited institution satisfied state departments of education to which
the lower schools were responsible. Secondary teachers could earn
master's degrees in a small number of substantive fields at Loma Linda
and Andrews, but the number of these options declined from a variety
that was already limited, making it necessary for many Adventist teach-
ers to attend non-Adventist graduate schools.
In offering doctoral studies in professional education Adventist uni-
versities made one of their most significant impacts by providing train-
ing for superintendents of education and administrators, although some
who earned doctorates in education found employment in college de-
partments of education on Adventist campuses. Many teachers in ele-
370
mentary grades studied for master's degrees at Adventist universities

with financial support from their sponsoring conferences. A limited
number of graduates from the Seminary's doctoral programs also
taught in college departments of theology, and graduate programs in
nursing furnished some teachers for Adventist nurses' training courses.
Beyond teaching, the ministry, and nursing, graduate degrees in a vari-
ety of other professions, ranging from public health to business and
architecture, gave young Adventists the chance to prepare for a career
on a denominational campus. Regardless of these achievements, Ad-
ventist graduate education did not develop the dimension of what it was
in large universities.
Some have argued that the heavy stress on graduate education in the
professions combined with the decline of the initial emphasis on the
philosophy of graduate education as Hammill and his contemporaries
saw it has perpetuated the traditional Adventist utilitarian view of edu-
cation. Seventh-day Adventists have never had either the will or the
wherewithal to establish universities committed to the exploration of
ideas. In many ways they have paralleled the trend among most Chris-
tian denominations that operate colleges and universities with the be-
lief that erudition becomes valuable only when it has a pragmatic ap-
plication. Historian Mark A. Noll has expanded on this notion in The
Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, suggesting that "evangelicals do not,
characteristically, look to the intellectual life as an arena in which to
glorify God because, at least in America, our history has been prag-
matic, populist, charismatic, and technological more than intellectu-
al."25
Perhaps the educators who founded the Adventist university over-
stated their case, but it is worth remembering that higher education in
the United States has also followed a utilitarian trend beginning in the
nineteenth century. At that time practical education was regarded as
reform. Yet, for all of its utilitarianism, the intellectual level of Adven-
tist higher education rose substantially because of the Adventist univer-
sity and its influence on the colleges. Within the Adventist world, re-
search occurred, investigators published their findings, and scholars
contributed to the body of knowledge about the universe. The univer-
sity transformed the character of Adventist education because it repre-
sented the conviction held by a generation of educators in the 1950s that
371
by more emphasis on critical thinking and whatever investigation was

feasible, truth would ultimately strengthen, not disappear.
According to one line of reasoning Adventist universities in North
America were the culmination of the accreditation controversy. Resis-
tance to regulation had been powerful. Many church leaders saw ac-
creditation as truckling to secular authority, but in the end more rea-
soned voices prevailed. Providing qualified teachers as measured by a
recognized standard was a valid explanation in its own right and con-
formed to Ellen White's enunciation of the principle, long before Ad-
ventist universities were born, of academic preparation appropriate to
the professional and intellectual needs of the church. 26
Adventist universities helped to change denominational education
by leading the trend for a greater sense of professionalism. Through the
latter half of the twentieth century an increasingly higher number of
graduates entered the broader job market rather than church employ-
ment; consequently, the beliefthat denominational schools were to pro-
vide competitive academic experiences took on new meaning. As a
result, in their student recruitment campaigns, Adventist colleges and
universities found themselves compared with secular institutions.
Adventist Universities Spread

The trend toward universities did not end with Andrews and Lorna
Linda. University status spread to the world divisions, beginning in
1973 when Colegio Vocacional y Profesional in Montemorelos, Mexico
converted to Montemorelos University. By the end of the twentieth cen-
tury thirty Adventist institutions in nine of the eleven divisions were
classified as universities, many of them offering graduate degrees. In
contrast to the United States where the term university carried no legal
significance, elsewhere the term symbolized official recognition as a
degree-granting institution in most of the other countries. For Adven-
tist schools that received this recognition, the status of university was
mandatory.
Most of these universities were in developing countries. With their
new degree-granting authority their mission was to become a local
source for higher education which would avoid sending future denomi-
national employees half way around the world to the United States to
earn a degree. Thus, research was not central to their mission although
372
it did not inherently conflict with their purpose. In part, these young
institutions earned professional reputations by helping to establish aca-
demic respectability in the nation-building process. By acquiring uni-
versity status they represented a maturing educational establishment
both for the denomination and society at large.
Adventist universities were institutions of varied character. However
widespread they became, the Adventist world continued to recognize
the campuses in Michigan and California as the unofficial academic
centers in the denomination, but the development of other universities
provided legitimization of Adventist education that the former colleges
and training schools lackedY
Both Andrews and Lorna Linda universities were and continued to
be General Conference institutions with General Conference personnel
chairing their boards and subsidies from the General Conference sup-
porting their operations. Denominational needs determined their roles,
which meant that while they entered the circle of universities their pur-
poses remained limited. It was never the intention of the church to com-
pete with the ivy league, but within the range of their institutional mis-
sions the goal of both institutions was to excel. As they stood on the
threshold of the twenty-first century, the universities could look back
upon approximately forty years of tradition-building which, on occa-
sion, had caused both debate and controversy, but without denial, had
added a new chapter to Adventist education and helped to shape de-
nominational education in the world fields as well.
'Kern to Seminary Board, 1940 (no specific date), AST, RG 51; College Bible and His-
tory Teachers to J. L. McElhany, August 23, 1940.
2 Charles E. Weniger, "The Seminary Comes of Age," (The Journal of True Education,
June 1954), pp. 36, 37; General Conference Bulletin, 1946, no. 7. pp. 166-168.
lGeneral Conference minutes, October 30, 1944.
·Ibid., July 1, October 26, November 11, 1954.
5Richard Hammill, "New Developments in Adventist Graduate Education," (Journal of
True Education, February 1957), p. 3. Also see General Conference minutes, April 5, 1955;
Ronald Knott, "For a Beginning, 'Most Satisfactory'," (Journal of Adventist Education, Feb-
ruary-March 1983), p. 22.
6General Conference minutes, October 28, 1956.
'The minutes of the various university planning committees, 1956 through 1958, are
found in AST, RG 51.
8For a colorful account of the merger, see VandeVere, Wisdom Seekers, pp. 243-251.
9For the story of Lorna Linda University, see From Vision to Reality 1905-1980 (Lorna
Linda, CA: Lorna Linda University, 1980), and Carol Small, ed. Diamond Memories (Loma
Linda, CA: Alumni Association, School of Medicine, 1984).
'OGeneral Conference minutes, October 30, 1944.
"Ibid., October 22, 1954.
'2Ibid.; ibid., January 25, 1955.
IJlbid., April 14, October 30, 1944; October 26, 1948.
'4Ibid., October 25, 1957; October 24, 1958.
'Slbid., October 25, 1959.
'6Ibid., October 24, 1958; October 8, 1962; October 17, 1963.
'7Ron Graybill, "Lorna Linda-a multiversity or a health science university?" (Spectrum,
v.19, no. 5 1989), pp. 2-7; John Whitehair, "Lorna Linda put on probation for two years,"
(Ibid .. no. 4), p. 62; Pacific Union Recorder, March 5, 1990, May 21, 1990; General Confer-
ence minutes, August 30, 1990.
'8For an insight into the work of the heart team, see Herbert Ford, Affair of the Heart
(Nashville, TN: Southern Publishing Association, 1970).
'9Ellen White, Testimonies, v. 5, pp. 583, 584. See A. L. White's background material
about the same statement as it applied to European schools. Ellen White, v. 3, The Lonely
Years, pp. 368, 369.
2°Keld J. Reynolds, "'Universitas'-The Idea of Higher Education," (Journal of True Edu-
cation, October 1956), pp. 16-18; Reynolds, "Patterns of Graduate Education," (Ibid., Octo-
ber and December 1962), pp. 7-9, 30 and 19-22.
2lYandeYere, Wisdom Seekers, p. 254.
22Richard Hammill, "What Is a University?" (Focus, January-February 1965), pp. 1-3.
DGodfrey T. Anderson, "The Christian Scholar and the Church," (Spectrum, winter
1969), pp. 7-14.
24Leslie R. Martin and James R. Wilson of La Sierra University discuss the benefits of
research in "The Critical Role of Research in Adventist Education," (Journal of Adventist
Education, April / May 2002), pp. 37-40.
2sMark A. Noll, The Scandal ofthe Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: William B. Erdma-
nns Publishing Company, 1994), p. 55.
26Ellen White, Testimonies, v. 5, pp. 583, 584.
27World Report 2000 provides a list of Adventist universities, division by division.
374
HIGHER EDUCATION IN
ASIA AND THE PACIFIC
Developing training schools outside North America into a system of

postsecondary schools became one of the primary issues in Adventist
education after World War II. The driving force in this movement was
a determination to furnish recognized credentials, first to ministers in
order to fulfill public expectations for formal preparation of clergymen,
and often to teachers to comply with legal requirements in the teaching
profession. The trend evolved unevenly, but the stress was ordinarily on
ministerial education, in which the General Conference maintained a
strong, controlling hand based on actions beginning in 1918. This au-
thority remained a critical element in the transition from training school
to degree-granting institution.
Theological Education outside the United States

Except for Philippine Union College which became a degree-granting
institution in the mid-1930s, training schools represented the highest
level of education in the rest of the Adventist world until after World
War II, although a score or more began offering limited post-secondary
classes during the interim years. Occasional students from the world
fields journeyed to the United States to attend a college, but only a few
375
could afford the expense and the time. Many training schools served
union constituencies and developed a local character, but others culti-
vated an international complexion because they were education centers
for larger regions or General Conference divisions and drew students
from different countries.
Worker-training courses, usually meaning ministerial education,
followed a denominational-institutional design rather than a systematic
and recognized pattern for baccalaureate degrees. Training schools
could issue diplomas to students graduating from these courses but
these documents were of limited value outside the denominational em-
ployment market. As the post-World War II era advanced the Adventist
Board of Regents granted an increasing number of institutions the au-
thority to offer four-year degrees in theology, but until the schools re-
ceived official recognition by the appropriate government agency, these
degrees still lacked credibility. Schools sometimes earned government
approval for specific programs, such as teacher-preparation, which val-
idated the credential of graduates in education, but ministerial students
were the ones most often left with no recognition.
All of this meant that the legal validity of diplomas varied from
place to place. The situation could become especially complicated for
training schools that served an international constituency. Students
from one country who enrolled in post-secondary courses in a neigh-
boring land needed assurance that the institution was recognized if
their diplomas were to mean anything in their home country. On the
basis of denominational reciprocity, the Seminary would accept these
degrees as preparation for graduate study, but this was an in-house ar-
rangement that did not guarantee official recognition outside Adventist
circles. Degrees based on denominational approval did not equate to
government recognition.
The Theological Seminary touched Adventist education at its most
tender spot, ministerial training, which became a key factor in elevat-
ing training schools to recognized, degree-granting institutions. One of
the stated aims of the Seminary was to provide advanced education for
church workers around the globe, but because training schools did not
offer the necessary prerequisites for graduate education, most person-
nel from the world fields were eligible only for non-degree, inservice
courses.
376
HIGHER EDUCATION IN ASIA AND THE PACIFIC
Coupled with this deficiency was the fact that during the early years
ofthe Seminary many ministers from North America did not have time
to complete a master's degree. These conditions accounted for the ten-
dency of the Seminary to function as an inservice center rather than a
true postbaccalaureate institution. Refresher classes were better than
none at all and they had a unifying effect on the Adventist ministry, but
students who completed them had little more than their transcripts to
validate their academic experience inasmuch as they did not fulfill a
defined program of studies.
The practical effect of graduate programs in theology at the Semi-
nary was a widening gap between North American institutions and
training schools in the world fields. In North America ministerial edu-
cation was synonymous with a baccalaureate degree which earned even
more strength after the granting institution achieved accreditation,
while in the world fields most training schools fell short of the degree.
This difference became even more pronounced in 1953 when the Semi-
nary raised its entrance requirements to restrict enrollment to graduate-
level students, which effectively cut off students from most of the world
fields unless they held a degree that the Seminary would accept by
reciprocity. Unless training schools around the world converted into
recognized degree-granting institutions, pastors and ministerial stu-
dents in most of the world fields would have to content themselves with
less than a baccalaureate education and would not benefit from the
Seminary.
Transition from Training School to Higher Education

The first institution outside the United States to earn degree-granting
authority was Philippine Union College which took the step even be-
fore the Seminary began. Spicer Missionary College in India was next
in 1944 while World War II was in its final stages. By 1973 every major
training school outside North America that survived World War II be-
came a four-year, post-secondary school. As Adventist membership in-
creased, new tertiary schools appeared. By the end of the year 2000 the
chain of post-secondary denominational institutions around the world
lengthened to ninety-four, seventy-nine of which were outside North
America. During the final quarter of the century some of these institu-
tions inaugurated graduate education.'
Although circumstances differed from institution to institution,

some general patterns emerged. Schools received their status as four-
year, postsecondary schools by General Conference authorization
which usually applied to the theology curriculum first and secondly to
teacher-preparation courses. It was not the rule, but from time to time
schools offered postsecondary classes unofficially before authorization
came. On the basis of reciprocity graduates of these schools could en-
roll in the Seminary.
The majority of Adventist postsecondary schools appeared in the
developing countries, most of which had weak educational traditions.
A mentality of self-awakening permeated these societies. In most cases
their new sense of nationhood fostered education as a means to im-
prove their standing in the sisterhood of nations, but sometimes gov-
ernments were cautious about recognizing Adventist schools, wanting
to make sure that they were compatible to their strategy for nation
building.
That this mood would impact the Adventist world was a given. The
growth of Adventist higher education around the world, while under
the general oversight of the General Conference Department of Educa-
tion, also occurred at the pleasure of host governments that functioned
within the framework of post-World War II nationalism. Whether they
planned it or not, Adventist schools in the developing world often be-
came instruments of nationhood.
General Conference approval may have permitted institutions to
grant degrees in ministerial education, but governments did not uni-
formly recognize them. Holders of these unrecognized degrees en-
countered little difficulty as long as they remained in denominational
employ, primarily pastoral work, but their careers could suffer if con-
ventional wisdom expected pastors to study in professionally recog-
nized institutions. Students seeking degrees in careers that govern-
ments regulated were at a disadvantage unless the schools they attended
had acquired official status. Teaching was one of the most frequent
examples of a regulated profession.
In some instances schools could not grant theology degrees inde-
pendently from government approval; in such cases ministerial educa-
tion lagged. Some schools attempted to compensate by affiliating with
a North American Adventist college. This practice provided a vehicle
378
HIGHER EDUCATION IN ASIA AND THE PAClFlC
for credible degrees, but these arrangements were not always feasible
because regional accrediting associations in the United States some-
times attached conditions to their approval that would effectively block
any link between an American campus and a struggling school in a
developing country.
Educational jargon sometimes added confusion. Many training
schools took the title of college, which simply meant a school in most
countries outside the United States. As used in the United States col-
lege and university were not synonymous but both referred to post-
secondary institutions with degree-granting authority through the
doctoral level. In some countries both colleges and universities were
postsecondary but universities had a legal right to grant degrees
while colleges did not. Again, perhaps a college was authorized to
offer postsecondary classes but a university was much larger with a
larger number of academic fields. Also, different understandings of
secondary education affected the definition of postsecondary educa-
tion.
Typical of a new generation of Seventh-day Adventist schools sprouting up after World

War 1/ was Mount Klabat College in Indonesia, beginning in 1965. This 1969 photo-
graph shows faculty housing and West Hall during the early phases ofcampus construc-
tiun. By the year 2000 enrollment on this campus reached about 1,600.
379
Besides these conditions education became more technical after

World War II and denominational leaders did not always sense a clear
direction in handling this complex mix as they sought to systematize
denominational education. Because Adventist higher education was
born in the United States, North American education became the mea-
suring rod to determine equivalent values of academic credit when stu-
dents transferred from one country to another. With the advent of world
institutions that deliberately attracted students from around the globe-
Andrews and Lorna Linda universities-it became even more necessary
that baccalaureate degrees from schools in all world fields were compa-
rable to each other.
In 1972 the General Conference Department of Education published
the first of four editions of Patterns of Seventh-day Adventist Educa-
tion which, among other data, detailed the levels of instruction, pro-
gram by program, in Adventist schools around the world. With the ad-
vent of degree-granting authority in institutions in the world fields,
Patterns became less needful, and the Department of Education initiated
World Report: Adventist Education Around the World, which summa-
rized statistically the categories of Adventist schools and their curricula,
division by division. These publications demonstrated that the Adventist
accrediting system
had generated a
similarity of edu-
cational practices
in denominational
postsecondary ed-
ucation. Against
this complex back-
ground some se-
lected examples
demonstrate the
historical develop-
ment and variety
Middle East College. Beirut. Lebanon. founded in 1939 as of Adventist high-
a junior college. was the on(v Seventh-day Adventist post- er education in
secondary institution in the Muslim Middle East. In 1946 it be- Asia and the South
came afour-year institution and at one time served as the only
college in the Afro-Mideast Division. Pacific.
380
HIGHER EDUCATION IN ASIA AND THE PACJFIC
Graduate Education in the Philippines

The first request to offer graduate education outside the United
States came from Philippine Union College in 1939 where Adventist
education had developed rapidly along North American lines partly
because of four decades of United States presence in the islands. The
intent was to organize a graduate school to offer credentials for nation-
als who would teach at the college. General Conference leaders were
not ready to take this step and nothing came from the request, but after
it reappeared in 1948 and again in 1952, church leaders authorized a
limited amount of graduate study during the summer and stipulated
that a full graduate program should follow only after the institution
underwent a thorough self-study.2
Between the original request in 1939 and its repetition in 1948 a
world war interrupted the school and the Philippines gained indepen-
dence. In 1949 Philippine Union College planted an extension program
on an academy campus in the southern island of Mindanao. This school
eventuated into Mountain View College, but at the time it offered only
junior college classes, but the need for credentialed postsecondary
teachers was increasing. National leadership took over Philippine Union
College about the same time the third request to offer graduate classes
reached the General Conference in 1952. One of the prominent issues
at PUC during the 1950s was curriculum development, and after add-
ing several degree programs, the school received authorization from
both the Philippine government and the General Conference in 1957 to
offer a master's degree in education.
With enrollment soaring above a thousand and students enrolling
from all regions of Asia, Philippine Union College was an unquestioned
fulfillment of the announcement by W. E. Nelson, General Conference
secretary of education, at the 1936 General Conference when he de-
clared that "It is planned that this school shall also be the training cen-
ter for advanced work for all countries in the Far Eastern Division.")
Candidates for the new master's degrees began graduating in 1959; by
1964 the General Conference approved a graduate degree in religion,
which allowed Adventist ministers in Asia to earn a master's degree at
considerably less cost and trouble compared to spending time at the
Theological Seminary in the United States.
In view of the unique role PUC played in Adventist education in
381
Asia, an organized seminary and graduate school became common

talk even at General Conference levels, and in 1972 a newly organized
Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary graduated its first stu-
dent. A year later the Association of Theological Schools in South East
Asia accredited the graduate program. The seminary was still an arm
of Philippine Union College, but it 1978 when the school moved from a
suburb of Manila to Silang, an hour below the national capital, it sepa-
rated from the college to become an institution of the Far Eastern Divi-
sion. Accordingly it changed its name to Asia Adventist Theological
Seminary but also functioned as a graduate school. Its new title indi-
cated that its service area extended far beyond the boundaries of the
Philippines to serve all of Asia. 4
Before the move to Silang an arrangement with Lorna Linda Univer-
sity introduced a master's degree in public health, but for the most part
the graduate program developed on its own. In its new location and
with its new identity the seminary thrived. In 1988 seminary Dean
Werner Vyhmeister added a doctoral
program to its lengthening list of grad-
uate degrees, but the impracticality of
operating two institutions on a single
campus was becoming obvious. Phil-
ippine Union College was daily stung
by the loss of its graduate program be-
cause it hosted the seminary on its
campus and shared common facilities.
When friction and misunderstandings
became too serious to pass off as inci-
dental, moving the seminary away
from the college appeared to be the
best resolution. In 1989 dignitaries
from the government and the church
broke ground for a new campus for the
Kata Ragoso, a son of a native chief
on the island of New Georgia, Solo- seminary about fifteen miles from
mon Islands, was a product ofAdven- PUC.
tist schools. He provided effective
Two years before groundbreaking a
leadership to Seventh-day Adventists
during World War /I and helped to presidential decree enabled the semi-
translate the Bible into Masori. nary and graduate school to reorga-
382
nize under a new name, the Adventist International Institute of Ad-

vanced Studies. As an international institute, AlIAS fell under different
regulatory legislation than universities or colleges, which gave admin-
istrators more flexibility in employing non-Filipino faculty and institu-
tional officers. The new graduate program caught on handily and Al-
IAS attracted students from many parts of Asia and also offered
extension classes on Adventist post-secondary campuses from Bangla-
desh to Korea.
By 1990 AliAS had expanded its offerings to thirteen master's de-
grees in education, business, institutional administration, nursing ad-
ministration, public health, and religion, and three doctorates from the
seminary, including a doctor of philosophy degree. Plans were under
way for doctoral programs in education. Also in 1990 AliAS graduated
its first students from the graduate school and its first doctorates. Six
years later the school became a General Conference institution. Al-
though some Philippine Adventists persisted in seeing AliAS as a Fili-
pino school, it was designed for an international clientele, but operated
on Philippine soiP
The development of a separate graduate education program was a
bitter pill that became totally unpalatable for Philippine Union College
after AliAS moved to a separate campus. Practically speaking, the col-
lege reverted to an undergraduate institution operated by the North
Philippine Union, a status that was several cuts below the reputation
the school had developed since the mid-1930s as the leading Adventist
school in Asia. AlIAS functioned without an undergraduate base on its
campus, but the Adventist colleges in the region, including PUC, un-
derstood that they would serve in that role. The graduate library, which
the Far Eastern Division had bankrolled for the graduate school, went
to the new campus, but PUC received classroom and residential build-
ings that had once belonged to the seminary.
Arguably, Philippine Union College reverted to undergraduate sta-
tus when the graduate school and seminary organized into a separate
institution several years prior to opening the new AlIAS campus. The
two entities functioned on the same grounds, which benefitted the col-
lege because students continued to gravitate to the campus from many
parts of Asia. Filipinos easily perceived PUC as a postbaccalaureate
school, which it earlier was. The move of AlIAS to a separate campus
383
was painful, not only because PUC had become an undergraduate

school, but because it no longer enjoyed the reputation that the graduate
programs had brought.
Soon after the break, Philippine Union College set plans in motion
to become a university in its own right and recover the reputation it had
lost. In order to meet the criteria for universities set by the National Ac-
creditation Federation, Philippine Union College improved its ratio of
doctorates to twenty percent and established a research center. Govern-
ment approval in 1996 resulted in a name change to Adventist Univer-
sity of the Philippines, or AUP. By the time of this change, the school
had restored its graduate program and was offering master's degrees in
education, religion, biology, nursing, and business. In 2002 it announced
a doctoral program in science education with emphases in biology and
math, and another doctorate in education with fields in administration,
psychology, and English.6
The desire by Philippine Union College to regain what it saw as its
lost status was neither a secret nor merely a whim of the moment but
rather an urge to preserve its traditions. Decades previously, church
The major classroom building on the campus 0/ the Adventist International Institute 0/
Advanced Studies, Silang, Cavite, Philippines. This unique Seventh-day Adventist insti-
tution offers on(y graduate degrees and employs an international/acuity. Its enrollment
is largely Asian.
384
leaders had supported its development into the focal point for Adventist
education in Asia. The original motivation for graduate education in
the Philippines was the need for credentialed teachers. In the revived
graduate program at AUP, professional education was still the corner-
stone of advanced studies.
University administrators were enthusiastic about the new univer-
sity status and graduate education, but there were doubters. Six de-
cades since Nelson's declaration to the General Conference session in
1936 had brought changes in both professional needs and denomina-
tional organization that required different solutions than those con-
ceived in the 1930s, hence the separated AlIAS. One prominent ques-
tion asked ifan institution with less than a fourth of its faculty holding
doctorates and a library with fewer than 40,000 volumes was compe-
tent to offer doctoral programs on the scale that AUP advertised. Oth-
ers argued that AUP was reinventing the wheel by offering programs
in competition to a sister institution only fifteen miles away, even
though the two campuses were accountable to different administra-
tive units of the church.
The financial strength of the school was also in question. Since the
seminary and graduate school moved to a new campus AUP no longer
benefitted from subsidies that came from the Far Eastern Division, or
in its reorganized form, the Southern Asia Pacific Division. The uni-
versity was one of three tertiary institutions in the North Philippine
Union Mission, and it remained to be seen whether this single parent
body could muster enough financial support for the ambitious program
that the school contemplated.
Sahmyook University
Adventist higher education made astonishing advancements in
South Korea. Asian turmoil had scarred this country-more than three
decades of Japanese occupation, cut athwart at the thirty-eighth paral-
lel after World War II and divided into two politically hostile camps,
each a symbol in the parrying contest between communist and capital-
ist philosophies. In 1949 the Adventist training school reestablished it-
self on a 200-acre rural site northeast of Seoul, only to be driven out
less than a year later by invading forces from North Korea. When the
school reoccupied its ravaged campus in 1951 the Korean War was still
13-IPF.TW
385
see-sawing along the North-South frontier, only a stone's throwaway,

as it were. 7
Reestablishment also brought a new name, Korean Union Training
School, which the Koreans called Sahmyook Seminary, a term analo-
gous to the Adventist concept of educating the head, the heart, and
the hand. Three years later the government recognized it as a post-
secondary institution and in 1961 the Ministry of Education autho-
rized it to grant degrees in theology. Within another year the Korean
government granted permission to organize industrial programs as
part of a junior college curriculum specializing in agriculture and
home economics.
While school leaders felt blessed, they had not yet received approval
by the denominational Board of Regents either as a degree-granting or
even a postsecondary institution. These events meant that Korean
Union College, as it came to be known, had advanced more at the lead
of the South Korean Ministry of Education than the General Confer-
ence Department of Education. But the church could not easily refuse
friendly gestures from the government, which left little choice for the
Korean Union than to upgrade the school as rapidly as possible to
satisfy the accrediting criteria of the Board of Regents. In 1964 the
General Conference issued its approval to KUC as a four-year post-
secondary school.
By the end of the decade the campus was well into a transforming
construction program. The 1970s brought curriculum broadening. Af-
ter the government approved the teacher-preparation program in 1967,
the college added an English language department, followed by a nurs-
es' education course in 1973 as part of the junior college. Before the
decade ended the junior college organized departments in dairy sci-
ence and food and nutrition. Building on older courses in home eco-
nomics and agriculture, the college developed departments in business
and pharmacy.
Enrollment gains required more construction which left no ques-
tions about institutional aims. In 1985 a new library opened with shelf
space for 350,000 volumes and seating for a thousand students. In the
same year more than 2,100 students enrolled, making Korean Union
College second only to Lorna Linda University as the largest postsec-
ondary campus in the Adventist world.
386
The School of Theology, Sahmyook University, Seoul, Korea. At the beginning of the
twenty-first century, Sahmyook University had become the largest tertiary institution
operated by Seventh-day Adventists with an enrollment approximating 5,500 students.
Expansion in the 1990s continued at a phenomenal pace. Typifying

its advancement, the institution changed its name in 1992 to Sahmyook
University. Academic departments proliferated in both the traditional
arts and sciences as well as contemporary vocations, embracing among
other fields, computer science, environmental landscaping, and inter-
national language. In 1993 the university opened a branch on the Rus-
sian island of Sakhalin.
Government approval in 1980 of a master's degree in theology was
the first step toward a graduate school that began the same year. By
1998 the graduate school was offering master's degrees in pharmacy,
nursing, chemistry and biology. Government recognition of the gradu-
ate school of theology as a seminary came in 1989, which enabled the
university to offer a doctor of philosophy in theology. The government
also approved a school of management in 1996 as part of graduate-
level offerings.
387
At the beginning ofthe twenty-first century enrollment exceeded all

previous expectations and gave Sahmyook University the distinction of
being the largest Seventh-day Adventist school in the world. In round
numbers 5,500 students attended, 2,000 in two-year programs, 3,000 in
four-year degree programs, and 500 in the graduate school. About
eighty-five percent of the faculty held doctorates. Not only had institu-
tional growth been spectacular within the Adventist community, it had
also caught the eye of the government. In 1994, when enrollment was
still less than 3,000, the government accrediting agency rated Sah-
myook ninth among all institutions in the country, both public and pri-
vate, based on an evaluation of its facilities, faculty, program, and fi-
nances.
Trends in Korean life played a role in developing Sahmyook Univer-
sity, and the history of the institution suggests that school officials con-
sciously sought to contribute to a new Korea. One matter revolved
around the increase in the Christian popUlation. At the close of the
twentieth century South Korea was still predominantly Buddhist, but it
was nearly one fourth Christian. This development indicated that tradi-
tional religion was less important than the spirit of nationhood in the
South Korean mentality, a mood that paved the way for Adventism.
Sahmyook's step-by-step advancement with government approval em-
powered the school to grow rapidly, not only as a theological center but
also as an institution that served the needs of the Korean college-age
population.
Sahmyook's speedy growth to become a recognized university of-
fering a variety of graduate degrees was more a response to national
needs than a calculated design by denominational leaders to develop a
powerful university, but Korean Adventists had succeeded in planning
an institution that conformed to national standards while retaining an
Adventist character. While adjusting to Korean needs, Sahmyook
reached back to its beginnings to substantiate claims to have helped to
shape the new Korea by introducing progressive ideas into education,
among them coeducation, professional training for women, dormitory
housing for students, vocational and technical education, and the no-
tion of service as an educational goal.
An important aspect of this process was the location of the campus.
Originally, the surroundings were rural and in conformity with the de-
388
nominational tradition of planting training schools in the country. Ag-

riculture was part of its program, and even after the institution gained
official recognition, the junior college curricula centered on the dairy
and the arts of homemaking.
But South Korea became an industrial force to be reckoned with.
By the late 1960s and early 1970s the economy was generating un-
precedented prosperity. Technology and other professional studies
superseded agriculture as fields of study. Education became an item
of high demand and with more wealth at their disposal Koreans
found education more easily accessible. As Seoul's population spread
to the gate of Sahmyook's campus, the school lost its rural character
but adapted to national trends. At the beginning of the twenty-first
century the agricultural program still existed in abbreviated form,
but the vocational emphasis was on preparing students for urban liv-
ing.
Church leaders and university officials alike agreed that one of the
contributing factors ofSahmyook's growth was its location on the edge
of the national capital. Korean students, they argued, would gravitate to
the Adventist university from all parts of the country in order to attend
an urban school but they would not enroll in an agricultural institution
in the country.
University officials used these circumstances to serve evangelistic
purposes. Kei Hoon Shin, a former president of Sahmyook University,
once pointed out that in the new Korea the church had to devise means
to take the gospel to Korean youth and that schools were the most ef-
fective way to accomplish that task. 8 As a result, evangelism developed
into a major campus activity and Sahmyook became what some might
call a mission university, a large, modernized edition of the traditional
mission school.
By the end of the century the institution had become one of the most
productive evangelistic agencies in Korea. Of the 5,500 students only
about 10 percent lived in dormitories; the majority were commuters.
Typically, about three-fourths of the freshmen enrolled as non-Adven-
tists and were organized with other non-members into groups which
became "parishes" for students in the School of Theology, who gave
special attention to their spiritual needs. By the end of the 1990s this
personal evangelism netted nearly a thousand baptisms each academic
389
year. Evangelism also became a prominent part of the nursing school

associated with Seoul Adventist Hospital where the majority of the 300
students also enrolled as non-Adventists, but at graduation about eighty
percent had become members.
Adventist higher education at Sahmyook University differed from
its counterpart at Adventist University of the Philippines. The Korean
institution was more prone to cater to public needs and even though it
had become a university, it tended to interpret its role as reminiscent of
the traditional mission school. In the Philippines graduate education
emerged from the need for credentialed teachers, and later pastors,
whereas ministerial education was always the priority concern in Ko-
rea. A teacher-preparation program at Seoul figured prominently dur-
ing the late 1960s, but by the end of the century this course attracted
only a small proportion of the student population. The program may
have dwindled, but it was effective. In the year 2000 Korean Adventists
operated eight secondary and ten primary schools which required nearly
400 teachers. Every teacher in the system held certificates from both
the state and the denomination.
The stress of Sahmyook's graduate school remained on the School
of Theology, but taken as a whole, the university was geared to profes-
sional fields that did not necessarily lead to denominational employ-
ment. This tendency produced a similarity with colleges in the United
States where students could prepare for an enlarging variety of ca-
reers.
Trends in India
Probably no set of circumstances in Asia were more problematic than
those that surrounded Spicer Missionary College in India. This institu-
tion had been a strong worker-training center that became a four-year
postsecondary school but it did not have recognized degree-granting
authority. Indian independence in 1947 gave rise to a powerful move-
ment of national self-awareness and within the Adventist community
the intention to convert the college into a recognized degree-granting
institution developed into a priority goal for the Southern Asia Divi-
sion. The education of ministers was an important part of the college
program, but the campaign for recognition was also closely tied to the
need for credentialed teachers in Adventist elementary and secondary
390
schools, which were more numerous in India as compared to most

world fields. 9
These denominational schools maintained a strong Adventist iden-
tity, but they were poorly equipped and managed. The finger ofrespon-
sibility pointed to Spicer where teachers trained. The prospects of ame-
liorating the teacher-preparation program at Spicer worsened when
India tightened its regulation of education, requiring Adventist teachers
to hold valid credentials which the Adventist school could not grant.
In 1959 R. S. Lowry, secretary of education in Southern Asia, tied
all of the problems together into an impassioned call to improve the
college at all costs. Based on his sense of the direction which indepen-
dence was leading India, he was convinced that education at Spicer and
in the lower schools was to be not only Adventist, it was also to be In-
dian, and that it must be professionalized to meet the increasingly high-
er educational goals of the new nation. Lowry viewed the situation as a
crisis and singled out improvements at Spicer, including recognition for
its programs, as the crucial point in church affairs in Southern Asia.
Recognition was not a new problem. The state government had con-
sistently denied degree-granting authority for Spicer as it customarily
did for all private institutions. Following a suggestion in 1956 to affili-
ate Spicer with an Adventist college in the United States, Duane John-
son, associate director of the General Conference Department of Edu-
cation, cautioned that the American school should have unquestioned
approval by its regional accrediting association and the word "mission-
ary" must not be part of its name. After weeks of bandying the idea
among themselves, educators in both India and the United States gave
it up as infeasible.
Johnson's caveats revealed much about Indian independence. His
warning to avoid the word missionary signaled that Indian leaders did
not believe their country needed Christian missionaries to teach them
values. India was notorious for poverty and illiteracy but it was also
home for philosophical religion and a well-educated upper class. Intel-
lectualism was not alien to the country. Some of India's best had been
students in England's leading universities and had become the leaders
of independence. Johnson's recommendation that unchallenged accred-
itation by an Adventist college was to be a precondition for affiliation
with Spicer was a warning that Indian officialdom knew the meaning
391
of valid higher education and that India was not opening itself as a
market for imported, second rate education. Spicer Missionary College
changed its name to Spicer Memorial College in 1955 to honor William
A. Spicer, a recently deceased General Conference president who had
spent mission time in India, but dropping the "missionary" from its
name was an omen that the institution was in harmony with Indian
moods.
Approval by the University of Poona became the next option, but it
fizzled when the university laid down conditions, which in effect, would
require Spicer to relinquish control of its Adventist identity in matters
of curriculum and personnel. Although these conditions were accord-
ing to policy, not a sinister plot to gain control of the campus, compli-
ance was impossible for an Adventist institution. Without any means to
provide recognized education to Indian Adventists, the source for
teachers, nurses, and physicians would dry up, leaving much of the
denomination's program leaderless. Almost as a corollary, Adventist
youth, many of them children of church workers, began to avoid Spicer
by enrolling in universities in large numbers to study for professions
with no intention to prepare for denominational employment.
Some church leaders viewed this trend as a lack of loyalty to the
church. After a six-week visit to Southern Asia in 1976, Ethel Young,
associate director in the General Conference Department of Education,
tersely recommended a requirement for all workers to send their chil-
dren to denominational schools. As it would apply to elementary and
even secondary levels, it was possible for church workers to comply,
but Indian parents, denominational workers or not, could not force their
children to attend a college that was an academic dead end for students
except as they planned careers in some phase of denominational em-
ployment that did not require a recognized credential.
The problem was very complicated. One of its complexities was the
commonly held view in India that schools were an effective evangelis-
tic tool. R. S. Lowry, who became division president in 1962, instituted
a practice of planting schools in as many communities as possible in
order to establish an Adventist presence. Frequently these schools
spawned companies of believers and eventually churches. Evangelisti-
cally, the schools were paying handsome dividends, but their increas-
ing number only added to the problem of preparing credentialed teach-
392
ers. Without teachers evangelism would suffer, and so the problems fed
on each other.
One of the root issues in upgrading Spicer was the inability of Ad-
ventist workers to enter Indian universities for advanced studies be-
cause of their unrecognized degrees from the Adventist college. Enroll-
ing in graduate programs in the United States was possible but required
years of strenuous work. Moreover, the paucity of funds prevented
church leaders in India from providing financial support to prospective
Indian educators studying in American schools. When Spicer attempt-
ed to fill some of its teaching positions with missionaries, immigration
authorities sometimes denied visas, but in spite of this obstacle some
well qualified classroom professors made it to the campus, primarily
from other Commonwealth countries.
That it would be possible to find a way even partially through this
maze was something attributed to Lowry. Realizing that time was run-
ning out on the expatriate worker, he scraped up enough money to
sponsor a handpicked cluster of promising Indian workers in North
American graduate schools-not always Adventist institutions-on con-
dition that they return to Southern Asia after acquiring a graduate de-
gree. Among them was M. E. Cherian, a 1949 alumnus of Spicer, who
earned two master's degrees, one at Andrews University and the other
at the University of Maryland. After returning to India he enrolled in
1963 in the University of Poona to study for a doctorate in political sci-
ence, the first Spicer graduate that the university admitted. At the same
time he became president of Spicer.
Cherian's reputation broke the ice, and the University of Poona reg-
ularly began admitting Spicer graduates despite their unrecognized de-
grees. The university also began matriculating students with unrecog-
nized degrees from at least two other Christian institutions. By 1990
nearly a hundred Spicer alumni were studying for master's degrees and
twenty-five or more were engaged in doctoral studies in a wide variety
of liberal arts and professional fields. Spicer and the Adventist commu-
nity benefitted from this unexpected breakthrough, but the arrange-
ment with the university was only a gentleman's agreement, and before
the century ended the university withdrew Spicer from its most favored
list, explaining that the presence of students from an unrecognized
school proved to be an embarrassment. Students from the other Chris-
393
tian schools had already lost their enrollment privileges. Meanwhile, in

1980 an affiliation with Andrews University went into effect that en-
abled Indian students to enroll in graduate studies at Spicer in theology,
education, and business. Some Spicer graduates also traveled to An-
drews for doctoral studies and the Philippines for master's degrees.
In the field of medicine and health other breakthroughs occurred.
Since the days of R. S. Lowry a special arrangement coupled with de-
nominational financial contributions to the Christian Medical College
in Vellore near Madras opened the way for Adventist students from
India to study medicine in their own country with minimal cost. A
similar affiliation with another Christian medical institution in the
Punjab opened up more seats for Adventist medical and paramedical
students. In 1984 an agreement between Lorna Linda University and
Kasturba Medical College near Manipal on the southwest coast of In-
dia set up a teacher exchange program between the two institutions and
established a center for greater numbers of Adventist students to enroll
in the physicians' course. By 1990 Adventist students at Kasturba
branched into dentistry and pharmacy and students at Vellore were en-
tering a variety of allied health fields and the sciences.
Despite these accomplishments the blanket recognition that would
regularize Spicer's program proved as elusive as it had always been.
The need for Adventist teachers in Adventist schools became even more
acute as church membership soared in the latter years of the century
and the number of denominational schools mushroomed. Spicer's in-
ability to supply recognized credentials for teachers was a key factor
that fed a trend to hire non-Adventist teachers. This practice became
common in the 1980s. As the Southern Asia Division entered the twenty-
first century nearly forty percent of the teachers in the elementary and
secondary schools were not members of the church and approximately
ninety percent of the students were not Adventists.
Sharp debate arose about the direction and purpose of Adventist
education in India. Critics charged that Adventist schools had lost their
identity and had become a public service instead of institutions where
church members could send their children to study in a denominational
environment. The high ratio of non-Adventist teachers generated doubt
that the schools were genuinely Adventist, especially when occasion-
ally non-Adventist teachers taught Bible classes. In the eyes of many
394
the church had chosen financial stability over evangelism, for they be-
lieved that the primary purpose of these schools was to furnish opera-
tional funds to the church.
Defenders of the system admitted that Adventist schools were a pub-
lic service, even a business, but argued that they were contemporary
forms of the traditional mission school in which Adventist philosophy
permeated irrespective of the high percentage of non-Adventist faculty.
They pointed to membership growth that was ever spiraling higher
than they had imagined even a decade and a half earlier as evidence
that schools continued to be an effective evangelistic tool. The schools
were a method to reach the homes of the middle and professional class-
es. Through them the denomination was gaining a reputation as one of
the finest educational agencies in India in a manner similar to the repu-
tation of denominational health-care units where neither the clientele
nor the medical staff was restricted to church members. 1o
During the last years of the twentieth century Adventist higher edu-
cation duplicated some of the trends in elementary and secondary
schools. In quick succession five post-secondary schools sprang up, all
evolving from Adventist high schools. In 2002 all but one were affili-
ated with local universities and thus advertised recognized programs.
Somewhat analogous to the day schools, these colleges functioned as
public service institutions, specializing in such professions as business,
computer science, and allied health. Enrollment ranged from fewer
than fifty to approximately 400, and in the largest schools the students
were predominantly non-Adventist. Bible classes as Adventists knew
them became elective courses.
These new ventures reflected a growing desire among Indian youth
for professional education and the willingness of the Adventist com-
munity to contribute to change that was overtaking the country. It was
against this background that the church's intellectual leaders in India
insisted Adventist education must be understood.
Standing at the gate of the twenty-first century Adventist education
in Southern Asia was thriving, but it undeniably differed from the tra-
ditional pattern of Adventist schools. It was inevitable that controversy
would swirl around the question of whether or not denominational
schools in India truly typified Adventist education. It was evident that
protagonists on either side of the debate remained unconvinced by the
395
others' arguments. Despite these issues, given India's fierce national-

ism, forged in the crucible of independence, the church was blessed in
retaining its educational heritage, a benchmark of its existence.
The condition of Adventist post-secondary education in India was
mixed. The traditions of study and vocational experience continued to
attract favorable attention. Despite their unrecognized education, Spic-
er graduates had long since earned the right to sit for external examina-
tions which opened opportunities for them to enroll in other schools in
India. At the beginning of a new century faculty at Spicer with master's
degrees from these schools were a commonplace. About twenty per-
cent of the faculty held doctorates from several different institutions,
including Andrews University and AlIAS. More than twenty-five aca-
demic tracks led to bachelor's degrees, including a program in both
western and indigenous music. Through affiliation Spicer offered grad-
uate degrees in theology, education, and business and in 1996 the
School of Religion introduced the doctor of ministry degree with an
emphasis in missions, which placed cross-cultural evangelism at the
top of its academic priorities.
Spicer's experience illustrated some of the issues that Adventist
higher education faced in the developing world after World War II and
the persistence that denominational educators needed in order to re-
solve them. Affiliations helped, but a maturing Indian democracy also
produced improved conditions. Even though it lacked official recogni-
tion, Spicer was still atop the academic pyramid of denominational
schools in India. Regularizing its program remained one of the critical
questions in Adventist education in the subcontinent.
Avondale
It was not Spicer but Australasian Missionary College, or AMC, that
was the first school to affiliate with a denominational college in North
America to compensate for its lack of official recognition. Except for
students completing the two-year elementary education program ac-
credited through the state of Victoria, graduates of AMC worked with-
out recognized credentials because state governments in both Australia
and New Zealand consistently denied degree-granting charters to pri-
vate institutions. With a view of improving the theology program, the
Board of Regents ranked AMC as a four-year post-secondary school in
396
1951, which did not change its official standing within the Australian
system, but ministerial students could now earn the equivalent of a bac-
calaureate degree, although an unrecognized one. 1I
Because the Australian sequence required five years of secondary
courses followed by three more at the post-secondary level, Australian
Adventists concluded that an affiliation with a college in the United
States would be the most effective way for students to earn a recog-
nized four-year degree in theology. The affiliation was to be an adapta-
tion of the practice by universities in the United States to conduct ex-
tension campuses combined with the policy of the University of London,
which supervised students around the world in programs of external
studies. In this case Australasian Missionary College would link to Pa-
cific Union College whose faculty would go to Australia on temporary
assignment to teach and oversee the curriculum that Australasian stu-
dents followed.
The essence of affiliation was to design a course of study in Aus-
tralia whose content and level of difficulty equated to degree require-
ments at Pacific Union College. By completing this program Austral-
asian students would earn a four-year degree from PUC but take all of
their classes in Australia. As it materialized, the affiliation agreement
allowed AMC to retain its identity as an Australian school. Pacific
Union College did not control the curriculum in Australia or demand
that Australasian Missionary College meet accrediting standards of
the same association which recognized PUC, which would have prac-
tically converted the Australian school into a North American institu-
tion.
In addition to ministerial education, the affiliation applied to the
preparation of secondary teachers, where a gaping hole existed in the
Australasian Adventist school system. Unlike AMC's recognized
two-year elementary education program that furnished Adventist pri-
mary schools with credentialed teachers, the college had no authority
to prepare students to teach in substantive areas in secondary schools.
The result was a dearth of qualified teachers in Adventist high
schools.
The affiliation with Pacific Union College went into effect in 1954
and lasted until 1990. It functioned well for theology students who were
able to begin a sequence of studies coordinated with graduate studies
397
at the Seminary, but prospective secondary teachers were still tied to

the local certification system in which a degree from the United States
carried less weight than one from Australia or New Zealand. Often
teachers with education degrees from the Adventist college found it
necessary to start over again by earning their credential a second time
from a recognized school.
Two trends within Australia helped to resolve this problem. In their
certification procedures state governments became more prescriptive
which made Australian degrees much more advantageous. At the same
time Australia eased its restrictions on professional schools, especially
teacher-preparation institutions, by forming the Colleges of Advanced
Education, an association that upgraded professional schools to degree-
granting institutions. Long before the affiliation with Pacific Union
College ended, Avondale College-newly renamed in 1963 from its old-
er name, Australasian Missionary College-became a College of Ad-
vanced Education and in 1974 began offering an officially recognized
bachelor of education degree. With the door opened, the school added
degrees in business and nursing. But the system was still left wanting
because Australian and New Zealand universities tended to withhold
full recognition to graduates of a College of Advanced Education who
enrolled for graduate studies.
For Adventist students in at least some professional fields this prob-
lem disappeared by the end of the twentieth century when Avondale
expanded its programs to include master's degrees in business, educa-
tion, nursing, and theology with all programs recognized by either New
South Wales accrediting agencies or the Commonwealth Register.
These curricular additions enabled Australasian students to earn recog-
nized credentials in a variety of fields open for both denominational
and private employment.
A Summary of Asia and the Pacific

By the year 2000 the four General Conference divisions in Asia and
the Pacific were operating twenty-seven post-secondary institutions lo-
cated in Bangladesh, Myanmar, Indonesia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea,
Japan, the Philippines, and Fiji. Together these campuses reported more
than 20,000 students. Programs in business claimed about 4,700; health,
2,800; and theology, 2,000, the total of these three fields amounted to
398
almost half of the entire enrollment. The rest of the students registered
in a wide variety of programs in the arts, sciences, vocations, and teach-
ing.
The meaning of these statistics is clear. Since 1945 Adventist educa-
tion had graduated from its training school status to become a major
enterprise. The most academically advanced Adventist degrees were
available in ministerial education and teaching, but the broad spectrum
of fields indicated that denominational schools had become much like
their predecessors in North America, campuses where students could
prepare in an Adventist environment for a variety of careersP
Other numbers indicate that the concept of the mission school did
not die with the development of higher education. Approximately 6,900
non-Adventist students enrolled in the tertiary schools in Asia and the
Pacific in the year 2000, and during that academic year almost 1,300
were baptized, which translates into a conversion rate of nineteen per-
cent. Besides the level of instruction, the major difference between the
pioneer mission school and the contemporary post-secondary institu-
tion was that the campuses were in the hands of nationals. Adventist
educators in Asia and the Pacific were quick to admit flaws in their
system, but the half century after 1945 had brought more change than
they had envisioned.
ISee Brown, Chronology, for the dates when training schools became four-year institu-
tions. For statistics on tertiary schools, see World Report 2000 (Silver Spring, MD: General
Conference Department of Education, 2000).
'General Conference Minutes, November 30, 1939, Apri I 27, 1948, February 21, 1952.
lGeneral Conference Bulletin, 1936, no. 7. p. 149.
4Review and Herald, February 20, 1969, June 22, 1972, August 23, 1973, April 28, 1977;
Adventist Review, July 6, 1978; Academic Bulletin. 1998-2000, Adventist Internationallnsti-
tute of Advanced Studies; Minutes of the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary-Far
East, October 12, 1976, AST, RG 51.
5Adventist Review, August II, 1988; Far Eastern Division Outlook, December 1988, Feb-
ruary 1989, October 1990, March/April 1991; interviews: Oliver Koh, May 17,2002; Julian
Melgosa, May 18,2002.
6Adventist University of the Philippines Bulletin. 1997-2000; interviews: Elizabeth Role,
May 17,2002; Liberato B. Moises, May 17,2002; John Fowler, May 19,2002.
7Sources for events in Korea are General Conference Minutes, January 23,1964; July 27,
1967; September 29, 2000; Review and Herald, June 23,1969; ibid., October 31 and Decem-
ber 5, 1974; Adventist Review, October 13, 1994 and September 28, 1995; General Confer-
ence Bulletin, 1950, no. 10, pp. 237, 238; no. II, p. 15; ibid., 1962, no. 3, p. 29; ibid., 1985, no.
399
5, p. 27; Far Eastern Division Outlook, February-March 1987; ibid., November 1994; Sah-
myook University Bulletin, 1999-2000; Masaji Uyeda, "Northern Asia Pacific Division,"
2001 GC Report; and interviews: Masaji Uyeda, June 3, 2002; Jin Hong Shin, June 4,2002;
Kei Hoon Shin, June 4, 2002; M. K. Oh, June 5, 2002; Dong Seung Park, June 4, 2002; Dae
Yun Cho, June 4, 2002; D. K. Nam, June 5, 2002; H. H. Lyu, June 4, 2002; Si Young Kim,
June 4, 2002;Y. K. Chung, June 4, 2002.
8lnterview, Kei Hoon Shin, June 4,2002.
9The paragraphs relating to India are based on R. S. Lowry, "Summary of Observations,
Impressions and Recommendations from the Education Department on Tour in the Southern
Asia Division, August 4 to October 7, 1953," AST, RG 51; "Division School Inspection Re-
ports-1955," ibid.; R. S. Lowry, "Report of the Quadrennium Ending 1959," ibid.; L. R.
Rasmussen to E. E. Cossentine, December 6, 1956, ibid.; R. E. Rice to P. W. Christian, April
3, 1957; ibid.; Duane S. Johnson to W. R. Beach, February I, 1957, ibid.; Duane Johnson, to
L. R. Rasmussen, October 3, 1957, ibid.; other miscellaneous letters among General Confer-
ence, Walla Walla College, Southern Asia Division, and Spicer Memorial College, 1957,
ibid.; Richard Hammill to R. R. Figuhr, February 6, 1961, ibid.; Ethel Young to R. S. Lowry
and e. H. Tidwell, June 11, 1974, ibid.; the Self-Study by Spicer Memorial College, 1976,
ibid.; W. J. McHenry, "Southern Asia Division Report," (Journal of Adventist Education,
February-March 1980), pp. 15,20,21; Southern Asia Division Tidings, November 1990 pp.
3-7, 14; Spicer Memorial College Bulletin. 2001-2002; George Roos Jenson, Spicer Memo-
rial College, pp. 61-117; Justus Devadas, "Report Presented at the Asia-Pacific Education
Leadership Seminar, April 4-10, 2002. Interviews: Justus Devadas, May 24, 2002; Y. R.
Sam raj and wife, May 25, 2002; Gerald J. Christo, May 26, 2002; Charles Tidwell, January
2-27, 2002; John Fowler, February 7, 2002; Samuel M. Gaikwad, May 27, 2002; Gordon
Christo, May 28, 2002.
IOSee Edison Sam raj, "A Framework For Approaching Non-Christian Students In Our
Schools," in Maturing of Adventism, Edison Samraj, ed. (Pune, India: Oriental Publishing
House, 1995), pp. 141-172; John M. Fowler, "Caring and Excellence," (Journal of Adventist
Education, Summer 1990), pp. 70, 72, 73, and "The Mission School: Catalyst or Catastro-
phe?" (Ibid., December 1993-January 1994), pp. 37-40.
"George L. Caviness, "Upper Biennium Education at Australasian Missionary College,"
(Journal of True Education, April 1957), pp. 24, 25; Milton Hook, "Avondale Campus," in
Seventh-day Adventists in the South Pacific, pp. 146-165; Avondale College Handbook, 1999-
2000; "The Plan to Affiliate the Australasian Missionary College and Pacific Union College
for Curriculums in Ministerial Training and Secondary Teacher Training Leading to a Bac-
calaureate Degree," AST, RG 51; "Recommendations to the A.M.e. Boar of Managment and
the Australasian Inter-Union Committee," ibid.
'2These statistics adapted from World Report 2000.
400
HIGHER LEARNING:
EUROPE, AFRICA,
AND LATIN AMERICA
Similar to its counterpart in Asia and the Pacific, the development of
Adventist tertiary education also spread to Europe, Africa and Latin
America. The details varied, but sometimes the movement represented
the effectiveness of affiliations and extension campuses that had played
an important role in Australia and India. As the first instance of an af-
filiation between a North American institution and one in a world field,
the experience of Australasian Missionary College and Pacific Union
College demonstrated that if the conditions were right, an official con-
nection between schools on different continents could be a successful
means to export baccalaureate and perhaps post-baccalaureate educa-
tion to the Adventist world.
Whether or not affiliations or other official arrangements joined
North American institutions with campuses elsewhere, schools in the
United States continued to set the educational pace for the Adventist
world. Globally speaking, after World War II theological education,
teacher-preparation, and business were the fields of study most in de-
mand, which accounted for the tendency of Andrews University to be-
come the most prominent mentor in Adventist higher education around
the world, but Lorna Linda also played a vital role in advancing educa-
401
tion in medicine and health. As the story of denominational education

in Europe, Africa and Latin America show, the conditions were not
always right for affiliations or extension centers, which left some Ad-
ventist schools responsible for their own academic reputations. Such
was the case in Europe.
Adventist Higher Education in France and Germany

In 1948 the General Conference Department of Education conducted
two councils in Europe to revive education after World War II and to
systematize the schools in the Northern European and Southern European
divisions. A major point of consensus was to continue preparing students
for external examinations that would validate their education, but the
schools were not to sacrifice their identity as Adventist training schools
in the process. Seminaire Adventiste du Saleve in Collonges, France was
to become the educational center for the entire Southern European Divi-
sion with lesser schools sending their graduates to France for the most
advanced courses available in the field.
General Conference approval of Seminaire Adventiste as a four-
year, post-secondary campus came in 1955. With this new authority the
school began offering a complete post-baccalaureate program in theol-
ogy, but because the school lacked government accreditation beyond
the secondary level the degrees were of little if any value outside de-
nominational circles. In 1963 the French school requested the General
Conference to recognize its theology degree as equivalent to a master
of arts in religion as defined by American standards. Neither this peti-
tion nor discussions of a cooperative plan allowing students to begin a
graduate degree in France and complete it at Andrews University pro-
duced concrete results.
It was not until the theology department affiliated with the Univer-
sity of Strasbourg in 1983 that ministerial graduates earned govern-
ment approved theology degrees. The arrangement to issue theology
degrees under the umbrella of the University of Strasbourg amounted
to accreditation by a reputable institution and allowed graduates to pur-
sue further studies in other universities. The same arrangement recog-
nized a fifth year of theological study as a master of theology. The
school of theology at Seminaire Adventiste defined its four-year pro-
gram as equivalent to the North American master of arts. In 1996 the
402
HIGHER LEARNING: EUROPE, AFRICA, AND LATIN AMERICA
school became Saleve Adventist University. Later Saleve Adventist

University added a master's degree in leadership administered by New-
bold College in cooperation with Andrews University. A master's de-
gree in youth ministry through the good offices of the University of
Wales, Lampeter and Newbold College also became part of the offer-
ings on the Collonges campus. 1
Larger than Saleve Adventist University was Friedensau Univer-
sity in Germany. The restoration of Adventist education in Germany
after World War II brought a renewal of ministerial education at
Marienhohe Seminary in 1948, itself having revived that same year
after a hiatus of nearly a decade beginning during the era of national
socialism. Similar to the French school, the German seminary did not
seek affiliation with a North American school. A request to the Gen-
eral Conference from Marienhohe to offer graduate studies died in
stalemate. In 1994, five years after the collapse of the German Demo-
cratic Republic, the ministerial training program transferred to Frie-
densau in former East Germany where a seminary that had func-
tioned during the post-World War II socialist years received recognition
in 1990 as a university. This merger resulted in a single ministerial
education program for Germany. By the end of the decade enrollment
exceeded 200 and the program included master's degrees in theology
and social work. 2
Newbold College
These experiences in France and Germany confirmed that denomi-
national leaders in Europe held the long established practices of Euro-
pean education and university traditions in high esteem and that an
affiliation with an American university yielded few benefits. But equal-
ly as strong was the growing sentiment among church leaders that the
Seminary at Andrews was the world center for Adventist theological
studies and that a systematic organization of seminary education should
be the ideal for all the world fields.
Probably no case in Europe better illustrated this conviction than the
story of Newbold College in England. In 1950 the Northern European
Division council voted to establish this school as the division educational
center, which meant that it would offer the equivalent of a four-year
theology program for students from the British Isles, the Netherlands,
403
Scandinavia, Poland, West Africa, and Ethiopia. Although these fields

had their own training schools, Adventist membership was too slim to
support a degree-granting institution for every country. In 1953 New-
bold began a new phase of its history as the division's senior college
and, by definition, an international institution. 3
The plan was well intentioned but it ran amuck inasmuch as the
school shared a problem common to nearly all private post-secondary
schools in the British system-it lacked degree-granting authority. This
problem intensified as pressure was mounting in Europe for Adventist
ministers to carry not only a degree but credentials from recognized
theological programs. Also of concern was a tendency by immigration
offices in former English colonies to deny visas to Newbold graduates
on mission appointments because they did not own degrees from a rec-
ognized institution.
From its early days the school in England had been a leading source
for workers who could enter colonial territories around the world on the
strength of an English passport, but after World War II the mentality in
these countries stiffened. Sometimes they did not permit such easy
travel. Newly independent governments were prone to make sure that
holders of visas who were planning to live and work in their countries
were prepared professionally to contribute to nation building. A recog-
nized degree would provide the necessary credential, but Newbold de-
grees could not qualify. To rectify this problem, in 1955, only two years
after becoming a senior college, Newbold negotiated an affiliation with
Washington Missionary College to allow its theology students to earn
an accredited degree.
Church leaders in the Northern European Division planned that oth-
er schools in their field would form a network of feeder institutions for
Newbold. Students would take two years of classes in their own coun-
try and complete their degrees in England with two additional years of
study. For practical purposes this arrangement redefined the schools in
Scandinavia and the Netherlands as junior colleges instead of training
schools because they lost their ministerial education programs. Be-
tween the years 1956 and 1964 theology students from England and
others from as far away as New Zealand and Jamaica took advantage of
the affiliated degree program; 102 students graduated with a baccalau-
reate degree in theology. Additionally, the Theological Seminary con-
404
ducted refresher classes without academic credit as extension centers at

other European locations.
But problems arose when attempting to superimpose an American
degree on a European educational framework. Questions surfaced in
1964 when V. Norskov Olson, the Danish-born president of Newbold
College, proposed to extend Newbold's program beyond theology to
majors in religion and history with several different minors. He also
proposed that Andrews University establish a master's degree in theol-
ogy on the English campus to enable European ministers to stay abreast
of advancing trends in their profession. These changes required altera-
tions in the affiliation with Washington Missionary College, which had
since become Columbia Union College.
As a result of these suggestions a candid exchange broke out among
Adventist educators in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and England on
the topic of comparable levels of education in Europe and the United
States. The crux of the issue was the conflict between the European
system on the one hand that followed regimented curricula and exter-
nal examinations in order to advance upward through the system, even-
tually into a university, and on the other hand the Adventist theology
degree, a baccalaureate program built on secondary preparation, Amer-
ican style, that lacked well defined counterparts in Europe.
Europeans argued that their secondary education carried students
more academic distance than American secondary schools and that Eu-
ropean degrees represented more penetrating scholarship than Ameri-
can degrees. While the American bachelor's degree was accepted in
Europe, ministers who earned it in the affiliation program at Newbold
were at a disadvantage if they tried to pursue graduate studies in a Eu-
ropean university. European educators feared they would weaken their
programs in the junior colleges if they made curricular changes to ac-
commodate what they believed were lowered admission requirements
at Newbold. These changes, they affirmed, would jeopardize their
government-approved curricula which prepared students for external
examinations.
This negative reaction did not mean that heads of schools and facul-
ties in the Nordic countries and the Netherlands were opposed to teach-
ing religion and preparing ministers. They lamented the loss of minis-
terial training from their campuses when their programs transferred to
405
England after Newbold became a senior college, and they perceived

decline in their schools as a byproduct. But in what was becoming an
oft-told tale, they saw denominational schools as places where youth in
the church could earn an education in an Adventist environment rather
than institutions that were predominantly worker-training schools, and
they felt obligated to protect the validity of denominational education
as it fit into the schema of their countries, which would benefit the ma-
jority of Adventist youth who attended.
The debate did not end quickly nor did church leaders retreat from
their aim to center their theology program at Newbold. Schools in
Scandinavia and the Netherlands maintained their government-
approved curricula but the denominational need for advanced theological
education carried the day. Andrews University initiated a regular ex-
tension school on the Newbold campus in 1964. In 1972 this arrange-
ment grew into the Postgraduate Year which allowed Newbold students
to take a year of graduate classes and transfer to the Andrews campus
to complete a master's degree. To add substance to this graduate pro-
gram an Ellen G. White and Seventh-day Adventist Research Centre
opened on the Newbold campus in 1974, the first of its kind outside the
United States.
By the 1990s Newbold students could chose one of three routes to a
degree. Through its revised affiliation with Columbia Union College
students could earn bachelor of science degrees in accounting and man-
agement. An agreement with the Open University Validation Services
made bachelor of arts degrees available in biblical studies and humani-
ties. The affiliation with Andrews offered bachelor's degrees in Eng-
lish, history, Islamic studies, and behavioral studies, and master's de-
grees in education, religion, and pastoral ministry.
Newbold resolved the conundrum of degree-granting authority by
blending American and English education through affiliations and the
Open University system. Through these means Adventist youth were
able to choose from a comparatively broad set of offerings to acquire an
education on a denominational campus. At the beginning of the twenty-
first century ministerial education remained the strongest of all fields;
about one of three students enrolled in theology, the program that had
started the school on its road to senior college status. With only a small
number of church schools in the Northern European Division-in the
406
year 2000 three secondary and nine elementary in the British Isles and
a handful scattered throughout Scandinavia and the Netherlands-a
teacher-preparation course was not a critical issue.
In 1950 the vision for Newbold was to develop an international cam-
pus. A half century later the school retained that character, in part be-
cause of the decline of worker-training courses in other schools in the
division and in part because English was the lingua franca of the de-
nomination. The college gained a preeminent role among denomina-
tional schools in Europe by accepting students from many Adventist
post-secondary campuses on the Continent into the Open University
Validation Services program, thus providing an alternative graduate
study track for church workers.
A Summary of Adventist Education in Europe

By the year 2000 Adventists operated fourteen post-secondary
schools in Europe with a total enrollment of nearly 2,100. Because
many of them offered narrow academic programs-primarily ministe-
rial training-enrollment tended to be small; one reported only fifteen
students. Eight schools enrolled fewer than a hundred and the largest
approximated 500. As a rule these schools had to find their niche as
legitimate institutions within the system of the country in which they
were located.
Of financial benefit to some ofthese schools such as those in France
and Spain was the Adventist Colleges Abroad program, a consortium
of Adventist schools that arranged for students from the United States
to attend a non-American college either to earn a large segment of cred-
it toward an academic major in a foreign language or simply to have an
experience of living abroad for a year. Known as ACA, the program
brought much needed cash to the host campuses.
Solusi After World War II

During the nineteenth century, England transplanted its educational
traditions throughout its Empire, and even after newly independent
countries dismantled the colonial system after World War II, vestiges
of these educational practices lingered. Such was the situation at Solusi
in Southern Rhodesia where Adventists experienced their first major
test in establishing post-secondary education for Africans.4
407
For fifty-three years after

its founding in 1895 Solusi of-
fered only elementary-level
education. In 1948 the General
Conference elevated the school
to secondary level, and four
years later authorized it to be-
come a four-year post-second-
ary institution. More than any
other factor stimulating this
fast-moving change was the
recognition that the colonial
system was crumbling through-
out Africa and that the Southern
African Division needed to es-
tablish an institution to prepare
Africans to take charge of de-
nominational affairs in their
Russell Staples, president of Solusi College,
congratulates a graduate of the school as Mau-
own countries. The responsi-
rice Hodgen, professor of education, looks on. bility to convert Solusi into a
Solusi was the first Seventh-day Adventist viable post-secondary school
school for Africans to upgrade to baccalaure-
ate status. In 1995 if received a charter as a
fell initially on the shoulders
university. of C. Fred Clarke, science and
math teacher at Helderberg
College in South Africa, who transferred to the Rhodesian campus as
principal.
The school proclaimed its new status by changing its name to Solu-
si Missionary College in 1954, but when Clarke arrived that same year
he discovered little that resembled a post-secondary school. Before him
was a deteriorating school plant, a diseased dairy herd ready for the
slaughterhouse, dysfunctional water and sanitation systems, a deplor-
ably equipped academic program, a treasury emptied of its money but
saddled with ample debt, a faculty with critical vacancies, and interper-
sonal problems on the staff that bore racial overtones. Little else but his
belief in miracles kept him going for the next seven years, but in
1961when he handed over the keys to his successor, Russell Staples,
Solusi had graduated its first class of theology students from the four-
408
year post-secondary program. At the time Solusi was the only private
school in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland to offer this level
of education to Africans.
Staples had joined the Solusi faculty earlier as part of the upgrading
process, and when he took over the school he stepped into office with
informed opinions about the school's future. He also faced troubling
political events that sowed seeds of uncertainty on the campus. Solusi's
inception as a senior college coincided with the formation of the Fed-
eration of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, an attempt to hold together English
territories in south-central Africa under a single government. In 1963
this ill-fated union disintegrated and out ofthe territory came Rhodesia
and the new countries of Zambia and Malawi. During the same year in
the wake of these events and other swiftly changing conditions, a series
of All-Africa conferences of churches, youth, and heads of independent
states convened in rapid succession to strategize for a new continent.
Adventist leaders could not ignore these happenings. Accordingly,
in 1963 prominent denominational personalities from all parts of the
continent assembled at Solusi for a Conference on African Trends. The
six-day agenda was packed with topics dealing with change in Africa
under the motto "A Changeless Christ for A Changing World." This
gathering came none too soon. Less than two years later a government
of European minority rule seized Rhodesia and unilaterally declared
independence. The nature of this new government alienated much of
Africa and made travel difficult for Solusi students from all parts of
continent. Fighting between discontented Africans and the government
threatened the safety of the school and in 1978 Solusi closed to allow
the storm to blow over. By the time the school reopened in 1980 the
majority Black population had gained control of the country, changed
its name to Zimbabwe, and instituted new reforms.
Staples did not stay at Solusi long enough to watch all ofthis excite-
ment personally. In 1967 he left but not before changing the direction of
Solusi's development. His foremost contribution was to reject a pro-
posal to correlate the theology degree with the program of external
studies outlined by the University of South Africa, which he admitted
looked good on paper but was beset with pitfalls. At Bethel College, a
well known Adventist school for Blacks in South Africa, a similar plan
was in operation for art, but Staples warned that applying it to theology
409
would bring chaos to Solusi. He and his faculty wanted no connection

between an Adventist theology program and the University of South
Africa. One of the main reasons was the fact that Solusi was an inter-
national school whose students came from countries vehemently op-
posed to the South African policy of apartheid. Adventist ministers
carrying credentials from the University of South Africa would be as
politically incorrect as one could become in Africa. Staples also point-
ed out that an alignment with the University of South Africa would
produce divisiveness on the campus. Students studying for external ex-
aminations often berated their peers enrolled in internal degree pro-
grams, and vice versa. According to Staples, whether or not to issue
recognized degrees was not the question; what was debatable was
whether the degree should be an Adventist degree from an affiliation
with Andrews University or an African degree from the University of
South Africa. Staples convinced his colleagues that the connection
should be with Andrews in order to maintain a strong Adventist char-
acter in the school.
Affiliation did not come easily. Richard Hammill, the new president
of the freshly hatched Andrews University, spoke optimistically about
the possibility, but Andrews' accrediting body, the North Central As-
sociation, balked, not permitting the new university to entangle itself in
such an arrangement unless the African campus became a complete
extension school. The fact that Andrews itself was struggling with ac-
creditation problems did not help.
The needed improvements at Solusi were daunting, involving every
aspect of the plant, equipment, and curriculum. Progress was slow and
costly. Not until 1978 did the first African college professor land a posi-
tion at the college. In 1981 library accessions finally reached 20,000
books. Long before Solusi's administration checked off all of the items
on its long list of recommended improvements, discussion about affili-
ation dissolved.
The tide turned in 1984. A visiting delegation from Zimbabwe's
government the previous year did not bring the long coveted official
recognition, but government accolades were nevertheless profuse. An-
drews University followed with an inspection team, which recom-
mended affiliation, and in October 1984 the connection became effec-
tive. It was a milestone, but did not completely resolve the problem of
410
unrecognized degrees. Zimbabwe's Ministry of Education was still not

satisfied with Solusi's improvements and withheld its approval, at the
same time refusing to recognize degrees from Andrews even though
most African countries did not question the United States institution.
Another decade passed before Robert Mugabe, president of Zimba-
bwe, visited the campus in 1995 to receive an honorary doctorate and
to announce a university charter for Solusi, complete with degree-
granting authority. Solusi became the second private school in the
country to achieve this status. The president lauded the new university,
but cautioned that evangelical zeal for conversions to Adventism should
never be an excuse to deny admission to eligible applicants. His coun-
sel was actually a policy statement by the government supporting Solu-
si University's freedom to maintain its religious identity, but at the same
time expecting it to contribute to national well being.
The original thrust of higher education at Solusi came from theolo-
gy, but degrees spread to other fields. At its centennial graduation the
largest single group earned degrees in business. This trend was deliber-
ate. Adventist education in Africa had revolved around basic education
and theology with little attention on the financial aspects of church ad-
ministration. In 1968 Solusi expanded its curriculum to include busi-
ness in order to correct this deficiency. As time would show, this cur-
ricular development would also fit well into the educational aims of
Africa in general.
Figures in the year 2000 indicated that Solusi had complied with
its mandate to be part of Zimbabwe's nation building. More than half
of its 842 students were non-Adventist. Also more than half enrolled
in business or business-related curricula, many undoubtedly aiming
for careers outside denominational employment inasmuch as the
church did not have that many job openings for graduates in those
fields. Teacher-preparation and ministerial education, the two long-
standing professions in the church, attracted about a fourth of the
students.
The University of Eastern Africa, Baraton

Denominational interest in Solusi stemmed from its long history as
the first Adventist school for underdeveloped people. Its evolution into
a university was one ofthe great successes of Adventism in Africa, but
411
more recent schools were no less important. Probably none received as

much attention as the University of Eastern Africa, Baraton, in Ke-
nya.
The urge for a post-secondary institution in this country reached
near coercive levels in the 1970s, not only because of substantial mem-
bership increases in East Africa but also as a result of an international
crisis. Since 1970 Middle East College in Lebanon had been the educa-
tional center for the newly fashioned Afro-Mideast Division, of which
East Africa was a part. Political volatility in Lebanon forced the school
to close in 1978, which, although temporary, provided the impetus for
a tertiary institution in a less risky climate. Because Adventist mem-
bership in Kenya was among the highest in the division, the country
became a likely location for a schooI.5
Events moved rapidly. Working through an Adventist member of
parliament, the Kenyan president agreed to lease a former agricultural
station to the church which the division would convert into a post-
secondary school. A hurried master plan depicted a total campus,
complete with student housing, academic facilities that extended to
agricultural and vocational instruction, a 120,000-volume library and
an Ellen G. White Research Centre, and a university press to publish
results of scholarly research. During the construction of the school,
developers saw to it that plant and academic equipment was not cast-
away quality. Classes began in January 1980.
The impact of University of Eastern Africa (UEAB), which became
the official institutional name soon after it began operations, was al-
most instantaneous. The library began with 5,000 donated volumes; by
1985 accessions approached 18,000. Academic offerings broadened
quickly into vocational fields. Some graduates entered public educa-
tion. Instructors in the dairy and agricultural program conducted ex-
periments in cooperation with agricultural agencies in Kenya, and the
library collaborated with other civic and university collections. In 1990
the school received a half-mill ion-dollar grant from the United States
government to erect and equip laboratories for auto mechanics and auto
body repair and to offer bachelor of science degrees in auto technology
and in teaching auto service.
From the beginning Kenyan President Daniel Atap Moi made it
clear that the new school should have degree-granting authority, but
412
twelve years passed before the government granted the charter. Moi
was a trained educator who had entered politics, becoming minister of
education before ascending to the presidency. His intentions for UEAB
were never in doubt, but neither was his deliberation. While the univer-
sity waited for government recognition it affiliated with Andrews Uni-
versity, which allowed graduates to enter the professional world with
recognized degrees. After only a decade since opening day, the univer-
sity graduated students from eight fields with business and agriculture
at the top of the list.
In 1991 President Moi granted the long-anticipated charter. With
explicit thanks to Andrews University for its mentoring role in develop-
ing the African institution, he emphasized the place of high academic
standards in Kenya. "My chief concern here," he said, "is on the qual-
ity of education our youth should receive at university level. This con-
cern arises out of my belief that universities have a role to play in the
liberation of our people from hunger, ignorance and disease. Through
their researches, universities should also act as catalysts for develop-
ment."6There could be little question that Kenyan government officials
viewed the University of Eastern Africa as far more than a Seventh-day
Adventist worker-training institution; they gave it a mandate to become
a research center and to contribute to Kenya's nation-building process.
During the 1990s UEAB enlarged its program as a higher-education
school for denominational workers and professionals. The first class of
baccalaureate nurses graduated in 1992 and by the end of the decade
the university teamed with Lorna Linda University to offer master's
degrees in public health. Master of arts degrees in education were also
part of the graduate program, and by 2002 the faculty of theology were
on the verge of master of arts and master of divinity degrees.
Enrollment reached nearly 1,200 by the end of the century, momen-
tarily establishing UEAB as the largest Adventist tertiary institution in
Africa. Slightly less than half of the students were non-Adventist. Of
all denominational post-secondary schools on the continent the enroll-
ment at Baraton showed the most balance among fields of study. Busi-
ness remained the first choice among students, but sciences and health
were also popular, each attracting more than a hundred students. The-
ology was one of the larger departments with slightly less than a hun-
dred enrollees.
413
The University of Eastern Africa owed its quick rise from a vacant
agricultural station to one of the prominent tertiary institutions in the
Adventist world to a number of factors. In addition to a friendly gov-
ernment, the foremost was a willingness by the Adventist community
to design a school with an academic breadth that matched Kenya's na-
tional aims. It was a typical course of action in the developing world.
Elements of Change in Adventist Education in Africa

The events that unfolded at Solusi and Baraton were only two of
many in Africa. By the beginning of the twenty-first century the Ad-
ventist Accrediting Association had approved ten post-secondary
schools that ranged across the continent from South Africa north to
Nigeria and Ghana in West Africa to Kenya and Ethiopia in the north-
east. Most of these institutions originated after World War II. Two of-
fered graduate programs. In addition, several unaccredited schools
were in operation and worker-training curricula were still producing
church employees.
Of special note were schools in Central Africa and along the coast
of the hump. Adventist University of Central Africa in Rwanda, estab-
lished in 1979, became the single most important educational center for
French-speaking Africans before closing in 1994, no longer able to
function side by side with tribal conflict that bathed Rwanda with the
blood of tens of thousands of slaughtered victims. By 1996, after hos-
tilities had subsided, the African-Indian Ocean Division recreated the
university on four campuses in French-speaking Africa, all taking the
name of Adventist University followed by the campus name. Central
Africa resumed operations in KilgaJi, Rwanda; Cosendai opened in
Cameroon, Wallace in Lukanga, Congo, and Zurcher in Madagascar.
Each of the three institutions outside Rwanda developed from earlier
secondary and worker-training schools dating back to 1936. Each cam-
pus operated independently with separate administrations, but a limited
number of personnel migrated from school to school and a single uni-
versity senate became the seat of governance for the system. In 2003
combined enrollment on all four campuses approximated 1,200.7
Twenty miles north of Accra, Ghana, Valley View University began
with only a handful of students in 1979. A persistent and effective af-
filiation with Griggs University helped the school to develop a bache-
414
lor's degree in theology, and its accreditation with Ghana's National

Accreditation Board permitted it to offer additional degrees in com-
puter science and accounting. By 2003 its enrollment reached 800. 8
Following five years of planning, Babock University in Nigeria
opened its doors to seven students in 1959, known at the time as Adven-
tist College of West Africa. An affiliation with Andrews University in
1975 stimulated growth, and in 1988 an extension program from the
Michigan campus enabled ministerial students to earn master's de-
grees. In 1999 the Nigerian government recognized the school as a pri-
vate university, resulting in an enrollment soaring above 3,000, which
catapulted the campus above the University of Eastern Africa as the
largest Adventist tertiary institution in Africa. By 2003 it offered four-
year degrees in more than twenty fields induding nursing, computer
technology, theology, and a variety of areas in business. It maintained
its affiliation with Andrews University to grant master's degrees in
pastoral ministry and religion. 9
Several causes contributed to this growth of denominational higher
education in Africa. The demise of colonialism gave birth to a large
number of new independencies, and as the church repeatedly redrew its
administrative map to group these young and often struggling coun-
tries into manageable administrative clusters, schools followed as in-
struments of reorganization. The languages that Africa's colonial mas-
ters left behind helped to determine the lines of reorganization. Tribal
differences also influenced new boundaries. Political leanings some-
times held regions together or conversely, forced separation and more
reorganization.
Apart from these external forces affecting the number of Adventist
schools was the internal matter of membership growth. From the 1970s
onward conversions multiplied almost exponentially; by the year 2000
African Adventists numbered into the millions. The sheer weight of the
Adventist population demanded schools in which to prepare denomina-
tional employees, especially ministers. Church leaders regarded the
lack of educated leadership as a major crisis.
Educators most frequently targeted theology to be the strongest aca-
demic field among the schools. Across all the accredited tertiary
schools, about a fourth ofthe students chose careers in the ministry, but
total enrollment was approximately equally divided between Adventist
415
and non-Adventist students, which meant that about half of the Adven-
tist students were preparing for the ministry. The complete figures in-
dicate that the trend at Solusi toward business as the favored field of
study among all students held true throughout the rest of Africa. Near-
ly thirty percent, the largest single category, selected curricula leading
to careers in the business world.
The universities in Africa were very gratifying to church leaders,
but looking at Adventist education across the continent, observers could
see that denominational schools were not an unqualified success. Not-
withstanding the membership explosion, total enrollment in Adventist
post-secondary institutions approximated 5,000 at the end of the cen-
tury, a fact that gave rise to questions about the adequacy of Adventist
schools to accommodate the rising tide of potential students. By com-
parison, in the year 2000 African Adventists numbered twenty times
the membership in South Korea, but enrollment in Sahmyook Univer-
sity was equal to approximately eighty percent of the students in all of
Africa's tertiary schools combined. It was obvious that thousands of
Adventist youth in Africa were not attending denominational schools.
In an effort to systematize the needs of schools and plans for the
future, in 1994 and 1995 a Commission on Seventh-day Adventist Edu-
cation in Africa toured the campuses of post-secondary schools and
visited the division and union offices of education throughout the con-
tinent. Commission members usually found cordial relations between
Adventist education and governments, but some other aspects of Ad-
ventist education were troubling. All too frequently school plants were
inadequate, underfunded, understaffed or staffed with too many un-
qualified persons. Plans to expand programs and school plants were
optimistic to the point of being unrealistic as the commission members
assessed them. 1O
But however many question marks the commission found, the single
most striking feature of denominational education in Africa led back to
Solusi's founding when Cecil Rhodes granted land to the young Adven-
tist church for the purpose of bringing civilization to Africans. To vary-
ing degrees, ever since Adventists claimed their 12,000 acres in Mata-
beleland, denominational schools continued to play the role that Rhodes
envisioned while at the same time fulfilling the church objective of
preparing Africans to become carriers of the Christian gospel.
416
From among the tens of thousands who attended village schools to

learn how to rise above the hunger, ignorance and disease that Kenyan
President Daniel Atap Moi said still existed in his country in 1991, no
one knows what percentage became enduring church members. But the
tradition of the mission school did not die with modernizing trends.
Baptisms among non-Adventist students at the end of the century ap-
proached thirteen percent. The Africa of2000 was not the same land as
in 1895, but the needs of an emerging people were still present, and it is
to the credit of Adventist schools from Solusi to the University of East-
ern Africa that they were able to blend the social gospel with the saving
gospel to create a single message.
An Overview of South America and Inter-America

In the American republics south of the United States a combination
of events led to singular achievements in Adventist higher education
that had previously been far out of reach, even for the most optimisti-
cally minded. To a large extent, these accomplishments derived from
the most systematically developed educational establishments in the
Adventist world. Also of importance was church membership, which
began to rise significantly in the 1950s. The South American and Inter-
American divisions were the largest outside North America, and by
1970 more than one of every four Seventh-day Adventists in the world
lived in Latin America and the Caribbean.1I
Adventist medical units were scattered across South America, and
in Brazil and Argentina two major publishing houses produced large
volumes of denominational literature. Publishing and health-care insti-
tutions lagged in Inter-America, but after 1945 a ring of hospitals
sprouted up. These institutions, combined with a swiftly increasing
number of churches and schools, presented a steadily growing demand
for denominational employees which church leaders expected Adven-
tist training schools to supply.
The situation was complicated by the proximity of the two divisions
to the United States. A steady flow of immigrants northward added to
the Hispanic population that already occupied the southern fringe and
many of the large cities in the United States. This community became
a fruitful evangelistic source for North America, and by the 1970s the
Spanish-speaking membership in the United States numbered many
14-IP.FTW.
417
thousands, constituting hundreds of congregations and creating a need

for pastors.
Dating from the era of World War I former missionaries to Latin
America attempted to educate Spanish-speaking ministers in the Unit-
ed States, but their efforts always ended as truncated good intentions.
The last was a seminary near Albuquerque, New Mexico that prepared
a bevy of church workers after its founding in 1942, but became the
conference boarding academy ten years later. Many of the Spanish-
speaking ministers in North America originated in Latin America, thus
the North American Division depended on schools in Inter-America
and South America for workers to shepherd one of its fastest growing
sectorsP
Between 1955 and 1973 twelve of the training schools from Cuba
to Argentina received Board of Regents approval as four-year post-
secondary institutions. Eight of the campuses were Spanish, the re-
maining four were English, Portuguese, and French. In every case
ministerial education was the motivating cause of upgrading. Because
neither South America nor Inter-America designated a training school
as the division educational center these institutions functioned more
or less on an equal administrative footing.
But the schools were not equal. Brazil College served all Brazilian
unions and until other institutions developed it functioned as a regional
campus. Others, such as West Indies College in Jamaica, River Plate
College in Argentina, and Antillian College in Cuba, which moved to
Puerto Rico, developed strong reputations and attracted students from
other parts of the Americas. Nursing programs at Montemorelos, Mex-
ico and River Plate College also drew international enrollments.
While this system of education was well organized, post-secondary
schools functioned without government recognition. Governments fre-
quently accredited nursing education and teacher-preparation courses,
which allowed graduates to receive certificates of completion, but the
institutions remained unrecognized, although countenanced and even
encouraged by public officials. As was the case elsewhere, diplomas
from unrecognized courses were valid only in denominational circles.
As institutional development progressed Andrews University of-
fered some extension courses in both Inter-America and South America
and affiliated with West Indies College and Caribbean Union College,
418
both of which originated in the British system and faced problems of

recognition similar to Adventist schools in other former English colo-
nies. Educational policies differed from country to country in the Latin
nations, but during the 1970s and onward a string of actions in coun-
tries ranging from the Dominican Republic to Argentina brought offi-
cial recognition to Adventist tertiary institutions that had already re-
ceived denominational authorization as four-year, post-secondary
schools. A broadening of curriculum usually accompanied recognition
or followed soon after. As a rule of thumb, governments were friendly
and often helpful in the process, partly because they were interested in
improving literacy rates and raising basic educational standards.
The University of Montemorelos and Inter-America

Through the 1950s Antillian College in Cuba appeared to be ad-
vancing toward legitimate post-secondary status more satisfactorily
than any other training school in Inter-America, but a revolution halted
the school's progress after 1959. The first training school in the division
to break the barrier and receive recognition was Colegio Vocacional y
Profesional in Montemorelos, Mexico. Ministerial education had al-
ways been the primary course on this campus, but a nursing school
connected to the hospital on the edge of the campus had earned wide-
spread public respect, and medicine and healthcare became key issues
in the process of academic recognition.
The demand for medical personnel in Inter-America was far greater
than Adventist institutions could furnish, going far beyond nurses to
include physicians and technicians. In 1969 the Inter-American Divi-
sion officers voted to sponsor students in medical school and technical
training. Nearly at the same time the administration of the school at
Montemorelos requested degree-granting authority from the state of
Nuevo Leon, hinting that a school of medicine might be possible inas-
much as a hospital was part of the institutional campus. Suddenly in
April 1973, without consultation with school officials, the governor of
Nuevo Leon signed a decree that elevated the training school to a
degree-granting institution-a university-and authorized it to establish
a medical school.
State authorization struck the campus as a shockwave, but reaction
by the denomination was less dramatic. Two months after the governor's
419
announcement, an ad hoc committee convened on the campus to sur-

vey the readiness-or unreadiness-of the newly created Montemorelos
University to take advantage of the future that had opened up before it.
During its proceedings the committee repeatedly referred to the pros-
pects of a denominational school of medicine as a case of providential
intervention and indeed, many conditions were favorable to the new
order. The hospital enjoyed a reputation as one of the finest in north-
ern Mexico. Adventist membership in Mexico exceeded 60,000 and
was rapidly increasing. As the largest Spanish-speaking country in
the world, Mexico was probably in the best position to address the
chronic lack of medical personnel in both Inter-America and South
America.
Denominational approval in principle for the university came in the
autumn of 1973, but on condition that the reorganized school should
become an institution of the Inter-American Division and that improve-
ments would follow both the general upgrading instructions from the
In 1973 Mexico's Vocational and Professional Training School received state permission
to become a degree-granting institution. This plaque commemorates the visit of Mexi-
can President Jose Lopez Portillo to the University of Montemorelos in 1981 to inaugu-
rate the new medical center as the clinical facility for the second school of medicine in
the Adventist world.
420
General Conference Department of Education and the specific instruc-

tions the ad hoc committee spelled out. A second committee composed
of representatives from the General Conference, Inter-American Divi-
sion, and the Mexican Union was to visit the campus in 1974 to take
stock of the upgrading process before the schools of medicine and nurs-
ing began operations. The new university program was not to exceed
the recommendations by the first ad hoc committee.
If the limitations laid down by the General Conference appeared
cautious it was because the new university faced gargantuan tasks de-
spite basically favorable conditions. The campus was lacking in ade-
quate library and plant facilities, sufficient equipment, and qualified
personnel, all serious deficiencies. A recognized teacher-preparation
program was already in place and the school had begun an abbreviated
accounting course, but several degree curricula and a medical instruc-
tional staff were necessary to become a university. Original plans called
for five separate degree-granting schools: accounting, nursing, educa-
tion, medicine, and theology. Deliberately, no graduate education was
part of the plan.
These beginnings were minimal. Besides denominational funds,
about $5,000,000 flowed onto the campus from the German-based
Protestant Central Agency for Development Aid, enabling the univer-
sity to redesign the campus and erect a set of architecturally coordi-
nated buildings. To strengthen the theology program the White Estate
established an Ellen G. White Research Center on the campus.
In spite of the importance of theology, most of the attention was on
the school of medicine, which began in 1975 as only the second physi-
cian's course in the Adventist world. Lorna Linda University extended
a helping hand, sending instructors on short-term teaching assignments
to the Mexican campus. The first class of twenty-five graduated in 1979
and the following year eighteen more completed the course. The largest
single group of medical students came from Mexico, but others hailed
from a half dozen other Latin American countries, and Asia, Africa,
and the United States.
In 1981 Mexican President Jose Lopez Portillo spoke at the open-
ing of a new hospital that had been integrated into the university as
the clinical facility for the school of medicine. In the same year grad-
uate education in religion began as an extension of Andrews Univer-
421
sity. By the end of the decade Montemorelos University was offering

its own master's degrees in education and public health. During the
1990s curriculum expansion brought master's degrees in business and
pastoral theology, specializations in ophthalmology and odontology,
and a doctorate in education. The equivalent of a baccalaureate degree
was available in more than fifteen fields as divergent as theology and
nutrition.
Recognition, which had been so elusive during the first thirty years
of the school's existence, became commonplace in the next thirty. Ap-
proval by the state of Nuevo Leon gave blanket accreditation to the
university, and the school joined national bodies that oversaw higher
education and private institutions. The school also maintained mem-
bership in associations that monitored professional programs.
At the beginning of the new century the number of post-secondary
schools in Inter-America rose to ten, all of which achieved official rec-
ognition except Caribbean Union College in Trinidad. The Ministry of
Education for Trinidad and Tobago accredited the teacher-preparation
course, but an affiliation with Andrews University allowed students to
earn accredited degrees in other fields. In keeping with the division's
long and consistent support of elementary and secondary schools, near-
ly thirty percent of the 8,800 students in the institutions of higher edu-
cation enrolled in teacher-preparation programs.
Enrollment on other campuses in Inter-America forged ahead, espe-
cially at Dominican Adventist University in the Dominican Republic
and Northern Caribbean University in Jamaica, formerly West Indies
College, rivaling Montemorelos University, but because of its stature as
a division institution, the Mexican school offered a greater breadth of
programs, especially in the health sciences.
Accomplishments in Brazil and Argentina

In 1945 the best known campuses in South America were Argenti-
na's River Plate College, the oldest Adventist educational institution in
the division, and Brazil College on the outskirts of Sao Paulo. The Bra-
zilian school was the largest in South America with more than a hun-
dred students studying at the post-secondary level. In 1959 the General
Conference authorized the school to offer a baccalaureate degree in
theology. Two years later in 1961 the school became an institute, Insti-
422
Colegio Adventista Brasileiro grew to be the largest of Seventh-day Adventist post-sec-

ondary schools in South America. By the 1980s the city of Sao Paulo surrounded the
rural atmosphere of the campus and in 1984 the institution split. moving the theological
program and related studies to a new campus while leaving the sciences and related
studies on the original site. This post- World War II photograph shows the older cam-
pus.
tuto Adventista de Ensino, which designated it as a recognized Brazil-
ian post-secondary institution offering between five and ten programs.
The campus reorganized itself into several schools with degree-grant-
ing authority, but theology degrees remained unrecognized.
At the time of its origin the school was rural, but population growth
in Sao Paulo pushed the city closer to the campus, which fomented a
mood in the 1970s to move the school to a different location. The up-
shot was a decision to construct a new campus at Engenheiro Coelho,
about 120 miles from the original site, to which theology and programs
in social studies and humanities would transfer, leaving health, nursing
and sciences in Sao Paulo. The new campus added an Ellen G. White
Research Center for advanced studies in religion and eventually devel-
oped into the largest theological center in South America, offering both
master's degrees and doctorates by the end of the 1990s. In 1998 the
entire complex of both campuses advanced to the status of a university
center, the next to the highest rank for universities in Brazil. 13
423
Official recognition at River Plate College came in piecemeal fash-

ion, illustrating the tantalizing, if not patience-testing, pace of the de-
velopment of Adventist education in some countries. The curricular
stress at the Argentine school also lay on theology, but in the public eye
the school's academic reputation derived from a teacher-education pro-
gram dating from the 1920s whose graduates received official certifi-
cates after passing an external examination. The institution received
government recognition in 1943 as a secondary school, and ten years
later the teacher-preparation course became part of the secondary pro-
gram and also received official recognition. It was the first time in Ar-
gentine history that a private Protestant school acquired this level of
approval.
River Plate College had been offering post-secondary classes for a
dozen years when the General Conference authorized it as a four-year
post-secondary institution in 1958. During the 1960s and 1970s the col-
lege developed post-secondary tracks in teaching, office administra-
tion, philosophy, and music, each of which earned official approval. In
1969 a business course gained government recognition, and in 1973
Rosario University, less than a hundred miles to the south, incorporated
the school of nursing into its school of medicine. A rise in Adventist
membership throughout South America created a need for a nontradi-
tional educational option, which led Home Study Institute, the Adven-
tist correspondence school, to establish a branch on the River Plate
campus in 1966.
Since 1943 River Plate had been advancing program by program
toward recognition, but total institutional accreditation remained be-
yond its grasp. Although the campus was rural it was never out of the
sight of government officials. In 1965 Argentine President Arturo lI-
lia, a physician by profession, toured the campus, commending col-
lege and hospital administrators for their educational and medical
programs, but leaving no encouragement that recognition was forth-
coming. Fifteen years later negotiations for university status began
with the Argentine Ministry of Education, but ten years passed before
the coveted recognition came. It was a moment of ecstasy, "where for
years university-level programs seemed an impossible dream," wrote
South American Division Education Director Nevil Gorski. '4 With
it also came a name change to River Plate Adventist University, a
424
degree-granting institution organized into four schools: theology,

health sciences, business, and a single school for humanities, educa-
tion, and social sciences.
In 1994 the university began a fifth school, a school of medicine,
which the government accredited in 2001. This new undertaking joined
its sister institution in Mexico as the third physician's course in the
denomination which would serve Latin America and the Caribbean,
the home of thirty Adventist hospitals and major clinics besides lesser
health-care units. As River Plate Adventist University began its second
century it offered more than thirty fields of study, including a master's
degree and a doctorate in theology.
The Latin American Theological Seminary

Like its Brazilian counterpart, River Plate offered graduate degrees
in theology through the Latin American Theological Seminary, most
often known as SALT. During the early 1970s River Plate and Brazil
colleges joined a growing number of schools requesting permission to
inaugurate graduate studies in theology. Typically, these petitions re-
ceived a mixed reception at the General Conference, but denomina-
tional leaders realized that they could not ignore the surge for post-
baccalaureate education and generally sought ways to upgrade
gradually. For several years leaders in both South America and Inter-
America considered a single institution for both fields, but by 1978 they
jettisoned the idea as infeasible because of the vast territory the semi-
nary would have to serve. Instead, the two divisions substituted their
first request with a second to offer graduate studies in theology at their
three major campuses in Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil.
The next year, after the newly created General Conference Board
of Theological Education inspected the campuses to advise on mat-
ters of upgrading, South America launched SALT to organize pasto-
ral education programs on all campuses in the South American Divi-
sion into a single administrative unit. The seminary was not an
institution but an administrative office in the South American Divi-
sion headquarters in Brasilia that managed theological education. Ini-
tially, SALT developed a graduate curriculum for summer classes at
River Plate College and Brazil College. As the seminary matured it
incorporated Northeast Brazil College and campuses in Peru, Chile,
425
and Bolivia. Departments of religion at all post-secondary schools

became branches of the seminary but continued to offer degrees in
the name of their schools.
The academic aim of the seminary was not to produce theological
scholars but to professionalize the South American ministry in pursuit
of the church's evangelistic needs, which, besides direct evangelism,
included teaching, pastoring, and church administration. Beginning in
1981 with two master's degrees, SALT added doctoral studies in theol-
ogy and pastoral theology in the 1990s. The latter degree resembled the
North American doctor of ministry but included more theology. In ad-
dition to the approval by the General Conference Board of Theological
Education and the Adventist Accrediting Association, SALT joined
theological associations that recognized seminaries in Brazil and Span-
ish-speaking South America. By 2002 the seminary had graduated
about 600 students.
The Latin American Theological Seminary was unique in several
ways. It became the denomination's supreme example of church ad-
ministrative control of ministerial education. With seminary offices at
the division headquarters and the seminary president doubling as a
counseling secretary of the South American Division, SALT became
an arm of the division, or perhaps even a second department of educa-
tion assigned to theological instruction.
During the 1970s when conversations began about a seminary for
Latin America, five post-secondary schools in South America offered
ministerial education, one a junior college in northeastern Brazil.
Politically, the division was bi-polar with one sphere in Portuguese-
speaking Brazil and the second embracing the Spanish repUblics. Each
of these regions experienced striking membership increases, which
made it impractical to designate an existing institution as a single edu-
cational center for the division. SALT was an organization designed for
multi-campus functions, which was especially applicable to South
America but would not have been necessary in divisions such as South-
ern Asia where only one ministerial program existed.
By the year 2000 eight different post-secondary schools operated in
South America, most of them universities. By creating a central office
for theological studies and removing it from the control of the tertiary
institutions, South America preserved the notion of a system of higher
426
education revolving around theology and at the same time avoided the
financial strain of supporting a sprawling university.
SALT also exerted a standardizing influence on theology education.
With the best qualified instructors from various corners of South
America conducting summer classes, all branch sites of SALT shared a
common personnel pool. The result was a tendency of the various reli-
gion departments to become more nearly equal. Also contributing to
the equalizing process were criteria with which institutions complied
in order to qualify as a branch of the seminary.
About 8,400 students enrolled in South America's tertiary schools
in the year 2000. While the division put its best efforts into ministerial
education, the parent organizations of the schools-the unions-were
responsible to acquire official recognition and develop new curricula
according to regulatory legislation in the countries where the schools
existed. Teacher-preparation courses and health sciences, including
medicine, were the fields of study in highest demand, each with more
than 1,900 students, which reflected the long history of schools and
health-care institutions in the division.
In the year 2000 the Inter-American Division followed with its long-
awaited seminary when the Association of Theological Schools in the
United States and Canada recognized the Inter-American Theological
Seminary with headquarters at the division offices in Miami, Florida.
Previously, graduate studies in ministerial education in Inter-America
were extensions from the Seminary at Andrews University. The new
division seminary, known as IATS, absorbed these programs into a
single institution, which, in a manner resembling its South American
counterpart, assumed control of theological studies in all tertiary
schools and exerted a similar standardizing influence on ministerial
education. Headed by a dean, IATS offers graduate studies at branches
at the college in Trinidad and the universities in Mexico, Puerto Rico,
the Dominican Republic, Colombia, and Venezuela.
A Summary of Adventist Tertiary Education

Seen against the tradition of training schools that dominated Adven-
tist education until after World War II, the emergence of nearly a hun-
dred tertiary institutions around the globe by the year 2000, most
of them officially recognized, was an abundant academic harvest for
427
Seventh-day Adventists. Not only had baccalaureate education or its

equivalent spread throughout the Adventist world, but graduate studies
also became common. However, regardless of how penetrating it was,
most graduate education retained a pragmatic character that derived
from the longstanding denominational custom of establishing schools
to prepare church employees. Given this underlying purpose, Adventist
higher education tended toward the professions and applied sciences
rather than erudition in letters. In this intellectual climate scholarly
activity and research seldom received official support for its own sake;
more often it had to serve denominational interests in some manner,
even if nothing more than creating a favorable public image.
Before the majority of denominational schools in the world fields
stood on their own as recognized institutions, some of them affiliated
with North American colleges, which established accredited programs
by proxy. Ministerial training retained its place ofprimacy in Adventist
education. Because of its resources as the designated world center for
Adventist theological education, Andrews University became the pri-
mary exporter of accredited Adventist education. Andrews also was
the strongest magnet to draw church workers from all corners of the
Adventist map and to educate them for professional roles in their home
fields. In 1980 the Inter-American Division employed 186 administra-
tors, teachers, and pastors who were graduates of various programs at
Andrews. Ten years later the university reported eleven affiliations be-
sides numerous extension programs. 15
During the 1990s, as a larger number of Adventist tertiary institu-
tions around the globe received recognition, the role Andrews Univer-
sity had played declined but remained strong. Its relationship with oth-
er institutions in the world fields became increasingly similar to a
sibling rather than a mentor; however, official recognition of Adventist
education was not universal, which made the presence of Andrews or
another accredited institution a continued necessity, especially for
younger, still developing schools.
As the leader of denominational academic medicine, Lorna Linda
University had also been and continued to be influential in Adventist
institutions, but its shadow rested more on medical centers than schools.
It also sought out non-Adventist sites at which it could establish a de-
nominational presence and extend a healing hand. By 1995 it was af-
428
filiated with five university dental programs in Scandinavia and fifteen

medical centers in Asia, Africa, and Russia. It also organized graduate
study programs in public health that drew international enrollments
among Adventists. 16
As Adventist higher education around the world entered the twenty-
first century, it was not a homogenous enterprise, but for all of its inter-
nal differences it still bore the marks ofa single origin. Because of their
narrower purpose training schools had been more similar to each other
than were tertiary institutions. While theological education had been
the central motivation in the spread of accredited post-secondary edu-
cation, by the year 2000 Adventist higher education had become multi-
faceted to accommodate the needs of a broader spectrum of potential
students.
More than a century earlier Ellen White had written from her Aus-
tralian home that Adventists should establish educational centers
around the world because church workers should receive their prepara-
tion in the fields in which they were to serve. In addition she advised
that schools should not aim at a narrow clientele but that all Adventist
youth should have the opportunity of church-sponsored education in
order to become productive persons whether they entered private or
public life. It was an obvious implication that Adventist education
should be as broad as possible and that educators should not expect all
students to be formal church workers. 17
The approximately one hundred Adventist tertiary schools at the
beginning of the twenty-first century fulfilled this counsel. Graduates
marched from these institutions by the thousands, educated for church
service, but post-secondary curricula also broadened to accommodate
Adventist students who would enter private life. Denominational high-
er education was not all things to all people, but it offered an extensive
repertoire of professional courses that the church community at large
could not foresee in 1900.
'Keld J. Reynolds, "Two Educational Councils," (Journal of True Education, December

1948), pp. 20, 21; Otto Schuberth, "Southern Europe," (Journal of True Education, June
1954), p. 10; Pietro Copiz, "New Buildings, Exciting Opportunities," (Journal of Adventist
Education, Summer 1990), p. 32,33; Minutes, General Conference Committee, Southern
European Division, 1963; P. Steiner to E. E. Cossentine, January 26, 1966, AST, RG 51; Min-
429
utes of the European Theological Education Committee, October 12, 1976, ibid.; Minutes of
the Board of Theological Education, October 3, 1977, ibid.; Sal eve Adventist University Bul-
letin, 1999-2000. Email, Andrea Luxton to Floyd Greenleaf, March 2, 2005.
2Minutes of the European Theological Education Committee, October 12, 1976, AST, RG
51; Minutes of the Board of Theological Education, October 3,1977, ibid .; Johannes Hart-
lapp, ed. Chronik Freidensau, pp. 52-64.
)The section about Newbold College is summarized from Northern Light, August, 1953;
November, 1953; November, 1954; April, 1955; March, 1956; August, 1959; November, 1959;
no. 6, 1972; no. 5,1974; Newbold College Prospectus, 1998-1999; World Report 2000. Archi-
val materials from AST, RG 51: V. Norskov Olsen to E. E. Cossentine, July 23, 1964; Duane
S. Johnson to Richard Hammill, July 28, 1964; Henning Karstrom to B. B. Beach, no date (c.
summer 1965); Norskov Olsen to Richard Hammill, September 24,1964; J. van Westrhenen,
"Junior College-Newbold-C.U.C. Affiliation and Credits;" "General Comments from Stan-
borough School on the Letter re: Junior College-Newbold-CUC Affiliation and Credits;"
"Department of Health, Education and Welfare, International Education Office;" "Statement
of the Faculty of Toivonlinna Junior College on Its Relation to Newbold College;" Vaino
Jaakkola to B. B. Beach, December 2, 1964; "Replies to the Ten Questions."
41nformation about Solusi comes from Brown, Chronology, pp. 126, 167, 168; Sylvia J.
Clarke, "Solusi: From Secondary School to College," (Adventist Heritage, Spring 1992), pp.
4-14; Review and Herald, June 23, 1960; March I, 1962; February 13, 1964; Adventist Re-
view, April 23,1981; Trans-Africa Division Outlook, May 15, 1980; January 15, 1984; East-
ern Africa Division Outlook, August-October 1984; January-February 1985; September-Oc-
tober 1985; May-July 1990; July-September 1994; April-June 1995; World Report 2000.
Interview: Milton Siepman, January 8, 2002. Archival materials from AST, RG51: Russell
Staples to J. B. Cooks, September 8, 1961; Richard Hammill, "A Report To the Board of
Trustees of Solusi College and To the Southern African Division Committee Concerning the
Request for an Affiliation with Andrews University;" E. E. Cossentine to Robert H. Pierson,
November 1,1965; Richard H. Davis to Richard Hammill, November 12, 1965; "Memoran-
dUIll on the Future Development of Solusi College Presented to the Solusi College Board of
Managers," November 15, 1965; F. G. Thomas, "Memorandum on Educational Problems in
Rhodesia," March II, 1966.
5For the description of UEAB see Adventist Review, May 3 and June 28, 1979; Eastern
Africa Division Outlook, April 15, 1984; May-June 1986; November-December 1985; March-
April 1990; August-September 1990; March-May 1991; April-June 1992; University ofEast-
ern Africa Bulletin, 1998-2000 and 2000-2002; World Report 2000.
bEastern Africa Division Outlook, March-May, 1991.
7Directory of Seventh-day Adventist Colleges and Universities, 2004 ed. pp. 7-10.
8Ibid., p. 108.
9lbid. p. 19.
'OData Book of the Commission on Seventh-day Adventist Education in Africa. (Silver
Spring, MD: General Conference Department of Education, 1995).
liThe following sources have provided information about South America and Inter-
America, including the Latin American Theological Seminary: General Conference Min-
utes, October 30, 1958; October 25, 1965; August 18, 1966; October 4 and December 27,
1973; Interview, Enrique Becerra, February 13,2002; Statistical Report, 1945, 1950, 1970;
World Report. 2000; Brown, Chronology, passim; General Conference Bulletin, 1980, no. 3,
p. 10; no. 8, p. 12; Nevil Gorski, "Doors Opening for Adventist Education," (Journal of Ad-
430
ventist Education, Summer 1990), pp. 60-65; Greenleaf, Adventist Church in Latin America
and the Caribbean, vol. 2, pp. 458-468; Universidad de Montemorelos Catalogo, 1998-2000;
"Report of the Committee Appointed to Survey the Readiness of the Colegio Vocacional Y
Profesional Montemorelos for Upgrading to Senior College Status," June 10-12, 1973, AST,
RG 51; "Report of the Accrediting Visiting Team, Seminario Adventist Latinoamericano de
Teologia, 19 May to 3 June, 1991," GC Department of Education; LATS Evaluation, self-
study report, 2002; Report of the Visiting Commilleefor Latin American Adventist Theologi-
cal Seminary, 2002; Reportfrom the Argentinian Campus to the General Conference Survey
Commillee. 1997; "Evaluation Visit to the South American Theological Seminary, February
9-17, 1997"; Minutes of the Board of Theological Education, October 3, 1977, January 4,
1978, April 21 and October 3, 1978, October 2, 1979, October 6, 1980. Directory of Seventh-
day Adventist Colleges and Universities. 2004 ed., p. 50.
12For the impact of Hispanic immigration on the North American Division, see Manuel
Vasquez, The Untold Story: JOO Years of Hispanic Adventism. 1899-1999 (Nampa, \0: Pa-
cific Press Publishing Association, 2000).
lJThe best source of information about the development of Brazil College into a univer-
sity center is Alberto R. Timm, ed., Instituto Adventista de Ensino Campus 2: 15 Anos de
Historia (Engenheiro Coelho, SP: Imprensa Universitaria Adventista, 1999). See chapter II,
by Andre M. Pasini, "IAE-C2: Origem E Desenvolvimento Fisico," pp. 8-17.
14Nevil Gorski, "Doors Opening for Adventist Education," (Journal of Adventist Educa-
tion, Summer 1990), p. 62.
15General Conference Bulletin, 1980, no. 6, p. 7; ibid., 1990, no. 5, p. 15.
16Schwartz and Greenleaf, Light Bearers, p. 482.
17Ellen White's statment is recorded in Testimonies, v. 6, pp. 126-218. See spe-
cifically pp. 137, 139, 197,206,207.
ADVENTIST EDUCATION
IN ADVERSE CLIMATES
One of the unwritten chapters about Adventist education after World

War II is the account of hardship denominational schools faced in coun-
tries governed by socialist regimes. Before World War II Adventist
schools faced uncongenial conditions in Eastern Europe, and elsewhere,
for that matter, but the problems of the post-l 945 era were the result of
a new politico-economic atmosphere. In the aftermath of the war a
wave of socialist ideology spread rapidly from the Union of Soviet So-
cialist Republics, washing across Slavic Europe, splitting Germany
into two countries and sweeping away old centers of political power.
Illiberal governments quickly seized authority to reestablish order and
reconstruct shattered economies. Only ten months after the war's end
Winston Churchill characterized the new order as an iron curtain that
cordoned off Eastern Europe as a buffer between the USSR and West-
ern democracies.
This region of radical socialist governments, extending about 8,000
miles from the western edge of East Germany across Eastern Europe
and the Soviet Union, variously called the Soviet bloc, communist
bloc, or eastern bloc, pitted itself in a struggle against the capitalist
West. Although at times the conflict erupted into live warfare, it was
432
ADVENTIST EDUCATION IN ADVERSE CLIMATES
largely a battle of nerves, popularly known as the Cold War which

spread with varying intensity to the corners of Asia, Africa, and Latin
America.
Radical socialism claimed philosophical roots in scientific atheism
and proposed to eradicate Christianity as though it were an intellectual
poison, but religion did not disappear easily, even in the USSR. In one
form or another Christianity had a long entrenched history in Europe
and constituted part of the cultural milieu. The same could be said
about Latin America and non-Christian religions in Asian countries.
When seeking to make good its threats against religion, radical social-
ism often found compromise necessary. The movement also declared
itself to be an international train of events inevitably determined by
economic conditions, but in reality it was more a combination of na-
tionalism and anti-West politics and its character differed from country
to country despite its common rhetoric.
Whatever the circumstances, because of its philosophical declara-
tions, radical socialism exerted a powerful influence on education, pro-
ducing new dilemmas for Adventist schools in affected countries. It did
not take long for denominational education to feel its impact. "Unfor-
tunately," Keld 1. Reynolds wrote when reporting the two education
councils in Europe in 1948, "some representatives of our Eastern Euro-
pean schools were unable to attend their divisional council at Florence."
It is doubtful that Department of Education personnel expected events
to be different. They had devoted the entire June 1948 issue of The
Journal of True Education to pictures and commentary about the re-
covery Adventist education around the globe was making from World
War II, but the coverage included only a single laconic allusion to the
post-war political order. "Behind the curtain are other schools that are
in God's hands," the editor said with veiled concern, "the unofficial
reports from which are encouraging.")
Missionsseminar Friedensau
Because of a divided Germany, Missionsseminar Friedensau near
Magdeburg found itself in the German Democratic Republic, lumped
together with Adventist education in Eastern Europe where denomina-
tional schools had operated only erratically in the prewar years. In both
world wars the German government expropriated the school at Frie-
433
densau to convert it into a military hospital, a function that the Soviet

army continued when it overran eastern Germany in 1945. Claiming to
be the rightful owners, less than a year after the war's end Adventists
in East Germany requested the Soviet military government to return
the school to them. 2
Friedensau reopened in 1947, "after great difficulty and lengthy ne-
gotiations," General Conference Secretary of Education E. E. Cossen-
tine later commented, and a historic Adventist campus, now resusci-
tated, was off to an uncertain future in a communist climate. 3 Classes
began on July 1 with eighteen students and five teachers. For school
director Walter Eberhardt and his faculty the first year was a struggle
to stay alive. Food was scarce. Kitchen equipment was both deficient
and poor and furniture was lacking. To survive teachers had to work at
much more than classroom instruction.
The government, whether headed by Soviet occupation forces or
later the East Germans themselves, did not allow Friedensau to for-
get that the country was socialist. As it had been since early institu-
tional days, the community was actually a small village of Seventh-
day Adventists surrounding the school and retirement center. When
a new road was under construction to connect Friedensau to nearby
towns, students put in their fair quota of the work, laboring by hand
to lay the roadbed. "Under socialism came many curiosities," Chron-
ik Friedensau recalled. The celebration on May 8, 1953, the eighth
anniversary of the liberation from Naziism, became a work bee to
pull weeds and clean up the community. To observe Whitsunday the
next year, a German youth congress organized egg collections on
poultry farms.
Changes occurred in the student labor program. From its beginning
the school was known as an industrial school with students logging
between ten and twenty hours weekly in the various work departments.
The program was an integrated part of their education that helped to
keep the school financially afloat and helped students to pay their school
fees and learn a skilled trade. Although the school changed its name
several times, the labor program continued, but during the socialist
years the meaning of student labor changed because education was
free. The government permitted no funds to leave the country, which
allowed the East German Union to accumulate relatively large reserves
434
with which to subsidize the school completely. Even though they did
not need to work, the students still put in their customary hours and
earned a modest amount.
The school could not advertise religious education, but the church
itself could promote classes as church projects. Under this guise the
seminary offered a variety of summer and one-year classes especially
for German youth to orient them in so-called laymen's activities, a term
broadly construed to include instruction not necessarily religious, such
as typing. Known as deacons' short courses to distinguish them from
the ministerial curriculum, they continued for forty-three years, nearly
the entire life of the German Democratic Republic. Eventually a new
set of two-year laymen's classes offered among other subjects, nursing,
typewriting and shorthand, and social work opportunities. These class-
es were the forerunner of the social work program that became a recog-
nized part of the curriculum in 1989.
The purpose of the school was to offer a ministerial training course
equivalent to the post-secondary program in the United States. In 1961
the school's name changed, designating it as a ministerial seminary,
and two decades later changed again to Theological Seminary. Enroll-
ment was consistently less than a hundred, but the name changes sig-
naled not only an advancing institutional maturity but also a degree of
relaxed socialist regulation and more involvement with the Adventist
world. In the 1980s students enrolled from the socialist countries of
Mozambique, Angola, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union. The school
also improved its academic standing, resulting in denominational ac-
creditation in 1984.
With the unfolding years the institution became more intertwined
with church-related events in East Germany. In 1957 a Bible Confer-
ence for youth drew 950 participants to the campus, culminating in a
baptism. Three years later the first workers' meeting for all ministers in
East Germany convened on campus, but West Berlin preachers, though
conveniently less than sixty miles away, were prohibited. During the
1960s and 1970s leading denominational personalities visited the cam-
pus, including archeology professor Siegfried Horn from Andrews
University, General Conference President Robert H. Pierson, and Rich-
ard Hammill, who had become a General Conference vice president
and a kind of roving minister of education. A division-wide Bible Con-
435
ference for workers in 1977 attracted 300 ministers from East Germany
and other socialist states in Eastern Europe. Representatives from the
General Conference Biblical Research Institute and Andrews Univer-
sity also attended this gathering.
Friedensau's reputation reached beyond the confines of Adventism.
Several bishops from the Evangelical Methodist churches and the con-
sistorial president journeyed to the campus, as did the chairman of the
Evangelical Church Council. Gerald Gotting, the president of the Peo-
ple's Chamber of the German Democratic Government and chairman
of the Christian Democratic Party also paid the school a visit. All of
these contacts, both within and outside Adventism, added up to a rec-
ognition that however surly radical socialism might be toward religion,
it was evolving a sense of accommodation that contradicted scientific
atheism's original assertions that there could be no compatibility with
Christianity.
A strong heritage of music dating from the days of Otto Lupke, the
school's first director, continued during the socialist years and helped
to bring recognition to the campus. Regular concerts that audiences
would expect only in large cities began in the mid-1950s, which brought
noted artists to the "small village in the forest," Chronik Friedensau
observed. In 1974 the school installed its fourth organ in the chapel, a
powerful instrument that came on the occasion of the seventy-fifth an-
niversary of the school.
It was apparent that radical socialism was softening, at least in some
respects, and it would continue this course despite uprisings in 1956
and 1968 that had incited an iron-fisted response by Soviet forces in
East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. Dissent in a
newer form appeared in the 1980s, a product of glasnost and perestroi-
ka in the USSR itself, elements of a new spirit of openness with the
possibility of restructuring society. At Friedensau Bible conferences
for both youth and the clergy were common and visitors from denomi-
national headquarters were frequent. Andrews University also estab-
lished extension courses on the German campus.
In 1989 the Berlin Wall tumbled under the weight of a demonstrat-
ing public, and the next year the government authorized the Theologi-
cal Seminary to become a university and to grant degrees in its own
right. German unification followed soon after, which gave German Ad-
436
ventists the opportunity to consolidate their post-secondary education

by merging the ministerial program at Marienhohe with Friedensau.
The seminary at Marienhohe became a secondary school. By the mid-
1990s the new university at Friedensau was offering graduate studies
and diplomas in social work with an emphasis on international pro-
grams.
Friedensau had come full circle. A century earlier it began as Eu-
rope's strongest center to produce ministers and public health workers.
It had quickly grown into an international campus. By the year 2000 it
had regained its international character, and although its enrollment
remained small-a margin above 200-it had become a strong Adventist
educational hub in northern and eastern Europe.
The experience at Friedensau was a case of educational success in
spite of a less than sanguine environment. The government of East
Germany was not known for its lax attitude toward the capitalist West,
but the growth of Adventist education occurred anyway and in time
flourished, neutralizing the negative philosophical impact of an anti-
religious government and even gaining the respect of public authority.
Poland's Michal Belina Czechoswski Spiritual Seminary

Another example of Adventist education in Eastern Europe came
from Poland which furnished one of the best examples of compromise
between a socialist government and a Christian society. Before World
War II Seventh-day Adventists in Poland had no legal standing, but the
post-war government viewed Adventism, as small as it was, as a bal-
ancing force that socialism could use to help equalize religious influ-
ences in the country. Accordingly, Adventists received government
recognition in 1946 as an official church, which meant that they could
own and operate institutions. 4
This new legal status was at least a shadow of freedom and an im-
provement over prewar conditions, but the new liberty was a matter of
practical politics rather than freedom in an idealistic sense. Neverthe-
less, it was with optimism that Adventist workers began offering semi-
nary classes in Krakow in 1947, which were really a resumption of a
Polish worker-training school that functioned intermittently during the
1930s at Kamienica Slaska in the south. In 1949 the small ministerial
course moved back to this prewar site.
437
For five years beginning in 1953 politics reversed itself and the
school did not operate, but its reopening in 1958 was encouraging
enough to bring a $15,000 appropriation from the General Conference
to help restart the fledgling enterprise. Comforts were few. Thirty stu-
dents crowded into four dormitory rooms and some teachers lived in
improvised quarters in an attic. It was evident that the new school need-
ed all the assistance it could get.
The purpose of the Adventist school was to prepare church workers.
In the recent absence of a school one of the most common methods to
prepare ministers had been to assign a young prospect to an experi-
enced pastor for mentoring until he became ready to shoulder full re-
sponsibility. Adventist membership was inching upward to 3,300 and a
need for formally educated ministers was probably the most serious
deficiency in the three Polish conferences.
A year after its rejuvenation, the school moved to Podkowa Lesna,
about fifteen miles west of Warsaw. The new site was an eight-acre
estate, formerly of the aristocracy, that allowed room for small agricul-
tural projects that would furnish fruit and garden products to the school.
Here the ministerial program gelled into a five-year sequence.
At the time of the reopening in 1958, Adventist students were at-
tending universities in Warsaw and Krakow to study for a wide variety
of professions from medicine to law and various disciplines in the hu-
manities. Education of that kind was a concern of the state. The small
Adventist venture at Kamienica was not an attempt to provide an Ad-
ventist alternative to these public institutions, but the school collabo-
rated with state education by allowing its students time to attend a
nearby government school to take classes preparing them for the uni-
versity entrance examination.
Although the seminary was a place to educate new pastors, the prac-
tical effect of this arrangement was to provide an Adventist study track
for a few students while at the same time preparing ministers. By 1965
about thirty had graduated, eleven of whom became church workers.
Despite this ratio of employing only about one in three graduates, the
seminary had its desired impact. Most if not all of the ministers in Po-
land had been students at the seminary at one time or another. In time,
curricular changes modified theological studies to two- and four-year
sequences, both of which permitted time for students to continue their
438
studies at the state university. Occasionally some were able to attend

Newbold College in England for degree studies.
Enrollment remained low from the 1960s through the 1980s because
students had few reasons to attend the seminary unless they planned to
become church workers; however, by the mid-1980s prospects for in-
creased enrollment rose as the school developed more academic breadth.
A construction project added a new seminary complex to the campus
that housed a 200-seat chapel, a cafeteria, and eight classrooms, be-
sides dormitory space for more than sixty-five boarding students. The
school offered three curricula: a three-year theology program, a Bible
instructor program, and a secretarial course. Enrollment was thirty-
two in these "day school" curricula, roughly the same number as in
1958 when the seminary reopened for the second time. The school also
offered a two-year correspondence course in theology for laymen inter-
ested in evangelism. Enrollment in this program exceeded eighty-five.
The seminary, since the 1970s called the Michal Belina Czecho-
swski Spiritual Seminary, opened the new complex in 1986 with a cel-
ebration that brought several public personalities to the campus, includ-
ing the Polish minister for religious affairs, the director of non-Catholic
minorities, and the local mayor. Speaking before these dignitaries, the
president of the Polish Union described plans to add courses in health-
ful lifestyle, drug prevention, and foreign languages, and to establish
connections with Newbold College, Andrews University, and the theo-
logical seminary in Germany as well as to prepare students for gradu-
ate studies at the Polish Christian Theological Academy, the state sup-
ported ecumenical institution in which the government exercised the
authority of appointment.
These ambitious goals were the product of liberalizing trends, but
Polish politics proposed to integrate all elements of Polish society into
a single egalitarian movement. Polish law decreed that religion and
state must be separate, declared all churches equal, and guaranteed re-
ligious liberty to all churches, but only to those that were legally recog-
nized. The state reserved the right to educate, but allowed legal church-
es to operate schools without interference, called centers of religious
instruction, and to establish seminaries to educate clergy.
In reality religious influences in Poland were far from equal; conse-
quently, the government exerted a controlling hand over religious af-
439
fairs to maintain a degree of balance. B. B. Beach, a former director of

education in the Northern Europe Division, observed in 1973 that "the
churches in Poland are free to preach, publish and prosper, if they forth-
rightly co-operate in building a new socialist egalitarian society."5 It
was clearly in the context of a socialist society that the Adventist semi-
nary functioned.
The breakdown of the socialist system in 1989 did not bring pros-
perity to the Polish school. The school remained a secondary institution
with a worker-training course that was post-secondary but not a degree
program. Of note as well was the loss of many Adventists to western
countries by emigration, which caused comparatively slow member-
ship growth, only 900 during the 1990s. The demand for a large num-
ber of new pastors tapered off. By the year 2000 enrollment dropped to
the levels of the 1950s.
Adventisticki Seminar Marusevec in Yugoslavia

By some estimates Adventist education in Eastern Europe fared best
in Yugoslavia where socialism appeared to be less caustic. In 1955,
thirteen years after the Yugoslavian school closed because of World
War II, seminary classes resumed on a newly purchased, seven-acre
property in Rakovica near Belgrade, the national capital. Pavle Boro-
vic, a student at the seminary beginning in 1957 and later a conference
worker and teacher, remembered that the Yugoslavian church submit-
ted many requests to the government before the school reopened. The
curriculum was limited to male students enrolled in a three-year theol-
ogy curriculum. Space was too limited to permit a new beginning class
of students each year, so each cohort had to complete its studies in or-
der to make room for the next group. Because theology books were
scarce teachers wrote their own texts which they copied with a labori-
ous printing method. 6
Hardships or not, the school hung on, and by 1968 its leaders were
laying plans for expansion and a coeducation program that would offer
women students courses in secretarial training and home economics.
But growth at Rakovica became a moot question as the local civil gov-
ernment expropriated the school property to construct a highway,
promising to pay for the land. Borovic, who by this time taught at the
seminary, saw the government's action as an attempt to stop the school,
440
but if indeed, that was the case, it backfired. Yugoslavian church lead-
ers, including Borovic, argued that the land was extremely valuable to
them and proposed an exorbitant price for compensation.
Surprisingly, the government agreed, and with the money the Yugo-
slavian Union leased an old castle in the northern village ofMarusevec,
near Varazdin, about twenty miles from Hungary and not much farther
from Austria. Sufficient funds were left to repair the deteriorating cas-
tle, purchase adjoining land, erect two dormitories, student apartments,
and faculty homes. The new institution opened as a secondary school
only, without the seminary, but in 1974 the seminary joined the school
which took the name of Adventisticki Seminar Marusevec.
Additional land acquisition by 1978 expanded the campus to ap-
proximately seventeen acres, some of it devoted to classrooms and
housing for both faculty and students, and some to cultivation. By 1980
seminary enrollment reached almost fifty in three different curricula
for both men and women. Secondary students numbered about 170. All
were from Yugoslavia.
After closing during World War 11. the Seventh-day Adventist school in Yugoslavia re-
opened in 1955 and became one of the most prosperous of Adventist schools in socialist
countries. In 1968 the school moved to this castle in Marusevec in northern Yugosla-
via.
441
As early as 1968 the seminary underwent accrediting by the Gen-

eral Conference Department of Education. The examining committee
found much to commend but recommended more careful budgeting to
improve academic equipment and library accessions. It also suggested
that the school should reorganize its theology curriculum to cover four
years instead of three and to align with Seminaire Adventiste in France,
which would enable Yugoslavian ministerial students to complete a
theology degree.
During the next decade Marusevec became the only Adventist
school in the communist world to maintain a direct connection with a
denominational institution in a capitalist democracy by not only link-
ing with the French campus, but also with Newbold. It tied to Frieden-
sau as well, which furnished a variety of options for the equivalent of a
bachelor's degree in theology from schools both in and out of the Euro-
pean socialist community. The Yugoslavian school was also unique
among Adventist seminaries in Eastern Europe by having a well orga-
nized secondary school beneath it. Similar to the Polish seminary,
Marusevec also cooperated with the Yugoslavian system of higher edu-
cation by designing the ministerial curriculum as an entrance prerequi-
site for university studies. The effectiveness of this program became
evident as Adventist students fared well when taking university en-
trance examinations.
Marusevec benefitted from a less virulent socialist government as
compared to other countries in Eastern Europe. The primary burden of
the Yugoslavian government was to hold an ethnically diverse country
together in a federated system rather than to maintain solidarity within
the eastern bloc; in fact, early in the post World War II era Yugoslavia
made it clear that Soviet personnel and influence were not welcome and
that Yugoslavian communism was for Yugoslavians. In this nationalis-
tic environment, programs such as Adventist education which joined
the various ethnic groups within the country in peaceful pursuits could
be perceived to be nationally beneficial. The seminary campus also
became a Yugoslavian Adventist center for youth camps, ministerial
retreats, seminars for parents, and conventions, all activities that fos-
tered unity among Yugoslavian Adventists.
One such gathering on the campus in 1986 was a six-day workshop
which the Trans-European Division conducted in conjunction with Ad-
442
ventist World Radio to improve religious radio programming. Church

leaders in Yugoslavia and students alike attended. At the time Yugosla-
vian Adventists could not broadcast programs, but they were able to
prepare radio programs in six languages which they sent to Adventist
short wave stations in western Europe that were within range of radio
receivers in Yugoslavia.
Within two years after the demise of radical socialism in Eastern
Europe, fighting erupted in Yugoslavia and the country broke apart
along ethnic lines, producing several small republics. Almost immedi-
ately, in 1991, enrollment at Marusevec dropped to a quarter of its nor-
mal level while the school became a haven for refugees. Reflecting the
new political map, the Adventist Yugoslavian Union also fractured in
half, and in 1992 the seminary returned to the Serbian city of Belgrade
that had been the Yugoslavian capital for many years. In its relocated
site the seminary became Belgrade Theological Seminary, serving a
constituency of about 8,000 in the new independencies of Bosnia-
Herzegovina, Macedonia, and the remaining territory of the old Yugo-
slavia. This combined membership approximated two-thirds of the for-
mer Yugoslavian Union.
With the departure of the seminary from Marusevec the campus
reorganized as a government accredited secondary school in newly in-
dependent Croatia. Shortly the school added ministerial education to
become Adriatic Union College with a constituency in Croatia, Slove-
nia, and Albania. By the year 2000 about eighty enrolled in the two
post-secondary theology programs at Belgrade and Marusevec. Gradu-
ates of both schools were eligible to enter the Open University Valida-
tion Services at Newbold College for graduate study.
Romanian Adventist Theological Institute

In Romania, the European country with the largest Adventist popula-
tion, political conditions were deceptively congenial immediately after
liberation from Nazi occupation. In 1947 the denominational training
school reported an enrollment of l36, a figure that could have been
larger if the campus could have accommodated more students. "Having
liberty once more to preach the gospel, the young people go from vil-
lage to village and from home to home, calling the people to God," the
General Conference Department of Education announced. 7 But this
443
new freedom was only an interlude between one oppressor and the
next. In 1949 the government confiscated the school and the best the
church could do was to maintain only a skeletal form of ministerial
education in Bucharest.
Events moved quickly after the fall of the communist regime in
1989. The rate of church membership growth in Romania had been
and continued to be one of the highest in Europe and by the year 2000
the restored Romanian Adventist Theological Institute had grown to
be the largest denominational school in the Euro-Africa Division with
about 500 students. Nearly half of them were in theological studies,
but the school also offered a variety of other curricula with business
and the humanities also attracting large numbers. The school's de-
grees were nationally recognized. In 2002 Andrews University estab-
lished an extension on the fifteen-acre campus to offer a master of
arts in theology.8
Zaokski Theological Seminary, Russia

In the Soviet Union itself Adventist education made a late appear-
ance. During much of the 1920s Seventh-day Adventists, like other
religious bodies, practiced religion with comparative freedom. Church
leaders organized short, rudimentary classes in ministerial education,
but by the end of the decade official attitudes against religion hard-
ened. In 1929 the General Conference stopped receiving official sta-
tistics of Adventist activity in the country. Officially, at least, the
church came to a standstill. During the 1930s a school for Russians
operated at Harbin, Manchuria, where some prospective ministers re-
ceived training.9
Only when official Soviet policy began to relax in the 1970s did
church activity start to escalate. In the next decade the Russian terms,
perestroika and glasnost, expressing more openness and connection
with the outside world, became part of the English vocabulary. Adven-
tists organized conferences during the 1970s; union conferences ap-
peared in the late 1980s, and in 1990 the Euro-Asia Division went into
operation. At the 1985 General Conference session the church heard an
official report about Adventism in the USSR for the first time in about
sixty years. Among other optimistic descriptions of denominational af-
fairs, Mikhail P. Kulakov, head of the Adventist church in the Soviet
444
Russian Seventh-day Adventists built Zaokski Theological Seminary and began offering
classes in 1989. two years before the communist government collapsed. This 1995 pho-
tograph shows the original classroom building with the library on the far side. added in
1994.
Union, said he was "confident that the government will soon allow the
church to start a theological course for its pastors."'o
Two years later the church gained permission to reconstruct a de-
stroyed building in Zaokski, a small community about seventy-five
miles below Moscow. Led by Mikhail M. Kulakov, son of Mikhail P.,
Russian Adventists rallied to the task, donating time and supplies over
a period of two years. The new facility, built along traditional Russian
architectural lines and surrounded by a classic iron fence, opened in
December 1988. Among the guests were the chairman of the Soviet
Council for Religious Affairs, leaders of other churches, General Con-
ference President Neal Wilson, and other Adventist personalities.
A theological seminary in the Soviet Union, even advertised by a
road sign, was headline news that appeared on national television in the
USSR, but also of interest was an agricultural program based on a fifty-
acre plot where Jacob Mittleider, a well-known Adventist agricultural-
ist, introduced new methods of vegetable production. When the semi-
nary opened it offered three courses: theology, music and agriculture.
445
The tempo of other church activities also picked up. Adjacent to

the new seminary was land dedicated to a new Adventist publishing
house. Adventist evangelists conducted meetings in Moscow. A ra-
dio broadcasting center was under construction in nearby Tula.
Members of the Adventist Geoscience Research Institute attended a
gathering of the Academy of Natural Science in the Siberian city of
Novosibirsk and representation from the Theological Seminary at
Andrews visited the Zaokski campus to assist with the theology
program.
Though seen as a providential gift, the seminary nevertheless faced
myriad problems. A phenomenal rise in the number of conversions and
new congregations in Russia produced a heavier demand for ministers
than the seminary could supply. Well-educated Russians who could
teach were not uncommon, but a credentialed theology staff did not ex-
ist; consequently, the school depended on experienced ministers to
teach classes and on visiting pastors, church administrators, and teach-
ers, mainly from the United States, to conduct short intensive courses
or even remain for an entire quarter.
Meanwhile, the newly organized Euro-Asia Division supported a
campaign to upgrade promising faculty, sending them primarily to
the Theological Seminary at Andrews University. Particularly acute
was the lack of persons trained in accounting and business to handle
church financial matters, careers that were unknown during the So-
viet era. By the mid-1990s the seminary added a short business course
equivalent to a minor in the American baccalaureate system. The
school also affiliated with Andrews University for graduate programs
in theology.
Through the 1990s Zaokski retained its original emphasis on minis-
terial education, music, and agriculture, avoiding major curricular ad-
ditions partly because the school was officially recognized as a semi-
nary and to add new degree programs would require re-accreditation.
Adventist education at lower levels in Russia was evolving but not
spreading rapidly, which meant that a teacher-preparation course at Za-
okski was not practical.
Radical socialism in Europe was teetering on the edge of disintegra-
tion when the seminary at Zaokski was born, but of all the schools in
the Soviet bloc, it attracted the most attention as something almost sur-
446
real, given the apparent political isolation of the USSR. Just as surreal
was the membership explosion during the 1990s which raised the total
from about 35,000 in 1990 to more than 135,000 ten years later. In 1999
the seminary celebrated its tenth anniversary. The next year enrollment
reached nearly 350, of whom more than 200 were in theological stud-
ies, making Zaokski one of the leading Adventist theological centers in
Eastern Europe.
China
The largest country outside the Soviet Union to adopt radical social-
ism was China where a communist revolution succeeded in 1949, but
the country did not become part of the Soviet bloc as did Eastern Eu-
rope. The stance of the new Chinese government against Christianity
was more rigid than in most places in socialist Europe. Adventist edu-
cation in China simply vanished and the school in Hong Kong inherited
the responsibility of denominational post-secondary programs for Chi-
nese Adventists. In 1951 the Far Eastern Division began construction
on a new institution in Taiwan where the remnant of the Chinese repub-
lic maintained a free government. After passing through several phases
of development, the school became Taiwan Adventist College.
The demise of the Maoist era in the 1980s also marked the begin-
ning of more pragmatic and less ideological domestic policies in China,
but Adventist education did not reappear. With Adventist membership
estimated marginally less than 300,000 as the twenty-first century be-
gan, the need for trained pastors and other workers was acute, but only
informal methods of ministerial preparation were available. Fewer
travel restrictions allowed some students to enroll in Hong Kong Ad-
ventist College, and even attend a denominational school elsewhere.
Conditions also permitted visitors from the East Asia Association in
Hong Kong, something analogous to a set of union officers without a
constituency, who encouraged the growth of Adventism in China but
had no role in administering the churches. Without becoming intrusive,
the committee was able to exert an informal influence on Chinese
workers through inservice sessions. After the formation of the North-
ern Asia-Pacific Division in 1999 the East Asia Association became the
China Union Mission, but no differences in educational activity oc-
curred.
447
Lakpahana Adventist College and Seminary

Of all communist governments, China took the most adamant stand
against Christian education. Ironically, it was its Asian neighbor, Sri
Lanka, that represented one of the most benign cases of socialist influ-
ence on Adventist schools. In 1948 this island gained its independence
but remained a dominion in the British Commonwealth and retained
the name of Ceylon. Socialist political parties on the island originated
during the period between the two world wars, but not until 1956 when
the Sri Lanka Freedom Party ascended to power did the government
veer substantially to the left.
Under the tutelage of the SLFP, as the party was called, socialism
never assumed the radical form that characterized some of the govern-
ments in Eastern Europe. A broad spectrum of political parties contin-
ued to thrive, elections continued, and the country avoided a dictator-
ship. The SLFP generally favored the majority Sinhalese population
which was Buddhist, a policy that tended to alienate the Tamil minor-
ity that was largely Hindu."
Given this political cleavage, turmoil was unavoidable. The most
serious troubles were periodic communal riots among the Tamil-speaking
population that eventually led to outright hostilities. A see-saw political
struggle ensued between the SLFP and its leading rival, the more con-
servative United National Party. Constitutional changes in 1972 and
1977 changed Ceylon's name to the Democratic Socialist Republic of
Sri Lanka, which confirmed the political trends of the previous two
decades.
As it evolved, socialism in this island nation was far more national-
istic than ideological, but it translated into attempted land reform, ex-
propriation of private schools and free education from kindergarten
through university, free medical care, assistance to the poor, and na-
tionalization of industries, especially those under foreign control such
as oil production. Although the SLFP lent moral support to liberation
fronts in many countries, it maintained a diplomatically non-aligned
relationship between the protagonists of the Cold War. Beginning in
the late 1970s the government sought ways to return industry to private
hands and encourage foreign investment.
Adventist education walked a narrow and discreet path through
these political land mines. Less than two years after independence, the
448
Ceylonese government requisitioned the land on which the training

school operated in Kottawa, near the capital, forcing the school to move
northward in 1952 to an old coconut estate in the mountains, a dozen
miles from Kandy, the island's second largest city. Some regarded the
change as a blessing inasmuch as the new location was a choice prop-
erty that offered opportunities for growth that did not exist in Kottawa.
In typical Adventist fashion, a group of pioneer teachers and students
settled on the estate to build the school from the ground up, first clear-
ing the land that lay in abandoned confusion. The new school, named
Lakpahana, meaning light of Lanka, had hardly established itself when
the SLFP took over the country in 1956.
One of the government's first measures was to legalize Sinhala as
the national language. This attempt to nationalize communication
sparked the anger of the Tamil population who sent the country reel-
ing in communal riots. Lakpahana, whose faculty and students were
both Sinhalese and Tamil, tried to protect itself from the divisiveness
in the surrounding community by literally closing its gates and em-
phasizing unity on the campus. Years later, in calmer moments, the
government recognized Tamil as a second official language, but the
mischief had been done, and conflict over this issue ignited a peren-
nial hostility between the two ethnic groups that broke out in occa-
sional violence and shooting. Meanwhile, in order to maintain itself,
Lakpahana had to furnish teachers for both of the languages and
English as well.
Another government attempt to unite the country came from the
rival United National Party after it regained power in the mid-1960s.
With a new sensitivity toward the Sinhalese population, the UNP re-
placed the Christian Sunday with the Poya Day, a Buddhist holiday,
when schools and businesses would close. This new day of rest mean-
dered through the traditional seven-day week because the moon's cy-
cles determined its frequency. The result was a confused class schedule
for Lakpahana which also closed on the Saturday Sabbath. Although it
disrupted the traditional week, this calendar was more of a nuisance
than a threat. Even the general population found this calendar irksome
because it made difficulties for the business community which had to
correlate its activities with the rest of commercial world that conducted
its affairs according to the seven-day week.
15-IPFTW 449
The attempt to nationalize education by establishing a single lan-

guage and to institute a unique Sri Lankan calendar were matters of
nationalism rather than socialism, but land reform was a common so-
cialist issue that nearly destroyed Lakpahana. During the election of
1960 the local representative to the national legislature promised to
break up the estates in his area and redistribute the land to the people.
Legislation to fulfill his pledge passed, and forty acres of Lakpahana's
best plantation land were surveyed in preparation for redistribution, but
only hours before the school was to become a victim of this expropria-
tion, the government fell and land confiscation proceedings were im-
mediately scrapped.
Hardly had this threat passed before the government began outright
expropriation of private schools as part of its plan to nationalize educa-
tion. The government claimed legality for its actions because it subsi-
dized private institutions and was justified to control them in the name
of national well being. Since the early days at Kottawa in the 1920s
Adventist schools had followed the government's prescribed curricula
that prepared students for external examinations that validated their
education, but they had not accepted government subsidies, and from
the expropriation scheme of the 1960s Lakpahana escaped unscathed.
With the passing of this crisis the worst was over for Lakpahana, but
the school still faced routine government controls. Nationalization of
education was part of a broader plan to improve literacy, and after in-
dependence successive governments continued the colonial practice of
external examinations as a means to standardize achievement at gov-
ernment prescribed levels. Accordingly, in addition to its traditional
Adventist curriculum, Lakpahana included preparation for both the or-
dinary and advanced level tests. Adventist students established a good
performance record, and testing officials usually allowed them to avoid
examinations on Sabbath.
Although the record spoke well for Lakpahana, the school did not
earn the right to grant degrees. When Lakpahana added post-secondary
courses in ministerial education and teacher-preparation, two-year
diplomas were the limit of its academic authority. Several conditions
worked against the school's advancement. Sri Lanka needed pastors,
but the Adventist population on the island was neither large nor in-
creasing rapidly; consequently, the demand for ministerial students
450
was not as critical as in bigger and faster growing fields. Government

controls over elementary and secondary education made it impossible
to conduct traditional church schools, thus the long-standing denomi-
national practice of establishing lower schools wherever possible and
developing a system that fed students upward to a post-secondary
institution did not occur in Sri Lanka. Adventist membership on the
island was also poor, placing tuition out of reach of many Adventist
families.
Even against these odds, enrollment at Lakpahana reached well
above 300, but in the two-year diploma programs the number of stu-
dents was skimpy, which prompted an evaluation team from the South-
ern Asia-Pacific Division to recommend in 1998 that the school should
drop its post-secondary curricula. While officially the school discon-
tinued the courses, it retained its post-secondary status and concen-
trated on reestablishing its lost programs. Meanwhile, furnishing even
a few well-prepared pastors became problematical.
If Lakpahana's function as a post-secondary school had suffered, it
was clear that its role as a mission school was as strong as it had ever
been as it entered the twenty-first century. Non-Adventist enrollment
stood at forty percent, overwhelmingly Sinhalese. About half of the
370 students were from the immediate community. While the school
resumed its worker-training courses, they remained unrecognized. The
original plan to develop a student labor program lagged inasmuch as
the school developed no industries, but for the boarding students the
school provided jobs maintaining the campus.
In spite of the problems Lakpahana faced through the years-or per-
haps because of them-the impact of the institution on Sri Lankan Ad-
ventists was enormous. When the institution celebrated its seventy-fifth
anniversary in March 1998-its origins dated from 1923 at Kottawa-
nearly a thousand alumni, former staff, and friends flocked to the cam-
pus. One native Sri Lankan living in Canada and unable to attend, sent
$1,000 for the school's discretionary spending. For a field whose Ad-
ventist membership slightly exceeded 3,000, this showing was remark-
able. The school had furnished the island with ministers and teachers,
some of whom had proceeded to other institutions of higher learning
and positions of trust and leadership within the denomination beyond
Sri Lanka.
451
While Sri Lankan Adventists regarded Lakpahana Adventist Col-

lege and Seminary as their premier institution, other denominational
schools on the island represented a different turn. Because traditional
Adventist church schools were not feasible, Adventists in the Colombo
region established two large high schools as businesses, operating them
in a manner similar to church-sponsored schools in India. As entrepre-
neurial enterprises they did not fall under the ordinary government
controls over education. Kandana Seventh-day Adventist High School
and the Adventist International School each enrolled about a thousand
students from primary levels through secondary school who were
mainly Buddhist, but Hindu, Muslim, and Christian students also at-
tended. Many of the teachers were Buddhist but the curriculum was
denominational as were the teaching materials. The Sri Lanka Union
Mission regarded both campuses as mission schools.
Reflecting on the history of Lakpahana, one alumnus wrote in 1998
that the school had "been through the ravages of terrorism and poli-
tics," but it had survived even though at times some thought the school
should close.1 2 From the vantage point of a half century after the train-
ing school moved from Kottawa, Adventists on the island could agree
that the aggressive character of the government had produced trials
from time to time, but Lakpahana had not suffered crippling damage.
Antillian College in Cuba

Such was not the case in Cuba where a more militant socialist move-
ment engulfed Antillian College beginning in late 1958. Since 1956 a
small band of revolutionaries had been fighting out of the Sierra Maes-
tra mountains of eastern Cuba, gathering strength far beyond its small
numbers and becoming an increasing irritant to the Cuban government.
The campaign moved steadily westward and during the Christmas sea-
son of 1958 the revolutionaries moved into Santa Clara, occupying the
campuses of Antillian College and a public university immediately
across the road. For days the rebels, led by Fidel Castro and his
companion-in-arms, Che Guevara, fought it out with government forc-
es while faculty and students watched with a mixture of excitement and
fright. Planes bombed and strafed the campus, resulting in little dam-
age, but there were some near misses among those who had to run for
cover.11
452
On January 1, 1959, the Cuban government fell and the revolutionar-

ies surged into Havana as the new masters of the island. During the
battle of Santa Clara Guevara frequented the Adventist campus and
two months later Castro himself also visited both the university and
Antillian College. Both leaders personally assured Walton 1. Brown,
director of the school, that the Adventist institution represented educa-
tional ideals that the new government espoused. Understandably, a de-
gree of security ensued, but nonetheless, an undercurrent of unease
was also present on the campus.
For about two years Antillian College functioned without significant
change, but this honeymoon turned sour after the Bay of Pigs episode
in April 1961. In the aftermath of this failure by Cuban refugees, backed
by the United States, to retake the island, the government nationalized
private schools, including the Adventist campus. After the college pro-
tested, Castro apologetically reopened the school, but assigned a gov-
ernment supervisor to keep an eye on campus affairs.
Until 1967 Antillian College continued operations but under severe
modification. In 1956 it had become the only institution in the Inter-
American Division with denominational authorization to offer four-
year post-secondary degrees in theology for Spanish-speaking students,
and its unofficial status as the educational center for the division drew
an international enrollment. After the crisis of 1961, however, the Cu-
ban government cut off communication with the world beyond its
shores. Foreign students left and the school became an exclusively Cu-
ban institution. On the shoulders of Vicente Rodriguez, a native Cuban,
fell the responsibility of director. In the wake of these events, Antillian
College moved to Puerto Rico, leaving only a seminary in Cuba that
could offer a two-year program.
Despite these restrictions, enrollment remained surprisingly high,
exceeding 300 in 1962 and remaining above 200 through 1967. In Feb-
ruary of that year the government expropriated the campus, including
all equipment except the library books. Government officials insisted
that the action was not a confiscation and that they would pay for the
facilities, but remuneration never came. "Night had fallen," wrote Wal-
ton Brown. "The much loved Antillian College had disappeared."14
When the government allowed Adventists to reopen a tiny seminary
in the former office of the Antillian Union in Havana in 1970, govern-
453
ment limits on enrollment sharply reduced the number of students,

which, through 1990 never exceed forty and frequently less than ten.
After restrictions on travel and communication eased, L. H. Fletcher,
director of education for the Inter-American Division, and Walton
Brown were able to visit Cuba in 1982, finding the seminary barely
limping, sometimes with one person shouldering responsibility for all
of the teaching.
During the harsher socialist years of the late 1960s and the 1970s the
church had not ceased to function or sometimes to evangelize, but ha-
rassment and religious discrimination had been common. Finally, Cas-
tro himself admitted in 1985 that Christian values were necessary to
combat social problems of contemporary society. Similar to most radi-
cal socialist countries, during the 1980s Cuba loosened its grip on do-
mestic policies and by the end of the decade Adventists successfully
petitioned for the authority to offer post-secondary degrees and for
non-Cuban teachers to travel to the island to conduct classes. The first
class-twenty-four students-graduated from the seminary in 1990 with
bachelor of religion degrees. Teachers from Montemorelos University
offered the classes in several sequences of six-week intensive courses.
Antillian College in Cuba continued to operate[ollowing the socialist revolution in 1959.

but after 1961 it functioned under severe limitations. In 1967 the school closed. In this
photo students gather on the campus in 1961 to conduct prayer bands.
454
The government also permitted a select few of the graduates to leave

Cuba for graduate study.
Since ministerial education classes resumed in 1970 Cuban Adven-
tists hoped and repeatedly asked for a new seminary building with of-
fices, library, and classrooms. A generation passed before a small group
broke ground in 1995 for the long anticipated educational center. Mara-
natha Volunteers International helped to erect the building. The next
year Caridad Diego, director of religious affairs in the Cuban govern-
ment, was on hand to congratulate the show of solidarity of the Adven-
tist church with its Cuban members and to hear Robert Folkenberg,
General Conference president, dedicate the seminary, the first non-
government educational structure to go up in Cuba during the forty-
eight years since the revolution.
Cuba Adventist Seminary was still a small institution, built to ac-
commodate about fifty students, but by the year 2000 enrollment
reached nearly eighty. Its sole program was theology. Because Adven-
tists operated no institutions in Cuba, teachers and other categories of
institutional workers were not in demand. Although the seminary could
offer a traditional ministerial education program, the government still
controlled other aspects of education, which obviated the possibility of
broadening the curriculum to other fields of study. As academically
narrow as it was, the seminary filled a critical need for Cuban Adven-
tists. At the time of the revolution in 1959, membership approximated
5,000, a figure that had risen to more than 13,000 when the new semi-
nary went into operation in 1996. During the same period the number
of recognized congregations had doubled to about 140. Trained pastors
were needed.
A key factor in the revival of post-secondary education in Cuba was
the role of Montemorelos University. Since the Mexican Revolution
that began in 1910 the Mexican government had habitually dealt mod-
erately with leftist political movements anywhere, and its influence was
thus welcome in socialist locations where North Americans would have
encountered obstacles. Especially was this true in Cuba where, in addi-
tion to being a radical socialist movement the revolution was also a stiff
reaction against the United States occupation of Cuba and its controls
following the Spanish-American War in 1898. With its authority as a
state approved institution and at the same time the home of a denomi-
455
nationally recognized school of theology, Montemorelos University

was in a better position than any other Adventist institution to mentor a
ministerial education program in Cuba.
A Look Back at Adventist Education under Radical Socialism

From the experiences of Adventist education in socialist countries
after World War II comes much understanding about denominational
schools and their function under stress. It can be argued that the prob-
lems these Adventist institutions encountered were no more serious
than those in any politically illiberal environment. From the beginnings
of Adventist education in the world fields church leaders never restrict-
ed their schools to places where they could frolic in complete freedom;
sometimes they established schools in uncivilized or hostile environ-
ments, but in any case they experienced at least a modicum of tolera-
tion. Sometimes illiberal governments even expedited Adventist edu-
cation, sometimes they obstructed it. Stress from authoritarian states
was neither new nor something denominational educators could calcu-
late by formula.
But radical socialism exerted a different kind of threat from any-
thing Adventist churches and schools had previously encountered be-
cause of its claims to scientific atheism, a systematic, international
movement that proposed to uproot Christianity. The story of Adventist
education demonstrates that quite the opposite actually occurred.
Wherever socialism established a foothold, whether in Christian societ-
ies or cultures of other religions, without exception nationalistic senti-
ments superseded ideology.
At first glance, it would appear that Adventist schools in Germany,
Poland, and Yugoslavia were none the worse for the all of the anti-
Christian philosophy of radical socialism. But such a judgment should
be tempered by a reminder that however successful these schools were,
until radical socialism collapsed, they always swam against a swift
tide. The question is a speculative one, but it is probably safe to say that
in these three cases Adventist schools operated with no less freedom
and possibly with less interference than before the Soviet bloc existed,
although Friedensau in pre-Nazi Germany would be an exception.
Nevertheless, the pressure of a fundamentally antagonistic govern-
ment remained. Pavle Borovic reminisced that spies frequented church-
456
es and evangelistic gatherings and church leaders received threats, even

in Yugoslavia, but often these problems originated with overzealous
officials in local governments rather than members of the state govern-
ment. It is likely that this same condition existed elsewhere in the east-
ern bloc.
During the earlier stages of the Cold War Adventists in East Ger-
many, Poland, and Yugoslavia were able to maintain official contact
with the church at large, and not uncommonly support money from
the General Conference made its way into the education centers in
these countries. With the exception of Albania which suffered near
complete isolation until the Soviet bloc crumbled in 1989, policies
toward religion in the Eastern European countries softened sufficient-
ly beginning in the 1970s for churches to function officially. Adven-
tist administrative structure in these countries reintegrated itself
within the official church organization and the General Conference
regularly received statistical reports of membership growth and other
activities.
Although seriously curtailed in Cuba, the church never stopped its
functions and in China the 1980s also brought a measure of open reli-
gious practices. In these countries socialist governments reined in the
church tightly, but did not destroy it. Although Sri Lanka became a
socialist republic, competitive politics continued, which reduced the
threat of authoritarianism comparable to other socialist governments
while preserving an essentially leftist democratic climate.
These changes toward less bellicose policies did not mean that all
stress was gone, but that despite the philosophical claims of radical
socialism, governments could not deny the reality of Christianity. As
the twenty-first century began, the international movement of radical
socialism was a thing of the past although some governments remained,
but unlike the countries in the original Marxist movement, these ves-
tiges made no claims of being part of an international wave of scien-
tific atheism. While the Marxist politico-economic movement was at
its zenith, Adventist education had been part of a silent, passive, and
peaceful resistance, demonstrating that the conviction stemming from
the gospel commission to "teach all things whatsoever I have com-
manded you" was more powerful than the philosophy and politics of
authoritarianism and exclusion.
457
'Keld J. Reynolds, "Two Educational Councils," (Journal of True Education, December

1948), p. 20, 21; ibid., June 1948, p. 17.
2For data about post-war Friedensau see Johannes Hartlapp's Chronik Friedensau pp.
34-66; General Conference Minutes, April I, 1946; April 18, 1947; July 7, 1949; August 17,
1961; December 9,1965; October 21,1976; September 8,1977; November 19,1981; August
19, 1982; February 25, 1988; World Report, 2000; Pietro Copiz, "Euro-Africa Division,"
(Journal of Adventist Education, Summer 1985), pp. 25-28; E. E. Cossentine, "The Depart-
ment of Education: Report of the Secretary, 1950," AST, RG 51; email interview, Daniel
Heinz, July 4-7, 2003.
lE. E. Cossentine, "The Department of Education: Report of the Secretary, 1950," AST,
RG51;
4Sources for Poland are interview, B. B. Beach, March 14, 2002; Northern European
Light, December 1958; September 1959; April 1960; November 1962; July-August 1965;
November 1965; v. 23, no. 3, 1973; v. 5, no. 5, 1978; v. 28, no. 1978; June 1986; November
1986; November 1988; General Conference Minutes, October 28, 1957; October 24, 1966;
December 29, 1966; World Report, 2000; SDA Yearbook, 1991,2001.
Worthern Light, 1973, no. 3, p. 7.
61nformation about Yugoslavia drawn from interview, Pavle Borovic, July 30, 2003;
1977-78 Bulletin of Adventista Teoloska Skola; "Report of the Visiting Committee, Yugosla-
vian Adventist Seminary, May 24-26,1968," AST, RG 51; "Report of the Visiting Committee
of the General Conference Board of Regents and Euro-African Division Commission on Ac-
creditation for Adventisticki Seminar Marusevec," 1978, ibid.; General Conference Minutes,
April 11,1974; June 4,1981; January 21,1988; December 12,1991; Light, v. 28, no. 3,1978;
November, 1986; September 1989.
7Newsnote, (Journal of True Education, April 1947), p. 25.
81nterview, B. B. Beach, March 14,2002; Northern Light, December 1955; April 1956;
Light, March 1990; Adventist Review, July 25, 2002; World Report, 2000.
9For data about Adventist education in Russia see General Conference Bulletin, 1985, no.
7, pp. 2, 3; Adventist Review, September 14,1989; April 12, 1990; Light, February, 1989; Reo
Ganson, "Adventures in Russia-Adventist Education's Newest Frontier, (Journal of Adven-
tist Education, December 1992-January 1993), p. 3; General Conference Minutes, July 19,
1990; September 20,1990; November 8,1990; March 21,1991; May 9,1991; September 19,
1991; November 7, 1993; Mikhail Kulakov, God's Soviet Miracles (Boise, 10: Pacific Press
Publishing Association, 1993); interview, Harry Mayden, February 27, 2002.
'OGeneral Conference Bulletin, 1985, no. 7, pp. 2, 3.
"Sources for information about Sri Lanka: combined interview, U. D. Aloysius, W. D.
Joseph, Peter Munasinghe, J. Willy Reith, Colombo, Sir Lanka, May 21, 2002; interview,
Paul Essig, Mailapitiya, Sri Lanka, May 22, 2002; interview, Karen Essig, Mailapitiya, Sri
Lanka, May 23, 2002; interview, H. G. M. Fernando, Colombo, Sri Lanka, May 22, 2002;
interview, R. S. Fernando, Kandy, Sri Lanka, May 23, 2002; Donald M. Fernando, ed., 75th
Anniversary: Lakpahana Adventist College (Mailapitiya, Sri Lanka: Lakpahana Publishing
House, 1998); R. S. Fernando, The Isles Shall Not Wait (Colombo, Sir Lanka: Associated
Newspapers of Ceylon, 1987); A. W. Robinson, "Partial Account of Our Ceylon Experience,"
unpublished manuscript, library, Lakpahana Adventist College; E. A. Crane, "I Remember
Sri Lanka," unpublished manuscript, ibid.; Joyce and Eric Juriansz to Friends of Lakpahana,
March 27, 1998, ibid; Paul Essig to Joyce and Eric Juriansz, August 20, 1998, ibid.; Richard
458
Hammill to R. R. Figuhr, February 6, 1961, AST, RG 51; General Conference Minutes, June
I, 1961.
'2Kingsley C. 1. Peter, "Lakpahana-A Reflection," published in 75,h Anniversary: Lakpa-
hana Adventist College.
I1The Cuban story summarized from Walton 1. Brown, Oh Mi C. A! (unpublished history
of Antillian College, 1990); interview by letter, Vicente Rodriguez, April 12,2002; General
Conference Minutes, January 25, 1968; February 27, 1969; May 27, 1971; World Report,
2000; Adventist Review, May 5, 1983; March 26, 1987; November 16, 1989; March 8,1990;
September 15, 1994; December 14, 1995; December 12,1996; Liberty, May-June, 1988.
'4For a dramatic account of this phase of Antillian College, see Brown, Oh Mi C. A.!,
pp.83-104.
19
ACADEMIC FREEDOM
AND STATE AID
During the second half of the twentieth century developments in

Adventist education brought an entirely new look to denominational
schools. With the establishment of degree-granting institutions and
graduate education around the world came new issues that were both
pragmatic and philosophical. Among the leading questions were new
views of the two related matters of academic freedom and academic
due process. The issue of government aid raised questions about the
doctrine of separation of church and state, with which institutional ad-
ministrators and church leaders debated, sometimes with visible pas-
sion. Increasingly, these problems exerted external pressure on denom-
inational control of education.
Inductive Learning and Revealed Truth

The decision to establish universities that offered graduate de-
grees gave rise to keener awareness of scholarly activity and the role
which the proverbial pursuit of truth played in Adventist institu-
tions. Understood in the context of academe, a search for truth meant
that institutions committed themselves to a methodical process of
repeated questioning, testing, and dialogue in the belief that truth
460
ACADEMIC FREEDOM AND STATE AID
was discoverable. While this academic atmosphere was routine in

education at large, it caused discomfort to many Adventists because
they had long accustomed themselves to a theologically oriented
educational process based on revealed truth rather than inductive
search. For some Adventists it was tantamount to a denial of faith to
say that Adventist higher education was engaged in a search for
truth when they believed they already possessed the truth that mat-
tered, truth that went beyond the earthly and natural to the eternal
and supernatural.
It was not always easy to sort out the details of the debate. Scriptur-
ally revealed truth was theological and moral, and thus largely prescrip-
tive. The meaning and validity of Scriptural truth rested on believers'
faith in and commitment to its divine origin, which were very subjective
matters. By contrast, descriptive truth was scientific, natural, objective,
discoverable, and in its purest form, amoral. But this oversimplified dis-
tinction blurred because Adventists also believed that while revealed
truth was supernatural in origin, it contained many discoverable reali-
ties, such as prophetic interpretation and historical facts pertaining to
events and people as verified by research and archeological discoveries.
In the event of apparent contradictions between the two schools of
thought, the intellectually inclined found themselves impaled on the
question of whether to accommodate their faith to the discoverable re-
alities they knew or to accommodate the realities they discovered to
their faith.
Academic Freedom on the Adventist Campus

As the major protagonist of descriptive truth, secular education re-
jected the supernatural and subjective aspects of prescriptive truth as
unreliable and held that prescriptive truth was as discoverable as de-
scriptive truth. Adventist education did not deny the objective reality of
descriptive truth, but regarded it as secondary, if not subservient, to
prescriptive truth. The undergirding rationale was that God as creator
was the author of both prescriptive and descriptive truth and therefore
contradictions existed only as a result of inadequate understanding. A
collision of the two mentalities launched a debate over academic free-
dom during the 1960s that helped to shape the nature of Adventist high-
er education from that point forward.'
461
The legal profession never reduced the idea of academic freedom to

a neat definition for the courts, but as understood by the American As-
sociation of University Professors, the very notion of education pre-
sumed that teachers owned an inherent right for protection to research
and publish their findings in oral and written form. Implicitly, academic
freedom gave teachers the right to challenge conventional wisdom and
tenets of belief, but questions were to be serious and academically re-
sponsible, not flippant or merely challenge for the sake of challenge.
The protection teachers enjoyed under academic freedom was limited
to their professional specialties and related topics. This freedom never
gave teachers the right to say anything they pleased with impunity. The
courts generally upheld this position.
University teachers founded the American Association of University
Professors in 1915 expressly to promote academic freedom and due
process. Known as the AAUP, in 1940 it published a seminal statement
on academic freedom, with the caveat that religious institutions could
legitimately proscribe certain teachings by their faculty, but in all fair-
ness administrators should make their restrictions clear in writing be-
fore employing anyone. Thirty years later in 1970, the AAUP withdrew
its endorsement of this exception with the explanation that sectarian
institutions no longer needed or desired it.
It was during the years leading up to this 1970 action that the debate
about academic freedom broke out among Adventist educators. Earle
Hilgert, vice president for academic administration at Andrews Uni-
versity, warned in 1968 that the AAUP was on the verge of repudiating
its 1940 exception rule for sectarian schools and that regional accredit-
ing associations were also picking up on the same idea. He stated the
obvious when he said that Adventist schools would face acute problems
if accreditation bodies denied them the right to maintain their identity.
Four years prior to Hilgert's bleak prognosis, the General Confer-
ence went on record to uphold the paramount position of divine revela-
tion as applied to knowledge. A year later, in 1965, a committee of five
Adventist college and university presidents hammered out a proposed
policy of academic freedom that complied with AAUP's 1940 state-
ment, declaring that a teacher exercised academic freedom on an Ad-
ventist campus within the "framework of the appreciations, ideals,
spirit, beliefs, and doctrines of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, for
462
as a member of the church he has subscribed to its teachings and has

accepted its doctrines. Outside of this faith and structure he is not at
liberty to speak or teach."2
Until the 1960s Adventist campuses were relatively free from debate
about academic freedom, but the issue had existed from the days of
Battle Creek College. One of the earliest Adventist cases involving aca-
demic freedom occurred in 1889 when W. W. Prescott appointed E. 1.
Waggoner as a teacher in the Ministers' Bible school to introduce the
new doctrinal emphasis on justification by faith. Even though Prescott
also assigned Waggoner's theological antagonist, Uriah Smith, to con-
duct theology classes at the same time, traditional stalwarts in the de-
nomination ignited an incendiary reaction to Waggoner's presence on
the Battle Creek campus, accusing him of violating doctrinal ortho-
doxy. Waggoner did not remain on the campus long, but Prescott, with
whom most of the church leadership sided, did not let up his support of
Waggoner's views, even teaching some of the material himself.
As this fracas showed, maintaining the principle of academic free-
dom on an Adventist campus was probably more a matter of determin-
ing the shape of church beliefs than a guard against non-Adventist
teachings. The validity of such doctrines as the Sabbath and the state of
the dead were not controversial theological issues in Adventist schools,
but shifting nuances on long-held doctrines could precipitate cries of
heresy.
But fears of unorthodoxy figured in a case seven years after
the Waggoner incident when about a dozen instructors in the teacher-
preparation department left Battle Creek because the new president,
E. A. Sutherland, believed they had adopted ideas incompatible to
Adventism while studying at the University of Buffalo and other non-
Adventist institutions. During the accreditation debate in the 1920s and
1930s a similar fear became the primary argument to discourage or
even prevent denominational teachers from enrolling for advanced
studies in non-Adventist schools. 3
Through the years it became evident that some fields of study were
more susceptible to controversy than others. Theology topped the list,
but literature, history, science, and teacher-preparation programs were
special targets. Early on, some teachers exaggerated Ellen White's ad-
vice to make the Bible the center of all study into a policy that made the
463
Bible the sole textbook in all subject areas, but even though that im-
pulse subsided, a general sense remained that Adventist beliefs must be
obvious in all courses. However prevalent this conviction was, denom-
inational educators were unable to standardize it, and with no measur-
ing rod, teachers were on their own to devise methods to integrate
spiritual teachings into their courses. Sooner or later this grey area of
opinion would produce problems.
In time church leaders and educators focused on theology and sci-
ence as the primary fields where the question of academic freedom was
most critical. In some respects, the Adventist approach to church doc-
trine contributed to an atmosphere of debate and thus heightened the
level of controversy and emphasized the meaningfulness of academic
freedom. Adventists taught that the Bible was the absolute measure of
church teachings, but understanding biblical truths was progressive,
which presupposed continuous study with the possibility that church-
men would revise the wording of church beliefs to reflect improved
comprehension of Scripture.
Accordingly, church leaders did not reduce Adventist doctrines to
an official creed, but chose instead to publish statements of fundamen-
tal beliefs that were subject to reexamination. A comparison of the
three statements of Seventh-day Adventist fundamental beliefs issued
in 1872, 1931, and 1980 indicates that while basic doctrines retained
their essential meaning, understanding of biblical truths was indeed a
process of development and that the principle of progressiye under-
standing applies to corporate Adventism as well as to individuals.
Without the freedom of discussion this kind of change would have been
unlikely or even possible. 4
Academic Freedom and Science

During the 1930s concern mounted over science education in which
the theory of evolution was becoming increasingly pervasive. Science
classes in Adventist education had traditionally served two leading
purposes-they taught students to appreciate nature as God's "other
textbook" that demonstrated His creation, and they prepared students
for careers in medicine or nursing. Adventists customarily treated evo-
lution as a theological issue which the Bible refuted, but college profes-
sor George McCready Price had been agitating since the turn of the
464
century that creationists should meet evolutionists on their own ground

with contradicting evidence gathered from a study of geology.5
Price wrote prolifically and developed an international reputation
among creationists. Although he taught widely in denominational
schools and authored science textbooks that argued against evolution,
the church was ill prepared for the piercing wake-up call it received
during the 1925 "monkey trial" in Dayton, Tennessee when a court
convicted John T. Scopes of violating state law by teaching evolution in
the local high school. Though they won the case, creationists suffered a
serious loss of respect in the public eye as Scopes' defense caricatured
the biblical explanation of origins as a ridiculous idea. It became appar-
ent to Adventist theologians and science educators that while Price had
been hammering on the use of scientific evidence to oppose evolution,
aside from their theological arguments which scientists rejected out of
hand, the average Adventist science teacher was nearly bereft of ratio-
nal explanations for a belief in the Genesis story.
A year after the Scopes episode, delegates to the General Confer-
ence session approved a resolution encouraging research and publica-
tion in geology and biology in order to stave off the advance of evolu-
tion, and four years later at the request of the Department of Education,
the General Conference voted a position statement on creation. There
was little question that those who wrote the proposal understood the
philosophical implications of the issue. "We repudiate the materialistic
interpretation of science," it read, "and believe that in all fields of scien-
tific research we must look for the cause of natural phenomena, not in
resident forces, but in the active will of God."6
In 1938 Adventist science and mathematics teachers began a series
of conferences on the note that they should seize the initiative in re-
searching the issue of creation in order to answer the claims of evolu-
tionists. A growing number of science teachers held doctorates in their
fields but contrary to the fears of many church leaders who had dis-
couraged advanced studies, proceedings of the gatherings of science
teachers in 1942, 1947, 1952, and 1956 indicated their unquestionable
commitment to the Adventist belief in creation rather than a decline.
By the 1950s advances in radiocarbon dating posed a new challenge
to creationists, apparently pushing the age of the earth irretrievably
beyond the interpretation Adventists placed on the Genesis account.
465
Discussions that began at the 1956 meeting culminated the next year
when the General Conference formed a standing committee which, in
time, matured into the Geoscience Research Institute whose purpose
was to fulfill the 1926 resolution to research and publish on the issue of
creation. As the GRI scientists probed deeper into the questions of ori-
gins, the age of the earth and the biblical flood, they sometimes differed
among themselves, especially on the question of the trustworthiness of
the geologic column. It became clear that their findings were not con-
clusive, but only incomplete evidences pointing to the integrity of the
biblical record.
It was also evident that Adventist scientists could not answer every
question. How to interpret data was not always apparent. Increasingly,
Adventists learned to live with the consciousness that creation was be-
yond scientific explanation, a matter of faith, even though some had
hoped to nail it down.
The impact of these events on academic freedom in Adventist
schools was profound. A degree of pluralism entered academe which
affected theology as well as science. While the statements of funda-
mental beliefs in 1872 and 1931 recognized the creative power of God,
it was not until 1980 that Adventists spelled out the doctrine of creation
as a fundamental belief. Some critics complained that the heavy re-
search of the GRI would produce skeptics, but the 1980 statement up-
held the seven-day creation week, crowned by the Sabbath, but was
silent on the age of the earth.
Most ofthis debate as it affected academic freedom took place in the
United States, but as Adventist higher education spread to the world
fields, denominational schools could not avoid the impact of evolution.
That there were variations of the belief in creation was an acknowl-
edged fact; what was not so certain was the influence these differences
exerted on students in denominational schools and the church at large.
At the Annual Council in 2001 the General Conference approved a
proposal for scientists, educators, theologians, and church administra-
tors to conduct a three-year sequence of Faith and Science Conferences
to deal with the growing debate in the church about creation. The plan
called for regional discussions around the globe and two international
conferences to discuss the "interplay of faith, science, and philosophy
and the ways in which these challenge or contribute to the church's
466
understanding and proclamation regarding Genesis 1-11."7 Because the

doctrine of creation itself was not under review, the Faith and Science
Conferences were left with the task of clearing the air of tensions by
providing a forum for exchange and thus clarifying how Adventists
understood creation and how to teach a belief rooted in science as part
of a confessional faith.
After three years of discussions in seven of the world divisions and
two plenary sessions in the United States, the Faith and Science Con-
ference issued "An Affirmation of Creation," a judicious but unequivo-
cal statement explaining the position of the conferees. The statement
attributed the debate not only to questions that scientists raised but also
to the large number of Adventist students attending secular institutions.
Among denominational scientists no support for a completely natural-
istic explanation of origins arose, which meant that the issue turned on
variations of belief in the Genesis account rather than the biblical story
itself. The document confirmed the legitimacy of the scientific method
in studying matters of faith and applauded scientists for the contribu-
tions they made to Adventist beliefs and to higher education.
As much as "An Affirmation of Creation" supported scientific stud-
ies in Adventist classrooms, it denied science the right to be the final
arbiter of truth when scientists perceived disharmony between inter-
pretations of Scripture and empirical data. It upheld the primacy of
Scripture in the Adventist understanding of Genesis 1-11 and rejected
the idea that the scientific method was the only means to arrive at truth,
but it recommended the continual reexamination of Scripture in light of
information derived from scientific investigation. Significantly, it as-
serted that belief in the biblical account of creation was foundational to
all other teachings of Adventism and suggested that Seventh-day Ad-
ventist Fundamental Belief Six-the doctrine of creation-should be re-
vised to be more precise regarding the creation week and creation itself
as a recent cosmological event.
Members of the 2004 Annual Council overwhelmingly adopted the
report, but rejected the proposal to revise Fundamental Belief Six. This
show of support for the Adventist view of creation was encouraging to
church leaders, but it did not erase the fact that variations of belief ex-
isted, described as "earth-age pluralism" by one attendee who was con-
cerned that Adventist campuses would continue to tolerate "deep-time"
467
theories of creation espoused by some science teachers. 8 The dominant

theme of "An Affirmation of Creation" was its firmness on the long-
standing Adventist position that faith in revealed and prescriptive truth
was more influential than belief in discoverable and descriptive truth
when the two were in conflict. The statement did not include the term
academic freedom but it spoke to the question of responsibility and
integrity within the teaching profession. As a fundamental belief of the
church, creation remained strengthened as a limitation on the concept
of absolute academic freedom in Adventist education. 9
The Institute for Christian Teaching

The General Conference Department of Education also undertook
projects to bridge the gap between inductive learning and faith in re-
vealed knowledge. Adopting a model from evangelical colleges in the
United States, in 1987 George Akers, at the time director of the depart-
ment, and Humberto Rasi, an departmental associate who became di-
rector in 1990, founded the Institute for Christian Teaching as a vehicle
to promote Adventist philosophy of education. The primary activity of
the Institute was a sequence of seminars for post-secondary teachers in
all world fields to strengthen both their understanding and their com-
mitment to integrate faith and learning.
Rasi believed that Adventist teachers were obligated to help students
"in the rediscovery of the inherent unity that underlies all fields of
knowledge," a concept that he believed secular education had lost
through excessive reliance on rationalism and empiricism for expla-
nations of the natural world. This movement had climaxed in post-
modernism that declared truth to be inaccessible. "Adventist education
challenges those assumptions head-on," Rasi wrote, "and intentionally
seeks to restore the unity of knowledge that still exists, thus reconnect-
ing faith, knowledge, values, and life."ID
The seminars were something new for Adventist educators, who
were typically conditioned by a traditional beliefin the inherent values
of Adventist education without reflecting on the philosophical issue
that Rasi described. The motivating element of the seminars was a con-
viction that many Adventist teachers were susceptible to a dichotomous
approach to their classes, eliminating faith from their teaching in secu-
lar fields. As a requirement participants in the faith and learning semi-
468
nars read books and prepared papers which Rasi compiled under the
title of Christ in the Classroom and sent to Adventist college libraries
around the world. By the end of 2004 Rasi had conducted thirty-two
seminars and attendees had produced about 600 essays that explained
how various academic and professional disciplines could integrate a
biblical world view in their college classrooms. Thirty-two volumes of
these essays were available to every Adventist post-secondary institu-
tion, and about a third of them were retrievable as online documents. 11
The Desmond Ford Case and Recent Denominational Events

Perhaps the most celebrated case of academic freedom in the field of
theology began in 1979 when Desmond Ford, an Australian theology
professor teaching at Pacific Union College, advanced views that dis-
puted the traditional Adventist interpretation of the Mosaic sanctuary
and the prophetic significance of the year 1844. After he submitted a
lengthy explanation of his position, a 12S-member Sanctuary Review
Committee met in 1980 to discuss his understanding of the doctrine of
the sanctuary. Ford did not convince the committee of his interpreta-
tion, and as a result he lost his ministerial credentials but retained his
membership in the church.
Events in sectarian education at large furnished support for the posi-
tion of Adventist education on academic freedom. As they unfolded, it
became clear that the AAUP had underestimated the resolve of church
affiliated institutions to adhere to the 1940 declaration of academic
freedom rather than to buckle under pressure to accept its recision in
1970. One of the chief spokesmen in favor of religious limits on aca-
demic freedom was George M. Marsden, a member of the Christian
Reformed Church and for two decades a member of the faculty at Cal-
vin College before moving to Duke University and finally to Notre
Dame in 1992. Throughout his career he argued persuasively in numer-
ous books and articles that academic freedom was a legitimate right of
church related institutions as well as individuals, and that religious
scholarship was reliable and contributed to the multicultural society
that the United States claimed to be. Joining the debate was attorney
John Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute, who defended
academic freedom on the basis of the First Amendment to the Constitu-
tion.
469
In 1997 the AAUP showed signs of second thoughts when it teamed

up with Baylor University, the American Academy of Religion, and the
Society of Biblical Literature to conduct a conference exploring the is-
sue of academic freedom at sectarian colleges and universities. Aca-
deme, the journalistic voice of the AAUP, devoted its entire January-
February 2001 issue to the topic, providing a forum for Marsden and
others to state their case. Before the 1990s ended it was evident that
sectarian education had safeguarded its position on academic free-
dom.
Within Adventist circles educators never even hinted that they would
conform to AAUP's 1970 action. In 1972 the Board of Higher Educa-
tion considered a statement of academic freedom which upheld "disci-
plined" research and teaching, and included academic due process to
provide a fair hearing for teachers suspected of unorthodox instruction.
Fifteen years later in 1987 the General Conference adopted a position
statement that continued to uphold church doctrine as the norm for
limiting academic freedom but left room for differences of opinion in
some unspecified areas of belief. The action placed due process in the
hands of academic institutions where, after the mid- 1990s, the boards
of trustees became the legal controlling authority. In its essential prin-
ciples academic freedom as Adventists practiced it had not changed
from those embodied in the 1965 statement, but procedures of imple-
menting it had altered dramatically not only as a result of influences
from higher education but also as a result of the wider latitude in which
Adventists understood church doctrine.
Issue of Government Aid

The issue of academic freedom pivoted on the question of control of
denominational institutions, which was also true of government aid to
sectarian schools, another topic of animated discussion beginning soon
after World War II ended. At the heart of the debate was the First
Amendment to the United States Constitution which enunciated the
"establishment clause," the cornerstone of American religious liberty
which forbade Congress to legislate "respecting an establishment of
religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." It was this concept
that Thomas Jefferson immortalized in his classic metaphor of a "wall
of separation" between church and state.
470
Based upon this long tradition, Adventist church leaders habitually

taught that Adventist schools should not accept government support.
As part of the fallout from the Solusi episode, the 1895 General Confer-
ence session went on record with a resolution stating that gifts or grants,
either of land, money or anything else of value from governments at
any level violated the principle of separation of church and state and as
a denomination Seventh-day Adventists should neither seek nor accept
such favors. 12 D. Lois Burnett, of the General Conference medical de-
partment, surprised no one when she wrote in 1944 that Adventist nurs-
ing schools would not enroll students under the terms of the Bolton
Act, a wartime provision to furnish financial assistance in educating
nurses to serve public needs, including civilian as well as military duty.
Her reasons were unapologetic: Adventist schools risked their identity
as sectarian institutions if they accepted tax money either directly or
indirectly.13
Debate Over Governmental Aid in North America

Despite a rigid verbal stance on this question, immediately after the
war Adventist institutions took advantage of governmental largesse in
distributing surplus property to private institutions. The prime example
of tax-funded assistance to the church was the sale in 1948 of a former
military base to the Central California Conference for a dollar, despite
its fair market value of $350,000. The property became Monterey Bay
Academy. Some elementary schools participated in government-sup-
ported school lunch programs. The question was complicated by the G.
I. Bill, legislation that paid discharged military personnel to attend
schools of their choice. These allotments were payments to persons, not
institutions, but because the intention was to finance education and
school bursaries eventually received much of the funds, many argued
that this was a form of public aid to private education.
By the 1960s government financial involvement in private educa-
tion had become common. Through federal, state, and local govern-
ments tax money and services became available to private schools in
the form of reimbursement to families who did not use school busses,
loans of textbooks and teaching materials to private schools, auxilia-
ry health and counseling services to non-public institutions, vouchers
to families to pay educational fees in private schools, and grants to
471
construct buildings and to fund re-

search projects. Adventist schools in
the United States sometimes took the
money, sometimes refused it. In ev-
ery case, positive or negative, the de-
ciding factor was avoiding any possi-
bility of compromising the Adventist
identity of schools.14
As consistent as this practice ap-
peared, some were dubious about the
church's fundamental opposition to
government aid. Charles B. Hirsch, at
the time vice president for academic
administration at Andrews University
and later General Conference Director
Charles B. Hirsch served as president of Education, became one of the first
of Columbia Union College. vice to challenge openly denominational
president for academic affairs at An- policy when he spoke out in 1965, de-
drews University. General Confer-
ence director of education, and Gen- nying that the government had any in-
eral Conference vice president. He tention of usurping control of private
vigorous(v promoted the Adventist schools when it provided money and
accreditation system around the
world and helped launch the debate services, but instead simply wanted to
about the position of Seventh-day Ad- assist private education. After review-
ventists vis-a-vis government aid for ing two decades of financial aid to pri-
church-sponsored education.
vate schools, he could cite no case
when Adventist schools in the United States lost their independence or
denominational identity as a result of accepting tax-funded support,
and pointed out that any strings attached to government aid were no
more than those justified under reasonable accreditation requirements.
Hirsch also suggested that the constitutionality of government aid
was fluid, depending on opinions of judges whose views could change
from one generation to the next. Strict separation had once been the
norm but one ofthe growing arguments to justify granting public mon-
ey to non-pUblic schools was the doctrine of non-preferential assistance.
Hirsch pointed out that if this understanding of the First Amendment
and the establishment clause became the dominant one, educators could
expect public money to flow to private institutions. Another variation
472
on the First Amendment that was becoming more acceptable would

permit public money to fund non-religious aspects of sectarian schools,
but in no case could church-related education legitimately depend on
government aid for direct religious education.
Hisrch exploded a bombshell by venturing that the reason why Ad-
ventists rejected government aid was to perpetuate the doctrine of sep-
aration of church and state as fixed and unalterable. "It is here," he said,
"not in the question of control, doctrine, or moral issues, that we have
the crux of the matter. It is the factor of inconsistency that will plague
us ... and yet we must recognize that the path we have followed to the
present has not been a most consistent one."15
Not everyone agreed with Hirsch, but no one could deny the increas-
ing volume of public money flowing to private campuses. All schools
throughout the United States, both public and private, faced expanding
enrollments after World War II which spawned financial dilemmas and
stimulated federal involvement in education and required states to
spend more on education. During the 1960s when the baby boomer
generation began to enter post-secondary schools a sympathetic federal
government opened its purse, and under the slogan of the "Great Soci-
ety" poured out public money in unprecedented amounts to schools,
especially colleges and universities. These demographic and financial
conditions affected Adventist schools, but except for the G. I. Bill and
other cautiously selected assistance, Adventist policy placed govern-
ment aid off limits.16
In 1968 the issue broke wide open during a conference of North
American higher education teachers and administrators at Andrews
University. The debate did not settle the question, but protagonists on
both sides of the question squared off and deepened the rift that sepa-
rated them. Facing severe financial dilemmas, Adventist post-second-
ary schools acted on their own and arranged for help from the public
sector in spite of an official policy that was under severe fire. One mem-
ber of the General Conference Committee recalled that a stunned si-
lence descended on the General Conference Committee when colleges
disclosed how extensively they were involved in programs of govern-
ment aid. In the case of the most lucrative engagement, even the chair-
man of the board rose to say he was not aware of the school's commit-
ments. 17
473
By 1971 Adventist colleges and universities in the United States

were receiving public money in one form or another totaling almost
$5,400,000. The figure rose to nearly $9,000,000 in 1978. Perhaps the
most telling impact of this money was the fact that it accounted for
nearly eight percent of institutional operating funds and approximated
half the amount of church subsidies to Adventist higher education in
North America. Government money was clearly the margin of differ-
ence to balance the annual budgets in Adventist schools. Most of the
money came under the umbrella of financial assistance to students and
thus was a benefit to individuals, but the unmistakable destination of
the money was the institutional bursary.18
In 1972 the General Conference revised its earlier policy to allow
institutions to accept government money but only discreetly and with a
wary eye toward the risk of government control. The action, according
to Roland Hegstad, a member of the General Conference Public Affairs
and Religious Liberty Department, was to legitimize the growing prac-
tice of institutional applications for public money.19
Among Adventist educators an ambivalent attitude arose over this
situation. Institutional administrators welcomed government aid be-
cause it was sure funding that allowed them to balance their budgets
and to make campus improvements. On the flip side of the coin was a
misgiving over institutional dependency on public money and an ap-
prehension about demands that federal and state governments might
impose on schools to control the quality and nature of an education that
they were funding. An unease also arose among many who saw the
process as a cancerous undermining of the doctrine of separation of
church and state.
The same attitudes characterized conference and union superinten-
dents of education and principals of elementary and secondary schools.
Many of them stood to benefit from auxiliary public health services,
lunch programs, and loans oftextbooks, computer equipment and other
teaching materials. Pressure intensified as government aid did not
slacken while the sentiments on both sides of the issue became divi-
sive.
In 1991 at Clackamas, Oregon a group of about seventy-five church
leaders and educators, mainly from North America, met to discuss de-
nominational practices and policies relating to government aid, focus-
474
ing on elementary and secondary schools. Among the speakers were

attorneys, educators, theologians, and leaders in the field of religious
liberty. Presenters from Australia and Canada discussed the issue as it
affected Adventist schools outside the United States. 20
Opinions of the speakers varied, beginning with those who remind-
ed the audience of the historical position of the church and the specter
of government controls that always lurked in the shadows. On the other
side of the question, the strongest appeal to accept tax-supported aid
came from Richard Osborn, vice president for education in the Colum-
bia Union, who argued forcefully that eschatological beliefs had im-
paired a rational understanding of the purposes of government aid.
The attendees were not empowered to make any decisions. Probably
the most visible outcome of the meeting was its blunting effect on the
belief that government aid was unbiblical. However strong the church
had held to its beliefs, the question was a legal matter, and while vigi-
lance over government interference was a valid concern, the issue came
to be seen as a practical rather than a moral one. The gathering also
enlightened educators concerning shifts in legal tests that courts ap-
plied to determine whether or not a given case of government aid vio-
lated the establishment clause. 21
Columbia Union College v. Clarke

What some Adventist leaders deemed the capstone event in the dis-
cussion about government aid was a lawsuit that dragged over the de-
cade of the 1990s, climaxing in 2001 when a federal court of appeals
approved an application from Columbia Union College to receive Mary-
land state funding in excess of $800,000 for math, computer science,
and nursing programs. In 1992 the Maryland Higher Education Com-
mission denied CUC's original request for public money with the ex-
planation that the school was pervasively sectarian and to grant it mon-
ey would violate the establishment clause. Court actions upheld the
Commission's decision, but after additional hearings, the courts found
the college not to be pervasively sectarian, which made the school eli-
gible for state funds. 22
The court's ruling jolted Adventists and sparked a debate about the
nature of denominational education and potential repercussions of the
decision. Conditioned by customary denominational thinking, many
475
believed that being pervasively sectarian was axiomatic in Adventist

schools because of the long tradition that Adventism was inseparable
from all instruction. The conviction that this ideal should prevail in
denominational schools was fundamental to the faith and learning
seminars that Humberto Rasi conducted around the world and the mes-
sage of his Christ in the Classroom series-a worldview of knowledge
that provided a biblical rationale for all learning. Also, being perva-
sively sectarian was a point to be made to satisfy the criteria of the
Adventist Accrediting Association.
Some held the opinion that, in order to acquire public money, Co-
lumbia Union College had minimized the spiritual character of its non-
theology programs out of existence. They saw CUC compromising its
institutional mission by declaring that for practical purposes much of
its program was no different from what students would find at a state
university. It was easy to charge CUC with relinquishing its Adventist
identity and to forecast calamitous results for the school when it faced
problems that legally hinged on its status as a religious college.
Others, however, saw the decision more in light of equal treatment
of religious entities. According to the court, "pervasively sectarian"
was legalese which meant that the primary purpose of a given class was
to impart religious knowledge. Applying the court's reasoning, a chem-
istry teacher, for example, could include religious elements in the class
syllabus and share religious points of view in class lectures and labs,
but because the purpose of the course was to deliver information about
chemistry rather than theology the religious aspects were only inciden-
tal and did not produce a pervasively sectarian class. Church-sponsored
schools could even require students to attend religious convocations
and teachers could pray before classes without becoming pervasively
sectarian.
To add to the uncertainty, doubts were springing up in the legal pro-
fession about the propriety of the pervasively sectarian test in the first
place. Justices and constitutional lawyers alike were complaining that
to identify a pervasively sectarian campus they had to become too in-
trusive about the ways in which religious schools practiced their faith.
They did not question the impropriety of funding actual ministerial
education or general religion classes, but they were becoming increas-
ingly reluctant to split theological hairs about other religious activities
476
and tumble into pitfalls of inconsistency by declaring some schools eli-

gible for public money while denying others. They were fearful of
weakening the ability ofthe legal system to protect the rights of institu-
tions to fulfill their legitimate religious mission under the terms of the
free exercise clause of the First Amendment.
The Columbia Union College v. Clarke case had originated during
the presidency of William Loveless, but continued into the administra-
tion of Charles Scriven who contended that in the interests of fairness
CUC should receive aid inasmuch as all other mainline denominational
institutions were receiving it. The application was for funds from a
state program designed especially for private institutions of higher edu-
cation, including sectarian colleges which had to meet measurable
qualifications. In their arguments for the college, attorneys hinted
strongly that Scriven's view of the issue was the critical one, neutrality
rather than being pervasively sectarian was the primary question. Be-
cause other sectarian institutions had received state funding from the
same source, almost by definition the pervasively sectarian test became
irrelevant.
Some argued with a degree of cynicism that by relegating the perva-
sively sectarian test to the back seat, judges and attorneys were engag-
ing in legal gymnastics to arrive at the neutrality test which was a much
less controversial way to settle the issue. Whatever the truth, Columbia
Union College v. Clarke was a textbook case illustrating the dynamic
nature of legality. The court accepted the reality that religion itself was
a pervasive influence in society and that to apply the pervasively sec-
tarian test was too tricky to be practical. They decided that the more
evenhanded response was to grant religious schools money on an equal
footing, but at the same time ensuring that the funds did not finance
ministerial training or theological instruction. Whether or not Colum-
bia Union College was pervasively sectarian in the Adventist sense of
the term was a philosophical issue left to the judgment of the college
administration and the board.
Columbia Union College v. Clarke was important to Adventists be-
cause it directly involved Adventist education, but it was only one of a
lengthening list of even more significant decisions that set precedents
for the issue of public support of sectarian education. Viewed in their
entirety and chronologically from the 1940s onward, they emphasized
Hirsch's observations made in 1965, which had also received attention

at Clackamas: constitutional interpretations of the First Amendment
are not moral questions but instead are legal issues that swing accord-
ing to the political context and the stream of current thought in the legal
profession, converting what is illegal in one decade into legality in the
next.
When the United States Supreme Court ruled in June 2002 that
school vouchers were not a violation of the establishment clause,
Adventist leaders in education and religious liberty were officially
silent. School vouchers were analogous to the G. I. Bill-money
which denominational schools had accepted because it benefitted
individuals who chose the schools where recipients would spend the
money. More than thirty years earlier the North American Division
voted not to take a position on the voucher issue because the condi-
tions that states attached to the money varied to the point of defying
any blanket policy. The NAD action instructed schools to accept or
reject vouchers on the basis of the strings that the states had tied to
them.23
Government Aid in Australia

The debate over separation of church and state as it affected sectar-
ian schools had a peculiarly North American flavor because of the es-
tablishment clause, but the rest of the Adventist world also had its ver-
sions of this issue. Of all countries where government support of
sectarian education took place, Australia most resembled the United
States, chiefly because its constitution also included an establishment
clause that denied the Commonwealth the authority to enact any law to
establish religion, to impose religious observance, or to prohibit free
exercise of religion. Similar to the United States, education was a con-
cern of the states rather than the federal government. 24
Tax support for church affiliated schools in Australia was a non-
issue until after World War II when the Commonwealth government
began funding private education by granting money to the states, which,
in turn, disbursed the money according to criteria spelled out in the
legislation itself. By the 1960s and into the 1970s these grants acts
opened the valve to a torrent of tax money flowing into sectarian
schools. Using these funds for both operating and capital purposes, re-
478
ligious bodies built attractive and well equipped elementary and sec-
ondary schools that drew large enrollments.
This practice developed two rival systems of education, the first
consisting of traditional Australian public schools and the second,
church-affiliated schools with a dependency on state aid. Opponents to
government grants alleged that nongovernment schools were a threat to
the public schools because the tax support they received was in viola-
tion of the Constitution. As a practical matter they alleged that the pri-
vate schools drained off the better students into elitist programs. In
1960 the Australian Council for the Defence of Government Schools-
which often went by it acronym, DOGS-organized to prevent tax
money from going to church-affiliated schools On the basis of the
Australian establishment clause, in 1970 the DOGS sued to declare
government grants illegal.
In contrast to Columbia Union College v. Clarke two decades later,
which intended to expand state aid to sectarian colleges in the United
States, the DOGS case-Attorney General (Viet.); ex ref. Black v. the
Commonwealth-sought to prevent aid to elementary and secondary
schools. Legal arguments in Australia took an all-or-nothing approach,
charging that sectarian schools possessed an inherent religiosity that
made it impossible to separate secular and religious instruction, and
that government aid by definition established religion and therefore vi-
olated the Constitution. This line of argument differed from the Amer-
ican pervasively sectarian test which admitted that degrees of religious
influence could exist in schools that received public funding without
infringing on the Constitution.
Attorneys representing both Columbia Union College and the
Australian church schools downplayed the religious aspects of their
programs in order to demonstrate the legality of state aid. In the
DOGS case their testimony mattered little inasmuch as six of the
seven justices found that while the financial grants laws furnished
aid to sectarian schools they did not establish religion as an institu-
tion of the state, which was what the Australian Constitution for-
bade. Education in church schools had to measure up to secular
standards irrespective of its religious admixture. Religion, however
prevalent it might be in the schools receiving grants, was only inci-
dental to the purpose of the aid.
479
The court also argued that Australia depended on church-affiliated

schools to share the government responsibility for education and if
Commonwealth funding withdrew from sectarian schools, the burden
of education would fall completely on the states, which would be a tax
load too great for them to bear. From this argument Australians could
infer that church affiliated schools helped the country to fulfill its com-
pulsory education laws by providing education that met state criteria,
thus reducing government expenses. Whatever grants they received
were, in a sense, compensatory funds.
The ruling became the watershed event in Australia regarding state
aid to religious education and exerted a direct impact on Adventist edu-
cation. Years before the DOGS case Adventist elementary and second-
ary schools in Australia began receiving state aid. Before 1965 they
generally refused assistance, but in a few cases public funds found their
way into denominational schools in the form of payments to families.
In 1965 Carmel College in western Australia accepted a grant to build
a science laboratory. This was the first spurt in a stream of tax money
that funded additional science projects, libraries, and other capital im-
provements in Adventist institutions. By 1977 more than 30 percent of
both capital and operating funds for Adventist elementary and second-
ary schools in Australasia, including Longburn College in New Zea-
land, originated with the government.
Although Adventist elementary and secondary schools depended
heavily on state aid, the real target in the DOGS case was the Roman
Catholic system that comprised about 85 percent of the non-government
schools. Nevertheless, the small fraction of money Adventists received
was sufficient to categorize them among the defendants, although the suit
did not name them as such.
Australian grants laws prescribed accountability from the schools
that received money, but South Pacific Division Director of Education
Lester D. Devine wrote that until the DOGS case schools received state
aid on the basis of the "equivalency" test, which permitted schools to
receive grants with few attached conditions ifthey spent equal amounts
from nongovernment sources of revenue. In 1981 following the DOGS
suit, the government ended the equivalency program and established
categories of expenses for which schools could appropriately spend tax
money and at the same time required stricter accountability from the
480
schools concerning how they spent state aid. In Adventist circles this
wave of regulation prompted a review of the purposes of church educa-
tion accompanied by an acknowledgment that grant money would be
unacceptable ifit required schools to compromise their denominational
identity or the purposes of the church.
At the end of the twentieth century all Adventist schools in Australia
received government aid, but at a substantially lower rate than most
other sectarian schools. "The Adventist Church in Australia should
continue to accept government money," Devine said in 1991, "because
ifit doesn't, the schools are going to suffer and the quality and the total
volume of education provided would be substantially diminished, and
most [of] our small schools would not be viable."25 In keeping with this
policy the church restricted state aid to a margin below half of any
given institution's budget, which empowered the church to maintain an
upper hand in educational finance in a manner analogous to the stock-
holder of a business that owns at least fifty-one percent of the shares
and thus claims managerial rights.
Miscellaneous Cases of Aid to Adventist Schools

Unlike the United States and Australia, many governments estab-
lished a specific church by supporting it with public money, but through
constitutional provisions safeguarded the free exercise of other faiths
and permitted sectarian schools to function. Whether or not established
churches existed, governments commonly held that education was their
responsibility and, recognizing that sectarian schools provided a public
service, many countries made tax-supported assistance available to re-
ligious institutions.
The General Conference resolution in 1895 declaring government
grants unacceptable to Adventists had a very short life. Ironically, the
explanation of Adventists' involvement in the Solusi episode in which
the denomination received 12,000 acres ofland and which precipitated
the 1895 resolution, became the standard rationale in any discussion
about government aid, but the record of receiving public money was
mixed. In order that the Adventist industrial school at Meiktila, Burma
could survive, Robert Bruce Thurber accepted grants-in-aid to pay
teachers' salaries as early as 1914, but only after negotiating conces-
sions that would allow the school to retain its identity as an Adventist
16-IPFTW. 481
institution. Government aid was common in Africa and contributed

much to the advancement of Solusi Mission.
Yet there was an undercurrent of apprehension. L. H. Christian,
president of the Northern Division, noted in 1930 that Adventist mis-
sion work in Africa was largely education and that government policies
were becoming more numerous and sometimes difficult. "Some of our
schools have been given liberal grants of money by the government,"
he said. 26 R. E. Loasby, a delegate from India to the 1923 Colorado
Springs Convention, told his audience that he declined an offer for a
government grant for an Adventist school, choosing instead to establish
industries in which students could work and generate operating capital
for the school.
In 1965 when Charles Hirsch challenged denominational policy af-
fecting government aid in the United States he observed that in Scandi-
navia, Canada, West Africa, and parts ofIndia Adventist schools regu-
larly accepted public money. The list of schools was actually longer. In
Australasia, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Trinidad, British Guiana, Chile,
and Argentina government aid went to Adventist schoolsY
Hirsch admitted to misgivings and complications resulting from ac-
cepting public money in some parts of the world, but denied that gov-
ernment interference followed as if by formula. Church leaders who
warned Adventist schools in the United States against accepting public
money and services were hard put for evidence that their fears of gov-
ernment regulation actually materialized, but the fact that some de-
nominational schools in the world fields had wrestled with serious chal-
lenges from governments over the question of church control of
education lent credence to the cautionary attitude in the United States.
This lesson came from Lakpahana in Sri Lanka which escaped gov-
ernment confiscation because it had refused government assistance.
Again, after communists took control of the state government of Kera-
la, India in 1957, they did not force government aid upon the schools,
but they proposed to pay teachers' salaries and assume control of fac-
ulty appointments in schools that continued to accept grants-in-aid.
The Adventist school avoided this problem because it rejected govern-
ment money. Complaints also came from Trinidad where government
money seemed to be at the root of problems of control of denomina-
tional schools.
482
Government Aid to African Schools

Of all the places where complications arose from accepting govern-
ment money, Exhibit A was the Southern African Division during the
1950s and 1960s. This region embraced nearly all of Africa below the
hump. Here the problem was not an invasive policy by the colonial
governments into schools as a result of financial aid, but a general pol-
icy of government regulation. Government grants were involved be-
cause private education in the English-speaking colonies had developed
a near addictive dependency on them. 28
After a generation of giving assistance to mission schools, colonial
governments began to regulate education in 1931, and in 1945 they
made known their intention to supervise all schools. Six years later the
Beecher Report, a lengthy statement about education in Africa com-
missioned by the British government, recommended that colonial gov-
ernments should take over all schools. In quick succession Kenya,
South Africa, and the Rhodesias legislated aspects of the Beecher Re-
port that would pave the way for government control. 29
Government aid had usually come to Adventist schools in the form
of subsidies through the mission treasuries, but according to the new
plans teachers would receive their salaries directly from the govern-
ment, which would sidestep the denomination and place teachers im-
mediately under government control. Colonial governments also pro-
posed to register all teachers in an employment pool and assign them
according to the needs of individual schools, which would remove
church authority to manage school staffs. It was likely that in time pri-
vate schools would cease to exist.
One of the contributing factors to this issue was the modernizing
trend sweeping across Africa. One church leader remarked that twenty-
five years earlier a missionary teacher earning a couple dollars a month
with a chalk board and thirty or forty students gathered under a tree
was conducting a respectable school. But times had changed. Govern-
ment aid had helped mission societies to develop a wide system of
schools that for Adventists had begun as the most effective means of
evangelism but had become what amounted to a part of the colonial
school system.
Not all Adventist schools took grants. Statistics in 1953 showed 200
aided schools compared to 1,043 unaided in the Southern African Divi-
483
sion, but the amount of government money for the few exceeded de-
nominational appropriations for the many by more than 80 percent.
Aided schools were better staffed and the teachers better paid, which
created a rivalry among teachers to land jobs where salaries were high-
er. The government grant policy focused attention on the inferiority of
Adventist schools that could not afford the upgrading that new expecta-
tions demanded.
Adventist leaders were alarmed. Workers in the East African Union
interpreted the new proposals as a sinister plan that had been underway
for years to put sectarian schools out of business, a conclusion that was
not hard to imagine. That denominational schools had been a part of
the modernizing movement was undeniable, but government money
had enabled them to do it. Church control of aided schools had become
progressively difficult as teachers receiving salaries from aid money
sometimes neglected conventional Sabbath observance and ignored de-
nominational lifestyle standards. If government regulations went into
effect as feared, Adventist schools would have no authority over their
faculties, and denominational identity could vanish. Church leaders
faced the dilemma of whether to continue receiving public support and
risk the loss of denominational schools to government regulation or
refuse grants and risk the closure of church-sponsored education be-
cause of its inability to remain competitive.
The issue was potentially the most intense in the Zambesi Union in
the central area of the Southern African Division where about four of
every five schools were dependent on grants-in-aid. But the most shrill
reaction came from the East African Union in the northeastern part of
the division, where the majority of church leaders viewed government
support of sectarian education as unbiblical and therefore immoral.
Motivated by the hopelessness of their options and a desire to withdraw
abruptly from the government program, they dispatched a frantic re-
quest for help to the Southern African Division and the General Con-
ference. Unless massive amounts of money came from church sources
to take the place of government aid they foresaw the demise of Adven-
tist education in their territory.
Neither the necessary amount of denominational money was forth-
coming nor was the church ready to buckle to financial conditions
dictated by the government. In 1957 Adventist schools in East Africa,
484
Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland began to terminate their relation-

ship with the government. R. S. Watts, president of the Southern Af-
rican Division, told the 1958 General Conference session that while
the division had turned over many schools to the government to con-
trol and supervise, hundreds of primary and mission schools remained
in church hands, "financed entirely with denominational funds," he
added with a tone of orthodoxy.3D He did not mention the fact that in
Southern Rhodesia in the Zambesi Union no schools withdrew from
the aid program.
With their income declining, schools charged students high tuition
rates, but even so, low salaries continued as the norm and little money
was available to invest in buildings and equipment. The result was un-
avoidable: governments evaluated Adventist schools as substandard
and questioned the benefit of an Adventist education that was more
expensive and offered less than public schools.
Five years into the austerity program F. G. Reid, president of the
Zambesi Union, categorically rejected the view that the issue was a
moral one. The historical trend of Adventist education had led to a
commitment to mass education, and the denomination could pour huge
sums of money into what was virtually a part of the public school sys-
tem only by diverting funds from other legitimate church projects. Reid
saw this possibility as both unrealistic and prejudicial to the church. In
1962 he wrote that to refuse government money was worse than receiv-
ing it. By continuing to accept grants Adventists would be able to pre-
serve a degree of denominational influence and recover the lost reputa-
tion of their schools. This choice, he argued, should be the course to
follow as long as possible and would allow the church to meet each
problem in the best way that circumstances permitted at the time. As he
understood the issue, it was a pragmatic answer to a pragmatic prob-
lem. By the early 1960s many of the schools were already returning to
government aid, lending support to Reid's judgment.
Colonial rule in Africa collapsed with domino-like rapidity during
the 1960s, and questions about education passed on to indigenous gov-
ernments. As the new independencies gained power, each one ap-
proached the issue differently but by the middle of the decade some
patterns of similarity emerged. The fledgling African countries deemed
education to be a responsibility of government and continued giving
485
grants-in-aid, but, in keeping with the spirit of the Beecher Report,

regulation descended on schools as a matter of policy, not as interfer-
ence resulting from accepting public money. Government money be-
came a means that private schools used to meet regulatory legislation
which applied to all schools, aided and unaided alike.
Sometimes regulation could become a more thorny issue than grants-
in-aid. New governments tended to exercise direct supervision of
teacher-preparation programs and to prohibit unaided schools from of-
fering these courses, which meant that in some cases Adventist institu-
tions had to accept government money in order to educate teachers for
denominational schools. Frequently authorities also separated second-
ary schools from institutions that trained teachers. Governments were
also prone to regulate enrollment, establish tuition charges, and desig-
nate the location of new schools. To control private education govern-
ments sometimes used official recognition which did not always follow
a consistent pattern or indicate academic quality.
African students were quick to learn the value of government ac-
creditation and enrollments could fluctuate sharply according to offi-
cial approval. A case in point was Babcock University in Nigeria where
enrollment jumped from 250 to about 1,000 in a single year because of
sudden recognition by the government. Meanwhile, the number of stu-
dents at Bethel College in South Africa plummeted from about 300 to
fewer than fifty because the government withheld recognition.
In Kenya Kamagambo Training School faced an uncertain future
because of new regulatory measures. The problem improved, partly
because by 1965 fourteen former or current church members were
elected to the national legislature and helped to establish cordial rela-
tions between Adventists and the new government, creating an atmo-
sphere in which denominational schools could function and continue to
receive aid.
In Africa government support of sectarian education proved to be a
tradition too ingrained give up. By the end of the century the majority
of Adventist elementary and secondary schools were free from grants
but heavy dependence remained in Malawi, Zimbabwe, and the former
Congo, and in the Southern Africa Union nearly all denominational
secondary and elementary schools operated partially on government
funds. JJ
486
Adventist Policy at the End of the Century

At the end of the twentieth century about one of five Adventist ele-
mentary schools around the world received public money as did nearly
a quarter of the denomination's secondary schools, but state aid fol-
lowed a checkered pattern determined by political circumstances and
the need for money. Besides Africa and Australia, schools in Europe,
Japan, Korea, and parts ofIndonesia were frequent recipients, and scat-
tered cases existed elsewhere, including the French Antilles, Chile, and
Argentina. 32
With low costs and simple goals characterizing early Adventist edu-
cation, church leaders did not envision that they would ever face the
intricate problems that government financial assistance brought. But
denominational schools were forced to conform to professional stan-
dards in order to survive, which drove operating expenses upward. Af-
ter struggles with recurring debt and world depression, school admin-
istrators learned that students could not afford the real cost of a
competitive education and government aid in one form or another ap-
peared to be part of the solution.
In 1948 M. L. Andreasen, theologian and former college president,
reflected with ironic humor that "We have learned a new thing: As the
students cost more than they pay in, the more students, the harder it is
to run a school financially. We used to think that many students would
help us. But each one costs more than we take in. So one thousand stu-
dents are worse than five hundred. That is a new one. And so all our
schools are running in debt."33
The debate over state aid remained an issue as Adventist education
entered the twenty-first century, but opposition, especially in the Unit-
ed States, was slackening. North American colleges and universities
commonly applied for and received government money for equipment
and research. Lorna Linda University received millions annually. Gov-
ernment confiscation or lethal regulation of Adventist schools as a re-
sult of accepting public money appeared to be more of an apprehension
than a reality. The General Conference Public Affairs and Religious
Liberty Department had no record of Adventist schools closing because
they accepted public money. It was true that denominational schools in
Angola, Mozambique, and the Maritimes provinces in Canada closed,
victims of their governments' axes, but closure was the result of gov-
487
ernment policy, not a consequence of accepting government money.

These incidents pointed to the likelihood that governments could
find ways to close or control sectarian schools without using grant
money as an excuse, although this was not an absolute. In some regions
schools could refuse government money but would then become sub-
ject to taxation. In such instances schools became entrepreneurial proj-
ects but remained under denominational contro1. 34
Increasingly Adventist educators and church leaders came to believe
that governments were willing to help sectarian schools because they
recognized them as a public service. It was less expensive to grant finan-
cial assistance than erecting and staffing additional government schools.
Each region was left to determine its own course of action on the basis of
local conditions, with the overarching principle that public money should
never force an Adventist school to compromise its identity.
IThis passage about academic freedom based on Sidney Allen, "Academic Freedom,"
(Journal of True Education. April 1963), p. 8,9; Keld J. Reynolds, "Some Observations on
Academic Freedom," (ibid., March-April 1965), pp. 16-19; Earle Hilgert, "Academic Free-
dom," (ibid., February-March 1967), pp. 16-19; Reuben Hilde, "A Look at Academic Free-
dom," (ibid., Summer 1969), pp. 14, 15; Minutes, College and University Administrators
Meeting, August 2-5, 1965, AST, RG 51; "A Statement on Academic Freedom in SDA
Schools," ibid.; "To What Degree Can Critical Thinking Be Promoted, or Even Permitted, on
an Adventist Campus?" ibid.; Board of Higher Education, "Academic Freedom in Seventh-
day Adventist Colleges and Universities," ibid.; Minutes, Board of Higher Education, June
18, 1972, ibid.; John Whitehead, "Academic Freedom and the Rights of Religious Faculty,"
online version, www.leaderu.com: George Marsden, "Liberating Academic Freedom," ibid.;
interview by Atlantic Monthly, George Marsden, "A truly multicultural society," (Atlantic
online, October 2000); Wendi Maloney, "Religion and the Academy," (Academe online, Jan-
uary-February, 2001); "Academic Freedom and Tenure," AAUP online version; "Develop-
ments Relating to Censure," (Academe online, January-February 2003); "A Statement on
Theological and Academic Freedom and Accountability," official position statement, Gen-
eral Conference of SDA, online version, www.advenist.org.
2General Conference Minutes, October 25, 1964; "A Statement on Academic Freedom in
SDA Schools," AST, RG 51.
'Valentine, Shaping of Adventism, pp. 49-51; VandeVere, Wisdom Seekers, p. 81.
"The introductory note to the twenty-seven fundamental beliefs of the Seventh-day Adven-
tist church reads: "Seventh-day Adventists accept the Bible as their on Iy creed and hold certain
fundamental beliefs to be the teaching of the Holy Scriptures. These beliefs, as set forth here,
constitute the church's understanding and expression of the teaching of Scripture. Revision of
these statements may be expected at a General Conference session when the church is led by the
Holy Spirit to a fuller understanding of Bible truth or finds better language in which to express
the teachings of God's Holy Word." See online edition, www.advenist.org.
488
5For data about science education and evolution see General Conference Bulletin, 1926,
no. 12, p. 228; 1930, no. 14, p. 239; "Report of the Conference of Teachers of Science and
Mathematics, August 18-30, 1942," AST, RG 51; reports of meetings of science and math
teachers, 1947, 1952, 1956, ibid.; H. W. Clark, "Adventist Science Teaching and Post-War
Problems," (1947) ibid.; John Beltz, "Student Attitudes Toward Evolution," (1964) ibid.; Gary
Land, "God's Second Book: Adventist Education and the Sciences," (Journal of Adventist
Education, Summer 2002); Adventist Review, October 25,2001; March 21, 2002; Ronald L.
Numbers, The Creationists. (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1992); Schwarz and Greenleaf, Light
Bearers,pp.434-438.
7Adventist Review, October 25,2001.
8Adventist Review, October 7, 2004, p. 41.
9"An Affirmation of Creation," ibid., November 11,2004.
'OHumberto Rasi, "Integrating Faith in the Classroom," in Maturing of Adventism, Edi-
son Samaraj, ed. (Pune, India: Oriental Watchman Publishing House, 1998), p.23.
"lnterview, Humberto Rasi, February 7, 2002; Humberto Rasi, "Integrating Faith in the
Classroom," ibid., pp. 1-26; Humberto Rasi, compo Christ in the Classroom: Adventist Ap-
proaches to the Integration of Faith and Learning, vols. 1-26B (Silver Spring, MD: Institute
for Christian Teaching, 1991-2001); email messages Rasi to Greenleaf, December 29,2004.
'2General Conference Bulletin, 1895, no. 2, p. 514.
110. Lois Burnett, "Federal Aid to Nursing Education," (Journal of True Education, Feb-
ruary 1944), pp. 18, 19.
I4For a list of actions by the General Conference pertaining to government aid to educa-
tion, see Robert Nixon, compiler, "Church-State Relationships in the United States: Compi-
lation of Actions and Policies of the General Conference and the North American Division,"
unpublished document in the Office of General Counsel, General Conference of Seventh-day
Adventists.
"Charles B. Hirsch, "Government Aid to Education-and Control," June 12, 1965, AST,
RG 51.
'6For differing opinions in the debate as it occurred among Adventists, see Charles Flem-
ing, Jr., "Federal Support Is Not Coercive," (Spectrum, Autumn 1969), pp. 53-60; Loyed R.
Simmons, "Federal Support Is Intrusive," (ibid.), pp. 45-52; Alonzo L. Baker, "Should Ad-
ventists Take Federal Aid For Their Schools?" (ibid., Winter 1969), pp. 33-40; Clifford L.
Jaqua, "Should Church Schools Receive Government Aid," (Journal ofAdventist Education,
October 1977), pp. 16-18,24,25; Robert L. Reynolds, "Government Intrusion in Higher Edu-
cation," (ibid., February-March 1980), pp. 14, 15,27-29; Gary M Ross, "The Federal Govern-
ment's Impact on Adventist Colleges," (ibid., February-March 1984), pp. 15-17,42.
'7Roland R. Hegstad, "Government Aid to Education-Pitfalls, Snares, Principles, and
Policies," in Public Funds and Private Education: Issues of Church and State, D. S. Penner,
ed. (Silver Spring, MD.: Board of Education, K-12, Board of Higher Education), 1991, pp.
55-70.
18T. S. Geraty, compiler, "Federal Obligations to SDA Colleges & Universities, Fiscal
Year 1971," ibid.; "NAD Higher Education, 1976-1977," four statistical tables, ibid.; three
tables: "Church funds," "Government," "Student funds," 1978, ibid.
19General Conference Minutes, October 20, 1972.
20See the papers presented at this meeting in D. S. Penner, ed., Public Funds and Private
F:ducatian: Issues afChurch and State (Silver Spring, MD.: Board of Education, K-12, Board
of Higher Education), 1991.
489
IN PASS/ON FOR THE WORLD
"This aspect of the issue of government aid received attention at Clackamas, which both
Mitchell Tyner and Robert Nixon reemphasized in interviews on February 20, 2002 and
February 25, 2002, respectively.
22Columbia Union College v. Edward 0. Clarke, Jr., et. at. 2001, United States Court of
Appeals, Fourth Circuit. Copy in the Office of General Counsel, General Conference ofSev-
enth-day Adventists. See also Sash a Ross, "As the Court Turns," (Spectrum, spring 2002),
pp. 20-29; Nicholas P. Miller, "A Question of Credibility: Columbia Union College and the
Pursuit of State Funding," ibid., pp. 30-36; Mitchell A. Tyner, "A Question of Equity: Colum-
bia Union College and the Pursuit of Fairness," ibid., pp. 37-44. For an old but informative
discussion of the shifting winds oflegal tests applied to government aid to sectarian schools,
see Dale E. Twomley, Parochiaid and the Courts (Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews University
Press, 1979). Chapter 12 especially applies.
23North American Division Committee Minutes, October 14, 1971.
24For this passage about Australia see Lester D. Devine, "State Aid for Education in Aus-
tralia: An Overview," in Penner, Public Funds and Private Education, pp. 31-40; Anthony
Potts, "Public and Private Schooling in Australia-Historical and Contemporary Consider-
ations," wwwhistory.ac.uk/projects/elec/: Australian Council of State School Organizations,
"Six myths about private schools in Australia," [email protected] .. au: "D.O.G.S and the High
Court Case," Internet homepage, Australian Council for Defence of Government Schools;
Allorney General (Vict.); ex rei. Black v. the Commonwealth, "Australian High Court Cases,"
www.austlii.edu.au/cass/cth/high3t. See also, "Australasian Division, Summary of Educa-
tion Funding, 1977," AST, RG 51; "Constraints on the Acceptance of Government Funds for
the Operation of Seventh-day Adventist Schools in the South Pacific Division," Office of
General Counsel, General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists.
2'Lester D. Devine, "State Aid for Education in Australia: An Overview," in Penner,
Public Funds and Private Education, p. 40.
26Proceedings ofthe Educational and Missionary Volunteer Departments of the General
Conference ofSeventh-day Adventists in World Convention, p. /89; General Conference Bul-
letin, 1930, no. 7, p. 127.
27"Summary on Government Aid," [l966?], AST, RG 51; J. F. Ashlock to M. E. Loewen,
January 20, 1965, "Compilation of Actions and Policies," Office of General Counsel, General
Conference of Seventh-day Adventists; statement by George W. Brown re: Caribbean Union,
ibid.
28 J. F. Ashlock to M. E. Loewen, January 20, 1965, ibid.
29 This passage on Africa taken from "Survey and Report of the Committee on Govern-
ment Educational Grants-in-aid as adopted by the East African Union, April 1955," AST, RG
51; "A Memorial to The General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists and the Southern
African Division," April 1955, ibid.; F. G. Reid to Roland R. Hegstad, March 16, 1962, ibid;
E. D. Hanson to W. R. Beach, February 26, 1965, ibid.; "Educational Problems-East African
Union," [1965?], ibid.; interview, Garland Dulan, February II, 12,2002.
31 World Report, 2000: tables for each division.

32/bid.; interview, Humberto Rasi, February 7, 2002.
33Quoted in Steinweg, Without Fear or Favor," p. 154.
34lnterviews: Jonathan Gallagher, February 27, 2002; John Graz, February 28, 2002;
email message, Rasi to Greenleaf, December 29,2004.
490
20
CHALLENGES
OF MODERNIZATION
The challenges that Adventist education faced from academic free-

dom and government aid were primarily external in origin, but from
within serious questions also developed during the latter half of the
twentieth century. The number of post-secondary institutions reached
nearly a hundred by the end of the 1990s, and with this growth came
financial dilemmas that made systematic regulation of tertiary educa-
tion increasingly problematical. Opinions differed about the balance
between centralized and local control. Perennial debate took place
about the breadth of curricula, how high higher education should reach,
and more pragmatically, how much post-secondary education the de-
nomination could afford. Questions arose about the identity of Adven-
tist schools of higher learning, and denominational educators specu-
lated about how urbanization and new economic realities impacted
their traditional philosophy of practical education. Also problematical
was the matter of reconciling technological change to Adventist phi-
losophy of education and accommodating to its ensuing financial bur-
dens.
All of these questions intertwined, creating a tangle that prevented
anyone from dealing with any single issue without affecting the oth-
491
ers. These problems forced Adventist educators to rethink the pur-

pose of denominational education in order to adapt long accepted
principles to new conditions. In the end they found themselves restat-
ing Adventist philosophy of education in terms amenable to the twen-
ty-first century.
Development of Distance Education

One of the more impressive changes took place in the denomina-
tion's correspondence school which began as Fireside Correspondence
School in 1909. Its name changed to Home Study Institute and then to
Home Study International, both of which were known as Home Study
in common Adventist parlance. For most of its life Home Study, or HSI,
functioned quietly as a convenient source of academic credit for Ad-
ventist students at all levels who did not have access to a denomina-
tional school. By the end of the 1980s HSI operated branch offices in
Singapore, the Philippines, Australia, India, and England. The school
received an injection of new life in 1989 when Joseph Gurubatham
became its eighth president. Almost immediately he organized the in-
stitution into three divisions: Home Study Elementary School, Home
Study High School, and Griggs University, the post-secondary section
named after Frederick Griggs who founded Fireside Correspondence
School. In 1990 Griggs University began offering a limited number of
accredited degrees in religion and business, mainly to international stu-
dents.
Records showed that as Home Study entered the twenty-first cen-
tury more than 300,000 students had studied under its auspices.
During the 1990s it became an,aggressive center of distance educa-
tion. It collaborated with Columbia Union College to offer degrees
through that institution's external degree program and began ac-
tively to enroll non-Adventist students from the million and a half
in the home-school population in the United States. HSI also be-
came the source for online curriculum in more than twenty public
school systems in the United States. Gurubatham took his place
among the circle of North American college presidents and when
Adventist colleges and universities formed a consortium in 2002, he
became its executive officer, a part-time salaried position funded
from dues paid by the member institutions.)
492
CHALLENGES OF MODERNIZATION
Offices of Development and Fund Raising

Financial issues were a major concern in the latter half of the cen-
tury. Between the end of World War II and 1980 aging college cam-
puses in the United States underwent extensive rebuilding, replacing
old structures in order to accommodate successively higher enroll-
ments and to meet new standards in education. Of the three leading
sources of institutional revenue-student fees, profits from institutional
industries, and church subsidies-income from the students was much
larger than the other two combined. Adventist schools were tuition
driven and depended on progressively larger numbers of students to
help pay their bills, but plummeting enrollments beginning about 1980
sent college presidents and business managers reeling to find relief
from the tide of red ink that was sure to follow. Already institutional
industries had become less productive and contributed fewer dollars to
college operating budgets. Some schools had sold off many of their
auxiliary operations because they were losing money.
Before enrollment began its downturn, Milton Murray, a graduate
of La Sierra College who had become a skilled fund raiser, joined the
General Conference to begin a new denominational venture, Philan-
thropic Service for Institutions, which became a mentoring office for
advancement programs among Adventist institutions. For the first time
in the history of Adventist education, organized fund raising became a
serious part of institutional administration. Murray promoted active
solicitation of gifts, issued incentives and nationwide plans for consis-
tent programs of giving by alumni, and helped schools to establish ac-
tive development offices.
These ideas caught on, and during the five years prior to 1985 Ad-
ventist higher education in North America gleaned $45,000,000 from
voluntary sources. During the next five years the figure rose to about
$88,000,000. Murray retired before the 1995 General Conference ses-
sion, but not before he had revolutionized the concept of planned giving
and fund raising among Adventist institutions. As part of his legacy
endowments became common to Adventist schools.2
On the threshold of the twenty-first century every tertiary institu-
tion in North America and many secondary schools as well as some
schools beyond North America had organized sophisticated and per-
manent development offices that had accumulated millions in endow-
493
ments and other financial support, all of which brought improved sta-
bility to Adventist education. Murray did not resolve all the financial
problems of Adventist education, but his consistent leading finally
pushed institutional fund raising into the twentieth century and pro-
duced a source of income that otherwise donors would have spent else-
where.
The idea of endowments for Adventist schools was a new idea. Typ-
ically, denominational schools at all levels had depended on church
subsidies to provide the margin of solvency, and some pointed out that
this practice was better than an en9owment, which necessarily would
have to be of astronomical proportions to furnish the same amount of
money that the church pumped into its education program. Taken as a
group, the newly established endowments did not eliminate the need
for subsidies or become a panacea for operational expenses for Adven-
tist post-secondary institutions, but nonetheless, fund raising in general
provided an increasing proportion of institutional budgets. 3
At the same time while the absolute dollar value of subsidies from
parent organizations to the colleges consistently increased during the
latter half of the century its proportional value in the total institutional
operating budgets remained small and sometimes shrank. This dimin-
ishing dependence upon direct support from the church gave rise to a
growing sense of independence on post-secondary campuses, which
some church leaders saw as a contributing factor to the steady decline
of centralized control of a denominational system of education and a
potential threat to the Adventist identity of higher education.
A Centralized System Based on Shared Control

The question of control and systematization of denominational edu-
cation was probably the overshadowing problem during the years after
1945. Events in the debate about these issues harked back to the begin-
nings of educational organization in 1901. By 1905 the General Confer-
ence adopted plans to standardize curriculum, textbooks, and some
teaching materials. Also in effect was the policy to establish a post-
secondary institution in each union and assign elementary and second-
ary schools to the conferences. A stream of students flowing upward
through the post-secondary institution would tie the system together.
Administratively, the schools operated under an arrangement of shared
494
control in which the General Conference held the upper hand in order
to maintain a system. Policy making was centralized at the world head-
quarters while the conferences and unions owned and administered the
schools. In no way was this modus operandi meant to be an open door
for autonomy among post-secondary institutions. 4
During the first three decades of the century these practices pre-
vailed. College boards functioned as subsidiaries of the unions and el-
ementary and secondary schools operated under the auspices of depart-
ments of education in the unions and local conferences. With ever
growing seriousness, conferences assumed responsibility for maintain-
ing a corps of credentialed teachers, assuming responsibility for the
financial solvency of church schools and academies, and administering
accreditation criteria. The entire structure of education was under the
administrative thumb of the General Conference whose task it was to
maintain the framework and refine it according to developing needs. 5
That this organizational model applied to Adventist education
around the world was a given. Denominational leaders encouraged
schools in the world fields to contextualize their programs, but they
also expected educational leaders to pattern their organization after the
North American system. Ideally, schools were to be rural and indus-
trial as broadly construed, curricula were to embody Adventist beliefs,
and lower schools would prepare students for additional study at higher
levels until they reached a training school in the union or division. The
entire system revolved around the dual purpose of teaching Adventism
to students and preparing church workers. The apparatus of control was
inherent in the 1923 world convention of Adventist education at Colo-
rado Springs. The exemplary role of North American organization was
patently clear two years later in 1925 when the Department of Educa-
tion conducted an educational conference in China, the largest such
gathering outside North America up to that time.
The most serious questions of shared control occurred at the post-
secondary level where the first substantial test cropped up in 1913. Un-
able to find answers to perennial financial problems in North American
schools, the General Conference Department of Education attempted
to limit the number of post-secondary institutions in the United States
and Canada and determine the extent of curricular offerings, but resis-
tance choked off these proposals. Among the leading dissenters were
495
some of the union presidents who were ex officio chairmen of college

boards. A similar situation occurred during the Great Depression.
These events were defining moments for the education system, demon-
strating not only the practical limits of authority of the General Confer-
ence Department of Education but also that union conference presi-
dents in North America could and would block organizational change
among the colleges if they believed their territorial interests were at
stake.
Additional challenges to centralized policies of control of education
surfaced during the 1920s and continued into the 1930s as Adventists
debated the implications of regional accreditation. General Conference
personnel were more prone to oppose accreditation than were union
presidents and college administrators whose wall of resistance was vis-
ibly porous, if not non-existent in some cases. The modus operandi,
giving unions ownership and immediate control of colleges, that had
emerged from the General Conference sessions of 1901 and 1903 had
taken an unforeseen turn. By the time the accreditation issue had run
its course, postsecondary education in North America was showing
definite signs of a nascent independence. Shared control was tilting
more steeply toward the unions.
Adventist Accrediting Practices

The Association of Seventh-day Adventist Colleges and Secondary
Schools, renamed in 1943 as the Association of Seventh-day Adventist
Institutions of Higher Education and Secondary Schools, did not suc-
ceed in sidestepping regional and professional accreditation bodies, but
it became the single most influential factor in maintaining a system of
Adventist education. In 1932 the General Conference recognized the
Board of Regents as the source of standards and policies which, after
ratification by the General Conference, would become the "operating
policies for all member institutions."6
Using the Board of Regents as the enforcing agency, the General
Conference Department of Education established a single set of mea-
surements for education, and by repeatedly updating these criteria, it
applied progressively stricter standards to elementary and secondary
schools through departments of education in the unions and confer-
ences. The Board of Regents worked directly with postsecondary
496
schools. Denominational accreditation originally applied to North

American schools only, but in 1954 the Association broadened its influ-
ence to include schools in the world fields. Newbold College became
the first Adventist institution outside North America to fulfill denomi-
national accreditation criteria in 1970, more than a decade after it af-
filiated with Columbia Union College.7
The Board of Regents continued into the mid-1990s as the leading
systematizing agent within Adventist education. As membership
swelled in the world fields and more secondary and tertiary schools
arose, denominational accreditation became standard procedure. Dur-
ing the 1990s the Board of Regents changed its name to a more univer-
sal term, the Accrediting Association of Seventh-day Adventist Schools,
Colleges and Universities, most often shortened to the Adventist Ac-
crediting Association or its acronym, AAA. Briefly, some hoped again
that this denominational agency would replace the need for regional
accreditation, but that goal proved elusive. In the United States some
states recognized denominational accreditation at the elementary and
secondary levels as more thorough than criteria of the state govern-
ments; however, at post-secondary levels regional accreditation bodies
in the United States and governments in the world fields remained the
principal sources of recognition. By the end of the century the AAA
often concentrated on matters of specific denominational interest dur-
ing an accreditation process while leaving other matters to regional
accrediting bodies. 8
Challenges to the System and the Board of Higher Education

As effective as denominational accreditation became, it did not solve
other problems of systematization from which Adventist postsecond-
ary education chafed, particularly in the United States. Four trends
contributed to this friction: the emergence of graduate education, the
soaring cost of education, an infectious competition among institutions
of higher learning, and the growing predisposition in the unions to re-
sist centralized influences.
Graduate education began inauspiciously in the mid-1930s with ad-
vanced studies in theology, but not until the late 1950s did Adventist
leaders take serious note of its impact. Several postsecondary institu-
tions introduced their own limited graduate programs, some of which
497
predated those at Andrews and Lorna Linda, but the universities raised
the stakes of academic achievement in Adventist circles and added a
new dimension to the tradition of each North American union owning
a complete educational track from the first grade through the baccalau-
reate level. With the advent of graduate schools, colleges no longer rep-
resented the final step in denominational education. Questions arose
spontaneously about the relationship of postsecondary institutions to
each other as well as to the two universities.
A Commission on Higher Education, established in 1961, and a
Commission on Graduate Education tried to design a rational mold in
which to recast Adventist postsecondary institutions, but before the end
of the 1960s rivalry among colleges for both students and academic
reputation was rife. In 1967 a subcommittee of the reconstituted Com-
mission on Higher Education concluded that conditions had reached a
crisis, declaring that the denomination was unable to halt the cost pf
higher education that had been spiraling upward because of numerous
causes, including graduate education and increasingly higher salaries
and benefits. The report held out few options. In order to avoid both
government aid on the one hand and obsolescence on the other if the
schools sat idle in the face of change, the group advocated a restructur-
ing of denominational support as the only means of survival. 9
Discussions among church leaders and educators during the next
year focused on the need for improved systematization as one of the
key factors to rein in costs and competition. To a large extent at the
behest of union presidents as well as college administrations, a new
entity was born, the Board of Higher Education, chaired by the presi-
dent of the North American Division but under the daily operation of
an executive secretary.
The Board of Regents continued as the denominational accrediting
body while the new BHE concentrated on managing higher education
in North America. As such it became a body of the North American
Division rather than another standing committee of the General Con-
ference Department of Education. Its crucial duty was to develop a
master plan of higher education in North America and to "recommend
or approve the establishment or discontinuance of universities, colleg-
es, schools, college divisions, programs, majors, institutions, depart-
ments, branches, campuses and other units as may be indicated by the
498
master plan." The BHE was to "main-

tain general overview of the system of
higher education." It was a tall order.lo
In his first major report to the BHE
in 1972, the executive secretary, Fred-
erick E. 1. Harder, who left his post as
dean of the graduate school at An-
drews University to assume his new
position, demonstrated that he took
the tasks of systematization seriously.
During the previous months the BHE
had ruled on curricular issues at five
institutions, not all of them positively.
Harder called for institutions to plan
curricular change according to BHE
reports based on disclosures of finan-
F. E. J. Harder, first executive direc-
cial information that administrators tor of the Board of Higher Education.
had heretofore regarded as institution- The BHE constituted a major attempt
ally private. Although he spoke in the to organize Seventh-day Adventist
higher education in the North Ameri-
context of academic freedom for teach- ca into a system.
ers, he announced his agreement with
the principle that institutional independence is never absolute.
The Board of Higher Education did not maintain this robust begin-
ning. A seventy-year accumulation of administrative traditions was not
easy to sweep away by a single speech and by the mid-1970s it became
apparent that the BHE would not fulfill the purposes that church lead-
ers and educators expressed when it was born.
The weakness of the BHE showed up quickly in 1972 when both
Lorna Linda and Andrews universities submitted proposals to offer
doctoral programs in education. The subcommittee charged with in-
vestigating both campuses recommended a rejection of Lorna Linda's
proposal. In language rarely equaled in denominational records for
bluntness, the recommendation reminded members of the BHE that
regulatory policies already prohibited competing doctoral degrees in
Adventist institutions. Further, it categorized LLU's accreditation in
education as insufficient, declared that a doctoral program in education
was inconsistent with Lorna Linda's mission, chided educators who
499
would not take a 2,000-mile plane trip for doctoral studies at Andrews,
and warned the BHE that it would become a laughingstock if it did not
make a hard decision that its own policies already dictated. Notwith-
standing this inflammatory rhetoric, Lorna Linda University began of-
fering doctorates in education within two years, inexplicably with the
approval of the BHE.
One of the major driving forces behind the Board of Higher Educa-
tion was systematization to manage costs, which translated into cutting
out duplication of programs, but this incident demonstrated that, de-
spite their earlier claims for the need of new financial and other mana-
gerial policies, officers of institutions were unwilling to relinquish their
decision-making power. In resolving basic issues pertaining to their
own goals, colleges and universities tended to rely more on the author-
ity of their boards rather than to comply with policies of a centralized
system.
From the late 1960s into the 1990s the relationship among the col-
leges remained politely darwinian as institutions sought to attract high-
er enrollments by dismantling their longstanding territorial distinctions
and adding new and sometimes thinly veiled competing programs.
Colleges and universities openly recruited students from anywhere.
There was also a consciousness that the idea of system had gone awry.
For the Adventist public there was no shortage of speculation about
solutions. Suggestions ranged from a radical reduction in the number of
institutions through consolidation and closure to a virtual release of
postsecondary institutions from all controls which would permit all of
them to go it alone. A sense prevailed that Adventist higher education
in North America was plunging ahead, but with an unclear destination.
Some doubted it had a destination, at least at the moment."
In 1992 the North American Division attempted to clear the air by
approving a recommendation originating with the college presidents
that recognized institutional boards of trustees as the ultimate voice of
authority in operating postsecondary schools. Some saw the action as a
demise, others as a new beginning, but arguably, it was one of the con-
cluding steps in a trend that began in 1903 when A. G. Daniells and W.
C. White concurred that the General Conference should not have any
schools, publishing plants, and hospitals, and that the unions and con-
ferences should assume the responsibility of owning and operating de-
500
nominational institutions. By 1992 shared control of postsecondary

schools that the General Conference had once dominated had gravi-
tated into the hands of the owners.12
Associated with the independence movement of higher education in
North America was a groundswell among educators for a thorough
overhaul of the salary schedule. Frequent arguments surfaced that Ad-
ventist postsecondary schools lost the service of highly qualified per-
sonnel because the traditional salary policy offered them substantially
less than they could earn elsewhere in the education market. Agitation
set in for a separate remuneration plan for teachers, thus reducing the
denominational salary policy to ministers.
The North American salary schedule prescribed relatively low earn-
ings but granted a tax-free package of benefits that included generous
health coverage and professional development allowances. The amounts
varied from institution to institution, but depending on individual
needs, the value of these combined perquisites could amount to thou-
sands of dollars annually. As the twenty-first century began no clear
resolution of this issue was in sight, but tertiary schools, acting on the
strength of their newly authorized independence, began to experiment
with salary plans that increased the income of post-secondary faculty.
The Board of Higher Education survived until the mid-1990s. It
never achieved the reality of its original hope, living on with steadily
declining strength and finally dying from natural causes-it ceased to
function meaningfully and became irrelevant. Replacing it was a High-
er Education Cabinet with membership consisting of institutional pres-
idents, board chairmen, and other selected General Conference person-
nel experienced in education who exercised only perfunctory checks on
institutional independence. They functioned more as coordinators than
regulators and provided only minimal accountability to the central au-
thority of the church.
Association of Adventist Colleges and Universities

Some characterized the organization of Adventist higher education
in North America as unstable. At best it was fluid. In 2002 college
presidents, in consultation with other denominational personnel, orga-
nized the Association of Adventist Colleges and Universities, a consor-
tium to fill the vacuum left by the absence of any clear central direction
501
for North American higher education as an establishment. The formal

organizational document affirmed the legal individuality of Adventist
colleges and universities and pledged their commitment to the mission
of the North American Division. The institutions agreed to the ideal of
a "seamless fabric" of Adventist higher education, a kind of educa-
tional free trade atmosphere in which students could move about with
minimal regulation.
The most promising aspect of this action was its spontaneous na-
ture, which recognized that systematization, imposed from centralized
authority, had not survived well, but that group organization of some
kind was necessary. It was a tacit admission that colleges and universi-
ties had more to gain and nothing to lose by acting in voluntary concert
rather than in rivalry. The Association's opening statement sounded
idealistic and, if achieved, beneficial to the participating campuses, but
only time would tell if postsecondary institutions could live up to their
own new standard of individual units functioning separately but with
mutual helpfulness after decades of competition.13
Ministerial Education and System

Although the boards of postsecondary schools officially became the
ultimate controlling authority over higher education in North America,
elements of a system remained. One of the most important was the pat-
tern of centralized control over ministerial education that had evolved
from the early years of the century when theological programs began to
crystallize. The General Conference strongly influenced the formation
of theological education by spelling out essential curricular elements.
Although programs differed from school to school, baccalaureate min-
isterial courses resembled each other.
With the arrival ofthe Theological Seminary, a General Conference
institution designated as the world center for Adventist men of cloth,
the undergraduate schools became the preparatory phase of ministerial
preparation and correlated their programs with the advanced school.
Even after a master's degree became the standard credential for minis-
ters, many college graduates continued to enter directly into pastoral
work, but the percentage of ministers with graduate degrees steadily
increased. The colleges functioned in a prescribed supportive role to
the finishing school. Although not formalized in a written statement,
S02
this organizational principle was understood to be the bedrock condi-

tion of ministerial preparation.
With the appearance of graduate degrees in theology in the world
fields the Theological Seminary no longer held the distinction of the
sole source of ministerial education. In 1994 the Annual Council voted
that ministerial education was the province of the General Conference
working through the world divisions, and placed all graduate programs
in theology under the aegis of either the "respective division," or, in the
case ofthe Theological Seminary, the General Conference. Institutional
discretion was not to direct graduate education in religion. The purpose
of this policy was to "strengthen the worldwide unity and mission focus
of these programs." By placing the divisions of the General Conference
in charge of ministerial education in their territories, the church de-
fined its inherent right to determine how its clergy would be prepared.
It also recognized the legitimacy of the seminaries in the world fields,
which had grown up as children of the Theological Seminary.'4
The first serious challenge to this policy occurred two years later in
1996 when the board of Southern College in Tennessee voted to inau-
gurate a master's degree in pastoral training. The decision of the Ten-
nessee college board gave rise to a bundle of questions. In the religion
department an admitted dissatisfaction with the Theological Seminary
had been smouldering for years, stoked by accusations of liberal theo-
logical tendencies on the Michigan campus. The action by Southern
College placed the school in competition with the official ministerial
education program instead of the preparatory role it was to play accord-
ing to denominational policy. The action also challenged church policy
by implying that in North America, unions instead of the division de-
termined ministerial education.
Funding for the proposed graduate degree came from private sourc-
es, demonstrating that financial backing could be more influential in
theological education than denominational policy. In addition, the ac-
tion raised the question of loyalty among union presidents who were
willing to approve a policy when voting as members of the General
Conference Committee, but who would take a contradictory position
when they returned to chair the boards of their schools.
In the eyes of church leaders the implications of this action were
troubling, for they struck one of the most tender spots of Adventist edu-
503
cation, the preparation of ministers. The issues added up to what was

probably the most serious challenge to the denominational policy of
centralized control over the preparation of ministers. Appeals by the
North American Division and the General Conference Department of
Education slowed but did not stop the graduate degree at Southern Col-
lege, which in the process changed its name to Southern Adventist Uni-
versity, a result of a parallel decision to enter the field of graduate edu-
cation.
With the inauguration of a separate graduate program of ministerial
education in Tennessee, the last meaningful vestige of centralized con-
trol of postsecondary schools disappeared. La Sierra University fol-
lowed in 2002 with a program of graduate studies in theology. To dis-
tinguish its programs from those at other Adventist institutions, the
Theological Seminary advertised its graduate degrees for ministers as
the only ones approved by the North American Division.
International Board of Ministerial and Theological Education

Meanwhile, another ingredient complicated the discussion about
what authority controlled ministerial education. Since 1929 the Adven-
tist accrediting system approved or disapproved of institutions as a
complete unit, but at the 1998 Annual Council the church took its first
step in specialized accreditation by establishing basic criteria for reli-
gion departments in all postsecondary schools around the world. The
action called the new process "endorsement," but its practical distinc-
tion from accreditation was hardly noticeable.
In compliance with the 1994 action confirming ministerial educa-
tion to be a General Conference responsibility, an International Board
of Ministerial and Theological Education, or IBMTE, would give glob-
al oversight to pastoral training and each division would organize a
branch of the IMBTE to handle questions within its own territory. Co-
ordination between the Adventist Accrediting Association and the divi-
sion boards of ministerial education linked the two bodies. 15
The reaction was mixed and debate was immediate. Eventually all
the divisions except North America organized boards as the policy pre-
scribed. The presidents of colleges in the United States resisted the
endorsement plan, asserting that the policy which gave their boards of
trustees ultimate governing authority also applied to theological educa-
504
tion and that the new policy was an invasion into the details of campus
administration which would adversely impact accreditation. They also
declared that processes of accountability built into board control and
the criteria of the Adventist Accrediting Association constituted suffi-
cient regulatory authority over ministerial education.
The critical issue was the endorsement process for individual teach-
ers that allowed division boards of ministerial and theological educa-
tion to screen religion teachers according to criteria established by the
international board, which in turn would declare personnel eligible for
employment or deserving dismissal. Endorsement would recur on a
five-year cycle and would include a signed statement from each indi-
vidual reaffirming his or her agreement with the published fundamen-
tal doctrines of the church. Criticism charged that this endorsement
plan impinged on North American traditions of academic freedom by
transferring selection of employees and due process from the institu-
tion to the divisions of the General Conference.
Some further argued that the policy put trained theologians more or
less on trial when instead the church should be relying on them to assist
in determining the biblical integrity of Adventist doctrines. Because
Seventh-day Adventists taught that biblical understanding was an ex-
panding continuum, theologians on college campuses believed that re-
ligion departments were an appropriate place for theological discus-
sions.
For their part, church leaders were more interested in the colleges as
sites for ministerial preparation than as centers of theological debate.
The General Conference had long since established a Biblical Research
Institute, led by recognized theologians drawn from academe, who
spent their full time in theological study, and while not proscribing ac-
tive academicians from this process, church leaders preferred that doc-
trinal debate should take place under the controlled circumstances of
the BRI rather than to spill into college classrooms and publications.
The possibility of deviant theology probably helped to inspire the orig-
inal notion of endorsement, but the proposal focused more on the need
to ensure the unity of theological programs in the face oftrends toward
decentralized control. The heart of the issue was to uphold the long ac-
cepted prerogative ofthe church to determine the preparation of its own
ministers.
505
The newly published Handbook of Seventh-day Adventist Ministe-

rial and Theological Education allowed alternative methods of endors-
ing religion teachers, but required the ministerial board in the division
where disagreement with the policy occurred to offer a substitute plan.
In North America no ministerial board existed. Prolonged negotiation
between the General Conference and the North American colleges did
not resolve the controversy.
Complicating the issue was the need to agree upon separate arrange-
ments for General Conference institutions that did not fall under the
auspices of a division. Griggs University, Andrews University, Lorna
Linda University, Oakwood College, and the Adventist International
Institute of Advanced Studies in the Philippines constituted this group.
Lorna Linda did not offer ministerial education, but its academic orga-
nization included a faculty of religion with the largest cluster ofprofes-
sors in any Adventist school in North America outside the Theological
Seminary. Because four ofthe five General Conference institutions af-
fected by the policy were in North America they lent moral support to
the union schools in the United States, but in October 2003 the General
Conference institutions had formulated an alternate plan designed es-
pecially for them which the IBMTE accepted. Essentially, because the
chairpersons of the boards of these schools and other members of the
boards were General Conference personnel, these institutions by defi-
nition fulfilled the requirements spelled out in the Handbook.
The disagreement with the North American campuses rested on
methodology to accomplish a valid objective. College presidents could
not and did not try to gainsay the right of the church to regulate the
preparation of its own ministry but consistently resisted what they be-
lieved to be invasive policies of institutional management. General
Conference leaders held North American schools accountable to pre-
pare an alternative plan and gave institutions time to negotiate out of
the impasse, but as late as 2004 the issue remained unresolved. 16
Issues in Higher Education and World System

The debate over central control of theology was part of the broader
issue of systematization and identity of denominational schools world-
wide. World systematization strengthened during the 1970s when a
Board of Theological Education became the clearinghouse for propos-
506
als to establish degree programs for ministers in the world fields. This
body became an important part of the controlling authority over the
growth of Adventist education outside North America, impacting the
academic ambience of entire campuses by requiring fields of instruc-
tion beyond theology to develop a genuine post-secondary character in
order to maintain academic balance throughout the institution. In most
cases denominational recognition of a training school as a four-year,
postsecondary institution originated with the institution's capability to
offer baccalaureate education in theology. The spread of denomina-
tional accreditation roughly coincided with the appearance of degree
programs in theology in the world fields.
Associated with this movement were criteria of regional accredit-
ing bodies in the United States that required compliance from schools
outside North America if they wished to qualify as an affiliated insti-
tution. Of singular influence was the North Central Association to
which Andrews University belonged. During the heyday of affilia-
tions, the 1970s and 1980s, these controls functioned effectively, but
with the mushrooming of Adventist higher education outside the
United States-nearly a score of new denominational colleges and uni-
versities emerged during the 1990s-a reexamination of the process
became imperative. Affiliations had been a crutch for many Adventist
schools in the developing world, but these institutions found it neces-
sary to generate their own academic reputations according to regula-
tory authority in their own countries, and organic connections with a
North American school became less important, if not a hindrance in
some cases.
By the late 1980s all matters relating to Adventist postsecondary
education beyond North America converged on the International Board
of Education which was similar to the North American Board of High-
er Education but with global authority. Recognition by the Adventist
Accrediting Association kept alive aspects of systematization affecting
the identity of denominational schools and educational procedures.
Although denominational accreditation was not a perfect process, it
had proven through the years to be effective, especially in developing
countries. In contrast to developed countries in the West where Adven-
tist schools functioned on the periphery of the public education estab-
lishment, developing states often leaned on private education to lift
507
literacy rates and lead in professional training. These countries lacked

strong educational traditions and the resources to build quality school
systems on short notice.
Adventist schools, backed by an international church and monitored
by its own demonstrably effective international accrediting body,
earned high marks in many young countries even though they would
fall short of accepted standards in an economically advanced nation.
Frequently these schools enrolled large numbers of non-Adventist stu-
dents in keeping with a long denominational practice of utilizing
schools as a mission outreach. Many of these schools also employed
non-Adventist teachers, sometimes in increasing numbers to keep pace
with expanding enrollment. Because of these circumstances, many Ad-
ventist schools substituted for a public education system. By the late
years of the twentieth century some governments in the developing
world requested Adventists to take over or establish new schools as a
public service.17
All of this was a mixed blessing. A commendable standing in the
public eye was flattering and as old as Adventist education in the non-
Christian world beginning with Cecil Rhodes, who perceived Christian
schools as a more effective means to accomplish social change than the
colonial government itself. The image that Rhodes attached to Adven-
tist schools in particular followed wherever churchmen established ed-
ucation on the frontiers. But flattering as they were, proposals by devel-
oping countries to operate schools solely as a public service brought
heavy pressure to the church and its philosophy and policies of educa-
tion. Apprehension that non-Adventist content could creep into denom-
inational education prompted fears that secularism would invade Ad-
ventist campuses.
General Conference President Jan Paulsen recognized education as
a symbol of "Christ's victory over evil," and he spoke out for "a variety
of structures" to meet church needs resulting from unparalleled growth
in parts of the world. But he tempered his remarks with a reminder that
the church should make the distinction between mission and social de-
velopment. 18
In response to these conditions and other concerns including finan-
cial support of education, the unique identity of Adventist schools, and
the breakdown of a sense of system, especially in the United States, a
508
General Conference Commission on Higher Education went into action

in the year 2000. Its function was to examine the nature and purposes
of Adventist postsecondary schools and to gather information upon
which to recommend a global plan to guide the development of colleges
and universities. The very existence of the commission belied the con-
viction that the notion of system was not yet dead. After more than four
years of discussions, the commission still had more unresolved issues
than answers; one of its leading tasks was to engender compliance with
denominational policies by the unions, the entities that owned and op-
erated postsecondary institutions. In simple terms, the commission
sought ways to redress the question of shared control. 19
A practical tool began in 2000 when the General Conference De-
partment of Education established the Adventist Professionals' Net-
work, or APN. In collaboration with the secretariat of the General Con-
ference, Adventist Development and Relief Agency, and Andrews and
Lorna Linda universities, APN established a data base of thousands of
names of Adventists with college and university degrees in about 150
countries who may be available to fill employment vacancies around
the world. 20
The Debate over Adventist Philosophy of Education

The commission could not avoid debate about Adventist philosophy
of education, especially as it touched matters such as identity, purpose,
and control. Both explicitly and implicitly the philosophy of Adventist
education had been central in much of the debate about education dur-
ing the decades following World War II, but in the verbal sparring from
the 1960s onward differences between tradition and philosophy were
not always clear. In 1976 Raymond Moore, an educational administra-
tor with experience in both the United States and Asia, published Ad-
ventist Education at the Crossroads, in which he insinuated that the
primary problem with Adventist schools was their departure from sev-
eral aspects of their original philosophy, among them the agricultural
work programs. For corrective measures he advocated revamping de-
nominational schools, reorganizing curricula and extracurricular pro-
grams, and setting enrollment caps to conform to economic efficiency.
His prescription also called for a possible twelve-month operating
schedule for secondary schools.
509
Four years later Reuben Hilde, an associate director in the General

Conference Department of Education, replied with Showdown: Can
SDA Education Pass the Test?, a book that defended changes in Adven-
tist education during the twentieth century but at the same time admit-
ted to a long list of shortcomings. Under Hilde's scrutinizing eye de-
nominational schools probably merited a C+ or a B-, but he balanced
his observations by explaining circumstances surrounding many of the
problems church-sponsored schools faced in late twentieth century
America that were absent during earlier decades. Pointing out some of
the wrong impressions by which Adventists commonly judged their
schools, he was quick to identify what he believed to be one of the
worst problems: church members, some of them leaders, who had
strong convictions about education and supported them with one-sided
quotes from Ellen White, claiming to follow the "blueprint," a term
mistakenly attributed to Ellen White that generations of Adventists
used synonymously with her philosophy of education. 21
The primary target of Moore's remarks was Adventist boarding
schools, mostly in North America, where student labor would be a
meaningful feature of campus life. By contrast, Hilde aimed his com-
ments for the most part at both elementary and secondary schools, also
in North America. Even compensating for this difference, the two au-
thors were poles apart philosophically. While Moore called for radical
change back to a previous ideal, Hilde urged adaptation of Adventist
principles to the needs of contemporary society. Hilde was in a position
to effect the changes he thought were necessary and during the 1970s
he led the North American Division in the development of a reorga-
nized K-12 curriculum that included production of new reading and
Bible textbooks, both critical to the identity of Adventist education.
Newer science texts were also part of later upgrading.
Following on the heels of Hilde's reforms was the dissolution of the
historic "special relationship" that the North American Division main-
tained with the General Conference and its consequent alignment with
the other world divisions. As North America developed its new role
during the 1980s and 1990s, a new North American Department of
Education set about to establish a different identity for grades K-12 by
creating a Ministry of Teaching credential for teachers (until then they
had received credentials as a missionary), continuing curriculum de-
510
velopment, updating code books and policies, and conducting regular

administrative conventions. The crowning event in this process was a
gathering of approximately 6,500 teachers in grades K-12 in Dallas,
Texas in 2000, probably the largest assembly of Adventist educators in
Adventist history. Again, these developments served as models to the
rising tide of elementary and secondary education in the world fields,
especially in the developing countries.
Before Hilde wrote his defense of Adventist education, George
Knight, church historian and educator, destroyed many of the favorite
illusions that shaped Adventist ideas about their schools. His Myths of
Adventism did not focus on education exclusively, but he devoted many
chapters to denominational schools whose problems were becoming a
conversation piece in church circles. The ink had hardly dried on Hil-
de's book when Knight added a scholarly touch to the debate by pub-
lishing two more books; one, a study that examined Adventist philoso-
phy of education in the light of nineteenth-century America and the
second an edited collection of informative biographical sketches of in-
fluential leaders in Adventist education.
The obvious conclusion from Knight's books was that denomina-
tional education had always faced changing times and Adventist educa-
tors themselves were never unanimous when applying educational phi-
losophy to new conditions. Adventist philosophy was an evolving thing
and the so-called "blueprint" as such existed only in one's fantasy al-
though Ellen White's pronouncements were still basic to denomina-
tional education. 22
With decades of conflicting debate behind them, more than 250
Adventist educators and church leaders convened an International Con-
ference on the Philosophy of Seventh-day Adventist Education at An-
drews University in April 2001. The task of forging a philosophical
statement that would fit schools in all world fields was not simple, but it
was necessary as a beginning point for the work of the Commission on
Higher Education. In essence, the finished document declared that
knowledge is best understood in the context of the Christian worldview
consisting of both supernatural and natural orders; it upheld biblical
teachings about the nature of humans as sinful beings in need of salva-
tion from sin, and committed schools to prepare students for both eter-
nity and productive lives on this earth, including active involvement in
511
the work of the church. More specifically, the statement summarized

basic outcomes for education at the elementary, secondary, and tertiary
levels.23
As Adventist education entered the twenty-first century after nearly
130 years of experimenting, struggling, and reorganizing, perhaps one
could ask if the Adventist world could expect anything more than these
essentials and how different they were from the principles in Ellen
White's "Proper Education" of 1872. One could also ask how well Ad-
ventist schools exemplified the ideals that inspired denominational ed-
ucators to develop one of the largest sectarian programs of education in
the world.
Of all the shades of meaning that six or seven generations of Ad-
ventists have drawn from their understanding of denominational phi-
losophy of education, a few common denominators remained con-
stant. In 1872 Ellen White advocated separate schools for Adventists
for two fundamental reasons: to inculcate spiritual values based on
2.~ ··UCn:;flNAT10NAL FAITH AND
U:ARWUIG Sf:"lItAR
NOVEMBER 2~ - DECEUBl::K "1 1998
Participants in the Faith and Learning Seminar, 1998, conducted on the campus of the
University of Eastern Africa, Bara/on, Kenya. Humberto Rasi, co-founder, leading pro-
moter and organizer of the seminars, stands at the far right. The seminars were intended
to help teachers in Adventist postsecondary schools around the world to cultivate philo-
sophical perceptions of knowledge compatible with a Christian worldview.
truth as Seventh-day Adventists understand the Bible and to prepare

people to become active participants in spreading the biblical mes-
sage of salvation. Scripture stood at the center. These two purposes
and their focal point presupposed philosophical assumptions about
the nature of humankind, the source of moral values, the existence of
the created universe of which the world is a part, the origins and
forms of knowledge, how information is acquired and utilized, and
why an organized understanding of all these questions is superior to
Ignorance.
During the 130 years after Goodloe Harper Bell began the first de-
nominationally sponsored school, Adventist education developed dis-
tinctive features about these assumptions and expressed its underlying
reason for being. In the beginning its character was appropriate to the
nineteenth century. As historian George Knight claimed, changes in
the trappings of Adventist education were necessary both with the pas-
sage of time and as schools spread to different cultural and politico-
economic environments. It was not surprising that disagreements arose
when educators engineered change or adaptations while seeking to re-
tain the essential philosophy on which Adventist schools were found-
ed.
Critics charged that Adventist schools lost the key to their identity
because student labor programs that were once so prominent, particu-
larly in agriculture, became rare in the twenty-first century. As modern
life and schools became more oriented to urban living, agriculture de-
clined in importance. North American schools methodically sold off
most of their enterprises as economic conditions made student labor
and viable institutional industries not only obsolete but financial drains
as well, especially those in agriculture.
Practical education remained, however, by virtue of the heavy empha-
sis of Adventist higher education on job preparation. The nineteenth-
century movement to promote practical education was in part a reaction
against a college education in the classics, which produced a specie of
academic degree that lost its appeal as the twentieth century unfolded.
Vestiges of the classics remain in the traditional liberal arts, but in most
denominational institutions education and job preparation became nearly
synonymous, which is a far more pragmatic definition of college educa-
tion than that of the 1870s and the era of Battle Creek College.
17-I.P.F.TW
513
Vast differences exist among Adventist schools but so do the envi-

ronments in which the schools exist. As denominational education
spread and elaborations on the original "Proper Education" appeared,
Adventist educators learned that in order to implement effective curri-
cula and instructional techniques they had to adapt to the societies they
served. This kind of change did not damage fundamental philosophical
constants, but required repackaging for different markets.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century one of the most perplex-
ing questions was the extent to which denominational schools could or
should parallel non-Adventist education to serve the interests of an ex-
panding denominational population. Adventist educators have not
found pat answers to this issue, which has left details in the hands of
institutional authorities to decide to the best of their understanding
within the framework of Adventist philosophy, their decision-making
authority, and the limits of their resources.
Another question that became increasingly serious at the end ofthe cen-
tury was how to attract Adventist students to Adventist schools. Statistics
showed that after the mid-1960s Adventist schools were losing out to non-
Adventist institutions. For twenty years after 1945 about one in four Ad-
ventists worldwide attended a denominational school; between 1965 and
the year 2000 the proportion dropped steadily to less than one in ten.
Without specific studies to determine the cause of decline explana-
tions become speculative. An instructive example occurred in the United
States where the academy, or secondary school, which constituted one of
the largest components of denominational education in the region of the
Adventist world with the largest student population, became an endan-
gered specie after the 1970s. In 1971 more than 20,000 secondary stu-
dents enrolled in North American academies and intermediate schools;
in the year 2000 the figure dropped to 14,000 even though supporting
membership more than doubled from 440,000 to about 923,000. 24
Educators attributed this decline to several causes, most often citing
the steeply rising cost of denominational education, but also of impor-
tance was a widespread opinion that parents and students alike ap-
peared more willing than were previous generations of Adventists to
view the broader curricular opportunities in public schools as evidence
of better education than the narrower offerings in church-sponsored
schools. It appeared that families not only in North America but in
514
many parts of the world tended to place less stress on spiritual values
when deciding where their children would attend school. As a practical
matter, however, it is questionable that Adventist schools could accom-
modate an enrollment increase that at the end of the century would
have raised the student population exponentially if the proportion of
Adventists returned to its 1945 level. 25
With this trend clearly in view, in 1987 the General Conference De-
partment of Education joined the Adventist Chaplaincy Ministries De-
partment and the Youth Department to create new approaches to min-
ister to Adventist students in public colleges and universities, who by
2004 numbered a quarter million, or about three times the enrollment
in denominational institutions. Guided by AMiCUS, short for Adven-
tist Ministry to/with College and University Students, this initiative
conducts seminars and conferences around the world to nurture faith
and loyalty among Adventist students in intellectually hostile environ-
ments. In 1989 it began publication of College and University Dialogue,
a magazine discussing issues of intellectual concern to Adventists,
published three times annually in parallel editions-English, French,
Portuguese and Spanish. The Department of Education circulates Dia-
logue free in more than a hundred countries. 26
A debate has remained since the days of Battle Creek College about
which purpose of Adventist education-to perpetuate Adventist beliefs
in the church's young or to educate denominational workers- is pri-
mary and how to balance the two. "Proper Education" admitted of no
conflict, but church leaders did not always agree among themselves or
with educators about how the two purposes related to each other. In the
early years of denominational schools, a smaller number of courses
produced higher percentages of graduates seeking denominational em-
ployment, but with their broader curricula at the end of the twentieth
century Adventist postsecondary schools enrolled proportionately few-
er students in worker-preparation courses.
This trend led to the easy conclusion that preparation of church em-
ployees has become secondary to education itself and that academic
pursuits have obscured the real reason for Adventist education. But not
to be overlooked is the fact that as the church became more complex it
depended on a wider variety of professionals than in pre-World War II
years, which in part justified the increased number of career options for
515
students. Because the church could employ only a fraction of the gradu-
ates of Adventist schools, the majority of students sought jobs elsewhere.
In turn, educators concluded that the church benefitted from an expand-
ing proportion of laity, professionally prepared on Adventist campuses.
Encouraging news came from the student missionary and task force
programs which furnished incontrovertible evidence that commitment and
old-fashioned missionary service were not dead letters in Adventist educa-
tion, in spite of unprecedented emphasis on careers and professionalism.
The idea of sending college students to church outposts around the world to
assume genuine mission duties materialized spontaneously at Washington
Missionary College in 1959, and later
became an integral part of the denomi-
nation's youth movement. At first the
practice was exclusively North Ameri-
can, where some influential church lead-
ers responded with tolerant attitudes that
were considerably less than enthusiastic.
But the practice hung on and by the
end of the century student volunteer-
ism on Adventist campuses had be-
come a global habit. The urge to con-
tribute to the Adventist movement
compelled hundreds of students annu-
ally from schools circling the world to
interrupt their education to participate
One of the ways the General Confer- in short-term mission service or task
ence Department of Education ad-
vanced the dignity of the teaching
force assignment in some corner of the
profession was to award a Medallion world, sometimes filling a vacancy
ofMerit to individuals who performed in a struggling secondary school or
outstanding service. Born in 1874. a
child of freed Black slaves. Anna
some other institution. Many secondary
Knight attended Battle Creek College schools adapted the idea to what
and later established schools for came to be called mission trips, proj-
Black children in Mississippi. her na-
tive state. She served a long and dis- ects lasting one or two weeks during
tinguished career as a teacher. nurse. which teenagers traveled to remote
and Bible worker in India and the spots to build schools and churches.
United States. In 1971 she received
the Medallion of Merit for her life of The monetary value of student vol-
exemplary and se(fless service. unteerism was beyond calculation.
516
Eventually the youth volunteer program became an integrated part

of the Adventist Volunteer Center, an office directed by an associate
secretary of the General Conference which organizes volunteerism
for the entire denomination.27
The status of Adventist higher education at the end of the twentieth
century has prompted contemplation on an observation by Wheaton
College historian Mark Noll who declares that although intellectuality
in evangelical education has been typically weak, it is gathering
strength. There is little question that Adventist institutions of higher
learning, and to some extent secondary schools as well, have provided
a spawning ground for thought and reflection that did not exist in pre-
World War II days. The constantly broadening range of academic offer-
ings which developed on North American campuses and which has
spread to schools in the world fields, gave both Adventist educators and
students alike a chance to think about how they as educated profession-
als and committed Christians could live relevantly in the world and
contribute to the world but not be of the world.
Probably many Adventists did not give this issue a second thought,
nor did the conclusions of those who did think about it stun the aca-
demic world, but to the thoughtful Adventist the terms missionary,
witnessing, and salt of the earth assumed new philosophical meaning
that the founders of denominational schools had not dreamed of. It
was not mere coincidence that this question grew in importance as
the mood of Adventism became less apocalyptic and more socially
conscious. In the process, the church did not yield any ground in its
belief in the second advent of Christ and the resultant evangelistic
implications for church members, but the church showed more aware-
ness that while people still occupy this planet, there is a Christian
obligation to ameliorate the human condition. This mentality brought
a willingness to engage in self-criticism, produced a growing aware-
ness of the complexity of Scriptures, and encouraged a desire for
higher education and a respect for study.28
One of the most striking evidences of this mentality showed up in
the church's adoption of the 2004 statement, "An Affirmation of Cre-
ation" which congratulated denominational scientists for their contri-
butions to an understanding of the Scriptures and encouraged them to
continue their probing despite the tensions that might arise over unan-
517
swerable questions. The Annual Council was in good company. That

unanswerable question did not endanger faith was the same rationale
that Galilei Galileo echoed in his seventeenth-century response to the
ecclesiastical prohibition slapped upon him to prevent further discus-
sion of the Copernican view of the universe, which contradicted the
officially approved Ptolemaic system. Declaring that God has given
humans the right to argue about the universe and he urged "Let us then
exercise these activities permitted to us and ordained by God, that we
may recognize and thereby so much the more admire His greatness,
however much less fit we may find ourselves to penetrate the profound
depths of His infinite wisdom. "(italics supplied)29
Also playing a role in the growing intellectual atmosphere of Adven-
tist education was the Journal ofAdventist Education, the Department of
Education quarterly that traced its roots to September 1909 when editor
Frederick Griggs' Christian Education made its debut. In 1922 the peri-
odical changed to a lengthy name reflecting the belief that Adventist edu-
cation was a combination of both the home and school. In 1939 it became
the Journal of True Education and finally Journal ofAdventist Education
in 1967, a less exclusive name more reminiscent of Griggs' original title.
As postsecondary and graduate education circled the Adventist world,
writers and editors presented increasingly thoughtful penetrations of
their profession. For its professionalism the periodical earned recognition
and awards from the journalism fraternity. At the end of the century, it
was blanketing most ofthe world of Adventist education with editions in
French, Spanish, and Portuguese as well as English.
Philosophically, from Battle Creek College to Sahmyook University
Adventist education has proposed that human life is part of a created mor-
al universe which speaks to God's glory even though we can only begin to
understand it. Adventist teachers have upheld the Bible as the authoritative
communication of God to His created beings on this earth. Adventist edu-
cation has consistently taught that sin exists which in itself constitutes a
cosmic struggle between good and evil and that individuals choose and are
responsible for the loyalty they exercise on either side of this conflict. Ad-
ventist schools have fostered an understanding and acceptance of salvation
through faith in Jesus. Adventist campuses have pointed students to their
responsibility as propagators ofthese convictions. Adventist education has
upheld the dignity of the individual. It has maintained that useful labor is
518
as valuable as knowledge and that successful humans should have skills in

both. And Adventist education has argued that the human body deserves
respect because its spiritual, physical, social and intellectual capacities are
best realized in a state of good health.
In the year 2003 nearly 1,300,000 students were receiving this in-
struction from approximately 65,700 teachers in more than 6,700 schools
at all levels. Burgeoning membership had brought administrative decen-
tralization to the church and the system of education as church leaders
conceived it at the beginning of the century gave way to a network of
schools. But a system remained as expressed in a common concept of
education founded upon a universal philosophy, basic mission, and com-
mitment to its ideals. Through an established accrediting process and an
international board with regulatory authority, these aspects of systemati-
zation enabled Adventist schools to retain a remarkable continuity not
only among their partners in the network but with their heritage.
Whether in the simple classrooms of a remote elementary school or
in the research laboratories of Lorna Linda University, Adventist edu-
cation had made its mark. It did not compile a perfect record, but "Proper
Education" had worked. Despite their critics and their imperfections
and shortcomings, and in ways that H. R. Salisbury could never envi-
sion, Seventh-day Adventist schools continued to inspire their students
to have a passion for the world.
I General Conference Bulletin, 1990, no. 7, p. 27; ibid., 1995, no. 10, p. 10; ibid., 2000, no.
6, p. 15.
2General Conference Bulletin, 1985, no. 6, p. 22; ibid., 1990, no. 8, p. 22. For the complete
story of Murray's career, see Ronald Alan Knott, The Makings of an Philanthropic Fund-
raiser (San Francisco: Jossey-Boss Publishers, 1992).
JEmail, Richard Osborn to Floyd Greenleaf, August 3, 2004.
4Ibid., 1903, no. 5, p. 67; no. 7, pp. 100, 101; no. 10, pp. 158-160.
5Ibid., 1903, no. 12, pp. 177-183; 1905, no. 4, pp. 19,20.
6General Conference Minutes, October 19, 1932.
'Joseph G. Smoot, "Accreditation: Quality in the SDA College," (Journal of Adventist
Education. February-March 1983), p. 44.
8Email, Humberto Rasi to Floyd Greenleaf, October 23, 1997; email, Richard Osborn to
Floyd Greenleaf, August 3, 2004.
9Sources for the passage about the Board of Higher Education are "Report of Sub-Com-
mittee of the Commission on Higher Education," December I, 1967, AST, RG 51; Betty
Stirling, "What Is the North Amercan Division Board of Higher Education?" (Journal of
Adventist Education, December 1975-January 1976), pp. 21-24; Minutes of the Board of
519
Higher Education, October 15, 1970, AST; ibid., June 18, 1972; ibid., January, 1973; inter-
views, A. C. McClure, January 23 and April 8, 2002; email interview, Richard Osborn, May
28,2002; "Higher Educational Policies," www.nadeducation.adventist.org.
IOMinutes of the Board of Higer Education, October 14, 1970, AST.
IIFor a sampling of these suggestions see Wilfred M Hillock, "Tuition Rates in Seventh-
day Adventist Colleges" (Spectrum, summer 1969), pp.44-49; Donald R. McAdams, "Free
the College Boards: Toward a Pluralism of Excellence," (ibid., summer 1985, pp. 27-35; Mal-
colm Russell, "Break Up the College Cartel," (ibid.), pp. 36-44; Frank A. Knittel, "Merge 14
North American colleges into two? Yes!" (ibid., January 1997), pp. 20-28; Lawrence T. Ger-
aty, "Merge 14 North American colleges into two? No!" (ibid.), pp. 29-35; George H. Akers,
"Can the Adventist church support two North American universities?" Adventist Reveiw,
October 5, 1989; Charles B. Hirsch, "The Future of SDA Higher Education," (Journal of
Adventist Education, December 1984-January 1985).
12North American Division Minutes, October 14, 1992.
IJ"Code of Regulations," email, Richard Osborn to Floyd Greenleaf, May 27, 2002.
14General Conference Minutes, October 6,7, 1994; interview, Humberto Rasi, February
27,2002.
I'See Handbook afSeventh-day Adventist Ministerial and Theological Education (Silver
Spring, MD: International Board of Ministerial and Theological Education, 2001); interview,
Humberto Rasi, February 27, 2002.
16Bonnie Dwyer, "G. C. Approves Proposal to Control Theological Education and Theo-
logians with 'Endorsement' Policy," (Spectrum, Winter, 1999), pp. 70-76; Douglas Morgan,
"Targeting Higher Education" (ibid., Autumn 2001), pp. 69-73; Press Conference, Jan
Paulsen, General Conference Executive Dining Room, October 10, 2002, www.adventist.
Q!g; email, Garland Dulan to Floyd Greenleaf, January 11,2005.
17Adventist Review, North American edition, October 2001, p. 24.
ISlbid., September 25,2001; "New Commission Will Aim to 'Keep Ahead of Challenges'
Facing Higher Education Worldwide," ANN, October 1,2000, www.adventist.org.
19lnterview, Garland Dulan, November 29,2004.
2°Email message, Rasi to Greenleaf, December 29,2004.
2 1Raymond E. Moore, Adventist Education at the Crossroads (Mountain View, CA: Pa-
cific Press Publishing Association, 1976). Reuben Hilde, Showdon: Can SDA Education Pass
the Test? (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1980).
22George R. Knight, ed. Early Adventist Educators (Berrien Springs, M I: Andrews Uni-
versity Press, 1983); Myths in Adventism (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Publishing
Association, 1985); Philosophy and Education: An Introduction in Christian Perspective,
2nd ed. (Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews University Press, 1989)
2J"A Statement of Seventh-day Adventist Educational Philosophy," (Journal ofAdventist
Education, April-May 2002), insert.
24Figures adapted from Statistical Report, 1971, SDA Yearbook, 2001, and World Report 2000.
25"Global Adventist Education: Statistics 1945-2000," General Conference Department
of Education.
26Email message, Rasi to Greenleaf, December 29,2004.
27For a vivid description of the beginnings of the student missionary program see Donna
June Evans, Mosaic of Adventure (Nashville, TN: Southern Publishing Association, 1976).
2sNolI, Scandal, p. 213.
29 Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems-Ptolmaic and Co-
pernican, Stilman Drake, trans. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), p. 464.
520
HEADS OF SEVENTH-DAY
ADVENTIST EDUCATION
The following have served as head of Seventh-day Adventist educa-

tion with varying titles of "secretary," "chairman," or since 1974, "di-
rector":
1887-1897 - W. W. Prescott
1897-1901 - L. A. Hoopes
1901-1902 - 1. H. Kellogg
1902-1903 - W. W. Prescott
1903-1904 - L. A. Hoopes
1904-1910 - Frederick Griggs
1910-1913 H. R. Salisbury
1913-1915 - 1. L. Shaw
1915-1918 - Frederick Griggs
1918-1930 - W. E. Howell
1930-1933 - C. W. Irwin
1933-1936 - W. E. Nelson
1936-1946 - H. A. Morrison
1946-1966 - E. E. Cossentine
1966-1974 - Charles B. Hirsch
1974-1980 - Walton 1. Brown
1980-1985 - Charles R. Taylor
1985-1990 - George H. Akers
1990-2003 - Humberto Rasi
2003- - C. Garland Dulan
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books
60 Years of Progress: Walla Walla College. College Place, WA: Walla Walla
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Aamodt, Terrie Dopp. Bold Venture: A History of Walla Walla College. Col-
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Anderson, Emma, et. al. Adelaide B. Evans, ed. With Our Missionaries in
China. Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 1920.
Anderson, W. H. On the Trail of Livingstone. Mountain View, CA: Pacific
Press Publishing Association, 1919.
Baker, Alonzo. My Sister Alma and I. Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press Pub-
lishing Association, 1980.
Booth, Ernest S. Biology: the Story ofLife. Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press
Publishing Association, 1950.
Brown, Walton J., compiler. Chronology of Seventh-day Adventist Educa-
tion. Washington, D.C.: Department of Education, General Conference of Sev-
enth-day Adventists, 1972.
-. Oh Mi C. A.! Self-published, 1990.
Bull, Malcolm and Keith Lockhart. Seeking a Sanctuary: Seventh-day Ad-
ventism & the American Dream. San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers,
1989.
Cadwallader, E. M. A History of Seventh-day Adventist Education. Lincoln,
NE: Union College Press, 1958.
Camargo Vieira, Ruy Carlos de. Vida E Obra de Guilherme Stein Jr. Sao
Paulo, Brazil: Casa Publicadora, 1995.
Carpenter, Joel A. and Kenneth W. Shipps, eds. Making Higher Education
Christian. Grand Rapids: Christian University Press, 1987.
Chapman, Muriel. Mission of Love: A Century of Seventh-day Adventist
Nursing. Silver Spring, MD: Association of Seventh-day Adventist Nursing,
2000.
Christian, L. H. The Fruitage of Spiritual Gifts. Washington, D.C.: Review
and Herald Publishing Association, 1947.
-. Sons ofthe North. Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press Publishing Associa-
tion, 1942.
Clapham, Noel, ed. Seventh-day Adventists in the South Pacific 1885-1985.
Warburton, Victoria, Australia: Signs Publishing Company, 1985.
Cooper, Emma Howell. The Great Advent Movement, 5th ed. Washington, D.
c.: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1957.
The Chronicle of Southwestern Adventist College. 1984. No editor or pub-
lisher listed.
522
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Data Book ofthe Commission on Seventh-day Adventist Education in Africa.

Silver Spring, MD: General Conference Department of Education, 1995.
Delafield, D. A. Ellen G. White in Europe. Washington, D.C.: Review and
Herald Publishing Association, 1975.
Dick, Everett. Union, College of the Golden Cords. Lincoln, NE: Union Col-
lege Press, 1967.
Dudley Charles Edward, Sr. "Thou Who Hath Brought Us ... " vols. I, II.
Brushton, NY: TEACH Services, 1997.
-. Thou Who Hast Brought Us Thus Far On Our Way, book three, vol. three.
Nashville: Dudley Publications, 2000.
Edwards, Josephine Cunnington. Malinki of Malawi. Mountain View, CA:
Pacific Press Publishing Association, 1978.
Evans, Donna June. Mosaic ofAdventure. Nashville, TN: Southern Publish-
ing Association, 1976.
Ferch, Arthur 1., ed. Symposium on Adventist History in the South Pacific:
1885-1918. Warburton, Victoria, Australia: Signs Publishing Company, 1986.
Fernando, Donald M., ed. 75,h Anniversary: Lakpahana Adventist College.
Mailapitiya, Sri Lanka: Lakpahana Publishing House, 1998.
Fernando, R. S. The Isles Shall Not Wait. Colombo, Sri Lanka: Associated
Newspapers of Ceylon, 1987.
Fiedler, Dave. Hindsight: Seventh-day Adventist History in Essays and Ex-
tracts. Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald Graphics, 1996.
Ford, Herbert. Affair of the Heart. Nashville, TN: Southern Publishing As-
sociation, 1970.
- . For the Love of China: The Life Story of Denton E. Rebok. Mountain
View, CA: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 1971.
From Vision to Reality 1905-1980. Lorna Linda, CA: Lorna Linda University,
1980.
Gandhi, Mohandas K. Gandhi, an Autobiography: the Story of My Experi-
ments with Truth. Mahadev Desai, trans. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993 ed.
Gardner, Elva B. and 1. Mabel Wood. SMC: A School of His Planning. Chat-
tanooga, TN: Board of Trustees, 1972.
Gish, Ira, ed. A Pictorial History of Madison College: School of Divine Ori-
gin, 1904-1964. Clarksville, TN: Madison College Alumni Association, 1986.
- and Harry Christman. Madison: God's Beautiful Farm. Mountain View,
CA: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 1979.
Graybill, Ronald D. E. G. White and Church Race Relations. Washington,
D.C.: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1970.
Greenleaf, Floyd. The Seventh-day Adventist Church in Latin America and
the Caribbean, 2 vols. Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews University Press, 1992.
Handbookfor the Approval ofNew Degree Programs and Institutional Upgrad-
ing in Seventh-day Adventist Colleges and Universities, 1995 ed. Silver Spring, MD:
International Board of Education, General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists.
523
Handbook ofAccreditationfor Colleges and Universities. Silver Spring, MD:

General Conference Department of Education, 1998.
Handbook of Seventh-day Adventist Ministerial and Theological Education.
Silver Spring, MD: General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, 2001.
Hansen, Louis A. From So Small a Dream. Nashville, TN: Southern Publish-
Hartlapp, Johannes, ed. Chronik Freidensau. Friedensau: Theologische
Hochschule, 1999.
Haussler, Doris Holt. From Immigrant to Emissary. Nashville: Southern Pub-
Hertogs, Drusilla. Ruth Gorle, Makhumalo: Mother of Teachers. Published
by the author, no date.
Hilde, Reuben. Showdon: Can SDA Education Pass the Test? Washington,
D.C.: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1980.
Hodgen, Maurice. School Bells and Gospel Trumpets: A Documentary His-
tory of Seventh-day Adventist Education in North America. Lorna Linda, CA:
Adventist Heritage Publications, Lorna Linda University Press, 1978.
Hook, Milton. Avondale: Experiment on the Dora. Cooranbong, New South
Wales, Australia: Avondale Academic Press, 1998.
Jacques, John Godfrey. Escape from Siberian Exile. Mountain View, CA:
Jenson, George Roos. Spicer Memorial College . .. a Dynamic Demonstra-
tion of an Ideal. Poona, India: Oriental Watchman Publishing House, 1965.
Jordan, Ann Devereaux. Seventh-Day Adventists. New York: Hippocrene
Books, 1988.
Loewen, Gertrude. Crusader for Freedom: the Story of Jean Nussbaum.
Nashville: Southern Publishing Association, 1969.
Knight, Anna. Mississippi Girl: An Autobiography. Nashville: Southern Pub-
Knight, George R., ed. Early Adventist Educators. Berrien Springs, MI: An-
drews University Press, 1983.
-. Myths in Adventism. Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Publishing
Association, 1985.
-. Philosophy and Education: An Introduction in Christian Perspective, 2nd
ed. Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews University Press, 1989.
Knott, Ronald Alan. The Makings ofan Philanthropic Fundraiser. San Fran-
cisco: Jossey-Boss Publishers, 1992.
Kulakov, Mikhail. God's Soviet Miracles. Boise, ID: Pacific Press Publishing
Association, 1993.
Land, Gary, ed. The World of Ellen White. Washington, D.C.: Review and
Herald Publishing Association, 1987.
Loughborough, 1. N. Rise and Progress of Seventh-day Adventists. Battle
Creek: General Conference Association of Seventh-day Adventists, 1892.
524
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Maxwell, C. Mervyn. Tell It to the World: the Story oj Seventh-day Adven-

tists. Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 1977.
McKibbin, Alma E. Step by Step. Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Pub-
Mitchell, David. Seventh-Day Adventists. New York: Vantage Press, 1958.
Moore, Mary Hunter. They That Be Teachers. Nashville, TN: Southern Pub-
Moore, Raymond E. Adventist Education at the Crossroads. Mountain View,
- . China Doctor. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961.
-. Mitchibiki. Washington, D. c.: Review and Herald Publishing Associa-
tion, 1956.
Neff, Merlin. For God and C. M. E. Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press Pub-
-. Invincible Irishman: A Biography oj Percy T. Magan. Mountain View,
Abridged edition of For God and C. M. E.
Noll, Mark A. The Scandal oJthe Evangelical Mind. Grand Rapids: William
B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1994.
Numbers, Ronald L. The Creationists. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1992.
Oliver, Barry, Alex Currie, and Doug Robertson, eds. Avondale and the South
Pacific: 100 years oJmission. Cooranbong, New South Wales, Australia: Avon-
dale Academic Press, 1997.
Olsen, M. E. Origin and Progress oJSeventh-day Adventists. Washington, D.
c.: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1925.
Oss, John. Mission Advances in China. Nashville: Southern Publishing As-
sociation, 1949.
Penner, D. S., ed. Public Funds and Private Education: Issues oJChurch and
State. Silver Spring, MD: Board of Education, K-12, Board of Higher Education,
1991.
Perry, Walter. The Open University. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1977.
Pettibone, Dennis. A Century oJChallenge: the History oJSouthern College.
1892-1992. Collegedale, TN: College Board of Trustees, College Press, 1992.
Phillips, Glenn O. I. The Making oj A Christian College: Caribbean Union
College. 1927-1977. Port-of-Spain, Trinidad: The College Press, 1977.
Phipps, Barbara. Test Tubes and Chalk Dust: the Story oj Burton H. Phipps.
Berrien Springs, MI: University Printers, 1976.
Price, George McCready. The Geological-Ages Hoax. New York: Fleming H.
Revell Company, 1931.
-. The Modern Flood Theory oj Geology. New York: Fleming H. Revell
Company, 1935.
- . The New Geology. Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press Publishing Asso-
ciation, 1923.
525
- . The Phantom of Organic Evolution. New York: Fleming H. ReveIl Com-

pany,I924.
-. Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation. New York: Fleming
H. ReveIl Company, 1932.
Proceedings of the Educational and Missionary Volunteer Departments of
the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists in World Convention. Wash-
ington, D.C.: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1923.
Purdon, Rowena. That New England School. South Lancaster, MA: CoIlege
Press, 1956.
Quimby, Paul with Norma Youngberg. Yankee on the Yangkze. Nashville:
Southern Publishing Association, 1976.
Reavis, D. W. I Remember. Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Publishing
Association, n.d.
Reiber, Milton T. Graysville, Battle Creek of the South, 1888-1988. CoIlege-
dale, TN: n.d.
Reid, George W. The Sound of Trumpets: Americans, Adventists, and
Health Reform. Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Publishing Association,
1982.
Reynolds, Louis B. We Have Tomorrow: the Story of American Adventists
with an African Heritage. Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Publishing As-
sociation, 1984.
Report of the Blue Ridge Educational Convention, August 17-25, 1937. Wash-
ington, D.C.: General Conference Department of Education, n.d.
Robertson, John J. A. G. Daniells: the Making ofa General Conference Pres-
ident. Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 1977.
Robinson, Dores E. The Story o.fOur Health Message, 3rd ed. NashviIle, TN:
Southern Publishing Association, 1965.
Samaraj, Edison, ed. Images 1893-1993: the Seventh-day Adventist Church in
Southern Asia. Pune, India: Oriental Watchman Publishing House, 1993.
- . The Challenging Years 1990-1995: Images II. Pune, India: Oriental
Watchman Publishing House, 1995.
- . Maturing of Adventism. Pune, India: Oriental Watchman Publishing
House, 1998.
Schaefer, Richard A. Legacy, Daring to Care: the Heritage of Loma Linda.
Lorna Linda, CA: Legacy Publishing Company, 1990.
Schwarz, Richard W. John Harvey Kellogg, M.D. NashviIle, TN: Southern
- . Light Bearers to the Remnant. Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press Publish-
- . and Floyd Greenleaf. Light Bearers: a History ofthe Seventh-day Adven-
tist Church. Nampa, ID: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 2000.
Seventh-day Adventist Encyclopedia, rev. ed. Washington, D.C.: Review and
Herald Publishing Association, 1976, 1996.
526
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Small, Carol, ed. Diamond Memories. Lorna Linda, CA: Alumni Associa-
tion, School of Medicine, 1984.
Spalding, A. W. Captains oj the Host. Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald
-. Christ's Last Legion. Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Publishing
Association, 1949.
-. Origin and History oj Seventh-day Adventists, 4 vols. Washington, D.C.:
Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1961. The four-volume set is a re-
vised edition of the original two-volume set.
Stahl, F. A. In the Land oj the Incas. Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press Pub-
Steinweg, Virginia. Without Fear or Favor: the Life oj M. L. Andreasen.
Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1979.
Sutherland, E. A. Studies in Christian Education. No date or location.
Swomley, John M., Jr. Religion, the State & the Schools. New York: Pegasus,
1968.
Syme, Eric. A History oj SDA Church-State Relations in the United States.
Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 1973.
Thurston, Claude, chairman of book project. Sixty Years oj Progress: Walla
Walla College. College Place, WA: College Press, 1952.
Timm, Alberto R., ed. Instituto Adventista de Ensino Campus 2: 15 Anos de
Historia. Engenheiro Coelho, SP: Imprensa Universitaria Adventista, 1999.
Toppenberg, Valdemar E. AJrica Has My Heart. Mountain View, CA: Pacific
Press Publishing Association, 1958.
Twomley, Dale E. Parochiad and the Courts. Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews
University Press, 1979.
Utt, Richard. From Vision to Reality, 1905-1980: Lama Linda University.
Lorna Linda, CA: Lorna Linda University Press, 1980.
-. Uncle Charlie: a Biography oJ Charles Elliott Weniger. Mountain View,
Utt, Walter. A Mountain, a Pickax, a College. Angwin, CA: Alumni Asso-
ciation of Pacific Union College, 1968.
Valentine, Gilbert M. The Shaping ojAdventism: the Case oj W. W. Prescott.
Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews University Press, 1992.
VandeVere, Emmett K. Rugged Heart: the Story oj George I. Butler. Nash-
ville, TN: Southern Publishing Association, 1979.
-. The Wisdom Seekers. Nashville, TN: Southern Publishing Association,
1972.
- . compiler. Windows. Nashville, TN: Southern Publishing Association, 1975.
Vasquez, Manuel. The Untold Story: 100 Years ojHispanic Adventism, 1899-
1999. Nampa, ID: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 2000.
Were, Eric. No Devil Strings: the Story oj Kata Rangoso. Mountain View,
Westphal, F. H. Pioneering in the Neglected Continent. Nashville: Southern

White, Arthur L. Ellen G. White, 6 vols. Washington, D.C.: Review and Her-
ald Publishing Association, 1981-1986.
White, Ellen G. Counsels to Parents and Teachers. Mountain View, CA: Pa-
cific Press Publishing Association, 1913, 1943.
-. Counsels to Writers and Editors. Nashville, TN: Southern Publishing As-
sociation, 1946.
-. Education. Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press Publishing Association,
1903, 1942.
-. Fundamentals of Christian Education. Nashville, TN: Southern Publish-
-. The Southern Work. Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Publishing
Association, 1966.
-. Testimonies to the Church, 9 vols. Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press
Wilcox, E. H. In Perils Oft. Nashville: Southern Publishing Association,
1961.
Early Adventist Textbooks

Cady, M. E. Bible Nature Series, 3 vols. Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press
Publishing Association, 1908, 1910, 1913.
-. True Education Reader, Book Seven. Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press
The Gospel Primer. New York: International Tract Society, 1895.
Kellogg, J. H. First Book in Physiology and Hygiene. New York: Harper and
Brothers, 1887, 1888.
-. Second Book in Physiology and Hygiene. New York: American Book
Company, 1894.
McKibbin, Alma E. Bible Lessons in Old Testament History, Book One.
-. Bible Lessons in Old Testament History, Book Two. Mountain View, CA:
-. Bible Lessons: the Life of Christ. Book Three. Mountain View, CA: Pa-
cific Press Publishing Association, 1909.
-. Bible Lessons: the Acts of the Apostles; Plan of Salvation, Book Four.
Price, George McCready. A Testbook of General Science for Secondary
Schools. Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 1917.
Sutherland, E. A. The Bible Reader. Number One, rev. ed. Berrien Springs,
MI: Advocate Publishing Co., 1903.
-. The Mental Arithmetic for Home and School. Battle Creek, MI: Review
and Herald Publishing Association, 1901.
528
BIBLIOGRAPHY
True Education Reader Series:

Hale, Katherine B. Indoors with God's Book. Primer. Mountain View, CA:
-. True Education Reader. Book Two. Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press
Publishing Association, 1907, 1925.
Peck, Sarah Elizabeth. True Education Reader. Book Three. Mountain View,
CA: 1907.
-. True Education Reader. Fourth Grade. Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press
-. True Education Reader. Book Five. Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press
-. True Education Reader. Book Six. Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press
Periodicals and Annual Publications

Academe (Internet editions)
Advent Survey
Adventist Heritage. Citations of specific authors found in endnotes.
Adventist Review (including all previous names of this paper).
Adventist Yearbook
Australasian Union Conference Record
Directory ofSeventh-day Adventist Colleges and Universities
Eastern African Division Outlook
Far Eastern Division Outlook
Focus
General Conference Bulletin
Journal of Adventist Education (including its predecessor, Journal of True
Education). Citations of specific authors found in endnotes.
Light. including its predecessor, Northern Light (official paper of the North-
ern European Division and Trans-European Division)
Missionary Magazine
Rasi, Humberto, compo Christ in the Classroom: Adventist Approaches to the
Integration of Faith and Learning, vols. 1-26B. Silver Spring, MD: Institute for
Christian Teaching, 1991-2001.
Southern African Division Outlook
Southern Asia Tidings
Spectrum. Citations of specific authors found in endnotes.
Statistical Report
Trans-Africa Division Outlook
World Report: Adventist Education Around the World: Silver Spring, MD:
General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, Department of Education
18-IPF.TW
529
Institutional Catalogs
Adventist College of Professional Studies (Surat, India)
Adventist International Institute of Advanced Studies (Philippines)
Adventist International School (Sri Lanka)
Adventist University of the Philippines (Philippines)
Andrews University (United States)
Antillian Adventist University (Puerto Rico)
Avondale College (Australia)
Canadian University College (Canada)
Central Philippine Adventist College (Philippines)
Haitian Adventist University (Haiti)
Helderberg College (South Africa)
Hong Kong Adventist College (China)
La Sierra University (United States)
Middle East College (Lebanon)
Mission College (Thailand)
Myanmar Union Adventist Seminary (Myanmar)
Newbold College (England)
Oakwood College (United States)
Pacific Union College (United States)
Pakistan Adventist Seminary (Pakistan)
Sahmyook Nursing & Health College (Korea)
Sahmyook University (Korea)
Saleve Adventist University (France)
Southwestern Adventist University (United States)
Spicer Memorial College (India)
Tanzania Adventist College (Tanzania)
University of Eastern Africa, Baraton (Kenya)
Universidad de Montemorelos (Mexico)
Yugoslavian Training School (Yugoslavia)
Articles
Australian Council of State School Organizations. "Six myths about private
schools in Australia," [email protected]
Brereton, Virginia Lieson. "The Bible Schools and Conservative Evangelical
Higher Education, 1880-1940," in Making Higher Education Christian, Joel A.
Carpenter and Kenneth W. Shipps, eds. Grand Rapids: Christian University
Press, 1987. pp. 110-136.
Holsinger, M. Paul. "The Oregon School Bill Controversy, 1922-1925," Pa-
cific Historical Review, XXXVII (1968), pp. 327-341.
Jorgenson, Lloyd P. "The Oregon School Law of 1923: Passage and Sequel,"
Catholic Historical Review, LIV (1968), pp. 445-466.
Knight, George R. "The Transformation of Education," in The World o/Ellen
530
BIBLIOGRAPHY
White, Gary Land, ed. Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Publishing Asso-
ciation, 1987. pp. 161-175.
Potts, Anthony, "Public and Private Schooling Australia-Historical and Con-
temporary Considerations," www.history.ac.uk/projects/elec
Reynolds, Keld 1. "The Church under Stress, 1931-1960," in Adventism in
America, Gary Land, ed. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.,
1986. pp. 170-207.
Smith, Timothy. "Introduction: Christian Colleges and American Culture,"
in Carpenter and Shipps, ibid. pp. 1-15.
Thompson, Ida E. "Bethel Girls' School," in With Our Missionaries in China,
Emma Anderson, et. al. Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press Publishing Associa-
tion, 1920, pp. 43-63.
Archival and Unpublished Materials

"An Affirmation of Creation," the International Faith & Science Conferences
2002-2004. Report of the Organizing Committee to the General Conference Ex-
ecutive Committee through the office of the General Conference President, Sep-
tember 10, 2004.
Ashlock, George S. "The Establishment of White Seventh-day Adventist El-
ementary Schools in the United States, 1853-1900." M.S. thesis, University of
Tennessee, 1959.
Australian High Court Cases, www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/high_ct
Cady, Marion Ernest. "Seventh Day Adventist Denominational Schools on
the Pacific Coast." M.A. thesis, University of California, 1916.
Columbia Union College v. John J. Oliver, Jr., et. al., 2001, United States
Court of Appeals, Fourth District. Copy in Office of General Counsel, General
Conference of Seventh-day Adventists.
Correspondence: Joyce and Eric Juriansz to Friends of Lakpahana, March
27, 1998; Paul Essig to Joyce and Eric Juriansz, August 20, 1998. Library, Lak-
pahana Adventist College and Seminary.
Crane, E. A. "I Remember Sri Lanka." Unpublished manuscript, Library,
Lakpahana Adventist College and Seminary.
Haloviak, Bert. "A Brief Sketch of SDA Ministerial Training." Unpublished
manuscript.
Kelly-Little, Mary. "Development of the Elementary Schools of Seventh-day
Adventists in the United States." M.A. thesis, University of Washington, 1932.
Minutes of the Board of Higher Education, General Conference Archives.
Minutes of the Commission on Higher Education, General Conference Ar-
chives.
Minutes of the General Conference Committee, General Conference Ar-
chives.
Minutes of the International Board of Education, General Conference Archives.
Nixon, Robert, compo Church-State Relationships in the United States: Com-
531
pilation of Actions and Policies of the General Conference and North American
Division. Office of General Counsel, General Conference of Seventh-day Ad-
ventists.
Official Statements, www.adventist.org
Pohlman, Edward. W. "First the Blade, Then the Ear." Unpublished article
from the collection of Gordon Christo, Spicer Memorial College, Pune, India
(later published in Eastern Tidings, September 15, 1945).
Record Group 51, General Conference Department of Education, General
Conference Archives.
Robinson, A. W. "Partial Account of Our Ceylon Experience." Library, Lak-
pahana Adventist College and Seminary.
Interviews and Correspondence

U. D. Aloysius, W. D. Joseph, Peter Munasinghe, J. Willy Reith, combined
interview, Colombo, Sri Lanka, May 21, 2002.
Bert B. Beach, telephone conversation, March 10, 2002.
Enrique Becerra, Silver Spring, MD, February 13, 2002.
Pavle Borovic, Englewood, FL, July 30, 2003.
Dae Yun Cho, Seoul, Korea, June 4, 2002.
Barbara Choi, Hong Kong, May 14, 2002.
G. J. Christo, Hosur, India, May 26, 2002.
Gordon Christo, Pune, India, May 28, 2002; email, June 15, 2004.
Daniel Chuah, Hong Kong, May 14,2002.
Y. K. Chung, Seoul, Korea, June 4, 2002.
Justus Devadas, Hosur, India, May 24, 2002.
Garland Dulan, Silver Spring, MD, February 11, 12, 2002; November 29,
2004.
Karen Essig, Mailapitiya, Sri Lanka, May 23, 2002.
Paul Essig, Mailapitiya, Sri Lanka, May 22, 2002.
H. G. M. Fernando, Colombo, Sri Lanka, 22, 2002.
R. S. Fernando, Kandy, Sri Lanka, May 23, 2002.
John Fowler, Silver Spring, MD, February 7, 13,2002; Silang, Cavite, Philip-
pines, May 19,2002.
Samuel M. Gaikwad, Pune, India, May 27, 2002.
Jonathan Gallagher, Silver Spring, MD, February 27, 2002.
John Graz, Silver Spring, MD, February 28, 2002.
Daniel Heinz, email, July 4-7,2003.
Si Young Kim, Seoul, Korea, June 4, 2002.
Oliver Koh, Silang, Cavite, Philippines, May 17,2002.
Ezras Lakra, Hosur, India, May 24, 2002.
Anna Lee, Hong Kong, May 15,2002.
Andrea Luxton, email, July 11,2004; January 11,2005.
H. H. Lyu, Seoul, Korea, June 4,2002.
532
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Harry Mayden, Takoma Park, MD, February 27, 2002.

Alfred McClure, Punta Gorda, FL, January 23, April 8, 2002.
Julian Melgosa, Silang, Cavite, Philippines, May 18,2002.
Liberato B. Moises, Silang, Cavite, Philippines, May 17,2002.
D. K. Nam, Seoul, Korea, June 5, 2002.
Robert Nixon, Silver Spring, MD, February 25, 2002.
M. K. Oh, Seoul, Korea, June 5, 2002.
Richard Osborn, email, May 28, 2002; August 3, 2004.
Dong Seung Park, Seoul, Korea, June 4, 2002.
Tim Poirier, Silver Spring, MD, email, January 14, 2005.
Humberto Rasi, Silver Spring, MD, February 6, 7, 27, 2002; email, Novem-
ber 3 and December 29, 2004.
Vicente Rodriguez, Macon, GA, correspondence April 12,2002.
Elizabeth Role, Silang, Cavite, Philippines, May 17,2002.
Mr. and Mrs. Y. R. Samaraj, joint interview, Hosur, India, May 25, 2002.
Jin Hong Shin, Seoul, Korea, June 4, 2002.
Kei Hoon Shin, Seoul, Korea, June 4, 2002.
Milton Siepman, Punta Gorda, FL, January 8, 2002.
Charles Tidwell, Punta Gorda, FL, conducted by email, January 2-29, 2002.
Mitchell Tyner, Silver Spring, MD, February 20, 2002.
Masaji Uyeda, Koyang City, Korea, June 3, 2002.
INDEX
(Page numbers in bold type refer to photo illustrations.)
A dealt with at Colorado Springs and Blue

Abbott, George, K., 76 Ridge conventions, 328
Academe, 470 SDA accreditation extended to world
academic freedom, 461-470 fields, 329,497
defined, 462 Great Depression impacted debate of, 333
AAUP exception for religious institutions, impact of nursing education, 337
462 sanitarium nursing schools subject to, 339
SDA position, 1965,462,463 encouraged graduate education, 343
focused on theology and science, 464 effect of SDA accreditation around world,
challenges from creation vs. evolution, 380
464-468 relationship to academic freedom, 463
Faith and Science Conferences, 466-468 under African governments, 486
"An Affirmation of Creation," 467, 468 relationship to ministerial education, 505
Desmond Ford case, 469 SDA accreditation coincided with spread
promoted by sectarian institutions, 469 of ministerial education, 507
statement by Board of Higher Education, impact of outside North America, 507, 508
470 Adams, W. L., 291
due process an institutional responsibility, Adriatic Union College, 443
470 Advanced Bible School (see Seventh-day
related to ministerial education, 505 Adventist Theological Seminary)
academy (see secondary education) Adventist Accrediting Association, 414, 426,
accreditation 476
government controls accepted, 304, 321 coordinated with international ministerial
voluntary accreditation in US, 304, 305 education board, 504
at College of Medical Evangelists, 305 impact of outside North America, 507, 508
SDA accreditation intended to replace Adventist Chaplaincy Ministries, 515
voluntary accreditation in US, 310 Adventist Colleges abroad, 407
General Conference debate of, 311-317 Adventist Education at the Crossroads, 509
financial aspects of, 311, 314, 320 Adventist International Institute of Advanced
most acute struggle of SDA education, Studies, 384
317 origins at Philippine Union College, 381-382
relationship to SDA philosophy of Asia Adventist Theological Seminary, 382
knowledge, 318, 319 separation from Philippine Union College,
debate based on purposes ofSDA 382
education, 319, 320 served all of Asia, 383
impact on professionalism, 319, 320 academic programs, 383
validated SDA educational practices, 321, a General Conference institution, 383
322 endorsement plan for ministers, 506
534
INDEX
Adventist International School, 452 411,413,414

Adventist Professionals' Network, 509 Adventist education in, 414-417
Adventist Review, 17, 18,26,32,37,85,92,317 ten accredited post-secondary schools, 414
Adventist University of Central Africa, 414 education crisis caused by rapid member-
Cosendai,414 ship growth, 415
Wallace, 414 successes and deficiencies of SDA
Zurcher, 414 education, 415-417
Adventist University of the Philippines, 375 SDA education retained Cecil Rhodes'
Philippine Academy, 256 original purpose, 416
origin at Pasay, 168 SDA education a blend of social and
growth from academy to college, 255, 256 saving gospel, 417
Philippine Union College government aid, 483-486
move from Pasay to Baesa, 257 regulatory practices of new governments,
first SDA degree-granting college 486
outside US, 257, 377 Akers, George, 468
learning center for Far East, 256, 381 Alu, Pele T., 132
national faculty in 1930s, 259 American Academy of Religion, 470
Manalaysay presidency, 259 American Association of University Professors
only school outside US offering defined academic freedom, 462
baccalaureate nursing degree, 341 met with resistance from sectarian
first outside US to offer graduate institutions, 469, 470
classes, 381 American Medical Association, 305,309,361
graduate degree in religion, 381 American Medical Missionary College, 72-
formed Seventh-day Adventist Theo- 74,76
logical Seminary (Philippines), 382 American South
move to Silang, 382 regarded as a mission field, 63-65
regained graduate programs and benefited from Health and Missionary
university status, 384 School,72
Adventist Volunteer Center, 517 AMiCUS, 515
affi Iiations "An Affirmation of Creation," 467, 468
issue with US accrediting bodies, 378, impact on academic freedom, 467, 468
379,507 reflected intellectual trends, 518
Spicer Memorial College 394, 396 Anderson, Mrs. B. L., 183
post-secondary schools in India and local Anderson, Godfrey T., nature of university,
universities, 395 368,369
Australasian Missionary College, 396-398 Anderson, J. N., 179
means to export higher education from Anderson, W. H., 173
US, 401 first teacher, Solusi, 174-176
not common with European schools, 403 founded Rusangu Mission, 175
Newbold College, 404 Andreasen, M. L., 309, 316, 316, 487
Solusi,410 Andrews, J. N., 105, 115,357
Caribbean Union College, 422 Andrews University, 359, 370, 380
program of, Andrews University, 428 emergence of, 356-357
program of, Lorna Linda University, 428, General Conference institution, 357
429 early struggles with accreditation, 357,
Zaokski Theological Seminary, 446 358
Africa graduate degrees tended to the professions,
colonial background, 172 358
SDA missionaries latecomers, 174, 177 doctorates in education, 359
training school in each union, 1930,246 Adventist Heritage Center, 359
spectacular educational growth, 247 Center for Adventist Research, 359
nation building policies and education, Museum of Natural History, 360
535
Andrews University Press, 360 first in lAD to offer Spanish post-secondary

archeological activities, 360 courses, 293, 453
growth of graduate program, 360 became exclusively Cuban school, 453
purpose of the university, 360 expropriated by Cuban government, 453
affiliation with Spicer Memorial College, move to Puerto Rico, 453
394 Argentina
most prominent mentor of SDA higher English enclave target for SDA mission, 106
education, 401 early SDA schools, 134
affiliation with Solusi, 410 debate over SDA curriculum, 135
affiliation with Caribbean Union College, leader in Latin American education, 136
422 source of missionaries to Lake Titicaca, 163
primary exporter of SDA accredited Armitage, F. G., 175
education, 428 Ashcroft, Charles, E., 133
extension courses at Friedensau, 436 Association of Adventist Colleges and
extension graduate program, Romanian Universities
Adventist Theological Institute, 444 spontaneous consortium, 501, 502
affiliation with Zaokski Theological Association of American Medical Colleges, 74
Seminary, 446 Association of Seventh-day Adventist
ministerial education, 506 Institutions of Higher Education and
Battle Creek College, 26, 125, 129,513 Secondary Schools, 496
founded, named, 25, 26, reorganized from Association of Colleges
social, academic issues, 27, 29, 32 and Secondary Schools, 496
produced workers, 31 Association of Colleges and Secondary
closure of, 33 Schools established, 310, 341
physical education, 39 SDA accreditation to replace secular
student labor program, 37-39 accreditation, 310
evaluated by Michigan State Board of established a single standard for all
Education, 43, 44 SDA schools, 329, 330
Training School for Christian Workers, cultivated systematization, 329
46 accepted nursing schools as members, 339
move to Berrien Springs part of reform, established policies for all institutions, 496
47,48 Association of Theological Schools, 358
relationship of to other SDA schools, Atlantic Union College
46,49,50 South Lancaster Academy, 33, 44, 52, 59, 90
"Revolution of 1897," 45 teacher-preparation course, 85, 201
site for Bible institutes, 54-56 Griggs, principal, 207
product of the times, 80 senior college status, 227
site of the Movement of 1897, 85-87, 101 attendance (see enrollment)
teacher-preparation course at BCC, 86, 87 Australia, 47, 48,85,89,95
indebtedness, 215 target for SDA mission, 106
Emmanuel Missionary College, 58, 104, called for a worker-training school, 107, 128
212,306,313,314,316,358 government denied degree-granting
a regional college, 49, 50 authority, 396
education for immigrants, 57, 58 most resembled US in matters of religious
self-supporting movement, 65, 66 liberty, 478
graduate education, 344 Australian Council for the Defence of
merged with Potomac University, 356 Government Schools, 479, 480
Andross, E. E., 284, 285, 287 Australasian Missionary College (see
Ann Arbor, 73 Avondale College)
Antillian Adventist University, 454 Avondale College, 128-133, 131
beginnings at Bartle, Cuba, 293 founding, 128-130,
move to Santa Clara, 293 "sour" land, 129
536
INDEX
legal controversy of title to land, 129, 130 theme of Education, 48

government praises school, 130 misunderstandings about, 98
primary source of workers for Pacific central in most schools in Anglo colonies
islands, 132, 146 and Latin America, 145
growth into post-secondary school, 236 first school in China, 180, 181
Victoria Council of Public Education, 236 Meiktila Technical School, 190
effective worker-preparation school, 237 most weighty concern in SDA curriculum,
first SDA school to affiliate with US 213
school, Pacific Union College, 396, 401 agenda item at conventions, 1888, 1891,
unrecognized program, 396, 397 1894,214
senior college status, 396, 397 identifying mark of SDA schools, 221
became College of Advanced Education, 398 relationship to academic freedom, 463,
recognized by New South Wales and 464
Commonwealth Register, 398 Blue, I. F., 195, 268
Blue Ridge Convention, 317, 321
B primary issue: distinctive SDA curriculum,
Babcock University, 415, 486 328
largest SDA institution in Africa, 415 second and last world convention, 328
Battle Creek Church, 18 Board of Higher Education
role in the McLearn controversy, 37 statement on academic freedom, 470
Battle Creek College (see Andrews University) created to implement master plan for SDA
Battle Creek Sanitarium, 26, 51, 54, 60 higher education in North America,
School of Hygiene, 70, 71 498,499
School of Domestic Economy, 71 failed to fulfill expectations, 499,500,501
nursing school, 71 replaced by Higher Education Cabinet,
Health and Missionary Temperance 501
School, 71, 72 Board of Regents, 313
role in education of physicians, 70, 72, 73 founded, 1928, 310
Baylor University, 470 fostered global system of SDA schools, 329
Beach, B. B., 440 converted nursing to collegiate program,
Bear Lake, Michigan, 87, 91, 101 340
Beaven, Winton, 356 nursing schools outside US not subject to,
Beckner, J. B., 154 341
Beecher Report, 483 authorized theology degrees in schools
Belgrade Theological Seminary, 443 outside US, 376
Bell, G. H., 96, 200 ranked Australasian Missionary College
began "Select School," 19 as four-year college, 396, 397
supported student labor program, 27 elevated ten training schools in Latin
battle with McLearn, 32 America to college status, 418
helped to found South Lancaster Academy, to establish policies for all institutions, 496
33 extended authority to world fields, 497
operated correspondence school, 76 became Adventist Accrediting Association,
author of A Natural Method in English, 93 497
published Bel/'s Language Series, 94 leading systematizing influence in SDA
Bender, Urbanus, 155, 156 education, 497
Bethel College, 246, 409, 486 Board of Theological Education, 426,506
beginnings of, 178 Boehm, J. H., 142, 143
Biblical Research Institute, 505 Bolivia
biblical studies benefited from Titicaca Normal School, 277
to be central, 27, 32, 38, 43, 91, 92, 96 Bolivia Adventist University
issue at Harbor Springs Convention, 41, 42 beginnings at Collana and Cochabamba,
favored theme of A. T. Jones, 46 279
537
Bolton Act, 471 C

Borovic, Pavle, 440, 441, 456 Cadwallader, E. M., 172
Boxer Rebellion, 179 Cady, M. E., 98, 205, 209
Boyd, C. B., 287 published Bible Nature Series, 95
Boyd, Ella, 132 contributed to True Education Readers
Bradley, W. P., 257, 258, 260, 262 Series, 97
Branson, W. H., 242, 247, 325 demanded educational reform, 205, 206
role in accreditation debate, 314, 316, 317 Calkins, Glenn, 297
Brazil Adventist University Camacho, Manuel
precursors at Curitiba, Brusque, Taquari originated schools for Aymaras, 158, 159
for German students, 140 jailed, 159
establishment near Sao Paulo, 142 Camacho, Manuel Avila, 297
strong agricultural program, 143 Canadian University College
changes under Thomas Steen, 144 senior college status, 227
largest SDA school in South America, Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education, 83
1945,276 Carmel College, 237
became junior college, 275 origin at Darling Range, 132
nationalization of faculty, 276 benefited from government aid, 480
Domingos Peixoto presidency, 276 Carmichael, A. S., 174, 175
authorized to offer theology degree, 422 Carr, S. W., 166
government recognition, 422, 423 Caribbean
divided campuses, 423 English areas target for SDA missions, 106
graduate education, 423 Caribbean Union College
Ellen G. White Research Center, 423 origins, 287
Broadview College, 58, 62 attracted public attention, 289
Brodersen, P. E., 280 became post-secondary school, 289
Broken Stone Mission, 160 teacher-preparation course officially
Brown, Walton J., 453, 454 recognized, 422
Brownsberger, Sidney, 25, 26, 39 affiliation with Andrews University, 422
succeeded Bell, 24 Castro, Fidel, 452, 453, 454
successes and problems at Battle Creek, Caviness, G. W., 44, 45
30,31 Central America
president of Healdsburg College, 31, 33 English enclaves target for SDA missions,
Bruce, Edith E., 193 106
Buck's Bridge school, 16, 17, 18, education for English and Spanish students,
budgets, operational budgets introduced, 290
331 Central American Adventist University
Bulawayo, 173, 174 origins at La Saban a and Tres Rios, 290, 291
Burgess, L. J., 193 Central California Conference, 471
Burnett, D. Lois, 471 Centralia, California, 88, 92, 102
Burrus, Georgia, 192 Ceylon (see Sri Lanka)
Burton, \. 8., 174 Chai, Tai Hyun, 262
business education, 401 Chapman, Muriel, 340
preferred course at Solusi University, 411 Cherian, M. E., 393
preferred course at University of Eastern Chiang Kai-shek, 250, 253
Africa, 413 Chiang, Madame, 250, 252, 253
most popular course in African SDA Chicago Medical Dispensary, 54
schools, 415 Chile
Butler, G. \., 19,33,36,56, 128 English community target for SDA
Butterfield, C. L., 261 mission, 106
Byington, John Fletcher, 18 Chile Adventist University
Byington, Martha, 16 beginnings at Pua, 115, 138,282
538
INDEX
move to Chillan, 139, 140 schools, 197

secondary status to River Plate College, 282 SDA education a part of and benefited
destroyed by earthquake, 282 from, 300
China demise of in Africa, 408, 409, 415
object of imperialism, 178 Colorado Springs Convention, 68, 77, 98,
spread ofSDA schools, 182-184 308,495
political background, 249, 250 first world convention of SDA education,
adopted some Western culture, 250 327
communist influences, 250, 251, 254, 447 purpose of, promote global system of
seventeen training schools, 1940,255 education, 327
early gathering of SDA educators, 326 Columbia Union College
education conference in 1925,495 controversy over government aid, 475-477
Chosen (see Korea) Washington Missionary College
Christ in the Classroom, 469, 476 emerged from Foreign Missionary
Christ's Object Lessons, 216, 331 Seminary, 151,221
Christ Our Saviour, 92 program for graduate nurses, 1924,338
Christian, L. H., 63, 482 to affiliate with proposed graduate
views of recovery after World War I, 229, school,356
230 affiliation with Newbold College, 404
Christian Medical College (Vellore, India), 394 initiated student missionary program,
Chronik Friedensau, 434, 436 516
Churchill, Winston, 432 Columbia Union College v. Clarke, 475-477
Civil War (US), 57, 63, 65, 80 Commission on Higher Education, 498
followed by educational reform, 22 Commission Higher Education (new), 509,
Clackamas, Oregon, 474, 478 511
Claremont Union College (see Helderberg Commission on Seventh-day Adventist
College) Education in Africa, 416
Clarke, C. Fred, 408 Commission on Graduate Education, 498
classical education, 23, 24, 81 Committee on Graduate Study, 355, 356
at Battle Creek College, 30, 31, 42, 45 Committee ofTen, 83
Claxton, P. P., 66 communism (see radical socialism)
Clinton Theological Seminary, 58, 59, 62 in China, 250, 251, 254
Colcord, G. A., 66 Conference on African Trends, 409
Cold War, 432, 448 Conradi, L. R., 57, \06, 139, 142,233
College and University Dialogue, 515 conventions
Colleges of Advanced Education (Australia), organization of educational levels, 1903,
398 213
College Bible and History Teachers Council, articulation of SDA curriculum, 213, 214
354 SDA post-secondary school better
college education (see post-secondary defined,214
education) improved administration and teacher
College Vertieres (see Haitian Adventist certification, 214
University) generated a sense of ownership among
Colombia Adventist University faculty, 215
beginnings of, 292 early meeting in Shanghai, 326
colonialism, 122 used by Howell to systematize education,
impact on SDA education in Philippines, 169 326
Christian missions a part of in Africa, 172, first gathering in South America, 326
173 world conventions impractical, 328
mixture of religion and imperialism in European councils after World War II,
China, 178 402
often helped in establishment of SDA Cooranbong (see Avondale College)
539
correspondence school (see Home Study for secondary teachers, 355

International) overseer of higher education, 378
Cossentine, E. E., 237 published source books on SDA education,
councils (see conventions) 380
Counsels to Parents and Teachers, 48 conducted councils in Europe after World
creationism, 465-468 War II, 402
SDA fundamental belief, 466, 467 directed upgrading of Montemorelos
"An Affirmation of Creation," 467,468 University, 420, 421
Cuba originated Institute for Christian Teaching,
socialist revolution, 452,453 468
Cuba Adventist Seminary union presidents resisted authority of, 495,
opened, 1970,453 496
degree-granting authority, 454 worked through Board of Regents for
new campus, 455 strict standards, 496
Czechowski, M. B., 105 opposed graduate ministerial education at
Southern Adventist university, 504
D established Adventist Professionals'
Dalinger, David, 163 Network, 509
Daniells, A. G., 204, 206, 208, 209, 216, founded program to meet needs of SDA
217,309,500 students in non-SDA schools, 515
DeGraw, Bessie, 65 departmental organization
Movement of 1897, 86, 90 replaced societies and associations, 203
co-authored Bible Reader, 94 began in Australia and South Africa, 208
degree-granting authority (see post- development
secondary education) offices of, 493, 494
democratic reform in education, 22-24 promoted through Philanthropic Service
brought to Asia by SDA schools, 270 for Institutions, 493
Denmark, 106, 108, III fund raising transformed by Milton
school at Jerslev, 107, 107, III, Murray, 493, 494
worker-training schools, 108-111 endowments, planned giving supplemented
Department of Education, 378 subsidies 494
unifying influence of, 200 Devine, Lester D., 480, 482
Educational Society, 201, 203, 205 Dewey, John, 82
Educational Department formed, 203 Dexter, H. H., 117
Department of Education formed, 208, 213 Dick, E. D., 246
recommended reduction in colleges in Dick, Everett, 342
US, 227, 495 Diego, Caridad, 455
one of better organized GC departments, director of education
302 secretary of education, office created, 201
recommended accreditation of SDA departmental heads common in world by
schools, 304 1920,209,210
became source of resistance to accredita- DOGS case (government aid to private
tion,306 education), 479, 480
portrayed accreditation as "emergency," Dowkontt, George D., 73, 74
320 Druillard, Nellie, 65
recommended improved employment due process (see academic freedom)
conditions for teachers, 325
visualized as the hub of SDA educational E
activity, 329 Eberhardt, Walter, 434
recommended standardization of education
theology education, 343 pragmatic character of SDA, 51, 371,428,
recommended five-year teacher-preparation 513
540
INDEX
SDA schools shaped by their environment, teacher-preparation not critical, Sri

80,84,226,249 Lanka, 451
spread of, four-pronged movement, 107 SDA schools a business in Sri Lanka, 452
evangelistic tool, 162, 169,254, debate about creation, 464-468
social uplift, 160, 163, 169, 197,300,301 debate over pervasively sectarian legal
linked to humanitarianism, 169 test, 475-477
agent of change in China, 181 education for immigrants to US, 57-59, 62,
women's rights in China, 180, 180, 181, 183 63,308,312
means to reach public, Korea, 187 integrated into English schools, 57-59
more effective than preaching in non- Danish, 57, 58
Christian lands, 194, 195, 197 French, 57, 59
appeared to be part of imperialism, 197,249 German, 57, 59
social uplift and redemptive mission, 197 Norwegian, 57-59
formative years for SDA schools ended, Russian, 59
1920, 198 Swedish, 57-59
rapid expansion in 1890s, 202 impact of, 62, 63
tension over dual purpose of SDA schools, Education, 48, 131
219,301,302 Educational Society (see Department of
SDA growth statistics, 1920-1945,225-228 Education)
bulk of SDA secondary, post-secondary Ehlers, E. c., 144
schools, in US in interim, 225 elementary education
techniques tested in North American Normal course at Battle Creek College, 29
schools, 228 part of reform at Battle Creek College,
evangelism, measure of success in Africa 45,46
and South Pacific, 247 summer schools in Northeast US, 85
saved in China by vocational character, 252 teacher-preparation at Battle Creek, 86,
quiet growth in India during interim, 263, 86,87
264 Grand Island, Nebraska, 88
crucial role in India's evangelism, 268, rare in Scandinavia, 110, 111
269,392 non-existent in Germany, 114
contributed to national goals in Asia virtually unknown in France, 118
during interim, 270 beginnings in Argentina, 137
comparison of South America, Africa, elementary schools in Australia, New
Pacific, 284 Zealand, South America, 145
movement of in Inter-America in the struggles in Jamaica, 154
interim years, 297 Solusi training program, 175
balanced among language groups in Inter- in China, 183
America, 291, 297 Korea, 187,390
evolved according to local beliefs of EGW colleges designed teacher-preparation
instruction, 299 courses, 202
issues facing SDA education, 1920,300 defined at 1905 GC session, 210
health, a key aspect of, 301 growth of in world fields exceeded US,
professionalism, part of upgrading 225
movement, 303 general profile drawn by 1920,226
teacher-preparation a factor in upgrading teacher-preparation in Australia, 236, 237
training schools, 378 movement in Australasia, 238
non-Adventist teachers in India, 394 expanded in South Pacific during World
differed in India from traditional SDA War II, 241
pattern, 395 widespread in China during interim, 255
concept of mission school perpetuated, 399 teacher-preparation in Philippines, 258
teacher-preparation strong in South prospered in Korea during interim, 261
America, 427 comparison of China and Far Eastern
541
divisions, 263 Study International)

in India during interim, 268,269 Fireside Teacher, 76, 77
teacher-preparation at River Plate, 273, 283 First Amendment (see establishment clause)
teacher-preparation at Titicaca, 276, 277 Fitzgerald, W. 1., 1913
teacher-preparation in all South American Fletcher, L. H., 454
training schools, 283 Fletcher, W. w., 264
successful in South America, 283 Folkenberg, Robert, 455
prospered in Inter-America, 297 Friedensau University, 403
accreditation required for teacher- achieved government recognition as
preparation, 306 university, 403
attempt to destroy parochial education in Missionsseminar Friedensau, 111-115,112,
Michigan, 307 456
proscription of private schools in Oregon, early center for medical missionaries, 113
307,308 graduates served German colonies, 114
critical to evangelism in India, 392, 395 an international center, 114, 122
non-Adventist teachers in India, 394 decline after World War I, 115
teacher-preparation courses in Inter- during interim years, 231-233
America, 422 graduate nurse program, 341
Emmanuel Missionary College (see during era of radical socialism, 433-437
Andrews University) reopened after World War II, 1947
endowments (see development) "laymen's" courses, 435
English, lingua franca of Adventism, 106, as Theological Seminary, 435
407 SDA accreditation, 435
Enoch, G. F., 154, 155,265 relaxed controls and increased church
enrollment, decline of, 514, 515 involvement, 435, 436
Erickson,1. M., 108 music traditions, 436
Erzberger, James, 105 Andrews University extension courses,
establishment clause, Australia, 478 436
basis for landmark litigation on govern- government authorization as university,
ment aid to private schools, 479 436
establishment clause, US, 470, 475 Marienhohe theological course transferred
changes in interpretation, 472 to Friedensau, 437
in Columbia Union College v. Clarke graduate education, 437
case, 475, 477 Froebel, Friedrich, 82, 99
school vouchercase,478 Frost, S. L., 214, 251, 257, 258, 260
Evans, Adelaide B., 181, 183 Fua, Paul, 241
Evans, I. H., 181,219,227,256,257,260,261 Fulton College
evolution origins, 166
produced scientific view of man, 81, 82 Buresala, a worker-training center for
issue in academic freedom, 464-468 South Pacific, 240
Fulton,1. E., 164, 165, 168,241
F founded training school for Fijians, 165, 166
Faith and Science Conferences, 466, 467 fundamental beliefs, 464, 466
Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, 409 relationship to academic freedom, 464
Figuhr, R. R., 355, 361 creation, 466, 467
Fiji
political background, 164 G
Fijians unable to attend Avondale, 165 Galilei, Galileo, 518
during interim, 240, 241 Gandhi, Mohandas K., 265
Finland, 109, 110 Garza, Raimundo, 296
v.,
Fi nster, L. 168 Gates, E. H., 165, 166, 185
Fireside Correspondence School (see Home Geoscience Research Institute, 466
542
INDEX
General Conference control of ministerial education, 343,

adopted Bell's school, 19 344,347,348,354,502
action to establish Battle Creek College, recommended graduate school of theology,
25,30 345
EGW reprimands college at 1881 session, 32 gave way to world divisions in
Minneapolis, 1888,41 management of education, 351
voted to move Battle Creek College, 47, 49 required master's degrees for ministers,
relationship to Battle Creek College, 49, 50 354
sessions of, sites for Bible institutes, 54 committees to investigate graduate
role in establishing Oakwood College, 60 education, 355
studied relationship with self-supporting voted to establish new university in
movement, 68 Michigan, 356
became parent organization of Lorna approved graduate education at CME, 362
Linda, 76 efforts to control graduate education,
discouraged Movement of 1897, 70, 89 361-364
promoted education in world fields, 106 approved graduate education at Philippine
dealt with debate following 1888 session, Union College, 381
128 financial assistance to schools in socialist
donated money to Avondale, 130 countries, 438, 457
committee session, Switzerland, 1907, upheld paramount role of divine
149 revelation applied to knowledge, 462
controlled Foreign Missionary Sem i nary, approved research to oppose evolution,
150,151 465
halted work on school, Riversdale, Jamaica, position statement on creation, 465
156 created Geoscience Research Institute,
controlling influence over education, 200, 466
201,494,495 established Faith and Science Conferences,
reorganization in 1901,202,208,209 466
approved education reform, 1901, 1903, adopted "An Affirmation of Creation,"
1905 sessions, 202, 204-206, 208, 210 467
withdrew direct supervisory role over position statement on academic freedom,
schools, 204 470
unions the standard administrative unit, 208 rejected government aid, 471, 481
adopted subsidy plan for education, 208 revised policy on government aid to
recommended reduction in colleges, 1913, schools, 474
220 policy making ministerial education a
workers for Oceania to come from responsibility of GC and divisions, 503
Australasia, 240 policy challenged by Southern
financially assisted Philippine Union College, 503
Junior College, 257 created International Board of Ministerial
approved accreditation, 304, 316 and Theological Education, 504
prohibited accreditation, 306, 307, 316 sought redress of issue of shared control
created Board of Regents, 310 of post-secondary schools, 509
approved accreditation for professional Geraty, T. S., 254
courses, 310 German Democratic Republic, 433, 435,
established commissions to study colleges 436
and accred itation, 311, 313 German East Africa
accreditation as an "emergency," 312, 321 field for Friedensau alumni, 114
recognized legitimacy of critical care served by Newbold College, 122
nursing, 336 Tanganyika, 242
standardized nursing education, 336 German enclaves in South America, 106,
recommended graduate nurse programs, 339 133, 134, 138, 139, 140, 141
543
German Society for the Promulgation of withdrawal from aid program in Africa,
Health-reform, 113 484,485
German Union, 115 in Africa after colonialism, 485, 486
Germany, 106, 233 softening views ofSDAs, 486, 487
International Tract Society, Hamburg, III government regulation not dependent on,
closure of German schools, 232 487,488
education following World War II, 403 graded instruction, 81, 83, 97
Gil, Camilo, 137 graduate education, 341-348
Gilson, William, 239 EGW interpreted to support graduate
Goldmark Report, 337, 340 education, 55, 344, 367
Gorle, Ruth, 244 proposed at Battle Creek, 221, 342
Gorski, Nevil, 424 perceived dangerous, 308, 328
Gospel Primer, 92, 94 growing tendency of teachers to enroll,
government aid to private education (see 309,355
grants-in-aid) part of debate about system and accredita-
separation of church and state, 470, 471, tion, 342
473,474 at Emmanuel Missionary College, 344
traditionally opposed by SDAs, 471 graduate degree standard for ministers,
Ellen White supported gift of land, 348,354
Solusi,190 SDA needs not completely fulfilled by
common in US by 1960s, 471 Seminary, 348
aid and identity ofSDA schools, 190, forceful impact on SDA education, 353
472,478,481,488 responsibility of colleges, 354
traditional SDA position challenged by tendency to favor professional degrees, 358
Charles B. Hirsch, 472, 473 on West Coast of US, 356, 360, 363
dependence on and involvement of SDA consortium in West headed by CME, 364
schools, 473, 474 spread of in US schools, 369
conference at Clackamas, Oregon, 474, 475 limited fields of study in SDA schools, 370
biblical or legal issue, 473, 475, 478, 484, graduate degrees in education benefited
485 SDA schools, 370, 371
Columbia Union College v. Clarke, 475- culmination of accreditation controversy,
477 372
pervasively sectarian vs. equal treatment spread to world fields, 372
legal tests, 475-477 first outside US at Philippine Union
school voucher issue, 478 College, 381
common in Australia after World War II, Sahmyook University, 387, 388, 390
478 opportunity for students from India, 393
Allorney General (Viet.); ex reI. Black v. Spicer through affiliations, 396
the Commonwealth, 479, 480 (DOGS at Sal eve Adventist University, 402, 403
case) Open University Validation Services, 407
involvement and dependence of University of Eastern Africa, 413
SDA schools in Australia, 480, 481 Montemorelos University, 422
equivalency test in Australia, 480, 481 Brazil Adventist University, 423
Solusi case became standard SDA River Plate Adventist University, 425
position, 481 Latin American Theological Seminary,
common in many countries, 481, 482, 487 426
rejected in India and Sri Lanka, 450, 482 Friedensau University, 437
caused troubles in Trinidad, 482 Romanian Adventist Theological Institute,
Southern African Division, 483-486 444
Beecher Report, 483 contributed to rivalry among US schools,
involvement ofSDA schools in Africa, 497
483,484,486 at SDA schools in North America, 369, 504
544
INDEX
graduate school president of Andrews University, 358

proposed, 1931,312,344 views on SDA university, 368, 369
proposed, 1956, 355, 356 Handbook o/Seventh-day Adventist
affiliation with Washington Missionary Ministerial and Theological Education,
College, 356 506
approved for College of Medical Evange- Hansen, Louis A., 62, 64, 337
lists, 362 Harbor Springs Convention, 41
graduate school did not satisfy accreditation Harder, F. E. J., 499
needs of SDA post-secondary schools, first executive director of Board of
370 Higher Education, 499
Graf, H. F., 140 Haskell, S. N., 85, 106, 118, 128, 130
grants-in-aid (see government aid), 482 Haynes, Carlyle 8., 278
Meiktila Technical School, 189-191,481 Haysmer, A. J., 155, 156
Solusi, 245, 246 Healdsburg College (see Pacific Union
Lakpahana, 450 College)
Australian grants acts, 478-481 health education
Trinidad,482 a fundamental ofSDA education, 20, 21
Graybill, Ron, 63 in early SDA schools, 91,93,94
Graysville, Tennessee, 66 at Friedensau, 112
Great Disappointment, 16,34 facilitated in India by special arrange-
Griggs, Frederick, 126, 127, 133, 145, 162, ments, 394
183,185, 186, 190, 194,206,207,209,218, Hegstad, Roland, 474
255,302,326,351,492,518 Helderberg College
founder of correspondence school, 76, 77 origin at Claremont, 125-128,126
teacher-preparation course, Battle Creek, Peter Wessels' financial support, 125
86 external examinations, 125, 126,243,244
University of Buffalo, 86, 90 economic impact of Anglo-Boer War, 127
conflict with Sutherland, 89, 90 move to Spion Kop, Natal, 127, 128
advocated textbook writing, 97 move from Spion Kop to Somerset West,
leading voice in SDA education, 207 243
first full-time secretary of education, 208 unrecognized academic program, 243
used conventions to generate change, 213- Hennig, Paul, 143, 144
215 high school (see secondary education)
advocated professionalism and organization, Hilde, Reuben, 510, 511
303,304 Hilgert, Earle, 462
promoted principle of accreditation, 304 Hirsch, Charles B., 472, 478
supported graduate education, 342, 343 challenged traditional view of govern-
Griggs University (see Home Study ment aid to private education, 472, 473,
International ), 482
Guevara, Che, 452, 453 Hispanic SDAs in North American
Gurubatham, Joseph, 492 Division, 417, 418
Ho, P. T., 254
H Hodgen, Maurice, 408
Hadfeld, B. E., 132 Home Study International
Haitian Adventist University origins, 76, 77
origins at Cap-Hatien and Port-au-Prince, correspondence school in China, 255
294,294 branch at River Plate College, 424
Hale, Katherine 8., 97 branch offices in Singapore, Philippines,
Haloviak, Bert, 345 Australia, India, England, 492
Hamilton, L. Mark, 107, III divided into three divisions, 492
Hamilton, R. S. J., 286, 288 entered home school market with
Hammill, Richard L., 358, 371, 410, 435 distance education, 492
545
Griggs University, 506 India

offered accredited degrees, 492 early target for SDA missions, 106
collaboration with Columbia Union College colonial background, 191, 192
external degree program, 492 beginning of SDA presence, Calcutta, 192
"homeland," 107, 122, 123 fragmented nature of SDA education, 194
Hong Kong Adventist College rudimentary SDA system in South India,
beginnings as Bethel Girls' School, 196
179 impact of national movement on SDA
as South China Training Institute, 253 education, 390-394
move to Hong Kong, 254 SDA schools essential to evangelism, 392
merger with China Training Institute, arrangements with medical colleges, 394
253,254 debate about purpose of SDA schools,
became sole post-secondary school in 394,395
China, 447 growth of post-secondary education, 395
Hook, Milton, 128, 129 Indian Christian Training School, Lucknow,
Hoopes, L. A., 202, 206 195,196
Horn, Siegfried, 435 indigenous workers, reliance on before 1945
Howell, John, 159, 160, 162,281 in Lake Titicaca region, 160-162
Howell, W. E., 139, 145, 162,237,246,307, Solusi, 175, 176
324-332,344,351 India, 193, 195
president of College of Evangelists, 75 schools in South Pacific, 241, 242, 247
principal of correspondence school, 76, Africa, 244, 247
77 South China Training Institute, 254
leading opponent of accreditation, 306- Philippine Union College, 254
310 Japan Missionary College, 261
feared loss of SDA identity by accred ita- Chosen Union Training School, 261
tion, 307-309, 311 important role during World War II, 263
change in views of accreditation, 310, Spicer College, 266, 267
315,328,344 secondary schools, Southern Asia, 268
promoter of organization and system, Korea, 262
324-325 Brazil College, 276
held educational meetings around world, South America, 280, 281
326,327 Inter-America, 284
supported GC control of SDA post- Industrial Revolution, 80, 81
secondary schools, 329, 330 Institute for Christian Teaching, 468, 469,
SDA graduate school to satisfy accredita- 512
tion needs, 369 Inter-American Division
Hughes, C. B., 130, 154-156 formed,157
Hutchinson Theological Seminary, 58, 58, rapid increase of members and institutions
59,62 caused need for education, 417
post-secondary education unrecognized,
418
Iceland, 110 Inter-American Theological Seminary
immigrant SDAs in US, 57 approved by Association of Theological
indebtedness of schools Schools in the United States and
widespread among schools in US and Canada, 427
world, 215, 216 resembled South American seminary, 427
Christ's Object Lessons, 216 interim years, 223
tuition not adequate to operate schools, the era of the training school, 223, 299
217,218 intermediate school, 227, 228
subsidy plans ineffective, 332 International Board of Education, 507
increased during Great Depression, 332 regulated SDA higher education outside
546
INDEX
North America, 507 Education. lournal of True Education),

International Board of Ministerial and 355,433,518
Theological Education, 504-506
resisted by North American schools, 504- K
507 Kalbermatter, Pedro, 163
International Conference on the Philosophy Kamagambo Training School, 486
of Seventh-day Adventist Education, 511, Kandana Seventh-day Adventist High
512 School, 452
International Medical Missionary Society, 74 Kasturba Medical College, 394
Irwin, C. w., 311, 313 Kei Hoon Shin, 389
head of commission to study SDA colleges Kellogg, J. H., 96, 203, 207
and accreditation, 311, 312 joined Battle Creek College faculty, 26
conducted educational meetings in world experimented with health education, 28
fields, 326, 327 at Harbor Springs Convention, 41
Irwin, George, 60, 167, 168,311 health education at Battle Creek College,
Italian Junior College, 231 45
bought Battle Creek College, 47
J participant in Bible institutes, 54
Jackson, Michigan, early school, 18 promoted health evangelism, 69
Jacobs, Solon, 60, 61 advanced education of physicians, 69, 70,
Jamaica, 404 72-74
most prosperous SDA field in West Indies, gained legal control of school of medicine,
153 75
similarities to American South, 157 author of Physiology and Hygiene, 93,94
James, J. S., 195 wished to design education around health,
Japan, 249, 250, 253-255, 258-263, 270 203
public education by imperial government, chair, Educational Department, 204, 205
259 Kelly-Little, Mary, 91
imperial policies and SDA education, 260, Kenya, 412
261 government encouraged SDA education,
Japan Missionary College 412
founded, 259, 260 controls of education, 412, 413
under indigenous presidents, 261 nation building and education, 413, 414
Jefferson, Thomas, 470 Kern, M. E., first Seminary president, 345,
Jensen, Kathryn L., 336-340 351
promoted nursing schools as part of SDA kindergarten movement, 99
education, 336 Kinney, C. M., 60
introduced post-secondary credit for Kingsway College (Oshawa), 59,227
nursing classes, 338, 339 Knight, Anna, 516
criteria for SDA accreditation of nursing Knight, George, 511, 513
schools, 339 knowledge
Jenson, George R., 266 discoverable vs. revealed, 460-463
John, Walton c., 134, 139 relationship to academic freedom, 461
Johnson, Duane, 391 primacy of revealed knowledge, 467
Jones, A. T. impact of "An Affirmation of Creation,"
at Harbor Springs Convention, 41 468
participated in educational reform, 45, 46 Institute for Christian Teaching, 468, 469
ministerial education, 56 reconciliation of faith and learning, 468
president of Educational Society, 203 Knox, W. T., 332
Jones, Dan, 56 Korea, historical background, 186
Jones, G. F., 132, 185 Kress, Loretta, 335
lournal of Adventist Education (Christian Ku Klux Klan, 308
547
Kulakov, Mikhail M., led education Brazil College, 275

program, USSR, 445 Lima Industrial Institute, 279, 280
Kulakov, Mikhail P., 444 West Indies Training College, 285-287
Kung, H. H., 252 Caribbean Training College, 288
Kuomintang,250-253 Antillian College, 293
Agricultural and Industrial School, Mexico,
L 296
La Plateria financial value of challenged, 332, 333
site of first school and clinic in Peru, 159 role in modern SDA schools, 513
an educational center, 159-162 Lacey, H. c., 120
attracted national attention, 160, 161 Lake Titicaca, 158-164
education spread to Ecuador, Bolivia, 164 schools became evangelizing tool, 162
La Sierra University, 163,370 schools spread to Quechua tribe, 162
dissolved union with Lorna Linda, 365 climate unhealthful for missionaries, 162,
La Sierra College 163
senior college status, 227 medical care and education closely linked,
graduate degrees in education, 364 163
merger with Lorna Linda University, 365 Lakpahana Adventist College and Seminary,
labor and study program, 51 448-452
basic theme in "Proper Education," 20, 21 move from Kottawa to Kandy, 449
agricultural program neglected at Battle struggles with political conditions, 449, 450
Creek College, 25-27, 29 post-secondary courses, 450
promoted by E. A. Sutherland, 45 mission school accomplishments, 451
theme in EGW writings about education, impact on Adventism, 451, 452
47 Landeen, William, 313
influential at Oakwood, 60-62 Lane, S. H., 216
central to self-supporting movement, 66 Latin American Theological Seminary
strong at Friedensau, 113 manages theological education in South
weak at Claremont Union College, 126, 127 American schools, 425
agricultural program at Avondale, 130 goal to professionalize SDA ministry for
schools in Anglo colonies and Latin evangelism, 426
America, 145 supreme example of church control of
agricultural studies outside SDA schools, theological education, 426
145 centralizing and standardizing influence,
West Indies Training School, 156, 157 426,427
Philippine Academy, 168 Latin Union (Europe), 115-118
at Solusi, 174, 176 schools in Geneva and Paris, 116
Chosen Training School, 187 French-speaking population favored, 117
Meiktila Technical School, 188, 189 Latvia
impacted by organizational changes, 210, Advent Missionary Seminary, 234
211 Lee, K. 0., 187
agricultural programs varied, 211-213 Lee, Sung Eui, 262
industrial work vs. agricultural, 212 Leguia, Augusto B., 277-279
provided income for schools, 218 Lewis, C. c., 77
agriculture and industries at academies, Lillie, C. P., 183
227 Lindsay, Harmon, 60
at Solusi during interim, 244 Lindsay, Kate, 71
at China Missionary Junior College, 251, Lipke John, 140, 143
252 Littlejohn, W. 1., 36-38
protected China's schools, 252 Livingstone, David, 175
in Japan, 260 Lloyd, Trevor, 238
attracted official attention in India, 266 Loasby, R. E., 482
548
INDEX
Lorna Linda University, 364-366, 370, 380 Lowery, G. G., 195, 196,266
a General Conference institution, 75, 76, 373 Lowery, R. S., 391-394
purchase of original property, 75 Lundquist, H. B., 279, 280
merger with La Sierra College, 365 Lupke, Otto, 112-114
tension between health sciences and
science education, 365, 366 M
heart transplant program, 366 Madison College, 317
proton treatment for cancer, 366 as Nashville Agricultural and Normal
research in nutrition and health, 366 Institute, 65, 66, 67
outreach to developing countries-India, helped to resolve a national dilemma, 67
China, 366 defaulted to denomination, 69
best typified research university among senior college status, 227
SDA schools, 369 first to offer bachelor's degrees to nurses,
working arrangement with Asia Theological 1919,338
Seminary, 382 Magan, P. T., 89, 106, 309
arrangement with Kasturba Medical at Harbor Springs Convention, 41
College, 394 assisted in Sutherland's reforms, 46
vital role in advancing medicine and role in moving Battle Creek College, 46,49
health education, 401, 402 assisted in self-supporting movement, 65
assisted school of medicine, Montemorelos, participant in Movement of 1897, 86
421 secretary, Educational Department, 204,
affiliations with dental and medical schools 205
outside US, 429 Committee on Reliefofthe Schools, 216
government money, 487 role in accreditation debate, 309, 319
theological education, 506 Malamulo Mission, 177,247
College of Medical Evangelists, 312, 360- Malinki, James, 177
364 Manalaysay, Reuben G., 259
formed, 75, 76 Mann, Horace, 22, 47, 48, 136
accreditation struggle, 305, 309 compulsory attendance law, 81
accreditation encouraged graduate Maranatha Volunteers International, 455
education, 343 Marienhohe Seminary, 232, 232
received most of help in GC debt relief site of ministerial education after World
plan, 218 War 11, 403
charter authorized academic and transferred to Friedensau, 403
professional degrees, 360 Marsden, George M., 469, 470
separate schools added, 361 Marshall, J. S., 137,273,293
tendency toward a health sciences Marshall, Marian, 273
center, 361 Martin, H. R., 133
School of Dentistry added, 361, 363 Matabeleland, 173, 174
graduate education began, 361,362 Matteson, J. G., 57, \06, \08
doctoral programs authorized, 362 Mao Tse-tung, 250
science education, 362 McElhaney, J. L., 317
granted university status, 364 McGuffey, William H., 22
Lorna Linda Sanitarium, 75 McGuffey's Reader, 94
merged with medical school, 361 McKibbin, Alma, 97, 238
Longburn College, 237 beginning of career, 88,92,94
origin of, 133 authored first Bible textbooks, 95
benefited from government aid, 480 four-volume series, Bible Lessons, 97
Longway, E. L., 263 honored at Pacific Union College, \02
Loughborough, J. N., 118 books translated into Spanish, 283
Loveless, William, 477 McLearn, Alexander, 31-34
Lowery, Bertha, 195 Mead, F. L., 175
549
Medical Department (General Conference), Philippine Union College, 381

336,337,339,341 recognized by Korean government, 386, 387
Medical Missionary and Benevolent Spicer Memorial College, 396
Association, 73, 74 Australasian Missionary College, 397
Meiktila Industrial School, 187-191,212 Seminaire Adventiste du Saleve, 402, 403
a Burmese experiment in vocational Germany after World War II, 403
education, 188 Newbold College, 404, 406
as a training school, 190 Scandinavia and Netherlands, 404-406
grants-in-aid issue, 189-191,481 Solusi,411
Melbourne, Australia, Bible school, 129 University of Eastern Africa, 413
Meleen, E. M., 195, 264 half ofSDA students in Africa enrolled, 415
Meng, C. I., 254 Brazil Adventist University, 423
Mexico Latin American Theological Seminary,
background of political conditions, 295 425-427
Middle East College, 380, 412 Board ofThcological Education, 426, 506
Miller, Harry, 250, 252, 253, 255 Inter-American Theological Seminary, 427
ministerial education, 53-57, 78 retained status of primacy in SDA schools,
fell short at Battle Creek College, 30 428
impact of Harbor Springs Convention, 41, Friedensau,437
42 Polish Spiritual Seminary, 437, 438
driving force in design of schools, 53 Yugoslavia during socialist era, 440, 441,
Bible institutes for ministers, 54, 55 443
Ministers' Bible School, 55-57 Romania, 443, 444
Latin Union, 116 Zaokski Theological Seminary, 445-447
Stanborough Park, 121 China and Hong Kong Adventist College,
initially weak at River Plate College, 136, 447
273 Lakpahana Adventist College and Seminary,
adapted to training schools, 146 450
South India Training School, 196 Cuba Adventist Seminary, 453-456
Helderberg College, 243 relationship to government aid, 476, 477
Philippine Union College, 259 baccalaureate programs to feed Seminary,
difficulties in Korea during interim, 261, 502,503
262 GC and its divisions to control, 503
Brazil College, 275, 276 Southern Adventist University, 503, 504
unproductive in Peru in early years, 280 La Sierra University, 504
Adventist Industrial College, Chile, 282, International Board of Ministerial and
283 Theological Education, 504
Central America, 291 controversy over endorsement plan, 505,
Mexico, 296 506
declined in US, 314 at General Conference institutions, 506
connection to graduate education, 343 part of systematization of SDA education,
was to be preeminent program at colleges, 506,507
343,344 Ministerial Training Advisory Committee,
poorest among SDA professions, 343 354
to be controlled by General Conference, missionary (see student missionary)
347,348 movement of to American South, 63-65
graduate degree to be standard, 348 meaning of the term in SDA world, 104,
central to upgrading training schools to 105,517
degree-granting schools, 375, 429 movement, effect of on education, 149, 152
unrecognized degrees from schools outside Urn issionary" in names of colleges, 104
US, 376, 377 SDA concept of, 171, 172
master's degree, religion, approved for productivity of European schools, 229-231
550
INDEX
productivity of Australasian Missionary Neandertal Missionary Seminary, 232

College, 132, 146, 237, 238 Nelson, R. A., 163
Missionary Volunteer Society, 150 Nelson, W. E., 239, 243, 257, 313, 333, 381
Mittleider, Jacob, 445 challenged value of school industries,
modernization, trends during the interim 332,333
years, 324 Netherlands, 404, 405,407
Moi, Daniel Atap, 412, 413, 417 New Zealand, 129, 132, 133,238,239,398,
Montemorelos University, 372,419-422 404
beginnings of, 296 early target for SDA missions, 106
greatest factor in Mexican Adventism, 297 denied degree-granting authority, 396
early agricultural program, 296, 297 Newbold College, 230, 403-407
first to receive government recognition in origins in Greater London, 119
Inter-America, 419 did not follow traditional SDA mold, 119-
became division institution, 420 121
Ellen G. White Research Center, 421 international character of, 120-122,404,
second SDA school of medicine, 421 407
graduate education, 421 prepared students for external examina-
assistance from Lorna Linda University, 421 tions, 121
mentored Cuba Adventist Seminary, 454- decision to establish senior college, 1930,
456 231
Monterey Bay Academy, 471 connections with SDA school in France, 403
Montgomery, Oliver, 144, 160, 163 became Northern European Division
Mookerjee, L. G., 266 college, 403
Moore, Raymond, 509, 510 affiliation with Washington Missionary
Morning Star, 65 College, 404
Morrill Act, 23 unrecognized degrees and external
Morrison, H. A., 269, 317, 321, 328, 333 examinations, 405
Morton, Eliza H., 96 Andrews University affiliation and exten-
authored SDA geography textbooks, 94 sion, 406
Mount Klabat College, 379 first SDA Research Centre outside US, 406
Mount Vernon College, 220, 221 Open University Validation Services,
Mountain View College, 381 406,407
Movement of 1897, 85-90 first school outside US to receive SDA
Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania, accreditation, 497
Wisconsin, 87 Noland, Mrs. H. B., 95
need for SDA textbooks and curriculum, 91 Noll, Mark A., 371, 517
effect of, 100-102 North America
Mugabe, Robert, 411 environment shaped SDA education, 84
Murray, Milton, transformed fund raising, Protestant, democratic and pragmatic
493,494 education, 84
Murray, Mrs. W. E., 144 SDA education a paradigm for the world,
Myths of Adventism, 511 104
colleges resisted endorsement plan for
N religion teachers, 504-506
Nashville Agricultural and Normal Institute new Department of Education, 510, 511
(see Madison College) Ministry of Teaching credential, 510
National Board, 305 convention, Dallas, Texas, 511
National Accreditation Federation (Philippines), Northern Caribbean University, 289
384 beginnings of, 154
National Education Association, 83 precursors at Willowdene, Riversdale,
National League for Nursing, 336, 337, 340 154-156
nature study, 91, 92, 95 move to Mandeville, 156
551
served a former slave population, 157 helped to uplift of African Americans, 63

added post-secondary courses, 285 conformed to "Proper Education," 63
financial problems during interim, 286 served West Indies Union, 156
only post-secondary school for English in senior college status, 227
Inter-America, 287 ministerial education, 506
North Central Association, 306, 316, 357, Oberlin College, 23, 27
358,410,507 Olsen, O. A., 60, 106, 128
Northfield, Vermont, early school, 18 Olson, V. Norskov, 405
Norway, 55, 106, 108-110 Open University Validation Services, 406, 407
nursing education, 334-341 an alternative graduate program, 407
Madison College, 66 Oregon School Law, 307, 308, 328
Battle Creek Sanitarium, 71 Osborn, Richard, 475
Lorna Linda, 75 Oshawa Missionary College (see Kingsway
Friedensau, 112, 113 College)
Switzerland, 116 Otsuki. K., 228
Stanborough Park, 123 Our Lillie Friend, 92
River Plate College, 136,424
Washington Foreign Missionary Seminary, P
151 Pacific Press, 216
China, 255 Pacific Union, 76
precursor of training school in Mexico, Pacific Union College 31, 33, 44, 53, 75, 102,
296 314,316
required accredited pre-nursing courses, teacher-preparation course, 88
306 published first Bible textbooks, 95
leading issue in systematization of educa- first to earn SDA accreditation, 313
tion, 334 first to earn regional accreditation, 313
first designed to prepare missionary nurses, introduced graduate nurse courses, 339
334,335 site of Advanced Bible School, 345
debate between missionary and critical consortium of schools for graduate
care nursing, 335, 336, 339, 340 education, 364
decline of sanitarium nursing schools, graduate program, 369
337,340 affiliation with Australasian Missionary
apprehension about affi liations for nurses, College, 397, 398
338,340 Desmond Ford case, 469
graduate nurses, 339, 341 Pallerns of Seventh-day Adventist Education,
joint effort of medical and education 380
departments, 339 Paulsen, Jan, 508
became a college-based program, 340 Pease, Mattie, 87, 92, 95
baccalaureate nursing at Philippine Peck, Sarah, 99,238
Union College, 341 contributions to SDA textbooks, 96-98
first graduate program at CME, 362 authored True Education Series, 97
Korea, 386 called for reform at Colorado Springs,
University of Eastern Africa, 413 327
Bolton Act, 471 Peixoto, Domingos, 276
Nussbaum, Jean, 116 Perez, Braulio, 291
Perry, F. L., 158
o Peru
Oakland, California, 54, 99 colonial background, 157, 158
Oakwood College, 312, 317 beginnings ofSDA presence at Puno, 158
origins, 60, 62 social and constitutional change, 159-164
early press, 61 government controls of SDA education,
productivity of, 62 278,281
552
INDEX
Peruvian Union University North America too small to support

founded, 1919, 179 existing colleges, 312, 314
move to ]\lana, 281 inefficient operations of, 314
Pestalozzi, Johan, 82 all US senior colleges accredited by 1945,
Philanthropic Service for Institutions, 493 317
Philippine Academy (see Adventist Univer- SDA colleges as world institutions, 329,
sity of the Philippines) 330
Philippines financial impact of Great Depression,
historical background, 167 332,333
American education introduced, 167 a major issue in SDA education after
rapid membership growth fed schools, 1945,375
256,257 increase of degree-granting schools, 377
SDA education benefited from US presence, unrecognized degrees, 376, 378
259 US form of became measuring rod for
Phillips, Glenn O. 1.,289 world,380
philosophy ofSDA education (see "Proper similarities encouraged by SDA accredi-
Education"), 518, 519 tation, 380
debate over, 509-518 increase in tertiary schools in India, 395
formal statement of, 511, 512 twenty-seven post-secondary schools in
comparison of modern SDA schools with Asia, 398
"Proper Education," 512-514, 519 summary of in Europe, 407
Pierson, Robert H., 435 Solusi,407-411
P/essy v. Ferguson case, 59 University of Eastern Africa, 412, 413
Pohlman, E. w., 196 successes and deficiencies of in Africa,
Poland 416,417
no legal standing for SDAs before World unrecognized in Latin America and
War II, 437 Caribbean, 418
government controls during socialist era, need for in Latin America caused by
437, 439, 440 membership and institutional growth,
Polish Spiritual Seminary (Michal Belina 417
Czechoswski Spiritual Seminary), 456 government recognition of, Montemorelos
Polish Union School, 234 University, 419
resumed during socialist era, 437 ten government-recognized schools in
cooperated with state universities, 438 Inter-A merica, 422
curricular breadth and expansion, 439 Brazil Adventist University, 423
Polish Christian Theological Academy, 439 River Plate Adventist University, 424, 425
Pomata Mission, Lake Titicaca, 161 nearly 100 SDA tertiary schools, 428, 429
Potomac University, 356, 357, 358, 360 breadth of, 429
post-secondary education Friedensau University, 437
defined at 1905 GC session, 210, 211 Romanian Adventist Theological
broadened to vocational, technical courses Institute, 444
during interim, 226, 227 Lakpahana Adventist College and
increase in SDA institutions, 227 Seminary, 450
beginning of in Northern Europe, 231 challenges of modernization, 491, 492
existed only in China and England, 1920, Griggs University, 492
228 systematized by accreditation, 497
Helderberg, 243 decline of system in North America, 497-
South India Training School, 264-266 501
most developed in South America, 1945, voluntary systematization, 501,502
289 spread of related to ministerial educa tion,
GC commissions to study colleges and 506,507
accreditation, 311-314, 320 regulated outside North America by
553
International Board of Education, 507, SDA university, 367, 369

508 Review and Herald Publishing Association,
not to confuse mission with social change 24,51,93, 106,216
in developing world, 508 Rhodes, Cecil, 173,245,246
growing intellectuality, 517 used missionaries to civilize Africa, 173,
Prescott, Sarah (Sadie), 40, 41 174, 178,300,416,508
Prescott, W. w., 38, 106, 128, 138, 143,202, righteousness by faith
206,207,209,214 conflict at Ministers' Bible School, 56
presidency of Battle Creek College, 38-43 debate after 1888 GC session, 128
promoted elementary education, 46 early case of academic freedom, 463
organized ministerial education, 54-56 Rittenhouse, Floyd 0., 356,357
founded SDA education in England, 119 River Plate Adventist University, 133-138, 135
edited Christian Education and Special founded, 134
Testimonies on Education, 132 originally served Russo-Germans, 134
first sccretary of education, 201,203 upgraded by John, Stevens, Marshall, 134-
centrality of biblical studies, main 137
concern, 203 leading SDA school in South America, 272
chair, Educational Department, 205 became junior college, 273
early case of academic freedom, 463 debate about location, 273, 274
Price, George McReady, 464, 465 government recognition of individual
primary education (see elementary education) programs, 424
progressive education, 82 Board of Regents authorization as senior
progressive understanding of Bible, 464 college, 424
"Proper Education," 44, 45, 63, 84, 210, 219, university status achieved, 424
512 graduate courses, 425
landmark statement in SDA education, 21 third SDA school of medicine, 425
appeared in Health Reformer and Review, Roberts, G. A., 155, 156
19,20 Robinson, A. T., 173
summary of, 20, 21, 28, 29 Rodriguez, Vicente, 453
called for rural location of school, 23 Romania, 235, 443, 444
Battle Creek College compared to, 26, 27, Romanian Adventist Theological Institute
31,32,34 Institutul Biblic, 233
best fulfilled at Avondale, 128, 129, 131 skeletal program after World War 11, 443
a unique SDA curriculum, 304 resumed after 1989,444
compared to SDA education of twenty- Andrews University extension graduate
first century, 512-515, 519 program, 444
Protestant Central Agency for Development Roth, A. G., 295
Aid, 421 Roth, Hazel, 295
Put Put Training School, 241 Roth, Herminie, 294
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 82
Q Ruble, Wells A., 76
Quimby, Paul, 252, 253, 255 Rudge, E. B., 210, 237, 238, 241
Rudy, H. L., 231, 234
R Russell, Riley, 186
race relations in US, 59, 63 Russia (see Union of Soviet Socialist
Ragoso, Kata, 132,382 Republics), 110, 114,233
Rasi, Humberto, 468, 469,476 membership explosion after 1989,447
Reavis, D. w., 28
Rebok, Denton. E., 183, 184,251,251,255 S
president of Sem inary, 347, 348, 354 Sahmyook University, 387, 416
Reid, F. G., 485 origin at Soonan, 186
Reynolds, Keld, 1., purpose and nature of as Chosen Union Training School, 261, 262
554
INDEX
impact of Japanese occupation, 261,262 to offer job preparation courses, 83, 84

reestablished as Korean Union Training defined,210,211,220
School,386 academy defined, 210, 211
government recognition, 386, 388 US high school defined in 1920s, 226
senior college status (Korean Union became college-preparation course, 226
College),386 vocational and technical courses after
curricular development for urban living, 1920,226,227
386,387,389 academies no longer training schools,
university status, 1992,387 226
graduate education, 387, 390 early difficulties in Australia, 239, 240
designed to meet national needs, 388, 389 growth in Philippines, 258
a productive evangelistic tool, 389, 390 in India during interim, 268
Sal eve Adventist University, 118 beginnings of in South America, 283
origins at la Ligniere, 116 beginnings of in Inter-America, 297
established at Collonges-sous-Saleve, 117 accreditation required for teacher-
center for French-speaking SDA education, preparation, 306
118, 122 financial impact of Great Depression, 333
during interim, 224, 230 in Korea, 390
development of degree programs, 402, 403 critical to evangelism in India, 392, 393,
center for Southern European Division, 402 395
affiliation with University of Strasbourg, teacher-preparation in Australia, 397, 398
402 European vs. American, 405
graduate courses, 402, 403 decline of in US, 514, 515
connections with Andrews University, secretary of education (see director of
Newbold College, University of Wales, 403 education)
Salisbury, H. R., 9-11,89, 149, 150, 151, 152, self-supporting movement, 65-69
192, 193,519 purpose of, 65-68
founded forerunner of Newbold College, 10, conflict with denominational organization,
119 67-69
president, Foreign Missionary Seminary, 10, Selmon, A. c., 182
150 Seoul Adventist Hospital, 390
Salisbury Park, 9 Seventh-day Adventist Theological
Sanctuary Review Committee, 469 Seminary, 346, 381, 382
Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 136 origins of, 344,345
Scandal oJthe Evangelical Mind, The, 371 Advanced Bible School, 345
Scandinavia (see individual countries), 404, established in Washington, D.C., 345
405,407 initiated graduate degrees, 345
schools during interim, 231 courses linked to college ministerial
school districts, rise of, 82 curricula, 346
Schubert, G. w., 232 balanced emphasis on teaching, evange-
science education lism, 345-347
creation vs. evolution, 464-468 international impact of, 347
scientific method not final arbiter of truth, legitimized SDA graduate education, 348
467 fell short of broad goals for graduate
Scopes, John T., trial of, 465 education, 348, 353
Scriven, Charles, 477 emphasized in-service training in first
Second Great Awakening and religious years, 353, 354, 376,377
education, 23 as part of Andrews University, 357-360
secondary education accreditation from theological association,
undefined in nineteenth century, 81 358
academies in Northeast US, 81 doctoral studies programs introduced,
as preparation for college, 83 359
555
preferred location of graduate studies in difficulties from local political unrest, 409,
religion, 363 410
reciprocity with schools outside US, 376, affiliation with Andrews University, 410
377 university charter, 411
extension courses in Europe, 404, 405 contributed to nation building, 411
at Newbold College, 406 role in government aid controversy, 471
the only approved graduate program in South Africa
North America, 504 early target for SDA mission, 106
endorsement plan for ministers, 506 South America
Shanghai Missionary College (China plans for coordinated education, 326
Missionary Junior College, China increases in membership and institutions
Training Institute) caused need for education, 417
beginnings of, 183, 184 South Pacific
move to Nanking, 250, 252 spread of SDA education during interim,
saved by agricultural program, 252 240-242
destroyed during Japanese invasion, 253 schools and clinics linked, 240
merged with South China Training government controls of education, 241
Institue, 253, 254 Southeast Asia Union College
Shaw, J. L., 156 beginnings in Singapore, 185
Showdown: Can SDA Education Pass the Malayasian Union Seminary, 262, 263
Test?,510 served a cosmopolitan constituency, 262
Sidney Sanitarium, 240 closed during World War II, 263
Siegfried H. Horn Museum, 360 Southern Adventist University
Simon, J. F., 229 origins at Graysville, Tennessee, 66
Singapore, 184, 185 Southern Missionary College, 68
Skodsborg, 109, 110 senior college status, 227
graduate nurse program, 342 challenged GC policy on ministerial
Smith, Uriah, 24, 33, 128 education, 503
participant in Bible institute, 54, 56 Southwestern Adventist University, senior
early case of academic freedom, 463 college status, 227
Smith, W. R., 186 Southern California Conference, 75, 76
Smith-Hughes Act, 83 South Lancaster Academy (see Atlantic
social legislation, 82 Union College)
social sciences, 82 Spalding, A. w., 27, 32, 89, 91, 92
socialism, radical Sparrow, Fred, 174
movement after World War 11,432,433 Spicer Memorial College
impact on SDA education, 433, 456, 457 origin as South India Training School, 195
scientific atheism, 433, 457 move to Bangalore, 195
Society of Biblical Literature, 470 emerged as India's leading training school,
Solomon Islands, 132,241 196,264,265
Solusi University, 407-411, 408 concentrated on post-secondary courses,
prime example ofSDA mission in 266,267
primitive land, 176, 177 official praise for agricultural program, 266
origins and early years, 172-178, 173 division institution, 266
central educational center, 175 move to Poona, 267
expansion to other sites, 175-177 degree-granting college status, 267, 377
showcase among African SDA schools, unrecognized degrees damaged entire SDA
244 program in India, 390, 391, 392
depended on indigenous teachers, 244 impact of Indian nationalism, 391, 392
curriculum during interim, 244, 245 arrangement with University of Poona, 393
first case of post-secondary SDA affiliation with Andrews University, 394
education for Africans, 407, 408 upgrading offaculty and offerings, 396
556
INDEX
doctor of ministry degree, 396 world systematization under W. E.

Spicer, W. A., 118, \36, 141,209,266,392 Howell, 325-331
Spies, F. w., 140, 142 world system cultivated by Board of
Spies, Izadora, 142, 144 Regents, 329
Sri Lanka (see Lakpahana Adventist College system affecting operation of tertiary
and Seminary) schools, 331
political background, 448, 449, 450 serious challenges to system after 1945,
most benign case of socialist influence on 351
SDA education, 448 SDA system of shared control, 494, 495
SDA education as a business, 452 unions gained upper hand in shared
St. Helena, California, 99 control of colleges, 496, 501
Stahl, Ana, 158, 159, 163 systematization cultivated by accreditation,
Stahl Center for World Service, 163 496
Stahl, F. A., 158-164 Board of Higher Education to systematize
Stanborough Park Missionary College (see higher education in North America,
Newbold College) 498,499
Staples, Russell, 408, 408, 409 territoriality discarded in North America,
Steen, Thomas, 144,275,313 500
Steen, Margaret, 144 college boards become ultimate voice of
Stein, William, 140 authority for North American colleges,
Stevens, H. U., 137 500
Stewart, Ann, 71 voluntary consortium in North America,
Stewart, G. G., \32 501,502
Stilson, Homer 0.,242 issue of shared control redressed, 509
student missionary program, 516, 517
Stump, L. M., 258 T
Sun Vat-sen, 250, 252 Taft, W. H., 167
Sunnyside, 47, 130 Taiwan Adventist College, 447
Sutherland, E. A., 89, 203, 206, 207 task force, student (see student missionary)
reforms at Battle Creek College, 45, 46 Tasmania, 132,238
moved Battle Creek College, 47, 49 Tay, John I., 164
led self-supporting movement, 65-68 teacher-preparation (see education,
led Movement of 1897, 85-87 elementary education, secondary
co-authored Bible Reader, 94 education)
wrote Mental Arithmetic/or the Home Teel, Charles, Jr., 163
and School, 94 Tenney, J. E., 86
urged agricultural education, 203 tertiary education (see post-secondary
secretary, Educational Department, 205 education)
early case of academ ic freedom, 463 Testimonies, 47
Svenson, S. F. \09 textbook production, 93-98
Sweden, 108, 109 Thirteenth Sabbath offering, 138,260,261,
training school at Nyhyttan, \09 276,281,293
Switzerland, 105, 115 Thomas, E. D., 266-268, 267
early SDA schools, 116 Thompson, Ida, 179, 179-182, 184,253
system of education Thorpe, E. E., 132
laid out at 1905 GC session, 207 Thurber, Robert Bruce, 187-191
North American model spread to Asia, experience with grants-in-aid, 189-191,481
214,495 Titicaca Adventist Academy, 277
Australasia, 239 opened as Colegio Adventista del
India, 268 Titicaca, 162
need for produced by growth, 299 viewed as social service by Peruvians,
attributable to Griggs, 302 276
closed by government, 277,278 assumed responsibility for North America,

became a secondary school, 278 209
Titicaca Normal School (see Titicaca owned and operated colleges in US, 209,
Adventist Academy) 213
Tolhurst, H. L, 132 control of colleges not to be autonomy, 495
Tolhurst, Pearl, 132 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 432
Tonga, 132, 166 softening of religious controls, 444
school recognized by government, 241 school for Russians, Manchuria, 444
Town, N. Z., 134, 137 United States Supreme Court, 59, 308, 478
Tieche, L. P., 116-118 university, 353-373
training school, 228 purposes of SDA university, 367-369
in Anglo, Hispanic and Portuguese lands, a milestone in SDA education, 366, 368
134,137 committed to discover knowledge, 368
firmly established institution by 1920, 169 helped to raise intellectual level of SDA
early schools in Africa, 176 schools, 371
China, 182-184 spread to world fields, 372, 373
evolving character of, 197, 198 different meaning of "university" vs.
era of during interim, 223 "college," 372, 379
most important SDA school outside US, University of Buffalo, 46, 86, 90, 206, 463
225 University of Eastern Africa, Baraton, 411-
seventeen in China, 1940,255 414
in Inter-America, 284, 285 rapid development, 412
success measured by impact on evangelism, agricultural and technical education, 412
300 degree-granting authority and charter,
praised when graduates entered church 412,413
work,301 affiliation with Andrews University, 413
decline in productivity of church cooperation with Lorna Linda University,
workers, 301, 302 413
training schools vs. degree-granting graduate courses, 413
schools, 375-377 University of Poona, 392, 393
Tripp, G. B., 174, 175 arrangement with Spicer Memorial College,
Trummer, Max, 137 393
truth, search for United States Constitution, 22, 23, 59
descriptive vs. prescriptive, 460, 461
relationship to academic freedom, 461 V
scientific method not final arbiter of Valentine, Gilbert, 40, 342
truth,467 Valley View University, 414, 415
impact of "An Affirmation of Creation," VandeVere, E. K., 18,30,45,62, 128,367
468 Vicksburg, Mississippi, 60, 64
Institute for Christian Teaching, 468, 469 Vincent Hill School, 269
Tuskegee Institute, 60 Votaw, H. H., 315
Vuilleumier, Jean, 116
U Vyhmeister, Werner, 382
Union College, 44, 49, 50, 53, 57, 58,62,
137,202,206,213,309,342 W
debts of, 215 Waggoner, E. J., 26, 56, 118, 128
accredited by New York Regents, 306 early case of academic freedom, 463
broke impasse over accreditation, 316, 317 Wang, James, 254
first to offer SDA collegiate nursing, 340 Wallings, W. D. family, 19
offered graduate degrees, 342, 343 Walla Walla College, 44, 45, 76, 85, 86, 90,
union conference 202,317
introduced at 1901 GC session, 208 secondary school accredited, 306
558
INDEX
college accred ited, 313 reform principles, 47, 48

graduate program, 363, 369 participant in Bible institutes, 54
consortium of schools for graduate recommended advanced study for
education, 364 ministers, 55
Washington, Booker, T., 60 "Our Duty to the Colored People," 59
Washington Foreign Missionary Seminary, regarded American South as mission field,
150-153,212,220,221 63,64
impact on missions, 151 role in self-supporting education, 65, 66
demise of, 151-153 promoted health evangelism, 69
Washington Missionary College (see urged preparation of physicians, 69, 72,
Columbia Union College) 73,75
Waterloo Industrial School, 177 helped establish Loma Linda, 75
Watson, C. H., 240, 241, 313,315,317 SDA schools products of her philosophy,
Watts, R. S., 485 80
Webster, Noah, 22 urged SDA schools in California cities, 85
Weniger, Charles E., 354 churches to offer schools for six students,
Wessells family, 130 85
Wessells, John, 172, 173 Movement of 1897, 85,89
Wessells, Peter, 125, 172-174 opposed rote learning, 91
West Africa, 177, 178 relationship of schools to home, 98
West Caribbean Training School, 289, 290 on school entry age level, 84, 99, 100
favored site on Panama Canal, 290 encouraged schools in Scandinavia, 108
West China Union Training School, 254 moved to Australia, 128
West Indian Union, 155, 156 role in establishing Avondale College,
West Indies (see individual countries) 128-131
economic background, 153 advised islanders to attend Avondale, 165
colporteurs, first SDA workers, 153 supported gift ofland for Solusi, 190
Western Association of Schools and urged church schools, 201
Colleges, 365 critical of "kingly" power, 203
Western Health Reform Institute, 69, 72, 74 SDA education reformers used her
Westphal, Frank, 106, 133, 134, 138 writings, 203
Westphal, J. w., 106, 135-137, 139 advised change offinancial management
White, Arthur, 106, 131,215 of schools, 216
White, Edson (J. E.), 47 offered Christ's Object Lessons for
school for Blacks in Mississippi, 60, 63 schools, 216
author of Gospel Primer, 94 ministry in Australia encouraged elemen-
White, Ellen, 20 tary education, 238
foundational principles of education, 15 advice to educate for private life, 302
encouraged education in Review, 1854, 18 writings used both to oppose and support
"Proper Education," 20, 21 accreditation, 319
SDA educators to be reformers, 21-24 counsel interpreted to support graduate
derived some ideas from other reformers, education, 55, 344, 367
24,48 White Estate, 359
disagreed with but supported Battle Creek Ellen G. White and Seventh-day
College, 25-27, 33, 50 Adventist Research Centre (Newbold),
reprimanded Battle Creek College, 37 406
reform after McLearn, Battle Creek Ellen G. White Research Centre
College, 37, 38 (University of Eastern Africa), 412
advice about sports, 39, 40 Ellen G. White Research Center
participant in Harbor Springs Convention, (Montemorelos University), 421
41 Ellen G. White Research Center (Brazil
move of Battle Creek College, 47-51 Adventist University), 423
559
White, James, 17 Worster, W. w., 335, 336

urged Adventist education in Review,
1857, 17 Y
neglected ministerial education, 18 Yamamoto, 261
helped to found Battle Creek College, 25 Young, Ethel, 392
role in McLearn episode, 31, 32 Youth Department, 515
death,34 Youth's Instructor, 87
changed views on ministerial education, Yugoslavia
54 during socialist era, 440-443
participant in Bible institutes, 54 relationship with SDA education, 440, 442
promoted language study for missionaries, Yugoslavian Adventist Seminary (Adventi-
105 sticki Seminar Marusevec), 440-443, 441,
president of Educational Society, 20 I 456
White, W. c., 19,47,208,500 Yugoslavian Training School, 235, 235
urged improved professionalism for resumed during socialist era, 440
ministers, 54, 55, 128 curriculum, 440
Whitehead, John, 469 move to Marusevec, 441
Wilcox, E. H., 162 SDA accreditation, 442
Wilcox, F. M., 317 connection with Seminaire Adventist du
Wilcox, M. c., 118 Saleve and Newbold College, 442
Wilbur, Edwin, 182 cooperated with state universities, 442
Wilkinson, B. G., 116 a center for SDA activities, 442
Wilson, N. c., 266 spawned Belgrade Theological Seminary
Wilson, Neal, 445 and Adriatic Union College, 443
Wineland, W. H., 286
Wolcott, Bertis, 87, 92, 93 Z
Wolcott, Maud, 87, 91, 101 Zaokski Theological Seminary, 445
World Report: Adventist Education Around established, 1988,445
the World, 380 agricultural program by Jacob Mittleider,
World War I, 15,54, 114, 115, 121, 143,201, 445
223,229,234,242,249,302,308,343 affiliation with Andrews University, 446
recovery from, 229, 231 challenges of curriculum and faculty
World War II, 68, 132,228,231-235,241, preparation, 446
242,247,250,254,258,259,263,270, Zimbabwe, 409
273,288,402,432,440 controls at Solusi, 410, 411
560

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In

Pacific Press" Publishing Association

Printed in the United States of America by

w. W. Prescott (page 38): Ellen G. White Estate.

The abbreviation, AST, appearing in the end notes, represents the

I have omitted references of sources for most of the historical back-

Chapter I The Head, Heart, and Hand .............................................................. 16

Chapter 15 From Colleges to Universities ............................. ............................ 353

Heads of Seventh-day Adventist Education

Tucked against a knoll on the outskirts of Pune, India lies Salisbury

But stir my heart in passion for the world;

Stir me, 0 stir me, Lord till all my heart

Till thy compelling 'must' drives me to prayer;

This book is about Seventh-day Adventist education. It is also about

a time of fulfillment and challenge, when spectacular growth and

bok Memorial Library at the General Conference, and his assistant,

For many Seventh-day Adventists

later as six installments in The Health

Another cardinal point was balance. "The world is full of one-sided

Reform in American Education

can colleges were religious institutions, many of them an aftereffect of

and legitimizing professional and practical education on a level equally

A New College at Battle Creek

By now unquestionably committed to the idea of a college, James

was nearing completion.

Battle Creek College: an Experiment

of the denomination's first college, Brownsberger clung to what he

The Alexander McLearn Debacle

James White reacted immediately. "We should be pleased to see

sophically, but they worked together because of their commitment to a

ricular reVISIon emphasized denominational service. By November

program. With no exception, Ellen White regarded the centrality of

Prescott's Reforms at Battle Creek College

lia. Prescott soon received a reprimand from her, warning against

Reform in Biblical Studies

from them. With a view of raising academic standards he sent selected

The Board of Visitors pointed out that a long-standing issue in

The Sutherland Era at Battle Creek College

worker-preparation courses some students could find opportunitIes

pIe and depended increasingly on student labor. He viewed the college

Adventist Educational Philosophy and Berrien Springs

Since 1898 Sutherland had urged a change in location but Ellen

regional institution. Seven years before the move to Berrien Springs

three issues of the centrality of the Bible in its curricula, preparation of

From the beginnings of Adventist education above the elementary

professionalism began to emerge roughly coincident with the founding of

several classes in biblical studies. Administratively, the Ministers' Bi-

problem of how to educate a professional ministry continued to plague

Schools for Immigrants

The strongest factor in their decline was the diminishing number of

Origins of Oakwood College

One of the most notorious examples of segregation was education.

By 1899 Oakwood Industrial School was offering two-year diplo-

An Appraisal of Schools for Minorities

Industrial School, Ellen White wrote that "efforts should be made to

The Self-Supporting Movement

ventist presence in many places where traditional evangelistic methods

Conferences took over the management of some self-supporting schools

icine. Medical schools commonly lacked effective instruction in hy-