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Friends United Meeting |
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November 1998
Friends University and the Yearly Meeting
By Margaret and Raymond Nelson
Mid-America Yearly Meeting (formerly Kansas Yearly Meeting) and Friends University have worked together for 100 years. True, the road was not always smooth, and there were ups and downs along the way.
In the mid-eighties of the nineteenth century, Wichita seemed about to become "The Athens of America." The town was buzzing with activity, business was booming, real estate was a hot item, and virtually every religious denomination seemed in pursuit of "culture" in the form of high schools, academies, and colleges. Indeed, plans were under way for nine different colleges and universities in 1885.
Quakers were included in that number. An independent group of Quakers, concerned that yearly meeting youth had no college, launched John Bright University, but the effort failed for lack of funds when nothing more than a foundation had been laid. By 1891 many of these Quakers formed a College Association and tried hard to gain yearly meeting support, with little success. By 1896 the Association recommended as a stopgap measure that the yearly meeting enter into a three year agreement with Penn College in Iowa to be the official university for Kansas young people, and recommended also that two Kansans be appointed to the Penn College Board of Trustees to represent local interest.
"Yet," wrote Juliet Reeve in The Growth of an Idea, "In October, 1898, when yearly meeting convened in Lawrence, Friends University in Wichita had opened its door, in a magnificent building, with a well-known and enthusiastic president, a well qualified faculty, a beginning of endowment, and fifty-three students. It is a miracle." How had the miracle come about?
Most of the attempts to establish higher education in Wichita had failed. One of the most ambitious efforts had been expended by the Christian Church in establishing Garfield University, and it was very successful for a few years, when it too failed in 1893, and the huge building stood vacant.
Then, in 1898, James and Anna Davis bought the building vacated by Garfield University and presented it to Kansas Yearly Meeting. Mr. James Davis stipulated that the school be called Friends University (not "college"), that all faculty members be Quakers, and that the yearly meeting establish a $50,000 endowment for the school. Pledges came in and Quakers in Kansas finally had what had long been sought, a place of higher education for their young people. It was indeed a miracle.
Dr. Edmund Stanley became the first president as of July 1898, and set about starting classes by September--a big order. He hired faculty, planned publicity, prepared a building that had been vacant for five years and was consequently run down, recruited 53 students, and Friends University was born that fall. By 1899 there were 144 students.
Kansas Yearly Meeting supported the university valiantly in a variety of ways. Leaders encouraged students to enroll, monthly meetings and interested individuals gave money, and many shared in the leadership of the school. In 1899 the yearly meeting convened at the university in Wichita instead of at Lawrence, Kansas (where the yearly meeting had been held), and continued to do so in succeeding years.
Friends University and Kansas Yearly Meeting were thus hand in glove from the birth of the school. Dr. Stanley was clerk of the yearly meeting as well as president of the school and served for many years in both positions.
There were tremors from time to time. Dr. Stanley, with the blessing of other weighty Friends, had established Friends University as a "liberal arts institution," and so it sought to be. Individual voices throughout the state, however, thought that the school should be more of a "Bible Seminary" and several faculty members took up the cause. Through 1913, 1914 and 1915, the issue simmered until three faculty members resigned and Dr. Stanley's stated purpose prevailed.
Tensions between so-called liberals and evangelicals led to accusations of biblical and theological infidelities from time to time. Some parents refused to send their young people to that "hot bed of liberalism," and pressures continued to plague the administration. When President W. A. Young resigned in 1946, he published some of the problems he had lived with during his years in leadership. He felt the lack of unity in what the Quakers really expected from the university, but like Dr. Stanley, he had maintained the need for a liberal arts education. Then when President Lowell Roberts also became aware of ongoing tensions during his administration, he said, "Friends University is chartered as a liberal arts college. That charter will not be violated."
Despite such debate and broad diversity of views within the yearly meeting, the two institutions cooperated. The yearly meeting met at the university until 1926 when University Friends Meeting built its meeting house, which was large enough to accommodate the yearly meeting, and assumed hosting the annual event. But in the early 1970s the yearly meeting needed more space so moved back to the university again.
University Friends Monthly Meeting had begun within one month of the founding of the university, and was officially approved by the summer of 1899. Faculty, administrators, staff, and students thus worshipped together on campus until they moved to the new building. The two had a symbiotic relationship. Even then, key leadership positions at the monthly meeting came from personnel at the university, and the yearly meeting maintained its umbrella posture over both. Each of the three was deeply involved in the interests and fortunes of the others.
For many years the yearly meeting provided half the members of the Board of Trustees at Friends University. And the university reported major decisions to the yearly meeting each August. Typically, for example, presidential changes took place during yearly meetings for many years.
President Hal Cope faced a peculiarly disturbing problem relating to the yearly meeting in 1974. He and the trustees had approached the Metropolitan Council of Wichita for counsel in removing a $2,000,000 debt. The Council made twelve recommendations including that the university sever its ties with Kansas Yearly Meeting. The prime reason was a "do-nothing board." Hal listened to the recommendations, prayed earnestly for guidance, and worried about the rightness and wrongness of the proposal. He was a birthright Quaker, and his strong sense of loyalty to both institutions gave him pause. One Friday morning just before a decisive meeting on the issue the following Monday evening, Hal says he was "walking with an open mind" and he received a message very clearly: "Look at the yearly meeting minutes. Look at the yearly meeting minutes." "Of course," he thought.
Coming to Davis Hall he stopped in Stan Brown's office and asked him to check yearly meeting minutes from the beginning of the school to the present for any mention of Friends University. Stan worked in the university Development Office and was chair of the trustees of the yearly meeting. On Monday morning, Stan came to Hal and said he couldn't believe what he had found. In 1931, at sessions of Kansas Yearly Meeting, "They gave up all control of Friends University"! Though nobody remembered the action, duly recorded in the Sedgwick County Courthouse, it solved Hal's problem. The action had presumably been prompted by fiscal concerns in those critical early days of the depression. Even then, Hal approached the board about the debt of the school, and together they made pledges to take care of that debt over the next few years.
The separation led to several changes. No longer would half of the Board of Trustees be Quakers. Hal thought the forty-member Board was too large. So by attrition he reduced the size of the Board to twenty-two, of whom six would be Quakers (two elected each year to the self-regulated Board in its cycle of three-year terms).
Hal Cope nurtured relationships with the yearly meeting. Hal, a member of University Friends Meeting, began "Sunday with Friends." He wrote to all monthly meetings and offered faculty, administrators, and students at Friends University as speakers and musicians on each of two Sundays during the spring. This was not to raise money; it was at university expense to say to each of the monthly meetings visited, "Thank you for seventy-five years of support in students, money, prayer, and interest." Later, President Richard Felix, a Nazarene, continued the Sunday with Friends program, and worked closely with the Mid-America Yearly Meeting Superintendent (who sat on the university Board) to keep in touch with yearly meeting concerns at its annual meeting on campus.
Dr. Biff Green, current president of Friends University, said, "As president of Friends University for the last seven years, I've appreciated our relationship with the yearly meeting, particularly with the members who are on our Board of Trustees25% of our Board members are elected through the yearly meeting. I have found their guidance and counsel and support to be invaluable to me as the president but also to the vision and direction of our institution. We appreciate that relationship. We feel that our relationship, particularly with the local churches, has become stronger than ever. For example, we started Kingdom Cafe in University Friends Church, a program every Tuesday night when up to a hundred students meet with Chaplain Jim Smith for fellowship, fun, and inspiration. Clearly we get along very well."
Dr. Bruce Hicks, superintendent of Mid-America Yearly Meeting, says, "Friends is an important element in our fellowship." He mentioned the library space provided by the university for the Quaker Room (the most extensive Quaker holdings west of the Mississippi) and the yearly meeting archives. Dozens of pastors have studied at Friends and are currently serving churches in the fellowship. As Bruce visits congregations throughout the three states, he marvels at the wonderful music, both vocal and instrumental, as a result of lay people who have sung with the Singing Quakers or played in the ensembles. "Churches have supplied the students, and the students have returned to enrich their congregations in countless ways," he said.
A hundred years brings many changes, but some things stay the same. One constant in the ongoing relationship between Friends University and Mid-America Yearly Meeting is their mutual consideration and respect.
Margaret and Raymond Nelson are members of University Friends, Mid-America and Nebraska Yearly Meetings.
Copyright (c) 1998 Friends United Meeting
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