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Peabody 20 years after the merger
Vanderbilt University Photographic Archives
The lobby of the Social Religious building was a place to study and socialize at George Peabody College for Teachers in 1929.
by GayNelle Doll and Phillip B. Tucker
If you stood outside and listened carefully on the morning of Feb. 13, 1979, you might have heard a collective gasp rippling across Nashville and beyond as thousands of Peabodians opened their morning papers. There, in one-and-a-quarter-inch type, dwarfing other front-page headlines about anti-American sentiment in Iran and a local bus-fare hike, were the words “TSU, Peabody to Join?”The headline’s implication took the faculty, staff and students of George Peabody College for Teachers by surprise. They were unaware of the depth of the financial downturn that was then threatening to close the college’s doors, and they had no idea the administration had been exploring options that would keep those doors open.
Five frantic weeks later, however, following negotiations, it was Vanderbilt University rather than Tennessee State University whose new partnership with Peabody was making headlines. The next era in Peabody’s complex history had begun.
“A great many people loved Peabody and wanted to preserve it for its own sake as well as for its substantial educational reputation,” said Chancellor Emeritus Alexander Heard, who was Vanderbilt’s Chancellor at the time of the 1979 merger. “There were shared feelings, beliefs and values on both campuses that made a constructive union of the two institutions seem not only sensible but potentially of educational significance.”
Twenty years have passed since the tumultuous events that caused many alumni to ask whether the spirit and mission of Peabody could survive becoming part of Vanderbilt.
But today, Peabody thrives — all the while honoring many of its pre-merger traditions. In fact, when viewed against the backdrop of Peabody’s history, the merger with Vanderbilt could be simply the latest example of the school’s ability to reinvent itself while remaining true to its origins.
“We were determined that Peabody would be respected and survive within the University — and we succeeded.”
—Elizabeth Goldman Chair, Peabody Faculty Council, 1979
Peabody’s earliest forbear, Davidson Academy, had its beginnings in 1785 when the North Carolina legislature authorized establishment of a school in a new outpost that would later be called Nashville. Two decades later its trustees were given permission to convert the school to a college, renamed Cumberland College. The institution’s next incarnation came in 1826 as the University of Nashville.
The evolution of Peabody College
1785-1909
The previous incarnations of Peabody College exist as Davidson Academy, Cumberland College, University of Nashville and State Normal CollegeJune 1914
George Peabody College for Teachers opens at its present site with 78 instructors and 1,108 students1919
Peabody grants the South’s first Ph.D. degrees in education1935
Peabody, Vanderbilt and Scarritt College enter agreement to create the Joint University Libraries1959
Professor Susan Gray’s Early Training Project established1965
The John F. Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development is establishedApril 27, 1979
Peabody and Vanderbilt boards of trust officially approve the final merger planFall 1982
Undergraduate program in human development begins with 20 students1984
Learning Technology Center is established1995
In its first ranking of graduate programs in education, U.S. News & World Report lists Peabody as sixth among 223 institutions; the school has continued to rank among the top 10 ever since1996
U.S. News ranks Peabody’s graduate programs in special education as the nation’s bestAfter the Civil War, the Tennessee legislature and trustees of the Peabody Education Fund — created in 1867 with a million-dollar gift from financier George Peabody to help improve education in the postwar South — established the State Normal College as a division of the University of Nashville. (A “normal school” was one that had the primary responsibility of training teachers.) In 1888, the State Board of Education renamed the institution Peabody Normal College to honor the contributions of George Peabody.
In 1903, when trustees of the Peabody Education Fund voted to establish a “George Peabody College for Teachers” in the South, Peabody Normal College President and former Tennessee Gov. James D. Porter led a campaign to have the school located in Nashville as the successor to Peabody Normal.
The bid succeeded, but trustees, at the urging of Vanderbilt Chancellor James H. Kirkland, recommended the new college be located near Vanderbilt in order to facilitate sharing of resources. Porter, fearful such proximity would lead to merger, fought the move unsuccessfully.
The old normal school closed at the end of the 1910-11 school year. When the new George Peabody College for Teachers opened in 1914 with 78 faculty members, only one was a carryover from the old school.
Bruce Payne, the new college’s first president, oversaw ambitious plans for a campus inspired by Thomas Jefferson’s design for the University of Virginia. The columned buildings, initially financed largely by gifts from John Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan, dominate the Peabody landscape today.
Over the years Peabody had entered into a variety of cooperative arrangements with Vanderbilt, and the schools had engaged in a number of discussions on the subject of a closer alliance. Harvie Branscomb, Vanderbilt Chancellor from 1946 until 1963, often expressed his desire for an “organic unity” of the two institutions.
Branscomb’s successor, Alexander Heard, had been friends with Peabody President Felix Robb since Heard’s days as dean of the graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Even in those earlier years, I would occasionally get vibrations about the relationship between Peabody and Vanderbilt,” he said.
When he arrived as Chancellor at Vanderbilt in 1963, Heard said, “I communicated to Felix my conviction that Vanderbilt and Peabody should cooperate in programs and on issues when doing so would, in their judgment, benefit them both.”
Heard conveyed the same message to Robb’s successors at Peabody, including John Dunworth, who assumed the presidency in 1974. By then, Peabody’s fiscal troubles could no longer be put off.
Dunworth described the college he found when he arrived in 1974. “Peabody was a magnificent institution whose accomplishments had put it at the pinnacle of colleges of education,” he said. “It was clear, however, that its economic viability was in doubt.”
“For decades, there had been discussions regarding a merger with Vanderbilt,” said Thomas Stovall, Peabody’s former executive dean for academic affairs.
However, the timing was off for a merger with Vanderbilt, which was in the midst of a massive reassessment of its own programs. Peabody looked elsewhere, including Duke University and George Washington University in St. Louis, Stovall said.
The scenario that received the most attention and came closest to realization was a merger with Tennessee State University in Nashville, which could have offered doctoral programs through Peabody.
A possible merger with TSU caused a flurry of activity at Vanderbilt. On March 17, 1979, Sam Fleming, chairman of Vanderbilt’s Board of Trust, drafted a formal Vanderbilt offer, which was delivered in the form of a letter to Robert E. Gable, chairman of the Peabody board.
Three days later, the news that Peabody had accepted Vanderbilt’s merger proposal hit the papers, once again surprising Nashvillians who, at that point, were expecting a merger plan with TSU.
Members of the Peabody community who survived the arduous merger process found themselves on a mission to prove not only that Peabody could survive, but also flourish in its new environment. One of those people was Elizabeth Goldman, who has served on Peabody’s faculty since 1968. She was chair of Peabody’s Faculty Council when the college’s first post-merger dean was appointed and she served several years as the college’s associate dean for undergraduate student affairs.
“Many of us who remained at Peabody after the merger, particularly those of us who were moved into administrative positions or other leadership roles, saw it as our personal goal to prove to Vanderbilt that they had acquired an asset and not a liability,” said Goldman, who later served as Vanderbilt’s associate provost for academic affairs. “We were determined that Peabody would be respected and survive within the University — and we succeeded.”
Peabody’s recovery from the merger process is attributable to the efforts of Goldman and many others, but two who merit special mention are Willis Hawley and Joe B. Wyatt.
Hawley, the first post-merger dean, hired top researchers in order to make Peabody a viable partner with the other schools in the University.
Hawley established the groundbreaking Learning Technology Center, which has been central to Peabody’s national reputation for research on technology in teaching and learning environments, as well as the Corporate Learning Institute, which evolved as a graduate program in human resource development. He also was a catalyst for Peabody’s continued, vital support of the John F. Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development which, like the Learning Technology Center, owes much of its success to the interdisciplinary nature of the enterprise.
Under Hawley’s deanship, the human and organizational development program also came into being. Today the human and organizational development major is the largest undergraduate program at Vanderbilt.
Vanderbilt Chancellor Joe B. Wyatt arrived in 1982 and, according to some Peabody faculty, recognized Peabody’s value early on.
“Mr. Wyatt has been extremely interested in education and supportive of Peabody,” said Bob Newbrough, a professor of psychology, education and special education who joined Peabody’s faculty in 1966 and is today the college’s longest-standing faculty member. “His track record of bringing resources into the college has been remarkable. He’s helped keep the Peabody paradox — a private institution doing public work —alive.”
“Peabody has not lost its pre-merger identity,” said Joseph Cunningham, who joined the faculty in 1969 and has served Peabody as associate dean for administration for most of the last two decades. “Its emphasis on the community, on social action and on schools remains. And the strong focus on research and training in special education and psychology are still very much alive.
“In many ways the college is stronger than it was pre-merger. The financial stability that resulted from the merger made it possible to move forward in a strategic and planned fashion.”
Vanderbilt, of course, also continues to benefit from the merger.
For many reasons, Vanderbilt enjoys a higher national profile because of Peabody. The prolific, multimillion-dollar research activity of Peabody’s faculty, for example, is a major factor in the college’s continued climb among the top 10 colleges of education, as ranked by U.S. News and World Report. Currently, Peabody ranks sixth among the nation’s 188 graduate education programs — the highest rank among all graduate programs at Vanderbilt. And in the past few years, programs in every department at Peabody have appeared among the top 10 in their respective categories.
Peabody’s undergraduate education programs are equally respected. In fact, among the private institutions ranked by U.S. News as the top 10 colleges of education, only Peabody has retained its undergraduate teacher education program. For the last decade, Rugg’s Recommendations on the Colleges has named Peabody as the nation’s top choice for undergraduate teacher education.
“I take great satisfaction in seeing how well Peabody has integrated into the University as an important, contributing part of the whole, and it does so without having lost its historical character,” Goldman said. v
The complete text of this abridged story was originally published in the winter 2000 issue of the Peabody Reflector, the alumni magazine for Peabody College.
