Methodist Bishop Holland McTyeire, left, envisioned a Vanderbilt inspired by church values. Chancellor James Kirkland wanted a nonsectarian university.

"Who controls Vanderbilt University?" "Who founded Vanderbilt--northern money or southern Methodists?"

A century ago fierce questions about the status of Vanderbilt inflamed debate across the South. And the way they were answered--decisively, painfully in 1914--has shaped the destiny of the university and its divinity school, as well as religion and education in the South, ever since.

It may come as news to recent Vanderbilt alumni that their university used to be a thoroughly Methodist institution, where Methodist bishops patrolled board meetings and piety was a faculty credential. That was Vanderbilt in its first decades, late in the 19th century.

By the early 20th century, however, competing visions of the university's future were in open conflict.

From the start, the mandate was to make Vanderbilt a top-ranked university in the South and the nation. How to do it? The involvement of church denizens at Vanderbilt's beginnings supplied decisive leadership, but it also introduced tensions that were impossible to resolve: intellectual freedom vs. religious tradition, national ambitions vs. local responsibilities.

After a stormy series of lawsuits ending in 1914, the Methodists washed their hands of the university and Vanderbilt embarked on a new course--nonsectarian, free to pursue excellence by its own lights. Even so, those old tensions between free speech and orthodoxy continue to play out in American culture. The history of the Vanderbilt-Methodist crisis offers a tale of the clash of well-intentioned ideals and unforeseen outcomes.

"Church leaders wanted the institution to be more integrated into the life of the church, and the institution thought it needed to be the best it could be--and that might mean hiring non-Methodists," says Frank Gulley, PhD'61, emeritus professor of church history at the Divinity School and a Methodist scholar, who contributed an essay about the crisis in Vanderbilt Divinity School: Education, Contest and Change, a 2001 book edited by Dale A. Johnson, the Drucilla Moore Buffington Professor of Church History, emeritus.

"My sense is the break was inevitable," adds Gulley.

The struggle for control of Vanderbilt made headlines from the student newspaper to The New York Times.
IMAGES FROM VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS.

No one saw conflict at first. Vanderbilt's original leaders, Methodist bishops of the South after the Civil War, dreamed of a new university, inspired by church values, that would become a national institution and lead the South out of the disarray of defeat.

It was never a simple proposition. Such a vision of higher education cost money, and there wasn't much in 1865. The war had dealt a severe blow to regional prosperity. The Methodists were the largest national Protestant group and dominant in the South through the Methodist Episcopal Church South (MECS). Nevertheless, most of their own Dixie-based schools had shut down after the war.

But the dream wouldn't rest. By 1871 progressive Methodist leaders in Tennessee, including Bishop Holland McTyeire, declared they would raise money for a new first-class university, with a theological school attached. They were convinced the New South needed a university to keep up with a rising middle class, meet the challenges of an industrial economy, and prepare clergy for a coming milieu of modernism and urbanization.

Not all Methodists in the South agreed. Many, maybe most, were ambivalent about a new institution of higher education and a school for ministers. An old assumption remained deeply persuasive: God would call the ministers God needed. Preaching skills and Bible reading were inspired by the Spirit, not German models of education or the Ivy League example. Methodism had succeeded as a populist frontier faith by emphasizing right living and experiential religion. Higher learning leads to heresy, skepticism, elitism.

But progressives replied that an "ecclesiastical West Point" would forge a better grade of clergy, a forward-looking Southern cadre of ethical leaders. Graduates would fan out as Christian prophets to civilize the new gilded age of materialism.

And the progressives prevailed in 1875, the year Vanderbilt University opened, but only because northern money came through. New Yorker Cornelius Vanderbilt ultimately provided nearly $1 million after meeting visionary Bishop Holland McTyeire. The aging Commodore was no churchman, but he had been seeking a beneficiary for his riches and was impressed by McTyeire's plan. Vanderbilt's offer to fund establishment of the university was made March 17, 1873, and was accepted by the MECS leadership 11 days later. (See Gone With the Ivy: A Biography of Vanderbilt University, by Paul K. Conkin, for the full story.) Nashville, already a Methodist hub (the publishing house was there), was the chosen location.

The university was divided into five departments--academic (arts and sciences), education, law, medicine, theology--and straightaway made furious efforts to establish patterns of competency and build a reputation. Theology became the "Biblical Department," a term perhaps devised as "a concession to fears among some in the church that this venture was going to develop theological sophisticates who could not communicate with the common people," Gulley writes in Vanderbilt Divinity School.

Slowly, though, as administrators got more ambitious about building a faculty of distinction, hirings went against the ecclesiastical grain. Discontent was foreshadowed as early as 1878 in the case of geology professor Alexander Winchell. He was a strong scholar, a good Methodist--and an enthusiastic evolutionist. Some administrators suspected his notions might corrupt the ministers-in-training across campus. So Winchell's contract was not renewed. It was dawning on Vanderbilt leaders that it might be difficult to protect students from fresh intellectual currents.

Headings within the Supreme Court opinion explain why it overturned the Davidson County Chancery Court decision in 1914. The historic separation of church and college helped lead to the founding of Emory and Southern Methodist universities.

"The MECS had created a form of theological education it could not control," writes church historian Glenn Miller in Vanderbilt Divinity School.

Church suspicions about Vanderbilt's direction increased as qualified non-Methodists swelled the faculty ranks by the turn of the 20th century. A new arena of conflict then emerged--within the Board of Trust. Guided by Chancellor James Kirkland, the board was growing confident that it should be free from clergy influence to make decisions to improve Vanderbilt's academic standing. The board's view was that the Commodore, not the church, founded the university. At the same moment, dramatic growth in Methodism increased the expectation that more bishops would be named to the board. But Kirkland wanted more lawyers and businessmen on the board, not bishops, Gulley writes. In 1905, Kirkland proposed redefining the board to be autonomous from church power. Some Methodist leaders took this as an act of disloyalty and creeping secularism.

Through church publications and pulpits, a campaign stirred to take back Vanderbilt. Confrontation came in 1910, when church delegates approved a Methodist commission's report that called for reclaiming the university. Kirkland and the board refused.

The Methodists sued in Nashville's Davidson County Chancery Court, arguing Vanderbilt belonged to the church. And they won--until the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed the Davidson Court decision on March 21, 1914, ruling that bishops had no power over the school. Legally, anyway, the Commodore had founded Vanderbilt after all.

The Methodists wasted no time disowning the school and calling for the formation of two new church-based Southern universities. They would become Emory University in Atlanta and Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

One Divinity School professor looks back on the crisis with a sense of loss.

"There was hubris on both sides," says Douglas Meeks, the Cal Turner Chancellor's Professor of Wesleyan Studies and professor of theology.

"But I don't think the split was inevitable. If a few progressives and moderates in the church had prevailed, it's possible the relationship could have continued. It's inevitable that there is tension, but it all depends on who the leaders are."

Post-1914, the university was free to move forward (and freer to pursue grant money without sectarian restrictions). But the new freedom intensified a drama in one campus corner--the Biblical Department. It was now bereft of Methodist support or a steady supply of Methodist students.

The divorce of 1914 was felt most acutely there. Many universities had slowly drifted away from their denominational origins--Harvard from the Puritans, for instance. But the Methodist break with Vanderbilt appears to be unique in education annals, historian Glenn Miller suggests in Vanderbilt Divinity School. Its abruptness forced the Biblical Department to reinvent itself to survive. The department quickly was renamed the School of Religion and embarked on a new adventure in theological, interdenominational identity.

The timing was intriguing. The School of Religion reorganized during a period when a national ecumenical spirit was gaining ground, and Christian activists hoped to reform America to improve race relations, housing conditions and labor laws. Vanderbilt's School of Religion would emerge as a voice of liberal Christian reform in the South, a moderating force in the midst of conservative religion, unrestricted by any sectarian doctrinal dictate.

To survive, though, it needed new relationships with church life, and the decades after 1914 witnessed various initiatives--with the YMCA, the Disciples of Christ denomination, rural churches and with Methodists. Though not a majority, once again Methodists eventually represented the largest single group of students at the religion school. (That statistic holds true today in the Vanderbilt Divinity School, the name for the School of Religion since 1956.)

By the 1990s prominent Nashvillian and Methodist businessman Cal Turner Jr., BA'62, issued substantial gifts to Vanderbilt. They made possible the chair in Wesleyan studies and the Cal Turner Program for Moral Leadership in the Professions. Last year he gave $2.9 million more to the divinity school for Methodist student fellowships.

"If this program can have an impact on the clergy leadership of the church, that will have a multiplier effect on our society," Turner announced last year. "These men and women who become effective ministers will have great impact on the lives of others, who will in turn have great impact on the lives of others, and so on for many years to come."

A long, turbulent saga over a university's future, and the role the church should play in it, was now the distant past.

John D. Rockefeller Sr. (1839-1937) and Jr. (1874-1960)

At the end of the 19th century, vast personal fortunes were created in the United States. Industrial advances made from 1870 to 1900 opened opportunities in railways, oil, banking and manufacturing. Savvy businessmen with names like Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Morgan and Rockefeller accrued enough wealth to ensure a life of ease for generations to come.

With these riches they built "cottages" like The Breakers in Newport, R.I., and country homes like Biltmore in Asheville, N.C. They took their new money into old homes and mingled with the Edith Wharton-esque characters of the Gilded Age. These so-called robber barons spent on a lavish scale--jewels, travel, and Worth gowns from Paris. But they also revolutionized philanthropic giving in the United States.

Hospitals, museums, opera houses and libraries all benefited from their largesse--and so did Vanderbilt University.

In 1873 Cornelius Vanderbilt agreed to donate $1 million to endow the university that bears his name. However, the name of the family that has given the most money over the years isn't found anywhere on campus--not on a building or statue or even a classroom door. When the final accounting is done, the Rockefeller family may have had a far greater impact on Vanderbilt than its namesake.

John D. Rockefeller Sr. founded Standard Oil Co. in 1870 and ran it until he retired in the late 1890s. He is often maligned and charged with the same unscrupulous business practices that ran rampant in the latter years of the 19th century. It is true that he built his fortune by buying out his competitors. Those who were reluctant to sell were often forced into bankruptcy by the larger Standard Oil.

But those who did sell usually found themselves very wealthy--especially when shares of Standard Oil were included in the deal.

Vanderbilt's new medical center, opened in 1925, housed the medical school, hospital and research laboratories under one roof. The building is now part of Medical Center North.

As America's dependence on gasoline grew, Rockefeller's stock value--and wealth--grew accordingly. He was easily the richest person in the world and is regarded by some as the richest person ever. A staunch Northern Baptist, he gave 10 percent of every paycheck to his church from the time he was 16. Over the years Rockefeller and his heirs funneled money to Vanderbilt in three ways--through the General Education Board (GEB), the Rockefeller Foundation and individually.

The GEB was created in 1902 and chartered by Congress in 1903. Its mission was to promote education throughout the United States "without distinction of race, sex or creed." Specifically, the GEB focused on the education of African Americans in the South. The secretary of the new organization was Wallace Buttrick--a name that's familiar to Vanderbilt alumni and friends. Chancellor James Kirkland quickly formed a relationship with Buttrick when he realized the possibilities that existed within the GEB.

Over the years the GEB donated more than $23 million to Vanderbilt--including, in 1928, the funds that built Garland, Buttrick and Calhoun halls, and more than $17 million to the medical school between 1914 and 1960.

In 1910 Abraham Flexner, a Kentucky schoolteacher and principal employed by the Carnegie Foundation to visit and report on medical schools in the United States and Canada, published a document focusing on the sorry state of medical education. The impact of the "Flexner Report" was felt around the country and resulted in the closure of many medical schools.

Nursing school class in Mary Kirkland Hall shortly after the building's 1925 completion, with funding provided by the Rockefeller Foundation.

In 1912 Flexner moved to the GEB to serve as secretary under Buttrick, who had been named president. By 1917 the GEB had committed $50 million to improving medical schools, especially in the South. Together, Flexner, Buttrick and Kirkland envisioned a new Vanderbilt Medical School with a research-oriented faculty attuned to meeting the special needs of the mostly poor, mostly rural South. In 1919 Kirkland secured $4 million to build the new facility--the GEB's largest grant to a university up to that time. In just 10 years the GEB would invest another $10 million in the medical school.

In 1913 John D. Rockefeller Sr. created the Rockefeller Foundation with a mission to "promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world." His son, John D. Rockefeller Jr., was one of the original leaders of the foundation.

One of the foundation's lasting legacies was the funding it provided to the Vanderbilt School of Nursing. The school was created in 1908 but was not considered a part of Vanderbilt's overall educational mission. At that time--especially in the South--nursing sometimes meant little more than housekeeping and was not a career of choice for prominent young women.

By 1925 Canby Robinson, dean of the medical school, envisioned a much-improved nursing school to complement the new medical school. He turned to the Rockefeller Foundation, which gave two grants--one to upgrade the existing school and one (shared with Peabody College) for a joint public health nursing program. The foundation made other significant contributions to the School of Nursing in 1930 and 1937.

Individually, the Rockefellers have also been more than generous when it comes to Vanderbilt. Today's Divinity School benefited greatly from a gift John D. Jr. made to the School of Religion in 1925. Winthrop Rockefeller bequeathed $500,000 to Vanderbilt upon his death. And countless other gifts have impacted the university. From research advances to scholarship support to the physical beauty of the campus, Vanderbilt is much indebted to the Rockefeller family.

John D. Rockefeller Sr. is credited with helping to shape philanthropy in America as we know it today. His systematic approach of identifying targets through various foundations has had a major effect on medicine, education and scientific research. During his lifetime it is estimated that he gave away $550 million. So while Vanderbilt owes its origins and its name to the Commodore, it certainly owes a much larger debt to a man whose statue or portrait is nowhere to be found.

On the surface, the group of freshmen who showed up at Vanderbilt in the fall of 1973 didn't seem that different from any other.They were bright, to be sure. Eager and excited about starting this new adventure called college.And as they unpacked, settled in, and started finding their way around, they also started finding each other. For seven freshmen, those first days in Nashville would come to affect the rest of their lives.

They came to Vanderbilt as strangers for the most part--David Blum,Mike Bagot, Phil Walker,Margaret Lynch Callihan and Robert Courtney, all BA'77; and Cathy Madigan and Julie Caldwell Huffman, both BSN'77. (Walker and Madigan had been high school buddies back in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.)

They left as lifelong friends. And they left a legacy that is still remembered 30 years later.

"We just literally became fast friends," says Phil Walker, now a San Francisco attorney. "The universe does things that are very interesting.All of us had a personality that was a little challenging to authority."

Remember, these are the days when Richard Nixon was president. The early years of the '70s--before the atrocities of disco and Saturday Night Fever-- still had a '60s-era vibe. Being leery of the people in suits just came naturally. And that's what makes this group's relationship with then-Chancellor Alexander Heard all the more remarkable.

"On the very first night of school, the chancellor invited the freshman class to his house for dinner," explains David Blum, now a realestate broker and developer in Wilmette, Ill., north of Chicago."He gave a little speech and told us two things: He said that only 50 percent of what you learn in college comes from the classroom, and he said that his door was always open."

The new friends took that open-door policy seriously, and that is how a group of cocky freshmen became fast friends with the most authoritative person around. At their first meeting the chancellor even named the group. Thirty years later they are still known as the Wild Bunch.

"We were really non-subdued around him," remembers Cathy Madigan."We were all pretty entertaining, and I think the chancellor was just a little taken aback that we weren't this quiet freshman group sitting there not saying anything. In fact, I'm not sure he had a chance to get a word in edgewise."

Even in those early years at Vanderbilt, the group was assuming leadership roles in student government, various clubs, and in their respective fraternities and sororities.

"We clicked as people first, but we were the kind of people who wanted to contribute and give back and reach outside the normal college existence," says Blum. "We liked having fun, and we liked to embarrass each other."

Madigan, now clinical director of the UNC Heart Center at the University of North Carolina, remembers two examples of the embarrassing behavior. One involved Walker's payback for a perceived slight. "He hung a huge sign from the top of Lupton Hall that read 'Cathy and Julie--for fat girls, you don't sweat much.'"

But another time,Walker was on the receiving end.He gave tours to high school students curious about Vanderbilt. During one such tour,Huffman snuck into his dorm room, stripped bare, and got in his bed-- knowing full well that he always ended his tours by throwing open the door to his dorm room, telling the prospective student that this was a typical student room. Little did Huffman know that on this particular tour the student's father--a Nashville judge, no less--was also along.

No one remembers whether the student became a Commodore or not.

The group wasn't all about good times. Mike Bagot became president of the Student Government Association, and Bob Courtney became finance secretary of the SGA. Margaret Lynch Callihan was business manager of The Vanderbilt Hustler.Cathy Madigan was president of Kappa Delta, and Julie Caldwell Huffman was president of Chi Omega. Phil Walker, after serving as freshman class president, went on to found the Original Cast music group and organized the Campus Capers at Homecoming. David Blum became president of the Young Democrats.

"Vanderbilt gave us the latitude to have fun," says Blum."It told us exactly where the line was that you couldn't cross. You could put your toes on the line, but heaven forbid that you put your toes over the line."

Not crossing that line was just another sign of the respect that the Wild Bunch felt for Chancellor Heard.

"He was really a tremendous influence, especially the way he encouraged using the university as an open forum for the expression of new ideas," says Mike Bagot."He was very open to the students and to the idea of self-governance."

As the years passed, the Wild Bunch grew to include several dozen members, but the original seven--the founders--were always at the core. The group wanted to go out with a bang and hit upon the now-famous idea of kidnapping Heard and other university officials, including Senior Vice Chancellor Rob Roy Purdy, Dean James Sandlin, Dean Sidney Boutwell and Betty King, manager of schedules and reservations. On April Fool's Day, with the cooperation of various staff members, the Wild Bunch pulled off the kidnapping and whisked Heard and the others-- in a limo owned by Dorothy Mize, friendly proprietress of a Church Street liquor store-- to the farm of Battle (BA'24) and Sara (BA'22) Rodes. There they all feasted on champagne and hot dogs and initiated Chancellor Heard into the Wild Bunch.

"We wouldn't pull that off today, for sure," says Blum."Walking into Kirkland Hall now in commando clothes and squirt guns definitely wouldn't cut it."

It wasn't the group's last act before graduation. On the day of the ceremony itself, each member of the Wild Bunch handed the chancellor a flower.Madigan remembers it was a white carnation.Walker recalls a red carnation. Blum says it was a red rose. In any event, it was the group's farewell to a man-- and a place--they loved.

Graduation sent most of the Wild Bunch in different directions. Graduate school and careers became priorities. Bagot claims to have chosen the University of Texas as his law school because "after four years at Vanderbilt, I had to go to a football school."Regardless of where they landed, the group faithfully journeys back to Nashville every five years for their Vanderbilt Reunion and a "Wild Bunch Brunch." Their 30-year reunion took place in October.

In 1997, Blum chaired his 20-year Vanderbilt reunion. "I wanted the Wild Bunch to do something special, and someone came up with the idea of creating an endowment at the Jean and Alexander Heard Library to buy books," he says."I proposed it to the group as a way of honoring Chancellor Heard, and they all agreed it was a great idea.We announced the endowment at Reunion and invited Chancellor and Mrs. Heard to come to the event. They were really surprised and very touched."

Alexander Heard, whose own children were college age during the Wild Bunch's time at Vanderbilt, turned 90 in March and lives quietly with his wife, Jean, in their longtime Nashville home on Golf Club Lane."My father had interaction with many student groups, but he absolutely loved the Wild Bunch," remembers his daughter, Cornelia Heard, professor of violin at Vanderbilt's Blair School of Music. "He stayed in touch with several of them for many years and thoroughly enjoyed it."

In 2005 the group rallied when disaster-- in the form of Hurricane Katrina--struck one of their own.Mike Bagot and his family fled New Orleans and ended up in Nashville where Wild Bunch friends opened their homes, businesses and schools.

"I feel like if I'm ever in a catastrophe again, I have friends throughout the U.S.who I can call on at any time and say, 'I need sanctuary. Can you put me up?'" says Bagot,who is now back in New Orleans practicing law. "It's a good thing to know."

It's clear that many factors helped create the Wild Bunch. If the seven had attended Stanford or Northwestern or Emory, would they have found each other?

"I'd like to say we would have," says Bagot, "but it was a singular experience, from the chancellor on down.We felt safe and secure on one hand, yet adventurous on the other."