Emmanuel Missionary College (1901–1960)

Emmanuel Missionary College, an Adventist institution of higher education located in Berrien Springs, Michigan, operated from 1901 to 1960. Founded as Battle Creek College (BCC), the Adventist denomination’s first institution of higher learning, the school relocated to the southwestern corner of the state in search of more space and a rural environment. Over its nearly sixty-year history, Emmanuel Missionary College (or EMC) developed from a small, experimental program to a fully accredited, four-year liberal arts college. In 1960 the original Seventh-day Adventist college merged with Potomac University, which included the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary and other graduate programs, on the Berrien Springs campus and underwent another name change, becoming Andrews University.¹

Background

The Seventh-day Adventist Educational Society, comprised of many of the church leaders, was created in 1874 for the primary purpose of establishing a denominational college in Battle Creek.² Battle Creek College, the church’s first venture in higher education, pursued its aims in Battle Creek for the next twenty-seven years, exerting a moral influence on its students consistent with the values of the church, preparing workers for the Seventh-day Adventist evangelistic cause, and teaching Seventh-day Adventist doctrine.

Edward A. Sutherland,³ alumnus of the college and early Adventist educator, came to the presidency of Battle Creek College in 1897. He brought to the post a zeal for educational reform and began at once to enact his ideas such as a stronger emphasis on practical missionary and manual training. Sutherland also inherited challenges: a serious financial debt and an overcrowded Adventist community. Ellen G. White herself testified, “Battle Creek is in a congested state . . . .”⁴ The college enrollment dropped and unflattering rumors about Sutherland and what were perceived as his radical ideas began to circulate.⁵

Sutherland increasingly came to see relocation as the solution to all the problems. He and Percy T. Magan,⁶ the academic dean, who had first come to BCC as a young student from Ireland and later taught history there, wrote repeatedly to Ellen White, who was in Australia, expressing their desire to move out of Battle Creek and seeking her advice and support.⁷ Finally, when she returned to the United States for the General Conference meetings in Battle Creek in 1901, she was ready to support a move. On the floor of the General Conference, on the morning of April 12, she said, “God wants the school to be taken out of Battle Creek.” She elaborated, “This move is in accordance with God’s will for the school before the institution was established. But men could not see how this could be done. There were so many who said that the school must be in Battle Creek. Now we say that it must be somewhere else.”⁸

Search for a New Location

Sutherland had already begun to lay the groundwork for such a move. He, his wife, Sallie Bralliar Sutherland, and Dean Percy Magan rode their bicycles all over southwestern Michigan, looking for just the right property for their school to thrive according to the principles they so firmly believed. Sutherland had spent time in Berrien Springs in 1899 when he was invited to lecture there at a Chatauqua, or summer lecture series. Its location on the St. Joseph River, in the middle of a rich fruit belt with access by river or rail, made it a pleasant place to spend the summer. The town cultivated a resort atmosphere with band concerts, “social hops,” public picnics, and ball games. Berrien Springs was also centrally located between the larger towns of Benton Harbor and Niles and, in 1837, had become the county seat of government. The town lost that status in 1894 when the county offices were moved to St. Joseph, sister city to Benton Harbor.⁹

When Sutherland and his cohorts began to look again at Berrien Springs in the spring of 1901, it was a fairly well-developed, if smallish, town surrounded by plenty of agricultural and undeveloped land. Furthermore, it boasted a courthouse square of underused former government buildings The old courthouse served at that era primarily as a dance hall. The local paper, the Berrien Springs Era, later the Journal Era, reported that Sutherland and C.M. Christiansen, a former Wisconsin farmer who would become the farm manager at the new location, had spent the weekend in town looking for 200 acres of good farmland.¹⁰ According to Sutherland’s and Magan’s own accounts, the two of them arrived on their bicycles at the Garland farm outside of Berrien Springs in May of 1901. Then, as Sutherland remembered it, he strategically steered the “location committee” to Berrien Springs on May 21: “Magan and I piloted the locating committee to various places we had seen, reserving Berrien Springs for the last.”¹¹ Tradition has it that, within a month or so, in June, the Battle Creek representatives covered their option to buy the farmland, 272 acres, with the only five-dollar bill Magan had in his pocket.¹²

The official vote had yet to take place. From July 11 to 16, the trustees of Battle Creek College met in Berrien Springs, in a grove by the river, to make the final decision. They voted unanimously to purchase the property. That last evening, July 16, a smaller committee of trustees voted a new name for the new location: Emmanuel Missionary College.¹³ According to E. K. Vande Vere, “It [the name] impressed the relocating committee as being both a prayer and a goal.”¹⁴

The final seal of approval came as the trustees were meeting: Ellen White wrote to the managers of the Review and Herald Office: “I hear that there is some thought of locating the school at Berrien Springs, in the south west of Michigan, I am much pleased with the description of this place. . . The good hand of the Lord appears to be in this opening. . .”¹⁵

The New Campus

Sutherland wasted no time. In fact, the old college’s belongings were packed up and moved to Berrien Springs in fifteen or sixteen boxcars on the Milwaukee, Benton Harbor, and Columbus Railroad (MBH&C). As the trustees voted, all the worldly belongings of the new EMC were stored in every available barn and shed in Berrien Springs, as well as the empty jail and the courthouse.¹⁶

The whole process of developing a college campus began again. The college had purchased acreage and a farm of vineyards; plum, pear and peach orchards; berry patches; “bottomland” by the river; timber; and a beautiful view of the St. Joseph River from the bluff.¹⁷ There were no classroom buildings, no dormitories, no dining halls. But the new school hosted its first educational endeavor right away: a teachers’ institute held in tents in the city park in Berrien Springs.¹⁸

By October, Emmanuel Missionary College had settled into its temporary, rented quarters all over town. The Hotel Oronoko housed students. On the courthouse square, administrative offices occupied Franklin Hall. The courthouse, sheriff’s home, and various other office buildings would serve as classrooms. On October 30, 1901, in the main courtroom, the new school inaugurated its first school year.¹⁹

The teachers and approximately seventy-five students held classes in town from 7 a.m. to noon. Then everyone was expected to report to the farm, a mile and a half away, to work for the rest of the day.²⁰ In the spring of 1902, building on campus began in earnest, under the direction of A. S. Baird, carpenter and builder for the new school who also taught a class in drafting and general architecture.²¹

An Adventist architect in Iowa had drawn up a campus layout and plans for sturdy brick buildings, offering his firm’s services to the college free of charge.²² But in 1902, wooden structures began to rise on the new school grounds. Sutherland issued his manifesto in May, in the Advocate of Christian Education: “We want our buildings to be simple and small, without heat and electricity, for that is the kind of buildings our students will find in the mission fields. There must be no large and handsome main building, nor must the buildings be erected on the quadrangular plan, but on a meandering line in order to get plenty of fresh air and sunshine. Furthermore, such an arrangement will discourage the growth of pride and institutional spirit.”²³

The building began with “cottages” for Sutherland and Magan to live in, and the builders followed with a workshop which would also house “some boys;” small summer cottages and a pavilion in the grove for the summer school; a print shop; the Manual Arts Building, where more young men could sleep above a workshop; and the Domestic Arts Building to house the young women, the dining room and kitchen, and the utility rooms such as a laundry.²⁴

They had set themselves an ambitious construction agenda, especially given the background and experience of most of the workers. The school’s leadership was keen to involve the students in constructing their new school: “WE BELIEVE, While attending School, the youth should have an opportunity for learning the use of tools, . . . The students themselves should erect buildings and make needed improvements, . . . ”²⁵ So the students went to work under the supervision of “Brother Baird.”

That summer of 1902, EMC held its first classes on the new campus itself, also a teachers’ training course but this time in the grove known as Stevens’ Wood, part of the property the college had purchased. During a very rainy summer, the students lived in tents, carried water from a spring “out in the woods,”²⁶ and fended off clouds of mosquitoes with smudge pots and the screened-in pavilion built with Ida Magan’s entire inheritance.²⁷

Tireless, hard work had built a basic infrastructure on the EMC campus, and life began to fall into a more settled routine for the school year of 1902-1903. For the next two years, the school leaders shaped the life of the new institution according to their philosophies. The pattern emerged that students engaged in one manual labor contribution to the farm and campus, took one academic subject, and participated in one committee for the management of the institution.²⁸

By practical necessity, as well as philosophical leaning, life on campus revolved around the farm work; all hands were needed to meet the challenges of each season. Estella Murphy Straw, who came to school at EMC in 1902, remembered: “Sometimes when the weeds would be threatening the corn or potatoes, or the berry patch, classes would be called off for half a day and the boys, and sometimes the girls too, would line up at the field, each to receive a hoe and help put an end to the menace.”²⁹ Students could sign up for an agricultural curriculum offering such as grape culture, tree fruit, or bee culture.³⁰

In the academic classroom students studied one subject three hours a day for three months at a time and then took up a new line of study. None of the academic offerings was a Bible course. Instead, Sutherland advocated an integration of faith and learning that placed the Bible at the center of every academic subject.³¹

In addition to manual labor and study, every student participated in the governance of the school through membership on a committee, such as the Fuel, Light, Janitor, and Sanitary Committee or the Printing Committee and so on, all reporting to the school-wide Union Meeting every week.³² Perhaps the most radical aspect of Sutherland’s self-governance scheme involved the Law and Order Committee to which students submitted reports of their “irregularities,” or trespasses, against the school rules. The Committee would then decide on appropriate responses to the student reports.³³

Besides a more settled routine, the summer of 1903 saw the construction of the last major building needed on campus: the Study Hall, which would house classrooms, offices, the chapel, and the library. The three-story wooden building, also erected largely by student labor, dominated the fledgling campus with its distinctive onion dome where the college installed one of the most precious souvenirs from Battle Creek, the BCC bell. The school occupied its new building on December 11, 1903.³⁴

Sutherland finally presided over the educational institution that he had wanted to create all along. But he was still navigating troubled waters. The mistrust of what some judged to be Sutherland’s extremism followed him from Battle Creek to Berrien Springs. Enrollment was not robust. In addition, Sutherland and Magan could ill conceal their impatience with oversight by the church hierarchy. Their loyalty to John Harvey Kellogg, charter member of the SDA Educational Society, BCC board member, director of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, and a powerful voice in shaping the emerging denomination, further convinced church leaders that Sutherland and Magan shared Kellogg’s desire for independence from the General Conference and all institutional control by the church. The unrest came to a head at the end of the 1903-1904 school year.³⁵

Emmanuel Missionary College hosted the Lake Union Conference³⁶ session in May of 1904, and many of the church leaders planned to attend. It should have been a high day in the life of the young school: even Ellen White intended to come to Berrien Springs for the very first time. But the meetings brought tension, conflict, and sadness and became a critical turning point in the history of EMC. Matters came to a head in the power struggle between John Harvey Kellogg and the denominational leadership. The theological and philosophical focus of the controversy was Kellogg’s recently published The Living Temple, which some influential readers interpreted as pantheistic. The acrimonious discussion in Berrien Springs only served to widen the gulf between the factions, despite Ellen White’s private and public attempts to preserve relationships.

A further pall fell over the assembly with the death of Ida Magan, Percy Magan’s wife, from tuberculosis contracted at the mental hospital in Kalamazoo where she was a patient following a nervous breakdown. On Sabbath afternoon, the conference participants all came together for Ida’s funeral, which Magan said he wanted to be a “harmony affair.”³⁷ In the days following the funeral, Ellen White validated the move of the college from Battle Creek to Berrien Springs, suggesting that the divisions among the brethren had contributed to Ida Magan’s breakdown, and praised Sutherland and Magan for the beginning they had made at EMC.³⁸

But Sutherland and Magan had decided that their future lay elsewhere. In the heat of one of the bitter exchanges at the meetings, Sutherland jumped up and burst out, “I’ve done my best to work with the denomination, but I can’t. Now Elder Daniells you are driving me out of the organized work. Well, you hereby have my resignation.” Magan joined him.³⁹ Ellen White later chastised Sutherland for the timing and manner of his resignation, but supported his subsequent project to establish a new school in the South.⁴⁰

New Administration

Sutherland’s and Magan’s departure left EMC in a very vulnerable and uncertain position from which it did not emerge for at least the next four years, when O. J. Graf took over the presidency from Nelson W. Kauble. Kauble, in spite of his impressive resume in education and school administration, barely preserved the young institution during his short presidency. He came to EMC from Fox River Academy in Illinois, where he had built up a reputation as a good financial manager. But EMC struggled through crisis after crisis, such as November of 1905, when Kauble announced to the faculty that the school had borrowed enough money to buy coal, but “What about groceries?”⁴¹ Kauble instituted Bible classes and supported regularizing the curriculum, but the school still struggled to gain academic respectability. The one campus development that marked the Kauble years was the construction of a large new barn, which E. K. Vandevere has called “the most fitting monument of the Kauble era.⁴² For Kauble did understand and excel at farming. Chickens were his passion, and when he left EMC the local paper would remember him as the college president who developed a prize-winning strain of “Plymouth rocks.”⁴³ The day that Kauble called a board meeting in his presidential office and all the members convened only to discover that President Kauble was away at a poultry show, they terminated his presidency.⁴⁴

Kauble’s replacement was a very young man, 29-year-old O. J. Graf, a history teacher at Union College with a master’s degree in education from the University of Nebraska. Over his tenure of nine years (1908-1917), Graf stabilized the small college in Berrien Springs and probably ensured its survival. The tall Minnesotan was modest and reserved but possessed a gravitas that inspired confidence. He immediately began to make changes, overhauling the academic policies and curriculum,⁴⁵ instituting record-keeping,⁴⁶ legally incorporating the college as an institution of learning so that it could confer degrees,⁴⁷ and addressing the “monster debt” with which the college had been left. Graf, with the enthusiastic involvement of the student body, retired the last of the debt, more than $45,000, by 1916. The whole school celebrated the momentous achievement by burning the debt notes at the closing exercises for the school year.⁴⁸ Word got out that EMC was flourishing under a “complete reorganization of the educational policy and the curriculum of study.”⁴⁹ At the beginning of Graf’s first school year as president, there were forty students at the college. His last school year as president, 274 students were enrolled.⁵⁰

Under O. J. Graf’s administration, the EMC curriculum expanded and developed. The school added a number of college-level courses as early as 1908-1909, his first year as president—courses such as trigonometry, analytical geometry, and calculus, psychology, logic, and ethics. Language offerings increased as well: two years of Greek, Hebrew, and Spanish and three of Latin and German. A “School of Commerce” taught shorthand and bookkeeping.⁵¹ In 1915-1916, EMC advertised a new pre-medical program built on the improvements in the science offerings and laboratory facilities over the past few years.⁵² At the same time, Graf and his colleagues did not neglect the manual arts: a well-developed program of industrial and domestic training emerged over the course of his presidency.⁵³

With the school’s newfound and hard-earned stability, EMC began to develop a campus culture and traditions. The student campaign that helped lay to rest the college debt became, in campus parlance, “The Student Movement.” And the student energy and excitement generated by their campaign against the debt became a request to start publishing a student paper. The Student Movement, the premier student publication of Emmanuel Missionary College and later Andrews University, was born on August 19, 1915.⁵⁴ The students supported their paper with vigorous, not to mention sometimes raucous, paid subscription campaigns—fierce competitions, sometimes among the students from different states, sometimes between the men and women.

Campaigns became a central feature of student life on campus: Harvest Ingathering, a campaign for a grand piano, and an endowment fund, and then for new equipment, a music building, and finally for a new chapel building, a campaign to raise the enrollment to 300 students and then to 400 students—each new endeavor heralded and promoted by the official student voice, The Student Movement. A college with school spirit also deserved a college song, and in 1923, I. A. Steinel, a non-traditional student who had attended the “Preparatory Course” at Battle Creek College, won the competition for the school song with “Our E.M.C.”⁵⁵

Campus life developed in other ways as well. Club fever swept the campus. There were self-improvement societies for the young men—the Young Men’s Seminar and later the E.M.C. or Every Man’s Club—and for the young women—the Forum.⁵⁶ There were clubs for bird watching and for an interest in current history, and one for writing poetry called the Reboses Club.⁵⁷ Musical groups ranked high among student activities: a college band, the chorus, a men’s glee club, and the “band boys” (later disbanded by the faculty).⁵⁸ The chorus made quite an impression on Berrien County with its performance of ambitious works such as the sacred cantata “Ruth,” which they performed both in Benton Harbor and Niles after a campus concert for an audience of four hundred.⁵⁹

Forming missionary bands at the beginning of every school year also became a tradition at EMC as the college strove to fulfill its mission of “service in God’s cause.”⁶⁰ The students participated in many types of missionary outreach, both on and off campus: the Bible Workers Band, the Ministerial Band, the Canvassing Band, the Foreign Missions Band, the Medical Missions Band, the Sabbath School Band, and the General Missions Band. The various groups ministered to and held meetings in the small communities surrounding the college. In 1915, the students of EMC became a major force in the temperance drive to vote Berrien County “dry.” According to President Graf, the “Anti-Saloon league said that if the county was won for prohibition, Emmanuel Missionary College would have the credit.”⁶¹

EMC’s Golden Age

After a short interim presidency by Clement L. Benson, Union College alumnus and field missionary secretary for the Young People’s work west of the Mississippi, who stepped in when President Graf departed because of ill health, 1918 ushered in what in many ways was the golden era of Emmanuel Missionary College under the presidency of Frederick Griggs,⁶² alumnus of Battle Creek College and already a seasoned educator. During Griggs’ tenure the college enrollment soared to over 500 students, and the campus experienced its first building boom since the school was established on the Berrien Springs campus. Student accommodations to house the growing student population were the priority: an addition to the women’s dormitory, Birch Hall, and a brand-new dormitory for the men—who had been living here and there, but mostly in what was built originally as the Manual Arts Building—North Hall. Maple Hall, with its seventy rooms, double windows, a worship room, and a parlor must have seemed palatial to the young men who had “made do” for years.⁶³ Under Griggs the campus also added a music building, a Home Economics building, an addition to the Normal (or elementary) school, and the beginnings of a new chapel building.⁶⁴

In the Griggs’ era another arm of evangelistic outreach at EMC took advantage of the new technology of the era and the genius of student John E. Fetzer (1927). Recruited by Griggs himself, who was intrigued with the potential of radio, Fetzer came to the college from Indiana and, with his own equipment, established on campus the first Seventh-day Adventist radio station, which eventually came to be known as WEMC. For Fetzer, the main goal of the station was always to spread the Gospel. Broadcasting began with chapel programs and sacred music concerts. After leaving EMC Fetzer continued his pioneering work in radio and developed a broadcasting empire in Michigan and beyond. In 1961 he became full owner of the Detroit Tigers baseball team, which he held until 1983. Although Fetzer left Adventism, he nurtured a lifelong interest in spiritual matters and generously endowed the Fetzer Institute in Kalamazoo, Michigan, whose stated mission is to help build the spiritual foundation for a loving world.⁶⁵

Another notable alumnus, Willard “Bill” Shadel (1932), also began his media career at WEMC as the program and music director. A talented musician, Shadel played the marimba, saxophone, and other instruments and directed the Radio Orchestra for live broadcasts on “The Radio Lighthouse.” Shadel became a journalist and radio and television broadcaster, working with figures such as Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite. He moderated the third presidential debate between Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy, among many other contributions to media history.⁶⁶

The college chapel, which should have been Griggs’ crowning glory, actually became his downfall. The college debt had ballooned again under his administration. In spite of his vows to operate in the black, the campus building campaign and the nationwide economic slump had cost EMC its debt-free record. By 1922, the business manager had to report a debt in excess of $50,000.⁶⁷ And yet a new assembly hall was sorely needed. The chapel room in the Study Hall, or the College Building, later known as South Hall, could seat just under 300.⁶⁸ It was the spiritual heart of the college, not only the daily assembly hall for the student body, but also their church. In desperation, the faculty voted to take out the treasured old organ from Battle Creek College to make room for more seats.⁶⁹

A new, stand-alone chapel that would seat 800 was voted by the board, but where would the money come from?⁷⁰ Griggs launched an ambitious fund-raising campaign in the community and initially raised over $30,000, but then the campaign faded without meeting its goal of $200,000.⁷¹ As Vande Vere notes, in The Wisdom Seekers, Griggs’ “financial ability was limited to the concept of spending money to make money.”⁷² The school began to work on the chapel foundation in the fall of 1922, in spite of the financial shortfall, with President Griggs himself driving the horses that pulled the scraper to prepare the site for excavation.⁷³ But with no funding, the project stalled, and the gaping hole stood empty for almost a year.⁷⁴ Finally the board agreed to move forward, but only to enclose and heat the basement so that it could be used for chapel meetings that all students could attend. On New Year’s Day, 1924, the EMC student body gathered for its first public service in the basement chapel, presided over by a beaming President Griggs.⁷⁵

The school’s financial difficulties, however, had strained Griggs’ relationship with the board, and less than a year after the momentous chapel service he received a call to the Far Eastern Division. It was a wrenching separation for both the enthusiastic, well-loved president and the school. The three presidents who followed Griggs all served shorter terms than his seven years as President of EMC, all falling victim to the pressures of achieving elusive accreditation as a senior college. Guy Wolfkill (1925-1930), Lynn H. Wood (1930-1934), and Thomas W. Steen⁷⁶ (1934-1937), the first EMC alumnus (1910) to serve as president at his alma mater, continued to develop the school both academically and physically, but the accreditation issue overshadowed everything.

Seeking Accreditation

The pressure for EMC to seek accreditation came both from within the denomination and from outside forces, primarily the accrediting association for the Midwest, the North Central Association (NCA). Griggs, who had previously served as General Conference education secretary, had started the process during his presidency, understanding clearly that the school would be hard pressed to survive if it was not accredited. EMC achieved junior college accreditation with NCA in 1922.⁷⁷ That meant that EMC was functioning as a four-year institution with junior college status.

Within the denomination, the College of Medical Evangelists (CME) at Loma Linda, California, was accepting students only from accredited colleges under pressure from their own accrediting body and licensure requirements. Any aspiring Adventist medical student who wanted to attend the Adventist medical school had to graduate from an accredited school. For a short while the junior college accreditation sufficed, but in 1928, CME voted that as of the coming year they would no longer admit students from a junior college.⁷⁸ NCA also tightened the screws: no longer could four-year programs operate with junior college accreditation. They could: achieve senior college accreditation status; drop the final two years of their curriculum and truly become junior colleges; or, lose their accreditation entirely.⁷⁹

In the midst of the Depression, during the decade of the 1930s, EMC struggled to meet NCA’s standards for a senior college. Three areas were most difficult for the financially strapped school: an adequate endowment, a faculty with more reputable academic credentials, and improved facilities, especially in the library. On the first issue, the college and its board played the situation both ways. To the NCA they argued that a college like EMC should be treated the same as Catholic institutions in recognition of the faculty’s sacrificial salaries, allowing their “contributed services” to be counted as part of an increased endowment. To their own denomination they pleaded for increased college subsidies from the union conference.⁸⁰

EMC also invested considerable sums to support their faculty in pursuing advanced degrees. Between 1930 and the school year of 1933-34, the college went from no full-time faculty with doctorates to five of the nine department heads having achieved doctorates or at least three years of graduate study toward a doctorate.⁸¹

But the most concrete and visible issue—to everyone—was the library and its deficiencies. The EMC library occupied the top floor of the Study Hall, or College Building, the large wooden structure at the heart of the school and built in 1903. By 1935, the library boasted a catalogue of 17,000 books, plus periodicals and other materials, but, due to space challenges, the stacks were closed.⁸² The main concern of the accrediting teams, however, always came back to the precarious nature of the wooden building in which the library was housed. They made it quite clear that there would be no senior college accreditation without a brick, fireproof library.⁸³

When President Steen came to campus, he took hold of the issue immediately, and the college began a fund-raising campaign to build a new library with the goal of a $1 donation from every Lake Union church member.⁸⁴ The school optimistically broke ground in November of 1936, but did not order the construction materials until two months later, in January of 1937. When the NCA accrediting team came to campus that year, expecting EMC to have met the requirements for the last, extended deadline to receive senior college accreditation, the library was still a hole in the ground. Emmanuel Missionary College lost its existing junior college accreditation, and Steen left EMC, his presidency a victim to the circumstances.

To President Henry J. Klooster (1937-1943), also an EMC alumnus (1923), fell the job of picking up the pieces. In the July 1937 issue of the Student Movement, he wrote, “We wish to assure all our young people previously enrolled at the College, as well as prospective students that the College Board is aggressively committed to a forward-looking program of development for Emmanuel Missionary College.”⁸⁵ He promised that the new library would be finished and ready for dedication by the beginning of 1938. And it was. On December 20, 1937, the school declared a half-day off from classes, and the student body moved all 20,000 volumes from the top floor of the wooden administration building to their new, brick library.⁸⁶ In April of 1939, the North Central Association accredited EMC as a senior college.⁸⁷ Klooster left EMC in 1943 for the presidency of Pacific Union College.

Commitment to Mission Service

Through the difficult years of the Depression, the serious financial strains, and the accreditation disappointments, the central theme that emerged—the ideal that buoyed up the entire campus—was the commitment to mission service, especially overseas. The message was proclaimed everywhere. Class mottos sounded the call to serve: “The World’s Need Is Our Call” (1926); “The Master is come and calleth for thee” (1929); “To extend the kingdom” (1933); “Into the Midst of the World’s Needs” (1935); and “Service Unto the End” (1937).⁸⁸ The Student Movement and the Cardinal yearbook featured EMC alumni serving as missionaries around the world: lists of former students and their fields of service; letters from far-flung corners of the globe—the Philippine Islands, Chile, India, Haiti, to name just a few; and stories of missionary martyrdom. The 1931 Cardinal honored alumnus Herbert K. Smith, murdered by a gang of bandits while walking on an evangelistic tour in China where he served in the Kweichow province with his wife, Thelma Chew Smith, also an alumna of EMC.

Herbert and Thelma Smith and their fellow EMC missionaries became the heroes of EMC’s campus culture. In the chapel building, a bulletin board posted the pictures and names of alumni who had gone into service as missionaries overseas.⁸⁹ In chapel services, Sabbath School and church, vespers programs, and even the Saturday night entertainment, missionary stories abounded. Missionary clubs of every description sprang up all over campus. The Missionary Volunteer Society advertised in the Student Movement: “Planning on being a missionary? Then meet with the European, the South American, the African, or the Far East mission band and get acquainted with the field and its possibilities. Returned missionaries are always with us to help you find your place.”⁹⁰

One non-traditional EMC alumna who, along with her husband, made her commitment to the mission field in the 1940s, inspired tens of thousands with her writing and speaking about their experiences in Africa and other stories. Josephine Cunnington Edwards (1944) served for seven years with her husband, Lowell Edwards, in what was then Nyasaland, now Malawi. Over her writing career Edwards published thirty-four books, including The Enchanted Pillowcase and Other Stories, Tales from Africa, and Swift Arrow. Andrews University awarded Edwards an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters in 1978.

The next two decades of the 1940s and 1950s transformed the small school in southwestern Michigan as surely as they did the rest of the world. Having former classmates spread around the globe made the EMC students sensitive to worldwide events. News of the war in Europe made its way into the Student Movement through reports from alumni and fellow church members abroad. A sense of foreboding prevailed. The Student Association president, John Miklos, began the 1940-1941 school year talking of “a very troublous world,” and President Klooster wrote in the student paper of democracy’s “last ditch struggle for its life.”⁹¹

At the Autumn Council of 1939, the Seventh-day Adventist church adopted an initiative on Adventist college campuses to provide Medical Cadet Corps training with the purpose of giving “young men a training before war breaks out that will enable them to secure noncombatant medical service in the event of being drafted into military service.”⁹² EMC had actually started teaching MCC classes in 1938 and by 1940 one hundred and sixty EMC men were enrolled and drilling on campus. By the next summer the exodus of young men from campus to military training camps had begun.⁹³

After Pearl Harbor, everything on campus revolved around the war, from patriotic programming to rationing and skimping in support of “the war effort” to overwhelming concern for the EMC men in the service. Newspapers were eagerly awaited, but some students listened for more up-to-date war news on their contraband radios.⁹⁴ Extra-curricular events on campus reflected the preoccupation with world events far beyond its borders. The October Festival of 1942, for example, featured skits of military life and all the service songs—“Anchors Aweigh,” the ”Caisson Song,” and the “Marine Hymn.”⁹⁵ The vespers services of organ music and poetry by Professor and Mrs. Hannum were a source of solace to the anxious students.⁹⁶ Gone for the immediate future were the visions of overseas missionary service; global travel was just too dangerous.⁹⁷

The EMC students experienced their own privations on their campus home front. Everyone turned their ration books over to the cafeteria so that provisions such as sugar could be purchased.⁹⁸ The kitchen itself joined the war effort: “In cooperation with the national effort to conserve food, they plan to can five thousand gallons of fruits and vegetables this season.”⁹⁹ The college began to save scrap paper, estimating that collecting the extra paper would save $30 to $35 a month.¹⁰⁰ Student automobiles disappeared from campus as gas and tire rationing hit the nation. Only a handful of ministerial students could get a few extra coupons so that they could meet their church appointments around southwestern Michigan, but even they had to scrimp and figure carefully.¹⁰¹ But the scarcity that the EMC women bemoaned most loudly was nylon stockings, a required feature of their campus attire but in short supply because nylon was needed for military supplies such as parachutes. The dean monitored the wearing of hose as the women left the dormitory for classes, and the cafeteria matron checked them as they came down the stairs to the dining room for meals. If they were not wearing the obligatory stockings, they paid a $1 fine. Consequently, nylons were often the subject of earnest prayer.¹⁰²

Most difficult of all, the students of EMC tried to carry on their academic and campus routines under serious emotional duress, dominated by concern for that long list of young men, their former classmates and brothers and fiancés, who had entered military service and were far away, some in dangerous circumstances. They wrote copiously, sending letters and eagerly awaiting replies. The Student Movement urged them on: “The men in service are sacrificing a great deal for those who remain at home. One of the ways we have of backing them up is to send them mail. A war correspondent recently reported that everywhere he went—in the tropical jungle, on the high seas, in the snows of Alaska—there was one cry, ‘Tell the folks at home to send us mail.’”¹⁰³ Said Jeanne Wagner Jordan simply, “It was our patriotic duty.”¹⁰⁴

The Student Movement began publishing a feature entitled, “Mementos of Our Marching Men” with shared excerpts from EMC servicemen’s letters. They spoke of the loneliness of being far away from friends and family, the challenges of remaining true to their desires to observe the Sabbath, what it was like to go into battle. Arthur Harms wrote from the southwest Pacific: “We had some very close calls as far as bombing and strafings go, and . . . that really scares a person. Anyone who says they are not afraid when the stuff goes on, is just a liar.”¹⁰⁵

In spite of the disruption and stress of the war, campus life moved forward. The school even erected three new brick buildings in an effort to update the aging wooden physical plant. The new plant services building went up in 1940. Construction on an applied arts building for the College Press and programs such as woodworking and a machine shop took place during the summer of 1941, before the war really impacted American life. The new building, with its generous space for vocational education, reinforced EMC’s original commitment to educating the hands as well as the mind.¹⁰⁶

The most ambitious part of the building program, a new administration building with much needed classrooms and faculty offices, was in the final approval and planning stages when the United States entered the war. Some on campus became nervous that the supply chains for building materials would soon be cut off. When religion professor Edwin A. Thiele voiced his concerns to President Klooster and advised him to just go ahead and order the supplies even if he did not yet have the final authorization, “He just smiled at me and told me that he had just given the contract for the purchase of the steel.”¹⁰⁷

Klooster’s foresight paid off. By August of 1942, the business office moved into its new quarters.¹⁰⁸ When school started in September, students met in five of the unfinished classrooms still being plastered around them.¹⁰⁹ In March of 1943, eleven faculty members moved into brand-new offices in what came to be known as Teachers’ Lobby.¹¹⁰ By that summer, the college had a completed administration building, now Nethery Hall.

Reaching Maturity

The end of the war brought jubilation and services of thanksgiving to EMC. It also brought an era of change to the institution. In the fall of 1945, the enrollment tallied around 450. In January of 1946 came an influx of returning soldiers. By fall, the enrollment had risen to almost 600. A year later, the enrollment reached 975. By 1949, it broke the 1,100 mark.¹¹¹ The campus was overflowing, with no place to house all the students. Accommodations for married students were in especially short supply, but the college administration struggled to find enough space for single students as well. A small trailer court and a quickly assembled community called “Tin Town,” a collection of rather flimsy duplexes built from military surplus materials, helped to house the married couples. In the dormitories, rooms were divided and roommates “tripled” up. Single students were housed in the attics and basement of the chapel building and administration building. Quonset huts as overflow for the men sprang up behind Burman Hall, the men’s dormitory.¹¹² In 1947, the housing crunch finally resulted in an exciting development for EMC’s female population: a brand-new, brick dormitory which would be named Lamson Hall in honor of Mary E. Lamson, dean of women from 1918 to 1935.¹¹³

The return of the war veterans changed Emmanuel Missionary College in other ways. The students on the GI bill, a federal law that helped provide veterans with funding to continue their education following World War II, took their studies very seriously, determined to make up for lost time and prepare for their future. In addition to their academic studies, many of them worked long hours to make ends meet. School policies forbade working off campus, but pay for campus work was very low, and some of the men found a way to sneak out and work the night shift at local factories for as much as $2 an hour rather than the rate of 45 cents an hour for some of the best campus jobs.¹¹⁴ Social life and mores changed as well. The veterans, coming home from war, resisted the strict regulations that the college was used to imposing on the students: curfews, regulations on automobiles, and dating rules. As one soldier put it: “We Adventist soldiers coming home have been under restriction and regulation tough enough and long enough to never again get the consent of a college president to kiss a girl on campus!”¹¹⁵

As both black and white veterans came to the EMC campus from their war experiences, the school’s discriminatory policies such as segregated seating in chapel and in the dining room became ever more glaring. For years the college had followed racially inequitable practices, some of them unspoken but some institutionalized by board actions, such as the vote in 1931 to restrict the admission of black students to EMC: “It was voted that colored students from outside the Lake Union Conference territory be not accepted at Emmanuel College. It was further voted that only such colored students from territory of the Lake Union Conference who have completed fourteen grades of work or those who have completed the high school course and desire to take pre-medical work be admitted at Emmanuel Missionary College.”¹¹⁶

In the 1930s and throughout the ensuing decades, once the black students arrived on campus they were also not treated inclusively. The dining room hostess directed all the black students to tables set aside for them. When, in 1937, the black students requested that the practice be stopped, the board voted “To reaffirm our policy of asking all colored students to be seated as a group under the direction of the matron in the College Dining Room.”¹¹⁷ When the topic came up again the following year, the board granted the black students the “coveted pleasure of segregating themselves.”¹¹⁸

After World War II, men such as Henry Doswell, a black veteran, and Louis Gordon, a white veteran, who had served together in the army, both felt strongly that they should not be treated differently on campus, that they should not be separated in their daily activities.¹¹⁹ In the cafeteria, the black students took the initiative to integrate the tables. There were no recriminations, as far as the students remembered, and that policy disappeared.¹²⁰ In Lamson Hall, the women were integrated, but in the men’s dormitories, black and white men were not allowed to room together, as of the late 1940s¹²¹ And the administration continued to draw the line absolutely against interracial dating. Blacks and whites were not even allowed to roller skate together in the new gymnasium (built in 1949), a policy which continued until 1954.¹²²

The large influx of veterans to EMC following World War II, bringing with them experiences from beyond the boundaries of the small rural campus, set the tone for the decade of the 1950s: an era of relative plenty; new standards both academic and social; a new kind of student engagement; and growth and maturation. In his history of Battle Creek College and Emmanuel Missionary College, The Wisdom Seekers, E. K. Vand Vere reflects, “Sometimes institutions, like people, require a breathing spell before a long leap forward. Such in essence was the experience of Emmanuel Missionary College from 1950 to 1959.”¹²³

The late 1940s and 1950s saw a building boom on campus, partly due to the increases in enrollment and probably also thanks to the business acumen of EMC alumnus (1920) President Alvin W. Johnson (1943-1950). Gone, for a time, were the years of handwringing over institutional poverty. Besides Lamson Hall, President Johnson directed the construction of other brick buildings that moved the physical plant of EMC into the modern era: the Education Building (now Bell Hall) in 1947-1948 and the gymnasium (later named for Johnson) in 1948-1949. By the time Johnson left the college presidency, the net worth of the institution stood at more than two million dollars.¹²⁴ The school was in good condition financially, and Johnson’s successor, Percy Christian (1950-1955), continued the progress on campus with the construction of the “college store” (and barbershop, beauty shop, and post office all in one service plaza), a new presidential residence in red brick, a new music building (now Hamel Hall in honor of Paul Hamel, long-time music teacher, band director, and chair) and the Life Sciences Building (now Marsh Hall in honor of Frank and Alice Marsh, long-time faculty in biology and home economics, respectively).

Under the auspices of President Christian EMC developed its academic profile as well, offering an expanded curriculum to an increasingly diverse student population.¹²⁵ Christian also facilitated the hiring of faculty with advanced degrees, as the institution fulfilled its commitment to meeting accreditation standards. Standing on the shoulders of those who had gone before them, a community of dedicated Seventh-day Adventist scholars with professional credentials were attracted to the college. In 1953, fourteen members of the faculty held doctorates, by 1958 that number had almost doubled to 26. In 1961 President Floyd Rittenhouse (1955-1963), who had graduated as president of his EMC senior class (1928), would report that the number had risen to 41.¹²⁶

In spite of heavy teaching loads, a number of the incoming faculty pursued research in their areas of expertise, bringing from their graduate studies a new professionalism to the college. One such faculty member, Alice Garrett Marsh, for example, conducted nutrition research with her students. Even before Marsh arrived on campus, as part of her hiring agreement, she requested two pieces of equipment to support her research projects: a machine for measuring basal energy metabolism and a freezer in which to preserve samples.¹²⁷ Very soon after joining the EMC faculty, Marsh launched into research, studying protein intake and low hemoglobin during the first ever EMC blood drive.¹²⁸ Other faculty joined Marsh in modeling a research culture and engaging their students.

Social change began to occur with the return of the GIs, but the students, not quite so compliant as the students of the 1930s and early 1940s, continued to push for new directions in campus policies. Newly minted PhD and French teacher Daniel Augsburger took on the post of Student Association (SA) faculty sponsor. He inherited an organization primarily responsible for planning social functions but encouraged the SA to engage in more serious issues, such as establishing “Interracial Day,” an event intended to improve race relations on campus. Under his tutelage students also learned how to exert their influence through student government. One of their first endeavors was to change the “lights out” policy, one of the most unpopular rules in all the dormitories, which dictated that room lights automatically went out at 10 p.m., leaving students to find innovative ways of studying any later. Their campaign succeeded.¹²⁹

Emmanuel Missionary College developed and matured, both inside and out. The era of the 1950s culminated with the realization of a long-held dream—a campus church, sacred space in which the college community could come together to worship. For the first fifty-eight years of the school’s existence, the campus had held their services in a variety of multiuse venues. The new Pioneer Memorial Church had one purpose—“An House of Prayer for All People.” Daniel Ekkens, who was a student during the construction of the new church, remembers, “When the Pioneer Memorial Church was complete, we met in the chapel one last time. After prayer and a song, we were all told to bring our hymnals and walk to the new church, which we did.”¹³⁰ The congregation worshipped in their house of prayer for the first time on February 14, 1959, and, once the church was completely paid off, dedicated their campus church on May 21, 1960, with their former pastor, J. L. Tucker, and their new pastor, James Rhoads. Emmanuel Missionary College stood poised at the beginning of a new era.¹³¹

Over the almost sixty years of its existence, Emmanuel Missionary College nurtured and graduated students who went on to serve their church and world in many capacities. Scores went on to become educators themselves, particularly in Adventist institutions across the nation and the globe. Some even returned to their alma mater. Edwin R. Thiele (1895-1986), who graduated in 1918, returned to EMC to teach in 1937 after a missionary career in China and earning a master’s degree in archaeology at the University of Chicago. Thiele’s scholarship earned him recognition well beyond Adventist circles. He published his doctoral dissertation of 1943 (University of Chicago) in 1951 as The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings, a “meticulous study” of the chronology of the Hebrew kings, still considered an important work.¹³²

Another scholar who returned to teach at her alma mater when it became Andrews University, Leona Glidden Running (1916-2014)¹³³ attended EMC from 1933 to 1937. Her extraordinary facility for languages manifested itself at an early age. After serving the church in a number of capacities, including working as a translator for the Voice of Prophecy and doing editorial work on Ministry magazine at the General Conference, she pursued seminary studies in biblical languages at the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary in Takoma Park, Maryland, and completed a doctorate at Johns Hopkins University under the preeminent biblical scholar William Foxwell Albright. The seminary recruited Running to teach Greek and Hebrew. She became the first woman to teach full-time at the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary. Running moved to Berrien Springs in 1960 when the Seminary merged with Emmanuel Missionary College, teaching languages such as Egyptian, Akkadian, and Syriac.

Countless other EMC alumni served the Seventh-day Adventist church as missionaries, pastors, church administrators, and evangelists. There is evidence that William Henry Branson (1887-1961), fourteenth president of the General Conference (1950-1954), attended Emmanuel Missionary College in its earliest days, although record-keeping at the time was limited.¹³⁴ Prominent evangelist George Vandeman (1916-2000), a 1942 graduate, made an early contribution to Adventist television ministry with the founding of It Is Written in 1956, now the longest running religious television program broadcast in color. Herman Kibble (1931-), a 1952 graduate, served both his God and his country as a military chaplain. He was the first African-American Adventist chaplain in the United States Navy, and the first Adventist chaplain ever to achieve the rank of captain in the Navy, where he served from 1969 to 1993.¹³⁵

Other alumni also made significant contributions beyond Adventist circles. Shirley Neil Pettis (1924-2016), for example, who graduated from Emmanuel Missionary College Academy in 1942 and attended EMC in 1942-1943, forged a career as a journalist and then replaced her husband, Jerry Pettis, in the U.S. House of Representatives when he was killed in a plane crash. She served as a representative from the state of California from 1975 to 1979. During her tenure, she advanced legislation that had been initiated by her husband to protect the desert lands of California.¹³⁶

Campus in Transition

In the fall of 1958, at the Annual Council of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, the body voted to move the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary and the graduate programs that comprised Potomac University to the Berrien Springs campus of Emmanuel Missionary College.¹³⁷ Initially, even after the graduate programs began their physical move to Michigan, many regarded the university and the college as two separate entities simply existing side by side. Neither wanted to lose its identity: the university as a General Conference institution and EMC as the Lake Union college.¹³⁸ However, logistical concerns, the demands of accreditation, and the State of Michigan all pushed the institutions toward official integration.

At the same time, the church and the institution wrestled with the question of a name for the new entity. Potomac University did not seem appropriate for a midwestern school. On April 4, 1960, the university board voted to “adopt the name Andrews University,” and on April 6 the Spring Council of the General Conference voted the same, saying, “This name was chosen because it honors our first missionary, a scholarly, dedicated man, J.N. Andrews . . . ”¹³⁹ In November the institution filed an amendment for a name change with the State of Michigan, for a $5 legal fee. On November 23, 1960, Emmanuel Missionary College became Andrews University.¹⁴⁰

Emmanuel Missionary College Presidents (1901-1960)

E. A. Sutherland (1901-1904), N. W. Kauble (1904-1908), O. J. Graf (1908-1917), C. L. Benson (1917-1918), Frederick Griggs (1918-1924), G. F. Wolfkill (1924-1930), Lynn H. Wood (1930-1934), Thomas W. Steen (1934-1937), H. J. Klooster (1937-1943), Alvin W. Johnson (1943-1950), Percy W. Christian (1950-1955), Floyd O. Rittenhouse (1955-1960).

Selected Sources

Advent Review and Herald of the Sabbath, Battle Creek, MI.

Battle Creek College Board. Minutes Collection, Center for Adventist Research, James White Library, Andrews University, Berrien Springs, Michigan, United States.

Cardinal. Berrien Springs, MI: Emmanuel Missionary College.

Emmanuel Missionary College Board. Minutes Collection, Center for Adventist Research, James White Library, Andrews University.

Emanuel Missionary College Calendar/Bulletin. Berrien Springs, MI: College Press.

Emmanuel Missionary College Faculty. Minutes Collection. Center for Adventist Research, James White Library, Andrews University.

Emmanuel Missionary College Union. Minutes Collection. Center for Adventist Research, James White Library, Andrews University.

Founders’ Golden Anniversary Bulletin of Battle Creek College and Emmanuel Missionary College: 1874-1924. Berrien Springs, MI: College Press, 1924.

The General Conference Bulletin. Battle Creek, MI: The Seventh-day Adventist General Conference, 1901.

General Conference Committee. General Conference Archives. https://documents.adventistarchives.org/Minutes/Forms/AllItems.aspx?RootFolder=%2fMinutes%2fGCC&FolderCTID=0x012000F14CCE0E47CC244BB8EA93FE785ED8BE00941CF68C17217C4CA49DE1E876677255

Jones Gray, Meredith. As We Set Forth. Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews University, 2002.

Journal Era, Berrien Springs, MI: Journal-Era Publishing Company.

Magan, Percy T. Percy T. Magan Collection (Collection 229). Center for Adventist Research, James White Library, Andrews University.

Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) Central Educational Association, Minutes Collection, Center for Adventist Research, James White Library, Andrews University.

Student Movement. Berrien Springs, MI: Emmanuel Missionary College.

Madison Institutions Collection (Collection 167). Center for Adventist Research, James White Library, Andrews University.

Vande Vere, E.K. E.K. Vande Vere Collection: The Wisdom Seekers (Collection 4). Center for Adventist Research, James White Library, Andrews University.

Vande Vere, E.K. The Wisdom Seekers. Nashville, TN: Southern Publishing Association, 1972.

White, Ellen G. Ellen G. White Letters and Manuscripts. Center for Adventist Research, Andrews University.

Notes