Rollins College
Rollins College is a private liberal arts college in Winter Park, Florida. It was founded in November 1885 and has about 30 undergraduate majors and several master's programs. Florida's fourth oldest post-secondary institution, and oldest private university, it has an approximate enrollment of 3,000 students, composed of roughly 2,500 undergraduates and 500 postgraduates.
History
Rollins College is Florida's fourth oldest post-secondary institution, and has been independent, nonsectarian, and coeducational from conception. Lucy Cross, founder of the Daytona Institute for Young Women in 1880, first placed the matter of establishing a college in Florida before the Congregational Churches in 1884. In 1885, the church put her on the committee in charge of determining the location of their first college in Florida. Cross is known as the "Mother of Rollins College." Rollins was incorporated, organized, and named in the Lyman Park building in nearby Sanford, Florida, on April 28, 1885, opening for classes in Winter Park on November 4 of that year. It was established by New England Congregationalists who sought to bring their style of liberal arts education to the frontier St. John's basin. A commemorative plaque listing the names of the founders was dedicated 1 March 1954 and is displayed in historic Downtown Sanford.Early benefactors of Rollins College included Chicago businessman Alonzo Rollins, for whom the college is named. Rollins made substantial donations to enable the founding of the college, and was a trustee and its first treasurer.
Another early benefactor was Franklin Fairbanks of St. Johnsbury, Vermont. Fairbanks was president of the family business, Fairbanks Scales, and was a founder of Winter Park, a donor to Rollins College and a trustee.
In March of 1936 during a visit to Central Florida, U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt was conferred an honorary degree in literature at the Knowles Chapel on campus. Other U.S. presidents who have visited the campus include Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama.
Firing of John Andrew Rice and required loyalty pledge
President Hamilton Holt decided to require all professors to make a "loyalty pledge" to keep their jobs. In March 1933, Holt fired John Andrew Rice, an atheist scholar and unorthodox teacher, whom Holt had hired, along with three other "golden personalities", in his push to put Rollins on the cutting edge of innovative education, for refusing to sign the loyalty pledge. The American Association of University Professors censured Rollins. The widely publicized case was investigated by the American Association of University Professors, and it is known as the "Rollins College Case" among historians of tenure. The four fired faculty quickly founded experimental Black Mountain College, with a gift from a former Rollins College faculty member.Okinawa statue
In October 1994, the school made international headlines when the government of Japan, per the request of its Okinawa Prefecture, asked for the return of a statue that was taken as war loot after the Battle of Okinawa in 1945 by Clinton C. Nichols, at that time, a lieutenant commander in the United States Navy and a Rollins alumnus. Nichols had presented the statue of Ninomiya Sontoku, a prominent 19th-century Japanese agricultural leader, philosopher, moralist, and economist, to then-President Hamilton Holt, who promised to keep the statue permanently in the main lobby of the Warren Administration Building. At first, the school rejected the offer made by Okinawan officials, who suggested that a replica of the statue will be presented to the school if the original was returned to the island. After consulting both with the U.S. State Department and the school's board of trustees, then-President Rita Bornstein accepted the offer and the statue was returned to Okinawa in 1995 in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. In addition to providing the school with a replica of the original statue, the government of Okinawa and Rollins signed "an agreement of cooperation" that pledges to develop additional cooperative projects between the college and Shogaku Junior and Senior High School, the Okinawan school where the original statue has been placed.Kairis case
On March 31, 1998, the body of Jennifer Leah Kairis, a sophomore student, was found in her Ward Hall dormitory room by a residential assistant. Kairis, who had attended a fraternity party held by the Tau Kappa Epsilon chapter on campus hours before she had died, was both legally intoxicated and had a large amount of prescription drugs in her system. At first, the assistant medical examiner at the Orange County coroner's office ruled Kairis' death as a homicide. However, that conclusion was quickly changed after Shashi Gore, the county's chief medical examiner ruled that she had died as a result of an accidental prescription drug overdose. Kairis' parents, who always believed their daughter was raped and murdered by her college boyfriend, requested a lengthy state investigation into their daughter's death due to their belief that the Winter Park Police Department botched the case. On March 4, 2004, Bruce Hyma, the Miami-Dade County chief medical examiner and expert toxicologist hired by State Attorney Lawson Lamar ruled that Kairis had committed suicide via a prescription drug overdose. The seven-year investigation was officially closed on April 13, 2005. Regardless of the investigation's outcome, the Kairis family asked then Governor Jeb Bush to bring in an outside medical examiner to take another look at the case and autopsy results and order an independent investigation of their daughter's death to resolve what they called the "Dueling Medical Examiners".Security measures
In September 2011, as a result of robbery suspects' use of the campus to hide from law enforcement officers as well as the armed robbery of two students who were sitting in a car outside their dormitory within one week, the college's administration initiated discussions on new security measures. Some measures included blocking or limiting access to four of the school's entrances and installing new security cameras to assure student and faculty safety on campus. On January 7, 2014, a full-scale drill with armed police officers was held to make sure the college was ready in the event a hostile incident was to take place on campus. In October 2014, school officials alerted the student body of four incidents at one of its public parking garages near the campus where female students were threatened by a male aggressor.Campus
The campus contains a range of amenities, including a theater for performing arts; the Cornell Campus Center; and the Alfond Sports Center. The college is in Winter Park, FL, across from Park Avenue.Architecture
The Rollins campus has highly decorative Spanish and Mediterranean Revival style architecture. According to College Historian and Professor Emeritus Jack C. Lane, the Spanish-Mediterranean style blended best with the natural environment of Florida, and that Rollins 8th president Hamilton Holt felt "the college's unified curriculum should be reflected in the architectural style." Lane goes on to state that Rollins' campus architecture has stayed consistent since its opening, and that "the college has been extremely fortunate to have leaders who recognized the significance of architectural style for the educational process. By making certain that new buildings retained a harmony of design, these leaders left present and future generations a deeply profound legacy: architectural beauty and unity create a spiritual sense of place that inspires the entire educational and social life of a college."Pugsley Hall and Mayflower Hall
In 1930, President Holt announced the gifts of Cornelius Pugsley and an anonymous donor for the construction of two women's dormitories, with their interiors designed by Virginia Huntington Robie. Pugsley and Mayflower Halls were dedicated in 1931. Mayflower Hall received its name from the Pilgrim ship. The Society of Friends at Chalfont St. Giles, Buckinghamshire, gave Rollins a 16-inch section of beam from the ship, which, it had been discovered, had been salvaged to build a haybarn in England. The block of wood was placed above the fireplace in Mayflower Hall. Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity moved into Pugsley Hall in 1997 and have occupied it all but one academic year since. In the 1990s, there were rows of shrubbery on either side of the sidewalk leading up to Pugsley Hall, which sits at the end of Park Avenue.Chase Hall
Chase Hall was built in 1908 and named for Loring Augustus Chase. It was built using white sand-lime brick with stone trim and a Ludowici tile roof. At its construction it contained eight double and six single rooms, along with a large common room.The hall was used as a men's dormitory through 1966, then until 1999 it was used by the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity, followed by the Phi Delta Theta fraternity. The Lucy Cross Center for Women and Their Allies was established in 2010 at Rollins College in Chase Hall, Room 205. The center is named after Lucy Cross, the "Mother of Rollins College".