This special anniversary issue of the Independent features an excerpt from the essay by former Chronicle of Higher Education correspondent Welch Suggs, written for Meeting the Challenge: America’s Independent Colleges and Universities Since 1956, a volume prepared as part of the recognition of the 50th anniversary of CIC’s founding in 1956.

The 50-year history of the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) is a story of helping member colleges and universities find ways to increase their visibility and providing them with a broad range of initiatives to improve the quality of education and strengthen institutional resources. In its earliest days, what was then the Council for the Advancement of Small Colleges (CASC) was dedicated to helping its members raise money and win regional accreditation. Over the past five decades, the organization has been transformed into a dynamic association of independent colleges and universities working together to support institutional leadership, advance institutional excellence, and enhance private higher education’s contributions to society….

“The Noise You Hear is Progress”

CIC got its start in the years after World War II as an organization of colleges trying to help themselves. It was not an advocacy group, but instead enabled like-minded college leaders to share ways of raising money and gaining regional accreditation.

In December 1955, K. Duane Hurley received a letter from the Ford Foundation in his office at Salem College in West Virginia. The foundation had just announced a $210 million initiative to supplement faculty salaries at 630 private colleges, whose enrollments were burgeoning as soldiers returned to school on the GI Bill. Salem College, Hurley was informed, was to be one of the recipients.

…Hurley contacted the foundation, where an officer told him with deep embarrassment that the foundation had intended to make the grant to another Salem College, a women’s college in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

The experience epitomized Hurley’s deepest frustration as a college president. Small colleges like his were respectable educational institutions—Salem had graduated four United States Senators and two West Virginia governors—but meeting the benchmarks required for regional accreditation had never been a need or a priority. Now, Salem, like many small colleges, needed the imprimatur of a regional accreditor to receive money from foundations, corporations, and other sources….

Shortly after the Ford Foundation episode, Hurley…identified 125 colleges in the same position as Salem: lacking regional accreditation but having credits approved by state departments of education, state universities, or other accredited colleges or universities. He…invited them to discuss ways they could work together to improve their common situation.

The group decided they needed a self-help organization. In barely a day, a set of committees organized by Hurley came up with a name, a purpose, membership qualifications, and personnel. The group decided to call itself the Council for the Advancement of Small Colleges… The Council would be a service organization designed to help colleges improve their educational programs, thus enabling them to obtain accreditation. Hurley served as the first president of the group, but CASC’s board of directors decided the following month that a full-time staff member was needed. Alfred T. Hill of the Council for Financial Aid to Education was named Executive Secretary and assumed his duties on September 1, 1956.
Operation Bootstrap

…CASC’s early programs were collectively dubbed “Operation Bootstrap… To gain accreditation, and perhaps to survive, the colleges attracted to CASC needed to increase their enrollments, expand their campus facilities, add books to their libraries, and improve the scholarly credentials of their professors, and all of these improvements required more operating funds and larger endowments. “Operation Bootstrap” proposed to aid them in all these endeavors by helping them strengthen their academic programs, deploying consultants to advise colleges on fundraising and fiscal management, and raising money directly for member institutions.

…Hill left the CASC executive directorship in January 1968 after seeing the Council through its infancy, raising nearly $1.5 million in corporate and foundation donations, and, in his words, breaking the “vicious circle.” His successor was Richard P. Saunders, who had been president of the Institute for Human Resources Development and of Future for Children, Inc. Saunders served for only eight months, owing to conflicts with the board, and was succeeded by Roger J. Voskuyl, president of Westmont College and a longtime member of the CASC board. Voskuyl led the Council until 1974, moving the offices in 1969 to the National Center for Higher Education at One Dupont Circle in Washington, DC. When he retired, the Council hired Gary H. Quehl, a college administrator who had been executive director of the College Center of the Finger Lakes. In 1986, Quehl left CASC to become president of the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education. He was succeeded by vice president Allen P. Splete, who had been president of Westminster College in Pennsylvania and a vice president at St. Lawrence University in New York. Splete led the Council of Independent Colleges (as it was now called) for 14 years. CIC’s current president is Richard Ekman, who was selected for the position after Splete’s retirement in 2000….

The Key Constituency—Presidents

In the 1970s, the Council’s programming priority became professional development for college presidents at member institutions. Many college leaders were only partly prepared for their jobs—many had been classroom instructors, some were ministers, and others were former administrators or business leaders…. Between 1969 and 1974, CASC received five grants from the U.S. Office of Education for an “Institute for the In-Service Training of Administrators and Members of Boards of Trustees of Small Colleges.” The annual institute (the forerunner to today’s Presidents Institute) was open to CASC member institutions and other colleges, and it gave campus leaders a chance to learn more about building relationships with trustees, fundraising, and fiscal management….

Another long-standing annual event for presidents is the Conversation Between Foundation Officers and College and University Presidents. Started in 1987, the meeting takes place in New York City and features presentations from foundation presidents and officers and a structured exchange of ideas between the worlds of small colleges and philanthropic foundations.

More recently, CIC expanded its offerings with other programs designed specifically for presidents. In 2005, CIC began a new program on Presidential Vocation and Institutional Mission. These seminars, designed to assist presidents in deepening their own sense of vocation in the context of their institutions’ distinct missions, are supported by Lilly Endowment Inc….

Making the Case

From its earliest years, one of CIC’s central tasks has been to help its members tell their stories to a wider audience. To that end, the organization has published books and other materials, conducted national publicity campaigns, and offered workshops to give institutions a chance to show that “small colleges can help you make it big.”

A key challenge has always been how to lift the bushel basket off small colleges and let their lights shine, both singly and collectively. Wrote Alfred Hill in 1961:

The greatest weaknesses to date have been their failure to create a clear, sharp public image and their failure to capitalize on the advantages of their group impact.…

Hill and his successors were determined to make a big splash, not just on behalf of CASC/CIC as an organization but for the members as well. The CIC executive directors and presidents always wrote widely, delivered numerous addresses, and networked relentlessly with foundations and higher education associations. As far back as Hurley’s presidency, the Council began collecting and publishing research on its members to help educate donors, potential students, and other constituents about the strengths and characteristics of small colleges….In 2005, the Council continued these efforts with an updated approach: “Making the Case,” a dynamic website (http://www.cic.edu/makingthecase/index.asp) containing a collection of data-backed assertions about the effectiveness of small and mid-sized independent colleges…

Developing the Leadership Team

With encouragement from presidents, CIC has always placed a priority on programming for other campus leaders. Over the years, CIC has offered a wide range of seminars, research tools, and other services to academic, business, and student affairs officers as well as directors of libraries, information technology, and institutional research, and also division and department chairs and faculty members…. In the early 1970s, the Council began what became its second major annual event, the Institute for Chief Academic Officers.

From Accreditation to Validation

In a recent interview, Gary Quehl noted that CIC has had five long-serving presidents. Each, he thought, had been the right person for the Council at the right time: Alfred Hill to shepherd CASC through its infancy; Roger Voskuyl to strengthen the ties with the founding membership; Quehl himself to make it a national service organization; Allen Splete to expand the membership and obtain new grant support; and Richard Ekman to widen CIC’s services to people in many leadership roles on campus, increase membership, and raise CIC’s national visibility.

Today, CIC is an organization that provides college presidents and other campus leaders with opportunities to learn from one another’s experience. Both CIC and its member institutions are more robust today than they were in 1956. But the challenges of 2006 are no easier than the challenges of 1956, and the organization must continue to evolve in order to meet them effectively.

Copies of Meeting the Challenge: America’s Independent Colleges and Universities Since 1956 can be ordered here or by phone at (202) 466-7230. Discounts are available for purchases of multiple copies.