Page 448

A SALUTARY INFLUENCE for old age." Meeting a few weeks later, the board directed President Hefelbower to make the necessary preliminary inquiries. He soon learned what he must already have suspected, that one sentence in Carnegie's letter meant exactly what it said, and thus effectively eliminated Gettysburg from participating in the new pension program: institutions which "are under control of a sect or require trustees (or a majority thereof), officers, faculty, or students to belong to any specified sect or which impose any theological test are to be excluded." In its second annual report, published in 1907, the Carnegie Foundation stated that 109 colleges and universities had some such disqualifying regulation. In the case of Gettysburg, the report noted, it was only the charter amendment of 1894, requiring that three-fourths of the trustees be members of the Lutheran church, that ran counter to Carnegie's dictum. The report declared that it was clearly the duty of all of the 109 institutions, "in justice to their own teachers, to consider the question whether the substitution of a relation of sympathy and tradition in the place of formal legal relationship does not lie in the direction of true progress." In March 1909 President Hefelbower was a member of a ten-person committee which met with representatives of the Carnegie Foundation in New York to present the claims of the so-called denominational colleges. They were not able to effect any immediate changes in foundation policy.56 In June 1909 the faculty asked the board of trustees to seek removal of the 1894 amendment from the College charter. A committee was appointed to bring in a recommendation, but possibly because a change in administration was then occurring it did not report. Then, in February 1911, the faculty passed six resolutions repeating their earlier request. They told the trustees that "the sympathetic relation of the College with the Lutheran church for more than 60 years before the amendment was fully as strong as it has been since." The only important effect of the amendment was to exclude the College from the benefits of the Carnegie program, something "manifestly unfair to our teachers who have given their faithful services for salaries acknowledged to be wholly inadequate." It was also unfair to the College, they argued, depriving it of the "comparative rank with other colleges to which it is justly 56Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Second Annual Report (New York, 1907), pp. 42-43, 60; Gettysburgian, March 3, 1909. By 1907 the foundation had placed fifty-five institutions on its accepted list, including five in Pennsylvania. One of the latter was Dickinson, whose trustees declared that their college was "never owned or controlled by any church body" and who directed the president "in the future to report the college as non-sectarian." See ibid., pp. 7-11, and Sellers, Dickinson College, p. 313. 44