Page 538

A SALUTARY INFLUENCE that it would take care of the demand of the Church and our constituency - it would provide an asset instead of a liability in our annual budget; it would enable Gettysburg College to present to the United Lutheran Church the most attractive equipment to be found in any Lutheran College on the eastern seaboard.180 When the time came to vote, the trustees decided to discontinue the academy at the close of the current year (in about two months), to convert its plant into a women's division of the College, and to resume admitting women students for the fall term. In his last commencement address to the academy graduates in June 1935, Huber blamed what had happened on the "relentless pressure of the past four years," and not on "an unsympathetic attitude" on the part of the trustees, six of whom he identified as academy alumni. In the fall of 1935 he took up his new duties as director of the women's division of the College. Most of the academy faculty found other positions, but the two whom Huber had called his "main props," Earl E. Ziegler and Charles R. Wolfe, joined the College faculty.181 Curriculum In spite of many changes which had taken place in the intervening thirty-seven years, a student in the sesquicentennial year of 1982 could recognize the way in which the Gettysburg curriculum of 1945 was organized. Most of the departments of the later year were already in existence at the time of World War II. The titles of some of the courses remained virtually the same, although the content of many was quite different. In both years there were distribution requirements to be met, major and minor fields of study to be selected (minors were optional in 1982), and schedules to be prepared in conjunction with advisers. The same could not be said in comparing ' the curriculum of 1982 with that of 1904. The course of study which 180The report which President Hanson presented on behalf of the committee is in the GCA. No attempt has been made here to determine the accuracy of the arguments which the committee made, but one has to recognize that the academy was successful during the 1920s in drawing students away from high schools located much closer to their homes than it was. At the same time, it should be noted that the number of academy graduates entering Gettysburg College dropped significantly after 1927-1928. During the last three years the percentage was twenty or less. President Hanson explained the closing of the academy to the alumni in the May 1935 issue of the GCB. 181The term "main props" appears in Hubert report to President Hanson, dated October 3, 1928, in GCA. The academy had so differentiated itself from the College that, years later, some alumni believed that it had sold its property to the College in 1935. The Franklin and Marshall academy survived until 1943. For the demise of Dickinson's academy, Conway Hall, in 1917, see Sellers, Dickinson College, p. 329. 53