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A GREATER GETTYSBURG being hired, and the endowment was significantly higher than ever before. He offered to provide any additional information that might be needed. Three days later, the chairman replied that the commission had placed Gettysburg on the "accepted list... at its first meeting," since it had "full and satisfactory information obtained from the records of the New York State Education Department."430 Gettysburg was one of the twenty-two Pennsylvania colleges and universities, already approved by the Pennsylvania Department of Public Instruction to grant degrees, which were included on the first Middle States list announced in November 1921. Twenty-five institutions with similar state approval were not accredited. Of these, six were identified as almost, but not quite, meeting the standards. In June 1922 President Granville told the trustees that accreditation does not mean "that it is safe for Gettysburg College to rest contented with what she is," since the standards which the commission used were "only a minimum, the least that for practical reasons could be used to start with." We should "make every possible effort to strengthen and increase our faculty and to augment our financial resources," he argued, not simply in order to obtain a "first grade" rating by all educational agencies, but "also because we shall never leave a stone unturned to make Gettysburg College one of the very best among the first grade colleges."431 Within a year of the announcement of the first Middle States list, the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa authorized chartering a chapter of that society on the Gettysburg campus. Since this action followed careful investigation of the College and its practices, acquiring a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa can be regarded as a form of accreditation. The Gettysburg chapter was the ninth in Pennsylvania. When Henry W. A. Hanson became president in 1923, the only widely recognized accrediting agency whose approval the College had not yet secured was the Association of American Universities, which had issued its first list of approved institutions in 1914. The coveted blessing of that agency came in the fall of 1926, after the required application, with supporting data, was submitted. According to the Gettysburgian for November 24 of that year, President Hanson told his chapel audience that this latest recognition of the College would "not cause as much demonstration as a football vic- 430The letters exchanged between Granville and Arthur Leroy Jones are in the GCA. In his letter, Jones enclosed a copy of the commission's questionnaire to institutions, which Granville chose to complete and return. 431In 1934 the Middle States Association reaffirmed the College's accreditation following receipt of a completed questionnaire. Regular ten-year reaccreditation visits did not become customary until after 1945. The academy was accredited in 1927. 71