Oxford College of Emory University

A two-year division of Emory University located in Oxford, GA. Students from this campus automatically continue at the Atlanta campus after successfully completing Oxford's curriculum. Oxford stresses excellence in liberal arts scholarship, leadership development, and community life.

History

In 1836, Georgia Methodists received a charter for a new Methodist liberal arts college located on a fourteen-hundred acre tract north of Covington, Georgia. Named Emory College, in memory of Bishop John Emory, Methodist leaders broke ground in 1838. In the early 20th century, Bishop Warren Akin Candler (former president of Emory College) and his influential brother, Asa Griggs Candler (of Coca Cola fame), were instrumental in selecting Emory as the undergraduate anchor of a new Methodist university and Atlanta as its site. Bishop Candler initially pressed for Emory's undergraduate program to remain at Oxford. However, the newly organized Board of Trustees decided to relocated Emory College and all its faculty, equipment and financial resources to the Druid Hills campus in Atlanta. Bishop Candler proposed that the Oxford campus be reorganized as a residential, college preparatory academy. Candler reasoned that the American South needed a first-class, residential, secondary school, along the model of Andover or Philips Academy in the Northeast. With Candler's support for the project, Emory trustees organized the Emory University Academy at Oxford.

Related Topics:
Covington, Georgia - John Emory - Asa Griggs Candler - Coca Cola - Andover - Philips Academy

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The Academy, established in 1916, enjoyed a promising beginning, and student enrollment tripled in the first three years. Unfortunately, the combination of economic depression and improvements to public schools in Georgia eventually led to the conclusion that a freestanding academy could not be sustained, and faculty campaigned to restore college-level course work at Oxford. In 1929, Emory included Oxford in its network of lower collegiate divisions. Emory Junior College at Oxford and the Emory Academy shared the same campus. For more than twenty years, "Emory at Oxford" functioned as both an Academy and as a junior college. Post World War II, administrators sought to make Oxford more appealing to prospective students. Influenced by the experimental models of integrating secondary and post-secondary education at the University of Chicago, Emory and Oxford leaders reorganized the Oxford curriculum into the South's first accredited four-year junior college. The "Four-Year Program" combined an accelerated program for the last two years of high school with the first two years of college. The Four-Year program could never recruit enough talented high school juniors to fully populate the lower classes.

Related Topics:
1916 - Georgia - World War II - University of Chicago

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In the early 1960s, Oxford evolved once more. Now called "Oxford College of Emory University," Oxford positioned itself as a two-year college. Oxford was not a "junior college" in the standard way, but a focused two-year program of general education leading purposefully and directly to the final two years of academic specialization (on the Atlanta campus at either the College, Business or Nursing School). Oxford students generally are very well prepared for academic work on the Atlanta campus with a high number being elected to Phi Beta Kappa and other honor societies. Alumni from just one recent class, for instance (class of 1996), have been admitted to graduate programs ranging from medical school to law school to Ph.D. programs at Harvard. Yale, Princeton Theological Seminary, Emory, Northwestern, Vanderbilt, Columbia, and many other institutions. In addition, the alumni base remains particularly strong both during the Atlanta years, and in life beyond Emory.

Related Topics:
Junior college - Atlanta - Phi Beta Kappa - Harvard - Yale - Princeton Theological Seminary - Emory - Northwestern - Vanderbilt - Columbia

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