Presidents

Last President of Emory College in Oxford, First President of Emory University

James Edward Dickey, Class of 1891
1864-1928

President 1902-15

The last president to serve Emory College in Oxford was also the first president of Emory who had no personal memory of the Civil War and its devastation. He was, therefore, the first Emory president who was a product of that "new South" heralded by Atticus Haygood fifteen years after the war's end.

James E. Dickey entered Emory college at the ripe age of twenty-three, graduating in 1891. Staying on as an adjunct professor of mental and moral science, he also received his license to preach, and in 1899 he left Emory to serve three years as minister of Grace Methodist Church in Atlanta. But when Charles Dowman resigned on June 8, 1902, the trustees immediately elected Dickey to take over the reins of the college. They would not let him go for thirteen years, despite his two resignations.

Apparently a systematic thinker, he set himself six goals in his first year and accomplished most of them. First, he wanted to pay off the thousand-dollar debt still remaining on Candler Hall, which housed the library; that he did. Second, he sought to build and pay for a new science hall named for President Pierce. That building, completed in 1904, was the first building in Oxford with steam, gas, and running water.

Third, Dickey intended to build a new gymnasium. The college had established its first requirement for athletics—two hours a week—in 1899, and the old technology lab built by Hopkins had served as a poor gym. With funding largely from J. P. Williams and Asa G. Candler and a handful of others, Dickey opened Williams Gymnasium in 1907. Built at a cost of $27,000, it ran $10,000 over budget and was putatively the finest gym in the South at the time, boasting steam heat, hot and cold running water, electricity, and a ventilation system.

Fourth, Dickey wanted to collect repayments of old loans to students in order to recycle the funds to current students and enlarge the Loan Fund, and he was in fact able to add a bit to the Loan Fund.

Fifth, Dickey aimed to increase the enrollment of the college to three hundred students or more. By 1910 enrollment was up to 313, but it would slip back to 260 in the fall of 1914, by which time the move to Atlanta was on the horizon.

Finally, Dickey intended to add to the endowment. Two years after taking office, he reported to the trustees that the college should have an endowment of at least $500,000. The endowment in 1902 was $203,000. In 1906, the board took up Dickey's invitation and launched a campaign to raise an additional $300,000. The trustees themselves pledged $66,000, although $50,000 of that pledge had been made by Asa Candler. The Alumni Association pledged $30,000 to endow a professorship in history. Soon enough all $300,000 had been pledged. True to its nineteenth-century habits, though, the college would collect less than half of those pledges. When Dickey resigned the endowment still stood at only $325,000.

Meanwhile, Dickey fought another battle for the shape of campus life. His predecessor, President Dowman, in 1901 had tried to persuade the trustees to sell the deteriorating helping halls, get students out of boarding houses in town, and move them into regular dormitories. The trustees instead had decided to fix up the helping halls and forgo the headaches of managing residence halls on campus. Dickey had more success than Dowman, however, as he showed that other colleges were making good use of residence halls. In 1912 Haygood Dormitory, originally budgeted to cost $50,000, opened at a cost of $67,000, paid in part by Asa Candler's pledge to the endowment. The previous year, the college had begun accumulating a budget deficit, which the trustees covered by encroaching on the endowment to the tune of $30,000 by 1915. Asa Candler would pay off this debt to make the endowment whole before the college moved to Atlanta.

In retrospect the Dickey administration looks a bit like a holding pattern, as the college made the slow transition from nineteenth-century Oxford to twentieth-century Atlanta. Still, Dickey oversaw the reestablishment of a law program from 1903 to 1907 and the creation of a department of theology in 1911, which merged with biblical studies in 1915 to become the Department of Biblical Literature and Theology.

It is difficult to tell how much Dickey's administration of the college was affected by the proximity of Bishop Candler, just forty miles away in Atlanta, and closer than that through the influence of his brother Asa, who chaired the Finance Committee. Dickey tried to resign in 1910 to become secretary of the Board of Education of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, but Emory's trustees declined his resignation and instead elected him to a three-year term as president. Two years later he submitted his resignation again, and again the board declined. One wonders about the free will of the man. In 1915, with the University established in Atlanta and Bishop Candler at its head as chancellor, Dickey apparently saw no reason to continue in an office that promised little reward or meaning, and this time his resignation was accepted. He continued to serve Emory as a trustee of the University and went on to become a bishop of the church.