Rollins College

Rollins College is Florida's fourth oldest post-secondary institution, [ 6 ] [ 7 ] and has been independent, nonsectarian, and coeducational from conception. [ 8 ] Lucy Cross, founder of the Daytona Institute for Young Women in 1880, first placed the matter of establishing a college in Florida before the Congregational Churches in 1884. [ 9 ] In 1885, the church put her on the committee in charge of determining the location of their first college in Florida. [ 9 ] Cross is known as the "Mother of Rollins College." [ 9 ] Rollins was incorporated, organized, and named in the Lyman Park building in nearby Sanford, Florida , on April 28, 1885, opening for classes in Winter Park on November 4 of that year. [ 1 ] It was established by New England Congregationalists who sought to bring their style of liberal arts education to the frontier St. John's basin . A commemorative plaque listing the names of the founders was dedicated 1 March 1954 and is displayed in historic Downtown Sanford. Early benefactors of Rollins College included Chicago businessman Alonzo Rollins (1832-1887), for whom the college is named. Rollins made substantial donations to enable the founding of the college, and was a trustee and its first treasurer. [ 10 ] Another early benefactor was Franklin Fairbanks of St. Johnsbury, Vermont . Fairbanks was president of the family business, Fairbanks Scales, and was a founder of Winter Park, a donor to Rollins College and a trustee. [ 11 ] In March of 1936 during a visit to Central Florida , U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt was conferred an honorary degree in literature at the Knowles Chapel on campus. Other U.S. presidents who have visited the campus include Calvin Coolidge (1930), Harry Truman (1949), Ronald Reagan (1976; prior to his 1980 election), and Barack Obama (2012). [ 12 ] [ 13 ] Firing of John Andrew Rice and required loyalty pledge President Hamilton Holt decided to require all professors to make a "loyalty pledge" to keep their jobs.

In March 1933, Holt fired John Andrew Rice , an atheist scholar and unorthodox teacher, whom Holt had hired, along with three other "golden personalities" (as Holt called them), in his push to put Rollins on the cutting edge of innovative education, for refusing to sign the loyalty pledge. The American Association of University Professors censured Rollins. The widely publicized case was investigated by the American Association of University Professors , and it is known as the "Rollins College Case" among historians of tenure . The four fired faculty quickly founded experimental Black Mountain College , with a gift from a former Rollins College faculty member. [ 14 ]

In October 1994, the school made international headlines when the government of Japan, per the request of its Okinawa Prefecture , asked for the return of a statue that was taken as war loot after the Battle of Okinawa in 1945 by Clinton C. Nichols, at that time, a lieutenant commander in the United States Navy and a Rollins alumnus. Nichols had presented the statue of Ninomiya Sontoku , a prominent 19th-century Japanese agricultural leader, philosopher , moralist , and economist , to then-President Hamilton Holt, who promised to keep the statue permanently in the main lobby of the Warren Administration Building. [ 15 ] At first, the school rejected the offer made by Okinawan officials, who suggested that a replica of the statue will be presented to the school if the original was returned to the island. After consulting both with the U.S. State Department and the school's board of trustees, then-President Rita Bornstein accepted the offer and the statue was returned to Okinawa in 1995 in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II . [ 16 ] In addition to providing the school with a replica of the original statue, the government of Okinawa and Rollins signed "an agreement of cooperation" that pledges to develop additional cooperative projects between the college and Shogaku Junior and Senior High School , the Okinawan school where the original statue has been placed. [ 17 ]

On March 31, 1998, the body of Jennifer Leah Kairis, a sophomore student, was found in her Ward Hall dormitory room by a residential assistant . Kairis, who had attended a fraternity party held by the Tau Kappa Epsilon chapter on campus hours before she had died, was both legally intoxicated and had a large amount of prescription drugs in her system. [ 18 ] At first, the assistant medical examiner at the Orange County coroner's office ruled Kairis' death as a homicide . However, that conclusion was quickly changed after Shashi Gore, the county's chief medical examiner ruled that she had died as a result of an accidental prescription drug overdose. Kairis' parents, who always believed their daughter was raped and murdered by her college boyfriend, [ 19 ] requested a lengthy state investigation into their daughter's death due to their belief that the Winter Park Police Department botched the case. On March 4, 2004, Bruce Hyma, the Miami-Dade County chief medical examiner and expert toxicologist hired by State Attorney Lawson Lamar ruled that Kairis had committed suicide via a prescription drug overdose . [ 20 ] The seven-year investigation was officially closed on April 13, 2005. [ 21 ] Regardless of the investigation's outcome, the Kairis family asked then Governor Jeb Bush to bring in an outside medical examiner to take another look at the case and autopsy results and order an independent investigation of their daughter's death to resolve what they called the "Dueling Medical Examiners".