Rollins College is a private liberal arts college in Winter Park, Florida, United States. It was founded in 1885. Florida's fourth oldest post-secondary institution and oldest private university, it has an approximate enrollment of 3,000 students, composed of roughly 2,500 undergraduates and 500 postgraduates.
Rollins College is Florida's fourth oldest post-secondary institution,[5][6] and has been independent, nonsectarian, and coeducational from conception.[7] 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.[8] In 1885, the church put her on the committee in charge of determining the location of their first college in Florida.[8] Cross is known as the "Mother of Rollins College."[8] 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.[9]
Another early benefactor was Franklin Fairbanks of St. Johnsbury, Vermont. Fairbanks was president of Fairbanks Scales, a founder of Winter Park, a donor to Rollins College, and a trustee.[10]
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).[11][12]
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 widely publicized ca
Sources:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollins_College
- http://rollins.edu
