Mercer University

• 1. Introduction

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  Mercer University opened as Mercer Institute on the 14th of January 1833, a boys' preparatory school in the Georgia town of Penfield. Its first class numbered 39 students. Nearly two centuries later, it is the oldest private university in the state, with more than 9,000 students and 12 colleges and schools.

  That distance raises questions. How does a small country school become a research university with its own medical programs and engineering partnerships? What did it cost Mercer to act on conscience when many around it held firm to segregation? And why did a church body that had backed the school since its founding eventually part ways with it? The answers lead through a founder's grave, a radio station whose call letters were a boast, and an unlikely basketball night against Duke.

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• 2. Penfield Roots

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  Billington McCarter Sanders, a professor, served as the first president of the new school, from 1833 to 1840. Beside him stood Adiel Sherwood, a Baptist minister. Sherwood had already founded a boys' manual labor school, and that earlier venture became the model for Mercer. The name honored Jesse Mercer, a prominent Baptist leader. Mercer and Josiah Penfield together provided the founding endowment, and Mercer chaired the first board of trustees.

  In December 1837, the Georgia General Assembly granted a university charter. The institution adopted its present name in 1838. Its first university class graduated in 1841 and held just three students.

  Nathaniel Macon Crawford led the school from 1854 to 1856 and again from 1858 to 1866. Spright Dowell held the office from 1928 to 1953, then returned as interim president in 1959-1960.

  In 1871, Mercer left Penfield for Macon, a center of transportation and commerce in Georgia. The School of Law was established there in 1873. In 1947 it took the name of Walter F. George, a member of the class of 1901 who became a United States senator from Georgia. George also served as President pro tempore of the United States Senate.

  Mercer was one of 131 colleges and universities in the V-12 Navy College Training Program during World War II. The program gave military training to students preparing for commissions in the United States Navy.

  Mercer still maintains part of the original Penfield campus, including Old Mercer Chapel and the gravesite of Jesse Mercer.

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• 3. Breaking the Color Bar

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  On the 18th of April 1963, Mercer's board of trustees voted 13 to 5, with 3 abstentions, to ratify a new admissions policy. It read: "Mercer University considers all applications based on qualification, without consideration of race, color of skin, creed, or origin." With that vote, Mercer became the first college or university in Georgia to fully desegregate.

  Sam Oni, a 22-year-old student from Ghana, became the first Black student to attend Mercer. He applied knowingly, and in part because he wanted to help end racial segregation in the United States. He described his purpose this way: "My role, as we conceived it was by breaking the color bar at Mercer, I would be challenging our Southern Baptist brothers and sisters in America to confront gross contradictions in the Christian witness at home and abroad."

  Segregationists in the South and within the Southern Baptist Convention pressed the university to stay segregated. An airplane flew overhead with a banner reading "Keep Mercer Segregated" while the trustees met. The board still voted to integrate fully.

  The civil rights activist Will D. Campbell later wrote a history of Mercer in the 1960s called The Stem of Jesse, named for the university's namesake. The book profiles Oni and Samaria Mitcham Bailey, who was one of the first African-American female students at Mercer.

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• 4. Baptist Ties

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  In 2006, the Georgia Baptist Convention ended an affiliation with Mercer that had lasted 173 years. Throughout that time Mercer kept an independent board of trustees. The convention provided financial support but did not control the university. That arrangement bred friction. Mercer resisted restraints on social issues, while the convention saw a school drifting toward secularism. The convention reportedly complained about a "pro-gay student group" and the university's "support for non-Southern Baptist organizations."

  Mercer now affiliates with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a more liberal group of Baptists. The denomination's official records are stored at the university.

  The James and Carolyn McAfee School of Theology, founded in 1994 on the Atlanta campus, shows how the new partnership works. Neither the Georgia Baptist Convention nor the Southern Baptist Convention directs its curriculum. James T. McAfee, Jr., a former chairman of Mercer's board, and his wife Carolyn provided its founding endowment. In 2006 the fellowship named the school an "identity partner," the designation that carries its highest level of funding. Only four theology schools hold it, and one of them has since closed.

  The Georgia Baptist Convention's old headquarters in Atlanta became part of the story too. Mercer bought it in 2004 after the convention built a new headquarters in Gwinnett County. Today it houses the American Baptist Historical Society, which holds the largest and most diverse collection of Baptist historical materials in the world. The society moved there in 2008 from Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and Rochester, New York. Beside it sits the Baptist History and Heritage Society, founded in 1938 as the Southern Baptist Historical Society, which arrived from Brentwood, Tennessee, in 2007.

  Song ties the university to its namesake as well. Jesse Mercer compiled a hymnal called Cluster of Spiritual Songs around 1800, and it went through 11 later editions. In 2010, Mercer University Press released Celebrating Grace, a hymnal for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, through the Townsend-McAfee Institute. In 2023 the institute acquired the dormant choral and printed music divisions of the John T. Benson Music Company, which Universal Music Group had shut in December 2021. In December 2024 it bought Smith and Helwys, a publisher of Bible study material for fellowship churches. Together these purchases made Mercer a leading publisher of choral music and church Bible study material, used by churches both inside and outside the fellowship.

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• 5. Mergers and Master Plans

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  Mercer reached Atlanta in 1959, when it absorbed the independent Southern School of Pharmacy. Until 1972 the university consisted of that school, the College of Liberal Arts and the School of Law. Then came Atlanta Baptist College, founded in 1968 under Dr. Monroe F. Swilley, a prominent Baptist educator. It merged with Mercer in 1972 and became the College of Arts and Sciences. In 1984 the college was renamed for Cecil B. Day, who founded Days Inn Hotels and had attended Mercer before leaving to serve in the United States Marine Corps. Faculty and students tried to prevent the closure of the undergraduate program in 1990, but they failed. The Atlanta campus turned to graduate and professional education.

  Tift College, a Baptist women's college in Forsyth founded in 1849, merged with Mercer in 1986 and closed. Mercer adopted its alumnae and maintains their records. The Georgia Baptist College of Nursing began in 1901 as the Baptist Tabernacle Infirmary, an independent institution in Atlanta. Nursing education started there in 1902. The college took its current name in 1993, merged with Mercer in 2001 and moved to the Atlanta campus in 2002.

  Between 1982 and 2013, Mercer established nine additional colleges and schools. One of them, the College of Continuing and Professional Studies, began in 2003 to serve working adults. It was renamed Penfield College in 2014 to honor the university's original home, and it later became the College of Professional Advancement. Its courses reach regional academic centers in Henry County and Douglas County. The Henry County center opened in 2003 in McDonough and merged programs from two smaller sites in Covington and Griffin. The Douglas County center, in Lithia Springs, was named in 2007 for Fred and Aileen Borrish, longtime benefactors.

  In 2009 the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation gave Mercer $5 million to help revitalize the College Hill Corridor between campus and downtown Macon. Mercer Lofts opened on the Macon campus in 2011 with a Barnes & Noble bookstore, other shops and student apartments. Mercer Lofts II followed in 2012 and houses the Center for Collaborative Journalism. There the journalism department shares space with the editorial and professional staffs of the Macon Telegraph and Georgia Public Broadcasting.

  On the 31st of October 2014, Mercer announced a drive to raise $400 million. The goal included $207 million for the endowment, $109 million for capital projects and $84 million for operations. Gifts and pledges had already reached $90 million by the public launch.

  On the 20th of April 2018, the trustees approved a new strategic plan titled Inspire: Mercer's Vision for the Decade Ahead. Its seven imperatives begin with being an intimate and diverse community of gifted scholars and end with being true to the university's heritage. It replaced a 2008 plan, under which Mercer was reclassified as a national research university, admitted to the Georgia Research Alliance and granted a Phi Beta Kappa chapter. Undergraduate enrollment grew 41 percent, research spending nearly doubled, and the university invested more than $200 million in new facilities. Its endowment rose above $300 million. Doctoral students grew from fewer than 35 to more than 250, and externally funded research spending now exceeds $36 million a year.

  The most visible product of that era is the Godsey Science Center, dedicated in April 2018 at a cost of $44 million. It is the largest academic facility project in Mercer's history, with 60 teaching and research labs and 46 offices for biology, chemistry, biochemistry and neuroscience.

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• 6. Healers and Engineers

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  The Mercer University School of Medicine, founded in 1982, is partially state funded and accepts only Georgia residents into its Doctor of Medicine program. Its core mission is training primary care physicians for rural and medically underserved parts of Georgia. In 2005, U.S. News & World Report ranked it 17th among 126 accredited medical schools in family medicine.

  Third and fourth year Mercer students had completed clinical rotations at Memorial University Medical Center in Savannah since 1996. Extra state funding in 2007 turned that partnership into the first four-year medical school in southern Georgia. It opened in August 2008 with 30 first-year students and graduated its first physicians in 2012. An $18 million expansion, finished in December 2015, lifted Savannah's Doctor of Medicine enrollment from 160 to 240 students, matching Macon.

  In February 2012, Mercer announced a third medical campus in Columbus, partnered with The Medical Center and St. Francis Hospital. Clinical rotations there began that summer for up to 80 third and fourth year students. On the 3rd of September 2020, the university broke ground on a campus for a full four-year program. The first cohort of first-year students began classes in August 2021, and the campus was finished that December.

  Pharmacy has its own milestone. The College of Pharmacy, founded in 1903, became in 1981 the first in the southeast and the fifth in the nation to offer the Doctor of Pharmacy as its sole professional degree. When the College of Health Professions opened on the 1st of July 2013, it took over the physical therapy and physician assistant programs and added a public health program. Its founders left room for later additions such as occupational therapy.

  The School of Engineering, founded in 1985, is the only private engineering school in Georgia. It is one of only five in the state. It serves as the primary provider of engineers for Robins Air Force Base in Warner Robins. In 1987 the school opened the Mercer Engineering Research Center in that city, where it holds research agreements with Robins and the United States Department of Defense.

  In 2009, the Clinton Global Initiative University recognized a Mercer On Mission project that provides low-cost prosthetics to amputees in developing nations. Faculty and students in the School of Engineering developed the universal socket technology behind the devices. Former President Bill Clinton singled out only three university projects at that conference, and this was one of them.

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• 7. Stage, Press and Airwaves

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  The Grand Opera House in downtown Macon opened in 1884 with the largest stage in the southeastern United States. Over the years it has hosted vaudeville, Broadway touring companies, community theatre, concerts and movies. Bibb County owns the building, but Mercer has operated it since 1995 under a lease.

  Mercer University Press, established in 1979, is the only Baptist-related university press in the nation. It has published more than 1,000 books, mainly in theology, religion, Southern culture, biography, history, literature and music. Former President Jimmy Carter is among its authors. Its annual Authors Luncheon in Atlanta is billed as Georgia's premier literary event.

  The Townsend School of Music opened on the 1st of July 2006, named for Raymond and Sophia Townsend, the parents of Carolyn McAfee. Within it, the Robert McDuffie Center for Strings accepts at most 26 students: 12 violinists, 6 violists, 6 cellists and 2 double bassists. McDuffie, a violinist, has served as Distinguished University Professor of Music since 2004. The center works from the Amanda Bell House, which was renovated in 2014 and appears on the National Register of Historic Places.

  In 1922, a physics class project gave Mercer its first radio station. Its call sign, WMAZ, stood for "Watch Mercer Attain Zenith." Students ran it from the tower of Willingham Chapel until 1927, when Mercer gave it to the Macon Junior Chamber of Commerce. The Southeastern Broadcasting Company bought it in 1935 and added a television station with the same call sign in 1953. The radio side was later dropped, but the television station survives as a CBS affiliate on Channel 13.

  In 2006, Mercer and Georgia Public Broadcasting created WMUM-FM, whose call sign was changed to stand for "Mercer University Macon." On the 31st of March 2014, Georgia Eagle Media donated the low-powered station then known as WRWR-LD to Mercer. It became WMUB-LD that July. On the 1st of January 2016, it became an affiliate of France 24.

  The student newspaper, The Cluster, started in 1920 and borrowed its name from the songbook Jesse Mercer wrote. Its website went live in 2011, and in 2022 it announced a move to digital-only publication.

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• 8. Debaters, Bears and Alumni

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  Mercer's debating society, founded in 1897, is the oldest organization on campus and the oldest debating society in Georgia. In 1898, the champion orator John Roach Straton won the first Intercollegiate Oratorical Championships in Atlanta. A year later, Walter F. George led a Mercer team to victory over the University of Georgia in the Mercer-Athens Debate.

  Jazmine Buckley arrived as a freshman in 2015 and became the first freshman and the first African-American named top speaker at the National Parliamentary Debate Association tournament. She outranked 320 other debaters from programs such as the University of California, Berkeley, Wheaton, Rice and Whitman, and received the James "Al" Johnson Top Speaker Award. In March 2018, Buckley and Kyle Bligen became the first all-African-American duo to win the National Parliamentary Debate championship. Lindsey Hancock and Hunter Pilkinton won the Georgia Parliamentary Debate Association State Championships for Mercer for the first time, with Hancock the first woman to take the state title. The pair also became the first team from Mercer and from Georgia to attend the National Parliamentary Tournament of Excellence, held at William Jewell College in Missouri.

  On the athletic side, the Bears field eighteen teams at the NCAA Division I level, with football in the Football Championship Subdivision. All compete in the Southern Conference except women's sand volleyball, which plays in the ASUN Conference. Mercer was a charter member of the ASUN, originally called the Trans American Athletic Conference, from 1978 to 2014. Its teams won 21 Atlantic Sun championships, including six in men's basketball and five each in baseball and men's soccer.

  The men's basketball team won the 2012 CollegeInsider.com Postseason Tournament. In 2014 it beat Duke in the NCAA tournament and later lost to the University of Tennessee. It finished 27-9, its third straight season with more than 20 victories, and the win over Duke earned Mercer the 2014 Espy Award for Best Upset.

  On the 19th of November 2010, Mercer announced that football would return in the fall of 2013. The sport had been suspended during World War II and never revived, and the final game had been played in 1941. The Bears played their first game in 72 years on the 31st of August 2013, beating Reinhardt University before an overflow crowd of 12,172. They finished 10-2, an NCAA Division I record for wins by a start-up program, and went undefeated at home. Their first Southern Conference victory came on the 27th of September 2014, on the road against Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia. That season ended 6-6 with only half the team on scholarship because of start-up restrictions.

  Finally, Mercer's graduates have gone far beyond campus. Alumni include former Governor of Georgia Nathan Deal, 21 United States Representatives, 12 governors and four United States Senators. They also include two Pulitzer Prize winners, two Rhodes Scholars and a United States Attorney General.

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