Fight for Wake Forest

"Let's get a jukebox," somebody yelled, and while the music blared, 1 ,000 chanting students of Wake Forest College twisted, frugged and hully-gullied under the North Carolina sky. The scene looked like football victory celebration; actually it was bitter defiance of church authority. The Baptist State Convention, which controls Wake Forest, had just voted down a proposal to give the school greater freedom from church control. The chants were angry cries of "To hell with the Baptists," and the twisting flouted a ban on dancing as "demoralizing."

For most of its 130-year history, Wake Forest was known as "North Carolina's best high school." Since a scholarly Baptist theologian named Harold Wayland Tribble became president in 1950, the college has advanced to become a reputable small (2,900 students) liberal arts school. It offers degrees in law and medicine, gives M.A.'s in seven fields. Though all students must attend twice-weekly chapel programs and take two semesters of religion, the curriculum, the student body and the faculty are not narrowly sectarian. Fewer than half of the undergraduates and only three-fifths of the teachers are Baptists. "There is a shortage of dedicated Baptists who rank high in academic circles," Tribble explains.

Tribble badly wants to transform Wake Forest into a truly academic university, a goal that the fundamentalist preachers who dominate the state convention bitterly oppose. They want the school to train future leaders of the church. "We're not in education for education's sake," protested the Rev. Tom Freeman.

The convention agreed, resoundingly defeated a proposal to allow nine of Wake Forest's 36 trustees to be non-Baptists and nonresidents of North Carolina. Also voted down was a proposal permitting Wake Forest and six other Baptist schools in the state to accept federal aid for construction. The results stunned Tribble, who had counted on enticing foundation support for a $69 million expansion program if the vote had gone the other way.

Though the convention rules Wake Forest, it contributes only 5% of the liberal arts school's $5,500,000 operating budget; most of the rest comes from tuition and the tobacco-rich Reynolds Foundation, which in 1946 gave the college free land for its new campus near Winston-Salem. Hinting that Wake Forest might break its ties to the Baptists, Tribble warned that "one way or another we shall move into the future." As students strolled through the campus last week, they wore hand-lettered tags that read I CAN'T WAIT TO DISAFFILIATE.

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