Hollins University Informations

Hollins University is a private university in Hollins, Virginia. Founded in 1842 as Valley Union Seminary in the historical settlement of Botetourt Springs, it is one of the oldest institutions of higher education for women in the United States.

Hollins is today a full university with about 800 undergraduate and graduate students. As Virginia's first chartered women's college, undergraduate programs are female-only. Men are admitted to the graduate-level programs.

Hollins is known for its undergraduate and graduate writing programs, which have produced Pulitzer Prize-winning authors Annie Dillard, former U.S. poet laureate Natasha Trethewey, and Henry S. Taylor. Other prominent alumnae include pioneering sportswriter Mary Garber, 2006 Man Booker Prize winner Kiran Desai, UC-Berkeley's first tenured female physicist (and a principal contributor to theories for detecting the Higgs boson) Mary K. Gaillard, Goodnight Moon author Margaret Wise Brown, Lee Smith, photographer Sally Mann, and Ellen Malcolm, founder of EMILY's List.

In June 2019, Inside Higher Education reported that President Pareena Lawrence resigned. The article noted that "financial and enrollment pressures" were growing at many small schools, increasing pressure on leaders.

The area where Hollins College developed was the site of Botetourt Springs. The area developed as a resort which operated from 1820 to 1841. It then became the site of a short-lived seminary. When it failed the property and buildings were acquired for Valley Union Seminary.

The institution of higher learning that would become Hollins was first established in 1842 by the Reverend Joshua Bradley as the coeducational Valley Union Seminary. Bradley left in 1845 for Missouri, and in 1846, the seminary's trustees hired a 25-year-old math instructor from Richmond named Charles Lewis Cocke to direct the institution.

Cocke arrived with his wife, Susanna, and 16 slaves. The same year, Cocke established the first school for enslaved people in the Roanoke area; many students at the school worked at the seminary. In 1851, Cocke abolished the men's department of the institution, and in 1852, the school became a women's college called the Roanoke Female Seminary. In 1855, Lynchburg residents John and Ann Halsey Hollins gave $5,000, and the school was renamed Hollins Institute. The Hollinses gave an additional $12,500 in gifts before their deaths in 1859 and 1864 respectively.

Before the Civil War, Hollins used the labor of enslaved people to build and maintain the grounds. In addition, many students brought "servants" with them who were likely slaves. After slavery was abolished, Hollins employed many formerly enslaved people, mostly women whose names were not recorded. Students were encouraged to ignore these workers in the college handbook during this era, and employees were forbidden from developing friendly relationships with women studying at Hollins.

As the head of Hollins, Cocke saw his students as a part of a family and himself as their father figure. His pedagogy was based upon the "southern sensibility that a lady was to be trained to submit to the order of men". Though he thought women studying at Hollins were best confined to domestic duties, he still placed great value on intellectual excellence. Cocke considered the higher education of young women in the South to be his life's calling; in 1857, he wrote that "young women require the same thorough and rigid mental training as that afforded to young men". Hollins was known as a rigorous institution where degrees were not easily earned during Cocke's tenure. Students at the school during this period remember the "unbelieveably [sic] serious" instruction and "high standards". During this period, Hollins also pioneered several academic practices; it became the first school in the United States to begin a system of elective study, and it was the first to establish an English department under a full professor.

The Hollins of Cocke's ambitions was limited by region, as Cocke was interested in educating women only from Southern states. Because of this limited scope, Hollins struggled to "professionalize" in the 1880s and beyond. Its remote location far from the better respected and funded men's institutions put Hollins in contrast with the Seven Sisters in the Northeast. Despite its academic rigor, Hollins and other southern women's colleges were smaller and poorer than women's college such as Smith College and Mount Holyoke in the north. However, Hollins saw its enrollment rise in the last two decades of the 19th century, as more women sought higher education nationwide.

From 1846 until his death, Cocke did not take a stipulated salary from the institution so that the trustees could instead put the school's income toward paying faculty and improving the grounds. In 1900, the board of trustees found themselves so thoroughly in debt to Cocke that the school was deeded to him and his family.

Charles Lewis Cocke's death in 1901 at the age of eighty-one was a grave moment for the Hollins Institute, but the transition to the leadership of his forty-five-year-old daughter Matty Cocke was smooth. "Miss Matty," as she preferred to be called, was intent on preserving the "genteel" atmosphere her father had cultivated at Hollins. Though she was a "charismatic leader" and the first woman to head a college in Virginia, Miss Cocke was not interested in waging any battles for women's education; indeed, she let her nephews, Joseph Turner and M. Estes Cocke, handle the school's financial dealings entirely. Miss Cocke shared the opinion of President John McBryde of Sweet Briar Women's College, who in 1907 decried the "independence" sought by Vassar and other members of the Seven Sisters and suggested instead that women's education focus on "grace [and] refinement". In 1911, the school was renamed Hollins College.

Because the Cocke family owned Hollins, the school could not raise an endowment through alumna donations. Further stalling Hollins' prosperity was President Matty Cocke's distaste for fundraising. Due to their financial limitations, Hollins was not able to hire high-quality faculty or assemble an up-to-date library or laboratory, making accreditation hard to achieve. This was not unusual for the time; as of 1916, only seven southern women's college were certified by professional organizations as "standard," while both Hollins and Sweet Briar were designated as "approximate". The Cocke family agreed to turn over ownership if sufficient funds were raised in 1925, but the Depression slowed their efforts. A scathing 1930 letter from alumna Eudora Ramsay Richardson in the South Atlantic Quarterly indicted the American Association of University Women for regional bias. Richardson's letter and prompting from the presidents of Mount Holyoke and Bryn Mawr sped up the accreditation process. The Cocke family turned the school over to a board of trustees and President Cocke tendered her resignation in 1932, as the school finally gained accreditation.

Hollins was home to the first exhibition gallery in the Roanoke region in 1948. In 1950 when he was 31 years of age John R. Everett was elected President of Hollins College, a position he held until he resigned in 1960. One of the first writer-in-residence programs in America began at Hollins in 1959. Hollins was home to the first graduate program focusing on the writing and study of children's literature, established in 1993. Hollins University Quadrangle is on the National Register of Historic Places.The institution was renamed Hollins College in 1911, and in 1998 it became Hollins University. Nancy Oliver Gray led Hollins from 2005 until she retired in 2017; that same year, Pareena Lawrence became Hollins's twelfth president.

In April 2019, the Hollins University president ordered the temporary removal of four volumes of the university yearbook from the library's digital commons after the 2019 blackface controversy involving Virginia Governor Ralph Northam. The four volumes (1915, 1950, 1969, 1985) contained photographs of students wearing blackface. The removal was widely criticized, including by the Society of American Archivists, the Steering Committee of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference, the American Library Association's Office of Intellectual Freedom and Office for Diversity, Literacy and Outreach Services, and the Virginia Library Association. The volumes remain available on other websites like the Internet Archive. In addition, hardcopies of all volumes were always available in the library. The university issued a statement saying access to the yearbooks would be restored once the university developed accompanying "educational information regarding the history and practice of blackface to help all of us understand why it is a racist and prejudicial practice." The Wyndham Robertson Library and the Hollins University Working Group on Slavery and its Contemporary Legacies issued a statement in response objecting to the decision, saying that, "we cannot and do not support any erasure of institutional history, even if only temporarily" and recommending that the affected yearbooks be made electronically accessible again along with a statement on the content. More than one hundred Hollins University students also signed a letter in support of the Wyndham Robertson Library and the Hollins University Working Group on Slavery and its Contemporary Legacies. The four withdrawn volumes were made publicly available in the library's institutional repository on April 9, one week after the president ordered their removal along with the added educational content.

The Hollins College Quadrangle consists of six contributing buildings. The earliest buildings were built for the Botetourt Springs resort which operated from 1820 to 1841 and then became a seminary. When it failed the property and buildings were acquired for Valley Union Seminary.

The first built specifically for the new college is East Building, erected 1856–58 opposite the hotel building. The Main building was built in 1861 at the north end of the quadrangle, Bradley Chapel was erected in 1883 between the East and Main Buildings, the octagonal Botetourt Hall was built in 1890, and the Charles Cocke Memorial Library was built in 1908 at the south end of the quadrangle.

The main dorm of Hollins University was decorated and improved in the 19th century by local carpenter and woodworker Gustave A. Sedon. "In Sedon's daybook, his journals, all these bits and pieces of decorations are noted. Seadon (sic) was a very interesting character with a wry sense of humor, even though he had troubles spelling in English. One year just before the Civil War, his journal notes he had to build a walkway to the necessary—a walk way to the outhouse behind the building. The next year he cryptically noted a cover to the walkway to the necessary. Obviously, the young ladies didn't like getting wet as they walked downstairs."

Hollins College Quadrangle was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.

Hollins University has a number of beloved traditions, many of which have been observed for more than 100 years. Tinker Day is the school's best known and best loved tradition, dating back to the 1880s. One day in October, after the first frost, classes are cancelled so that students, faculty, and staff can climb nearby Tinker Mountain while wearing colorful and silly costumes. After a lunch of fried chicken and Tinker Cake, the students and new faculty perform skits and sing songs before returning to campus. The exact date of the celebration is a closely held secret.

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