Chapter Two.
A University for Hartford

1957

Governor Ribicoff signs the bill granting a
charter to the University of Hartford as
founders John Lee, Alfred C. Fuller, and
Mrs. T. Merrill Prentice look on
with George Schwolsky.

Lavelle comments:
The negotiations, to say the least, were quite interesting. Mrs. Gabriel had tax problems with the City of Hartford, at which she was quite incensed. When she learned that if the college [Hillyer] bought the property the City would no longer receive any tax benefits from the land, she immediately dropped all objections to selling. The bond for deed was given on November 29, 1955.

A few days earlier, Stephen Langton [Executive Secretary of Hartt College of Music], in search of a site for Hartt College, had visited the Gabriel property and was taken aback when he read in the newspapers, just after his visit, that Hillyer had bought it. Calling [President Alan S.] Wilson, he asked if Hillyer would consider selling Hartt 15 acres. They got together and walked over the property. Neither mentioned the university idea. There was good reason, as far as Mr. Wilson was concerned. While the Rutgers report had made it clear that some form of cooperation between the institutions was necessary for a successful future, he had decided that one reason all of Hillyer's overtures had failed was because of the fear on the part of smaller schools of being swallowed up by Hillyer, as the major component of any university.

It has been said that failure is an orphan, but success has a thousand parents. Never was the axiom more true than in the case of the founding of the University of Hartford. The University's Archives are full of fascinating transcripts of conversations with civic leaders ranging from journalist Bice Clemow to jeweler Bill Savitt telling of meetings they attended at which detailed schemes were put forward to bring at least the three founding members, if not other local colleges, together into a grand University of Hartford. In fact, the idea of creating the University was the talk of Hartford from the days following the war, when Hillyer College became a four-year institution and other educational establishments in the area grew and expanded. And if these individuals saw themselves as in at the creation, they were right even in a formal sense: Founders were specifically recruited for the enterprise for at least six years, from the middle 1950s to the early 1960s. There are at least three separate lists, with plaques and pictures, of the Founding Members ­­ and they are not all identical. Many who turn up on none of the three also have claims to being present at the birth.

A strong impetus toward merger ­­ in addition to the urgent need for new and larger facilities in the case of Hartt and the Hartford Art School and unified facilities for Hillyer ­­ was a study commissioned in November 1953 by John G. Lee, who chaired the Board of Trustees of Hillyer College and was a prominent local businessman and inventor. The study was intended "to investigate the educational needs of the Hartford area above the high school level and to suggest ways by which these needs might best be fulfilled, considering the traditional part played in the community by the various educational institutions." A memorandum of agreement was entered into on July 21, 1954, between the Board of Trustees of Hillyer College and the Division of Field Studies and Research at Rutgers University. Their final report, of March 1955, urged an institution that would "present unified needs and eliminate wasteful duplication" among its constituent units. The study concluded that there would be a significant increase in college enrollments in the region and growing competition for qualified faculty members, that there was an immediate need for new plant and equipment for Hillyer College, and that the college "must expand its source and size of income beyond the present tuition base."

Other institutions approached about a proposed merger included Trinity College, Hartford College for Women, and the Hartford School of Music, but all three of those colleges chose to keep their independent status and current locations. The three institutions most likely to combine were Hillyer, Hartt, and the Hartford Art School, but they, too, were concerned about preserving their historic missions, and the path to merger was difficult.

The delicate and Byzantine nature of the negotiations that went on behind the scenes is suggested in a short typescript in the University's Archives by Edward C. Lavelle, entitled "The Founding and Early Days of the University of Hartford." The typescript, we are told, was based on "the recollections of John G. Lee, Dr. Moshe Paranov, Stephen Langton, Rabbi Abraham J. Feldman, Mrs. T. Merrill Prentice, Alan S. Wilson, Frederick Houghton, Bice Clemow, Raymond A. Gibson, and Alfred C. Fuller." The earliest documented record of discussions of a merger at the trustee level was found by Mrs. T. Merrill Prentice in the Hartford Art School minutes of December 16, 1948, but serious and continued discussions began in 1955, after the issuance of the Rutgers study, and they intensified with the establishment of a Council of Hartford Community Colleges in February 1956, whose long-range goal, according to Helen M. Loy's account in the University Archives, was a confederation of the five member institutions (Hillyer, Hartford College for Women, Hartt, Hartford School of Music, and the Hartford Art School).

It was about that time that the Gabriel property came on the market. It consisted of some 150 acres on Bloomfield Avenue, along with two buildings, North House (now Bates House, home of the admissions office) and South Cottage. Mrs. Harriet Sage Gabriel, who was only the fourth owner since this was Indian land, lived alone in North House with a large, ferocious dog. Lavelle comments: (see left side column).

At this point, destiny stepped in. Just before Christmas 1955, Bice Clemow, editor of the West Hartford News and an active trustee of Hillyer, boarded a train for New York City, where he ran into Frederick D. Houghton, an equally active trustee of the Hartford Art School. They sat together. As they reached Bridgeport, Mr. Clemow reports, Mr. Houghton turned to him and said, "I think we ought to have a University of Hartford." The two agreed that, when they had done their business in New York, they would take the same afternoon train back to Hartford and continue their conversation. By the time the train pulled into Hartford, a plan had emerged for serious and formal discussion.

Meanwhile, Alfred C. Fuller had been taken to see the Gabriel property, destined to become the University of Hartford campus, and had expressed interest in the idea of merger, "with a thoughtful consideration of his responsibility to conserve the values of Hartt College."

It took most of 1956 for the delicate negotiations to continue, but in July, Hillyer College, now owner of the property, commissioned the firm of Moore and Salsbury, architects, to begin research and studies for a master plan for long-range development of the 150-acre site. John Lee's instructions to the architects were both practical and visionary. He asked for "a sound and flexible campus plan: buildings... functional with a minimum of extravagance; highly flexible building designs with maximum freedom for expansion, and... a long-range building plan."

An Interim Committee for the Projected University of Hartford met on November 11, 1956. It was the feeling of Alan Wilson that the University was born at this meeting, though at that point only Hartt and Hillyer were definitely committed. The decision was made to apply for a charter. Four days later, the press in Hartford and New York broke the news of the projected University of Hartford, and on December 13 of that year the Hartford Art School board voted to take part.

Things moved swiftly from then on. On January 6, 1957, the Interim Committee decided that the boards of trustees of each of the three schools should choose six members of their boards to become Regents of the University of Hartford. From the beginning, it was the intention that all eighteen should serve the interests of the University as a whole and not simply their own constituencies. The University was incorporated by unanimous vote of the Connecticut General Assembly on February 21, 1957, and that same day Governor Abraham A. Ribicoff signed the University Charter. The newly elected Board of Regents took control at a meeting on March 7. With the sounding of the USS Hartford's bell at 11 a.m. on September 16, 1957, unified operations began with the holding of the first University of Hartford Convocation in front of the old Chauncey Harris School, Hillyer College's main building.

The Regents thus owned the Gabriel property, and, in due course, took ownership of the bulk of the properties and assets of the three units, thus giving the board the authority they retain today: financial ownership of, and oversight over, the property and financial affairs of the university, including responsibility for fund-raising.

For the remainder of 1957, an administrative council, consisting of the presidents of Hartt, Hillyer, and the Hartford Art School, administered the affairs of the new institution. But it was clear that to make any of the three, Paranov, Tompkins, or Wilson, president of the overall organization would be to raise once again all the anxieties about preserving individual traditions and values that had delayed the merger for so many years.

A committee headed by Regent Atwood Collins, a Hartford attorney and former United Nations official, began a search for a Chancellor for the University of Hartford. Meeting once a week, they considered some fifty-four candidates, ultimately selecting Vincent Brown Coffin, an insurance executive with Connecticut Mutual Life in Hartford and an intimate of many of the local business leaders, for the job. Their choice was considerably influenced by President A. Whitney Griswold of Yale, who suggested that they choose "a successful businessman who also had some background and interest in education." The new Chancellor had had some experience as a full-time faculty member at New York University and had served for many years on the Wesleyan University board, so he was not wholly without higher education experience, but his widow, the late Mary Coffin, put the primary reason for the choice more succinctly: "Vince knew where the money was."

For fund-raising was, and continues to be, a major concern for a University that has traditionally depended on income from tuition and fees, not income from capital endowment. With its constituent parts emerging from a short history of comparative impoverishment, the new University needed all the help it could get. Vincent Coffin quickly recruited trustees and donors such as Beatrice Fox Auerbach, owner of the G. Fox department store, and her daughters Mrs. Bernard Schiro and Mrs. Richard Koopman, who gave, in addition to their support for many other facilities already cited, the Auerbach family residence on Prospect Avenue, to be used as a University guest house and meeting facility. It is now known as the ASK House, in honor of the Auerbach, Schiro, and Koopman connection.

Every founding member of the University was expected to recruit as many donors as possible from the business, educational, manufacturing, and social service communities, and this is how the list of founders grew so extensively over the first few years of the University's existence. Within a few years, there was hardly a major business in town that did not have its connection with the board. All over the Greater Hartford area, donors accepted the opportunity to become part of the dream.

The plans for the new campus were ambitious: Phase One was to consist of six buildings, designed to house engineering (this became United Technologies Hall), science and mathematics (which became Dana Hall), the library and business administration (which became Auerbach Hall), fine arts and University Administration (ultimately two separate buildings), music and University auditorium (which became the Fuller Center, housing The Hartt School), and liberal arts and education. This last was in fact the first building on the new campus, opened in 1960 as University Hall and in 1976 renamed Hillyer Hall. The initial projected cost of the buildings was eight and a half million dollars. The University was administered from North House, one of the old Gabriel buildings, which now contained the Chancellor's Office.

The new University became a member of the New England Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools in 1961 and received its initial accreditation four years later, thus opening the way to fund-raising from foundations that could only give to fully accredited institutions. The University has been reaccredited every ten years since, most recently in 1991.

With the establishment of the old divisions of Hillyer College as separate schools, the administrative structure of the University immediately took on a new complexity. For the sake of unity, and to demonstrate that it had no intention of simply absorbing its two smaller partners, the old Hillyer College moved swiftly to dissolve its existing board of trustees, but Hartt College and the Hartford Art School chose to retain theirs as the process of building a unified institution continued. Hartt and the Art School both sought in various ways to define their role in this broad-based institution, whose three founding members presented such different profiles and whose intellectual interests were so disparate. After much discussion, Hartt College decided that, in a university setting, the conservatory and performance-oriented nature of the education it offered would be best served by redesignating the college as the Hartt School of Music. Recently, the designation "of Music" has been dropped as the school has expanded into other performing arts. One notable continuance, however, very much in the tradition of all three founding members of the University, was the large Hartt Community Division, which offers individual and ensemble lessons to students in the greater Hartford area ranging in age from infants to senior citizens and today enrolls well over a thousand students.

A significant omission from Phase One was provision for dormitories or other on-campus living facilities, although of course there was no lack of suitable building space. The omission was not accidental: almost all of the student body was local, or at least lived within commuting distance. This state of affairs was destined to change, however, because in the course of the 1960s the State of Connecticut began to develop a community college system offering two-year education at strategic locations around the state, with subsidized tuition levels far below what a private college such as the University of Hartford could offer, and, indeed, even lower than the tuition and fees of the University of Connecticut.

Not for the first time, nor for the last, the community of institutions now known as the University of Hartford had to shift its sights, focusing on new student markets and adapting its programs accordingly. As Professor Bill Brayfield was later to observe, "The University of Hartford has always been extraordinarily nimble in responding to changes in the market, both in terms of programs and of constituencies." Depending for its livelihood on tuitions, it had little choice.

Its agility enabled the University to understand that, with its extraordinarily beautiful suburban campus, it offered a safe and attractive location halfway between the population concentrations of Boston and New York, with easy access to both cities for students who wanted freedom from their parents during the week and the ability to go home on the weekend. The first residence halls, known rather unromantically as Complexes A, B, C, and D, were opened in 1967, with residence halls E and F following in 1971. The buildings were financed in part by state bond issues. Also in 1967, the University strengthened its commitment to campus living with the opening of both the Gengras Campus Center, now the Gengras Student Union, and the Physical Education Center now incorporated into the Sports Center.

In 1967, an initial phase of the University of Hartford came to an end with the retirement of Vincent Brown Coffin as the University's first CEO. He had overseen the transition from three colleges to one University, and the beginning of plans for conversion from primarily a commuting university to at least a partially residential one. The beginning phase of the University was now over, though the battle for resources for the new institution would continue, and the delicate balance between education in the arts and education to serve the business and industry of the region would keep successive administrations alert to the need to serve all constituencies. Firmly established on its site on Bloomfield Avenue, the University was poised to grow, taking its place among Connecticut's institutions of higher education and ultimately becoming the second largest private university in the state.

History of University | The Presidents | Short History of the University

Contents | Foreword | Preface
Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five | Chapter Six
Bibliographical Note | University Gallery