Kansas Wesleyan Now Official Keeper of Marymount College Records

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Salina: The Kansas Board of Regents in Topeka has granted final approval for the student records and transcripts of Marymount College of Salina, KS, to be permanently housed at Kansas Wesleyan University. Eight file drawers of records have been delivered to KWU from Fort Hays State University in Hays, KS.

“We are honored to bring the Marymount records back to Salina and to host them for their alumni,” said KWU President and CEO Matt Thompson, Ph.D. “We treasure our relationship with Marymount College and look forward to continuing to make their alumni feel at home on our campus.”

During its 67 years of operation, Marymount College granted 6,867 degrees. It was opened as the first all-women’s college in Kansas in 1922, and in 1968 extended full enrollment privileges to men. Ownership of the college was transferred in 1983 from the Sisters of St. Joseph of Concordia, KS, who built it, to the Catholic Diocese of Salina.

Following the 1989 closing of the school, the Marymount College student transcripts and records were sent to St. Mary’s of the Plains College in Dodge City, KS, for safekeeping. Declining enrollment led to the closing of St. Mary’s of the Plains in 1992, and the Marymount records went along with St. Mary’s records to Fort Hays State University, where they have been kept until now.

More of the Story…

When it opened in September 1922 as an all-women’s college with its first 29 enrolled students, Marymount was the fulfillment of the longtime vision of Mother Antoinette Cuff, president of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Concordia, KS. According to Sister Marcia Allen, a 1967 graduate of Marymount and president of the Sisters of St. Joseph, the original plan was to build the school in Concordia. During World War I, building supplies became scarce during the war, which lasted from July 1914 to November 1918. The dream was put on hold.

Construction costs shot up following the war. A new plan was formulated to build their school in more of a highway and railroad transportation hub like Salina. It made better fiscal sense, especially with the help of an enthusiastic group of Salina businessmen. In the past, the sisters always paid cash for everything. Now they sought to borrow $400,000, an enormous sum in those days, and—according to a Nov. 23, 2014 article in the Salina Journal by Gary Demuth—were turned down by Archbishop John Bonzano of the Apostolic Delegation in Washington, D.C. Unswayed, the determined Mother Antoinette wrote directly to Pope Benedict XV in 1921, outlining the school’s purpose and their financial situation. The loan was granted. Groundbreaking took place Oct.6, 1919.

Marymount’s first graduating class in 1926 consisted of seven young ladies. During its 67 years of operation, the college granted 6,867 degrees, most of them to women, according to Dr. Patricia Ackerman, associate professor of Language Arts at Kansas State University Salina. Dr. Ackerman is a 1978 Marymount graduate and the author of the book Marymount College of Kansas: A History, published in 2014. Dr. Ackerman shares that some men were allowed to earn degrees from Marymount but were not allowed to take part in graduation ceremonies or be pictured in class photos. The college remained, in the public eyes, an all-women’s school until 1968, when for financial reasons male students were finally admitted with full student privileges.

In the early 1980s, in the face of the need for continuous maintenance on the facilities, growing debt, and a decline in enrollment, tuition revenue and major gifts, the possibility of closing Marymount was discussed. Instead, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Concordia, KS took drastic measures and gave away their beloved institution to try to save it.

“I was vice president of Sisters of St. Joseph of Concordia in 1983 when we transferred ownership of Marymount College to the Catholic Diocese of Salina. That was a difficult day,” said Sister Marcia.

The rescue was temporary. Finally, the Most Reverend Bishop George Fitzsimmons, bishop of the Catholic Dioceses of Salina, announced that Marymount College would close in spring 1989 following its final commencement ceremony, which graduated 62 women and 30 men.

Some of the Marymount students, staff and faculty transitioned to Kansas Wesleyan University. Two former Marymount faculty members are still teaching at KWU, Gerald Gillespie (Psychology) and Rose Steimel (Computer Studies). Others from the Marymount ranks who joined the KWU faculty were Steimel’s sister, Carol Ahlvers (Business), Charlene Roesner (English), Pat Brown (Nursing), and Brad Anderson (Art).

Anderson, a 1983 Marymount graduate, became a half-time art instructor at Marymount in 1986, and then later he taught part-time at KWU. He left for a few years, pursuing his ceramics art, but returned in 1996 and served as chair of the KWU Department of Art for 14 years. He is now executive director of Salina Arts & Humanities.

The tie between Marymount and Kansas Wesleyan is more than academic. Alumni of both schools can tell tales of how Kansas Wesleyan men met and married Marymount women. The annual Sadie Hawkins dance in KWU’s King Gym, to which Marymount girls were always invited, had a lot to do with that. According to Anderson, the institutions enjoyed a spirited rivalry in basketball, and they shared the educational resources made available by Dr. Wes Jackson, KWU ’58, at The Land Institute during the 1980s.

Following the 1989 closing of the school, the Marymount College student transcripts and records were sent to St. Mary’s of the Plains College in Dodge City, KS, for safekeeping. Declining enrollment led to the closing of St. Mary’s of the Plains in 1992, and the Marymount records went along with St. Mary’s records to Fort Hays State University, where they have been kept until now.

Marymount alumni are proud of their educational heritage, and rightly so, with many graduates of the school making a huge impact on their local community. Rodd Glavin,’84, who works in the Salina office of the Kansas Department for Children and Families, is treasurer for the Marymount alumni group. His wife Jolene, ’85, is director of Nursing for the Salina Surgical Hospital. Reunions are planned every so often, sometimes tied to a particular area of the college.

The pull to return to Salina to have a reunion might come from the exceptional education in Marymount’s classrooms and labs, or perhaps its basketball dynasty, but for some alumni it would be the arts. By the 1950s, the college had become a respected fine arts institution, and in 1957 it opened a new fine arts building with a 1,036-seat theatre auditorium and the 156-seat Little Theatre. On Aug. 1-2, 2014, 60 alumni of the Marymount Theatre Department gathered in Salina, coming from as far away as Texas, Vermont, Montana and Alabama to reconnect and reminisce.

Dr. Dennis Denning, who for more than 20 years chaired what he called “one of the best (theatre) departments in the country,” had directed 165 shows on those two stages. He was unable to attend this special reunion due to his bout of pneumonia, but he certainly had had a huge say in planning what he called “my party,” and he happily received alumni visitors in his hospital room.

During their reunion in town, the theatre alumni visited the former Marymount College campus, where parts of the property have been repurposed, and a delightful discovery was made. A portion of the facilities, including the theatres, now houses the Kansas Highway Patrol Academy, which graciously welcomed the alumni and invited them to look around their old stomping grounds.

“We walked into the auditorium, and there was a huge gasp!” said Betsy (Green) Wearing, ’84, president and executive director of the Greater Salina Community Foundation.

Onstage, the large curtain was stilll there, the one revealed at the end of the last performance before the school closed in 1989. It had a mural painted on it listing every production that had been put on in that auditorium. The Highway Patrol had preserved it and there it was just as it had been, all these years later. The Salina Journal published a story about the gathering, “Staging a reunion,” on Aug. 3, 2014, that included a photo of the stage and the final curtain. The story is not currently available on the Salina Journal website.

However, Wearing also wrote a summary of the 2014 Marymount alumni reunion weekend, “On Stage One More Time,” published in the October 2014 Messenger, the monthly publication of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Concordia, KS. READ IT HERE: http://www.csjkansas.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/Marymount-October2014-Messenger.pdf

Though it has been 26 years since the closing of Marymount College, the memories and inspiration of this special institution live on in its alumni. Marymount’s history is rooted in Salina. It is good to be able to bring these stories, and student records, back home.

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