John A. Dotson

1951-1962

John A. Dotson was appointed dean of education in 1951. He held a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University, a master’s from the University of Kentucky and a Ph.D. from George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville. He was a native of Kentucky and had worked in the Louisville Public Schools and the University of Louisville.

Before coming to UGA, Dotson had been a resident researcher for the Alabama Educational Survey Commission and was director of the Division of Teacher Education at Emory University. Thus he was in a good position to lead a group of educators whose mission was statewide.

In 1951-52, extensive repairs and remodeling were done on the College’s main building, Peabody Hall. In the nearly 40 years that had passed, Peabody had withstood pretty heavy usage but more importantly, the 1913 building did not meet the fire safety standards of 1951.

At first there was consideration of tearing the building down and starting over. Preliminary investigation revealed that the building was so well built as to be a major problem in demolition. Enormous amounts of steel had been used in construction and the hardwoods that had been used were of the most substantial kind.

In the fall of 1952, UGA’s enrollment stood at 4,659 students with men outnumbering women two to one. The College of Education, with 623 students, trailed only the College of Business Administration with its 894 students. Saturday classes enrolled 142. The Atlanta Division of the University, today known as Georgia State University, had 4,004 students. Other off-campus center workshops, extension classes and the Atlanta Area Teacher Education Services enrolled 2,354. These various off campus courses had far more education students than students in other areas. The Graduate School had 416 and Arts and Sciences had 931, but many of these were, or would be education majors. Clearly, the university was into teacher education in a big way.

In 1953, the decision was made to phase out the Demonstration School. An agreement was reached with the newly combined Clarke County Public School System in which the College could place its students in Clarke County schools for child study, observations, student teaching and other activities for a token sum of money each year. The implementation of the system took some time, but in June 1956, the Demonstration School closed its doors, after having been a training ground for thousands of Georgia teachers since it was begun at the State Normal School at the turn of the century.

Within and outside the College there were calls for changes in teacher education in the 1950s. Through a grant from Allstate Foundation, scholarships were made available through the Health and Physical Education Department of the College to help high schools. These scholarships were for driver education teachers for the summer session of 1953.

In 1955, it was reported that all education majors were required to take at least one course in industrial arts. They learned paper construction, weaving, soap carving, block printing, metal work, finger painting, etc. They also made paper mache animals, book ends and wood puzzles for small children. The special courses for education majors stressed the integration of industrial arts activities with the children’s other subject matter areas such as social studies, language arts, home economics and others.

The College began an emphasis on handicapped children in the 1950s. Even though more than 8 percent of the schoolchildren in the state had, through the years, been handicapped, the College of Education had done little to prepare teachers to help those children.

A few courses had focused on speech, hearing, intellectual and orthopedically handciapped students. However, there was no program, as such, until one was established in the fall of 1953 through a special appropriation by the Board of Regents. The program of Speech Correction became available in the winter of 1954 with Stanley Ainsworth as chair.

The program was available through the College of Education or the College of Arts and Sciences. By 1955, Ainsworth was acting head of the Program for Exceptional Children and taught speech correction courses. Waddel Hall had been remodeled to house the program. The UGA Speech and Hearing Clinic was established at this time. Clinic rooms and offices were soundproofed and one-way mirrors were installed for instructional observations.

Ainsworth was a major national figure in his field. He was executive vice president of the American Speech and Hearing Association. Harold Luper also taught speech correction courses and supervised most of the program’s clinical services. Dewey Force Jr., had charge of the work of training teachers of the mentally and physically handicapped. Both had come to the College in 1954.

By 1955, the College offered four degrees for the speech correction major: A B.FA. in Speech and Drama in speech correction, B.S. in Education in speech correction, and an M.A. or M.Ed. in Education in speech correction.

Since 20,000 school age youngsters in Georgia had speech or hearing impairments, the College was making a critical contribution in training teachers to work with that population.

In 1955, three degrees were available to students training for work with the physically and mentally handicapped: the B.S., M.A. and M.Ed. The various fields of special education were growing so rapidly throughout the country at that time, the College had no trouble placing its graduates. In fact, they could not adequately supply the growing demand for teachers, clinicians, therapists, researchers and administrators who were trained to work with exceptional children.

In 1956, Bernice Cooper became the first woman to earn a doctorate from UGA. Cooper remained in the College where she worked part-time for a number of years in the Bureau for Educational Studies and taught elementary education courses. Eventually, she became head of the Division of Elementary Education.

By 1957, the College of Education was the third largest in the University with 1,054 students. Its students received 26 percent of the degrees granted by the University. The College had 13 different fields of study and 62 members of the faculty that year.

One of the major services of the College during the 1950s was the Kellogg Project in Education. This project, which was designed to upgrade school administrators, began in 1952 and was financed by $86,000 in grants from the Kellogg Foundation. A second grant of $40,000 came in 1956.

Out of the early contacts of Aderhold, Dotson and others with the Kellogg Foundation came the roots of the Georgia Center for Continuing Education. The center was financed by state funds and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation of Battle Creek, Mich. Hugh B. Masters was director of the Division of Education of the Kellogg Foundation and helped plan the Georgia Center for Continuing Education. It was the second facility of this nature ever built; the first was at Michigan State University. Masters resigned from the Foundation to become the first director of the Georgia Center for Continuing Education when it opened its doors in 1957.

Constructed around a pecan tree in an interior open court, the Georgia Center offered the latest in lighting, acoustics, air conditioning and conferencing layout. It was the first building on campus to have carpeted floors. Hallmarks of the building were a hexagonal-shaped auditorium modeled after the United Nations General Assembly and a dining room styled as a fine restaurant.

For the past 50 years, the center has been used by groups from all over Georgia, including lawyers, realtors, educators and administrators, business people and journalists. The College of Education, however, has been and continues to be one of the heaviest users of the Georgia Center.

The idea that education should not be limited to children and young people took root rapidly in Georgia during the 1950s and led to new and varying programs and to new training programs for teachers as well as other professionals.

June 13, 1908, was selected as the “birthday” of the College. The University’s first education course had been taught in 1900; the first University of Georgia Summer School had been held in 1903, but the College decided in 1958 to mark its founding as the day the trustees approved the School of Education. Since it had been united with what had been the State Normal School, the College could have claimed a more distant founding.

The total enrollment of students in the College in fall of 1957 was 520 graduate students and 1,318 undergraduates. About half were on campus, and the other half were in Saturday classes, workshop courses, Atlanta area teacher education services, vocational education and field work.

When the College celebrated its 50th year anniversary in 1958, it had 61 full-time faculty members and 41 of them held doctorates. There were gender differences in the faculty as well. The College had four females with the rank of professor and 10 males. The two females held the rank of associate professor and 11 males. At the assistant professor level were 19 men and nine women.

During the College’s 50th Year Celebration, Dean Dotson made dozens of predictions, many of which have come true or have already been exceeded during these last 50 years, including a new building for the College of Education in the early 1970s.

On students:

Only those in the upper 40 percent of their high school class would be accepted in the College’s teacher education program.
The College would have enough scholarships that no student who met its entrance requirements would be denied an education because of financial need.
Each would have a minimum of three weeks of observations in a public school in their home community each September in their sophomore, junior and senior years and much observing of good teaching in the public schools through the use of mobile units of television.

On faculty:

Foresaw them teaching many courses for children and youth and for teachers and other adults through ETV.
Having its own mobile extensive television facilities.
Disseminating the College’s research findings through television.
Two-way television hookups between the College and public schools of Georgia.

One of the major reasons for the growth and development of the College over the next few years was that its faculty were continually on the roads of the state, doing workshops, making speeches and teaching off-campus courses. There was no question the College considered its campus to be statewide.

The year 1961 brought the University of Georgia into national headlines again to an extent not seen since the Cocking case in the 1940s. And two of the College’s foremost figures, O.C. Aderhold and Joe Williams, were at the center of events. Two African Americans, Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes applied for admission to UGA.

Blacks had sought to enter the university since 1867, at one time or another, but without much hope of success. Georgia State Labor Commissioner Michael Thurmond, who has extensively on black history in the Athens area, said that Samuel F. Harris attended classes at the University and the Normal School around the turn of the century. However, he was not enrolled in either school.

Mrs. John D. Moss, a white Harris benefactor, wrote in 1910, that he “showed the ingenuity born of strong purpose,” by learning to work Professor D.L. Earnest’s classroom projector and, according to her, “making his presence essential, and thus preventing any possibility of prejudice.”

Apparently, Harris used the same approach early women students used. He studied privately with some of the university’s professors and, when the university would not officially recognize these studies, he went to another institution that would.

“In 1903, Morris Brown College awarded Harris a master’s degree based on his studies at the University of Georgia,” wrote Thurmond. Harris went on to become of the most prominent black educators in the state.

Charlayne Hunter would graduate from UGA with a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1963, Hamilton Holmes graduated in 1963 and later graduated from the Emory University School of Medicine. He later became a managing trustee of the UGA Foundation.

But the first African-American graduate of UGA, was young black woman who joined Hunter and Holmes in their quest to desegregate the University – Mary Frances Early, who graduated in 1962 with a master’s in music education. She has had a long career as a professor and is now head of the music department at Clark Atlanta University.

In January 1962, Dean Dotson retired. In the 11 years of his administration, the College’s enrollment had nearly doubled. The faculty had been greatly upgraded in terms of the percentage who held doctorates from 16 in 1950 to 37 in 1957.

The curricula had been greatly expanded in 1961, and the College had moved across the street to Baldwin Hall.

In 1961, a new program was approved to prepare teachers of foreign languages, a direct response in the post Sputnik era to the national criticism of education for the decline of American competence in foreign languages.

Programs at the graduate level were also greatly expanded at this time. Sixth-year programs were approved in Elementary Education, Special Education, Secondary Education and Educational Leadership. Graduate enrollment jumped from 271 in 1959 to 507 in 1960, an increase of 86 percent.