Column History against both Communism and interpersonal selfishness. A Look at History
With Bright Hopes, Students Arrived at Mackinac College in 1966
Howard lectured extensively, on and off Mackinac Island, in support of these goals. While BY FRANK STRAUS

This is back-to-school time. Many of the elementary, high school, college, and graduate school students of the United States are heading back to their classrooms after a summer of work and fun. Mackinac Island will be affected in the usual manner this fall, as the family trade drops and student workers return to their studies.

Forty years ago, a pioneering group of students headed to their new classrooms on Mackinac Island. They were the entering members of the inaugural term at Mackinac College, a pioneering entity of higher education that operated in 1966-70 in what is now Mission Point Resort.

The hopes represented by the young college are remembered in John McCook Roots's book "Modernizing America: Action Papers of National Purpose." Printed by a Moral Re-Armament (MRA) publishing office, the 1966 book describes what the college's founders and entering student class hoped to see.

"The world is waiting," wrote Roots, "for something new to come out of America."

MRA's controversial founder, Frank Buchman, had died in 1961; Buchman's intimate friend and chosen successor, Peter Howard, followed him as head of the movement. Howard believed that the great mass of adults, around the world but especially in America, were spiritually impoverished because of their hypocrisy; they were trying to balance their spiritual beliefs and their daily lives. He believed that idealistic young people could be "straightened out" and then trained as interdenominational, evangelical lay ministers to wage two-front spiritual warfare on one of these lecture tours, he died in Peru in February 1965. Before he died, Howard had convinced most of his fellow MRA leaders to donate the movement's Mackinac Conference Center to be the infrastructure of a new college that would continue and intensify their youth work.

Mackinac College, under Moral Re-Armament, graduated 29 students June 20, 1970, the first and only class to receive degrees.

As the college moved toward start up, Howard's death created a leadership vacuum in the heart of the MRA movement. To some extent, the "inner circle" tried to fill and cover up this vacuum with rhetoric and hot air. As recorded in 1967 in "Moral Re-Armament: What Is It?" by Basil Entwistle and Roots, MRA executive director J. Blanton Belk spoke in Colorado in June 1966 as the college prepared to begin operations:

"Then there is Mackinac College launching out. It is not going to be what you think of as a college. It is going to be the most exciting, creative, new kind of academic training America has ever seen . . . . The college will generate a new breed of leaders . . . . It will be like a War College for man's creative mission here on earth."

Newly hired dean of students Richard Wailes spoke of "a revolutionary commitment of the hearts, minds, and wills of young America - a commitment big enough to include every man, woman, and child on the face of the earth," Roots reported.

In 1966, worldwide popular music had recently been further sexualized through the invention of "rock and roll" and multi-track sound recording, which made it easier for a singer to croon to a percussionstroke beat. Oral contraceptives were approved for prescription sale in 1960.

Many Americans were dismayed by these and other innovations. Among them, Roots quoted the college's president and Director Belk.

"The Pill makes it easy," exclaimed Mackinac College's president Douglas Cornell. "It leads to premarital indulgence on such a scale that multitudes of young people become quite unfit for the responsibilities of marriage."

As mass American youth culture reacted to these stimuli, many young Americans who rejected these temptations were drawn by Mackinac College's ideal of "absolute purity."

"A modernized man," explained Belk, "is a man whose heart belongs to the whole world because it has been freed of hate, fear, and greed. He has a passion for the whole world because his heart is pure."

Students needed high hopes to enroll in Mackinac College in 1966. The start-up college had not yet won accreditation, a crucial element in the value of the degrees it would hand out.

The new college was not bound by past traditions. MRA leadership had always valued a flair for media outreach and cultural self-promotion, and Buchman's team had built a 1950s cinematic sound stage on the college campus. Under veteran director John McCabe, Mackinac College in 1966 became one of the first American institutions of higher education to have a working theater department, where students would learn how to work on and produce plays while studying in an academic environment.

Up until this time, American higher education had studied plays as literature texts. Before 1966, the working drama trained young people by asking them to fight each other for jobs in "summer stock" and other forms of commercial apprenticeship.

The goal of Mackinac College's MRA founders was that the fledgling institution would draw in a head count of 1,000 students. About 100 showed up in fall 1966 to begin classes, but everyone was so enthusiastic that the college began its work with high hopes.

In fall 1967 a few more kids showed up, and enrollment peaked at 117. Not enough tuition was coming in to support even a bare-bones college infrastructure.

Mackinac College had always had, and would always have in the memories of those who had studied there, a family atmosphere. The high hopes with which the enterprise was launched would never die, and furthermore, everyone knew each other. But as the shadows began to close in, it began to feel like a dysfunctional family.

With the spring commencement of 1970, Mackinac College graduated its first and final college class. The faculty was laid off, and the trustees took on the heavy task of selling off the campus and winding up the young college's struggling affairs.

Those who had been part of the college from its start in 1966 would never forget those hopes and dreams.