World War II was more than the pivotal event of this century. It was the pivotal event of Florida State University. Whatever we've become, we can credit the war--and a man named Walker.

Fifty years ago this summer, World War II ended. Forty-eight years ago this fall, Florida State University began.

Hardly on the same historical page, the two events nonetheless share a surprisingly close kinship. Fact is, they're more like joined at the hip.

In a season of remembrance, it's a question worth asking: what would Florida State be like today if the war had never happened?

Like most "what if" questions, admittedly it's a bit nonsensical. World War II so profoundly changed the planet that arguably no human enterprise--from academe to religion--was left untouched by the conflict in some way.

The war's impact on American higher education in general was, in a word, revolutionary. From the flight of European academics to these shores during the ascent of Hitler's madness, to the G.I. Bill of Rights, campuses all across America experienced unprecedented change at every level.

Change was bound to come sooner or later to the nation's third largest, all-female liberal arts college--Florida State College for Women (FSCW). By 1940 the institution was clearly among a dying breed--for more than a decade, single-sex colleges and universities had been going the way of the bustle.

But the war--the all-encompassing war that baptized the world in change--was the catalyst that triggered the birth of Florida State University in 1947. It's a simple fact, though not fully appreciated by many today.

"It's not overstating the case in the least to say that FSU is a product of the war," says Dr. Werner Baum, an original architect of FSU's academic foundations, now retired. "World War II had a profound effect here, and while co-education was the single most important element of that, it was by no means the only one."

Baum arrived on campus in 1949 at 26, one of 125 young scholars hired that year to help crank up an authentic university in Florida's capital city. In building a meteorology program from the ground up, Baum symbolized the fledgling university's aspirations to become a powerhouse in the sciences. He would soon be joined by others equally impassioned--and empowered--to put Florida State University on the academic map.

G.I. Bombshell

Changes wrought on FSCW by the war were many and varied, but unquestionably the most direct impact came from the G.I. Bill of Rights. This series of Congressional acts, the first one coming in 1944, created a number of benefits for returning vets--a free shot at a college education being one.

By war's end, upwards of eight million veterans--armed with a federal promise of free tuition, books and a little pocket money--descended on campuses nationwide. The government's largesse caught many colleges and universities by surprise. In Florida, it almost capsized the whole system.

In 1945, Florida's system of higher learning had remained virtually unchanged for four decades. The 1905 Legislature, via the Buckman Act, shut down seven small, state-supported schools scattered around the peninsula, and replaced them with two colleges--FSCW and Florida A&M College for Negroes, both in Tallahassee--and a single university to be consolidated in Gainesville.

The three institutions were to be segregated by race and sex. FSCW was reserved for white females, while Florida was for white men only. Florida A&M was allocated to black students, both men and women.

Even before the war ended, Gainesville was feeling the effects of the G.I. Bill. War-surplus buildings were dragged to central campus and set up as emergency housing for the returning vets. But such measures proved woefully inadequate to accommodate a horde of ex-G.I. applicants in the summer of 1946. Faced with a waiting list of some 2,200 men wanting to enroll for the fall semester, UF President Dr. J.J. Tigert appealed to Gov. Millard Caldwell for help.

Probably never in the annals of Florida higher education was a university president's request handled with such alacrity. In only two days, a deal effectively making FSCW coeducational was struck between UF, the Florida Board of Control (now the Board of Regents), the governor and cabinet, and FSCW (see "The Great Transition," above). By the end of the 1946-47 school year, a total of 954 men--almost all of them G.I. Bill students--were enrolled in a legalistic creation called the Tallahassee Branch of the University of Florida (TBUF).

The door for men at the Tallahassee school soon opened wider, as the absurdity of TBUF began to be apparent even to the hardiest critics of coeducation. The dam finally gave way in May '47 when the Florida Legislature threw out the Buckman Act and made both FSCW and the University of Florida co-educational. Equally important, FSCW was accorded full status as a state university.

When a spanking new Florida State University opened for business in the fall of 1947, 4,400 students signed up--double the enrollment of fall 1945. Of the enrollees, 1,054 were men, and 890 of these were paying their way on the G.I. Bill. Interestingly, 25 G.I. Bill students enrolling that first semester in '47 were women.

Science, He Said

At long last, Tallahassee had a bona fide university, at least on paper. Now what to do with it?

President Doak Sheridan Campbell, FSCW's leader since 1941, figured to be no whiz at running a university. A product of George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville, Tennessee, Campbell had never even attended a university or served in a university administration. Moreover, during the war years, Campbell never championed the moves toward coeducation and university status for his campus, and reportedly thought ill of those who did.

But people who knew the man give Campbell credit for acknowledging his inexperience and then doing something about it.

"Campbell had the wisdom to let this place go," says Baum. "He may not have known much about a university, but he picked people who did and gave them plenty of room to operate."

One of those people was Dr. Edwin R. Walker, a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado. The University of Chicago-trained Walker had gotten the attention of Campbell's dean of students Broward Culpepper (later chair of the state's Board of Control), who had been favorably impressed by Walker at a meeting he had just attended. Culpepper pitched Walker to Campbell, who wasted no time in offering him the deanship of FSU's College of Arts and Sciences.

Baum talks of the man who hired him for his first teaching post in reverential tones. He described Walker as "a first-rate scholar, an extremely sophisticated man" who clearly had a vision for Florida State University. By the time he arrived on campus for the start of the '48 fall semester, Walker already had a well-planned agenda, which could have been summed up in a single phrase: bring on the science.

"Whatever we have today (in the sciences), we can trace back to the wisdom of Ed Walker," Baum says, emphatically. "He's largely forgotten today, but without a doubt, Ed was the single most important personality in the evolution of sciences at Florida State."

With Campbell's full blessing, Walker launched a campaign based on what he saw around him at his new post. What he saw was mostly opportunity. The school's curriculum was nearly devoid of the career-building courses in science and math that Walker knew from experience men were especially hungry for. If FSU was to become a university worthy of the name, Walker realized that solid programs in the natural sciences--chemistry, math, physics and meteorology, for example--had to be built from scratch.

The institution Walker joined in 1948 was only beginning to shed its liberal-arts look. When the war ended, the school's offerings in the sciences, paltry to begin with, stopped with the bachelor's degree. A graduate school hadn't been formalized until 1946, and by 1948 the only doctoral programs were in education, music education and home economics. Research, what there was of it, consisted of small, isolated projects, skating on thin funding. Less than half of the faculty had Ph.Ds.

Sensing the potential the school had for rapid growth--thousands of education-starved ex-G.I.s were still out there, and they were finding precious little in the way of science training in the South--Walker became a national headhunter for young talent in the sciences. He chose to go after promising Ph.D. graduates just starting their teaching careers, figuring he couldn't compete against well-established universities seeking seasoned faculty members. Campbell gave him everything he needed--including a handsome budget for salaries (state funds for such had built up during the war).

In 1971, shortly before he died, Campbell was quoted in Research in Review regarding his directives to Dean Walker:

"I gave (Walker) as near carte blanche as I have ever given anybody in the location and attraction of young men who were highly trained in the branches of science to which we expected to give attention. These were chemistry, physics, the various branches of biology, meteorology and geology."

Hiring scores of young recruits from the best programs he could find, Walker blew life into all these fields and more before leaving the university in 1952 (he eventually became president of Queens College in Charlotte, North Carolina). Two of his '49 hires--Baum and the late Dr. Karl Dittmer--got things rolling early in meteorology and chemistry, respectfully. Each new department head hired was given free rein to build their units as they saw fit, Baum recalls.

"Ed told us that it was up to us--either make it or break it. The excitement around this place was unbelievable."

Walker's passion for hiring bright young scientists was matched by his determination to set a new tone for scholarship on campus. He sought to substantially raise the bar for faculty advancement. The time-honored job of imparting wisdom in front of a blackboard would now be augmented by time spent creating such wisdom.

Ms. Kitty Hoffman, who taught chemistry at FSCW and at the new university before retiring in 1984, well remembers the Walker years and the effect his leadership had on faculty.

"It was made clear to the faculty that they had to take certain steps toward getting their Ph.D., or they would not be advanced," she recalls. "Teaching, then, would no longer be all that was required.

" Not surprisingly, all faculty members weren't happy with what amounted to a paradigm shift in their chosen profession. Quite a few simply packed up and left Tallahassee for good, Hoffman said. Others, who had been entrenched as deans or department chairs for years, fell on hard times, seeing their stature eroded or threatened by the erudite Walker and his youthful science corps.

"It was a painful transition for some, no question," Baum said. "Some took it in stride, and came out fine. Others actually fell apart--in fact, quite tragically in some cases. But as painful as it may have been, what took place in those early years was absolutely necessary if we were serious about building a real university in Tallahassee."

Surplus of Opportunity

When Ed Walker took up the reins for leading Florida State into the ranks of consequential universities in 1948, he couldn't have picked a better time for such a job anywhere on the continent.

The war had pitched the world on its end, and standing to benefit enormously from the fallout was American higher education. Before the war, a college sheepskin was a rare animal--less than two percent of the population owned one. Fully two-thirds of the men and women who served in the war had not even completed high school.

And suddenly, here comes Uncle Sam offering 16 million eligible vets a free ticket for something their mommas and daddies had only dreamed of--a college degree. So, just when Walker went shopping for young academics with advanced training, the G.I. Bill was producing them wholesale. With few exceptions, almost every faculty member Walker hired during his four years at FSU had the G.I. Bill to thank either entirely or in part for their graduate training.

The statutory stimulus, however, did much more than trigger a rush by returning vets for the gates of the nearest campus. It prompted an overhaul in federal thinking about the role of government in supporting graduate training and research.

Before the war, government support for scientific research was extremely limited. But campus-based research and development during the war years ably demonstrated such work's value to the nation. By 1946, it was clear to most that the federal government was about to get involved in university research in a big way. Even before he hired Walker, President Campbell was aware of the trend and had pushed for faculty incentives--including reduced teaching loads--to go after those new research dollars. These, he knew, would fuel growth in graduate research programs--the signature of any genuine university.

Walker wasn't on the job three months before the young university had its first cohesive policy governing research activities. A university research council was formed, and Walker was installed as its chairman. By 1950, Walker had hired more than 200 faculty whose arrival on campus coincided with FSU's new resolve to stoke its ambitions in scientific research with the increasing amount of federal help available. Toward that end, in April of that year the university joined its first research consortium, the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies, rather boldly agreeing to pay dues of $2,000 a year.

Inspired by their bosses' backing, Baum and Dittmer, along with other notable '49 additions--including biochemist Dr. Earl Frieden (Ph.D. Southern Cal), organic chemist Dr. Werner Herz (Ph.D. Colorado), and physical chemist Dr. Ernest Grunwald (Ph.D. UCLA)--plunged head first into the grant-seeking game. Their successes, modest at first, nonetheless spurred a sense of urgency among their colleagues, which was quickly passed along to newer arrivals.

"We worked like hell both in the classrooms and the labs--what labs we had, that is," Baum recalls. "Pretty soon, things began to move."

In 1950, Florida's Board of Control granted FSU its first doctorate programs in science--in chemistry, physiology/zoology and botany. A Ph.D. in meteorology was available in 1952, as was a terminal degree in psychology. A doctorate in physics followed in 1953.

The record shows that in 1952, one Boris Gutzbezahl, a graduate student in chemistry who had followed Grunwald to Tallahassee from UCLA, became the first recipient of a Florida State University doctorate.

Getting Serious

With the seeds planted, it was then a matter of letting nature take its course. Florida's population was growing rapidly, triggered by an influx of military bases established throughout the state during the war. Favorably impressed by the state's climate, when the war ended many ex-servicemen decided to stay.

News began to spread about the rigorous science-course offerings at the former "girl's school" in Tallahassee, and enrollment steadily eased upward. The university's 10th anniversary in 1957 was celebrated by 6,700 students--a 200 percent increase in a decade.

Growth, of course, meant more infrastructure money from the Legislature--much welcomed by the FSU community as a whole, and cheered loudly by the science faculty, who felt they were still living out of boxes. Dean Walker's campaign for science talent had dramatically overshot the university's capacity for housing it--both in classrooms and laboratories. So bad were things in 1949, in fact, that when some of Walker's recruits laid eyes on the campus, they immediately turned tail.

Werner Herz is one who stayed and made the best of it, convinced that things could only get better. He, along with the rest of the chemistry faculty, were squeezed onto a single floor in what had been FSCW's Science Building (now Diffenbaugh), built in 1921. His "so-called research laboratory" was located five miles away on what was called "West Campus," actually a phalanx of wood-frame barracks that housed airmen during the war.

"The barracks was heated by a coal furnace located in a little hut on the outside," Herz recalls. "In the winter, I had to stoke the furnace myself. In the summer, it was so hot that my solvents (lab chemicals) would evaporate."

Things did get better, but the cramped feeling lingered into the late 1950s. Dr. Joe Lannutti, today an associate vice president for research, arrived on campus in 1957 as a 31 year-old physicist from UCLA. He had been lured by thoughts of getting on the ground floor of a physics program-in-the-making.

"I walked into my assigned space in Diffenbaugh," he told Research in Review recently. "Suddenly the real meaning of the Ôground floor' concept hit me--it was a completely empty room in the basement."

Equipment was another story altogether. Without mountains of wartime leftovers to draw from, some labs might never have been built, says Baum, who got boxes of stuff through the Office of Naval Research. For years, a war-surplus wind vane, mounted atop a Westcott tower, announced to the world that FSU had a meteorology program.

But by 1958, a decade of hard work and sacrifice had obviously paid off. State appropriations for FSU had vaulted from $4.8 million in 1947 to $15.4 million 10 years later. In 1955, a Democrat from Tallahassee--and a staunch FSU advocate--named Leroy Collins was elected to the state house, and FSU's star was on the rise politically as well as academically. Baum, Herz, Lannutti and the rest of the FSU community eventually had plenty of reason to rue the passing of the Pork Chop Gang era.

"We were crazy," Baum says. "We used to wish we could get some college-educated legislators instead of these hick characters we had in there. But it turns out that these guys had an enormous respect for what universities were all about."

Collins forever endeared himself to FSU when he carried his love of FSU into the governor's office. He is generally credited with steering a $5 million package through the 1957 Legislature that established an FSU program in nuclear research--the first major scientific development to hit the campus. Anchored by a $2 million tandem van de Graaff nuclear accelerator--at the time one of only two on an American campus--this program instantly became a magnet for highly trained faculty--and handsome research dollars to boot. Within 10 years of its operation, in federal grants to the university the nuclear program had generated nearly five times its original cost to Florida taxpayers.

But in retrospect, perhaps the nuclear program's greatest contribution to the university was purely symbolic. It was a lit fuse that signalled the launch of FSU's scientific dreams in other areas. In 1960 the university landed a multimillion-dollar grant from the Atomic Energy Commission to establish an Institute for Molecular Biophysics, the first of its kind in the Southeast. This coup was chiefly the work of physical chemist Dr. Michael Kasha, one of Dean Walker's '51 recruits out of Berkeley--later a member of the National Academy of Sciences--and still an active faculty member today.

By 1968, FSU's struggle for recognition in the scientific arena had caught the attention of the National Science Foundation. That year the federal agency took a close look at the campus, liked what it saw, and awarded a $4.8 million development grant intended as seed money for the sciences. The award, together with a $3 million supplement from the state legislature, went for faculty salaries and space and equipment upgrades in chemistry, physics, statistics and for its day, what already was an extraordinarily sophisticated program in psychobiology (today's Program in Neuroscience).

In substantial ways, the '68 NSF grant signalled Florida State's arrival as a consequential figure in science training and research. The university's second decade saw an explosive growth in outside funding for research--from a feeble $300,000 in 1956 to nearly $15 million by 1969. During the same period, the number of doctorates awarded on campus sprang from 36 to 240.

Florida State University's name had finally become linked with serious science, and a special kind of science at that. The university became recognized as a center for basic--as opposed to applied--research, work directed more at finding out how natural processes work than in finding useful things to do with them. Neither Walker nor any of his successors deliberately charted such a course--it was a natural consequence of starting a multi-dimensional science program from next to nothing, says Lannutti.

"Applied research, which includes engineering and the other professional schools, evolves from basic research," he said. "Here, we were starting from zero. The people who were brought to campus were young, fresh out of (predominantly) basic research programs. Doing basic work was essentially all they knew."

The distinction was never more apparent than in 1957 with the Legislature's award to FSU for the van de Graaf accelerator. Essentially a large atom smasher useful for studying the innards of atomic nuclei, the machine fit neatly into FSU's emerging niche in the fundamentals of science. As part of that same appropriation package, the University of Florida got a nuclear reactor, to anchor a new program in nuclear engineering.

Arts & Humanities, Too

Ed Walker's Florida State legacy is surely most prominently evinced by the nationally and internationally acclaimed science programs now seated on campus. Even FSU's $100 million National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, with its far-flung research initiatives in materials science and biotechnology, may rightly be viewed as an outgrowth of strong programs in chemistry and physics which Walker helped start nearly 50 years ago.

But Walker's well-rounded intellect benefited other academic realms as well. The group of faculty brought to campus in 1949 (forever enshrined in FSU lore as "the Forty-Niners") included a number of outstanding scholars who made lasting contributions in the arts and humanities, notably in history, English and music.

Walker encouraged music dean Karl Kuersteiner in his successful bid to bring to campus Ernst von Dohnanyi, the great Hungarian composer, in 1949. Dohnanyi was one Forty-Niner whose world-class stature gave the School of Music--already well-respected--a powerful boost professionally before his death in 1960. Another, the late Dr. George Lensen, a renowned historian at the time of his death in 1979, helped set lofty standards for scholarship in his department. Notably, Lensen credited Walker with much of his success, calling him "an intellectual leader" who "inspired and enthused" him as a budding scholar.

Such infusion of diverse ability and intellect at the most critical stage of FSU's development served to magnify the gains being made in the sciences, Baum feels. The excitement being generated in the sciences became contagious, in fact, as progressive-minded new arrivals shook up the status quo and got things moving in every department.

But for all his contributions to the academic footing of Florida State University, Walker was merely taking advantage of a rare opportunity borne of even rarer world events. Half a century ago, Florida's top "girl school" was inching toward change, but it took a global war to bring a sudden end to one era of higher education and a bright beginning for the next. As a consequence of chaos half a globe away, Florida now had two universities rushing headlong into an all-new world.

FLASTACOWO LEADERS: from left Sue Chaires Boyington, Class of '43; Mary Lou Norwood, Class of '47; Katherine ("Kitty") Blood Hoffman, Class of '36; Daisy Parker Flory, Class of '37; Betty Lewis harrison, Class of '45; Mart Pierson Hill, Class of '42; Sara Lewis Marxsen, Class of '47

The Great Transition

As early as 1929, there was talk of making Florida State College for Women coeducational. Around campus, it was one of those titillating topics that editors of the student-run Florida Flambeau liked to raise occasionally just for kicks. Few before 1941 actually took the idea seriously.

But dramatic world events that year suspended any balmy notions of anything being immune from change--and in point of fact, the time had arrived when most FSCW students verily swooned at the thoughts of men on campus. And for good reason.

Less than three miles west of Landis Green, the Army Air Corps had set up a base for pilot training. By the fall of 1942, more than 2,000 male trainees were living at Dale Mabry Field, a tantalizing development to be sure. At the same time, a large Army base, Camp Gordon Johnston, was rapidly turning the piney woods of nearby Franklin County into one of the fastest growing areas in the state.

The impact on FSCW was both predictable and swift in coming. The administration, led by President Doak Campbell and Olivia Dorman, the stalwart dean of students, were obliged to man the battlements. Both realized that a ban on all contact between the student body and the new male neighbors would be futile. To keep a grip on the new social dynamic, Campbell and Dorman set up a regular series of formal dances in the Longmire Building. Throngs of men in uniform became familiar Saturday-night sights at these and other "soldier parties" thrown by the administration.

For the next few years, life at FSCW was suffused with such manifestations of war. Most male teachers of draft age vanished, often leaving lengthy holes in the curriculum. Enrollment shot upward, prompted by young women seeking training to help their families cope with missing wage-earners. The student body rallied to do its bit for the war effort, including planting victory gardens, knitting clothes, rolling bandages and selling war bonds.

All in all, it was a time of great excitement. Aside from their new social dimension (something their parents hadn't counted on), the women were awakened to the more sobering realities of war-time. Given its proximity to the coast, Tallahassee was regarded as being subject to German bombing attacks. Air raid sirens were installed on the roofs of Landis Hall and Westcott, and students soon learned to scramble for shelter when they heard them wail. The shooting war became real in June of 1942, when a German U-boat torpedoed and sank the 430-ft British tanker Empire Mica off Apalachicola only 80 miles away.

Mary Lou Norwood, Class of '47, remembers being in the downtown Florida Theater when her Dale Mabry date was suddenly ordered back to base following the Mica incident. Ostensibly to suppress panic, the sinking was hushed up in the local press. But the word got out anyway, as it did a year later when a tragic mishap cost the lives of dozens of Camp Johnston soldiers who drowned near Dog Island while training for the D-Day invasion.

The ferment of war-time rapidly took its toll on tradition at FSCW and elsewhere. As the Allied war machine approached final victory, the G.I. Bill already was threatening to swamp campuses nationwide with returning vets. At the all-male university in Gainesville, things were cramped by the summer of 1945, and growing rapidly worse. By the following summer, the situation was intolerable--UF President J.J. Tigert announced that 8,400 men had applied for the fall term--2,200 more than there was room for.

A special joint meeting of the Boards of Control and Education was held in Tallahassee on Sept. 2, 1946 (Labor Day) to discuss the situation. That evening in Suwannee Hall on campus, FSU hosted a dinner meeting for the principles, which included Tigert and Gov. Millard Caldwell. President Campbell was pressed to consider the urgency of the situation and grant access to FSCW classes to as many men as practical. They could be housed in the old Dale Mabry barracks, recently acquired by the city, which was willing to donate the property to the campus. If the Cabinet could immediately cut loose funds for hiring more faculty, Campbell saw no problem.

The very next morning, the Cabinet met and approved a plan to install up to 1,000 male students at FSCW during the coming year. Campbell was authorized "to do all things necessary" to get the job done as soon as possible. The board then approved $300,000 for renovating living quarters at Mabry Field.

To make this two-day deal legal--state law specifically prohibited coeducation at FSCW--the Board of Control created "TBUF," the Tallahassee Branch of the University of Florida. State Attorney General Tom Watson quibbled, saying that the emergency measure should in no way be construed as "a precedent" for coeducation at FSCW. Campbell replied that whatever the technicalities may be, in reality FSCW was now Florida's first de facto coed institution of higher learning.

By the spring of 1947, Tallahassee-born Senator Leroy Collins was ready with a bill, written with the help of local representatives Wilson Carraway and Payne Midyette, effectively overhauling the state's antiquated higher-ed system. The TBUF charade had shown that coeducation was not only something that FSCW could handle administratively, but something that the entire FSCW community, including the once-reluctant alumnae association, strongly desired.

Howls of protest by loyal University of Florida partisans punctuated lively debate on the issue, but on May 7, 1947, Collins' bill passed both houses. At the stroke of a pen, on May 15 Gov. Caldwell consigned Florida State College for Women, with its four generations of rich, liberal-arts tradition, to the history books.

In researching her dissertation on the history of FSCW, to be published in book form this fall, Dr. Robin Sellers of Tallahassee ran across an amazingly prophetic editorial from a 1937 Flambeau. When men appeared on campus, the author predicted that:

"....the gymnasium would have a companion stadium...the dining room system would not work, Odd/Even competition would be overshadowed by intercollegiate sports, girls' athletics would be subordinated to masculine talent, enrollment would increase but grades would decrease..."

Even as they championed the cause for coeducation, many FSCW alumnae today admit that they knew what was likely in store for them. All of their proud, Femina Perfecta traditions--including self-governance and athletic competition--would be subjugated, even erased altogether, by their male classmates. In 30 years following the "The Great Transition," a female held the office of student body president only once.

Interestingly, the main regret expressed by the alums reached for comment was the demise of intramural sports. The spirited Odd-Even rivalry--based on one's graduation year--tied the campus together in a way that has never been duplicated. Alumnae reunions typically ring with the sounds of Odd-Even cheers and fight songs even today.

But none of the women interviewed would roll back the clock, even if they could. They realize that without coeducation, FSCW would have been doomed to stagnate as an institution, to be perennially starved for funding and face an uncertain fate. Coeducation--together with university status--preserved substantial gains carved out by FSCW as a superb liberal arts college. What's more, the transition almost overnight translated into better instruction and a wider variety of coursework to choose from.

"The trade-offs were well worth it," says Norwood, whose diploma is stamped with the names of both institutions. "I was happy to be a student at FSCW, but I'm much happier to be a graduate of Florida State University." --FRANK STEPHENSON

For More...

Information for this article was drawn from Femina Perfecta: The Genesis of Florida State University, by Robin Jeanne Sellers, Ph.D. This dissertation, representing the first comprehensive history of FSCW and the "Great Transition," will be published as a book this fall by the FSCW/FSU Class of 1947. The book is available through Oct. 1 at a pre-publication price of $19.95 (includes tax and shipping) from The 1947 Book Fund, FSU Foundation, 634 W. Call Street, Tallahassee, FL 32306-4013.