History
In 1906, the Staked Plains Baptist Association purposed the creation of a school. Dr. and Mrs. James Henry Wayland offered $10,000 and 25 acres (100,000 m2) of land in Plainview if the Staked Plains Baptist Association and the citizens of the city would raise an additional $40,000. In 1910, the school offered its first classes despite the administration building not yet being fully built. A total of 225 students were taking classes in primary education through junior college levels during the school's first term. After a public school system was well established in Plainview, the elementary grades were discontinued. Wayland Baptist gained membership to the American Association of Junior Colleges in 1926 and would later be approved as a senior college by the Texas Department of Education and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. The university is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools and the Texas Education Agency for teacher education training.
The school is the oldest institution of higher education in continuous existence on the High Plains of Texas due to the leadership of Dr. George W. McDonald, the fifth president of the school. When a run on the banks during the Great Depression threatened to close the school, the administration and faculty agreed to forgo pay in order to continue the task of educating students, trusting God to supply their needs.
In 1951, a black teacher approached the college asking if she could fulfill continuing education requirements at the college. Dr. James W. "Bill" Marshall, the school's sixth president, led the college to take the historic step to admit black students to the college, making Wayland the first four-year liberal arts college in the former Confederate states to integrate voluntarily. This action came three years before the Supreme Court's decision to ban school segregation, Brown v. Board of Education.
The Malouf Abraham Family Arts Center on the Wayland campus was endowed by the family of the late State Representative Malouf Abraham, Sr., and his son, Malouf Abraham, Jr., a retired allergist and active art collector from Canadian, the seat of Hemphill County in the northeastern Texas Panhandle.
A musical scholarship has been established at Wayland in honor of Sybil Leonard Armes, a Christian writer and alternate poet laureate of Texas in 1969, who was the mother of Wayland President Paul Woodson Armes.
In 1979 the Hawaii campus opened as Wayland's first outside of Texas. There are now 12 satellite campuses located throughout the U.S.
In May 2008, entertainer Jimmy Dean, a Plainview native, announced that he is making the largest ever gift to Wayland.
In 2013, Wayland was ranked as the #72 university in the West Region by US News.
Read more about this topic: Wayland Baptist University
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