Greenville University and the Women Who Deepened its Faithfulness
By Brian T. Hartley and Benjamin D. Wayman
Dr. Brian Hartley, who spearheaded the NetVue grant and History of Women in Leadership Project, provides an overview presentation at Homecoming 2024.
In December, 2022, Greenville University was awarded an Institutional Saga grant from the Council of Independent Colleges’ Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education (NetVUE), to recover, discover, and compose a largely unwritten history of the lives of key women who have shaped the university over its 130-year history. The project produced a collection of vignettes that made available a fuller picture of GU’s longtime commitment to women in leadership in the context of its mission to educate for character and service.
The unwritten history aimed to display the pioneering role of Greenville University in training, empowering, and employing women for leadership. From its beginnings, Greenville College (now University) recruited women of character and competence to teach on its faculty, including Mary Alice Tenney, the author of its published early history. These women exercised an outsized influence on the ethos of the institution and the education of students. Their leadership at board level, in executive leadership roles, and in key leadership positions across campus put Greenville at the forefront of the Christian college movement. Countless women alumni have served, and continue to serve, in positions of leadership within the institution and across the church, including Suzanne Davis, the current President.
Through this project, Greenville University rehearsed this story of growth, influence, and faithfulness through the lens of women connected with it. The stories that emerged remind those connected to Greenville University, the Free Methodist Church, and the University's larger constituency of the contributions of the leading women of our collective history. From the start, the project sought to provide current undergraduate students with the opportunity to do original research in the college archives. The essays which follow seek to retain their original author’s voice, whether written by a student, an alumnus, or a faculty member. As such, they each read a bit differently, but retain a certain distinctiveness and joy of discovery. Students and faculty worked together in research teams focused on important personages who made an important contribution either within the institution or without, and who left behind a significant body of materials available for research. Through mutual feedback and faculty oversight, what emerged were unique perspectives based on numerous “finds” in the college archives, some of which had been hidden or never broadly known. It is our hope that these narratives will prove both helpful and inspirational for the following generations of women who take up leadership at the institution.
