Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 21, 1992 TAG: 9202210378
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER SOUTHWEST BUREAU
DATELINE: BLUEFIELD LENGTH: Medium
TINY BAPTIST COLLEGE THRIVING
At Bluefield College, they see the '90s as a decade of expanded opportunities rather than a time of money cuts, teacher layoffs and college closings.The Baptist-affiliated college, founded in 1922, plans to celebrate its 75th anniversary with expanded enrollments, new buildings, more teachers, better salaries, more scholarships and a bigger endowment.
The small, four-year coeducational college just south of the Virginia-West Virginia border has already made a good start in that direction.
Since the appointment in early 1989 of Roy A. Dobyns as president, enrollment has nearly doubled to 642 students last fall, making it the fastest-growing of the 53 Southern Baptist colleges in the nation. Faculty salaries have increased by 20 percent. Six new faculty positions have been added. The academic profiles of incoming freshmen have gone up. A new science building is under construction.
Dobyns, who came here from Carson Newman College where he is vice president and academic dean, said there is no secret about the successes.
"You get some good people around you who'll work hard and do their responsibility," he said. "You just set the goals and set the charge . . . That's how you go about getting things moving."
Dobyns is also a believer in finding consultants who specialize in fund raising or whatever the college needs to do.
"I don't mind taking advice. In this day and time, if you think you know it all, you're dead," he said. "I guess I wasn't here two weeks before I had a consultant here to help us with admissions."
It was a largely new board of trustees that hired Dobyns three years ago with those goals in mind. Later this year, the college will launch its 75th anniversary campaign to raise $7.5 million by 1997.
Although the campaign has not been formally announced, it already has about $2 million in its coffers. "I've only been here a month and I'm three months behind already," said campaign director Don DeBorde.
The funds will pay for the new science building, library addition and student activity additions, academic support, a new men's dormitory, refurnishing a women's dorm, renovating the Lansdell Hall administration building, student services, more parking lots and an endowment increase.
Bluefield College now offers 17 majors, 10 more than it had two years ago, said Academic Dean Paul Beasley. It has 30 full-time faculty members, about 60 percent with doctorates and most of them here for less than five years.
Its major recruiting areas are Roanoke, Southwest Virginia, Richmond, Tidewater, Northern Virginia and Marshall County, W.Va., said Nina Wilburn, director of enrollment management.
Lynchburg is being added this year, she said. About $600,000 goes for financial aid each year, with about 80 percent of the students getting some kind of aid.