Harding University: Faith, Merger, and Mid-South Education

Harding University sits in Searcy, Arkansas, about fifty miles northeast of Little Rock, and its origin is a story of two small Christian colleges that decided survival meant becoming one.

In the early nineteen twenties, Arkansas Christian College in Morrilton and Harper College in Harper, Kansas, were both financially fragile institutions affiliated with the Churches of Christ. Their leaders negotiated a merger, and on September twenty-third, nineteen twenty-four, the new Harding College opened on the Morrilton campus with twenty-six faculty members and two hundred eighty-four students drawn from seventeen states. The school took its name from James A. Harding, a pioneer preacher and co-founder of the Nashville Bible School, who had died in nineteen twenty-two.

The Morrilton campus proved too small, and in nineteen thirty-four the college relocated to Searcy, occupying the former grounds of Galloway College, a women's institution that had recently closed. The move gave Harding room to grow, and grow it did across the next several decades, adding graduate programs, professional schools, and an international studies emphasis unusual for a small Arkansas institution. In nineteen seventy-nine the school was formally elevated to university status.

Today Harding is the largest private university in Arkansas, with roughly five thousand students. Its commitment to integrating Christian faith with academics permeates everything from required Bible classes to a campus culture that still prohibits alcohol. The university operates one of the largest study-abroad programs among Council for Christian Colleges and Universities members, sending students to campuses in Greece, England, Australia, and elsewhere.

Notable alumni include Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel whose investigation defined a presidency, and Elwin Roe, the Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher who posted a twenty-two and three record in nineteen fifty-one and helped carry Brooklyn to a pennant. The university's outsized influence on Churches of Christ mission work worldwide has made Searcy, population about twenty-three thousand, an unlikely hub of global Christian education.