SWU News:

February 16, 2004

Southern Wesleyan pioneer dies at 86

By Anna Simon
CLEMSON BUREAU - The Greenville News

CENTRAL — The Southern Wesleyan University and Central community is mourning the loss of a beloved teacher and leader who shaped many young lives and transformed a junior college campus into a four-year university.

Claude Rickman, 86, a past president, dean and teacher at Southern Wesleyan, died Friday of natural causes at Mariners Health Care in Seneca, said Paul Wilcox, a funeral director at Duckett-Robinson Funeral Home.

"He was a great man who gave his life essentially to this institution," said Paul Wood, a retired former teacher and dean at the university who was recruited by Rickman.

"Dr. Rickman will mostly be remembered for his love for education and his love for Southern Wesleyan University and his care and concern for each individual student," said Bob Nash, a retired professor of biology at the university and a student there during Rickman's tenure.

Wilcox, who was one of Rickman's students in the early 1950s at a high school academy on the college campus, remembers his former teacher as "an old-time Southern gentleman."

One of Southern Wesleyan's own, Rickman, a North Carolina native from Transylvania County, arrived as a student and returned as an educator.

He graduated from what was then Wesleyan Methodist Junior College in 1939. He completed his undergraduate degree at Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion, Indiana, in 1941, and joined the U.S. Navy.

Later he would make history come alive for his students with stories about his World War II experiences on a ship off the coast of Normandy on D-Day, Wilcox said.

After the war, Rickman earned a doctorate at the University of North Carolina and returned to Wesleyan Methodist College in 1946 to teach history, world civilization and religion. Within a few years he was named academic vice president — academic dean — a position he held until 1968, when he was named president of the college.

He served as college president for 11 years, until 1979.

For many of his years as dean, Rickman was a dormitory residence counselor, living with his wife and three children in an apartment in the dorm, recalled Nash, who was a student at the time.

"Dr. Rickman was very much involved in the activities on campus. He loved the students" and as a residence counselor "assisted them with not only academic problems but also personal problems," Nash said.

During perhaps the school's darkest hour, when a women's dorm burned in 1962 and two students lost their lives, he tried to rescue the girls from the building and coordinated local assisting agencies and communications in the aftermath of the tragedy.

He influenced the course of history a few years later, in 1968, when the board refused entry to a black student, John Wesley Taylor, from Africa, at the then all-white institution. Both deans, Rickman and Wood, who was dean of student affairs, resigned in protest, and Wood believes fear of losing Rickman changed the board's decision.

"He was such a highly regarded man that they backed away from it and we became the first private college in the state to admit blacks," Wood said.

Rickman's wife, Evelyn, who was registrar, resigned as well. She was also invited back.

"He had a vision for becoming a liberal arts institution," said Wood, who remembers the time and energy Rickman devoted to combine the junior college and a Bible college that shared the campus into an accredited four-year school under the new name of Central Wesleyan College.

The staff was excited when Rickman was named president, Nash said.

"He was a good man," Nash said. "During his leadership as president, the college made tremendous strides in expanding its programs, adding new faculty members and recruiting new students. I feel confident the enrollment was doubled during that period of time."

Visitation is scheduled from 7-9 p.m. today at Duckett-Robinson Funeral Home at Central Clemson Commons on State 93 in Central, Wilcox said. Services are planned at 3 p.m. Monday at Central First Wesleyan Church, with burial in Clemson's Memory Gardens.

The family has asked that memorials be made to Southern Wesleyan University, Central, SC 29630, or to Hephzibah Children's Home, 8601 Zebulon Road, Macon, GA 31220.