The True Definition of Higher Education
BY CHRIS REINOLDS KOZELLE
Century-old Berry College remains true to its founding principles while adapting to the changing times.
A morning mist settles over the fields as herds of deer move unbothered through the tall pines. This little slice of tranquility is a recurring scene at Berry College, a private university boasting the largest contiguous college campus in the world, with more than 27,000 acres of forests, lakes, and trails. Located near Rome, Georgia, between the bustling cities of Atlanta, Birmingham, and Chattanooga, it’ s a place where history isn’ t just preserved, but lived in and carried forward into the future.
To understand how Berry College has navigated a century of change in education, you have to return to its unlikely beginnings as a Sunday school in a tiny cabin where young children gathered around Martha Berry, the daughter of a prosperous local family, who saw a need that others overlooked. By 1902, she had transformed her inherited 83 acres into the Boys Industrial School, which was built on a premise as practical as it was visionary— that students would work to help run their school in exchange for a quality education.
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That simple equation, learning through doing, has guided Berry through decades of cultural upheaval, economic turbulence, and technological transformation. Today, as the college faces a new century’ s worth of questions about relevance, affordability, and purpose, Berry continues to answer them by leaning into what made it distinctive from the start.
The philosophy Martha Berry articulated all those years ago— education of the head, heart, and hands— remains a living mandate.
A Vision Rooted in Head, Heart, and Hands
Walk the Berry campus today, and it’ s clear not only how much the school
Photo: Jeff Brown / Berry College
has grown, but also how much of Martha Berry’ s founding ethos still shapes the institution. The philosophy she articulated all those years ago— education of the head, heart, and hands— remains a living mandate.
Martha McChesney Berry founded the Berry Schools for the poor children of the rural South who typically couldn’ t afford to go to other schools. Within three decades, those schools of the early 1900s grew into Berry College, a comprehensive liberal arts institution. As a result of her 40 years of work in education, Martha Berry is among Georgia’ s most prominent women of the first half of the 20th century.
In the early years, Berry students built their classrooms, tended the livestock, and maintained the land. Work wasn’ t an extracurricular; it was the backbone of the academic model. By 1914, Berry officially integrated work as a central part of the educational program, helping keep operating costs low while reinforcing responsibility and self-reliance.
That founding principle, experience as education, turned out to be quite