S C T E CHN I CA L CO L L E G E S Y S T EM ’ S
F I R S T 5 0 Y EAR S
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members of the House and Senate were graduates from Clemson
and South Carolina. Their allegiance went to the big universities.
We just weren’t looked at. We had to prove ourselves.”
Zobel battled South Carolina and Clemson’s political influ-
ence. “I didn’t have football, baseball, or basketball tickets to give
away. I might change a legislator’s oil or build a barbeque grill,
but that was it.”
Nonetheless, Zobel got his foot in the door. “I got our pres-
idents to give me a member of the House and a member of the
Senate who would fall on their swords for technical education.
That gave us sixteen members in the House. We asked them to
recruit their desk mate. That added up, and we started getting a
little respect at the State House.”
Zobel and other lobbyists formed a group to promote higher
education. “The goal was to work together rather than as indi-
viduals. We formed the Higher Education Legislative Lobbyists.
We had to change that name because when we’d go see a member
of the House or Senate, the secretary said, ‘Sir, the group from
HELL is here.’”
They wisely added “Organization” to the name.
“And this paid off,” said Zobel, “because each of us would pull
members of the House and Senate aside and say, ‘You know, this
is what we need.’ We were on the same page. We weren’t asking
for any more money. We just wanted to divide it equally, which
was a funding formula we worked out with the Commission on
Higher Education.”
An old familiar dictum brought parents around: “Nothing
succeeds like success.” Walters adds, “Over time, this idea of
being a technical school in a negative sense became more posi-
tive. As we added programs like nursing and respiratory therapy,
health sciences, engineering technologies, and others, the stu-
dents coming in were some of the best students in the school sys-
tem. The parents of those students quickly learned the quality of
the technical college system.” The word spread that tech students
were landing good-paying jobs.
Dr. Marilyn “Murph” Fore, senior vice president for academic
affairs at Horry-Georgetown Technical College, has been part of
the college since 1974. She remembers how simple the curricu-
lum was at first at Horry-Georgetown TEC under the old Man-
power program. It wasn’t exactly the stuff colleges put in their
curriculum. “In the early days we taught short-order cooking.
They were making sandwiches and soups and things of that sort.”
Back then she said the school’s core strengths were business,
welding, machine tool, secretarial science, and automotive.
CHANGE IS ON THE HORIZON
Technical training centers were evolving, and new curricu-
lum areas and credit transfer programs were coming. The tender
shoots of colleges were sprouting. Dr. Lex Walters remembers a
key, enabling legislative change in 1972. “It moved the system’s
advisory committee from the state’s Department of Education
into its own board, the State Board for Technical and Compre-
hensive Education. That established the base for institutions to
be comprehensive. They could’ve been called community col-
leges, but many people in leadership positions jealously guarded
the word ‘technical.’ To take that word out, they thought, would
diminish the system’s potential to attract major employers to
South Carolina.”
Early signs of movement to college status existed. Dr. Jim
Morris joined the system in August 1972. Morris said, “I came
here sort of for the challenge. I didn’t come here for the money.
Stan Smith recognized that he needed to get some folks with a
doctorate who understood the two-year college and the compre-
hensive nature of those institutions. He hired a bunch of people
within three or four months, and I was fortunate enough to be
one of them even though I was well-placed in Jacksonville as the
coordinating dean for academic affairs college-wide.”
The first timeMorris came up, he said “no,” but Smithwouldn’t
take “no” for an answer. Morris remembers, “He just said, ‘I’m
going to get this boy up here some kind of way.’”
The 1970s
A
M O D E L F O R T H E N A T I O N E M E R G E S
