Presidents of Georgetown College

Leo Eddleman    1954-1958

        Leo Eddleman arrived at the end of a decade of rebuilding and renovating Georgetown College’s physical plant, morale, and financial standing.  But he also came, in his view, at a critical juncture for denominational colleges and universities.

        Born in 1911, in Morgantown, Mississippi, Eddleman graduated from Mississippi College, an institution of the Mississippi Baptist Convention, in Clinton.  After finishing his doctorate at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky, in 1935, he was appointed as a missionary to Palestine, where he worked for six years in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Nazareth.  During his stay in Palestine, he married Sarah Fox, another missionary.  As war threatened to engulf Palestine in 1941, Eddleman returned to the United States to teach Old Testament and Hebrew at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisiana.  He taught there for over a year before moving to Louisville to assume the pastorate of Parkland Baptist Church.  He stayed for ten years.  In addition to being a pastor, Eddleman served as superintendent of the church’s elementary school and as a professor of Hebrew and Old Testament at Southern Seminary.  He was also moderator of the General Association of Baptists in Kentucky.  In 1954, he accepted the position as president of Georgetown College.

        Eddleman believed that Baptist schools stood at a crossroads.  With the increasing support of public education in the United States, he saw Baptist schools threatened with extinction unless they could maintain their academic standards in the midst of standardization and accreditation pressures.  If Baptist colleges, such as Georgetown, were going to survive, they would have to provide distinctive training, producing aggressive, capable Christian leaders in all fields of life. 

        The major issue of Eddleman’s tenure was whether to merge Georgetown College with a central Kentucky Baptist university, which would be located in Louisville, Kentucky.  Some Louisville Baptists wanted to start a new college, which would be less expensive and more convenient to metropolitan residents.  Leaders of the Long Run Baptist Association began negotiations with the trustees of Georgetown College to support programs for arts and sciences and technical and vocational training in Louisville.  Money was committed, land was bought, and construction was started, but the trustees rejected the proposal to sponsor the extension in 1958, a move later confirmed by the General Association of Baptists in Kentucky.

        Georgetown College, during Eddleman’s administration, continued the growth that had been restored by his predecessor.  Enrollment and faculty expanded; much of the college’s debt was paid; more international students—from Israel, Nigeria, West Germany, Cuba, Rhodesia, and South Korea—attended; a graduate program in education was added to the curriculum; a new men’s dormitory, Anderson Hall, was built; and the V.V. Cooke library—student center was completed.  In sports, football, which had been suspended the year before Eddleman came, started again, and basketball became prominent under Coach Bob Davis.

        In the midst of the controversy over whether to move the college to Louisville, Eddleman had accepted the presidency of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, where he remained until his retirement in 1970.  He continued to be active, working as an editor for the Baptist Sunday School Board in Nashville, Tennessee and as a writer and teacher in Baptist institutions in Pineville, Kentucky and Dallas, Texas.  He returned to Louisville, where he died in July 1995.