Dream with a Deadline

Founded seven years ago by Louisville's Baptist churches, little Kentucky Southern College (843 students) has gotten high marks in educational circles. Its finances are something else again. Cut off from federal grants by Kentucky Baptist Convention policy, K.S.C. started the current school year on the verge of bankruptcy. Even severing its Convention ties did not help; a federal grant could not be obtained in time. The only alternative to receivership, said President Rollin S. Burhans, was to agree to a proposed merger with the University of Louisville.

K.S.C.'s students would have none of it. Hastily, they organized a fund-raising drive called "Project S O S" and dashed off thousands of letters to prospective donors. They manned telephones for 100 hours running, composed radio appeals, dispatched one member to Manhattan to seek foundation money, even sent another to Las Vegas to knock on Howard Hughes's gilded door. Neither traveler succeeded, but their enterprise made such an impression on K.S.C. Board Chairman L. LeRoy Highbaugh Jr., who made millions in real estate, that he donated $800,000 to the salvage effort.

In exactly 25 days, SOS netted $1,275,100 -- enough to keep the college going for two years. "We had sweaty hands," says SOS Treasurer Robert Izzi, "and we were so emotionally keyed up that when the announcement keeping us open did come through, we started singing The Impossible Dream." That dream, to be sure, still has a deadline: a $3,500,000 transfusion is needed if K.S.C. is to stay open for five more years. But the college's undaunted students have no doubt that they can raise the money. They are already planning another fund-raising project. As for the University of Louisville, which was beaten out of its merger, it is on a financial treadmill itself and is negotiating for a merger with the University of Kentucky.

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