Charles J. Turck

Charles Joseph Turck (September 13, 1890 – January 12, 1989) was an American lawyer, educator, and academic administrator who was the president of Centre College from 1927 to 1936, and then of Macalester College from 1939 to 1958. A native of New Orleans, Turck attended Tulane University before graduating from Columbia University with a law degree in 1913. After practicing law in New York City for three years, he taught law at Tulane and Vanderbilt University. He took his first administrative position when he was named dean of the University of Kentucky College of Law in 1924, a job he held for three years until his election to Centre's presidency. He spent nine years leading the school, from June 1927 to July 1936, during which time he continued plans to emphasize academics over athletics and gained the school admission to the Association of American Colleges and Universities. He left Centre for a position in the state tax commission under Governor Happy Chandler and also took an administrative role in the social education department of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America later that year.

Turck went to Macalester in 1938 to give a lecture; at that time, the school was nearly a year into a presidential search to replace John Carey Acheson. He was offered the job eight months after his talk. He accepted and took office in September 1939, becoming the school's ninth president. There, he worked to distance Macalester from its evangelical roots and emphasize the strengths of its liberal arts curriculum. He led the school through World War II, during which he spoke out against isolationism, which was broadly favored by the student body, and was accused by J. B. Matthews of being a communist spy. Macalester's enrollment saw a drastic increase after the war due to the G.I. Bill, as the school enrolled over six hundred veterans in 1947. He resigned the presidency in 1958 having held it for nineteen years, longer than any other Macalester president to date .

Early life and education Charles Joseph Turck was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on September 13, 1890, to Louisa Frank and Charles Edwin Turck.

Career Professor, dean, and president, 1916–1939 Turck left New York in 1916 to return to New Orleans, where he taught law at Tulane University until 1920, when he took a similar position at Vanderbilt University.

Turck was unanimously elected president of Centre College by its board of trustees on April 15, 1927, after his nomination to that vote was approved by the search committee, also unanimously. He took office as the school's thirteenth president in 1927. He was its second lay president, after Ormond Beatty, to take a position in Governor Happy Chandler's state tax commission. succeeding John Carey Acheson and taking office shortly after the death of president James Wallace. He was formally inaugurated on May 17, 1940. He desired to make the change to emphasize cultural education at Macalester by taking advantage of, and firmly maintaining, the school's liberal arts status, rather than veering away from it and more towards vocational education as some wished. Additionally, as early as his inaugural address, he expressed interest in moving the school past evangelicalism and its priorities of showing Christianity's superiority and saw religion as a means to an end for the school rather than the goal in and of itself. The differences in Turck's beliefs and those of the school's leaders of the past were summarized by former Macalester faculty member Jeanne Halgren Kilde as revolving around service and its purpose: Turck viewed it as being done for people, albeit with religion as a motivator, while the college's status quo placed it more as purely being done to benefit a deity. The 1940 school catalog reflected this by emphasizing the distinction between the college's religious identity and its former goal of spreading that religion to its students; however, it was the first catalog to explicitly mention Macalester's formal ties to the PCUSA. Macalester experienced a decrease in the proportion of its students who were Presbyterian; in the 1950s that number was typically in the high twenties or low thirties, compared to figures in excess of fifty percent prior to 1920.

Relatively early into his term, during World War II, Turck took a position at the United States Army School of Military Government, hosted by the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia,

During Turck's presidency, he started the school's foreign exchange program, which was a major step in their recruitment of international students.

Late career After leaving Macalester, Turck became executive director of the Japan International Christian University Foundation

Turck married Emma Fuller on September 28, 1914, and the pair were together until Emma's death on December 25, 1978. Both of the couple's children died over the next eight years: Emmy Lou in 1980 and Viola in 1986.

Turck died on January 12, 1989, at the National Hospital for Orthopaedics and Rehabilitation in Arlington, Virginia, of a heart attack. His funeral was scheduled for January 17, and he was buried in Danville's Bellevue Cemetery.