The word classis comes from the Reformed church tradition - it means a regional governing body of ministers and elders. The North Carolina Classis of the Reformed Church in the United States founded Catawba in 1851 in the town of Newton, then watched the institution buckle under the weight of the war. The transformation into a high school was a survival tactic, and the post-war return to college status was a long slow climb. By the time the trustees accepted Salisbury's offer in 1923 and reopened there two years later, the college had been through enough institutional near-death experiences that the move felt less like ambition and more like rescue. Today it remains affiliated with the United Church of Christ, the eventual successor to the Reformed Church through several denominational mergers.

On January 1, 1947, Catawba College won the very first Tangerine Bowl, beating Maryville College 31 to 6. One year later, on January 1, 1948, they won the second Tangerine Bowl, beating Marshall University 7 to 0. The bowl game eventually became the Citrus Bowl, one of the major college football postseason matchups, but Catawba was there for its founding moment - and across both games allowed only six points total. Catawba's athletic teams now compete in NCAA Division II in the South Atlantic Conference, fielding 22 varsity sports under the Catawba Indians name. The NCAA flagged the nickname in 2005 as potentially hostile or abusive, but the Catawba Indian Nation itself endorsed the school's continued use of the tribe-specific name, and the NCAA granted an appeal on the condition that the school refer to the nickname as the Catawba Indians rather than simply the Indians.

Catawba's Center for the Environment opened in 1996 with the brief of teaching environmental stewardship to students and the surrounding community. The building that houses it opened in 2001 and was hailed by North Carolina's top environmental official as the wave of the future in resource and energy efficiency - sustainable building materials, geothermal heating and cooling, green furnishings. Adjacent to the center is the 187-acre Fred Stanback Jr. Ecological Preserve, mature hardwood and floodplain forest that the NC Natural Heritage Program recognizes as a significant natural area. The college committed to carbon neutrality by 2030 and hit the target in 2023. Governor Roy Cooper visited that year to mark the milestone. For a school whose total enrollment hovers in the low thousands, beating the deadline by seven years is the kind of move that gets noticed in higher-education sustainability circles.

Ralph Ketner co-founded Food Lion, the regional grocery chain headquartered in Salisbury, and when he gave back to his community he gave to Catawba. The Ketner School of Business carries his name. It teaches accounting, economics, marketing, entrepreneurship, and the more recent additions of communications and sports communications, and it operates the Center for Entrepreneurship and Experimental Development. Most Catawba classes have fewer than twenty students; the student-faculty ratio sits at 12 to 1. U.S. News ranks the college sixth among Regional Colleges South and second among Best Colleges for Veterans. The school has produced a U.S. ambassador (William Lacy Swing), a governor of North Carolina (Pat McCrory), professional athletes across most major sports, and a clutch of football coaches including Jim Tomsula and Charlie Coiner.

Catawba received a $200 million gift in 2024 - its second nine-figure donation in three years. The endowment passed $580 million, an astonishing figure for a college of Catawba's size. The institution that had to become a high school to survive the 1860s now sits on financial reserves that many universities with five times its enrollment cannot match. What the trustees do with that money over the next century will shape what Catawba becomes. The signals so far - early carbon neutrality, business school investment, environmental preserve management - point toward a college trying to punch well above its weight class on the issues that matter most to the students walking under its red-brick arches today.