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Susquehanna University's history from 1858 to 2000 has occurred in three stages, each expressing a different mission. The school was founded in 1858 as the Missionary Institute of the Evangelical Lutheran Church to fulfill the vision of the Rev. Benjamin Kurtz, a Lutheran cleric and editor of the Lutheran Observer. He was a partisan of the American Lutheran viewpoint caught up in a fratricidal battle with Lutheran orthodoxy. The Missionary Institute sustained his viewpoint in the preparation, gratis, of men called to preach the gospel in foreign and home missions. A complementary purpose was to educate young people in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania at both the Institute and its sister school, the Susquehanna Female College. When the Female College folded in 1873, the Institute became coeducational.
This book demonstrates how colleges and universities have played a vital role during times of great crisis in American history, responding actively and helpfully to all the major challenges confronting their country. The colleges of the land became politicized repeatedly by such momentous developments as the American Revolution, the Civil War between the North and the South, the two vast global conflicts of the twentieth century, and America's controversial involvement in Southeast Asia. Campus life became intensely fractious during these difficult and turbulent periods. Violence sometimes accompanied the campus activism. While there were significant differences in the response of groups on the campuses - students and professors reacted differently, for example - to the crises of earlier times as compared to those in more recent years, there is an element of continuity. That thread of continuity from the Revolutionary era to Vietnam was the fact that time after time, the members of the academic communities sought to resolve the nation's crises constructively. They rallied to the cause of colonial rights and, ultimately, political independence. They supported the aims of their embattled sections, North and South. They sought to influence their nation's responses to the global crises of the twentieth century. And they campaigned to extricate the nation from an increasingly costly military entanglement in Southeast Asia. In all five of these tests of national purpose, the colleges and universities, while not the ultimate decision makers, helped shape the eventual patterns of America's response in an important way.
Historians have dubbed the period from the Civil War to World War I "the age of the university," suggesting that colleges, in contrast to universities, were static institutions out of touch with American society. Bruce Leslie challenges this view by offering compelling evidence for the continued vitality of colleges, using case studies of four representative colleges from the Middle Atlantic region u Bucknell, Franklin and Marshall, Princeton, and Swarthmore. A new introduction to this classic reflects on his work in light of recent scholarship, especially that on southern universities, the American college in the international context, the experience of women, and liberal Protestantism's impact on the research university. According to Leslie, nineteenth-century colleges were designed by their founders and supporters to be instruments of ethnic, denominational, and local identity. The four colleges Leslie examines in detail here were representative of these types, each serving a particular religious denomination or lifestyle. Over the course of this period, however, these colleges, like many others, were forced to look beyond traditional sources of financial support, toward wealthy alumni and urban benefactors. This development led to the gradual reorientation of these schools toward an emerging national urban Protestant culture. Colleges that responded to and exploited the new currents prospered. Those that continued to serve cultural distinctiveness and localism risked financial sacrifice. Leslie develops his argument from a close study of faculties, curricula, financial constituencies, student bodies, and campus life. The book will be valuable to those interested in American history, higher education, as well as the particular institutions studied. "This book continues the story started by Veysey's Emergence of the American University. Its innovative approach should encourage scholars to study colleges and universities as parts of local communities rather than as freestanding entities. Leslie's findings will substantially revise currently accepted accounts of the history of education in the late nineteenth century."--Louise L. Stevenson, Franklin and Marshall College