"An Old Institution of the Highest Order"

The Story of Ripon College

By Dr. Bernard S. Adams, October 24, 1977

Introduction

On October 24, 1977 the Newcomen Society in North America honored Ripon College and its president, at a dinner meeting in Madison for "their contributions to business, industrial, and institutional history and achievement." Ripon is the first college in Wisconsin to be honored by the society.

The Newcomen Society, a nonprofit educational corporation headquartered in London, England, and in Pennsylvania, exists "to increase knowledge and appreciation of our free enterprise system through the study of business, industrial, and institutional history." To accomplish this purpose, the society maintains a program for awards and grants to promote research and conducts a meeting and publication program.

At dinner meetings held across the country, papers are presented by chief executives giving the histories of their enterprises. Many of these papers are published and distributed to members of the society.

The dinner meeting honoring Ripon College and its president included over fifty invited guests. Father John P. Raynor, president of Marquette University, offered the invocation. E. David Cronon, dean of the College of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and member of Ripon College's Board of Trustees, brought the greetings of the Board. Dr. Robert E. Walton, president of American Breeders Service in DeForest and chairman of the "Wisconsin Committee" in the Newcomen Society, presided at the meeting. Introducing President Adams was James R. Underkofler, president and chief executive officer of the Wisconsin Power and Light Company. Also present was Charles Penrose, Jr., president of the Board of Trustees of the Newcomen Society in North America, who presented a testimonial citation.

The following pages contain the paper presented by President Adams at the meeting.

My fellow members of Newcomen:

It is the special privilege of many institutions of higher education to recognize, through the award of honorary degrees, individuals who have made exemplary contributions to modern society. Tonight the shoe is on the other foot as the Newcomen Society in North America pays tribute to a small midwestern college and its present leadership, a recognition that we accept with great pride but greater humility. American Newcomen has performed a singular service for more than half a century in promoting increased understanding and appreciation of our free enterprise system through the study of business, industrial, and institutional history. We at Ripon College are aware of the great organizations that have been recognized previously and we express tonight our deep gratitude not only to the officers and directors of the Society but to you who have honored us with your presence on this occasion.

This is not the first occasion on which someone connected with Ripon College has addressed a Newcomen gathering. On December 27, 1951, in Boston, American Newcomen honored the Liberty Mutual Insurance Companies and its president, Mr. S. Bruce Black. Mr. Black was a member of the Ripon College Class of 1913 and, from 1950 until his death in 1968, was a member of our Board of Trustees. I have read with admiration Mr. Black's 1951 address, on the subject of the development of workmen's compensation insurance in the United States, and can only hope that I can interest this Madison audience to the extent that Mr. Black did his in Boston over a quarter century ago.

Tonight I have the privilege to relate for you not the story of a great commercial enterprise or a great industry or a great financial institution--these being the stuff of which most Newcomen sagas are made--but rather the story of an enterprise that, in this age of bigness, contents itself with being an irrepressible David among the Goliaths. As Daniel Webster said of Dartmouth, Ripon is "a small college but there are those who love it." Let me tell you why this is the case.

The story begins, in 1844, with the crash of a steamboat upon a reef in New York City's East River. The owner of the steamer was Captain David P. Mapes. He salvaged the damaged hulk from the river, sold it for $6,000, and set out to recoup his fortune in the great west. He settled first in Racine, Wisconsin, but soon moved north and west with a group of friends in search of a place to found a city. The site they chose was near a small valley, watered by a winding creek, whereon was already started a settlement named Ceresco in honor of the Roman goddess of harvests. The new town was to crown a nearby hill, already determined, topographically, to be the highest point between the Milwaukee and Fox Rivers. This was in 1849, one year after Wisconsin became a state in the Union.

Only a year later, Captain Mapes' little city was a going concern, had absorbed nearby Ceresco, and had adopted the name of a very old cathedral city in Yorkshire, England -- Ripon. Then, on November 23, 1850, Mapes called together a small group of local citizens to discuss "the promotion of education" in what they obviously considered a model frontier town. It was agreed that there would be established a "Lyceum of Ripon" and that those attending that first meeting would constitute its board of directors. Mapes himself, who donated "a square acre of land on the highest hill," was elected president. Alvan E. Bovay, the town's first lawyer who, four years later, was to initiate the movement that led to the formation of the Republican Party, was elected clerk. Ezra L. Northrop who had opened the first store in Ripon became treasurer. Among the other directors were Warren Chase, founder of Ceresco and the Free-Soil candidate for governor in 1850, and John Homer, former secretary of the Territory of Wisconsin. In January of 1851, according to tradition, Mapes and Bovay staked out the site of the Lyceum's first building (according to tradition "in a gentle snowstorm") on the summit of that "highest hill."

The founders of what was to become Ripon College procured the financing for their infant enterprise in time-honored American fashion--by the issuing of stock. According to the minutes of an 1851 New Years Day meeting of the directors, "the honor of giving a name to the college was put up at auction"-- whoever purchased the most stock would name the college. Ezra Northrop subscribed for his brother-in-law, William Brockway, the largest amount--$250. The Lyceum of Ripon, accordingly, was incorporated as Brockway College--January 29, 1851, by act of the Wisconsin Legislature.

With the coming of spring in 1851, construction commenced on Brockway's first building, East College--a structure still in use and recognized, in 1976, as a national historic landmark. It was not until late in 1852, however, that part of the building was finished and not until June 1, 1853, that the college (really its preparatory department) opened for instruction. By that time, the directors had sold Brockway to the Reverend J. C. Walcott of Menasha who struggled through the rest of the decade in the vain hope that his church authority --the Winnebago Convention of the Congregational and Presbyterian churches--ultimately would take the institution off his hands.

The Winnebago Convention, always willing to serve as guardian, guide, and friend but never as financial sponsor, attempted to interest the Milwaukee and Madison conventions and the Milwaukee and Fox River presbyteries in the conversion of Brockway to a female seminary so it would not "compete" with fledgling (and coeducational) Beloit College on the southern border of the state. But even with the prospect of a second building, Middle College, started in 1857 and designated for the "ladies department," the churches could not be persuaded to back their interest with hard cash. The result was difficult times, still no graduating class from either the collegiate or the preparatory division, and continual strife between the Reverend Walcott, the church authorities, and the still-active directors from the town of Ripon. The financial panic of the late fifties and the outbreak of the Civil War combined to close the college during 1861 and 1862; while the college was closed, the grounds and buildings were occupied as a Union military camp by the First Regiment of the Wisconsin Cavalry.

When the college re-opened in 1863, it was little more than a charter, two still uncompleted buildings, and a debt that had increased to a staggering $20,000. Somehow, the directors (now largely elected by the church conventions) prevailed upon the Reverend William E. Merriman, a graduate of Williams College and Union Theological Seminary, to move from the East to assume the presidency. He was the first of only nine presidents. Within a year, Merriman had completed both East and Middle Colleges, cleared the debt, and obtained a new charter which renamed the institution Ripon College. And four years later four young ladies, constituting the historic first class of 1867, received degrees as Bachelors of Arts.

When the September session opened in 1868, there were six professors and five instructors on a campus boasting three stone buildings, the newest being West College, built to accommodate the increased number of students. There were now 66 students in the college course, 46 in preparatory studies, and numerous others in part-time status. 1868 was especially important, however, as the year in which Ripon won the endorsement of the New York-based "Society for the Promotion of Collegiate and Theological Education in the West." In return for severing its ties with the Congregational and Presbyterian Churches (the Winnebago Convention having given up its right to nominate candidates for vacancies on the Board of Trustees), the Society helped the college obtain its first endowment--the then magnificent sum of $50,000. With denominational control ended, with a sizable enrollment and a debt-free plant, with a substantial first endowment, Ripon College in 1868 at last was standing on its own feet and was about to make its mark throughout the state.

In 1873, President Merriman set forth the aims of his college in the following terms: "We seek to maintain the standard of a liberal education, both in thoroughness and extent, but we seek also to adopt instruction to the wants of the times." In those early days, the collegiate division offered three courses of study: classical, literary, and scientific. During the 1870's, it being the "want of the times," the science departments were strengthened and brought to Ripon a reputation that soon extended beyond the borders of the state. In 1876, for example, generous Ripon citizens underwrote the construction of a chemical laboratory (Athenian Hall) and a "transit house" for equipment they had purchased from a Cincinnati observatory. This made it possible for the Ripon faculty to be among the first in the country to replace the old lecture-textbook teaching of chemistry with the "hands on" laboratory form of instruction. At about the same time, the departments of mathematics, biology, astronomy and physics were organized; the latter was destined to bring to Ripon nationwide recognition.

The story of physics at Ripon is the story of one man. In 1906, the college's fourth president asked Doctor William Harley Barber to come from the Bureau of Standards in Washington to assume the single chair in the Physics Department. By the time of his retirement forty years later, Ripon ranked second nationwide in the number of graduates who had gone on for graduate study in physics. And in 1947, Professor Barber received the Oersted Medal from the American Association of Physics Teachers as the nation's premier teacher of undergraduate physics. Today, an endowed professorship bears his name--presented by a former student and the only one honoring a former faculty member.

Returning to the years around the turn of the century, advancements were being realized on all fronts. To the three original buildings and Athenian Hall were added the college's first dormitory for women (still in use for the same purpose), its first athletic field (also still in use), a large structure to house the library, classrooms, and laboratories, and the college's first gymnasium. By 1906, thanks largely to a matching gift from Andrew Carnegie, the endowment had grown to over $200,000. Moreover, the faculty and student body both were of sufficient size and quality to sustain a first-rate educational program. By 1911, Ripon was a reputable liberal arts college with its own indigenous traditions and a concern for excellence which attracted support from a variety of sources entirely on the basis of merit. And in the same year, the college was recognized by charter membership in the nation's first accrediting agency, the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools.

The father of the modern Ripon was Dr. Silas Evans, a graduate of the college who also held degrees from Princeton University and the Princeton Theological Seminary. Dr. Evans assumed the presidency in that same year, 1911, from which the modern college dates. There were "giants in those days," for Dr. Evans served two terms at Ripon (1911 through 1917 and 1921 through 1943). In the interim, he was president of Occidental College in California. Under his leadership, the college grew to full maturity: the preparatory course was dropped in 1913, the physical plant grew by some six buildings (four dormitories, the still-operative student union, and a handsome Greek revival library), and the curriculum assumed the general outlines that have characterized it ever since. The endowment reached $900,000 by the time of Evans' retirement in 1943, largely on the strength of a grant from the General Education Board of the Rockefeller Foundation.

The Evans years were marked by any number of institutional and individual achievements which served to advance the reputation of the college on the national scene. The honorary forensic fraternity, Pi Kappa Delta, was founded at Ripon in 1913 by Professor Egbert Nichols of the college faculty; by 1924, the Alpha Chapter of Pi Kappa Delta was the largest in the country. One of the forensic "stars" in the early twenties was one Spencer Tracy, then a Ripon undergraduate whose photographic memory served him as well on the debate platform as it did in college dramatic productions. In 1929, another member of the Ripon faculty, Professor Bruno Jacob, joined Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota in founding the National Forensic League for high school debaters, an organization still headquartered in Ripon.

Two other Ripon students of the Evans years should be mentioned here. One was Clarence A. Shaler whose inventive genius led him to experiment in tire vulcanizing. When he retired from the business he founded, in 1928, he was a multimillionaire who could well afford to turn to his real passion, sculpture. Shaler's "Lincoln the Dreamer" has an honored place on the Ripon campus where it lends credence to the city's claim as the birthplace of the Republican Party. The other alumnus was Frank J. Harwood, founder of the Appleton Woolen Mills, whose lifelong devotion to youth and to Christian service made it especially appropriate for the college's student union to bear his name when it opened in 1942.

One other "near-first" from early in the Evans years. A Department of the Army order, dated January 27, 1919, established at Ripon one of the first and, to this day, one of the most successful Reserve Officer Training Corps at any college in the country. During the 20's, 30's, and 40's Ripon was known, quite seriously, as the "West Point of the Midwest." Those years generated hundreds of regular and reserve Army personnel, many of whom were to become Colonels and Generals, and in numbers far out of proportion to the size of their college. As recently as 1967, every able bodied male student at Ripon was required to register for two years of Military Science. Even now, we are one of the handful of small colleges, nationwide, to maintain a numerically productive and qualitatively superior ROTC program.

When Dr. Evans retired in 1943, after 29 years in the presidency, the student body was comprised of 484 military and only 177 civilian students. Guiding these students and their college through the remaining war years was Evans' successor, Dr. Clark G. Kuebler. Ripon's first non-clerical president, Kuebler was a professor of classics at Northwestern with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He was an outstanding scholar and a brilliant speaker, known around the country as the president of the Episcopal Church's National Council of Churchmen. His twelve years at Ripon were to bring academic accomplishment but financial distress--the latter resulting from the general post-war depression and the disappointing results of the "Second Century Campaign" instituted in 1947.

Perhaps Dr. Kuebler's major achievement was the enlargement and rejuvenation of the faculty. Late in Dr. Evans' administration and early in Kuebler's, death or retirement had taken many of the great names on the Ripon faculty--Dr. Barber in Physics, Clark Graham and Phillips Boody in English and Speech, Grace Goodrich in Classics, the beloved "Daddy" Becker in Modern Languages. Kuebler replaced the "big names" with promising young professors but also engaged in a certain amount of academic house cleaning. The latter made the still-new president less than popular in some quarters but there is no doubt about the improvement of Ripon's reputation within the academic community itself. The culmination came in 1952 when the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa established a chapter at Ripon. Recognition by Phi Beta Kappa is the most considerable achievement to which a liberal arts college can aspire. Such recognition currently is limited to about seven per cent of the liberal arts colleges, public and private, nationwide.

Even with hard times financially, it was possible to continue the college's physical growth during the Kuebler years. Marshall Scott Hall, which still serves as a freshman dormitory, was named in the early 50's for a president of the Ripon-based Speed Queen Corporation, now a division of McGraw- Edison. The old gymnasium dating from the early 1900's was enlarged and renovated at the same time and serves even today as a memorial to Ripon's sons who lost their lives during the two World Wars. It remained, however, for Kuebler's two successors to complete the development of the college's educational plant.

Dr. Kuebler left Ripon in 1955 to head a new campus of the University of California in Santa Barbara. He was succeeded by Dr. Fred 0. Pinkham, a graduate of Kalamazoo College and Stanford University. Pinkham found the college heavily in debt as a result of several years of deficit operations and seriously in need of more satisfactory student housing. Within three years, Pinkham had balanced the operating budget, wiped out the accumulated indebtedness, and begun construction of what eventually would be six new residence halls. The most elaborate of these, a hall for upperclass women opened in 1962, was named for its donors, Mr. and Mrs. H. F. Johnson of Racine. With the 1964 completion of a new dining hall accommodating 750 students at a single seating, Ripon's residence facilities were fully prepared for the onslaught of students expected in the late-sixties. When those students began arriving, the campus could accommodate over 1,000 resident students, all but a handful in modern, functional buildings.

Dr. Pinkham, without question Ripon's most successful "bricks and mortar" president, did not stop with the residence and dining halls. In 1961, the Farr Hall of Science was opened--named for Albert G. Farr, a Chicago industrialist whose daughter Shirley was a Ripon trustee for 41 years. And a major campaign, completed under Pinkham's leadership, brought the college a new heating plant, a health services facility named for trustee James S. Kemper of Chicago, and a truly spectacular center for physical education and athletics. When Pinkham resigned the presidency in 1965, the physical Ripon had been transformed and the college's financial condition stabilized. No one knows as well as his successor the great debt owed to him.

It would seem inappropriate to dwell at great length on the years since 1966, the beginning of only the ninth administration in the history of the college. Suffice it to say that enrollment in the late sixties and early seventies grew to about 1050 and filled to overflowing the residence facilities. New academic as opposed to residential plant was required to house departmental programs that had never been adequately provided for. 1969 saw the opening of Todd Wehr Hall, named for the Milwaukee industrialist, to serve the social science departments, the foreign languages, and mathematics. In 1972, came the C. J. Rodman Center for the Arts, the most costly and probably the most handsomely functional of all the campus buildings. And in 1974 we opened a much enlarged and completely renovated library, triple the size of the original building presented to the college in 1931 by alumnus Rollin B. Lane. Ripon's physical plant now is fully adequate for a college our size, leaving only the renovation of two of the three original buildings for attention in the near future.

Ripon College today would be virtually unrecognizable to David Mapes and the other founders. No fewer than 32 buildings express varied but complementary architectural styles which enhance the natural beauty of a rolling 250-acre campus. The faculty now numbers about 75 with a most unusual 82% holding the Ph.D. or other terminal degree appropriate to their disciplines. The student body of about 950 hails from some 40 states and a dozen foreign countries. The college's endowment of approximately $4 million still is modest, even for a small college, but it is 800 times the size of the original endowment provided in 1868 by the Society for the Promotion of Collegiate and Theological Education in the West. Our $5.4 million annual budget (balanced each year but two since 1957) and our $17 million plant would astound the original directors who collectively contributed $345 toward the construction of East College in 1851. One thing that the founders might recognize: the full realization of their dreams for a liberal arts college "of the highest order."

I want to conclude this evening with some reflections on the special nature of a contemporary independent college of the liberal arts and sciences. Ripon happens to be a splendid example among many such institutions but we are hardly in a class by ourselves. So let me enlarge the focus and generalize a bit about a form of higher education peculiar to this country and very much a product of the private enterprise system that Newcomen celebrates.

An "independent" college is, of course, independent of state control. It is also independent of state support and must, accordingly, offer its services in the educational marketplace without benefit of governmental subventions. It costs independent colleges and state-supported institutions about the same to offer those educational services. But the taxpayer picks up most of the tab at the state institutions while private individuals do so at the independent colleges, through the necessarily higher pricing of the services and through private philanthropy. Obviously, we maintain our independence at a cost (doing without state support). We do so in the spirit of genuine private enterprise, believing that the goals and values of private individuals and groups should be expressed through independent institutions responsible only to those individually determined goals and values. Thus far, even with the massive expansion of government-owned higher education, the independent colleges have more than held their own.

We have done so largely because we have done extraordinarily well that one thing we are best equipped to do --to provide, for limited numbers of students, a high quality education in the liberal arts and sciences. The Philistines, the Utilitarians, the programmers of an already too programmed society continue to challenge colleges like ours on the grounds that we are not "useful" enough. A society that is so product-oriented, so predominantly concerned with the immediate pay-out, might not enthuse about colleges that are avowedly anti-vocational, that seek to educate rather than to train. It is true that we engage in the stretching of general human capacities rather than in purveying specialized technical training. But even more, we try to develop in our students a critical appreciation of man and his society. If enough of our students leave college with an appreciation of civilization that is not uncritical and a talent for criticism that is not unappreciative, then I think we are doing our job in liberal education.

There is something very special about the ethos of a small liberal arts college. Education that includes a concern for human values as well as for intellectual achievement, that requires critical analysis and reasoned interpretation, really must be highly participatory in character. The special genius of a college like Ripon is in the vital involvement of the total community in the educational process, viewed in its entirety. Active exchange between faculty and students occurs regularly, in and out of the classroom. Committed but purely amateur athletes can make the team, science majors can sing in the choir and perform on the stage, students don't have to get in line to obtain counseling or use the computer or write for the college paper. This does not mean that colleges like ours are hothouse environments for the controlled and artificial nurture of young plants--but simply that personal and intellectual growth, the most fundamental goal of liberal education, is more likely where there can be active personalized engagement in a total educational process.

I return, for a brief peroration, to the special human enterprise which Newcomen honors this evening. For 126 years, Ripon College has embraced a single but all- encompassing mission. We seek to educate men and women who can see the world "whole" in all its variety and complexity, who can think clearly, who can express themselves logically and gracefully, who can identify the elements of complex problems and propose solutions, who are conversant with the cultural and spiritual traditions which have shaped our civilization, who can help move our society toward worthy goals in an orderly and judicious fashion. What this college has accomplished toward full realization of its goals has resulted from individual initiative and from private support. Captain Mapes, at that first meeting back in 1851, declared that his college would become "an old institution of the highest order." Ripon College has become exactly that, entirely worthy of the distinctive honor that the Newcomen Society bestows this evening. I consider it a genuine privilege to serve this college and I am grateful for the opportunity that has been mine this evening.