History
1867 Members of the German Reformed Church begin plans to establish a college where "young men could be liberally educated under the benign influence of Christianity." These founders were hoping to establish an alternative to the seminary at Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, a school they believed was increasingly heretical to traditional Reformed faith.
1869 The college is granted a charter by the Legislature of Pennsylvania to begin operations in its current location on the grounds of Todd’s School (founded 1832) and the adjacent Freeland Seminary (founded 1848). Dr. John Henry Augustus Bomberger, for whom the campus' signature Romanesque building is named (see Gallery, below), served as the college’s first president until his death in 1890. Bomberger had proposed naming the college after Zacharias Ursinus, a 16th-century German theologian and an important figure in the Protestant Reformation, in order to declare the Reformed orthodoxy of the College.
1870 Instruction begins at the college in September; on October 4, the Zwinglian Literary Society was founded. For many years the annual opening meetings of "Zwing" and its rival society, Schaff, were the major events of the student year.
1881 Women first admitted, as a direct consequence of the closing of the Pennsylvania Female College in 1880, and a separate literary society for women, The Olevian, is formed.
1893 The first meeting of the college's alumni association is held at the Colonnade Hotel in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
1897 The Ruby, Ursinus' yearbook is first published by the Class of 1897 as a tribute to Professor Samuel Vernon Ruby, who collapsed as he was entering Bomberger Hall in 1896 and died in its chapel, surrounded by students and teachers who had gathered there for morning prayers.
1921 The first aerial photograph of Ursinus is taken, by future college president D.L. Helfferich, and is published in the 1921 Ruby.
1995 The college appoints Dr. John Strassburger as its 12th president, the first president from outside the Ursinus alumni group. Dr. Strassburger was an American Historian, a graduate of Bates College, Oxford University, and Princeton University.
2006 Ursinus College is profiled among only 40 colleges in former New York Times education editor Loren Pope's popular guidebook, Colleges That Change Lives.
2010 Aakash Shah '10 of Harvard Medical School is named Ursinus' first Rhodes Scholar.
2011 Dr. Bobby Fong, a graduate of Harvard and UCLA and former president of Butler University, began his tenure as the 13th president of Ursinus on July 1, 2011. For the third year in a row Ursinus is designated as a Top Ten Up and Coming College by U.S. News & World Report.
Ursinus College is now independent in character with historical but no longer any operational ties to its church past, and currently operates on a growing $118,000,000 endowment.
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