Wheaton College (Illinois) - History

History

Wheaton College was founded in 1860. Its predecessor, the Illinois Institute, had been founded in late 1853 by Wesleyan Methodists as a college and preparatory school. Wheaton's first president, Jonathan Blanchard, was a former president of Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois and a staunch abolitionist with ties to Oberlin College. Mired in financial trouble and unable to sustain the institution, the Wesleyans looked to Blanchard for new leadership. He took on the role as president in 1860, having suggested several Congregationalist appointees to the board of trustees the previous year. The Wesleyans, similar in spirit and mission to the Congregationalists, were happy to relinquish control of the Illinois Institute. Blanchard officially separated the college from any denominational support and was responsible for its new name, given in honor of trustee and benefactor Warren L. Wheaton.

A dogged reformer, Blanchard began his public campaign for abolitionism with the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1836, at the age of twenty-five. Later in his life, after the Civil War, he began a sustained campaign against Freemasonry. This culminated in a national presidential campaign on the American Anti-Masonic Party ticket in 1884.

In 2009, it was confirmed that under Blanchard's leadership, the College was a stop on the Underground Railroad. The confirmation came from the letters of Ezra Cook, one of Blanchard's relatives by marriage, who notes that the town and College's anti-slavery beliefs were so widely held that "that he, along with hundreds of other Wheaton residents, had seen and spoken with many fugitive slaves".

Blanchard consistently lobbied for universal co-education and was a strong proponent of reform through strong public education open to all. At this time, Wheaton was the only school in Illinois with a college-level women's program. Also, Wheaton saw its first graduate of color in 1866, when Edward Breathitte Sellers took his degree. Additionally, he is likely the first African-American college graduate in Illinois.

In 1882, Charles A. Blanchard succeeded his father as president of the college.

In the fall of 1925, J. Oliver Buswell, an outspoken Presbyterian, delivered a series of lectures at Wheaton College. Shortly thereafter, President Charles Blanchard died, and Buswell was called to be the third president of Wheaton. Upon his installation in April 1926, he became the nation's youngest college president at age 31. Buswell's tenure was characterized by expanding enrollment (from approximately 400 in 1925 to 1,100 in 1940), a building program, strong academic development, and a boom in the institution's reputation. It was also known for growing divisiveness over faculty scholarship and personality clashes. In 1940, this tension led to the firing of Buswell for being, as two historians of the college put it, "too argumentative in temperament and too intellectual in his approach to Christianity." By the late 1940s, Wheaton was emerging as a standard-bearer of Evangelicalism.

By 1950, enrollment at the college surpassed 1,600, and in the second half of the twentieth century, enrollment growth and more selective admissions accompanied athletic success, additional and improved facilities, and expanded programs.

In 1951, Honey Rock, a camp in Three Lakes, Wisconsin, was purchased by the college.

In 2010, The public phase of The Promise of Wheaton campaign came to a close with $250.7 million raised, an "unprecedented 5-1/2 year campaign figure for Wheaton College".

In 2010, Wheaton College become the first American Associate University of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation’s Faith and Globalization Initiative. Tony Blair noted that the partnership will "give emerging leaders in the United States and the United Kingdom the opportunity to explore in depth the critical issues of how faith impacts the modern world today through different faith and cultural lenses" and that Wheaton's participation will "greatly enrich the Initiative".