Founded by Friends : the Quaker heritage of fifteen - Scarecrow Press

xvi Thomas D. Hamm
Hicksite Friends, perhaps because they had in the 1820s seen themselves
responding to Orthodox compromises with “the world,” were
slower to follow suit. Discussions of the Hicksite college that would become
Swarthmore did not begin until the 1850s. And even then, it may be
significant that at the center of the movement were Friends like James and
Lucretia Mott, who in the disputes of the 1840s over Hicksite involvement
in reform movements had been seen by other Hicksites as dangerous radicals.
The colleges that had their start after 1860 reflected different influences.
Some—William Penn, George Fox, and Whittier—like the older Orthodox
schools, began as academies or secondary schools. Others—Wilmington,
Friends University, and Bryn Mawr—were founded as institutions of
higher education. They were, with the exception perhaps of Bryn Mawr,
envisioned as institutions to serve Quakers but in ways that were different
from the older vision of a guarded education. To be sure, the founders
of all saw themselves as mixing faith and secular education, and all would
have agreed it was the duty of a Quaker college to guard its students
against evil influences, whether they be moral or intellectual. But they
usually took as their intellectual models non-Quaker colleges and followed
general trends in American higher education. All, save Bryn Mawr,
were connected with Gurneyite yearly meetings that accepted the pastoral
movement and gave some attention to training pastors. But all assumed
that most of their students were bound for secular careers.
The two notable exceptions are Malone and Barclay, which were reactions
to developments in the other Quaker schools. These were Bible colleges,
institutions that took decades to develop into four-year colleges,
and only then with considerable debate and some misgivings. They were
designed to serve Friends, specifically pastoral Friends, by providing
what was in essence a guarded education. In this case, that meant guarding
against critical Bible study and other forms of modernism that were
becoming increasingly influential in other colleges and seminaries, including
other Quaker colleges, in the late nineteenth century. But like
other Quaker colleges, the founders of these two schools were also influenced
by non-Quaker models, in this case the Bible colleges that became
bulwarks of fundamentalist Protestantism in the early twentieth century.
Moreover, while by 1900 the other Quaker colleges accepted that most of
their students were bound for secular careers, the schools in Cleveland
and Haviland were designed to produce men and women who would
make their careers as pastors or missionaries or in other forms of “Christian
work.”
Closely related to patterns of founding in determining the future of
these schools were patterns of control. Surprisingly, only Guilford and
Earlham were projects of their yearly meetings, and even then the con