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

xviii Thomas D. Hamm
the mid-twentieth century, they preferred their own alumni (or graduates
of non-Quaker schools that they perceived as “sound”) to Quakers who
might be tainted with modernism. The other force was a growing emphasis
on professionalization. As Quaker colleges became more diverse
and more responsible to diverse constituencies, they have cast wider nets
in looking for leaders. At a majority of Quaker colleges, it apparently is no
longer an expectation that the chief executive officer be a member of the
Society of Friends.
PATTERNS OF DEVELOPMENT
Certain patterns of development are clear in the history of all these institutions.
One is how money talks. The generosity of eastern Friends, especially
in Philadelphia, meant that Haverford, Swarthmore, and Bryn
Mawr were relatively secure from the beginning. This also allowed them
to avoid the strictures that the need to rely on a yearly meeting for financial
support would have caused. Some of these colleges, most notably
Earlham with its ties to the Lilly family of Indianapolis, have been skillful
in cultivating wealthy donors, often without Quaker ties. In the case of
Malone, money stimulated migration, as eminent-domain funds from
freeway construction and a bargain-basement land offer moved the campus
from Cleveland to Canton in 1956. More common is a realization, usually
early in the history of the institution, that survival meant attracting
and enrolling non-Quaker students. That was often a source of dramatic
conflict because it inevitably led to a relaxing of some of the elements of a
guarded education.
The development at most colleges, in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, of what historian Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz calls
“campus culture” was a direct outgrowth of this urge for survival. Thus,
we find in most of these chapters accounts of the development of athletics,
especially football, and the conflicts that this sometimes brought with
constituencies, most notably the attempt of a disapproving Philadelphia
Friend to buy out Swarthmore’s football team with a million-dollar bequest
early in the twentieth century. Later, students agitated for other
changes that would make their Quaker colleges more like other schools.
At some places, such as Wilmington and Swarthmore, that meant the development
of fraternities and sororities. At several institutions, it meant
the acceptance of academic honoraries like Phi Beta Kappa. By the 1920s,
it meant agitation by students for the end of campus rules against smoking
and dancing. The exceptions that prove the rule are Friends, Malone,
and Barclay. A commuter institution throughout its history, Friends never
experienced significant debate over regulating the lives of its relatively