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

xx Thomas D. Hamm
and justice. Yet one does not see this in the history of Quaker colleges.
Haverford did not admit a black student until the 1920s, Swarthmore until
the 1940s, and Wilmington until the 1950s. Guilford deferred to local
segregationist mores until the 1960s. Even colleges like Earlham, which
admitted its first black student in the 1880s, often reflected the prevalent
racism of the larger society in other ways. In many respects, the best early
record may have been that of Malone, whose color-blindness as early as
the 1890s was striking. By the 1960s, however, a commitment to the civil
rights movement was seen as one of the distinguishing marks of a Quaker
college, and campuses like Earlham, Haverford, and Swarthmore were
centers of activism and support for it.
Another test might be commitment to gender equality. Only Haverford
and Bryn Mawr were founded as men’s and women’s colleges. The rest
were committed to coeducation. With the exception of Haverford, all the
Quaker colleges early hired women as faculty members. On the other
hand, one sees relatively little women’s rights activism on their campuses
before the 1960s, save at Swarthmore and, of course, Bryn Mawr. And
with the natural exception of Bryn Mawr, only a few of these colleges
have had a woman president.
Yet another mark of Quaker distinctiveness might be a common commitment
to the Quaker Peace Testimony against all forms of physical coercion
and violence. Today, many of these schools, as will be seen, manifest
this historic Quaker commitment through peace studies programs or
centers for conflict resolution. Yet this has hardly been a consistent motif
of the history of Quaker higher education. The information we have on
twentieth-century wars indicates that most of the men in Quaker colleges
went into military service during World War I and World War II. Open antiwar
activism could bring trouble, as Henry J. Cadbury found himself
forced out of Haverford and critics at William Penn of U.S. entry found
themselves under attack by neighbors during World War I. The roles of
the colleges themselves brought controversy. Swarthmore, for example,
accepted a military unit during World War I, and Whittier was willing to
perform certain forms of military training during World War II. Other
Quaker colleges saw these as inappropriate. During the Cold War, pacifism
that was too pronounced could have costs, as witness the ouster of
Cecil Hinshaw from William Penn and the controversies over draft resistance
at Earlham. By the time of the Vietnam War, the cleavages between
liberal Friends colleges and more evangelical ones was clear. Haverford,
Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, and Earlham had active antiwar movements.
On the other hand, as the chapters on Whittier, Malone, and Friends show,
such movements found little support on those more politically conservative
campuses. George Fox was apparently unique in being both evangelical
and pacifist.