Wabash College

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Wabash College
Wabash College logo.jpg
Latin: Collegii Wabashensis
Motto Scientiae et Virtuti
Motto in English Knowledge and Virtue
Established November 21, 1832 (178 years ago)
Type private all-male
Endowment $303.6 million[1]
President Dr. Patrick E. White
Academic staff 82
Undergraduates 875
Location United States Crawfordsville, Indiana, USA
40°2′17″N 86°54′18″W / 40.03806°N 86.905°W / 40.03806; -86.905Coordinates: 40°2′17″N 86°54′18″W / 40.03806°N 86.905°W / 40.03806; -86.905
Campus 60 acres (24 ha)
Colors Scarlet     
Athletics NCAA Division III, NCAC
10 varsity teams
Nickname Little Giants
Mascot Wally Wabash
Website wabash.edu

Wabash College is a small, private, liberal arts college for men, located in Crawfordsville, Indiana. Founded in 1832 by several Dartmouth College graduates and Midwestern leaders, Wabash is one of three remaining traditional all-men's liberal arts colleges in the United States.

Contents

[edit] History

Caleb Mills, Wabash College's first faculty member, would later come to be known as the father of the Indiana public education system and would work throughout his life to improve education in the then-primitive Mississippi Valley area. Patterning it after the liberal arts colleges of New England, the College's founders resolved "that the institution be at first a classical and English high school, rising into a college as soon as the wants of the country demand." The "demand" occurred rapidly. It was initially named "The Wabash Teachers Seminary and Manual Labor College" but was soon changed as the college solidified. Still, until the early 1900s, the College also offered a "Preparatory School" in order to sufficiently prepare incoming students who may have come from less-rigorous rural high schools and had not had the opportunity to study the courses required for entrance to the College.[2] After declaring the site at which they were standing would be the location of the new school, they knelt in the snow and conducted a dedication service. Although Mills, like many of the founders, was a Presbyterian minister, they were committed to the idea that Wabash should be independent and non-sectarian.

Elihu Baldwin was the first President of the College from 1835 until 1840. He came from a church in New York City and accepted the Presidency even though he knew that Wabash was at that time threatened with bankruptcy. He met the challenge and gave thorough study to the "liberal arts program" at Wabash. After his death, he was succeeded by Charles White, a graduate of Dartmouth College, and the brother-in-law of Edmund O. Hovey, a professor at the college.[3]

Joseph F. Tuttle, after whom Tuttle Grade School in Crawfordsville was named in 1906 and Tuttle Middle School in 1960, became President of Wabash College in 1862 and served for 30 years. "He was an eloquent preacher, a sound administrator and an astute handler of public relations." Joseph Tuttle, together with his administrators, worked to improve relations in Crawfordsville between "Town and gown".[4]

During World War II, Wabash College was one of 131 colleges and universities nationally[5] that took part in the V-12 Navy College Training Program which offered students a path to a Navy commission.[6]

[edit] National rankings

There are approximately 2000 four-year colleges and universities in the United States. Over the years, various publications have attempted to "rank" them according to a variety of standards.

Wabash was ranked 53rd among all national liberal arts colleges in the 2011 version of the U.S. News & World Report. [1]

According to the Princeton Review's Annual Rankings of College, Wabash was ranked nationally in the following categories:

  • Best Career Services#11
  • Professors Get High Marks#18
  • Most Accessible Professors#7
  • School Runs Like Butter#11
  • Great Financial Aid#15
  • Students Pack the Stadiums#19
  • Best Athletic Facilities#2

Wabash College is also listed in Loren Pope's Colleges That Change Lives.

[edit] Endowment

For the 2011 fiscal year, the value of the College’s endowment was in excess of $300 million, making it one of the highest in the United States on a per-student basis. The endowment was created primarily over the past seventy years utilizing both major campaigns and estate planning with alumni. Those who have funded this endowment include the pharmaceutical industrialist Eli Lilly, the company he founded, and his heirs. The school's library is named after Eli Lilly as are a number of premier scholarships.

[edit] Student government

The student government, referred to collectively as the Student Body of Wabash College, comprises executive and legislative branches. The executive authority of the student body is vested in a president and vice president, who chair the Senior Council and Student Senate, respectively. They are ex officio, non-voting members of the body that they do not chair. The president has broad powers of appointment over all Senate standing committees. The vice-president possesses a tie-breaking vote in the Student Senate.

The Student Senate of Wabash College is the legislative authority, consisting of senators from each residence hall and fraternity, four representatives from each of the three underclasses, and the chairmen of the Senate's standing committees. The body of approximately 32 voting members manages an annual budget of over $400,000, allocating funds and setting guidelines for recognized associations. The Senate also serves as a general student forum.

The Senior Council of Wabash College is a special quasi-legislative body comprising the presidents of certain student organizations and self-selected at-large councilmen. The Senior Council is responsible for representing student concerns to the faculty and administration, as well as fostering campus unity and maintaining proper regard for college traditions.

The Inter-Fraternity Council (IFC) is a body composed of representatives of each of the college's fraternities. It helps to organize recruitment activities, all-campus entertainment, and honors the chapters with the best Grade Point Average and Intramural Athletics record.

[edit] Athletics

Main article: Wabash Little Giants

The school's sports teams are called the Little Giants. They participate in the NCAA's Division III and in the North Coast Athletic Conference, where they are currently back-to-back-to-back-to-back (2005–2008) NCAC football champions. Every year since 1911, Wabash College has played rival DePauw University in a football game called the Monon Bell Classic. Wabash College is a member of the North Coast Athletic Conference. The rallying cheer of Wabash College athletics is "Wabash always fights." Wabash College competes in Men's Intercollegiate Baseball, Basketball, Tennis, Cross Country, Track and Field, Golf, Football, Soccer, Swimming & Diving and Wrestling.

The basketball team at Wabash is coached by Antoine Carpenter, a 2000 Little Giant graduate. Carpenter replaced Malcolm "Mac" Petty who retired after 35 seasons at Wabash. Wabash won the 1981–82 NCAA Division III title with a 24–4 record. Wabash won the first national intercollegiate championship basketball tournament ever held in 1922.

Football at Wabash dates back to 1884, when student-coach Edwin R. Taber assembled a team and defeated Butler University by a score of 4–0 in the first intercollegiate football game in the history of the state of Indiana.[7] The current head football coach is Erik Raeburn.

In the summer of 2010, Wabash reconstructed Mud Hollow and Byron P. Hollett Stadium to provide the football, soccer, baseball and intramural teams with better athletic facilities.

[edit] Monon Bell Classic

See also: Monon Bell Classic

Voted "Indiana's Best College Sports Rivalry" by viewers of ESPN in 2005, DePauw University and Wabash College play each November — in the last regular season football game of the year for both teams — for the right to keep or reclaim the Monon Bell. The two teams first met in 1890. In 1932, the Monon Railroad donated its approximately 300-pound locomotive bell to be offered as the prize to the winning team each year. The series is as close as a historic rivalry can be: Wabash leads the series 56–53–9. The game routinely sells out (up to 11,000 seats, depending upon the venue and seating arrangement) and has been televised by ABC, ESPN2, and HDNet Each year, alumni from both schools gather at more than 50 locations around the United States for telecast parties, and a commemorative DVD (including historic clips known as "Monon Memories") is produced each year. The most recent Monon Bell game, played on November 12, 2011, saw Wabash defeat DePauw 45-7.

In 1999, GQ listed the Monon Bell game as reason #3 on its "50 Reasons Why College Football is Better Than Pro Football" list.

[edit] Summer Programs

Wabash has a summer program for high school students: OLAB (Opportunities to Learn about Business).

OLAB is a co-ed program going into its 39th year at Wabash. OLAB is a one-week hands-on introduction to business and the market economy for young women and men entering their senior year in high school. In 2010, 44 students from 11 states and Korea participated in the OLAB program.

[edit] Notable alumni

See also: Category:Wabash College alumni

Business

Politics


Media & The Arts

Military

Law

Sports

Medicine

Academia

[edit] Fraternities

The Greek system has a unique role at Wabash. The first fraternity appeared at Wabash in 1846 and has been on campus continuously since. It was quickly followed by others. Many of the traditions of the college were begun and are maintained by the fraternities, both individually and collectively. On average, 50-60% of students belong to one of the campus's nine national fraternities.[9] Unlike most other colleges and universities, Wabash fraternity members — including pledges — live in the fraternity houses by default. While most Wabash fraternities allow juniors and seniors to live outside the house, the majority of Greek students live in their respective house all four years. This has led to the odd circumstance of a college with fewer than 1,000 students being dotted with Greek houses of a size appropriate to campuses ten times Wabash's size. The fraternity chapters range in size from approximately 40 to 70 members each.

The college and the fraternity system have created a somewhat symbiotic relationship that differs from most other colleges and universities. The college believes that the system largely accomplishes the task of quickly involving new students in the life of the college while also providing leadership opportunities for a larger number of students. All fraternity houses on campus, except one, are owned by the college. The college and the fraternity alumni associations have just completed a ten year project of either rebuilding or renovating each chapter house. At the same time, the college realizes that fraternity life is not right for each student, even in its somewhat different form at Wabash. Therefore the re-building project also included the renovation of most of the dormitories on campus.

[edit] List of fraternities

[edit] Wabash in fiction and popular culture

Wabash College is periodically referred to in cultural contexts. Among them:

Fiction

  • George Ade set his 1904[10] play The College Widow on a fictionalized version of the Wabash College campus. (Ade, an alumnus of nearby Purdue, saw his play adapted as a 1930 movie, retitled Maybe It's Love.)
  • One of the protagonists of Dan Simmons's Hyperion is a professor of ethics at a fictionalized Wabash; other characters in Simmons' novels are based on people he knew while attending.

Film and Television

  • A scene in the sports movie Hoosiers finds the star player's guardian Myra Fleener (Barbara Hershey) telling coach Norman Dale (Gene Hackman) to stay away from Jimmy Chitwood, the player under her care, saying "He's a real special kid, and I have high hopes for him... I think if he works really hard, he can get an academic scholarship to Wabash College and can get out of this place."
  • The film Leatherheads, the football team states that they played a clean game against Wabash (circa 1925), even though Wabash only had 9 men.
  • Wabash's student radio station, WNDY, loaned its call letters to the fictional Chicago radio station featured in the 1992 Dolly Parton movie Straight Talk. Alluding to this, a studio engineer is wearing a Wabash sweatshirt in one scene.
  • The college's name appears on a fraternity's composite portrait in an episode of Drawn Together. The seal resembles the seal of Tau Kappa Epsilon, which would make the composite that of the Alpha-Alpha chapter of TKE at Wabash.

Miscellaneous

  • The idea for the 1876 Centennial Exposition, the first official world's fair held in the United States, is credited to former Wabash Prof. John Campbell.

[edit] On Wabash

  • "The poetry in the life of a college like Wabash is to be found in its history. It is to be found in the fact that once on this familiar campus and once in these well-known halls, students and teachers as real as ourselves worked and studied, argued and laughed and worshiped together, but are now gone, one generation vanishing after another, as surely as we shall shortly be gone. But if you listen, you can hear their songs and their cheers. As you look, you can see the torch which they handed down to us."
    — Byron K. Trippet '30, Ninth President of Wabash College
  • "How well we have done together with our purpose will be demonstrated by how well you perform as individuals in the next ten, twenty, or thirty years – not as captains of industry or brilliant doctors or lawyers or teachers, but as men of sound character and sound intellect in the communities of which you become a part. And our future strength as a college will be determined to no small extent by what you as alumni feel and say and do about your alma mater."
    — Byron K. Trippet '30, Ninth President of Wabash College
  • "Perhaps we'll learn that there are more things to admire in men than to despise; perhaps, knowing it will never be enough to change the world, we will act more honorably than we expected we would; perhaps we'll have a lot of fun along the way. It wouldn't be a bad life."
    — William C. Placher '70, 1970 Commencement Address

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  • Gronert, Theodore G., Sugar Creek Saga: A History and Development of Montgomery County, Wabash College, 1958.
  1. ^ As of June 30, 2010. "U.S. and Canadian Institutions Listed by Fiscal Year 2010 Endowment Market Value and Percentage Change in Endowment Market Value from FY 2009 to FY 2010" (PDF). 2010 NACUBO-Commonfund Study of Endowments. National Association of College and University Business Officers. http://www.nacubo.org/Documents/research/2010NCSE_Public_Tables_Endowment_Market_Values_Final.pdf. Retrieved December 8, 2011. 
  2. ^ Gronert: pg. 30–31, 107.
  3. ^ Gronert: pg. 66–67.
  4. ^ Gronert: pg. 205–206.
  5. ^ Henry C. Herge. "Navy V-12, Vol. 12". Turner Publishing Co., 1996. http://books.google.com/books?id=utiWeaPsyvQC&pg=PA22&lpg=PA22&dq=v-7+navy+program&source=bl&ots=geSgzYlc0M&sig=bu896PgKd-zh-wir4kWdTX5SExg&hl=en&ei=ieJ8TomNCcLfsQL0lr0O&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CE0Q6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=v-7%20navy%20program&f=false. Retrieved September 22, 2011. 
  6. ^ "V12 Reunion Brings Back Unique Alumni Group". Crawfordsville, Indiana: Wabash College. 2011. http://www.wabash.edu/news/displaystory.cfm?news_ID=3845. Retrieved November 8, 2011. 
  7. ^ Ancestry.com Edwin R. Taber
  8. ^ http://m.9news.com/news.jsp?key=200743
  9. ^ http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/most-frats
  10. ^ College of Liberal Arts - Purdue Univ

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