Wabash College

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Wabash College
File:Wabash college.gif
MottoScientiae et Virtuti
For knowledge and for virtue
Typeprivate all-male
Established1832
Endowment$347.3 million
PresidentDr. Patrick E. White
Academic staff
90
Students850
Undergraduates850
Location
Crawfordsville
,
IN
,
USA
Campuslarge town: 60 acres (0.24 km²)
Athletics11 Division III NCAA teams
ColorsScarlet
NicknameLittle Giants
MascotFile:Wally tp.gif
Wally Wabash
Websitewww.wabash.edu

Wabash College is a small private liberal arts college for men, located in Crawfordsville, Indiana. Along with Hampden-Sydney College, Deep Springs College, and Morehouse College, Wabash is one of the only four remaining mainstream all-men's liberal arts colleges in the United States.

History

Wabash College was founded in 1832 by a number of men including several Dartmouth College graduates. Caleb Mills, the 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 Mississippi Valley area. Patterning it after the liberal arts colleges of New England, they 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." 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 that Wabash should be independent and non-sectarian.

Academics and Mission

"Founded in 1832, Wabash College is an independent and selective liberal arts college for men with an enrollment of 850 students. Its mission is excellence in teaching and learning within a community built on close and caring relationships among students, faculty, and staff." This mission manifests itself in the College's motto: "Wabash College educates men to think critically, act responsibly, lead effectively, and live humanely."

"Wabash offers qualified young men a superior education, fostering, in particular, independent intellectual inquiry, critical thought, and clear written and oral expression. The College educates its students broadly in the traditional curriculum of the liberal arts while also requiring them to pursue concentrated study in one or more disciplines. Wabash emphasizes [its] manifold but shared cultural heritage. [Wabash] students come from diverse economic, social, and cultural backgrounds; the College helps these students engage these differences and live humanely with them. Wabash also challenges its students to appreciate the changing nature of the global society and prepares them for the responsibilities of leadership and service in it.

The College carries out its mission in a residential setting in which students take personal and group responsibility for their actions. Wabash provides for its students an unusually informal, egalitarian, and participatory environment which encourages young men to adopt a life of intellectual and creative growth, self-awareness, and physical activity. The College seeks to cultivate qualities of character and leadership in students by developing not only their analytical skills, but also sensitivity to values, and judgment and compassion required of citizens living in a difficult and uncertain world. We expect a Wabash education to bring joy in the life of the mind, to reveal the pleasures in the details of common experience, and to affirm the necessity for and rewards in helping others." [1]

Endowment

A substantial endowment places Wabash amongst the top 120 colleges and universities in the nation, and on a per-student basis, amongst the top 25. This endowment drives a generous scholarship program. The benefactors that have funded this endowment include the pharmaceutical industrialist Eli Lilly, the company he founded, and his heirs. The school's library is named after Lilly.

Athletics

File:Wally tp.gif
Wally Wabash, the college mascot.

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 the current (2005) NCAC football champions. Every year since 1911, Wabash College plays rival DePauw University in the Monon Bell Classic. Wabash College is a member of the Great Lakes Colleges Association. The rallying cheer of Wabash College athletics is "Wabash always fights."

Alumni

Notable alumni include

Fraternities

The Greek system is a major presence at Wabash; between 65 and 70 percent of students are members of one of ten fraternities. Unlike virtually all other schools, all 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 vast majority of Greek students live in their respective house all four years. This has led to the odd circumstance of a campus with less than 1000 students being dotted with Greek houses large enough to fit in at campuses ten times Wabash's size.

Furthermore, fraternity rush at Wabash begins before the academic year. During March, students accepted for the coming year are invited to the campus for Honor Scholar Weekend, during which they take a battery of exams and compete to earn scholarship money. The students are distributed among the ten fraternities, with whom they stay during their visit. In the evenings following the day's testing, the fraternities (and the Independent Men's Association) host a wide variety of parties and events open to all comers. Fraternities are allowed to offer bids to prospectives starting that weekend, and rush runs through summer until its conclusion one week after school begins. Upon accepting a bid, the pledge is then housed in the corresponding fraternity house. As many pledges accept over the summer, it is possible for a freshman to never see the inside of a dorm room.

List of fraternities

ΒΘΠ,

ΔΤΔ, ΚΣ, ΛΧΑ, ΦΔΘ, Fiji, ΦΚΨ, ΣΧ, ΘΔΧ, ΤΚΕ

Wabash in fiction and popular culture

Wabash College has, despite its small size, been referenced a number of times in fiction originating from or set in the area. Playwright George Ade's 1927 comedy "The College Widow" (adapted into the movie Maybe It's Love in 1930) was set at Wabash. 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." One of the protagonists of Dan Simmons' Hyperion is a professor of ethics at a college that is clearly a fictionalized Wabash; other characters in Simmons' novels are based on people he knew at Wabash. Additionally, Kurt Vonnegut referenced Wabash and used a college alum as the basis for Dwayne Hoover in Breakfast of Champions. Wabash is also mentioned in The Plot Against America by Phillip Roth; the protagonist's family is shown around Washington DC by a guide who was a history lecturer at the college until losing his job in the Great Depression. Ernest Hemingway mentions the college in his work In Our Time Chapter IX, putting it among the ranks of Harvard and Columbia--possibly joking with friend Ezra Pound, who taught briefly at Wabash. The college's name appears on a fake fraternity's composite portrait in an episode of Drawn Together. The college's student radio station, WNDY, loaned its call letters to the fictional Chicago radio station featured in the 1992 Dolly Parton movie Straight Talk; during one brief scene, a studio engineer wears a Wabash sweatshirt.

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 worshipped 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

See also

External links


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