Without Adult Supervision: Campus YMCAs as an Ancestor of Student Affairs

Dorothy E. FinneganAssociate Professor

and Nathan F. Alleman

Graduate Research Assistant

School of EducationThe College of William and Mary

Williamsburg, VA

Presented at the Annual Meeting ofThe Association for the Study of Higher Education

November 16-19, 2005

1

Introduction1

Students began to organize their own indigenous societies at least by the latter decades of

the eighteenth century. Most associations were established for instrumental purposes. Although

self-development was a popular function, others helped to maintain social control on the

campus.2 Many of the organizations had literary ends, while others sought fraternity.3 Not

surprising, given the impact of the Great Awakening on the extant colleges and then the trend

toward secularization of study and student social life in the eighteenth century,4 religious

purposes also brought students together. The earliest religious societies at The College of New

Jersey (Princeton) date to the 1770s. At the turn of the century when religion appeared divorced

from many campuses, small groups of students gathered into prayer groups at Hampden-Sydney,

at Williams, and Yale.5 By the mid-1800s, most campuses had Christian societies, such as the

Christian Association at Cornell College and The Philadelphian Society at Princeton.6 Although

popular and active, most religious associations—unlike Phi Beta Kappa and succeeding early

fraternities that issued charters for other college chapters—appear to have been campus-based

and isolated from similar groups at other colleges.7

Campus-based until 1858 and isolated from others until 1877—it was in these respective

years that the YMCA first was established as a campus organization, and then linked to form a

national network. By 1912, 772 associations existed on American college campuses, claiming

69,296 members. Eight years later, the number peaked at 731; from then on, the movement

declined. Only 480 associations existed in 1940.8

The rise of the campus YMCAs in part was due to collegiate transformations during the

last quarter of the nineteenth century. At the universities, as faculty became immersed in the

advancement of knowledge, developed elective courses, and relinquished their advising duties,

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the gulf between student needs and faculty interests widened. Few institutions enrolled enough

students to warrant a complex administrative staff. Even at Harvard in the 1870s, Eliot’s dean of

the college managed faculty, student life, admissions, registration, and other personnel issues.9

At newer and smaller institutions, the board of trustees sank its precious dollars into building

construction, hiring faculty, and outfitting classrooms.10 Hiring staff to specialize in student life

was not even a glimmer. As the curriculum relaxed, permitting the election of courses, students

acquired increasing amounts of unsupervised time and were left to fill the vacuum with culture,

activities, and supervision of their own design. Although the YMCA movement began with a

religious mission, students fine-tuned membership recruitment strategies that morphed into

secular campus services. And these services eventually were absorbed by student affairs

personnel beginning in the 1920s and 1930s.

The profession of student affairs claims its earliest roots from the disciplinary and

advising relationships between the faculty and students, which, given the number and ferocity of

student riots, appears to have been often times less than successful.11 As the universities and

colleges developed in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, direct adult supervision of

students’ extra-curricular life lessened. Humanitarians, administrators, and psychologists

independently began working with students outside of the classroom at the turn of the twentieth

century, but increasingly after World War I.12 Not until 1919 did anyone argue the need for an

organized department dedicated to student life beyond the classroom. And even then, reflecting

the budding research, the “student personnel” role focused on student aptitudes and vocational

advising.13

The contemporary history of the student affairs profession in the decades between the

1870s and 1900 is thin, albeit growing. Only recently have a few scholars revisited early

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scholarship on the growth of administrative bureaucracy.14 A number of scholars have

mentioned the role of the campus YMCAs and YWCAs as a part of the missing story. This paper

addresses the vibrant student movement that pre-dated the unification of the student personnel

profession.

Our contention is that the campus-based YMCAs, joined by YWCAs, initiated a model

program of services and activities for their fellow students for which student affairs personnel

deliberately and progressively assumed responsibility during the mid-years of the twentieth

century. This paper traces the functional and organizational rise of the YMCA movement on

college and university campuses as a voluntary association from 1858 and its gradual

displacement by the emerging student personnel profession after World War I.

Although associations promoted a religious proselytizing mission on their campuses,15

our paper is limited to their social and developmental programs that provided a blueprint for

student affairs personnel. Further, we focus this discussion primarily on the YMCA for two

reasons. The men’s portion of the movement not only predates the women’s, but operated as the

more dominant group in leading and modeling campus activities and services. Second, the

women’s groups, which provided some parallel activities and partnered with the men to sponsor

certain services and events, seem to have been defined by a slightly different mission. The

differences, which are gender-based and related to differences in their allied national

organizations, are beyond this paper.

The Rise of the Student YMCA Movement

In 1858, students at both the Universities of Virginia16 and Michigan initiated, apparently

unknowingly to each other, Christian Associations associated with the YMCA. During the Civil

War, the clubs remained singular within their states. The third group established appears to have

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been at the University of Rochester in 1862.17 The UM and UVa students must have sent

members to other local colleges shortly after the war for the next associations to form were

primarily at Virginia and Michigan colleges. Whether the result of proselytizing or merely

hearing about the movement, “in 1865, Gen. Robert E. Lee, then President of Washington and

Lee University at Lexington, suggested and actively assisted [by contributing $100] in the

organization of the Association there.”18 Students were persuaded quickly at Roanoke (1867)

and Olivet (1868) Colleges also. Pennsylvania College established its association in 1867.19 By

1870, associations surfaced at the College of the City of New York (1868), Cornell and Howard

Universities (1869) and Hanover College (1870) in Indiana.

Credit for much of the early propagation of campus associations belongs to Robert

Weidensall, an employee of the Pacific Railroad, who was commissioned in 1868 by the YMCA

International Committee to organize YMCAs in cities and towns along the rail lines. Along the

way, Weidensall also visited colleges, assisting the formation of associations across Nebraska,

Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, and Illinois.20 Encouraged by an adopted resolution to support the

promotion of collegiate associations proposed by University of Michigan Prof. Adam K. Spence

at the Indianapolis Annual YMCA Convention in 1870, 21 Weidensall began to attend state

YMCA conventions assisting the collegiate representatives to plea for “local” recognition.

Within months of the 1871 Michigan state convention, Weidensall helped to establish

associations at Ypsilanti, Hillsdale, Albion, Adrian, and Kalamazoo.22 Using this technique,

students at a minimum of 30 additional colleges across the nation had initiated associations de

novo or transformed existing Christian societies in YMCAs by 1875.23

Although the primary early intercollegiate contact between campuses associations was

attendance at state conventions, the movement expanded through Weidensall’s propagation from

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1868 to 1877 and deputation teams sent out from stronger units. However, a chance meeting at

Princeton in December of 1876 soon changed the nature and intensity of the dissemination.

Luther Wishard transferred in 1875 from Hanover College to Princeton for his junior and senior

years. Active in the Hanover YMCA, Wishard, as a college representative, attended the 1872

YMCA International Convention at Lowell, MA, where he met Robert Weidensall. Wishard

credited Weidensall for inspiring him to diffuse the idea of association.24

Once at Princeton, Wishard joined the 50-year old Philadelphian Society, the college’s

religious society. Elected president in his senior year (1876), he convinced the society to

affiliate with the YMCA in the late fall. Shortly afterwards, Wishard found himself without coal

to heat his room. By chance, he knocked on the door of two sophomores who were entertaining

their father.25 The father was William E. Dodge, president of the YMCA of New York City,

member of the International Committee of the North American Associations, and founding

partner of Phelps, Dodge & Company. Once Dodge realized what Wishard had accomplished

with the Philadelphia Society, an extended conversation began. Out of this meeting was born the

true intercollegiate Y movement.26

Urged on by Dodge, Wishard became convinced that the colleges needed to unite. A

letter-writing campaign to 200 colleges by the Philadelphia Society-YMCA reaped enthusiastic

responses from 40 colleges; 25 delegates from 21 campus associations across eleven states

converged at the1877 YMCA International Convention at Louisville, Kentucky.27 On June 9th

the Convention recognized the college work and agreed to a resolution proposed by the collegian

representatives that asked for the appointment of a corresponding secretary and state assistant

secretaries.28 Although still a small movement compared to what it would become, thirteen

hundred students claimed membership in twenty-six campus associations that year. The

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gathering in Louisville probably was among the first major intercollegiate non-athletic student

conferences.29

Not surprising, in September 1877 the International Committee hired Wishard as a

visiting secretary to promote an intercollegiate movement. Within two months of his

appointment, Wishard established the College Bulletin, a four-page newsletter with information

pertaining to the movement, its conventions, and proven organizational processes as well as

notes on activities within the campus associations. In the February 1879 College Bulletin,

students at Davidson College announced that the students had just organized their association,

souls at the University of Georgia solicited prayers for their peers, and the students at East

Tennessee State reported great success in recruiting members, but at East Tennessee Wesleyan,

the “Association is working steadily against great odds.”30 By the end of Wishard’s first year,

the associations had met again at the International Conference at Baltimore and drew up a

constitution, 2,000 letters had been exchanged among students in 100 colleges, six issues of the

College Bulletin (14,000 copies) had been distributed to 350 American and Canadian colleges,

Wishard had visited 30 colleges, and campus associations numbered 60.31 During the second

fall, state college associations met in Michigan, Kentucky, Missouri, Ontario, and New Jersey.32

Each month’s issue of the College Bulletin announced new associations and campus

initiatives. In 1884, the association at Ohio State was formed, the seventeenth in the state.33 That

same fall when Iowa College (Grinnell) bragged that Wishard had joined them for Sabbath, it

also announced the establishment of a YWCA on that campus.34 On this same visit through Iowa,

Wishard told the YMCA students at Penn College, about 35 miles away, that the women who

had joined their two-year old association could not be members—the International Committee

had ruled that women were not eligible for membership.35 The Penn women were not deterred;

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they started a YWCA within a few months.36 Through Wishard’s endeavors, which continued

Weidensall’s early efforts, the YMCAs grew to 258 with almost 13,000 student members during

his eight years.37

Succeeding Wishard, John Raleigh Mott was appointed the first national (white) college

secretary in 1888. Henry Edwards Brown was appointed secretary for Negro student work the

same year. Between these two men, the movement gained further ground in the United States

and Canada through the 1890s. By 1902, Mott reported 648 student associations. Among them

were 103 associations in the African American colleges.38

Like Wishard, Mott had been a member of a campus YMCA and like Wishard, a leader

on his home campus of Cornell. Mott, building on Wishard’s foundation, introduced innovations

designed to inspire the young men at the campus level. His College Series consisted of

pamphlets to assist the student associations with organizational management and activities.

Mott’s 28-page booklet on conducting fund-raising activities for student association buildings

was one of the first in the series.39

In another pamphlet, Mott disseminated methods for reaching out to freshmen. A primary

concept underlying The Fall Campaign was known as the “six-fold plan”—devised originally by

Wishard from the principles of the College Y Constitution—that held the principle of “each

member is to work for his fellow.”40 Group activities were known as individual work, which

consisted of a wide range of campus service activities, especially focused on the freshmen and

mirroring the city association work concerned with the young man away from home.

The YMCA Programs and Activities

The mission of the early campus YMCAs paralleled that of the local city YMCAs. They

were both primarily religious in nature with activities that enhanced the spiritual life of its

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members and assisted young men to battle the temptations of their surroundings. The natural

mode for the campus Y was to adopt and adapt the successful endeavors of the city Y.

Facilities

The first endeavor that a city association would undertake would be to secure a meeting

place. Often the men would rent or lease a room or set of rooms that would be furnished with a

reading room and perhaps an assembly room. On the campuses, the college students recognized

the importance of place and operated out of three different types of facilities: dedicated meeting

rooms, stand-alone YMCA buildings, and communal socio-religious activity buildings (see

appendix 1). For some colleges, the meeting room was merely the first stage in their facilities

saga; for others, their physical space on campus never progressed much beyond a room or set of

rooms. Regardless, they all started with a small space provided by the administration.

The first evidence of a dedicated Y meeting room on a campus appears at the University

of Rochester where, by at least 1870, the trustees leased for the Y a “commodious room, which

has been tastefully furnished by voluntary contributions.”41 At Cornell, President Andrew

Dickinson White, who in answering 1870 charges of “heresy” at his college, noted that the

young YMCA [est.1869] at his campus holds its services “in a room appropriated to it in the

University buildings.”42 Having been a mentor while a faculty member at the University of

Michigan to Charles Kendall Adams, one of the founders of the Michigan association,43 White

was well aware of the new movement and apparently supportive.

The construction of a permanent building on many campuses advanced the identity,

legitimacy, permanency, and significance of the organization to both students and administrators

alike. Although other student groups often had space allotted to them on the campus, the Y

rooms and buildings outlived most others, were controlled by the students to maintain the

9

organizational mission, and were supported enthusiastically by succeeding administrative

officers and faculty. Murray Hall (1879), the first of the YMCA buildings constructed, resulted

from a bequest from Hamilton Murray, who drowned at sea in 1873, the year after his

graduation. With the unreserved support of President McCosh, Princeton’s Y building was

located on a prime spot on campus and opened in 1879.44 The building cost $20,000 and had

exterior dimensions of 60x100 feet. Four years later, the students at Hanover College erected a

wooden structure, 24x42 feet at the cost of $800, for their Y meetings. By 1892, a dozen more

buildings had been constructed at costs from $4,000 to $55,000.45

The most expensive of the early buildings developed under the leadership of John

Raleigh Mott, future national secretary of the Intercollegiate YMCA of the USA and Canada

(1888-1915), general secretary of the International Committee (1915-1928), and 1946 Nobel

Peace Prize winner. After transferring to Cornell from Upper Iowa University in 1885, he served

as the president of the Cornell YMCA in his junior and senior years (1886-1888). A tireless

leader, Mott led the Cornell Y in a fund-raising campaign for its new $53,600 building, Barnes

Hall.46

Understanding the difficulties of and needed strategies to implement a successful capital

campaign for a campus Y building from personal experience, Mott within his first few years as

college secretary, published a primer to be used by students on their own campuses. In How to

Secure a College Association Building (1892), Mott described several successful approaches to

fund-raising and cautioned against some ineffective tactics used by Y students. Employing case

studies of building campaigns at various campuses and adding his own experience at Cornell,

Mott advised that two paths led to a building: student-generated subscriptions and donors.

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Many of the YMCAs raised their funds the hard way—canvassing among their members

and at student revivals, among the faculty, and in the surrounding community. At the University

of Tennessee, the student subscription amounted to $2,265, from the faculty another $1,475, and

the town canvass produced almost $5,000. Unexpectedly, the university corporation donated

$6,000 toward the eventual $18,000 building, which was opened in 1892. That same spring at

Otterbein College, the Y students conducted a capital campaign to raise $10,000 for its building. 1 We would like to thank several librarians and archivists for their invaluable assistance in helping us to gather the material and documents for this paper: Dagmar Getz, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota; Julie Hanson, Wilcox Library, William Penn University; Barbara Krieger, Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College; Anna Mae Moore, Archives and Special Collections Library, Washington & Jefferson College; Paige Roberts, Archives and Special Collections, Springfield College; Mary Ann Willard, Special Collections/ University Archives, Bucknell University. 2 Leon Jackson, “The Rights of Man and the Rites of Youth: Fraternity and Riot at Eighteenth Century Harvard.” History of Higher Education Annual, 15 (1995): 5-49. 3 Caroline Winterer, “The Humanist Revolution in American, 1820-1860: Classical Antiquity in the College,” History of Higher Education Annual 18 (1998): 111-129.4 Richard Hofstadter, Academic Freedom in the Age of the College. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955).5 J. Edwin Orr, The Light of Nations: Evangelical Renewal and Advance in the Nineteenth Century. (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1963), 20-23.6 In 1824, a small group of Princeton students established “a secret fraternity called Chi Phi, dedicated to its members’ spiritual life and personal holiness.” Chi Phi became The Philadelphian Society by the middle of the century. Princeton University Archives, Student Christian Association (SCA) Records, 1855-1967, AC135, Introduction to Finding Aid. 7 During the mid-1900s, students on many campuses belonged to an organization entitled the Society for Religious Inquiry. Robert Weidensall, discussed below, found these societies (or variations on the name) at many colleges in Michigan, Illinois, and Indiana. The alpha group may have begun at Amherst in 1821 when the college was founded and spread from there to the University of Vermont, Union, Williams, Hartford Seminary, and the University of Michigan. Many of these societies transformed into YMCAs during the second half of the nineteenth century. Clarence Prouty Shedd, “The Origin and Development of the Student Young Men's Christian Association Movement in North America” (M.A. thesis, Clark University, 1914), 26-31. That story is beyond the scope of this paper.8 Shedd, Origin and Development, 233; C. Howard Hopkins, History of the Y.M.C.A. in North America (New York: Association Press, 1951), 646. 9 H.E. Hawkes, “College Administration,” The Journal of Higher Education, 1 (5, May 1930), 245. 10 S. Arthur Watson, William Penn College: A Product and a Producer (Oskaloosa, IA: William Penn College, 1971). 11 W.H. Cowley, “The History and Philosophy of Student Personnel Work,” Journal of the National Association of Deans of Women III (June 1940): 153-162; Orr, The Light of Nations.12 W.H. Cowley, “Student Personnel Services in Retrospect and Prospect,” School and Society, 19 Jan. 1957, 19-22. 13 C.S.Yoakum, “Plan for a Personnel Bureau for Educational Institutions,” in Student Affairs: A Profession’s Heritage ed. Gerald L. Saddlemire and Audrey L. Rentz (Alexandria, VA: American College Personnel Association, 1986), 4-8.14 Caroline Terry Bashaw, “Stalwart Women”: A Historical Analysis of Deans of Women in the South. (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999); Jana Nidifer, Pioneering Deans of Women: More Than Wise and Pious Matrons. (New York: Teachers College Press, 2000); Kenton Gatyas, “Thomas Arkle and the Office of Dean of Men at the University of Illinois, 1901-1917,” Journal of Educational Administration and History 30 (2, 1998): 145; Robert A. Schwartz, “How Deans of Women Became Men,” The Review of Higher Education 20 (4, 1997):419-436; Robert A. Schwartz, “The Rise and Demise of Deans of Men,” The Review of Higher Education 26 (2, 1997): 217-239.

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The students alone subscribed $5,800; in addition, the faculty pledged $1,000, alumni association

another $2,500, and from the community at least $1,500. In all, the Otterbein student’s ten-day

campaign not only hit its mark, but raised another $1,000, allowing them to expand their

campaign goal to construct a larger $15,000 building.47

15 David P. Setran, “Student Religious Life in the ‘Era of Secularization’: The Intercollegiate YMCA, 1877-1940”, History of Higher Education Annual 21 (2001): 7-45.16 In the minutes of the Louisville YMCA Conference in 1877, the Rev. J. Wm. Jones, D.D. of Richmond, Va. is quoted as stating: In 1855 I was privileged to assist in the organization of the Association at the University of Virginia, and it has had an uninterrupted existence ever since.” Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference of the Young Men's Christian Association, Louisville, KY, 6-10 June 1877, 69. YMCA International Conventions and Yearbooks, 1876-1880, Archives and Special Collections, Springfield College, Springfield College, Springfield, MA. All other citations, including documents from the UVa association put the founding as 1858.17 M. Edwards Gates, “The Association in a University,” Association Monthly, 1 (2, February, 1870), 33.18 Rev. J. Wm. Jones, D.D. of Richmond, Va., Louisville Conference, 1877, 69. Archives and Special Collections, Springfield College, Springfield College, Springfield, MA.19 The association was initiated by alumnus Robert Weidensall. The Y.M.C.A. Cabinet, The 1933 G-Book, 37th edition (Gettysburg, PA: YMCA, 1933), 91. Courtesy of Kurt E. Kramer, YMCA of the USA, Chicago, IL. 20 F.E. Seybolt, “Luther D. Wishard and the Intercollegiate Christian Movement” (M.A. thesis, International Young Men's Christian Association Training School, 1906), 8. Archives and Special Collections, Springfield College, Springfield College, Springfield, MA.21 Spence, one of the founders of the University of Michigan YMCA, published an article in the June 1870 issue of the Association Monthly, in which after explaining the need for collegiate young men to have guidance in their first days away from home, he “urge[d] a special consideration at the next international Convention for this subject—the CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION IN COLLEGES AND SCHOOLS—its values and how to plant and conduct it in such Institutions,” A.K. Spence, “The Association in Colleges and Schools, Association Monthly 1 (6, June 1870) 125. Archives and Special Collections, Springfield College, Springfield College, Springfield, MA; Shedd, “The Origin and Development,” 93-4. 22 Shedd, “The Origin and Development,” 96-97.23 The lists of associations with founding dates are far from complete and we are in the process of developing a list from a variety of sources. Lists that appear to be cited most often were compiled by Shedd of the original associations sending delegates to the 1877 Louisville Conference. We find them to be incomplete. Shedd, “The Origin and Development,” 148; Gates, “The Association,” 33; Spence, “The Association in Colleges, 125; “YMCA Universities,” The Watchman, (1 June 1877), 6; “College Young Men's Christian Associations,” Yearbook of the YMCA of the United States and British Provinces for the Year 1878-79, 82. Archives and Special Collections, Springfield College, Springfield College, Springfield, MA.24 Seybolt, “Luther Wishard”, 8-9.25 Cleveland H. Dodge, Address, Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Young Men's Christian Association, Philadelphia, Pa., June 1889, 87-88, Archives and Special Collections, Springfield College, Springfield College, Springfield, MA.; Shedd, “The Origin and Development,” 141. 26 Wishard notes that Dodge wrote a check at that meeting that would become “the first of a series of contributions which reached a magnificent climax” in 1901—the erection of Princeton’s YMCA building, Dodge Hall. Luther D. Wishard, “The Beginning of the Intercollegiate Movement,” The Intercollegian XXV (4, 1903): 76. Archives and Special Collections, Springfield College, Springfield College, Springfield, MA.27 Although most histories of the movement highlight the Princeton group’s push in 1877, obviously earlier attempts were made to coordinate campus Christian associations with the state YMCA meetings. Students from Hanover College in Indiana and Dartmouth College as well as those in Michigan accepted invitations to meet with their state associations prior to 1877. See Ralph Dwinell, “The first official contact” in Dartmouth Christian Association

12

With each successive capital campaign, the collective wisdom grew. Mott described the

“learning curve”:

It pays to strike while the iron is hot. In the early days of the building movement, Yale [students] raised $22,000 in three years. At Cornell, it was regarded as phenomenal when the students a little later secured $5,400 in three weeks. But, still later, by wise organization and aggressive work, fully $5,000 were pledged at the State University of Iowa in a few days. A few months afterward, over $4,000 were subscribed at the University of Virginia in three days. Better still, as we have seen, the Oberlin men pledged nearly $5,000 in less than an hour. And still more recently, over $5,000 were subscribed at the Iowa Wesleyan University in about twenty minutes. The most

Historical Material, Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College. 28 Proceedings, Louisville, 77. Two years later the college work made a permanent department of the International Committee to be also included in the biennial budget. Hopkins, History of the YMCA, 281.29 Students at several eastern colleges had only begun to compete against each other in rowing contests in the early 1850s and other intercollegiate sports contests in baseball and football were soon to follow. Smith, R. (1988). Sports and freedom: the rise of big time college athletics. New York: Oxford University Press. 30 College Bulletin, 1 (February 1879), 4. All issues of The College Bulletin cited are courtesy of Archives and Special Collections, Springfield College, Springfield College, Springfield, MA.31 “The Inter-Collegiate Work,” College Bulletin, 2 (October 1879), 2. 32 “College Y.M.C.A. Constitution,” “College Conferences,” and “New Jersey Conference,” College Bulletin, 2 (September 1879), 4. 33 “College Items,” College Bulletin VI (December 1884), 4.34 “College Items,” College Bulletin, VII (October 1884), 4. 35 Hopkins, 292-293.36 YM and YWCA, anonymous manuscript, 1-4, YM-YWCA file, Wilcox Library Archives, William Penn University.37 Shedd, “Origin and Development,” 185. 38 John R. Mott, “End of the first quarter century of the American and Canadian Student Young Men's Christian Association movement, 1877-1902,” in Addresses and papers of John R. Mott, volume 3. (New York: Association Press, 1947/1902): 162.39 John R. Mott, How to Secure a College Association Building. Second ed. (New York: The International Committee of Young Men's Christian Associations, 1892). 40 John R. Mott, The Fall Campaign or How to Reach New Students. (New York: The International Committee of Young Men's Christian Associations, 1892); Hopkins, History of the Y.M.C.A., 283.41 Gates, “The Association,” 33.42 Andrew D. White, “Heresy in Colleges,” Old and New, Jan. 1870, 133; White had been a faculty member at the University of Michigan from 1856 to 1865 when he and Ezra Cornell established Cornell University. At Michigan, White taught and mentored Charles Kendall Adams, who also succeeded White as president of Cornell. 43 Shedd, “Origins and Development,” 48-49.44 “Murray Hall.” http://etc.princeton.edu/Campus/text_Murray.html . Retrieved February 8, 2005. A second building constructed in 1900 for use by the Philadelphia Society, Dodge Hall, was attached to Murray Hall by a cloister in 1884. Funds for this building were donated by William Earl Dodge, Jr. and Cleveland H. Dodge (’79), as a memorial to Earl Dodge (’79), their respective son and brother, who died in 1884. http://etc.princeton.edu/CampusWWW/Companion/murrary_dodge_hall.html. Retrieved February 8, 2005. Earl and Cleveland were the two sophomores who answered the door when Wishard needed coal for his cold room at Princeton. 45 Mott, How to Secure, 28. 46 Mott, “A Year’s Development,” 14-26; Barnes Hall http://www.cornell.edu/search/index.cfm?tab=facts&q=&id=53 Retrieved February 8, 2005.47 Mott, How to Secure, 12-15.

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remarkable student subscription was that at the University of Illinois, where, within twenty-four hours, one hundred and forty-two students pledged $10,180 towards a building to cost at least $25,000.48

Generally even without deep pockets, student members managed to raise a considerable

amount of money for their new association home, but many building campaigns were accelerated

through a generous donation—often a memorial—from a single donor or family. Most of these

were named for the donor or in memoriam. The campaign for Barnes Hall at Cornell (1889)

received $45,000 from Alfred Smith Barnes, a New York City publisher; Levering Hall at Johns

Hopkins (1889) was entirely subsidized by a donation of $20,000 from Eugene C. Levering, a

local merchant; Mrs. Anson Gale Stiles honored her husband’s memory with a donation of

$25,000 to build Stiles Hall at the University of California in Berkeley (1892).49 Single donor or

memorial buildings also appear at the University of Iowa, and the University of Cincinnati.50

John D. Rockefeller provided significant donations (from $30,000 to $75,000) toward the Y

buildings at Brown, Indiana, Minnesota, Georgia Tech, Clemson, North Carolina A & M College

(North Carolina State University), Mississippi State University, and the University of

Mississippi.51

At Yale, Dwight Hall (1886) pays tribute to the first President Timothy Dwight, but was

subsidized entirely by Elbert B. Monroe; at Dartmouth, Bartlett Hall was christened in honor of

48 Mott, How to Secure, 20-21. 49 Hugh Hawkins, Pioneer: a history of the Johns Hopkins University, 1874-1889. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1960), 279; “An Historical Sketch of the University YMCA” in The Men and Program of Stiles Hall—the University Y.M.C.A., 1884-1948 (Berkeley: University of California), 1.50 “Close Hall,” History of the University of Iowa: Miscellaneous Papers, vol. I-II, Courtesy of the University of Iowa Archives, Iowa City, IA; The Centennial of the National Student YMCA, 1958-1959 and the 43rd Anniversary of the University of Cincinnati YMCA (Cincinnati: The University of Cincinnati YMCA and Cincinnati, 1958), 4.51 “Building Campaign Completed,” The Minnesota Alumni Weekly, XVI (Dec. 18, 1916), 6; Minneapolis YMCA Box 16, University Branch Building, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota; Martha Mitchell, “Faunce Hall” Encyclopedia Brunoniana, http://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau/Databases/Encyclopedia/search.php; Georgia Tech Alumni House History, http://gtalumni.org/House/history-pr.php; “YMCA,” The Student’s Handbook of Clemson College, 1953 (Clemson, SC: Young Men’s Christian Association, 1953), 104; “YMCA,” The Tech Student’s Handbook (Georgia School of Technology), 1922 (Atlanta, GA: Young Men’s Christian Association, 1922), 19.

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the college’s president who had helped to secure it. Lafayette College’s Brainerd Hall

memorializes David Brainerd, an eighteenth century missionary who worked with Indians and

for whom the college’s missionary society had been named.52 By 1903, at least thirty campus Y

buildings had been erected.53 The confidence shared between association students and the

administration of their universities was extremely high. Even though the students themselves

secured much of the funds for their building, they often entrusted its ownership to the university

trustees.

The Y buildings quickly became the hub of student activity on campus. The associations

housed their own activities as well as provided space for other college organizations. Since

Berkeley, Dartmouth, and Clemson, like so many other institutions in the late nineteenth century,

had yet to build adequate meeting space or even an auditorium, Stiles and Bartlett Halls, and the

YMCA Building became the equivalent of a student union for the campus. Bartlett Hall,

maintained by the “professors of dust and ashes”—student janitors, functioned as “a common

gathering place for the whole college…. Here also, members of all the fraternities can meet on

common ground in a building devoted to the interests of the entire student body.”54 In Stiles,

forensic teams scheduled debates in the hall, other religious groups held their meetings, and even

held the inauguration of President Benjamin Ide Wheeler.55 At Clemson, the YMCA Building’s

(1915) first auditorium was used for vespers, church programs, and special meetings on Sundays;

the second could be converted into a gymnasium or used for showing motion pictures. 52 James B. Reynolds, “Dwight Hall,” New Englander and Yale Review, (Nov. 1886), 972; Letter to Trustees of Dartmouth College from C.C. Merrill, President, on behalf of the Executive Committee of the Young Men's Christian Association of Dartmouth College, June 23rd 1893, asking to change the name of the building to Bartlett Hall. Courtesy of the Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College; “The New Association Building at Lafayette College,” The Intercollegian, 25 (Dec. 1902), 58. 53 Mott, The Students of North America United, 17.54 Charles T. Brewster, “A History of the Dartmouth Christian Association” in Dartmouth Christian Association Historical Material ed. Ralph Dwinnell (collection of unpublished manuscripts, 1929), 18-19. Courtesy of Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College. 55 The Men and Program of Stiles Hall—the University Y.M.C.A., 1884-1948, (Berkeley: University of California, date), 1

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Residential rooms within the building were used for dormitory rooms as well as a campus hotel

for guest lodging.56 At Virginia Polytechnic Institute, “for a number of years [after the YMCA

Building was constructed in 1899] all indoor athletic activities of the college were held in the ‘Y’

gymnasium.57 The Y buildings as smaller institutions, such as Gettysburg College’s Weidensall

Hall, offered a swimming pool, billiard tables, and even ping pong to all of the students of the

College.58

When a building was not possible, a dedicated room would do. Most tended to contain

similar features. In 1902, the association at Washburn College, Topeka, Kan., rejoiced

in a new room granted by the college authorities. It is located in the building containing the chapel and many recitation rooms, is large, well-lighted, and has steam-heating. The room is furnished as the social headquarters for the men of the college, and is used by the Association for all it meetings.”59

The Worcester Polytechnic Institute Y was given a room in the engineering building in 1900,

which was furnished after “some financial help was solicited and received.”60 Another former

Society of Religious Inquiry reorganized as a YMCA in 1881, the Washington and Jefferson

College (PA) association held regular meetings every Sunday evening “in a room in the College

specially set apart and furnished for that purpose.” The room, open at first only on Sunday

afternoons, held “religious periodical literature is placed for general use.” Similar to other

associations, W&J’s Y room appears to have been located in the main college building for some

decades, but eventually relocated to the Caldwell House, a college building, in 1925.61 At The

College of William and Mary, the Y men met at first in Ewell Hall, the college’s first dedicated

56 P.B. Holtzendorff, The Clemson College Y.M.C.A. [Annual Report, 1944-45] (Clemson, SC: YMCA, 1945), 2.57 “YMCA,” Guidon, Students’ Handbook of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, (Blacksburg, VA: Young Men’s Christian Association 1934), 39..58 The Y.M.C.A. Cabinet, The 1933 G-Book, 37th edition (Gettysburg, PA: YMCA, 1933), 66. The building was named in honor of alumni, Robert Weidensall, (Class of 1860), who is credited with starting the college’s Y in 1867.59 “The Student World,” The Intercollegian, 25 (Nov. 1902), 41. All issues of The Intercollegian cited are courtesy of Archives and Special Collections, Springfield College, Springfield College, Springfield, MA.

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dormitory in a room outfitted with the help of the Ladies’ Auxiliary and the administration and

then in their room in the gymnasium.62 As time went on, most of the Y rooms, like the one at the

Michigan Agricultural College, were outfitted as a reading and a game room.63

At Penn College (IA), until the institution could afford to construct a gymnasium, the Y

men operated their own gymnasium in the Main Building. The men’s gym sported floor mats,

chest weights, a horizontal bar, a punching bag, ladder, rings, a trapeze and jumping standards.

But equipment was not enough for these enterprising young men. In 1892, the YMCA boasted

that their Bath Rooms for men

have been in use two years, and during that time they have been extensively patronized. They are fitted out with three showers, a large basin, shoe blacking and brushes, so that after you have taken violent exercise in the gymnasium you may step into the bath room and make your toilet and be prepared for the class room with a clear brain and ready to take hold of your recitation with vigor. The bath is an important factor in maintaining good health.64

The income from the bath room, their towel concession, and non-member user fees allowed the

men to continue to add to the equipment. By the end of 1898, they hoped to purchase “a pair of

parallel bars and a number of dumb-bells.”65 The idea must have struck a chord. Another Quaker

college, Friends University in Wichita, reported “bath-rooms fitted up” in 1901 and “cost of

construction and maintenance has been provided by the students.”66

60 Winthrop G. Hall, “The History of the Tech Y.M.C.A.,” Tech News (April 28, 1913), 1. Courtesy of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute Archives and Special Collections, George C. Gordon Library, Worcester, MA. 61 “YMCA,” Pandora 1886, (Washington and Jefferson Yearbook), 92-93; Washington and Jefferson College Catalogue, 1881-82, 31; James B. Anderson, “Material relative to the College and its various organizations” W&J Collection 378.733 EA, 10; Courtesy of the Archives and Special Collections Library, Washington & Jefferson College.62 “The Y.M.C.A.” The Colonial Echo, (Williamsburg, VA: The College of William and Mary, 1902), 76; “The Y.M.C.A.” The Colonial Echo, (Williamsburg, VA: The College of William and Mary, 1901), 26; YMCA, Handbook of The College Of William And Mary 1919 (Williamsburg, VA: Young Men’s Christian Association of the College, 1919), Courtesy of the University Archives, Swem Library, College of William and Mary. 63 “The Student World,” The Intercollegian, 25 (Nov. 1902), 39. 64 “YMCA, Bathrooms,” A Handbook for Students, 1892-93, 8, Courtesy of the Wilcox Library Archives, William Penn University, Oskaloosa, Iowa. 65 “Y.M.C.A.,” The Penn Chronicle, (1903), 4, Wilcox Library Archives, William Penn University, Oskaloosa, Iowa. 66 “The Student World,” The Intercollegian, 25 (Jan. 1903), 89.

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Although the students at Oberlin College launched what first appeared to be a successful

fund drive for their own building in 1892, they ultimately could not gather enough for their own

home. Like several other campuses, they shared a building, which housed socio-religious

activities, other student groups. The Men’s Building at Oberlin, the gift of an anonymous donor,

cost close to a half million dollars and gathered men’s social, religious, athletic, musical, and

literary activities under one roof.67 Similarly, in 1893 the University of Pennsylvania

administration and board, taking a cue from an early fund drive and purchase of a downtown

building by its infant YMCA, constructed a university building with a quasi-YMCA mission.

This movement is intended primarily to promote the religious and moral life of the University and to extend such influence as [much] as possible among its students. The building should at the same time present such provision for intellectual and physical improvement and for social purpose, that it may be attractive to all its students, and especially so the very large number [of] boarding students near the University, who are deprived of the comforts of home and are exposed to great temptations.68

Houston Hall, subsidized by a donation of $150,000 from Henry Houston, a Pennsylvania

Railroad executive, opened its doors in 1896.69 Organized on the model of a men’s club,

Houston Hall was well-appointed. In addition to the rooms set aside for the YMCA on the

second floor, the building provided a reading room with current newspapers and magazines, a

pool and billiard room, bowling lanes, shuffleboard tables, a gymnasium, swimming pool, baths,

an auditorium that could seat 600 people for church services or serve as a ballroom for university

dances, four additional club rooms including space for the Camera Club with a modern dark

room, a café, a kitchen with a dumbwaiter, and a music room. Everything needed to keep the

Penn men from roaming into Philadelphia to find trouble.70

67 Oberlin College Archives, retrieved Oct. 21, 2005 http://www.oberlin.edu/archive/resources/photoguide/mens_building.html 68 University of Pennsylvania Board of Trustees Minutes, February 14, 1893, 88, cited in Paul Forchielli, “Houston Hall: Morality, Activity, and Community in 1890’s Philadelphia” (M.Ed. thesis, The College of William and Mary, 2004), 10.

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Clearly, whether a full-scale building or rooms, the campus associations afforded a

defined space for men. Supported by the college administrations across the colleges and

universities, the buildings and rooms encouraged leadership, enabled fiscal and managerial

responsibility, and keep the young men occupied in healthy activities on campus. During the

decades when colleges and universities had yet to construct student unions, nor for many,

dormitories or residence halls, these facilities provided not only a place in which men could

gather for religious or social intercourse, but often spatial accommodations for the maturing

institutional needs, such as presidential inaugurations and receptions, and housing for parental

visits.

Services

Through the end of the nineteenth century, the Y developed an increasingly proactive set

of strategies designed to target the new student at their most vulnerable moment of introduction

to campus and to shepherd them into the collegiate experience and, conveniently, into the fold of

the Y. In 1892, John R. Mott as College Secretary of the International Committee wrote a

pamphlet that detailed the purpose and process of the “fall campaign”, as he termed it.71 Mott

described seven steps for Associations to use to draw in new students. They included: the

student handbook, meeting trains, the information bureau, and the opening reception. Although

pioneering Associations inserted additional services such as housing bureaus, these four tactics

formed the backbone of the fall campaign.

Long before the days of the family moving son or daughter into the dorm and attending

orientation programs together, before the tearful parking lot goodbyes (and cell phone calls later

69 University of Pennsylvania Trustee Board Minutes, Nov. 6, 1894, 235, cited in Forchielli, 9. 70 Information on individual rooms and building layouts are taken from Spangler, The Howard Houston Hall, University of Pennsylvania, 59-63 and Photographs from William Rau and D. Lathrop, both found in the University of Pennsylvania Archives, as cited by Forchielli, 21-23.71 Mott, The Fall Campaign, 11.

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that night), many students arrived alone at an unfamiliar train station in a town they had never

seen to attend a college about which they knew little. Mott himself as an impressionable youth

was influenced by the Y’s coordinated welcome. As a transfer student to Cornell in 1885, Mott

wrote:

I was met before I got here by the Christian Association, which at that time already included both men and women students. When I had written from the West [Iowa] asking for a university catalogue, the Association sent me a handbook of information, issued annually by the Christian Association, which it published for the benefit of the students. Its representatives met me at the train on my arrival, helped me to get settled, and introduced me to some of the upper-classmen and instructors. They broke down the barriers by thus helping and befriending me.72

Meeting new students at the trains became a Y ritual at many institutions. At the

University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, the student handbook instructs incoming students to

“look for the red and blue badges”, whereas Albion College freshmen were to look for the “pink

and green badges bearing the inscription ‘Reception Committee’” that identified members of the

Y.73 At Washington and Jefferson College (1901) new students are advised in the handbook that

“a committee of YMCA fellows will meet you at the train and be of whatever assistance they can

to you.”74 According to Mott, Y men assigned to “train duty” should be carefully selected. In

The Fall Campaign, he exhorted:

The most attractive men socially should be delegated to perform this work. The new students will form their estimate of the Association very largely from the impressions made upon them by the first representatives of that organization that they meet. This work should be dignified and raised to a rank as high as any other phase of the fall campaign, and not regarded as an insignificant and mechanical service.75

72 Howard, History of the YMCA, 284. 73 YMCA, The Student’s Handbook for 1923-24 at the University of Pennsylvania, 1924 (Greenfield, IN: WM Mitchell Printing Company, 1924); YM-YWCA, The Students’ Handbook, 1899-1900 (Albion, MI, 1899), 19. Courtesy of Albert Zatkoff.74 YMCA, Student’s Handbook of Washington and Jefferson College, 1901 (Washington, PA: H. F. Ward Printer). 5. Courtesy of the Archives and Special Collections Library, Washington and Jefferson College. 75 Mott, The Fall Campaign, 15

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Once students were greeted and accompanied to campus, they were relayed to another

sub-committee of the Association responsible for manning the information bureau. Y

associations with their own building, such as Madison Hall at the University of Virginia, were

able to utilize this resource and “wow” the new freshman with the amenities available there.

Associations without their own buildings established an information bureau in a centrally located

structure. At Olivet College in Michigan the 1921 handbook advises arriving students to head

for the information bureau in Shipherd Hall, or the YMCA tent on campus.76

Mott suggested possible features for the information bureau in The Fall Campaign. His

list included maps of the campus and city, a temporary post office, copies of the latest papers and

magazines to occupy students before the start of classes, a baggage express, at least two well

informed Y members “…who command the confidence of the faculty” to advise students on

courses and registration. Two additional suggested features often gained “bureau” status of their

own: housing and employment bureaus.77

Housing bureaus most often serviced campuses that had not yet constructed enough on-

campus living accommodations and required some or all students to find their own lodgings such

as at Clark University, or schools that were large enough that the entire student body was not

expected to be housed on campus, such as at the University of Michigan. The 1899 Albion

College Y advised the freshmen that “having [the reception committee’s] assistance it {would ]

be unnecessary for anyone to come to Albion before the term opens in order to secure board and

rooms.78 At Colorado Agricultural College (1917), the handbook informs new students that

preparations were made the previous year to assist them in finding a room. “Guides are

furnished during the opening days. Maps of the city are furnished. Last year, five lists were

76 YMCA/YWCA, The Students Handbook of Olivet College, 1921 (Olivet, MI: publisher unknown, 1921). Courtesy of the Olivet College Archives, 95, 37. 77 Mott, The Fall Campaign, 16-18.

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prepared, involving hundreds of phone calls and days of work in calling at the homes.”79 By the

early 1920s though, some institutions began to gradually assume responsibility for this Y service.

At the University of Pennsylvania, a “boarding list” could be obtained either from the Christian

Association or from the Bursar’s Office.80

Although Mott mentions employment lists for those wanting to help pay their way

through college in his 1892 pamphlet, the service seems to appear around the turn of the century

in the handbooks and in the Intercollegian. In 1903, the Y at Ohio Wesleyan reported that its

employment bureau secured permanent employment for 16 men and 79 “occasional

opportunities for work were provided for needy students.” Likewise, the Y at Kansas State

Agricultural College in Manhattan, noted that it “assist[ed] large numbers in securing rooms and

employment. Practically all work of this character has been turned over to the Association by

the college authorities.81 On the Quad, the University of Missouri Y handbook, heralds its

employment bureau in 1905. “The employment Bureau is a good thing. It is especially

appreciated by the men for whom we found about $4,000 worth of work last year. Work is

found for all worthy students who need it.”82 Obviously, the students had to be careful in

selecting would-be employees to help. The College of William and Mary’s Y employment

bureau warned that “only serious, persistent, dependable students who will hold themselves

responsible for work attempted are desired as applicants. Any others would soon destroy the

usefulness of the bureau.”83

78 YM-YWCA, The Students’ Handbook, 1899-1900, 19. 79 YMCA/YWCA, The Handbook of the Colorado Agricultural College, 1917 (Fort Collins, CO: publisher unknown, 1917). College Christian Associations, 112, 12.80 “General Accommodations”, University of Pennsylvania Student Handbook 1924, 16.81 “The Student World,” The Intercollegian, 25 (Feb. 1903): 114-115.82 On the Quad, A Handbook of What, How, and When at the University of Missouri: Columbia, MO. University Archives, University of Missouri-Columbia, 1905, 55, 30.83 Students’ Handbook of the College of William and Mary: Williamsburg, VA. The College of William and Mary Special Collections, 1921, 17.

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By the 1930s, this service seems to have been ubiquitous. Yet, as a result of the National

Youth Administration (NYA), a federal program created to help students earn enough money to

stay in school, the Y bureau became less viable. At Pennsylvania State University in 1941, the

NYA provided jobs for 700 students who earned approximately $13 a month the previous year.

The Christian Association in response limited its employment bureau for the use of men

students.84

The fall “opening reception” served as an opportunity to formally introduce the entering

class to the faculty, upperclassmen, and organizational leaders. It also was used to tether the

freshmen to the institution and tangentially to the association. As the initiators of the event, the Y

assumed a position of legitimized authority, a representative of the institution. As a service, the

opening receptions were an event initiated early in the movement and were seemingly a universal

service to students and the institution.

The concept may have originated with the city association rather than on the campuses

though. In the fall of 1878 in Knoxville, Tennessee,

The religious society, aided by the ladies of the city, gave a social reception in their halls at the beginning of the college year for the new students. They had first religious exercises such as singing, prayer, and short speeches. The ladies then served refreshments, which are always acceptable to students. Thus the religious element of the college takes the new student by the hand and leads him in right paths.85

Another early example of an opening reception involving a city association appeared in The

College Bulletin in 1884. At Union College in Schenectady, New York,

A social reception recently given to the students by the City Association was largely attended, and has had the invariable effect of deeping their interest in the College Association. This is one of several ways in which the City Associations can render very great aid to the College work.86

84 The Student Handbook of Pennsylvania State University: State College, PA. Penn State Christian Association, 1941, 170, 24.85 “Religious Societies in Colleges,” Washington Jeffersonian II (December 1878): 2. Courtesy of the Archives and Special Collections Library, Washington and Jefferson College. 86“College Items,” College Bulletin VI (December 1884), 4

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By the time the handbooks emerge in the early 1880s, the opening reception appears

normative. The 1885 Hillsdale College handbook includes a note that a “social reception” will

be held the second week of each term.87 However, no reception recipe reigned. The Y men in

1902 found ways to take advantage of their natural surroundings.

A promising innovation at Yale Divinity School was a camp-fire reception given early in the term. It was held on the shores of the [Long Island] Sound, and was a time of fun and seriousness, participated in and enjoyed by the Faculty as well as the students. No event has ever cemented so quickly the relations between the students and Faculty.88

And the tradition continued to evolve. Three dozen years later, at the University of

Pennsylvania, a “freshman class luncheon under the auspices of the Christian Association”89 was

held in the gymnasium. This meeting included a light meal followed by short addresses by the

president of the senior class and the president of the Christian Association. The varsity

cheerleaders were also on hand to teach the young men the college cheers and songs.

Immediately following, the entire group processed out to Franklin Field to witness the opening

football game of the season. As these examples illustrate, the opening reception contributed to a

sense of community by creating a point of interaction removed from the classroom. They

facilitated the introduction of new students to important individuals and impressed upon them

social norms and customs such as the college songs and cheers.

Although the Y had developed an extensive program welcoming and imparting

information to the new student, associations began to develop “freshman camps” and other

orientation programs in the 1920s. Some programs were created in the absence of an “official”

orientation experience, while many others were supplementary. Information provided to

representatives from 13 campuses90 at the 1929 Blue Ridge YMCA/YWCA Summer Conference 87 Student’s Handbook: Hillsdale, MI. Hillsdale College Archives, 1885, 35, 14. Courtesy of the Archives and Special Collections Library, Washington and Jefferson College. 88“The Student World,” The Intercollegian, 25 (Nov. 1902), 41. 89 “Freshman Class Luncheon”, University of Pennsylvania Student Handbook, 1924, 21.

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included an outline of possible Frosh Week activities. Associations were exhorted to find a

suitable location off campus for a retreat, provide lectures on how to make the most of college

and information on religious education and employment, schedule recreation time with upper

class men, and develop leaders from the orientation experience. The common problems that

beset the first year man were also listed, such as homesickness, choosing friends, fraternities,

selecting a vocation, how to detect and deal with emotional difficulties, relationships with girls,

moral problems (gambling, drinking, etc.), and conflict between athletics and studies.91 In short,

many of the same topics typically addressed in the modern first year orientation program were

noted.

The camps clearly had different agendas though. The 1931 University of Florida

Freshman YMCA Camp featured an evening campfire with speeches by upperclassmen “on what

college has meant to them,” an address by university president John J. Tigert, and free time for

swimming, hiking, and other recreation.92 The University of Michigan Y sponsored a Freshman

Rendezvous Camp prior to the official orientation week. Limited to 125 men and held at nearby

Patterson Lake, the camp was followed up by a Rendezvous Club made up of men who had

attended the camp in previous years.93 The Clemson College YMCA in 1954 held a Freshman

Week where “practically all the freshmen who are interested in coming to school two days early

to attend a Y get-acquainted camp.”94

90 The schools listed with Frosh Week programs varying in length from four events to one full week are North Carolina State University, Louisiana State University, Emory University, Roanoke College, Louisiana Polytechnic Institute, Wofford College, University of Tennessee, Mississippi A&M, Tusculum College, University of South Carolina, Vanderbilt University, University of Virginia, and the University of Miami (FL). “Frosh Week” Frosh Work: Blue Ridge Conference, 1929. 4. Courtesy of the Special Collections Department of Smathers Library, University of Florida.91 YMCA, Frosh Work: Blue Ridge Conference, 1929 (unpublished). 3-7.Courtesy of the Special Collections Department of Smathers Library, University of Florida.92 University of Florida YMCA, Outline of Activities for the Freshman YMCA Camp, September 12-14, 1931. Courtesy of the Special Collections Department of Smathers Library, University of Florida. 93 “For Freshman” The Michigan Handbook, 1935. 56-57.94 YMCA, The Student Handbook of Clemson College, 1953 (Clemson, SC: Young Men’s Christian Association, 1953). 101.

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“Every college senior realizes that if he could be a Freshman again and make his plans

with the same knowledge and experience gained through four years of college life, he could do

much better.”95 So begins the description of the Y’s Freshman Orientation Conference in the

UCLA Handbook (1930). The success of student-run orientation programs rested upon the

ability of organizers to attract upperclassmen with outstanding social and leadership abilities.

Although the handbook was for new students, this was most certainly an appeal meant for

returning men. Founded in the mid-1920’s, the Y Freshman Camp at University of Minnesota

predated any official freshman orientation at the university by nearly 25 years. Known as “a

place where friends, not speeches would be made”, it was immediately successful, and continued

under Association control until the institution took over in the 1954.96

Beyond meeting the initial needs of the new student, the Y associations provided a range

of auxiliary services that varied with the perceived needs of the campus and the initiative of

individual associations. Several maintained lending libraries with religious books and textbooks

donated by students and alumni.97 At Harvard, the Association library began in 1907, and by

1925 boasted over 3,000 books, 1200 of which were borrowed by 350 different men during the

previous school year. “Books are loaned to students who cannot well afford to purchase them,

on deposit of 25 cents (of which all but 5 cents are refunded upon return).”98

Several Y associations exercised varying degrees of oversight on campus athletics. At

Penn College in the late 1800’s, all officers of the Athletic Association were required to be

members of the YMCA. In 1902, the association at Drew Theological Seminary provided

95YMCA-YMCA, The Student Handbook of UCLA, 1930, 124. 96 YMCA Centennial History Committee, A Timeless Place: The University of Minnesota YMCA, 1887-1987 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota YMCA, 1987), 9-15. Local Histories: The University YMCA, 1887-1987, Courtesy of the Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Archives. 97 YMCA, Clark College Student Handbook, 1910 (Worcester, MA: Clark College Press, 1910), 8. Courtesy of the Archives and Special Collections, Robert Hutchings Goddard Library, Clark University. Phillips Brooks House Association, The Handbook of Harvard University, 1925 (Cambridge, MA: Phillips Brooks House, 1925). 19. 98 “Libraries” The Handbook of Harvard University, 1925, 19.

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“liberally for the athletic enjoyment of the students by maintaining and equipping baseball

grounds and tennis courts.99 And in line with the Y philosophy, in 1940, “to develop us in body

as well as in mind and spirit, the Clemson YMCA sponsors an intra-mural sports program.

Students taking an active part in this program realize more real good from it than from any other

from of recreation offered by the college.100 The Clemson Y, like other associations with their

own well-equipped buildings,101 provided an impressive range of services and activities not

otherwise conveniently available to the college man. These included a pool, gymnasium,

showers, dressing rooms, meeting rooms, a movie theatre (with free shows for cadets), a bowling

alley, a tea room, a cafeteria (for many years, the handbook notes, the only place buy a meal on

campus), a barber shop, a “canteen” for college supplies, and rooms for short or long stay

“transients”.

Similar to Clemson’s canteen, Y associations at other schools found ways to meet the

physical needs of the student body. At Wesleyan University (CT), “in lieu of a co-operative

bookstore in the college, the Association started an exchange bureau for books, furniture, etc.,

for the men.”102 Springfield College YMCA ran the Student Co-operative Store, a profit sharing

venture “it seeks to supply the student with first-class goods at reasonable prices.”103 The

willingness of associations to create services meant for the entire student body illustrates the Y’s

comfort with assuming a role of responsibility and as a voice of all the students.

99 “The Student World,” The Intercollegian, XXV (Nov. 1902): 42.100 YMCA, The Students’ Handbook of Clemson College, 1940 (Clemson, SC: Young Men’s Christian Association, 1940). 67.101 Other examples of a “full service” Y buildings are the University of Virginia’s Madison Hall, Illini Hall, and the Texas A&M YMCA Building, to name a few. 102 “The Student World,” The Intercollegian, XXV (Jan. 1903): 92.103 YMCA, Student Association Handbook of Springfield College, 1914 (Springfield, MA: International Young Men’s Association, 1914), 15. Archives and Special Collections, Springfield College, Springfield College, Springfield, MA..

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Another resource meant for the campus at large were the range of counseling services

provided by some Y associations. At the University of Minnesota, “life work guidance” was

offered through two counselors on staff who dedicated nearly all of their time to this endeavor.104

About the same time, the University of Pennsylvania Y Association also provided “vocational

counseling.”

The object of this department is to furnish information regarding vocations, to bring men

in business and the professions into contact with the student body in conferences and with

individual students in interviews. Men who are undecided as to the choice of a career are

invited to confer with the Director of Vocational Counsel.105

Within the University of Michigan’s association’s new Lane Hall, facilities were provided for

students to meet with faculty member Dr. E. W. Blakeman for counseling purposes.106 Yet,

given the nature of the Y’s mission, associations seldom provided formal religious counseling to

students. The intent of the associations, however, was to encourage and not impede the

relationship a young man should have with his pastor.

Student Handbooks

Individual campus chapters first began to publish YMCA association handbooks at least

by the early 1880’s.107 Adopted widely across campuses from the east to west coasts throughout

the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the handbooks contained basic college survival

information, both in terms of logistics such as train schedules, academic calendars, lists of

104 YMCA, The University YMCA Commemorative Booklet. Published by the University of Minnesota Young Men’s Christian Association, 1923. Minneapolis YMCA, Box 90, History, Courtesy of the Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Archives.105 “Vocational Counsel” The Student’s Handbook at the University of Pennsylvania, 1924, 77.106 “Counseling Services” The Michigan Handbook, 1935-6, 55.107 The University of Virginia YMCA published its first handbook in 1883; their1886 handbook is the third edition (University of Virginia Archives). Northwestern University Y published an 1883 handbook (Northwestern University Archives). Hopkins notes that Hillsdale College published a handbook in 1883, Hopkins, History of the YMCA, 284.

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faculty and descriptions of campus buildings, and guidance, including advice on study habits,

and rules for class behavior (such as the popular freshman cap), and campus traditions (such as

the junior vs. freshman rope pull across University Pond at Clark College, 1921).

The originator of the concept of the student handbook is unknown. Yet most associations

appear to have recognized the potential of the handbook and adapted it to their own context.

Harnessing this service helped to establish and legitimize the local association in several ways.

First, most handbooks feature a welcome statement by one or more college officials. The

statement served as a de facto endorsement of the handbook (and by extension, the YMCA) as

representative bearer of accurate information regarding the institution and acceptable behavior

therein.

Although a feature of a few early handbooks, introductions became more common in the

1920’s and 1930’s. Most often penned by the president and occasionally followed by a similar

page by the provost or dean, these formal greetings served to welcome new and returning

students, and often also extolled the value of the Y association. According to Provost Thomas

Fell at the University of Maryland at Baltimore:

There is no question but that when you come from amidst the safeguards of home life and take up your position as students at the University, some agency should exist to which you can look for encouragement and sympathy. The Y.M.C.A. at the University of Maryland is animated with the desire of doing all that it can to smooth away the various difficulties, and to point out the dangers that beset the path of the new man.108

Official greetings rose in popularity concurrent with the importance of the handbook as a college

resource and the increasing role faculty and administrators assumed in creating policy regarding

student life. Despite this, the emphasis placed upon the Y within the greeting is more often a

108 The University of Maryland at Baltimore Handbook 1916-1917, (Baltimore: Young Men's Christian Association, 1916), 1.

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function of the role of the Y and the relationship of the author to the association, and less related

to the era and type of the institution.

Handbook greetings were also used to influence the attitude toward education of the

incoming student. In the 1910, President Joseph W. Mauck exhorted students in his greetings in

the Hillsdale College Handbook to “see to it that you do not disappoint the fond hopes of parents

and friends.” 109 Making the most of one’s educational opportunities in and outside the classroom

is a common theme in the introductory addresses.

Other greetings reflected the responsibility of the learner in light of external social and

political realities. Colorado State Agriculture College president C. A. Lory addressed the

changing attitude of higher education during World War I: “The call of the Nation, the call of

humanity are challenging each and all of us to make the best use of our time, of our facilities and

of our abilities in fitting ourselves to do our part in the struggle for democracy.”110

Second, Y association handbooks, as the “official” introduction to campus life and

culture, helped to establish normative behavior for new and returning students, including the

significance of Y membership and participation in Y events. From this voice of authority, the

handbooks also often presented details of the Y’s own mission, organization, services,

membership criteria, and leadership. The handbooks featured dates and details concerning

upcoming social, spiritual, and educational events, such as Bible Studies or Lyceum Series talks

and concerts and exhorted students to plan their schedules to include a variety of Y activities.

Third, the authority lent to the handbooks via official endorsement and the establishment

of campus norms, which included Y membership, cumulatively resulted in the opportunity to

make a deep impression on newly-arrived freshman seeking a foothold in a frighteningly new 109 Christian Associations, The Handbook for Hillsdale College, 1910 (Hillsdale, MI: Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Associations, 1910). Courtesy of the Hillsdale College Archives.110 College Christian Associations, The Hand Book of the Colorado Agriculture College, 1917 (Fort Collins, CO: Christian Associations, 1917). Courtesy of the Colorado State University Archives.

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environment. Through the handbook as well as other hospitable activities, the Y served as a

locus of information, reassurance, and authority to incoming freshmen, nearly all of whom were

first generation students. The associations’ orientation activities thus helped to capture a steady

stream of new members and assured its continued voice in the campus at large. Y membership

data across various institutions show participation dwindling as students progressed through their

four years.111

Over the decades, the Y handbooks evolved and adapted to the changing campus

landscape and increased institutional complexity. Despite significant changes to the content

volume and detail, handbooks usually accomplished three ends: to provide a sense of the

physical place (town and gown) the student was entering, to familiarize the student with the

norms, expectations, and opportunities of college life (from freshman rules to fraternities), and to

introduce them to the YMCA and its work.

Handbooks evolved at a steady though uneven pace through the seventy years of Y

publication. The germinal phase began in the early 1880s when Hillsdale College, the University

of Virginia, and Northwestern University (and likely others) published the first handbooks.

Typical of this phase, the 1883 Northwestern Handbook is pocket-sized and ten pages long,

opening with a list of the Y chapter leaders and a directive to new students to first see President

Cummings in his office and “…present a testimonial of character and receive a matriculation

paper….”112 The handbooks emphasize the new and novel details of travel and communication,

assuaging the fears of the many first generation students leaving home for the first time. Included

are railway time tables (Northwestern and Hillsdale), instructions for the telegraph office

(University of Virginia 1886) and a new service available in Hillsdale, which “is connected by

111 See page 37 for enrollment growth data.

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telephone with 175 cities and towns of Michigan and Ohio.”113 Other common features are a list

of local churches, boarding houses with rooms to rent, professors (and their home addresses),

and pages of ads for local merchants.

By the early 1890’s, parallel to the growing complexity of colleges and universities, the

handbooks had not only grown in depth of detail and content, but were recognized and

encouraged to connect the new students to the Association. Mott, in his 1892 Fall Campaign,

extolled the benefits of the handbook and provided a list of suggested content. Handbooks

predated Mott’s role as college secretary, but he, along with others, encouraged and helped to

standardize the handbook process and content.

Through the end of the nineteenth century and the decade that followed, Y handbooks

reflected the proliferation of organizations, activities, and policy governing student life. The

succession of handbooks published by the Penn College YM/YWCA between 1892 and 1913

illustrate this process of adjustment. The 1892 Penn Handbook begins with a greeting “for all

students,” along with a page of pointers with advice such as “get a catalog at the Presidents

office and keep it handy. You will want to refer to it constantly.” It also reminds students to

attend the YM/YWCA opening reception on Saturday night.114 By contrast, an increased

formality and extension of campus involvement is evident in the 1913 handbook. This edition

opens with a greeting from college president David M. Edwards followed by instructions to

looks for members of the YM/YWCA Reception Committee at the train station and then to

proceed to the Y Information Bureau to connect with the freshmen class advisor.115

112Student’s Directory of Northwestern University, Evanston, IL: Christian Associations of Northwestern University), 1883, 10, 2. Courtesy of Northwestern University Archives, 2.113 Student’s Handbook of Hillsdale College, Hillsdale Michigan: Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Associations, 1885, 22.114 YMCA-YWCA, Penn College Student Handbook, 1892 (Oskaloosa, Iowa:  Times Print, 1892).  Courtesy of Wilcox Library Archives, William Penn University.115YMCA-YWCA, Penn College Student Handbook, 1913 (Oskaloosa, Iowa:  Globe Press, 1913).  Courtesy of Wilcox Library Archives, William Penn University.

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Both the 1892 and 1913 Penn College handbooks include a description of Y activities,

campus features, faculty lists, and an academic calendar. However, the 1913 edition devotes

more than a page to athletics as opposed to one paragraph in 1892, excludes the “local

attractions” section, and employs a decidedly administrative tone introducing a new policy

entitled “Control of Activities.” Implemented by the faculty in 1912, these guidelines limited

students to a certain number of extracurricular activities based on a points system correlated to

their academic marks.116 Although this may have been an attempt on the part of the Y to provide

as much information to students as possible, it also represented a new kind of information. The

handbook demonstrates the transition to a publication of administrative rules that mediated

student behavior outside the classroom, and with time, the increased voice of the institution in

student life would result in a divestment of this role by the Y associations.

Handbooks from the 1920s through the 1940s continued the effort to blend the features of

the Y association work with the increasing complexity of campus activities and policies. In an

effort to maintain the convenience of the portable pocket-sized handbook, editions from larger

schools such as Harvard (1925, 199 pages) and UCLA (1930, 160 pages) became quite thick. By

now handbooks included extensive information on the rules of student government (usually

separate for men and women),117 athletics (often with photographs of coaches, teams, or

stadiums),118 and descriptions of Greek life along with rules for rushing.119

Two important transitions were taking place. Although incoming students had long been

the target audience, prior to 1920 handbooks were most often addressed to all students, as

116 Minutes of the Faculty Meeting, June 12, 1912, Penn College, 45-46. Courtesy of the Wilcox Library Archives, William Penn University. 117 YMCA-YWCA, The Freshman Handbook of Ohio State University, 1930 (Columbus, OH: publisher?, 1930). Courtesy of the Ohio State University Archives.118 Christian Association, The Handbook of the University of Michigan, 1935 (Milwaukee, WI: Sealman and Sons Co., 1935).119 The 1930 UCLA Handbook includes a page on the intra-fraternity council (men) and the pan-Hellenic council (women). YMCA-YWCA, The Student Handbook of UCLA, 1930, 110-111.

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exemplified by the 1913 Penn College Handbook.120 Gradually, the language and content of

handbooks focused on the target audience directly, with references to the guide as the “freshman

bible” occurring more frequently. At many institutions, this informal label gave way to a shift in

the official title from “College Handbook” to “Freshman Handbook”.121 This shift in

terminology often occurred with a transfer of responsibility for publishing the handbook from the

YM/YW or Christian Association to the institution. For example unlike previous Ohio State

handbooks, the 1930 OSU Freshman Handbook was not a Y publication, although it contains

evidence of the Y’s continued presence on campus. The Y continued activities such as the

employment bureau, the “frosh council” who organize the “freshman camp” (optional, but

limited to 130 new men), and a few religious activities.122 However, the university’s assumption

of publication duties demonstrates that the Y was now simply one of many campus

organizations, and no longer the voice of authority for and to the student body.

Activities

Any organization, whether voluntary or corporate, that persists more than seven decades

is bound to change. The mission, services, and activities of the campus YMCAs all changed as

their environmental elements altered. The campus Ys simultaneously existed within several

levels or types of environments, each of which impacted the response of the young collegiate

men. Foremost, their own membership (or lack thereof) through the decades dictated the nature

of the association. A secondary environment was their campus. During the decades in which the

movement began and matured, their institutions struggled and matured. Enrollments increased,

straining the physical and human resources. Institutions were forced by these internal pressures

120YMCA-YWCA, Penn College Student Handbook, 1913 (Oskaloosa, Iowa:  Globe Press, 1913).  Courtesy of Wilcox Library Archives, William Penn University. 121 Two examples are The Freshman Handbook of Ohio State University, 1930 and The Freshman Handbook of Springfield College, 1930 (Springfield, MA, 1930). Archives and Special Collections, Springfield College, Springfield College, Springfield, MA.122 The Freshman Handbook of Ohio State University, 1930.

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and contemporary external pressures to restructure and expand its operations. Third, the

intercollegiate environment consisted of shared information from other associations through The

College Bulletin at first, followed by The Intercollegian, and of manuals and advice from the

national, regional, and state secretaries hired by the parent YMCA International Committee.

These information sources disseminated innovations, but undoubtedly informally pressured

associations to imitate other groups. Over the decades, the shift in activities across the campus

associations represents a collective change associated with all of these environmental forces.

However, the most significant differences in the associations appear to have been the result of

their own institutional environment.

Socio-religious Activities

Reflecting the city associations, the college associations at their onset were voluntary

religious organizations. At the University of Virginia, the first official collegiate YMCA (1858),

the students were not merely concerned with their own religious spirit, but dedicated their

organization to service work as well. Its adopted constitutional purpose was “the improvement

of the spiritual condition of the Students, and the extension of religious advantages to the

destitute points in the neighborhood of the University.”123 And in fact, in their second annual

report, they launched the model by sponsoring public lectures, hosting prayer meetings, and

sending “every Sabbath some fifty young men [to preach} the gospel, either in the Sunday

Schools of Charlottesville or the University, or, willing to forego the privileges of the Sanctuary

during the day, as missionaries to different parts of the surrounding country.”124 Perhaps the

influence of the group’s chaplain, Rev. Dabney Carr Harrison, led the UVa association to follow

123 University of Virginia YMCA, “Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution and By-Laws of the Association,” adopted October 12, 1858, as quoted in Shedd, “Origin and Development,” 62, 37.124 L.M. Blackford, J.L. Johnson, R.H. McKim, “Second Annual Report of the University of Virginia Young Men's Christian Association” as quoted in Shedd, “Origin and Development,” Appendix B.

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the contemporary mission of the urban YMCAs in spreading the evangelical word. Perhaps as

Randolph Harrison McKim, one of the UVa-YMCA founders, explained,

That this child of [Thomas Jefferson], deeply imbued with his spirit, should have become the mother of the first collegiate Christian Association in the United States may seem an anomaly, but, when we consider the benefit that must inure to genuine religious development from the establishment of an Institute of Learning upon the broadest principles of religious freedom the anomaly disappears, and the event takes its place as the natural fruitage of the seed planted.125

Or its religious orientation may have resulted from both. Apparently, this same mission was not

as distinct within the second association.

Michigan’s group, “originally…had much the character of a literary society devoted to

the discussion of topics bearing on religion and morals.”126 It appears to have continued the

norms of the Society for Religious Inquiry, popular through the first half of the nineteenth

century. According to one of the founders, Charles Kendall Adams,

One of the prominent objects of the new Association was the hearing of essays, discussions and addresses. The first record in existence of a meeting (1859) had as its subject, Shall The Christian Dance?” Another subject was, “Need a Christian ever have an Enemy?” These questions, and others like them, took up much of the time of these meetings and it is probably only just to say that it was not until the work of the Society came to be more largely devotional in its nature that its real power came to be felt.127

Yet in 1884, Michigan reported in The College Bulletin, that “In addition to holding meetings

every evening and on Sunday morning, and a number of sections for Bible study, the Association

has instituted a worker’s training class for such Bible Study as will qualify the students to use the

Word skillfully in dealing with the unconverted.”128

125 Randolph Harrison McKim, “The Planting and Training of the Young Men's Christian Association of the University of Virginia,” The Intercollegian, XIII (May and June, 1891): 128. 126 “Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the Michigan University Association, The College Bulletin, Y.M.C.A., 5 (February 1883), 4. Archives and Special Collections, Springfield College, Springfield College, Springfield, MA.127 C.K. Adams, “Reminiscences,” Quarterly Centennial Celebration, University of Michigan, as quoted by Shedd, 67.128 “College Items,” College Bulletin, Y.M.C.A., VII (October, 1884), 4.

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However, the two charter associations did have a point in common. Among their first

members were future educators and clergy who assumed major leadership roles. Among the first

year’s roll of members at UVa, McKim cites men who became professors at the Union

Theological Seminary, Columbia, Richmond, Virginia (2), and the University of the South, and

numerous academy faculty. “Of the thirteen who made up the first roll of officers, seven or eight

became ministers of the Gospel.”129 Within the much smaller group of men who transformed the

University of Michigan’s Society of Inquiry in 1858 were Adam K. Spence and Charles Kendall

Adams, both of whom rose from faculty positions at Michigan to become university presidents—

the latter at Cornell (1885-92) and the University of Wisconsin (1892-1902) and the former at

Fisk University (1870-1875?).

During the transition stage from its Society of Religious Inquiry to a bona fide YMCA,130

the students at Washington and Jefferson were invigorated by attending a state convention in

Harrisburg in October of 1878. Learning what the associations at Lafayette, Pennsylvania

College (Gettysburg), Allegheny College, Wyoming Seminary, and State College were doing,

the members determined to transform the Society and its “very quiet work—so quiet that many

of the students scarcely knew of its existence” by joining the new movement. The awakened

group held “general prayer-meetings on Sabbath afternoons and Saturday evenings. They carry

on two Sabbath schools, one at a country school-house, the other among the colored people of

Washington.”131 These activities were typical of the associations in the late 1870s and through

129 McKim, “Planting and Training,” 129.130 The last entry for the Society of Religious Inquiry appears in the Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Washington and Jefferson College for the Academical Year 1880-1881 (Washington, PA: Review and Examiner Print., 1881), 32. The first entry for the Young Men's Christian Association appears the following year. Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Washington and Jefferson College for the Academical Year 1881-1882 (Washington, PA: Review and Examiner Print., 1882), 31. Courtesy of the Archives and Special Collections Library, Washington and Jefferson College. 131 “Religious Societies in Colleges,” Washington Jeffersonian 2 (December 1878): 37-38. Courtesy of the Archives and Special Collections Library, Washington and Jefferson College.

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the 1880s. In order to nurse and substantiate its newly-recognized collegiate department, the

International Committee provided a pamphlet of 300 topics for prayer-meetings “arranged for

each day of the year, Sabbaths excepted” at a cost of 50 cents a dozen or five cents each.132

Some of the established college associations sponsored revivals during these first decades, such

as at State College in Pennsylvania in 1877 and at Howard University in early 1879.133 With

visits from Wishard, attendance at state meetings, and subscriptions to the College Bulletin, the

students learned of activities accomplished on other campuses.

In 1884, the College Bulletin itemized the activities of the 181 college associations—91

of which had been established that year. They all conducted prayer meetings and business

meetings, half ran Bible study sessions, 84 held Foreign Missionary meetings, 55 engaged in

work in the college neighborhood, 43 had secured exclusive rooms for their use, and two

associations (Princeton and Hanover) had constructed buildings.134 The associations were on the

move.

By 1903, inspired no doubt by the settlement work of the era, 42 college associations

reported conducting “outside work,” that is, religious and philanthropic service activities. The

philosophy had started to shift from evangelistic conversion to personal Christianity and social

gospel in many of the campus Ys in the first decades of the twentieth century. A considerable

amount still involved religious evangelistic deputations, especially during holiday vacations, but

increasingly, the men became involved with visitations to hospitals, jails, and alms-houses. The

activities at smaller colleges were more focused. At Iowa (Grinnell), Cornell, Union, and Oberlin

Colleges, the men sponsored (not surprisingly) boy’s clubs. The larger universities conducted

even more extensive outside work, having more hands to organize and maintain the activities.

132 “300 Topics for Prayer Meetings for 1879,” College Bulletin, Y.M.C.A. 1 (January, 1879), 4.133 “Religious Societies”, 1; College Bulletin, Y.M.C.A. 1 (February, 1879), 3.134 “Last Year’s Work,” College Bulletin of the Young Men's Christian Association VII November, 1884), 1.

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The University of Pennsylvania carries on nearly all of the activities mentioned above, and in addition does rescue work for men, work for women, girls’ clubs, kindergarten and boys’ summer camps. “The University Christian Settlement” is the distinctive work of the Association, and owns a property worth $3,000. The whole outside activities at Pennsylvania cost $3,000 annually, and use 150 students.135

Yale and Columbia also operated boys’ clubs among a long list of other activities. Through

these activities, “the men become interested in social problems as regards the conditions” of

“poor-whites” and their African American neighbors. Beyond the social benefits provided to the

recipients, good will accrued to the association and to their colleges. Further, in at least one

instance, the role models the men provided produced applications for study at their college from

outsiders helped in these activities. And this new work enabled the associations to engage a

different set of students. “A section of the undergraduate body formerly not appealed to by any

form of Association work has been active in boys’ club work.”136

Social justice issues with regard to race emerged early at the University of North Carolina

at Chapel Hill. In 1913, 100 Y students participated in a six-week course based on the book

Negro Life in the South written by college secretary for the South, W.D. Weatherford. At UNC,

the discussions led to student initiated projects within the Black community – educational

opportunity in the form of a night school for Black boys and young men, and research on Black

living conditions. The students then established a Black YMCA in the winter of 1913-1914.137

Social awareness continued to swell. Association leadership sought opportunities for

students to experience pressing social problems of the day in their local context. At Colorado

Agriculture College (1917), two committees were formed: a Rural Life Committee which was

essentially a Y run extension office that met weekly to discuss the issues of rural life, with the

135 H.P. Andersen, “Religious and Philanthropic Work Outside the College,” The Intercollegian XXV (May 1903): 170.136 Andersen, “Religious and Philanthropic Work”, 171.137 Anthony Wayne James, “ Defining the Boundaries of Racial Liberalism : The Student YMCA and Interracial Activity at The University of North Carolina, 1910-1939” (M.A. thesis, North Carolina State University, 1992).  

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expectation that students would apply what they learned when they returned home, and an

Industrial Service Committee, an engineers’ group that visited local communities where “a

survey of the foreign section of the city [was] made to determine what can be done to better

lighting, sanitary, street, and building conditions.”138 At the University of Michigan (1935),

three-day faculty-led “sociology tours” investigated the living conditions of the poor in the inner-

city of Chicago.139 Similar work regarding racial issues was performed through the Inter-racial

Committee at Ohio State University (1930) and the Race Relations Committee at Penn State

University (1941).140

Socio-cultural Activities

A trend that began at the turn of the century involved sponsoring lectures or lyceum

courses. In 1893-94, the Penn YM-YW Associations organized a lecture series. In third annual

season, the Penn Associations teamed up with Oskaloosa Y to sponsor the “Union Association

Course” of six evening lectures and entertainments. The fifth annual series, which cost $2.00 for

the eight-week season, included Russell H. Conwell, founder-president of Temple University,

and Booker T. Washington. Other events over the years included lectures by social reformers

Jacob Riis and Jane Addams and concerts by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Temple

Male Quartette.141 Northwestern’s Student Lecture Course for the 1902-03 season included six

events, among them, the Lotus Glee Club, Russell H. Conwell (an obvious college circuit

lecturer), the Katherine Ridgeway Concert Company, and Henry Van Dyke, Professor of English

Literature, Princeton University.142 At the University of Missouri, featured lecturers included

138 “Activities of the YMCA,” The Student Handbook for Colorado Agriculture College, 1917, 14.139 “Sociology Tours” The University of Michigan Handbook, 1935, 57. 140 “Inter-racial Committee,” The Freshman Handbook of Ohio State University, 1930 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Handbook Committee, 1930), 67; “Race Relations Committee,” Penn State Christian Association, The Student Handbook of Pennsylvania State College,1941 (State College, PA, 1941). 55.141 Y.M.C.A. Lecture Course, 1893-1914. YM-YWCA File, Wilcox Library Archives. 142 College Young Men's Christian Association of Northwestern University, Student Lecture Course, Season 1902-1903 (Evanston: E.L.Kapelman, Printer, 1902).

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Jacob Riis (another circuit speaker), F. Hopkinson Smith, Gov. Bob LaFollette of Wisconsin, and

author Jack London, and music by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.143

Although their quest to perform social welfare actions continued, the activities that the

associations sponsored began to broaden after the war. The increased prominence of the

emerging American university enticed a growing stream of young people from other countries to

study in the United States. Several associations formed Cosmopolitan Clubs beginning in the

1920s to provide internationals with basic resources as well as opportunities to build

relationships with American students. The University of Kentucky Y initiated a Cosmopolitan

Club, providing socials and monthly meetings. The officers of the club were all to be foreign-

born “which gives them an opportunity to develop their executive ability.”144 The University of

Pennsylvania Y volunteered to maintain an International Student’s House.145 Y students

provided various kinds of entertainment and served meals in the student dining room. In the

handbook, Y men were encouraged to volunteer: “Remember that in helping these international

men you are showing to the future leaders of the world the true America.”146

Social Activities

The work of the early twentieth century college associations intended two distinct ends:

activities and services designed to educate and mobilize young men (religiously, socially, &

culturally), and those designed to spread the influence of the Y. The early drive of religious

fervor emphasized the Y’s evangelical mission. However, as associations honed their methods

143 YMCA-YWCA, On the Quad, The Student Handbook of the University of Missouri, 1905 (Columbia, MO: Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Associations, 1905), 55. 144 YM/YWCA, University of Kentucky Student Handbook, 1928 (Lexington, KY: James M. Burnes Co., 1928). 34.145 “International Students House” The Student Handbook of the University of Pennsylvania, 1923. 76.146 Similar work was done at Harvard (1925), where the handbook boasted of nineteen nationalities served by their international house; at Washington State (1929), the Y ran a “foreign student department” that “tries to build a friendship among the students of the college and the students of other lands” (46); at Michigan (1935), “international work” consisted of dinners, forums, and opportunities for Americans and foreign students to connect; and Penn State (1941), the Y conducted an “international tea” and an “international weekend”.

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of attracting new students and earned the respect of their institution, they assumed an

increasingly active role in the campus social life.

Prior to 1900, other than the opening reception, no social events or social committees

among the branches of the organization are recorded. On the Quad, the University of Missouri

Handbook (1905) lists Social Committee chair F. J. Bullivant, with this encouraging note: “If the

social chairman does not loaf on his job, we will have some good times together socially.

Sometimes with the girls, and sometimes without them.”147 From this point on, social

committees and events, often annual and seasonal, became an integral part of the Y’s role on

campus. The 1917 Colorado Agriculture College Handbook claims that “eleven YM-YW mixers

were held the past year and six stag socials.”148 Springtime at Olivet College in the early 1920’s

brought two cherished events: the annual YWCA track meet, and the YMCA “breakfast by the

lake”.149 The details of social events in the 1941 Muskingum College handbook are divided into

months, with the YM or YW initiating seasonal traditions such as the September Pink Tea (YW)

and PowWow (YM), “a weiner roast up in the hollow.” In November, YM/YW held a joint

Thanksgiving service, and prior to graduation in the spring, students and faculty alike walked out

to the college’s Fruit Farm for a day of entertainment including “faculty stunts” (skits) and a

picnic dinner.150 Through the middle of the twentieth century the audience for Y activities began

to shrink as campus activities formalized under deans of students and as fraternities and other

social organizations expanded. Thus, the Y once again catered to a niche of like-minded

students, as the association’s ability to speak for the campus was superceded by other authorities.

147 YMCA-YWCA, On the Quad, 30. 148 YMCA-YWCA, The Handbook of the Colorado Agriculture College, 1917 (Fort Collins, CO: College Christian Associations, 1917). 12. Courtesy of the Colorado State University Archives.149 YMCA-YWCA, Olivet College Students Handbook, 1921 (Olivet, MI: Olivet Christian Associations, 1921). 25-26. Courtesy of the Olivet College Library Archives.150 YMCA-YWCA, Student’s Handbook of Muskingum College, 1941 (New Concord, OH: College Christian Associations, 1941). 26-28.

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The Rise of Student Affairs

The student personnel movement, marked by a professional consciousness of kind, first

formed during the late 1920s and gathered strength during the next decade. The formation,

however, emerged from several streams of events and intellectual advancements through the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The appearance of the personnel researchers and

administrators, the advancement of disciplines and scholarship, the rapid enrollment growth, and

the adoption of the standardization and efficiency business model converged to press and provide

opportunities for systematic operations of campuses across the country. And all the while,

during the seventy-plus years in which this confluence of events and advancements transpired,

the campus YMCAs matured, expanded their activities, and gained influence and stature within

their institutions.

Personnel Researchers and Administrators

Nineteenth century professional women supervising the academic and social life of

women students provided a prototype for subsequent student-oriented staff. The impetus for

these early managers of women students’ life arose from “the fears and doubts of the educators

of the period in regard to co-education led to the designation of special officers to solve the

problems predicted for those colleges which would attempt to educate men and women

together.”151 Having no role model, co-educational colleges in the second half of the nineteenth

century hired lady principals or matrons to supervise women students’ college social and moral

life and their living arrangements, especially at the smaller colleges, such as Antioch and

Swarthmore and at women’s coordinate colleges, like Sage at Cornell.152 Since most of the state

institutions did not provide dormitories until well after the turn of the century,153 the need for

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mentors for their women students was absent. However, as women students were often ignored

both in and out of the classroom, women’s groups, such as the Woman’s League at the

University of Michigan, the Ladies Association of the Faculty at the University of Oregon, and

the earliest group, the Massachusetts Society for University Education for Women with concerns

for women students at Boston University, stepped in to provide social and vocational guidance.154

At first deans of women were hired to dual staff and faculty positions. In fact, between

1870 and 1933 most deans of women taught, generally holding master’s degrees.155 As women’s

enrollments expanded, fears of the academy becoming feminized and concerns for the special

health issues women posed caused a gradual specialization of the role. Michigan, Wisconsin,

and Oregon, and Northwestern Universities all hired deans of women, rather than lady principals

or matrons in the 1890s. Significantly, the newly-appointed deans employed their national

association, the Association of Collegiate Alumnae,156 not only for self-support, but to

collectively influence collegiate policy, eventually developing accrediting criteria and sponsored

scholarships. From a role designed to supervise women students, these professionals coalesced

to begin reforming the status of women on campus and address their needs.

On the other hand, the office of dean of men was a comparatively new and a less

universal position. Although Charles Eliot appointed Le Baron Russell Briggs as the first dean of

“students” at the all-male Harvard in 1890, the first dean of men was employed at the University

151 Holmes, History of Dean of Women, 5. 152 Nidifer, Pioneering Deans of Women, 16.153 W.H. Cowley, “The History of Student Residential Housing,” School and Society 40 (December 1 1934): 705-712. Even in 1927-28, not quite 15 percent of the students registered at 44 land-grant institutions were housed in institutionally-owned and operated residences. Arthur J. Klein, Survey of Land-Grant Colleges and Universities, Office of Education Bulletin 1930, No. 9 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1930), 426154 Holmes , History of Dean of Women, 18; Nidifer, Pioneering Deans of Women, 34. 155 McGrath, Evolution of Administrative Offices 99-100.156 Marion Talbot, Dean of Women at the University of Chicago from 1892-1925, was a co-founder of the ACA in 1881. Its purpose was to encourage young women to go to college and to advance opportunities for women college graduates. The ACA became the American Association of University Women in 1921. Nidifer, Pioneering Deans of Women, 37, 39.

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of Oregon in 1878.157 Even by the late 1920s, the role was neither prevalent across institutions,

nor well-defined at those that employed them. Most had been appointed in 1920.158 Scarcity

reflected ambiguity. Stanley Coulter, dean of men emeritus at Purdue, characterized the

quandary: “It is impossible to tell what the function of the dean of men may be. He is a

personality, not an officer. If he is not that he will be utterly unsuccessful in his work as a dean.

He is the human element in the university mechanism.”159

The transformation of deans of men and women into personnel counselors is credited to

Walter Dill Scott, an early applied psychologist and president of Northwestern University (1920-

1939).160 As president, Scott translated his World War I army personnel work to the campus,

establishing the first personnel office with L.B. Hopkins as its director. However, the headwaters

for the various streams that converged to create the student personnel movement began to bubble

up long before Scott arrived at Northwestern. One primary factor was enrollment growth.

Enrollment growth accelerated in the first thirty years of the 20th century, driven by population growth and continuing rises in participation rates. Between 1899-1900 and 1909-10, enrollment rose by 50 percent. In the following decade, enrollment rose by 68 percent, and between 1919-20 and 1929-30, enrollment rose by 84 percent. During these 30 years, the ratio of college students to 18- to 24-year-olds rose from 2 to 7 per 100.161

The sheer number of bodies crowding the campuses pressed for more effective campus

administration, but also made possible the use of statistical methods in educational research

—“the development of norms whereby the individual student may be more certainly

measured.”162 Prior to this advancement, studies about students primarily focused on student life

157 Robert A. Schwartz, “The Rise and Demise of Deans of Men,” The Review of Higher Education 26 (2, 2002): 217-229. 158 McGrath, Evolution of Administrative Offices, 4, 110; Klein, Land-Grant Colleges, 416.159 Stanley Coulter, “Function of the Dean of Men in the State University” in Secretarial Notes of the 10th Annual Conference of the National Association of Deans and Advisers to Men.(Lawrence, KS: Republican Printing, 1928), 36-38. 160 Robert A. Schwartz, “The Rise and Demise of Deans of Men,” The Review of Higher Education, 26 (Winter, 2002), 228.161 Thomas D. Snyder, ed., 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Report. National Center for Educational Statistics (Washington, DC: GPO, 1993).

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and institutional practices.163 Psychologist, J. McKeen Cattell pioneered the use of physical and

psychological tests on students at Columbia in 1894, but only suggested that the data might be

used to remedy “defects.”164 A dozen years after William Rainey Harper counseled in 1905 that

psychological instruments could be utilized to help students adjust to college, University of

Chicago Dean of Commerce and Administration Marshal and psychologist Harry Dexter Kitson

focus the use of testing on students.165

As a result of Scott’s appointment of Hopkins at Northwestern, the first bona fide

personnel work commenced. The office, opening in 1922, was created to coordinate student

services, not to supplant any operations that already existed. The staff consisted of a

psychologist, who managed the testing program and admissions for the liberal arts college, and

conducted interviews with men students, and a recent graduate, who maintained contact with the

fraternities, the YMCA, and athletics.166 By 1927, Northwestern sponsored a Freshman Week,

which included psychological and academic placement testing, greetings by various deans,

receptions by student societies (the Ys being most prominent), and registration.167 Conducting

primitive research and experiments primarily on students’ achievements and activities, the office

was able to supply faculty and administrators with institutional research for the first time.

Institutional Reorganization

162 David A. Robertson, “The Committee on Personnel Methods,” Personnel Methods. The Educational Record Supplement no. 8 (July, 1928), 3.163 For example, see Henry Davidson Sheldon, Student Life and Customs ( New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1901) and Louis Franklin Snow, The College Curriculum in the United States (New York: Teachers College, 1907).164 J. McK. Cattell and L. Farrand, “Physical and Mental Measurements of the Students of Columbia University,” Psychological Review, III (1896): 618-648 as cited in Esther McD. Lloyd-Jones, Student Personnel Work at Northwestern University (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1929), 4.165 William Rainey Harper, The Trend in Higher Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press); Harry Dexter Kitson, The Scientific Study of the College Student, Psychological Review Publications, 1917, both as cited in Lloyd-Jones, Student Personnel Work, 6.166 Lloyd-Jones, Student Personnel Work, 17-21.167 Lloyd-Jones, Student Personnel Work, appendix B, 231-237.

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The trail set by Hopkins and Northwestern of a dedicated research and service office does

not appear to have been followed immediately by others although by the early 1930s many of the

individual activities, whether testing, counseling, or Freshmen Week had been adopted at

numerous institutions. Obviously not everyone was convinced that this type of coordination was

necessary. In 1931, addressing the Seventh National Convention of the American Association of

University Women, C.S. Boucher, Dean of the College at the University of Chicago proclaimed

that:

Recently we have heard much blare of trumpets about a fifth wheel to the college cart—an independent personnel department, whose staff members are not faculty members and are responsible only to the president’s office. A college which has set up such an agency has done so apparently on the assumption that because faculty members have so long neglected their duty regarding educational guidance and all related personnel problems they cannot or will not study and meet this personnel service obligation of the institution to its students. If this is so, then indeed there is no hope for us.168

Others did not agree with Boucher. After a decade of scholarship resulting from this

newly-found research focus on students, Alexander Ruthven, President of the University of

Michigan, argued that “the discussion so far has been so academic as to be quite out of tune with

this scientific age, and many educators must have listened so long as to have become indifferent

or tired of it.” With these words, Ruthven began to contextualize the reorganization of his

university. He continued, “Since the modern university is of such financial dimensions as to be

comparable with a great business, so large as to acquire the physical plants of a sizable industry,

and has a student body of such magnitude that personnel and health problems require much

attention, experts are need who will devote all of their time to some of the details of the

institution.”169 Ruthven’s move was radical in 1931. However, the institution had become so

168 C.S. Boucher, “Current Changes and Experiments in the Liberal Arts College,” Fiftieth Anniversary and Seventh National Convention, American Association of University Women, Boston, MA (8-11 Apr. 1931), 204-05.169 Alexander G. Ruthven, “Administration at Michigan: A Plan by Which the Members of the Faculty Will Receive a Larger Measure of Self-government but More Responsibility,” The Journal of Higher Education, 2 (Jan. 1931): 7.

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complex and the need to stream-line the operation so imperative that a new order, a bureaucracy,

was the answer. Ruthven announced that

The general features of the new plan are: to add officers who will assist the president without, in effect, separating him from the faculty; to distribute various functions to several vice-presidents, deans, directors, and committees together with authority and responsibility, these officers to serve as advisers to the chief executive; to keep the president in direct contact with the staff through the deans and allow him time to study University problems; and to give the faculties more authority in the affairs of the individual units.170

Two Additional Driving Forces

Two events in the early 1920s appear to have released the locks that held some of the

streams at bay. First, following the war, colleges had to reassess admissions policies as

enrollments were stretching the facilities. The second was a series of student reports on their

institution’s curriculum. The reports, initiated by students at Barnard in 1921, were generated at

16 different institutions through the next decade.

By the mid-1920s, colleges began to list character, personality, and physical fitness as

criteria beyond academics.171 These criteria then required more systematic methods for high

schools in certifying their graduates and colleges in reviewing applications. A three-year grant

of $60,000 from Rockefeller to the American Council on Education (ACE) in 1927 produced

among other things a personnel record card system, which permitted the efficient chronicling of

a students secondary and post-secondary abilities and achievements. A year into the research, the

ACE began to disseminate the standardized cards and their manuals.172

Regardless of the academic quality of the more selective freshmen classes, academicians

also recognized that entering students were often failing and were far from mature.173 Faculty

170 Ruthven, “Administration at Michigan,” 9.171 L.B. Hopkins, “Personnel Procedure in Education: Observations and Conclusions Resulting from Visits to Fourteen Institutions of Higher Learning,” The Education Record Supplement 3 (Oct. 1926): 11.172 Robertson, “Committee on Personnel Methods,” 3-11.173 George W. Rightmire, “The Floundering Freshman: Furthering the Scheme of One University for the Orientation of the Freshman” The Journal of Higher Education 1 (April, 1930): 186.

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specialization, secularization, and scholarship exacerbated the void in student oversight and the

need for additional personnel to supervise students.174 Nowhere was the absence of advising

more felt than with new students. Although this recognition may not have been novel and the

retreat of some faculty from advising gradual, the sheer volume of matriculates required the

institutions to devise ways to ease students’ transition to college. At the University of Chicago,

Freshmen Week dates back to 1924 with staff believing that “the first term is likely to govern

later terms, and the first week of the first term is likely to imprint its character on later weeks.”175

Yet, the practice of Freshmen Week had yet to catch on and was far from an effective orientation

to college.176

By the early 1930s, more administrators recognized the advantages of bringing new

students to campus prior to the start of classes. The concept of Freshman Week included not

merely orienting students to college life, but testing their academic capabilities and limitations

for course placement.177 Out of this innovation, a new status emerged, that of dean of freshmen.

With increased enrollments and thus a more complex student body, more specialists seem to

spring up across campuses. In 1932 George F. Zook noted that colleges needed specialists to

admit, to test, and to advise students on vocational issues during matriculation and in anticipation

of graduation, and to supervise the health and physical activities of students.178 Yet, throughout

this period during which professional positions to oversee student life were multiplying, the

students themselves began to agitate.

174 Cowley, “The History of Student Personnel Work,” 155. 175 Ernest H. Wilkins, “Freshman Week at the University of Chicago,” The School Review, XXXII (Dec. 1924): 746.176 Hopkins, in his 1926 report on the practices of 14 major institutions, found that only three of the eight that conducted a Freshmen Week program operated programs worth sharing. The institutions participating were: Stanford, Northwestern, Columbia, Cornell, Syracuse, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton Universities, the Universities of Iowa, Minnesota, Chicago, Michigan, and North Carolina, and Dartmouth College; Hopkins, “Personnel Procedures,” 3, 16.177 Fred G. Livingood, “Extending Freshmen Week,” School and Society 40 (29 Sep. 1934): 420.178 George F. Zook, “The Administration of Student Personnel Work,” The Journal of Higher Education 3 (Oct. 1932), 351.

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At 16 institutions across the country, many of those which participated in the ACE study,

students published reports between 1921 and 1931 that covered such topics as mission, curricular

and instructional content and methods (including majors, tutorials, grading and honors courses),

admissions and size of college, the faculty, student activities, athletics, fraternities and sororities,

provisions for freshmen, and scholarships and loans. Most reports focused on academic issues,

but six student commissions also targeted aspects of student life. A consistent message

permeating the reports is reflected in the Barnard’s original report’s title: “Student Self-

Determination.”179 Unfortunately, the report that started the student movement seemed to go

nowhere. According to Margaret Mead, Editor of the Barnard Bulletin, mourned the following

year that “copies of the curriculum [report] are tucked away in the back part of the desk, if they

are kept at all. And no one is sufficiently interested to even ask why.180

In his letter to the 12 presidential-appointed student members of the Dartmouth

College Undergraduate Committee, President Ernest M. Hopkins wrote that “Dartmouth,

likewise, by virtue of having first among the American colleges adopted the policy of restriction

of numbers, is in a position to devote its funds and endowments from now on to maintaining and

improving the present grade of work within the College, and proposes to do this.”181 One of the

Dartmouth seniors selected by the president for the student committee was William H. Cowley

(’24), the Editor of The Dartmouth. Cowley, earlier that academic year “began hammering at

education in the editorial column; and the undergraduate body ultimately became interested. The

outcome was a Senior Committee, which went to work immediately to devise a system for

179 Leslie Patton, “Undergraduate Student Reports: A Factor in the Reorganization of Higher Education,” The Journal of Higher Education 3 (June, 1932): 286.180 Margaret Mead, “Comment: A Page of Student Self-Determination,” Barnard Bulletin, XXVII (15, Dec. 1922), 2. Barnard College Archives, The Barnard Bulletin Digital Archives, retrieved October 4, 2005 http://www.barnard.edu/archives/bulletin.html

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turning educated men out of our colleges.”182 Like the 1828 Yale Report, the Dartmouth seniors

focused on not merely the content of the curriculum, but the functional processes and intended

outcomes of the college’s academics. The students suggest rational thinking, philosophic

understanding, creative imagination, aesthetic sensitiveness, and service to serve as the

foundational principles of the curriculum.183 However rather than address the learning processes,

the faculty only a transformed the content of the curriculum.184

Reports continued to be issued through the early 1930s from students at institutions such

as the University of Chicago (1925), Bowdoin (1926) Harvard (1926), Northwestern ((1927)

Rollins College (1931) and Haverford (1931). Leslie Patton, analyzing the reports, reflected:

“No doubt this whole movement is a welling-up from within the colleges, an omen of the

‘renaissance in higher education,’ or a sign of the growing self-consciousness…. They are

certainly a factor in the present reorganization of higher education, and, declared by many

administrators, an important factor in the changes taking place.”185

The Transition to a Unified Student Personnel Office

At this point in time, other administrators besides Ruthven at the University of Michigan

had begun to rethink their staffing patterns. Evolving events at three different institutions reveals

fundamental elements and occurrences as well as threats and opportunities that the collegiate

communities experienced during the three decades in which the student personnel movement was

developing.

Bucknell University

181 “President Hopkins’s Letter” The Report on Undergraduate Education of the Dartmouth College Senior Committee, Part I (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College, 15 May 1924), 5. Courtesy of Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College.182 Edward Duffy, “A Critical Survey of the Dartmouth Report” Intercollegiate World, 1 (March 1926), 36. Courtesy of Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College.183 The Dartmouth Report, 12-16.184 Duffy, “A Critical Survey”, 38.185 Patton, “Undergraduate Reports,” 286-87

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At Bucknell, like the University of Michigan, a new president, Homer Price Rainey

(1931-35), coupled with a 1932 fire that destroyed part of the college’s main building,

encouraged reorganization. Rainey led the institution during his first year to rethink the

organization. Nine faculty committees were established: administration, faculty, curriculum,

personnel, student health service and sanitation, religion, physical education and intercollegiate

athletics, engineering, and physical needs; each produced a survey report. The year before

Rainey became president, Dean of Freshmen186 J. Hillis Miller recommended to the Board and

President Hunt “the establishment of a personnel office which would be made responsible for

coordinating all forces in the university in order to effect adequate supervision of student affairs

and to turn these activities to desirable ends.”187 Under Rainey’s administration, the Survey

Committees on Personnel and Student Activities and Organizations, “revealed intolerable

conditions with respect to student life on campus.”

Data concerning individual students were found to be scattered all over the campus, fraternity presidents constituted the only student government body, unsatisfactory relationships between students and faculty were conspicuous, every conceivable form of graft existed in student organizations, neither a centralized or a decentralized system of supervision was in evidence, campus politics was rampant, and for the most part an unwholesome situation prevailed.188

The following year, educational psychologists Charles Hubbard Judd, University of Chicago and

Melvin E. Haggerty, University of Minnesota spent three days at Bucknell, evaluated the

institution in an accreditation-like review. After talking with faculty and staff, who comprised

nine committees, the two recommended (among other things) that “an administrative division to

have charge of all matters relating to student” excluding instruction and curriculum be created.189

186 Deans of freshmen appear to have been popular during the 1920s when the concept of Freshmen Week was in its infancy.187 J. Hillis Miller, “The Liberal Arts College Functioning Through Student Activities,” School and Society 40 (8 Sep. 1934): 328-331.188 Miller, “The Liberal Arts College,” 328.

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In a letter to the Faculty in September, 1933, President Rainey explained that “there was

an urgent need for [the reorganization of all student activities], as you all know, and it has been,

perhaps, the most difficult phase of our entire reorganization program.” In the following year,

Bucknell abolished its Student Activities Committee and established Student-Faculty Congress

and a Personnel Committee, composed of two sub-groups, directed by Miller, now the new Dean

of Students, and a Student Budget and Finance Committee.190 Obviously, whatever role the

YMCA may have had on the campus in earlier days, by the early 1930s it no longer served as a

controlling or moderating force. Equally, the decentralized nature of personnel services appears

not to have been functioning adequately. Consolidation under and coordination from one office,

responsible to the president, was chosen as the resolution. Significantly, though, the

consolidation and reorganization did include substantial representation and participation by

students in the governance of student life.

Ohio State University

At Ohio State, President George Rightmire announced in November of 1934 the

formation of the Personnel Council to coordinate personnel activities of the university and advise

the president in student personnel matters. Composed of 13 faculty and administrative staff

members and chaired by (Dartmouth graduate) William H. Cowley, the Council was also

charged with promoting improved techniques of administration in student personnel offices,

conducting research on student personnel problems, and cooperating with the director of

publicity to publicize the student personnel activities of the university.191

189 Letter from Charles H. Judd and M.E. Haggerty to President Rainey, July 14, 1932, Courtesy of Special Collections/University Archives, Ellen Clarke Bertrand Library, Bucknell University. Judd and Haggerty were both scholars and leaders in the educational measurement movement of the 1920-30s.190 Minutes of the Faculty of Bucknell University, 3 May 1933, 1-2; Bucknell University Catalogue 1932-33, 157. Courtesy of Special Collections/University Archives, Ellen Clarke Bertrand Library, Bucknell University. 191 “The New Council at the Ohio State University,” School and Society, 40 (22 Dec. 1934), 836-37.

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During the summer of 1936, President Rightmire hosted William Guthrie (Ohio State

Class of 1932) to lunch. Guthrie remembered the president explaining to him, a newly-hired

National Youth Administration worker, that since the university was “exceeding 10,000 in

enrollments [it was] time to personalize it and make the academic life easier.” Trying to

convince Guthrie to assume the role of financial aid director, Rightmire reportedly pleaded:

Bill, we’ve come to the conclusion at the university that we need to enlarge on what’s done for students to help them with jobs and loans and scholarships and any other kind of self-help that we can develop. We’ve never had an office for self-help for students. We’ve got student loan funds scattered again that nobody knows about, and some that are known. We’ve got student employment which is in the Ohio Union office and the YMCA office, and we’ve got the YWCA on campus, where they deal with a number of these women who take care of little children and live [in] faculty homes or homes in the neighborhood. We’ve got 3,000 students now on National Youth Administrative jobs that are paid for by the federal government. It’s time we pulled all that stuff together and make a student employment or student financial aids office. Would you come up on campus and organize it?192

Guthrie was convinced, took the position, and became a subordinate of Mylin Ross, the dean of

men, who was the second man in the OSU’s history to occupy the role.

Joe Park had preceded [Ross]. Joe had been the YMCA secretary back in the era when student YMCAs and YWCAs were essentially the campus service organizations. It was in my time, both as a member of the Personnel Council, which was made [up] of persons who were heading the agencies that were in student services, for example financial aids. …As I say, my knowledge of what went on in transferring things from the YMCA into university offices came from not only being in Financial Aids but from being a member of that Junior Council and Personnel Council. …Joe Park, to his credit, was one of the architects of this transfer of student services from volunteer to university sponsorship. It came naturally from his own transfer from YMCA secretary to Dean of Men.193

Unlike Bucknell’s situation, the Y at OSU continued to function as a significant and positive

force for the university right up to the organization of the student personnel office. However, the

expanded enrollments required operations that were merely too complicated for a student-based

192 Robert Sutton, “Interview with William Guthrie,” (Dec. 7, 1983), The Ohio State University Knowledge Bank, 2 retrieved on Aug. 30, 2005 http://hdl.handle.net/1811/479. 193 Sutton, “Guthrie Interview,” 8.

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organization to continue to have a major impact or to coordinate activities for the whole

university. Bureaucratization was essential.

Springfield College

At Springfield College, an institution established to prepare YMCA professional staff, the

Student Association (SA), established in October of 1896, bragged in 1906 yearbook that “no

other Student Young Men's Christian Association controls such a variety of student activities.

The peculiar nature of the school makes this possible.”194 By 1914-15, the SA “control[ed] all

college activities, athletics, social life and religious work. In addition, it has departments for the

administration of the employment bureau, the student dining hall and co-operative store.”195 Five

years later, the Handbook again explains “The Student Association of our college is the one all-

inclusive organization of the Student Body. Every activity, every function, every detail is under

its supervision and control. It is an organization, democratic in the highest degree, and is by the

students, of the students and for the students.”196 Far from exaggerating, the SA ran the student

experience.

A gift of Elinor S. Woods, Woods Hall, the dining and social building, was erected in

1904. Two years later, the Student Association established a committee to supervise the

building. Five years later, early in the 1911-12 academic year, the SA assumed full control of

the operations in the building, clearly with the blessing of the administration. Having listened to

years of complaints, the SA Woods Hall Committee hired and supervised a chef, who competing

with “the European war, foot and mouth disease, hog cholera, and kindred ills” managed through

his “economizing secrets” to provide board to students at a reasonable rate.197 Additionally that

194 “Student Association,” Massasoit 1906 (Springfield, MA: Springfield Training School, 1906). 195 Student Association Handbook, 1914-1915, International Young Men's Christian Association College, (Springfield, MA, 1914), 10. 196 Handbook of Student Association, Springfield College, 1920-1921 (Springfield, MA, 1920), 28. Archives and Special Collections, Springfield College, Springfield College, Springfield, MA.

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year, the SA took over the “store business, which was a private concern conducted by a

student…and place[d] it upon a co-operative basis.” Although naysayers assumed failure, by

1914, the SA Co-operative Store Committee returned dividends to its members of 14-18 percent,

depending upon how much they reinvested in capital for the store.198 In a series of progressive

steps, though, the administration, similar to so many others across the nation, begin to assist, and

then absorb the responsibilities of the Student Association.

The first administrative venture into the domain of the SA appeared as an opportunity for

the college to extend its curriculum. President Doggett shared Prof. Arthur Rudman’s report,

“Plans for Religious Practice Work” with the Trustees at their June 11, 1920 meeting. With the

intent of organizing the religious work of students by unifying the instructional aspects with the

SA’s activities, Prof. Rudman “agreed to turn over to the Student Association such lines of the

religious work as can be properly carried on by them, thus contributing to the standing of the

Student Association in comparison with the Students Associations of other colleges along the

lines of religious and missionary works.”199

By the 1925-26 academic year, the Springfield College Freshman Handbook reflects for

the first time a decided presence of the administrators of the college. The president and the new

dean of freshman welcome the new students and impart the values of the college. A year later,

although the description of the association remains the same as it was in 1920-21, an Advisory

Council had been formed consisting of two seniors, two juniors, two members of the Faculty,

and the President and General Secretary of the Association. The council could make

197 “Woods Hall,” Massasoit 1915 (Springfield, MA: International Young Men's Christian Association College, 1915), 103.198 “Student Co-operative Store,” Massasoit 1915, 104; Springfield College Handbook, 1920-1921, 34. Archives and Special Collections, Springfield College, Springfield College, Springfield, MA.199 “Plans for Religious Practice” Report of Prof Arthur Rudman to Dr. L.L. Doggett, June 11, 1920, International YMCA College, Board of Trustees Record, June 1920-April, 1927 (Springfield, MA, 1920), 33. Archives and Special Collections, Springfield College, Springfield College, Springfield, MA.

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recommendations to the SA Cabinet, but also was to act as the final arbiter in controversies

between faculty and students. In addition, “the guidance of Freshmen is in the hands of the Dean

of Freshmen, assisted by a committee of six men…chosen from the Freshmen class at the end of

the Fall term.200 Finally, by 1924, worried about the finances of the college, Dr. Doggett laid a

plan before the trustees to assume control of athletics. Prior to this time, the SA managed the

athletic teams (with the college paying the coaches salaries) and realized the gate receipts

($1,760-$4,000) for intercollegiate matches. President Doggett proposed to hire a Manager of

Athletics, who would have faculty status and serve in a dual role of teacher-coach. Although the

president proposed to reserve half of the gate receipts for SA, he also argued to the board that

athletics should pay its own way.201

Thus, at Springfield through the 1920s, the college grew in complexity. It shared in the

post-war college participation boom, swelling its enrollment. Its stature also heightened as its

graduates succeeded as YMCA professionals and also within the mushrooming instructional area

of physical education. As President Doggett indicated to the Board, “the war has greatly

increased the cost of operation.”202 Efforts had to be made to streamline and professionalize the

operations, squeezing revenue out of places that previously the college valued on the basis of its

democratic spirit and philosophy of practical application, but could no longer afford.

Conclusion

In her review of the 13 major student affairs philosophical statements, Nancy Evans

identifies the factors that “contributed to the need for professionals who were responsible for

200 Student Association of Springfield College, Freshmen Handbook, 1926-1927, XIII (Springfield, MA, 1926), 36-37, 18. Archives and Special Collections, Springfield College, Springfield College, Springfield, MA.201 “Report of President L.L. Doggett to the Board of Trustees, International Young Men's Christian Association College, Springfield, Massachusetts, April 2, 1924,” (Springfield, MA, 1920), 237. Archives and Special Collections, Springfield College, Springfield College, Springfield, MA. 202 Report of President L.L. Doggett to the Board of Trustees, International Young Men's Christian Association College, Springfield, Massachusetts, June 13, 1924,” (Springfield, MA, 1920), 261. Archives and Special Collections, Springfield College, Springfield College, Springfield, MA.

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overseeing the out-of-classroom activities of students.”203 Citing a variety of authors, she lists:

faculty research demands yielding less time for students; increasing diversity of students and

parental concerns for student welfare; secularization of higher education; and expanding

vocation opportunities.204 Clearly, all of these elements had transpired within the first decades of

the twentieth century and led presidents to find ways to alleviate the problems. However,

determining causality does not entirely explain the processes by which individual institutions

established their student affairs operations and the content of their programs.

Not until 1937 did the American College Personnel Association develop its philosophical

statement, The Student Personnel Point of View (SPPV).205 Indeed, a confluence of the elements

including expanding needs of increasingly complex institutions, intellectual innovations of

psychological research, and organizational improvements through standardization and

bureaucracy facilitated the emergence of a variety of specialist roles on campuses after the turn

of the twentieth century. As these specialist roles matured, they sought camaraderie and support

among themselves, organizing professional networks and caucuses. Newly-formed universities,

detecting a fertile delta, established graduate programs to further research as well as specialized

training. As J. McKeen Cattell observed in the same year as the SPPV, “Educational

administration is becoming a profession—witness the professional school of the Columbia

Teachers College.”206 Whether vocational counselors or deans of women and men, the streams

203 Nancy J. Evans, “Guiding Principles: A Review and Analysis of Student Affairs Philosophical Statements. Journal of College Student Development 42 (4, 2001): 359-378. 204 Evans cites in order: E.M. Nuss, “The Development of Student Affairs,” in Student Affairs: A Handbook for the Profession. 3rd edition ed. S.R. Komives and D.B. Woodard (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996), 22-42; W. H. Crowley [sic], “Some History and a Venture in Prophecy” in Trends in Student Personnel Work ed. E.G. Williamson (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1949), 12-27; R.B. Caple, To Mark the Beginning: A Social History of Student Affairs (Lanham, MD: American College Personnel Association, 1998); N. J. Evans, D.S. Forney and F. Guido-DiBrito, Student Development in College: Theory, Research, and Practice (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998); and R.B.Young, “Guiding Values and Philosophy,” in Student Affairs: A Handbook for the Profession. 3rd edition ed. Susan R. Komives and D.B. Woodard (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996), 83-105. 205 http://www.naspa.org/gradprep/StudAff_1937.pdf 206 J. McKeen Cattell, “Retrospect: Psychology as a Profession” Journal of Consulting Psychology 1 (1937): 1-3.

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of student personnel specialists, meandered toward one another through the 1920s and 1930s and

coalesced with the development of the SPPV.

But, national professionalization is merely half of the story. On the campuses, beginning

with the establishment of the first two YMCAs in 1858, students themselves first initiated

religious activities for themselves and neighbors of their colleges, then gaining the approbation

of their peers and the administrators they extended their organizational skills to assist new

students in learning the ropes of college life, to provide space on campus for students to gather,

to help those with less means to remain in school—in short to ensure the welfare of the student

body on campus. Was the YMCA the only organization on campus to serve the requirements of

students during this seventy-year period? Of course not. Fraternities, sororities, and literary

societies as well as athletic teams obviously addressed the myriad needs. However, the Y

associations transformed their services and activities toward an ethos of social justice and

leadership as the university system matured and American society shifted yet their focus

remained on their fellow students. By the late 1920s, the Y movement clearly had sketched the

blueprint for the institution’s nascent student personnel professionals.

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