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  • Founded by Friends: The Quaker Heritage of Fifteen American Colleges and Universities
  • Amy C. Schutt
Founded by Friends: The Quaker Heritage of Fifteen American Colleges and Universities. Edited by John W. Oliver Jr., Charles L. Cherry, and Caroline L. Cherry. Scarecrow Press, Lanham, Md. 2007.

Founded by Friends offers a fascinating look at the histories of a diverse range of schools with Quaker roots—from the small Bible-oriented Barclay College to the large research-oriented Johns Hopkins University. Liberal arts colleges—Haverford, Swarthmore, and Earlham among them—also figure prominently in the volume. An introduction by Thomas D. Hamm and a conclusion by John W. Oliver Jr. helpfully show comparisons and contrasts among fifteen essays and the institutions they examine. This book encourages readers to ponder what an association with Quakerism has meant for various institutions in various time periods—a complex endeavor, given the divergent paths of Quaker history.

Concerns about the future of Quakerism shaped the founding of the earliest institutions, which arose after the Hicksite-Orthodox schism of 1827–1828. [End Page 54] Hamm indicates that a motive for institution building among some Orthodox Friends was the conviction that education would prevent further splits, for they viewed the "Hicksite heresies" as the result of "ignorance of the Bible and the doctrines of early Friends" (pp. xv, 45). Orthodox Friends predominated among founders of the earliest boarding schools that evolved into colleges: Haverford in Pennsylvania, Guilford in North Carolina, and Earlham in Indiana. In North Carolina, as Gwen Gosney Erickson notes, it was not the Hicksite-Orthodox controversy that stimulated institution building but rather it was the urgent concern that Quakers were not doing enough to protect their children from outside influences. For them, the "survival of Quakerism in the South" was at stake, she writes, as western lands and competing denominations enticed Quaker youth away from North Carolina Yearly Meeting (p. 22). A concern to provide a "guarded" education also shaped the establishment of Earlham and Haverford, as Hamm and Diana Franzusoff Peterson indicate in their respective essays (pp. 1, 45). Christopher Densmore notes that Hicksite Friends had a similar goal to protect Quaker children from "worldly" influences in establishing Swarthmore College (p. 58).

By the late nineteenth century, increasing numbers of Friends had accepted a pastoral system, which resulted in growing demands for Quaker ministers. Several of the authors show the impact of this development—on George Fox University (Paul Anderson), on Azusa Pacific University (Sheldon Jackson and Tamsen Murray), and on Barclay College (Glenn W. Leppert). Azusa Pacific, for instance, emerged from a gathering at Whittier, California in 1899, where plans were set, as Jackson and Murray write, to "prepare ministers and missionaries" ready to go "speedily to their ministry" (p. 241). This volume portrays the effects on Quaker higher education of the post-Civil War holiness movement, of which the pastoral system was an outgrowth. Oliver's essay on Malone College especially captures the impact of this wider Protestant movement that stressed "revivalism, Bible study, strict rules to protect personal morality, and prayer." He describes well how holiness-inspired Malone students and faculty took on "rescue work" to aid Cleveland's poor and combat prostitution, gambling, and alcohol abuse (p. 205). Several of the authors explore the effects on institutions of the controversies between holiness/fundamentalist and modernist/liberal viewpoints—for example, Earl Holmes on Friends University, Hamm on Earlham, Jackson and Murray on Azusa Pacific, Oliver on Malone, and Anderson on George Fox.

This volume also stresses the influences of nonsectarianism and secularization, a theme highlighted in the introduction. Eric Pumroy insightfully analyzes why Bryn Mawr College, a school founded by Orthodox Quakers, came to interpret "sectarianism" as "incompatible with the goal of creating a first-rate academic institution for women" (p. 147). Although both Ezra Cornell and Johns Hopkins were individuals with Quaker backgrounds, as Elaine D. Engst and James Stimpert [End Page 55] discuss, each man founded a university that was nonsectarian. Engst states that the founders of Cornell "opposed any sectarian control since they believed that religious orthodoxy frequently limited the scope of instruction in universities" (p. 81). Anne Kiley and Joseph Fairbanks discuss how Whittier College...

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