Friends University, 1898-1973 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES53 wondering whedier the vast amount of effort expended by FCNL in some areas has been as influential in the formation of national policy as FCNL workers imply. There is not necessarily a success ratio between effort expended and results achieved. Friends have to be satisfied to make their witness and not try to count the results in terms of legislative battles won. Perhaps the best way to conclude this review is to put it in historical perspective by quoting the words of Frederick Tolles in his 1956 Ward Lecture at Guilford College, Quakerism and Politics: Quakers had been engaged in lobbying—that is to say, in seeking to influence legislators by personal visits—ever since 1659. . . . The weightiest Friends in England, including George Fox and William Penn, busied themselves buttonholing Members of Parliament and appearing at committee hearings. The Yearly Meeting even rented a room in a coffee house hard by the Houses of Parliament for a headquarters—a kind of Friends Committee on National Legislation office. . . . From time to time in the course of the campaign (for religious liberty) the Meeting for Sufferings urged Friends to write their Parliament-men on the subject. If anyone thinks the techniques of the FCNL are a modern innovation, he knows little of Quaker history. (Op. cit., pp. 10-11). The life and work of E. Raymond Wilson, and his more than thirty years of association with the Friends Committee on National Legislation bear this out, and Uphill For Peace gives thorough and ample documentation of this tiiree-century old concern of Friends. Earlham School of ReligionWilmer A. Cooper Friends University, 1898-1973. By Floyd and Norma Souders. Wichita, Kansas , 1974. 279 pages. $11.85. This well-bound book, with 8Vi by 11 inch pages with easily read type and scarcely a page without at least one photograph, is a handsome tribute to a college which has given seventy-five years of service to "Christian education." While the relationship of Friends University to the Kansas Yearly Meeting of Friends is described in die brief account of the origins of the instituton, diere is little in the main part of the book to indicate that this college is one which follows principles of Quaker education. The authors have consciously chosen to use a strictly chronological format, with year-by-year reporting of activities grouped under the regimes of ten presidents. They rely heavily on the student newspaper University Life, on student yearbooks, and on other periodical publications issued under the aegis of the school. They are journalists more than they are historians. Their book is one which will appeal more to the nostalgia of alumni of Friends University than to the serious student of history. Little attention is given to the purposes or philosophy of the college. There is little, if any, evaluation either of its educational policies or of its implementation of tiiose policies or of its fulfillment of purpose. It is, apparently, considered an adequate evaluation to say that Friends University has provided Christian education to the young men and women who have been enrolled as its students. Yet one who knows the school at all well, or who has known the many members of faculty and staff of Friends Uni- 54QUAKER HISTORY versity, whose lives are models of right living and devotion to high ideals, knows diat Friends University has helped to produce many leaders of real worth in church and society. It is students as they were who are reported in this journalistic account of seventy-five years of Friends University, not the adult citizens whom the same students have become. Perhaps a social historian would look more carefully at the contribution of alumni and alumnae and less at "the good time had by all" during the college years. This reviewer wonders what value to place on the book in terms of its historical accuracy when (on page 119) the list of members of die Order of the Tower in the 1939 graduating class substitutes for his own name the name of his older brother who had graduated two years earlier. No doubt this book will do what must be its obvious purpose—to win the...