Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Educating across Cultures: Anatolia College in Turkey and Greece by William McGrew
Anatolia College, an American school founded in Merzifon, Turkey, in 1886 and relocated to Thessaloniki in 1924, is a highly privileged institution in many respects. One of them is the plethora of works written about it, mostly in English and almost exclusively by authors who were closely related to it. With the exception of a doctoral dissertation in Turkish (Alan 2002), the story and the history of Anatolia have been mainly written by its presidents or their spouses (White 1918, 1940; Compton 1986; Riggs 2007). William McGrew follows in this tradition. He served as president for 25 years and has stayed close to the school since retiring. Educating across Cultures was in the making for almost ten years and was warmly received by the Anatolia community of alumni and friends in Greece and abroad. It is a scholarly, comprehensive, and thoroughly researched history of a resilient institution that has gone a long way since its original theoretical inception in the Haystack Prayer Meeting at Williams College in 1806.
The missionary schools that have operated across the Mediterranean and the Middle East have acquired significant scholarly attention, as they exemplify a vast array of cultural, linguistic, and social interactions. Despite the overarching goal of proselytism, such schools did not remain static in time. On the contrary, their development illustrates a continuous transformation defined by the gap between proselytizing aims and actual results, the shifting geopolitical realities in the region, and the complicated relations between the host countries and the foreign schools in general. Anatolia College offers a fascinating example of this transformation: it was conceived [End Page 429] as a missionary theological Seminary in Constantinople, operated in Merzifon as a four-year liberal arts college in the “educational model of the American church-related college” (111), and finally was transformed into a six-year high school when it relocated to Thessaloniki.
Educating across Cultures is one of those titles that encapsulate not only the content but also the angle from which the author approaches his subject. The emphasis is on educating within and across different cultures and not on curricula, syllabi, teaching methods, and timetables. This focus explains why “Anatolia College” appears in the subtitle. The author’s aim is to use the case of Anatolia to explore the historical trajectory of cross-cultural education from the late Ottoman Empire to the Modern Turkish and Greek states. A historian by training, McGrew provides a synthetic account of the school’s changing identity alongside major political and social events. At the same time, the author was a key figure in the school’s administration from 1974 until 1999, which enables him to offer insights on the policies, challenges, and initiatives of the school as a social and educational institution. It is through this unique combination of a historian and administrator that he can present an informed, balanced, and intriguing narrative that does not escape either to abstract generalizations or narrow specificities.
The book is organized in eleven chapters arranged in chronological order from 1810 to 1999. The first four chapters comprise the Merzifon/Ottoman-Turkish period (1–178), and the last seven the Thessaloniki/Greek years (179–401). John O. Iatrides’ excellent introduction (xv–xxii) puts things into the right perspective, preparing the reader for what is to follow; but it can also be appreciated on its own merits.
The school’s formative period in the Ottoman Empire provides a compelling read that could well be turned into a documentary or even a screenplay. The main protagonist is the famous “Marsovan team,” a dedicated group of Congregational missionaries who transplanted a theological seminary and a girls’ school in 1865 from Constantinople to Merzifon, aspiring to make the remote town of 15,000 the “Andover of Asia Minor” (36). The results of their evangelization efforts were modest and certainly below their expectations, operating as they were from “the corner of a stable” (White 1918, 70). Shifting their priorities to philanthropy and education without abandoning...
