Denison Magazine Summer 2005

“A Christian College of Liberal Arts”
Jeff Gill

From a distance, the first view of Denison an arriving student and family get is of the chapel spire rising above the trees on the top of the hill.
Closer up, their first sight of a piece of campus close enough to touch is the brick and stone entrance where Granville’s Main St. crosses College St. and becomes President’s Drive, more familiarly “the Drag.”
What you see to your right as you turn onto the steep road up to the main campus is a yards-wide carved panel in Vermont granite, looking as if its been there forever, is the name Denison University carved above the college seal, and the words beneath: “A Christian College of Liberal Arts.”
After passing through the four church corner just before seeing that entrance, and driving past it under the downward gaze of Swasey Chapel’s façade, those few words are relatively unremarkable in that context. But fairly regularly prospective students or their families ask in Admissions or call the President’s office to ask “Is this school really a Christian college?”
Their point is one of openness and acceptance for other faith perspectives, or none at all, and the answer to that at Denison for many years has been “all are welcome.” Yet the question still lingers: “Is this school a Christian college?”
One could turn the phrase around for a partial answer. Denison offers many classes well beyond any basic definition of “liberal arts,” and no one doubts that a school can be both/and. In the same sense, many other creeds than Christianity find a welcome place on the hill and around the village of Granville, which doesn’t mean it can’t be in some way a Christian college.
Part of the problem is that today, “Christian college” has a very specific meaning in modern society. That label is usually kept for schools with a narrow sectarian background, often with a “Statement of Faith” that both teachers and students must agree to and even sign, and tight limits on acceptable public behavior both in and between classes on campus, let alone mandatory attendance at worship services.
Of course, within living memory, all those things were true of Dension University.
Through the 1920’s and 1930’s, issues like dancing, non-Christian faculty, attendance at preaching services on campus, even whether female students could smoke off-campus, all occupied a great deal of time for the Board of Trustees and administration.
While protestations of “preserving the high moral character” of the student body were a common reaction to motions toward loosening restrictive rules on conduct and behavior, the fact that these initiatives came so often from the student organizations and staff indicates that interest in things like dancing, smoking (and possibly even drinking!), and not going to chapel services was not purely hypothetical. Memoirs of the period, even back to the 1890’s, show that inattention to the sermon during mandatory worship and inebriated students wreathed with tobacco smoke were already a common feature of campus (or at least near-campus) life.
When the Granville Literary and Theological Institution was founded in 1831 by Ohio Baptists, they were following in a long-standing tradition of church bodies starting schools to train both clergy and future leaders for their denominations. Harvard began with Puritan ministers in 1636 who wanted a school on their side of the Atlantic to train scholars in theology; Yale was started in 1701 by Congregationalists who wanted a place more in line with their differing views on church government. Brown University grew out of the dissenters from Massachusetts and Connecticut who were in many early cases expelled for their religious beliefs, and was founded by Baptists in 1764 (although, like Denison, the “College of the Colony of Rhode Island” did not pick up a benefactor’s name until 1804).
Brown was a source of both inspiration and practical design – as well as a number of early presidents and faculty – for much of Denison’s early history. While Baptists began Colgate in 1819 and Kalamazoo College in 1833, Brown was the touchstone for Denison’s formative years.
Yet even prototypical Brown had gone independent by the 1930’s, cutting the cord that bound it to Baptist polity and structures. The reasons for the general departure of higher education from religious connection were many, but a core issue was survival. Denominational bodies no longer provided prospective students in large numbers, and they certainly did not fulfill capital and annual fundraising support with meaningful numbers.
Denison’s experience with the Baptist “New World Campaign” in the 1920’s was all too typical: a broadbased fundraising campaign by the national and regional church body promised huge returns, and college efforts to raise capital funds were graciously deferred out of respect for their formal relationship. But the quality and professionalism of the effort were not what they could have been, and the results were as much as ten times less than what Denison administrators had hoped and planned for (and likely thought they could have successfully achieved on their own).
Failure at fundraising, and declining student referrals out of churches left board members concerned about tying the future of Denison as an institution too closely to the quality of outside religious administrators.
So as the centennial of Denison’s founding approached in 1931, the question of raising funds beyond the traditional Baptist base and interest in recruiting a larger number of board members from successful alumni rather than just Ohio Baptists, no matter how respected within that small orbit, reached fever pitch.
On one hand, promotional material like aerial photographs of the late 1920’s campus based on long-standing patterns of development work within historic supporters could include text that sounded like this: “Our Baptist Institution at Granville . . .Denison was founded by Baptists in 1831 . . .In order to secure funds . . . the Denison Centennial Movement is being conducted in the Baptist Churches . . . Every loyal Baptist will want to take this opportunity to aid our church school.”
That picture did not include the modern gateway. The other hand was an outstretched gesture to a wider, broader public in Ohio and beyond, claiming a set of ideals and aspirations less Baptist, and more generally Christian. At the dawn of Denison’s second century in 1930, Indiana limestone was employed to suggest that Denison had purposes and plans that went beyond the Baptist heritage, extending to all of Christendom. To say Denison was a Christian college was not to deny the Baptist heritage that had built the path to 1931 over a century, but it did clearly claim a wider scope for her work than the merely sectarian.
Today’s Denison looks even further afield, and as limestone gave way to granite in 1967, the current gateway may yet be revised and expanded in ways the founders could not have anticipated. A vision of education rooted in transcendent ideals with practical application is still at the heart of what the college on the hill is all about; how best to tie the deep sources of transcendence with practical realities of everyday faith, and current forms of religious expression, still challenges the board, students, and supporters of this almost 175 year old “Christian College of Liberal Arts.”