Notes from my Knapsack 12-9-21

Notes from my Knapsack 12-9-21
Jeff Gill

Denison celebrates 190 years
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In 1831, Ohio Baptists looked at their losses to competing religious groups in northeast Ohio, also known as the "Western Reserve", and in the southwestern part of the state around Cincinnati, and they took steps to create educational institutions to build up their tradition.

There weren't a great many Baptists in east central Ohio, but just enough, especially around Zanesville, to make a pitch for a proposed "Literary and Theological Institution" in their neck of the woods, in as yet uncontested ground by the competitors so common up around Kirtland and Mentor or down in Carthage and Mt. Healthy.

So it began, the Granville Literary and Theological Institution, formally launched December 13, 1831 by Ohio Baptists.

Obviously, the name was long and somewhat unwieldy, and even after they moved across Raccoon Creek through "miles of mud," from their former location to their new and lasting home atop Prospect Hill, it just wasn't a name to conjure with.

Financial struggles in the 1850s nearly closed down the relocated college, but a bachelor farmer who had cared for aging parents beyond the age of marriage and offspring offered, at the urging of his Muskingum County Baptist preacher, to fund a renewed university if they preserved his family name.

Ironically, William S. Denison at nearly 60 found a teenage bride willing to marry him and bless their union with children, and he fought paying off the full amount pledged right into the Civil War years, but the state Supreme Court agreed that he'd made a binding promise, and in the end his heritage didn't last through children, but Denison University did.

This puts Denison in an interesting category with Harvard and Vanderbilt as institutions of higher education named for people who never physically visited their campuses . . . but Denison is unique in having to sue in court to get their bequest.

Denison was a university well before the time when many private residential colleges have more recently looked to change their name to a more attractive "university" label. Doane Academy as a private secondary school, Granville Female Seminary, and Shepardson College for Women all were part of the collection of institutions that meant Denison truly was a university from the late 1800s on into the present day. Locally, residents and students alike refer to "the college" but the full name has been Denison University since the 1850s.

Brown University in Rhode Island was a template from Denison's earliest days, another Baptist school which became an independent and influential academic institution in their region. Preachers and teachers and leaders were the result of the curriculum, at Brown and at Denison, with the Twentieth century ushering in an era a further independence from sectarian ties, first from exclusively Baptist affiliations to a more general "Christian college" model, and to the private residential liberal arts undergraduate program of today.

A college which trained missionaries for places like Japan, China and Myanmar is today a university whose graduates are still catapulted around the world. The mission of today's Denison University is "to inspire and educate our students to become autonomous thinkers, discerning moral agents and active citizens of a democratic society." The program is more secular in nature, but the intention is still one of inspiration, rooted in "a firm belief in human dignity and compassion unlimited by cultural, racial, sexual, religious or economic barriers, and directed toward an engagement with the central issues of our time."

Happy 190th birthday, Denison University!


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's learned much at the fair college on the hill, and even gotten to teach a little there. Tell him what you've learned about educational institutions at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.