Ursinus College

Ursinus College

Seal of Ursinus College
Motto	Super Firmum Fundamentum Dei
Motto in English	On the Firm Foundation of God
Type	Private
Established	1869
Affiliation	Secular
Endowment	$122 million[1]
President	Brock Blomberg
Academic staff	140
Undergraduates	1,650[2]
Location	Collegeville, PA, USA 40°11′36″N 75°27′21″W / 40.1934°N 75.4559°W / 40.1934; -75.4559Coordinates: 40°11′36″N 75°27′21″W / 40.1934°N 75.4559°W / 40.1934; -75.4559
Campus	Suburban 170 acres (0.69 km2)[3]
Colors	Red, Old Gold, and Black[2]
Athletics	23 Varsity Teams Centennial Conference NCAA Division III
Nickname	Ursinus Bears
Website	Official website

Ursinus College is a private, independent, coeducational, liberal arts college located in Collegeville, Pennsylvania.

Founded in 1869, Ursinus sits on a 170-acre campus approximately 30 miles from Center City Philadelphia. Ursinus is one of the eleven Centennial Conference schools, a Phi Beta Kappa college, and is a member of the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship list, Project Pericles, Project DEEP, the Bonner Leader Program, and the Annapolis Group. The college is also home to the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art.^[4]

History

19th Century

1867: Members of the German Reformed Church begin plans to establish a college where "young men could be liberally educated under the benign influence of Christianity." These founders were hoping to establish an alternative to the seminary at Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, a school they believed was increasingly heretical to traditional Reformed faith.

1869: The college is granted a charter by the Legislature of Pennsylvania to begin operations in its current location on the grounds of Todd’s School (founded 1832) and the adjacent Freeland Seminary (founded 1848). Dr. John Henry Augustus Bomberger, for whom the campus' signature Romanesque building is named (see Gallery, below), served as the college’s first president until his death in 1890. Bomberger proposed naming the college after Zacharias Ursinus, a 16th-century German theologian and an important figure in the Protestant Reformation.

1870: Instruction begins at the college in September; on October 4, the Zwinglian Literary Society was founded. For many years the annual opening meetings of "Zwing" and its rival society, Schaff, were the major events of the student year.

1881: Women first admitted, as a direct consequence of the closing of the Pennsylvania Female College in 1880, and a separate literary society for women, The Olevian, is formed. Like Zwingli and Schaff, Olevian Hall on campus is named in honor of its respective historical society.

1893: The first meeting of the college's alumni association is held at the Colonnade Hotel in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

1896: In 1896, the town of Freeland officially incorporated as the Borough of Collegeville, the name the Pennsylvania Railroad had given the place in 1869—because of the Pennsylvania Female College; and not, as many believe, because of the then brand-new Ursinus. However, in years since, the “college” in Collegeville has come to mean Ursinus.

1897: The Ruby, Ursinus' yearbook is first published by the Class of 1897 as a tribute to Professor Samuel Vernon Ruby, who collapsed as he was entering Bomberger Hall in 1896 and died in its chapel, surrounded by students and teachers who had gathered there for morning prayers.^[5]

20th Century

1921: The first aerial photograph of Ursinus is taken, by future college president D.L. Helfferich, and is published in the 1921 Ruby.

1938: J.D. Salinger enrolls at Ursinus for the fall semester. As quoted from the Ursinus website, "The late 30’s also saw the arrival of someone who was perhaps Ursinus’ most famous student ever: Jerome D. Salinger. Gallant and slim, he swooped in from New York City for a few months in 1938, wrote a zany column for the student newspaper, The Skipped Diploma, dated a few of the coeds, then dropped out at Thanksgiving. He went on to great fame as author of The Catcher in the Rye, and short stories appearing in The New Yorker".^[5]

Berman Museum of Art

1942: Ursinus sees its male enrollment drop in half due to the start of World War II, falling from 535 to 350. During the war, Ursinus made a concerted effort to bring in military students from across the country, even acquiring a Naval V-12 unit.

1972: Dr. Gerald Edelman '50, wins the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work with Dr. Rodney Robert Porter on the immune system, becoming the college's first Nobel laureate.^[6]

1989: The Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art opens on the Ursinus campus.

1990: Phi Beta Kappa invites Ursinus into its ranks. Also in 1990, the F.W. Olin Foundation awarded a $5.6 million grant to Ursinus to construct a humanities building.

1993: Ursinus joins the Centennial Conference at its inception, a regional athletic conference, consisting of Swarthmore College, Bryn Mawr College, Haverford College, Dickinson College, Gettysburg College, Johns Hopkins University, Franklin & Marshall College and others.

1995: The college appoints Dr. John Strassburger as its 12th president, the first president from outside the Ursinus alumni group. Dr. Strassburger was an American Historian, a graduate of Bates College, Oxford University, and Princeton University. Under President Strassburger, Ursinus initiated the Summer Fellows program in which selected students worked on individualized research projects with faculty advisors. During President Strassburger's tenure as president Ursinus became affiliated with numerous prestigious groups such as the Annapolis Group, the Watson Foundation, the Kemper Scholars group and Project Pericles.^[5]

21st Century

2006: Ursinus College is profiled among only 40 colleges in former New York Times education editor Loren Pope's popular guidebook, Colleges That Change Lives.

2011: Dr. Bobby Fong, a graduate of Harvard and UCLA and former president of Butler University, began his tenure as the 13th president of Ursinus on July 1, 2011.^[7][8] For the third year in a row Ursinus is designated as a Top Ten Up and Coming College by U.S. News & World Report.

2014: Dr. Fong dies suddenly of natural causes at his home in Collegeville.^[9] Lucien T. (Terry) Winegar, the Dean and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, is appointed Interim President.^[10]

2015: S. Brock Blomberg, Dean of the Robert Day School of Economics and Finance at Claremont McKenna College, is named 17th president of Ursinus.^[11]

Ursinus College is now independent in character with historical but no longer any operational ties to its religious past, and currently operates on a growing $120,000,000 endowment.

Academics

Ursinus established its chapter of Phi Beta Kappa in 1992. At the time, only 242 of the nation's 3,500 colleges and universities had gained acceptance into the elite group. While students can choose from 60 courses of study, "biology, business and economics, and English are the three majors with the largest numbers of students."^[12]

Common Intellectual Experience

The Common Intellectual Experience is Ursinus' unique seminar course required of all first-year students and is a requisite for the bachelor's degree. The Common Intellectual Experience (referred to as CIE) is composed of two semester-long seminar courses which seek to investigate three of the central questions of the traditional liberal arts education: How should we live our lives? What does it mean to be human? What is the universe and how do we fit into it?^[13] The courses are characterized by students in all CIE classes discussing the course texts at the same time, and studying the works in both the seminar room and through additional avenues of scientific and artistic exploration. The course is taught by faculty in all disciplines and the assigned texts and materials are altered yearly, allowing students and faculty a mutual experience of discovery and critical engagement. CIE, in combination with residential clustering of first-years, is meant to foster a sense of togetherness for incoming students, and to create introspective discussions on the core questions beyond the classroom. To further this environment, there was also an experiment conducted in which the students in one CIE class lived on the same hall together. This was dubbed the Delphi Project and was used to determine how physical proximity might generate more discussion and creativity with ideas. Ursinus also offers additional higher-level CIE classes that go beyond the three original questions, extending the discussion into new domains. Unlike the requisite classes where the questions remain constant, the questions posed by the higher level classes change from semester-to-semester. CIE classes are often paired with a writing fellow, a student trained with background in writing rhetoric. The writing fellow will meet with the CIE freshman to help them with their papers in the course. CIE Fellows also work with freshmen students to further explore and discuss CIE texts and themes.

In September 2012, Ursinus and Columbia University were awarded a joint grant from the Mellon Foundation to work together on the core of their seminar courses - Ursinus College's CIE, and Columbia University's Core Curriculum. The $300,000 grant will allow Ursinus faculty with prior experience teaching CIE classes to work with, and mentor, post-doctoral students at Columbia, will create post-doctoral fellowship program at Ursinus, and will also support campus visits and guest lectures from Columbia faculty who have expertise in the subject matter of CIE.^[14]

Student life

While the first students enrolled at Ursinus were almost exclusively Pennsylvanians, today the school's 1,650 students come from 35 states and 12 countries. Twenty percent are students of color and two percent are international students. The school has a 12:1 student/faculty ratio.^[2]

Greek life

The Ursinus College Greek community consists of five sororities (Kappa Delta Kappa, Phi Alpha Psi, Sigma Sigma Sigma, Tau Sigma Gamma, and Omega Chi) and eight fraternities (Alpha Phi Epsilon, Beta Sigma Lambda, Delta Pi Sigma, Kappa Alpha Psi, Phi Kappa Sigma, Pi Omega Delta, Sigma Pi, and Sigma Rho Lambda).^[15] The Ursinus College Inter-Greek Council serves as the elected governing body of all social Greek organizations.

Clubs and organizations

The Leadership Development and Student Activities Office provides the student body with leadership opportunities through its more than 100 student clubs and organizations. Ursinus College clubs and organizations range from student government to community service, academic honor societies, political clubs and intramural sports.^[16] Ursinus is also home to a student-run newspaper, The Grizzly - the name taken from the Latin root of Zacharias Ursinus' surname (ursus translating as 'bear') - as well as The Lantern, one of the oldest, continuously produced student literary journals.^[17]

Athletics

Ursinus Bears Logo

Ursinus is a member of the Centennial Conference, founded in 1993, and which now contains eleven highly selective private colleges in the mid-Atlantic region, including Bryn Mawr, McDaniel, Johns Hopkins, Dickinson, Haverford, Franklin and Marshall, Swarthmore, Gettysburg, Muhlenberg, and Washington.

In the immediate years following its founding, there were no organized athletics at Ursinus College. Baseball matches held against neighboring towns, hiking along the Perkiomen Creek and in the nearby area that is now Valley Forge National Historical Park, and skating, bathing and boating in the Perkiomen were popular pastimes for students. In fact, students used to be able to rent canoes and fishing rods from the same location where they can now rent bikes. Students then organized a tennis club in 1888, and intercollegiate baseball began with play against Swarthmore College, Haverford College, and Muhlenberg College in 1890. The college's first football team was also fielded in 1890. A field house with shower and locker facilities was first built in 1909, and a "field cage" with facilities for indoor basketball practice was built behind the field house in 1910.

The college was well known for many years for its Patterson Field endzone, in which a large sycamore tree grew undisturbed. Ripley's Believe it or Not featured the famous tree for being the only one on an active field of athletic play. A new sycamore, growing since 1984 from a seedling taken from the old tree, stood nearby until a turf field project required its removal in 2011.^[18]

In 1974, the NCAA Award of Valor was presented to the 1973 basketball team. Every member of the team had entered a burning building, with their combined efforts leading to the rescue of 14 persons.^[19] In the 2003-2004 season, senior shooting guard Dennis Stanton led all NCAA Men's Basketball scorers, averaging 32.6 points per game.^[20]

Ursinus' athletic teams regularly place regionally and nationally. Its field hockey team was the 2006 National Champion for NCAA Division III. The team earned spots in the national championship game three times before, between 1975–77, as a Division I program, and the United States Field Hockey Hall of Fame's permanent home is at the college. Ursinus' women's lacrosse team were the 1986, 1989 and 1990 NCAA Division III Women's lacrosse champions and the 1985, 1987 and 1991 runners-up.

Campus and facilities

The 170-acre (0.69 km²) campus is 25 miles (40 km) northwest of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and is also within three hours’ driving distance of New York City, Baltimore, Maryland and Washington, DC.

Notable facilities at Ursinus include:^[3]

• Bomberger Memorial Hall, opened in 1892 and renovated in 2006. Bomberger Hall is named for John Henry Augustus Bomberger, the 1st President of Ursinus College. Bomberger Auditorium is home to the Heefner Memorial Organ, a three-manual 62-rank organ dedicated in 1986, the gift of the late Mrs. Lydia V. Heefner in memory of her husband, Russell E. Heefner.
• The Phillip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art, dedicated in 1989, located in the original Alumni Memorial Library, built in 1921, expanded in 2010.^[21] The museum program is fully accredited by the American Alliance of Museums and houses over 4,000 paintings, prints, drawings, sculpture, decorative, and cultural objects representing a broad array of art historical genres.^[22][23]
• The Eger Gate, erected in 1925.
• Brodbeck-Wilkinson-Curtis Hall, Brodbeck and Curtis opened in 1927, Wilkinson Hall, named for Joseph C. Wilkinson, opened in 1966 connecting Brodbeck and Curtis.

Pfahler Hall of Science

Curtis Hall, where J.D. Salinger lived on the third floor during his time at Ursinus

• Pfahler Hall & the Walter W. Marstellar Memorial Observatory. Pfahler Hall opened in 1932, renovated and expanded in 1998. Named in honorof Dr. George E. Pfahler, famed radiologist, Pfahler Hall is where Professor John Mauchly built key components of ENIAC, considered the world’s first computer, and Nobel LaureateGerald Edelman (Ursinus Class of 1950) attended classes. Pfahler’s well-equipped laboratoriescontain a 300-MHz nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer, three Fourier-transform(FTIR) spectrometers, an isothermal calorimeter, two gas chromatography/mass spectrometers(GC/MS), a voltammetric analyzer, four U-V visible absorbance spectrometers, seven highperformance liquid chromatographs (HPLC), an atomic absorption (AA) spectrometer, a capillary electrophoresis (CE) apparatus, a Mössbauer spectrometer, and a fluorescence spectrometer.
• Beardwood-Paisley-Stauffer Hall, opened in 1957, named in honor of Hannah Beardwood and her husband Matthew, a chemistry professor at Ursinus from 1903 until 1940, Dr. Harry Paisley, president of the Ursinus board of directors from 1910 until 1961, and Rev. George A. Stauffer, class of 1894.
• Wismer Center, opened in 1964, named for Ralph Fry Wismer, class of 1905.
• Reimert Hall, opened in 1966, named for William D. Reimert, class of 1924.
• Corson Hall, dedicated in 1970.
• Thomas Hall, opened in 1970 and renovated in 1991, it is the home of the Biology and Psychology departments and the following endowed laboratories: Levi Jay Hammond Laboratory of Comparative Anatomy, the W. Wayne Babcock Laboratory of GeneralBiology, the Anna Heinly Schellhammer Laboratory, and the Parlee Laboratory.^[21][24]
• Myrin Library, opened in 1971, renovated in 1988, and again in 2004-05. Myrin houses more than 420,000 volumes, 202,000 microforms, 32,000 audiovisual materials, 3,800 e-books, and offers on-site and remote access to approximately 25,900 print, microformand electronic periodical titles.The library is also one of only three U.S. Government depositories in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania and, as such, receives print and electronic federal documents for the collection.^[25] Myrin Library is home to the Pennsylvania Folklife Society Collection (an extensive Pennsylvania German archive), the Linda Grace Hoyer Papers, the Grundy Collection on South African history, and the Ursinusiana Collection (college archives).
• Ritter Center, opened in 1980.
• Olin Hall, opened in 1990, named for the F.W. Olin Foundation. Olin Hall contains a 320-seat lecture hall, a 63-seat tieredclassroom, a 42-seat tiered classroom, a Writing Center, eight traditional classrooms and four seminar rooms.^[26]
• The Floy Lewis Bakes Field House, dedicated in 2001 upon the expansion and renovation of Helferich Hall, 1972. The Field House encompasses the D.L. Helfferich Hall of Health and Physical Education and the William Elliott Pool. The field house pavilion opened in 2001, while the other buildings were dedicated in 1972 in honor, respectively, of the ninth president of Ursinus College and Dr. William Elliott. Helfferich Hall now includes completely renovated locker and training rooms, and a two-story, glass-enclosed area for fitness and recreation. The physical education complex serves both men and women with three full-size basketball courts; locker rooms and team rooms; wrestling room; weight room; dance studio; classrooms; a regulation collegiate-sized swimming pool; squash and handball courts, and a gymnastics space. (Helfferich
• Richter-North Residence Hall, opened in 2002, named for former college President Richard P. Richter.
• Kaleidoscope Performing Arts Center, opened in April 2005 with a performance by jazz legend Wynton Marsalis.^[27] The performing arts center features The Lenfest Theater (a 380-seat state-of-the-art Proscenium Arch Theater), a flexible seated black box “experimental” studio theater, a box office and concession booth, a rehearsal studio, a scenic workshop, as well as teaching support space and a gallery and work space for art students.^[28]
• New Residence Hall, opened in 2007.

Gallery

• 
  Olin Plaza
• 
  Bomberger Hall
• 
  Thomas Hall
• 
  Chadwick sculptures
• 
  Reimert Hall
• 
  Hobson Hall
• 
  Kaleidoscope Performing Arts Center

Notable people

Faculty and staff

• Raymond Dodge, experimental psychologist: Appointed Professor of Philosophy in 1896
• John Mauchly, computer pioneer and creator of the ENIAC: While Professor of Physics at Ursinus from 1933 to 1941, developed and tested digital electronic calculating devices at Ursinus's science labs in Pfahler Hall, a building which still stands on campus (see Gallery, below)
• Royal Meeker, statistician: Taught at Ursinus from 1906 until his appointment by President Wilson to be Commissioner of Labor Statistics in 1913. He later served (1923–24) as Pennsylvania Secretary of Labor and Industry
• Joseph Melrose, former U.S. Ambassador to Sierra Leone (1998-2001): Ambassador-in-Residence of the school's International Relations Program
• Deborah Poritz, jurist: Attorney General of New Jersey (1994–96), Chief Justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court (1996-2006): Taught English Literature at Ursinus in the late 1960s

Alumni

• Alfred Alspach (Class of 1933): Founder of the Boys & Girls Club of Lancaster, PA.
• Reds Bassman: American football player
• Barrie Ciliberti (Class of 1957): Maryland House of Delegates legislator and Reagan administration appointee
• Ryan Costello (Class of 1999): American politician and United States Representative for Pennsylvania's 6th congressional district
• Larry Crabb (Class of 1965): Author and psychologist; founder and director of New Way Ministries
• Joseph DeSimone (Class of 1986): American chemical engineer, 2008 recipient of the Lemelson–MIT Prize, 2016 recipient of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation^[29]
• J. William Ditter Jr. (Class of 1943): United States Federal Judge
• Steve Donahue (Class of 1984): Current men's head basketball coach at The University of Pennsylvania
• Gerald Edelman (Class of 1950): Winner of the 1972 Nobel Prize in medicine
• Hermann Eilts (Class of 1943): Former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia and Egypt who assisted Henry Kissinger's Mideast shuttle diplomacy effort, worked with Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat throughout the Camp David Accords, and dodged a Libyan hit team
• Cynthia Fisher (Class of 1983), biotechnology entrepreneur
• Jacob G. Francis (Class of 1891): Author, historian, Church of the Brethren pastor, and founder of Elizabethtown College
• Norman E. Gibbs (Class of 1964): was an American software engineer, scholar and educational leader.
• Ruth Grauert (Class of 1939): American modern dancer, lighting designer and stage director, director of Bearnstow arts camp.
• Kim Guadagno (Class of 1980), Lieutenant Governor of New Jersey^[30]
• Paul Guenther (American football) (Class of 1993): Defensive Coordinator for the Cincinnati Bengals of the NFL ^[31]

Ryan Schmidt - Pinch runner and winning run vs. Empire Beauty School Baseball team

• Eric Hoffman (Class of 2007): Professional lacrosse player for the Philadelphia Wings^[32] in the National Lacrosse League and formerly for the Philadelphia Barrage of Major League Lacrosse.^[33]
• Russell Conwell Johnson (Class of 1916): Major League Baseball pitcher (Philadelphia Athletics, 1916–1928)
• Sam Keen (Class of 1953): Author, professor of philosophy and religion, and former contributing editor of Psychology Today
• Michael Marcon (Class of 1986): Founder and CEO of Equity Risk Partners^[34]
• Joseph Melrose (Class of 1966): Former U.S. Ambassador to Sierra Leone
• Dan Mullen (Class of 1994): Head Coach of the Mississippi State Bulldogs football team
• Alan Novak (Class of 1971): Attorney and former chairman of the Republican State Committee of Pennsylvania.
• J.D. Salinger (attended 1937-38): American author, most known for The Catcher in the Rye, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, Franny and Zooey and Nine Stories, a collection of short stories.
• Ismar Schorsch (Class of 1957): Former Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America
• Aakash K. Shah (Class of 2010): Rhodes Scholar,^[35] White House Champions of Change.^[36]
• Bob Shoudt (Class of 1988): Professional Competitive Eater w/multiple World Records aka Notorious B.O.B.
• Linda M. Springer (Class of 1979): Director of the United States Office of Personnel Management
• Dennis Stanton (Class of 2004): Professional basketball player.^[37]
• Jeff Trinkle (Class of 1979): Professor and Chair of Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; known for his work in robotic manipulation, multibody dynamics, and automated manufacturing.
• Robert Yerkes (Class of 1897): Psychologist, ethologist and primatologist best known for his work in intelligence testing and in the field of comparative psychology; co-developer of the Yerkes-Dodson law relating arousal to performance.

References

• Ursinus College Catalog. Ursinus College: January 1991.
• Yost, Calvin Daniel. Ursinus College: A History of Its First Hundred Years. Ursinus College: 1985.

External links

• Official athletics website
• Ursinus College News
• Ursinus College on Twitter