| Ursinus College | |
|---|---|
| Established | 1869 |
| Type | Private |
| Endowment | $120 million[1] |
| President | Dr. Bobby Fong |
| Undergraduates | 1,750[2][3] |
| Location | Collegeville, PA, USA |
| Campus | 170 acres (0.69 km2) [8] |
| Mascot | Grizzly Bear |
| Website | ursinus.edu |
Ursinus College is a liberal arts college in Collegeville, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.
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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 had proposed naming the college after Zacharias Ursinus, a 16th-century German theologian and an important figure in the Protestant Reformation, in order to declare the Reformed orthodoxy of the College.
1870 Instruction begins at the college in September; on October 4, the Zwinglian Literary Society — which was to be resurrected in the early 1990s — 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.
1893 The first meeting of the college's alumni association is held at the Colonnade Hotel in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
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.
1921 The first aerial photograph of Ursinus is taken, by future college president D.L. Helfferich, and is published in the 1921 Ruby.
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.
Today Aakash Shah '10 of Harvard Medical School is named Ursinus' first Rhodes Scholar.
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.
For the third year in a row Ursinus is designated as a Top Ten Up and Coming College by US News and World Report. Ursinus is also included among only 40 colleges in Loren Pope's popular guidebook, Colleges That Change Lives.
Ursinus College is now independent in character with historical but no longer any operational ties to its church past, and currently operates on a growing $118,000,000 endowment.
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. The school is a member of the Watson Foundation List, Project Pericles, Project DEEP, and the Annapolis Group.
While students choose from 28 majors and 49 minors, "Biology, Business & Economics, and English are the three majors with the largest numbers of students."[4] Many graduates go on to attend law and medical schools, and 90 percent of those who do apply to these schools are accepted.
While the first students enrolled at Ursinus were almost exclusively Pennsylvanians, today the school's 1,780 students come from 25 states and 15 countries. Eight percent are African American, 3% are Latino/a, and 2% are international students. The school has a 12:1 student/faculty ratio.[9]
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 the Phillip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art, the Walter W. Marstellar Memorial Observatory, and the Kaleidoscope Performing Arts Center, which opened in April 2005 with a performance by jazz legend Wynton Marsalis.
The college's Myrin Library has an extensive Pennsylvania German archive and is one of three government repositories in Montgomery County.
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 nearby Valley Forge, and skating, bathing and boating in the Perkiomen were popular pastimes for students. Students first 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 school is now a member of the Centennial Conference, founded in 1992 by eleven selective colleges in the mid-Atlantic region, including McDaniel, Washington, Bryn Mawr, Dickinson, Haverford, Franklin and Marshall, Gettysburg, Muhlenberg, and Swarthmore. 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.
In the fall of 2001, Ursinus students started a men's rugby team/club called the Bearcox. The Bearcox is a member of the Eastern Pennsylvania Rugby Union (EPRU) and of USA Rugby. They play in Division III and their practice field is located on Hunsberger Farm.[10]. The Women's Rugby Club, also a member of the EPRU and USA Rugby, has enjoyed successes, winning back-to-back divisional championship titles in 2005 and 2006, resulting in the team being promoted to Division II. Rugby is becoming a dominant sport at Ursinus, recruitment doubling in the last two years.
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,[5] and the seclusion "of the tree at night for generations afforded lovers a trysting place. Greek organizations initiated pledges into their mysteries under its branches."[6] A new sycamore, growing since 1984 from a seedling taken from the old tree, now stands nearby.[7]
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.
Ursinus is the home of the USA Field Hockey Hall of Fame.
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