Historic Figures:

A century ago, Grinnell College boasted an enrollment of barely 500 students, nearly all of them Iowans and two in five natives of Poweshiek County. Today the institution draws students from 50 states and a like number of foreign countries and enrolls about 1,600. 

Grinnell plans to keep enrollment at that level, but getting there was a journey. The College fought through everything from Civil War recovery to a devastating tornado. Along the way, Grinnell kept its strong commitment to diversity, social responsibility, and a well-honed world view.

Each president brought personal goals, adding new touches to the success story that is Grinnell College. Here is a look at how the College changed with the help of so many faculty members, students, staff members and supporters. 

Brothers John and William Windsor came first. They were the lone graduates during Iowa College’s first commencement in 1854, when the predecessor of Grinnell College was still in Davenport. 

They were pioneers in a time of inconsistent college growth and growing pains that eventually transformed the school into a diverse, internationally recognized, liberal arts powerhouse.

Growing Pains, 1858–1900

In 1858, the Trustees of Iowa College decided to move the school westward to Poweshiek County, merging it with what J.B. Grinnell had imagined as Grinnell University. First to re-open, in September of 1860, was the preparatory academy, which operated into the next century primarily as a feeder for the College. The next fall Iowa College resumed its undergraduate programs, with an enrollment of 99, but it wasn’t exactly the dorm-packing vision of today. A mere 12 students were registered in the college course with more than half the total enrollment coming from Grinnell and surrounding Poweshiek County.

The college decided to admit women before the move to Davenport. That helped enrollment, especially considering the Civil War had occupied so many men. 

In July 1865, three men received bachelor’s degrees as the first graduates of the college course in Grinnell, while 10 women received diplomas for completing the ladies’ course. That same day, George Magoun was inaugurated as the institution’s first president.

Substantial enrollment gains would not happen without better facilities and a larger faculty. The College launched fundraising efforts but donations barely trickled in and the school frequently operated at a deficit. 

There were other challenges. Fire destroyed “East College,” the original campus building, in 1871. The Panic of 1873 and the ensuing depression forced the College to dip dangerously into endowment funds.

Not to mention that higher education was mostly the realm of the well-to-do throughout the 19th century, and in 1870 only 63,000 students were attending some 563 colleges and universities nationwide. That represented just 1 percent of the 18- to 24-year-old population. The average enrollment nationally was 112 students, and Iowa College wasn’t far off the mark, enrolling 90 undergraduates in 1869–70. Another 175 were in various preparatory courses.

Despite the challenges, the financial ones in particular, the College did grow.

Traditional boarding houses developed, and local residents began to open their homes to students. Dormitory construction on campus cut demand for rental rooms by the 1920s, but not before lifelong Grinnell resident and legendary local physician John Rhodes Parish ’27 got a first-hand look at the phenomenon as a young boy. “We always had one or two students in our home during the school year,” Parish recalled in the 1996 Grinnell College Blue Book, published in honor of the College’s sesquicentennial. “And I remember how sophisticated they appeared to me — smoking pipes, staying up late, and going out with girls.”

More than 350 students from 15 states enrolled in the various college and preparatory programs in 1881. But the following June 17th, a tornado hit Grinnell, killing 39 and virtually destroying the campus. During commencement nine days later, a cornerstone was laid for the first replacement building, Alumni Hall, but full recovery took years. The trustees and J.B. Grinnell spent months in search of financial support. While certainly disastrous, the Grinnell Cyclone drew nationwide attention to the College, widely admired for its resilience.

Late-century Changes, 1883–1900

The remainder of the 19th century was no less undulating for Iowa College’s fortunes. Three replacement buildings — Alumni Hall, Blair Hall and Chicago Hall — were completed in the mid-1880s, followed by Goodnow Hall in 1886, more than making up for the cyclone’s physical wrath. And in 1888 came Mary Mears Cottage, the institution’s first true women’s dormitory. Iowa College’s total enrollment topped 500 students for the first time in the fall of 1888, split about equally between the college department and preparatory programs. But no further enrollment gains would be made for another 15 years.

Other changes continued, however.

President George Gates, who arrived in 1887, favored a balanced curriculum, with equal emphasis on science, history, language, and literature, and held that service toward the betterment of society should be the aim of graduates from an institution such as Iowa College. In 1893, the trustees moved to make the conservatory an integral part of the College, bringing in a new music faculty and renaming the program the School of Music. This broadened the program’s reach and attracted more undergraduates interested in studying music at Iowa College.

Another move Gates made brought the College national attention, not all of it welcomed. George Herron was hired in 1893 to head a newly-developed Department of Applied Christianity. For a time, the College was at the forefront of growing interest in the field, and in efforts to “awaken the churches to the seriousness of social issues.” Eventually, however, things turned negative. Herron undertook a nationwide lecture schedule in 1895 and attracted opponents, resulting in widespread rejection from churches and others, and the stifling of fundraising. Herron resigned in 1899 but the damage had been done; Gates left the following year.

Rise of the Residential College, 1901–1931

The early 20th century saw the College’s founding ideals mesh with the era’s progressive outlook, under the leadership of President John Main. Main wanted the College to grow in numbers and in stature but recognized little would happen without successful fundraising, so that became a priority. He also stressed the founders’ challenge to service and made its encouragement a hallmark of his administration. Students readily followed Main’s lead, as a number of graduates of the early 1910s went on to high-profile public work and were especially prominent during the New Deal era.

Iowa College officially became known as Grinnell College in 1909. A record 491 students enrolled in undergraduate programs that fall .Including preparatory and music students, 711 students were studying on the Grinnell campus during 1909–1910. While 16 states were represented among the 491 undergraduates, the great majority — 414 or 84 percent — were Iowans.

The second decade of the 20th century brought the most profound physical changes, which encouraged growth of buildings and programs and allowed the College to survive challenges. Construction of the Women’s Quadrangle on South Campus was initiated in 1914, with work on the North Campus men’s halls beginning late the following year. The massive undertaking benefited more than just students, as national attention came to Grinnell upon its transformation to a residential college.

By the early 1920s, Grinnell enrolled close to 750 undergraduates as well as more than 100 in the School of Music, although the prep academy had closed a decade earlier due to the rise of public high schools. Iowa still accounted for the great majority of all students, (more than 80 percent most years), but enrollees from 25 states and five foreign countries were on campus in 1921. The College would have been poised for further growth had not the financial picture again darkened, as huge deficits hampered the entire decade. After the stock market crash of 1929, conditions turned dire.

Through Depression and Wartime, 1931–1955

President Main died in office in April of 1931, and so John Nollen’s administration began as the worst stretch of the Depression approached, bringing with it faculty and enrollment reductions and salary cuts. Fran Collins James ’34 recalled students’ financial realities of her senior year. “As the economy worsened, students were forced to leave the campus,” she wrote in 1996. “Probably the busiest office in the Administration Building was that of the treasurer. His letters to parents begged for the money owed or encouraged advance money to keep children enrolled. …Many smaller colleges closed their doors.”

A mere 152 freshmen arrived on campus the fall of James’ senior year, as opposed to 408 in 1921, with the total undergraduate enrollment of 519 a full 33 percent decline from 12 years earlier. Main had held that quality instruction was the College’s best form of advertising, but Nollen felt the need of a more aggressive approach and hired Elizabeth Howe as an associate in public relations, focusing recruiting efforts on the Chicago area. Howe and other new recruiters gradually met with success as the enrollment began increasing; a record 168 seniors graduated in June 1939. Tuition and fee increases were made as well, and the financial outlook improved markedly by the time Nollen stepped down in June 1940.

With World War II under way prior to his administration, Samuel Stevens took the helm at Grinnell expecting to make significant changes on the campus. A key accomplishment of the Stevens era was following through on planned residence hall construction, but Grinnell’s enrollment as well as its economic health and campus atmosphere made wild swings during this period. After averaging 750 students annually during the 1930s, Grinnell’s civilian enrollment bottomed out in 1943–44 when only 316 students were on campus. But Stevens arranged for the College to host nearly 1,000 men in military educational units from October of 1942 through March of 1944, the influx accommodated by completion of Cowles Hall and Darby Gymnasium.

After the war ended, things changed. Eminent writer Curtis Harnack ’49 began his association with Grinnell College in 1944, arriving that fall from the family farm near Remsen in northwest Iowa. After serving in the Navy, Harnack returned to Grinnell to finish his degree. The campus then, he wrote later, was “a very cosmopolitan place in the best sense: fellow students often hailed from far places, different backgrounds. … There was a refreshing absence of discrimination regarding money, status, family prestige, and ethnic groupings.”

The qualities Harnack appreciated were due in part to several hundred veterans, some with wives and children, housed in 11 reconstructed surplus war barracks. Harnack’s senior year saw enrollment hit a new high of 1,140, including 319 veterans, with a record-low proportion of Iowans at just under 32 percent. In fact, more Grinnell students in 1948–49 came from Illinois (371) than Iowa (359), with Chicago and surrounding suburbs accounting for close to 200 enrollees.

The late 1940s and early 1950s also saw a total of 17 black students enrolled at Grinnell for one semester each, participants in the College’s exchange program with Hampton Institute, a black college in Virginia. A like number of Grinnell students spent one semester each at Hampton. The program was viewed at the time primarily as an opportunity for cultural exchange, as opposed to a serious civil rights effort, and yet both the New York Times and Washington Post reported on it as a unique endeavor.

The Korean conflict brought new financial difficulties and enrollment reductions in the early 1950s. George Drake ’56, Grinnell’s 10th president, came to Grinnell in the fall of 1952 as one of the College’s 10 annual Baker Scholars, students from across the country awarded full tuition through the prestigious George F. Baker Trust. “Grinnell in those years was up against a tough demographic, caused by low Depression-era birth rates and just not enough students to go around,” Drake notes. “The College was literally beating the bushes. John Pfitsch [long-time Grinnell coach, physical education instructor and athletic director] told the story of spending time on recruiting trips to Chicago in the ’50s and getting $25 for every student he unearthed for the College.”

New Gains and New Struggles, 1955–1979

When Howard Bowen came to Grinnell from Williams College in 1955, the College had been through more than three decades of financial struggles as well the tumult of the war years and having hundreds of soldiers and veterans on campus. Bowen saw many areas needing improvement and moved to raise standards. He hired Robert Sauers ’49 as Grinnell’s first admissions director. “Howard self-consciously set out to make the college national rather than regional,” Drake explains. “The whole admissions thing picked up in those years — better selectivity, more students. And there was a demographic transformation that allowed the quality to go up.”

The 1960–61 enrollment of 1,127 was more than a hundred above the previous high of 1,019, hit a full decade earlier. Burling Library, a fine arts complex and the Forum were all built in the early 1960s and are testament to the optimism — and successful grantsmanship — of the Bowen era.

Grinnell’s enrollment remained relatively stable from the mid-1960s through the 1970s, at least in terms of overall numbers. But it was a time of consistent upheaval. Glenn Leggett took over as president in September 1965. His tenure was characterized by student dissent and protest over national and world events. Curricular and campus changes during the period also were volatile. The faculty voted in 1971 to drop all graduation requirements except a new first-year tutorial, which put great emphasis on advising and writing. Labeled the “open curriculum,” the new arrangement remains a significant selling point for College recruiters. Some worried that Grinnell’s liberal reputation would hurt recruiting, but the College averaged 1,200 students on campus, and gained black students.

Rise of the International College, 1979–Present

Since 1980, Grinnell College has enjoyed a strong reputation as a liberal arts institution. President George Drake stressed admissions in an administration that began in 1979. 

“In the fall of 1979,” he notes, “we were getting barely 1,000 applications. And in order to bring in a class of 350 to 400 we were admitting a very high percentage. That didn’t mean necessarily that we had a poor student body, but we were not particularly selective. By the time I left the presidency in 1991, we were probably getting 1,800 to 1,900 apps, but building it up was a slow, hard process.”

Drake also worked on diversity. The Grinnell-Nanjing Exchange began in 1987. However, he was frustrated by static black enrollment. “I was a trustee for almost 10 years before I became president,” Drake explained, “and then and in the ’80s we’d have a section of every meeting devoted to diversity issues. Those were huge issues, and it was a struggle.“

The school’s small number of Iowa students irked Drake. He discovered there were more New Yorkers attending than Iowans. A push led to Iowans accounting for 18 percent of the student body, double the figure when Drake took office.

During the past two decades, the College has emphasized diversity, social justice, and international-student enrollment. Just as we would have a “global literacy,” so we should have a “multiethnic literacy” operating within the confines of our campuses,” Pamela Ferguson remarked during her inaugural address. The overall enrollment edged up under Ferguson, Grinnell’s first female president (1991–97), averaging 1,350 students. All 50 states and three dozen countries were represented.

As the 21st century began, Grinnell entered a new era of expansion that followed a master planning exercise. President Russell Osgood (1998–2010) presided over an ambitious project of residence hall construction and renovation that enabled enrollment to jump above 1,600. And there were also major expansions made to the student center and science facilities plus major new recreation and athletic center was constructed. An Office of Social Commitment was initiated, reflecting College’s lengthy involvement in matters of social justice, and new opportunities were created for students to explore community service work as part of their Grinnell experience. These changes seem to have resonated significantly with applicants.

Now, still early in the administration of President Raynard S. Kington, Grinnell College remains focused on providing an outstanding liberal arts education to a diverse, talented student community. Efforts are under way to ensure longtime financial health for the College so that its mission never will be compromised.

On July 5, 2013, Curtis Harnack, who claimed to always sense “a special never-never land atmosphere” on the Grinnell campus, died at 86. Though his writing sometimes lamented the enormous changes taking place in the world, Harnack remained convinced that the essence of what Grinnell College has offered young people through all the years is entirely valid. “The most enduring gift of a Grinnell education [is] the liberal arts conviction that a student should be taught to think [and] take responsibility for his or her intellectual development and continued growth,” Harnack wrote in 1996. “There is no predicting the needs and demands of the future, but one had better be prepared not so much specifically but generally, (and) able to move forward with all sensors alert.”

Today, Grinnell College enjoys a diverse student body few would have predicted or even hoped for a half-century ago. In the coming decades, as the College faces challenges familiar as well as new, Grinnellians will no doubt work to balance desires for change with a determination to keep the essential ideals of the institution’s earliest years.