OBERLIN AND CO-EDUCATION
By ROBERT S. FLETCHER
Early Oberlin is best understood as the
experimental college
of its day. For the most part, the
colleges of the middle third of
the nineteenth century sternly resisted
the assaults of innovation.
A monastic unworldliness and
timelessness characterized the
great majority; they stood barrenly and
stubbornly isolated amidst
the pounding surf of romantic reformism.
Even newly-established
institutions of the always-innovating
West were so completely
dominated by the ideals and traditions
and general conservatism
of ancient foundations in the East that
only incidental concessions
were made in them to local convenience
or liberalism. Curriculum,
rules, ceremonial, even buildings were
slavishly patterned after
those of eastern parent institutions. No
western college could bear
a prouder title than
"Yale-of-the-West" or "Princeton-of-the-
West." Indeed, one important
purpose of many of them seems
to have been to save the West from
"innovation," a word which
bore decidedly unfavorable implications
to easterners of Federal-
ist traditions.
But innovation, barred elsewhere, was
always welcomed at
Oberlin. Oberlin embraced the heretical
theology of President
Charles Grandison Finney and every
reform which could be
reconciled with that form of revolt
against Calvinism. Oberlin
was the chief center of the peace
movement beyond the Appa-
lachians. Students and faculty embraced
Graham vegetarianism
and expelled meat from the commons. The
largest local chapter
of the American Moral Reform Society in
the West was at Ober-
lin. Negroes were welcomed as students
at Oberlin when they
were scarcely or not at all tolerated
elsewhere. Of course, Ober-
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