About
History
Whittier College: More than a century in the making
The Religious Society of Friends established the town of Whittier in 1887 and the Whittier Academy the same year. Whittier College grew from the academy and was chartered by the State of California in 1901 with a student body of 25.
Both the town and the College were named in honor of John Greenleaf Whittier, prominent Quaker, poet, and leader in the abolitionist movement. Although no longer affiliated with the Society of Friends, the College remains proud of its Quaker heritage and deeply committed to its enduring values, such as respect for the individual, fostering community and service, social justice, freedom of conscience, and respect for human differences. In its more than 100 year history, Whittier College has embraced and upheld these values as the foundation for its academic and social community.
The College began construction on its first building, Founders Hall, in 1893. Initially, Founders Hall housed all classes, dormitories, and the library. Several buildings were later added to the College, including a gymnasium and the Redwood Building, the latter housing female students and the College library. Campus icon, the Rock, was installed by four senior pranksters in 1912.
During the 1920s Whittier became an athletic powerhouse in California, playing teams from institutions its own size, as well as universities such as USC, UCLA, and Cal Berkeley. This decade also marks the first foriegn national enrollee: a woman student from Russia.
During the 1930s, the College acquired the Mendenhall building, originally belonging to the Elks Lodge. That building housed the administrative offices and the library. It was during this decade the college began to detach itself from the control of the Quaker Yearly Meeting, becoming fully independent by the end of the 1930s. It was also during this time that Whittier's most famous alumnus, Richard Millhouse Nixon, spent his four undergraduate years making an indelible mark on the College's history—as a founding member of the Orthogonian Society, as a well-liked student body president, a strong performer in the debate club, and as a football player on the Poet team, albeit one that spent much of his sports career good-naturedly on the bench.
In the 1940s, World War II and the call to enlist caused the college-bound and college-enrolled male population to sharply decline; so much so that Whittier College agreed to absorb the entire student body of neighboring Chapman University. Service projects and service clubs, focusing on aiding and comforting soldiers oversees and training in domestic camps, sprung up on the Whittier campus; these efforts included a toy, clothing, and candy drive for children in Japanese American Internment camps. As the war ended and veterans returned home, Whittier College's enrollment lists once again swelled. This began a prosperous time for the College, and a construction boom soon followed.
Most of the major buildings on campus have been built since the late 1940s—three in the 1940s and 1950s, seven in the 1960s, three in the 1970s and 1980s, and five since 1990. The latest addition to the campus, the Campus Center, is currently under construction, with a completion date scheduled for late 2008.
Today, with its widely praised curricula and emphasis on interdisciplinary and experiential learning, Whittier College is a cosmopolitan vanguard of 21st-century society, with more than 45 percent of its undergraduates and three of its four Rhodes Scholars from underrepresented ethnic and international groups. This cultural diversity profoundly strengthens intellectual discourse and provies a realistic exposure to the kind of world students will enter upon graduation. Students and faculty continue a long tradition of community service, echoing the Quaker conviction that helping others is a moral obligation. International study opportunities enrich every field and major, reflecting the Quaker idea that truth transcends the boundaries of race, culture, and nation.
