Intro/Conclusion

Summer Fellows is officially over and even though I'm going to be working on this project for the next two semesters I figured I'd include in a post on here the intro and conclusion from my SF paper. The paper is merely the entries from this blog (including comments!), but the intro and conclusion are somewhat personal reflections on how this came to be. No worries though - I plan for my honors paper to be much more academic/formal!

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Earlier this summer I spoke with a prospective student whom I was interviewing in Admissions. I related my own personal experiences at Ursinus and, as I usually do, zeroed in on what is commonly referred to as “the freshman experience.” I explained the way the freshman dorms were set up, the orientation process, and what I believe to be the core of an Ursinus education – the Common Intellectual Experience. As I rattled on about these things and why they are important I began to consider how far I’ve come in the last three years and what exactly brought me to where I am today.

The first week of school freshman year I recall talking with some of my hall mates about various things that concern eighteen year olds. Our discussion mostly revolved around what we knew we all had in common since we’d only been acquainted for a few days. We started with complaining about the summer reading, went on to who was going to go try to find a party that weekend, and then finally to why we all chose Ursinus. One person had turned down Penn, another Harvard, and yet another a full ride at the Ohio State University. Others hadn’t considered other schools and some just came for the bio and pre-med programs. I loved the fact that all of us came from the widest range of backgrounds imaginable and that we were all planning to go into an even more varied range of fields, but what really blew my mind was that a place like Ursinus College could bring us all together that night through something as simple as an ancient Mesopotamian epic. The whole concept of a course like the Common Intellectual Experience is unique in and of itself, but bringing together ten years’ worth of Ursinus students through a common appreciation for the liberal arts has created an unparalleled sense of community.

I’d never really thought too much about Ursinus’ roots beyond the basics that all freshmen learn during the academic convocation at orientation. However, my father is one of those academic types who will read up on anything and everything he encounters in his daily life. Once I decided to attend, Ursinus was no exception. His readings on the German Protestant Reformation shed a lot of light on why things are the way we are here at Ursinus. I learned a good amount of pre-history (everything from who Ulrich Zwingli and Zacharias Baer were to why it is that the College doesn’t have big fancy buildings or any of the other bells and whistles commonly associated with academic institutions) and brushed up a bit on the founding of the school itself. What I was left with was a lot of what my friends refer to as my “fun facts” but, I see now, just as little perspective as I began with.

When I first approached Dr. Nathan Rein about the possibility of doing a Summer Fellows project about the religious history of Ursinus and how our former affiliation with the Reformed Church has impacted the identity of the school he reminded me that I had overlooked something very important. In all of my excitement about finding out what the implications of the Heidelberg Catechism had on the whole concept of a liberal arts education I managed to forget that there was once a time during which Ursinus was affiliated with the German Reformed Church (now the UCC), that we are no longer affiliated with them, and that something happened during the last 140 years that changed that. When I left Dr. Rein’s office that afternoon I had a whole new crop of questions swimming around in my head, but the subject that came to the forefront was that of change. Within that broad subject came such foci as what I began this summer researching – that is, when was compulsory chapel abolished and what repercussions came of it?

When I began working in the Ursinusiana archives in June I sifted through a lot of Ursinus Weeklies, faculty minutes, course catalogues, and other old Ursinus documents. At that point I didn’t really knowing how anything was going to turn out and all I had to guide me was my original question about chapel at Ursinus. At the request of Dr. Rein I began to organize a journal of sorts to organize my research and to keep track of my thoughts about each document I came across. As I gleaned various dates and such from the archives I realized that my project wasn’t going to go anywhere if I didn’t figure out a way to make my research accessible to the rest of the Ursinus community. All we have in the archives is what people send in and all I had was my personal analyses of these documents. What if I were to somehow get my friends, professors, and even alumni involved with the project? Not only would I be able to share my findings with them but they would be able to open new doors to me through their own observations and, in the case of alumni, memories of Ursinus back in the 1960s.

This resolution lead to my beginning a blog entitled “Ursinusiana Project.” While blogs are still new and somewhat untraditional in the academic world, I can’t imagine any tool that would have been more helpful to me and my progress in the archives this summer. Getting feedback from professors, alumni, my peers, and even my parents has taken me on an extremely unpredictable path through my research but, at the same time, has yielded a newer, better, more exciting path as I prepare to begin the next stage of my Fellows project as I pursue honors.

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If being an Ursinus student has taught me anything it’s that if the final product of a research project answers the same question you started out with then you’ve done something wrong, and I certainly take comfort in the fact that as I write this I’m totally off base from the research topic I started with. As interesting as the implications of the abolition of compulsory chapel at Ursinus are to me, the similarities between compulsory chapel and CIE have caught my attention and throughout the summer really taken over as a primary concern in my project. What I have found is that when Ursinus College opted to slowly phase out the chapel program the sense of community dwindled. For thirty years Ursinus students who came in as biology and pre-med majors had little reason to mingle with the philosophy and English majors in any sort of organized or academic setting. As I reflected on those discussions I had during my first week of freshman year that revolved around the Epic of Gilgamesh and tried to make them fit into the feedback I’d gotten on my blog about the old chapel program, it became very clear to me; as I mentioned in the blog, CIE has filled the community void left behind by chapel. I have yet to go into much more detail since this is a recent revelation, but I look forward to pursuing this hypothesis of mine as I continue my research for honors this coming year.

Right now my plans for the continuation of this project include gaining an even better understanding of the chapel program by tracking down such documents as minutes from the meetings of the Men’s Student Government Association, the Board of Directors, and faculty committees on chapel. I also hope to find former President Donald Helfferich’s personal letters, papers, and other documents that we are missing in the Ursinusiana archives as well as conduct interviews with alumni, former professors, and other people affiliated with the College during the 1960s. I feel that having gone through two semesters of CIE I have a fairly detailed understanding of how it works, but I am also hoping to review documents concerning the program (such as Middle States reports) and speak with some of the faculty who assisted in implementing the program. At this point, though, I’m open to any new direction or approach that comes my way.
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