Goshen College

Goshen College is a private Mennonite liberal arts college in Goshen, Indiana. It was founded in 1894 as the Elkhart Institute of Science, Industry and the Arts, and is affiliated with Mennonite Church USA. The college is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission and has an enrollment of 824 students. While Goshen maintains a distinctive liberal Mennonite worldview and Mennonites make up 30 percent of the student body, it admits students of all religions.

Goshen College is home to The Mennonite Quarterly Review and the Mennonite Historical Library, a research library compiling one of the world's most comprehensive collection of Anabaptist and Mennonite primary source material.

"Old" Mennonites started the Elkhart Institute in Elkhart, Indiana, in August 1894, to prepare Mennonite youth for college. H.A. Mumaw, a practicing physician, first led the small operation with a group of 15 "Old" Mennonite ministers and laymen started a corporation named the Elkhart Institute Association. Lured by businessmen to relocate several miles away to Goshen, Indiana, the Institute moved in September 1903 and added a junior college course list, renaming itself Goshen College. By 1905, the Mennonite Board of Education had taken control of the college, dissolving the Elkhart Institute Association. After 1910, most of Goshen's students were enrolled in college courses. There were attempts at founding a "School of Agriculture" and also a college-prep academy program.

The school was closed during the 1923–1924 school year by the Mennonite Board of Education but reopened the following year. One of many factors in closing the college was denominational tension due to modernist and fundamentalist Christian theologies of the 1920s and their impact on Mennonite theology at the school. In response to this crisis, many of Goshen's faculty and dozens of students, frustrated with the Mennonite Board of Education's decision, relocated to Bluffton College.

When the institution was reopened, it was marked by the new leadership of president S.C. Yoder and dean Noah Oyer. The community became known as the "Goshen Historical Renaissance".

During the 1940s, Goshen was one of the Mennonite Central Committee's key places to form a "relief training school" that helped to train volunteers for unpaid jobs in the Civilian Public Service, an alternative to the Army. Many Mennonites chose the civilian service alternative because of their beliefs regarding Biblical pacifism and nonresistance. Young women pacifists volunteered for unpaid Civilian Public Service jobs to demonstrate their patriotism; many worked in mental hospitals. Lois Gunden, a French professor at the college, volunteered for the Mennonite Central Committee and established an orphanage for refuge children of the Spanish Civil War and Jewish children from Rivesaltes internment camp. The children that she rescued were malnourished, in poor health, and had lice. She was awarded the title Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem for her efforts to care for and protect children.

In 1980, the college was granted care of Merry Lea Environmental Learning Center, a 1,150-acre (4.7 km²) nature preserve that now offers Goshen's master's degree in Environmental Science.

In 1993, Harold and Wilma Good, longtime friends of the college, left their estate to Goshen. The estate, said to be worth many millions, consisted of the majority in stock of the J.M. Smucker Company. Wilma was a daughter of the company's founder. The college sold the stock and added the funds to its endowment, more than doubling it.