Oberlin College

Oberlin College is a private liberal arts college and conservatory of music in Oberlin, Ohio. Founded as the Oberlin Collegiate Institute in 1833, it is the oldest coeducational liberal arts college in the United States and the second-oldest continuously operating coeducational institute of higher learning in the world. The Oberlin Conservatory of Music is the oldest continuously operating conservatory in the United States.

In 1835, Oberlin became one of the first colleges in the United States to admit African Americans, and in 1837, the first to admit women (other than Franklin College's brief experiment of 1787–89). It has been known since its founding for progressive student activism.

The College of Arts & Sciences offers more than 60 majors, minors, and concentrations. Oberlin is a member of the Great Lakes Colleges Association and the Five Colleges of Ohio consortium.

The Oberlin Collegiate Institute (name changed later to Oberlin College in 1850) was founded in 1833. The college's founders wrote voluminously and were featured prominently in the press, especially the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, in which the name Oberlin occurred 352 times by 1865. Original documents and correspondence survive and are readily available. There is a "wealth of primary documents and scholarly works". Robert Samuel Fletcher (class of 1920) published a history in 1943, that is a landmark and the point of departure of all subsequent studies of Oberlin's history. His disciple Geoffrey Blodgett (1953) continued Fletcher's work.

"'Oberlin' was an idea before it was a place." It began in revelation and dreams: Yankees' motivation to emigrate west, attempting perfection in God's eyes, "educating a missionary army of Christian soldiers to save the world and inaugurate God's government on earth, and the radical notion that slavery was America's most horrendous sin that should be instantly repented of and immediately brought to an end." Its immediate background was the wave of Christian revivals in western New York State, in which Charles Finney was very much involved. "Oberlin was the offspring of the revivals of 1830, '31, and '32." Oberlin founder John Jay Shipherd was an admirer of Finney, and visited him in Rochester, New York, when en route to Ohio for the first time. Finney invited Shipherd to stay with him as an assistant, but Shipherd "felt that he had his own important part to play in bringing on the millennium, God's triumphant reign on Earth. Finney's desires were one thing, but Shipherd believed that the Lord's work for him lay farther west." Shipherd attempted to convince Finney to accompany him west, which he did in 1835.

Oberlin was to be a pious, simple-living community in a sparsely populated area, of which the school, training ministers and missionaries, would be the centerpiece. The Oberlin Collegiate Institute was founded in 1833 by Shipherd and another Presbyterian minister, Philo Stewart, "formerly a missionary among the Cherokees in Mississippi, and at that time residing in Mr. Shipherd's family," who was studying Divinity with Shipherd. The institute was built on 500 acres (2 km²) of land donated by Titus Street, founder of Streetsboro, Ohio, and Samuel Hughes, who lived in Connecticut.

Shipherd and Stewert named their project after Alsatian minister Jean-Frédéric Oberlin, about whom a book had just been published, which Stewart was reading to Shipherd. Oberlin had brought social Christianity to an isolated region of France, just as they hoped to bring to the remote Western Reserve region of northeastern Ohio.

Their vision was: