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Wittenberg University

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Wittenberg University

Wittenberg University (officially Wittenberg College) is a private liberal arts college in Springfield, Ohio, United States. It has 1,326 full-time students drawn from 33 states and 9 foreign countries. Wittenberg University is associated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

Wittenberg College was founded in 1845 by a group of ministers in the English Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Ohio, which had previously separated from the recently established German-speaking Evangelical Lutheran Joint Synod of Ohio and Other States. The college was named for the historic University of Wittenberg in Wittenberg, Germany, the town in which Martin Luther famously posted his Ninety-five Theses on the church door on October 31, 1517.

A German American pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the Rev. Ezra Keller was the principal founder and first president of the college. Its initial focus was to train clergy with the Hamma School of Divinity as its theological department. One of its main missions was to "Americanize" Lutherans by teaching courses in the English language instead of German, unlike the nearby Capital University in Columbus, Ohio.

The first class originally consisted of eight students at the beginning of the academic year, but grew to seventy-one by the end. With a faculty of one professor and two tutors, classes were held in Springfield, Ohio, in a church on land that was donated. That city was selected for its location on the National Road, running from the eastern cities of Baltimore and Cumberland, Maryland, to the west in the Illinois Country, eventually to the territorial capital of Vandalia, near the Mississippi River.

In 1874, women were admitted to the college, and, the following year, the first black students were admitted. The college attained university status in 1957 and was renamed accordingly. In 1993, the university and its namesake city Wittenberg entered into an official partnership.

In 1995, the American Philosophical Association censured Wittenberg University when the Wittenberg administration overruled the faculty personnel board and denied tenure to Leemon McHenry, a member of the faculty. The university was sanctioned in 2021 by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), for discontinuing eight academic programs and firing two tenured faculty members without, in the AAUP's opinion, respecting faculty rights.

Luther Alexander Gotwald, Professor of Theology in the Hamma Divinity School that served as the theological department of the college, was famously tried for and unanimously acquitted of heresy by the board of directors at Wittenberg on April 4–5, 1893. The trial concerned many key issues that Evangelical Lutherans still debate today.

For decades, Hamma and Wittenberg were associated with the local English-speaking regional Lutheran synods in the Midwest.

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