Wheaton College history

Also, Wheaton saw its first graduate of color in 1866, when Edward Breathitte Sellers took his degree.

In 1882, Charles A. Blanchard succeeded his father as president of the college.

On April 24, 1890, Wheaton incorporated as a city with an elected mayor and aldermen, serving from wards.

For fifty years the college and academy students were closely mingled; it was not until 1915 under Dean William Rice that Wheaton College Academy began to achieve its own identity by acquiring a separate faculty and building, known as Schell Hall on the Wheaton College campus today.

On April 17, 1917, Wheaton chose the Commission form of government with a mayor and four commissioners, each charged with a specific part of the city government’s operations.

In 1925, J. Oliver Buswell, an outspoken Presbyterian, delivered a series of lectures at Wheaton College.

In 1934, while attending a revival meeting led by the evangelist Mordecai Ham, Billy Graham underwent a religious experience and professed his “decision for Christ."

In 1940, this tension led to the firing of Buswell for being, as two historians of the college put it, "too argumentative in temperament and too intellectual in his approach to Christianity." By the late 1940s, Wheaton was emerging as a standard-bearer of Evangelicalism.

The Alumni Association, which today serves some 51,000 alumni around the world, was formed in 1944.

By 1945, Wheaton Academy outgrew that building and moved to its own 33-acre campus on Prince Crossing Road in West Chicago.

By 1950, enrollment at the college surpassed 1,600, and in the second half of the twentieth century, enrollment growth and more selective admissions accompanied athletic success, additional and improved facilities, and expanded programs.

In 1951, Honey Rock, a camp in Three Lakes, Wisconsin, was purchased by the college.

The Marion E. Wade Center, established in 1965, contains a collection of manuscripts and papers of seven British writers, including C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Dorothy L. Sayers; it publishes Seven, a literary review containing articles on the centre’s authors.

Although Graham later mended relations with Kennedy, Nixon remained his favourite politician; indeed, Graham all but endorsed Nixon’s reelection effort in 1972 against George McGovern.

After a land purchase in 1988, the campus is now 53 acres.

His widely-read book on Christian higher education, Conceiving the Christian College (2004), imparts critical clarity on foundational issues such as institutional identity, the foundations of Christian thought, and establishing a more congenial academic environment.

Bill Graham concluded his public career with a preaching mission in Queens, New York, in June 2005.

Doctor Philip Graham Ryken '88 was appointed Wheaton’s eighth president in 2010.

As of 2015 the college continued to retain its Christian "Statement of Faith and Educational Purpose" and expected public statements of its faculty members to conform to it.