Ninth president 1966-1985 Bernard Schroder Adams was born July 20, 1928. He was a graduate of Princeton University, Yale University and the University of Pittsburgh, and he taught English literature and had a wide range of administrative responsibilities at Princeton, Pittsburgh and Oberlin College. At Ripon, he continued the expansion of the physical plant and […]
Eighth president 1955-1965 A graduate of Kalamazoo College and Stanford University, Pinkham previously was assistant to the president of George Washington University and executive director of the National Commission on Accrediting. He also was a teacher and lecturer. He helped expand the student body, faculty, administration and physical plant, and administrative procedures were modernized. His […]
Seventh president 1943-1954 Clark G. Kuebler was a scholar, lecturer and teacher of classics. Although he served as president of the Episcopal Church’s National Council of Churchmen for several years, he was Ripon’s first president without a ministerial background. He helped establish a national reputation for the College by conducting lecture tours across the United […]
Sixth president 1918-1920 He had been a student of law and divinity and president of Emporia College in Kansas before serving briefly as Ripon’s president between the two terms of Dr. Silas Evans. His skill in public speaking made a strikingly favorable impression, but health and personal problems often interfered with his duties. He returned […]
Fifth president 1910-1917 and 1921-1943 Silas Evans, a graduate of the Ripon College Class of 1898, Princeton University and Princeton Theological Seminary, retired as teacher of Greek and Hebrew at the University of Wisconsin to accept the presidency of his alma mater in 1911. He led Ripon College for the next 32 years — except […]
Third president 1892-1901 He was a widely respected biblical scholar and Congregational minister with a flair for financial management. Within one year of assuming office, he raised $50,000 in pledges, thereby qualifying the College for an $80,000 gift. He also launched a program for modernization by adding men like O.H. Ingram and Albert G. Farr […]
Second president 1876-1891 He was a graduate of Oberlin College and Oberlin Theological Seminary and appointed principal of the preparatory department and professor of languages in 1862, then president in 1876. During his 16-year tenure as president, a new chemistry laboratory made it possible to discard the obsolete method of exclusive textbook-lecture instruction; East Hall […]
Edwin Lockwood served on the first Board of Directors for the Lyceum of Ripon. When the directors first pledged funding to support the endeavor, Lockwood was listed as having pledged $10, a respectable sum. After the charter for the school with the name of Brockway College was approved, Lockwood also was named to the first […]
Founder Almon Osborn was born June 24, 1813, in Rival, Hancock County, Maine. He moved west with his family with several stops, eventually settling in Waukesha County, Wisconsin, in 1835. He came to Metomen township near Ripon in June 1845 where he was a farmer and the first supervisor of the town of Metomen. His […]
Founder Ezra Lathrop Northrup was born March 28, 1818, in Sherburne, Chenango County, New York. He arrived in Ripon in November 1849. He was given a plot of land on the east side of the public square in Ripon if he would open a store there selling general merchandise. He had done so within six […]
Founder Asa Kinney born May 21, 1810, in Homer, New York. He moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin Territory, in 1836 and had a farm in Oak Creek. He served in the first Wisconsin Constitutional Convention in 1846 and the last Wisconsin Territorial Legislature in 1847-1848, and represented southern Milwaukee County in the Wisconsin State Senate during […]
Founder Warren Chase was a pioneer, spiritualist, social reformer and politician. He was born Jan. 5, 1813, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. In Southport (now Kenosha), Wisconsin, he became involved with spiritualism and the theories of the French social philosopher Charles Fourier. In 1844, he led a small party of pioneers to 800 acres of land […]
Class of 1867: First graduating class Harriet Hemans Brown was one of the four members of the first graduation class of 1867 at Ripon College. She was born Oct. 21, 1840, in South Shaftsbury, Vermont, and came to Wisconsin in 1846, Coming from her home in Lamartine, Wisconsin, she studied in the scientific course at […]
Founder Alvan Earle Bovay was a founder of both Ripon College in 1851 and the newly established Republican Party in 1854. He was born July 12, 1818, in Adams, Jefferson County, New York, where David Mapes also was living at the time, although it is not known if they knew each other there. Bovay graduated […]
Fourth president 1901-1909 He was a Presbyterian clergyman and teacher of psychology and was instrumental in designing and implementing a college curriculum at Ripon for the 20th century. Preparatory classes were greatly reduced and the educational program expanded to include most subjects comprising a modern liberal arts curriculum. The college expanded with the installation of […]