Susan Cantrell, a Wabash College Public Affairs senior writer, recently renewed an old tradition. She is now writing a twice-a-month column for The Paper of Montgomery County. The column, Watching Wabash, is inspired by a long time newspaper column published until recent years.
When the freshmen arrive on the Wabash campus for their orientation in just a few weeks, some of them will already be head-over-heels in love with the place. They may have very little understanding of the rigorous academic standards they will be asked to meet or what life in a college dorm is like, but they don’t really care.
You see, they are in love. And they will be as long as they live. Being 17 and 18-year-old young men, they will never tell you that now, but later, perhaps very much later, say when they are 60 or so, they will gladly tell you that they loved Wabash from the moment they first saw it. "It just looks like a college is supposed to look," is a frequent explanation. "It just felt right walking around campus," is another response. Okay, for guys with a Wabash education they can’t come up with very articulate explanations, but then, who among us can, when speaking of something very dear to us?
What engages them at first are all those red brick buildings with white trim standing guard around the oval mall. They’re not so tall as to be intimidating; in fact, they have a welcoming air about them. They are surrounded by huge old trees that have watched over thousands of young men hurrying to breakfast or to class, not to mention the excitement of Commencement day.
At one end of the mall is the beautiful Chapel, perfect in its simplicity and the heart of the campus. It is the site of the sacred events in the life of Wabash College: sometimes funerals for faculty members and trustees are held there; lots of Wabash men have been married there. The College conducts campus-wide pep rallies before the annual Wabash-DePauw Monon Bell game in the Chapel, a very important part of the school year; guest speakers and artists take the stage there; and when there needs to be a campus-wide discussion it is held there.
At the north end of the Mall, near Wabash Avenue, sit three small white houses that now serve as office buildings. One of them, Forest Hall, was built in 1833 as the first Wabash College classroom and dorm. The other two, built in 1836, were homes for the first two professors. The Caleb Mills House later served as home for the Wabash president and his family; the other was a home to professors.
On around the Mall to the east sits the large Center Hall, so named because for many years it literally was the center of the College, housing classrooms, offices, exhibit halls, and the chapel. At each wing of the building, as well as in the center, are tall, elegant staircases that loom large in the memory of Wabash men, at least Wabash men of the last century or so. The old wooden stairs have been walked on and run up so many thousands of times by energetic students that the old boards are warped by use. The stairs make a friendly creaking sound as you walk up or down that reminds a guy he’s not the first student ever late for class or the first ever to have aced a test. Their sound tells students they have done their job for so many, many years he surely can do his just one more semester. Many young Wabash men know their fathers, uncles, and grandfathers hurried up and down the same stairs and find strength in that knowledge.
The buildings of Wabash don’t look much like Indiana, by which I mean they are not made of limestone in a sort of prairie style architecture. Think of the campuses of Purdue and Indiana University, then contrast Wabash with its buildings of red brick and white columns. They are what make the prospective students think Wabash looks "like a college ought to look."
Wabash doesn’t look like Oxford or Cambridge in England, if they are the models for what colleges are supposed to look like, but it does bear resemblance to the fine old colleges of New England, which is no surprise when you know that its first faculty members, the men who built the white houses, came to the Midwest from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.
Young men looking at colleges aren’t thinking about that kind of historical information. They want to find someplace comfortable, a place where they can be part of the community, and feel at home for a few years.
Naturally, all who work at Wabash like to believe that students choose the College for the excellent reputation it enjoys nationally because of the high quality of education the faculty members offer, for the opportunity they will have to participate in so many different kinds of activities, including travel abroad.
In fact, most of them do select Wabash on the basis of important criteria, but, admit or not, we know there’s something special about the guys who choose Wabash because they fell in love at first sight, because "it just feels right." Truth be told, that’s how most of us chose it, too, and our hunch was absolutely right.
Cantrell, a Wabash College Public Affairs department senior writer, writes this twice-a-month column for the Paper of Montgomery County.
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