Trinity College in the Twentieth Century: A History, the first book on the history of the College to be published in more than 30 years, is now available. The book is lively and features more than 350 illustrations in its 500-plus pages. The book is being offered at a special introductory price of $40.00 (plus $5.00 s/h). Copies may be ordered by clicking here.

From modest beginnings in the rented basement of a Hartford church, Trinity has become one of the nation's leading independent liberal arts colleges.

The College was founded in May of 1823 as Washington College (the name was changed in 1845). It was only the second college in Connecticut, and its founding climaxed a thirty-five-year struggle by the state's Episcopalians to break the educational monopoly of Congregationalist-controlled Yale. In granting the Charter, the Connecticut General Assembly reflected the same forces of religious diversity and toleration that had caused it to disestablish Congregationalism as the official state church five years earlier. Appropriately, the Charter prohibited any religious test from being imposed on any student, faculty member or other member of the College.

The Trustees' decision to locate the College in Hartford, instead of New Haven or Middletown, resulted from the greater generosity of Hartford residents in pledging support for the fledgling institution. In addition to substantial monetary gifts from such prominent merchants as Charles Sigourney and Samuel Tudor, Jr., offers of assistance came from scores of laborers, artisans and shopkeepers. Typical were the pledges of Samuel Allen, a stonemason, to provide ten dollars worth of labor and of James M. Goodwin to supply one hundred fifty dollars worth of groceries. Such strong support from the Hartford community has continued throughout Trinity's history.

Present when classes opened on September 23, 1824 were nine students: six freshmen, one sophomore, one senior and one young man who was not ranked. The faculty numbered six: the President, Bishop Thomas C. Brownell, who taught Natural and Moral Philosophy; a Tutor in Greek and Latin; and Professors of Belles Lettres and Oratory, Agriculture and Political Economy, Chemistry and Mineralogy, and Botany. The presence of the two latter professors attests that Trinity, unlike many early 19th-century colleges, was committed to the natural sciences as well as the classical curriculum. This commitment has characterized the College to the present day.

A year after opening, Trinity moved to its first campus: two Greek Revival-style buildings on an elevated tract of land now occupied by the State Capitol. Within a few years the student body had grown to nearly one hundred, a size that it rarely exceeded until the 20th century.

Undergraduate life was arduous during the College's early history: students arose for prayers at 6 a.m. (5:30 during the summer semester), and classes began at 6:30. Because most students entered the College at age fifteen or sixteen, the faculty attempted strictly to regulate their behavior. Students were forbidden to gamble, to drink intoxicating beverages, to throw objects from the windows of College buildings, to engage in any sort of merrymaking without faculty permission, and so forth. One regulation prohibited students from keeping a sword in their rooms--a reflection, perhaps, of the fact that the pre-Civil War student body included many "chivalrous" young men from the Southern states. Of course, the regulations were not always scrupulously observed, and the historian of Trinity, Professor Emeritus Glenn Weaver, has found several instances of riotous student behavior. On one occasion in the late 1820s, the students barricaded themselves within the College, forcing President Brownell to batter down the door with a fence post. A favorite end-of-semester practice was to conduct a ritual burning of the textbook used in some required course which students had found especially onerous. (The course in "Conic Sections" was often singled out for this treatment.)

In 1872 Trinity took an important step toward the future when it sold the "College Hill" campus to the City of Hartford to provide a site for a new State Capitol. Six years later, the College moved to its present location. Bounded on the west by an escarpment and on the east by gently sloping fields, the new site had been known in the 18th century as Gallows Hill. (Local legend has it that several Tories were hanged here during the Revolution.) The Trustees chose William Burges, the distinguished English architect, to design the new campus. Influenced by the architecture of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges, Burges proposed an elaborate scheme of four enclosed quadrangles extending north and south from a massive Gothic chapel. Financial and other considerations made it impossible to implement most of Burges' plan, but Jarvis and Seabury Halls (completed in 1878) and Northam Towers (1881) bear his distinctive stamp. Generally viewed as the earliest examples of "collegiate Gothic" in the United States, these buildings were to exert an important influence on academic architecture for several decades to come. Together with the imposing Gothic chapel completed in 1932, they are a compelling reminder of the medieval origins of collegiate institutions.

The late 19th century was a seminal period in the history of American higher education: not only did the modern university begin to emerge, but many undergraduate colleges sought to recast their curricula and institutional practices in forms more appropriate to a rapidly industrializing society. The forces of change were seen at Trinity in the increased proportion of Ph.D.s on the faculty, the introduction of more electives into the curriculum, the addition of a program in biology, the strengthening of the other natural sciences, and the doubling of the number of library holdings. There was also talk of transforming Trinity into a university. But as had been true of earlier proposals to establish schools of medicine, law and theology, nothing came of this plan. Thus the College's commitment to undergraduate liberal arts education was reaffirmed.

Another significant development in the late 19th century was the movement to loosen Trinity's traditional ties with the Episcopal Church. Although never a "church school," Trinity was closely linked with the Diocese of Connecticut, particularly after 1849 when the Bishop of Connecticut was made ex officio Chancellor of the College. The Charter was amended in 1889 to end this practice, an important step in the secularization of the College. Secularization proceeded apace in the 20th century, and today a substantial majority of undergraduates comes from non-Episcopalian traditions. Nonetheless, the College still values its Episcopal heritage, and such individual parishes as Trinity Church, New York City and Christ Church, Hartford continue to provide valuable support.

The achievements of the 1880s and '90s notwithstanding, difficulties marked the early years of the new century, in part because of the notoriety caused in 1899 by the faculty's decision to suspend the entire sophomore class for six weeks as punishment for the brutal hazing of freshmen. Enrollments declined sharply (only six students graduated in the Class of 1904), and the College began to look increasingly to the Hartford area for many of its undergraduates. For a while it seemed that Trinity's destiny might be strictly regional. In the late 1920s, however, the College began to reestablish itself as a national institution. In 1929, the Trustees fixed five hundred as the ideal size of the student body and directed that applicants be sought from all parts of the country. Admissions standards were raised and financial aid expanded.

Although the Great Depression entailed severe hardships for many colleges, the 1930s were years of growth for Trinity. The faculty expanded steadily and the student body surpassed five hundred in 1936. Four residence halls were added, as well as the Clement Chemistry Building and the Chapel.

Rapid growth continued after World War II. The student body has now attained a plateau of approximately eighteen hundred and the number of faculty exceeds two hundred. An architecturally eclectic collection of buildings has gone up; among the more noteworthy are the Library, Downes Memorial Clock Tower, Mather Campus Center, McCook Hall, the Austin Arts Center, the Albert C. Jacobs Life Sciences Center, the George M. Ferris Athletic Center, the Koeppel Student Center, several new dormitories, and a computer science-engineering-mathematics facility that opened in January 1991. In 1997, Trinity began an extensive campus revitalization project to create a campus that better supports Trinity's educational mission and enriches the lives of all who study and work here. Because of the complexity and scope of this revitalization effort, the plan will be implemented in three successive phases over a span of 20 years. Each phase of the plan coordinates a comprehensive set of institutional goals addressing all aspects of the Trinity undergraduate experience in its curricular, residential, administrative, athletic, and technological dimensions. Each phase works incrementally toward a transformation of the campus in pursuit of Trinity's long-range educational vision. Perhaps most importantly, the plan will preserve the College's cherished architectural legacy while creating a campus for the 21st century

Of course, a college is much more than enrollment statistics, or faculty size, or bricks and mortar. In an age of constant social and intellectual transformation, a college must be a living community that can respond imaginatively to changing circumstances, while preserving pertinent parts of its heritage. Thus, innovation, tempered by a respect for the past, has been the hallmark of Trinity's recent history. Curricular reforms have reinvigorated the liberal arts tradition by restating it in terms which speak to the concerns of men and women whose lives and careers will continue well into the 21st century. As undergraduates have manifested greater personal maturity, the College has abandoned all remnants of paternalism in favor of treating them as responsible adults. Students have been given an enlarged voice in institutional decision-making and governance through the addition of their elected representatives to various faculty committees.

In 1968, Trinity made a commitment to the admission, with financial aid when needed, of a substantially larger number of black and other minority students. Less than a year later, the Trustees voted to admit women as undergraduates for the first time in the College's history. For the first five years of coeducation, male enrollment was held at a minimum of one thousand. But in January 1974, the Trustees abolished this guideline, so that henceforth sex would not be a criterion of admission any more than race, religion or national origin are. In September 1984, Trinity passed a milestone when it enrolled the first freshman class in its history in which women outnumbered men. Coincident with these developments, the College has acted to increase the number of women and minority group members on the faculty and in the administration. Approximately two hundred older, non-resident students also pursue the Trinity bachelor's degree through the Individualized Degree Program, established in the early 1970s.

Throughout the 1980s and into the '90s, Trinity continued to adjust its practices and programs in accordance with changing academic values and student needs. The nature and quality of social and extracurricular life were a subject of lively discussion. Faculty members involved themselves even more vigorously than before in research and publication, but there was no lessening of the traditional emphasis on excellence in teaching. In fact, it was recognized that the two activities are closely linked: serious commitment to scholarship usually betokens the kind of intellectual vitality that is essential to effective classroom instruction. Moreover, a college of Trinity's stature believes it is obligated not only to convey existing knowledge to students but also to be energetically engaged in the pursuit of new knowledge.

In the curricular area a number of important steps were taken. The Faculty voted, for example, to approve new majors in Theater and Dance, Computer Science, Neuroscience, and Public Policy Studies. It also established a Program in Women's Studies to ensure that scholarship by and about women is diffused throughout the curriculum, and in 1992 created a major in Women's Studies. The program of student internships, begun in the late 1960s, was greatly expanded. The latter program took advantage of Trinity's urban location by placing students in state and local government offices, business and financial institutions, social agencies, museums, and the like. Through internships undergraduates integrate practical field work with academic study under the supervision of a faculty member, thereby testing theoretical and conceptual perspectives at the same time exploring possible career interests. An urban curricular initiative is now being implemented to capitalize on the fact that Trinity is one of the nation's few liberal arts colleges set in the heart of a city; and greater attention is being given to international and global issues.

The College's "open" curriculum, adopted in 1969, was the subject of growing debate as the 1980s advanced. In 1983, 1984 and again in 1985, faculty committees put forward detailed plans for curricular innovation, including the establishment of non-major requirements. Though they differed in important particulars, these plans shared a concern for writing and quantitative skills, breadth of study, and interdisciplinary study. Early in 1986 the Faculty gave final approval to a package of curricular reforms that took effect with the class entering in the fall of 1988. These included requirements in writing and mathematical proficiency, and the integration of knowledge across at least three disciplines. (The latter requirement was discontinued in 1997, but the curriculum continues to have a distinct interdisciplinary flavor.) In the spring of 1987, the faculty voted to supplement these measures with a modest distribution requirement designed to ensure suitable breadth in every student's program of study.

Under new presidential leadership, the College began in 1995 to devote greatly increased attention to the needs of the surrounding neighborhoods, which were troubled by many of the social and economic problems typical of late-20th-century American cities. In partnership with the nearby Hartford Hospital, Connecticut Children's Medical Center, Institute of Living, and Connecticut Public Television and Radio and with strong government support at the municipal, state, and federal levels, Trinity launched a multifaceted neighborhood revitalization initiative that has attracted national attention and received backing from the business community and major foundations. The initiative is designed to enhance educational and home-ownership opportunities for local residents, and to generate new economic activity in a 15-square-block area adjacent to the campus. Central to the initiative is the "Learning Corridor," which includes a public, Montessori-style elementary school, a new neighborhood middle school, a math-science-art high school resource center to serve suburban as well as Hartford young people and teachers, a center for families and child care, the first Boys & Girls Club in the country to be located at a college, and a Health and Technology Center. Trinity students have numerous opportunities to engage in volunteer work, internships, and research projects in conjunction with these institutions and other elements of the neighborhood initiative, as will members of the faculty. The "Learning Corridor" opened its campus to students in the fall of 2000.

Amidst continuing change, Trinity's commitment to liberal education remains steadfast. The College believes that by maintaining a rigorous curriculum grounded in the liberal arts and sciences it can most effectively help its students discover their strengths, develop their individual potential, and prepare themselves for lives that are both personally satisfying and valuable to others. With this mission clearly in view, the institution moves confidently toward a new century.