Mennonite Weekly Review

On my desk is A School on the Prairie: A Centennial History of Hesston College, 1909-2009, by John E. Sharp, published by Cascadia Publishing, co-published by Herald Press, 2009, 503 pages.

Rachel Waltner Goossen teaches history at Washburn University in Topeka, Kan.

Known today as a two-year liberal arts college with programs in nursing and aviation, Hesston College began in 1909 as a high school-level academy on 80 acres of donated land in south central Kansas. Attracting Mennonite students from Kansas, Colorado and Missouri with an initial teaching staff of four and a tuition/room-and-board price of $135 per year, the school’s founders were dedicated to providing a “new school in the West” for Mennonite youth.

From the beginning, the school was inseparable from its Mennonite cultural and religious roots. Its founders were Swiss Mennonites whose families had come 30 years earlier from Pennsylvania to establish farms in central Kansas a decade after the federal removal of Osage and other tribal groups.

Sharp tells of immigrant Mennonites embracing the opportunities of newly available land while he also conveys regret for their complicity in unjust policies that favored white settlers over native people with long-held attachment to the land.

By the early 20th century, the Mennonite Board of Education, which was already overseeing Goshen College in Indiana, supported developing an academy with liberal arts and Bible offerings that would draw young people from western states. Bethel College, seven miles southeast of Hesston and affiliated with the General Conference Mennonite Church, was already established. But it was scarcely a factor in the decision to locate another Mennonite school in Harvey County, given the cultural forces then dividing the Swiss Mennonites from the Dutch-Prussian-Russian and Swiss Volhynian Mennonite supporters of Bethel.

Residents of nearby communities — Harper, Protection, Pea­body, Canton and Trousdale — hoped their towns might become the site for the new institution. But in 1908 the Mennonite Board of Education’s “Western School Committee” selected Hesston, population 150. One year later, the school opened with 21 students, in what Sharp terms “an inauspicious, but celebrated, beginning.” Within months a tornado would hit the main building and surrounding community, causing considerable damage and providing a storyline of triumph over adversity that would carry the Hesston school into its first decade and, ultimately, its first century.

A School on the Prairie celebrates the early 20th-century Mennonite intellectuals who moved through Hesston as students, faculty, or both (Harold Bender, Edward Yoder, Guy Hersh­berger); pioneering relief workers (for example, Menno Shellenberger, 24-year-old volunteer to Turkey who succumbed to smallpox); and longtime Hesston pillars whose commitment to the school was legendary (Mary Mill­er, Milo Kauffman and others). Church connectedness would be a mainstay of the school. Its founding in 1909 coincided with the establishment of a new congregation, Hesston Mennonite, with which it would share facilities for decades to come.

This volume, organized by decade, focuses on personal stories, leadership and the college’s efforts to persevere through controversies and hard times. For example, Sharp offers a detailed and clear-eyed accounting of Hess­ton’s first president, D.H. Bender, whose integrity and calm leadership in facing sustained threats from angry agitators during the First World War is evident; yet whose later sexual abuse of his daughter led to family tragedy and institutional crisis.

Sharp notes that by the 1920s, when the school had developed into a postsecondary college, “it had carefully placed itself in the Mennonite world as safe theologically, conservative ideologically and intensely loyal to the church with a mission of training leaders.”

Predictably, this conservative orthodoxy would result in discriminatory practices toward women employees and students over the next decades. Yet both Hesston’s women and men pushed for a loosening of cultural restrictions in policies regarding dress, athletics and student life, and by the last third of the 20th century the Mennonite school had set aside many of its earlier behavioral prohibitions.

A School on the Prairie also emphasizes service. Over the years, students have taken opportunities offered by Civilian Public Service, 1-W and Pax service, and more recently the college’s Disaster Management program, begun in 2005 in cooperation with Mennonite Disaster Service. Sharp also highlights the school’s commitment to a globally oriented campus, with at least 10 percent of its student body from outside the United States.

Finally, many readers will appreciate the book’s explanation of the campus flag controversies that flared up during the First World War, Vietnam era and, most recently, the post-9/11 climate. This commemorative volume places the school’s century-long past in its geographic, religious and even political contexts.

Rachel Waltner Goossen teaches history at Washburn University in Topeka, Kan.