History
In 1831, Westbrook Seminary was established by the Kennebec Association of Universalists in Westbrook, Maine. The original 8-acre property was a gift from Zachariah Stevens, for whom Steven's Plains and Stevens Avenue are named, and Oliver Buckley. The seminary building, now called Alumni Hall, was not finished until 1834, and the first classes were finally held after its completion. The four tracks of study included English, scientific, ladies' classical, and preparatory. It was co-educational, but women in the scientific or ladies' classical tracks received unique "laureate of arts" and "laureate of science" degrees upon completion.
Westbrook became an all-female institution when the last co-educational class graduated in 1925, and gradually became a junior college, as well, and dropped all preparatory work by 1933. During this time, it seems to have been named Westbrook Junior College. The women's junior-college plan had been proposed by president Clarence Quimby in 1914, but was rejected, and he later resigned in 1920. The college continued to grow through the 1970s, and the name was changed to Westbrook College. It became co-educational again in 1973, after the federal government stopped providing funds to gender-discriminating institutions.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Westbrook made a commitment to a four-year liberal arts college education, but was hit hard by declining enrollment at the same time. By the mid-1990s, the college was seeking to close and merge with another institution, and finally did so with the University of New England in 1996. In an odd twist, the merger actually took place under the Westbrook charter, technically making the new institution Westbook College and changing its name to University of New England.
Read more about this topic: Westbrook College
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“It would be naive to think that peace and justice can be achieved easily. No set of rules or study of history will automatically resolve the problems.... However, with faith and perseverance,... complex problems in the past have been resolved in our search for justice and peace. They can be resolved in the future, provided, of course, that we can think of five new ways to measure the height of a tall building by using a barometer.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“We said that the history of mankind depicts man; in the same way one can maintain that the history of science is science itself.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)