Origins of off-campus study

Today, the university is “ranked first by the Institute of International Education in percentage of students participating in mid-length off-campus study programs,” and “typically ranks among the top 10 baccalaureate institutions for the number of students studying abroad.”¹

How did such a robust set of offerings come about?

Early organizations of ministerial students such as the Philomathesian Society, the Eastern Association, and the Society for Inquiry focused their activities on studying the language and culture of Burma. The Hamilton Baptist and Theological Institution’s first graduate, Jonathan Wade ’22, established a famous mission there, and four students from the institution’s early classes followed Wade to Burma. Those students corresponded with groups on campus, and later returned to Hamilton, bringing Burmese students with them to study in Hamilton.

Examples of similar correspondence date to the late 19th century, when missionary alumni wrote to members of the Society for Inquiry back on campus.

While the Baptist Education Society of the State of New York, Colgate’s progenitor, didn’t label the students’ endeavors as “off-campus study,” their travel and writing qualify among the earliest examples of the activities that students would pursue on study groups in the years ahead. Ultimately, study groups would proliferate and become one of Colgate’s signature features.

In his sesquicentennial history of Colgate, the late professor and archivist Howard Williams ’30 wrote² that the university in 1905 began offering a study group in New York City for advanced seminary students. The university’s name had been changed to Colgate by then and — while it was increasingly secular — it still incorporated a seminary. Seminary students could elect to “spend a term in New York City under the instruction of Edward Judson, minister of the Judson Memorial Baptist Church in Washington Square,” Williams wrote. Judson, who had taught briefly in Hamilton, introduced the students to the practical experiences of ministering to the needs of a metropolitan congregation.

Starting 30 years later, Colgate’s first semester-long program in Washington in 1935 is generally credited as the beginning of the university’s modern study group movement. The Colgate Scene marked the 75th anniversary of the Washington Study Group with an article in 2010 that included quotes from many alumni and directors of the program.

Among them, Professor Paul Jacobsen, who led the early groups and described the goal of the program in the 1937 Journal of Higher Education: “The fundamental purpose of this off-campus study was to give the student an opportunity to see the government at work — to learn how it operates by watching ‘the wheels go round’ from vantage points of intimate contact and association with the officials.”³

Except for a five-year hiatus during World War II, the Washington Study Group has been offered annually since its founding, and while some of the details have changed, the goal has remained remarkably consistent. The late political science professor Joseph Wagner led the group in the late 1980s. He described the program as having “a liberal arts emphasis. We engage students in seeing the world not just as practical problems that need solutions, but as intellectual puzzles about what makes government work.”⁴

Widely regarded as the first program of its kind in Washington, the Colgate group was featured in national press, including the New York Times and Chicago Tribune.⁵ The Times in its story on October 19, 1947, referred to the study group as “Colgate’s mythical Capitol Hill Campus.”⁶

Colgate’s first international study group began in 1958 with seed funding from the U.S. Department of State through its Office of Educational and Cultural Affairs.⁷ Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures James Dickinson, Class of 1939, led that inaugural group to Argentina.

The success of programs in Washington and Argentina soon led to the development of additional study groups. The economics department inaugurated its group in London in 1962; the history and English departments first offered a combined group in London in 1966, which later expanded to two separate groups. Other departments added groups in London in the ensuing years. The Romance languages and literatures department began its popular group in Dijon, France, in 1966.⁸

A study group in Asia (1966) led to increasing enrollments in the Asian Studies Program on campus; two students from Wells College joined the 1970 South Asia Study Group and became the first women to participate in a Colgate study group. The music department’s study group to India, begun in 1974, was led for years by Professor William Skelton.⁹

A study group at an Israeli kibbutz began in 1972. During the Yom Kippur War of 1973, college officials were advised by the State Department that it was safer to have students remain on the kibbutz than to attempt to fly home.¹⁰

In the decades that have followed, the scope and reach of study groups — both domestic and international — have continued to expand. International offerings have expanded to locations as diverse as Wollongong, Australia; Nsukka, Nigeria; Sri Lanka; and countries in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the West Indies, as well as China, Japan, Korea, and, most recently, Singapore. Domestic study groups, meanwhile, have enabled Colgate students to immerse themselves in media in Los Angeles; Native American history and culture in Santa Fe; and the work of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda.

Endnotes

Images in Order of Appearance

By James Leach

Notes & Sources

What's in a Name?

Early Student Groups

Jonathan Wade and Eugenio Kincade