Walla Walla University

Walla Walla University is a Seventh-day Adventist institution of higher education founded in 1892. Its headquarters is located on an 83-acre campus in the Walla Walla Valley in southeastern Washington state. The university also operates three satellite campuses, including a School of Nursing in Portland, Oregon, a marine biology station near Anacortes, Washington, and a School of Social Work and Sociology graduate campus in Billings, Montana. In 2020-2021 it enrolled 1,601 undergraduate and graduate students in sixty-one bachelor’s degree majors and concentrations, ten associate degree programs, twelve pre-professional areas, nine master’s degree fields, and one doctoral program.

Founding

The school opened as Walla Walla College on December 7, 1892, and it marked an ambitious new undertaking by the 1,500 Seventh-day Adventists in the Pacific Northwest.¹ The first Adventists moved to the region in 1869. The first Adventist church was established in 1874 at Walla Walla, an attractive destination in southeast Washington Territory for the wagon trains that populated the area. In 1876 a second congregation formed in nearby Milton, Oregon, and soon churches also appeared in the Palouse farming country in eastern Washington as well as in Portland and throughout the Willamette Valley of Oregon.

Elementary schools were soon established in those early areas of Adventist settlement, and by 1888 the church also operated high school-level academies in Milton and Portland. Students desiring a Seventh-day Adventist college education had to travel a long way, to Battle Creek College (now Andrews University, established 1874) in Michigan, Healdsburg College (now Pacific Union College, established 1882) in northern California, or Union College (established 1891) in Nebraska.

Adventists in both Portland and Milton dreamed of developing their academies into colleges, but the church members could not support two such institutions. In 1890 Ellen White, the sole surviving co-founder of Seventh-day Adventism, intervened by advising the Portland flock to work together with Milton Adventists rather than compete with them. “I would feel sad indeed to see two schools established,” she wrote, “[as] it is so contrary to the light which God has been pleased to give me. . . you want to make [your school] the best that both conferences [North Pacific and Upper Columbia], with their united means and talent, shall be able to secure.”² Following that advice, the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists’ education secretary, W. W. Prescott, urged church members in the region to close both academies and construct a “union” school that could accommodate students from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Alaska Territory. The vicinity of Milton was deemed most central for the membership population, but the Milton Academy site was too small for expansion. The local conference, Upper Columbia, began searching for an alternate site.

Following a model recently developed at Union College, church officials sought a community that would partner with Adventists by giving funds and land to the college project, which in turn would raise land values in the area and stimulate the regional economy. Three Washington cities made offers–Yakima, Spokane, and Walla Walla, but the Walla Walla bid was by far the most promising: the donation of forty acres of land for the campus by the Walla Walla mayor, Nelson G. Blalock, MD, and additional donations of land and funds from area businessmen worth $14,000. The catch—the church would need to contribute $25,000 and, if the college closed within twenty-five years, the Walla Walla community money must be refunded.

As Adventists migrated from Milton and elsewhere to the college site, they determined that the town growing up around the campus would be named College Place. The first president of Walla Walla College was W. W. Prescott of the General Conference, although he spent little time there since he was simultaneously president of Battle Creek College and Union College. He left “principal” Edward A. Sutherland, 27, in charge, and Sutherland became president in 1894. The Upper Columbia Conference president, Henry W. Decker, laid the cornerstone for the new college building in May 1892. College faculty began recruiting students, and the first college catalog committed the institution “to develop and train every part of the being—physical, mental, [and] moral.” Recruiters promised a modern campus building with central heating and indoor plumbing, amenities that most Adventist farm families did not enjoy at home.

Unfortunately, when classes began on December 7, 1892, the building was unfinished, unheated, and unelectrified. The college matron improvised a cold breakfast, as the cookstove refused to work. Ninety-one students from elementary through college age, including fifty-eight college students, began the school year that snowy morning. The sole campus building housed most of them and the faculty, as well as the classrooms, cafeteria, library, chapel, and gymnasium.

When students complained to the Seventh-day Adventist General Conference president, O. A. Olsen, that the building’s promised hot and cold running water had failed to materialize, he referred them to page 351 of Man the Masterpiece by the Adventist physician John Harvey Kellogg, M.D.: “[there] you will find a mode of bath prescribed which does not require very expensive fixtures. . .‘The sponge, or hand bath, is the simplest and most useful mode of applying water to the surface of the body. . .A great quantity of water is not required; a few quarts is a plenty, and a pint will answer admirably in an emergency’.”³ College faculty also felt the pinch of privation that first year, as there were no funds to pay their salaries for the spring term’s final weeks: “You will, no doubt, be glad to contribute your part to the new institution,” Principal Sutherland assured them.⁴

Early Challenges

The financial panic of 1893 and a crop failure in the Pacific Northwest nearly foundered the new college, and those financial difficulties created a crippling operating debt for decades. At times only the specter of repayment of the founding grant from the citizens of Walla Walla kept the school’s doors open. However, it was able to incorporate in 1901, which was a first step toward becoming a stable institution.

Walla Walla College held its first commencement in 1896 for the three students who had completed the prescribed postsecondary course of study, and it awarded its first baccalaureate degrees in 1909. In 1897 the Greek teacher, Lydia Sutherland Droll, further strengthened the college’s scholastic foundation by planting a Mountain Ash tree on campus to memorialize a commitment to ancient languages, the basis of a liberal arts education in the nineteenth century. Today Walla Walla University is described as a comprehensive institution with a liberal arts soul, and Droll’s early tradition is commemorated in the name of the college yearbook, the Mountain Ash, and in the choice of the tree’s hues of green and orange as the school colors.

The college expanded its curriculum in the early 1900s to offer course work in German, Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian to accommodate students whose families had recently emigrated to the United States.

True to form, significant early challenges persisted. In the fall of 1902, the campus experienced a typhoid epidemic, and several students died. Another calamity befell the community in late 1918, when the worldwide flu pandemic shut down the school twice and took the lives of three students.⁵

Accreditation

From its beginning years the college was conflicted about its educational mission: should it emphasize short courses and rush graduates out into the field to do missionary work, or should it promote baccalaureate degrees? How could higher education also include practical training? For several years, all faculty members taught a trade in addition to their academic courses, including floriculture, broom-making, tentmaking, blacksmithing, and glove-making. While these practices were short-lived, Walla Walla College would operate many industries to provide student employment, and the last such enterprise, the College Dairy, operated until the 1990s.

Facing many challenges and still saddled with the initial operating debt, college officials considered selling off some of the school’s property to keep it afloat. In 1905 they sought advice from Ellen White, who had traveled to Walla Walla twice before the college was founded and had visited the campus briefly in 1901. Responding to rumors that the campus might be sold to the Mormon church, she insisted that the reports must be squelched. Further, the school’s leaders should not sell property but use it to raise cash crops, and the college should re-purchase property that had been sold. Their work should advance, not retreat. “Do not be discouraged if you do not gain immediate success,” she instructed, “but work for it, pray for it, and believe you will obtain it.”⁶

The next school year, 1905-1906, a new president, M. L. Cady, turned the school around, nearly doubling enrollment in three years and firmly committing the college to a baccalaureate degree path. The college celebrated the full repayment of its institutional debt in 1909.

As Walla Walla College continued to develop its identity, academic accreditation became an issue. Although Ellen White had urged the denomination to gain full accreditation for its medical school at Loma Linda, California, church leaders did not immediately grasp that this action would necessitate accreditation for high schools and undergraduate colleges. In fact, the denomination remained ambivalent about accreditation for many years. In the 1920s church leaders seemed inclined to keep most institutions at the junior college level, intending to accredit just two or three four-year institutions.

To be permanently designated a junior college would have been inadequate for the needs of Adventist students in the Pacific Northwest. In 1923 the state of Washington approved Walla Walla College’s three-year normal training program for future teachers, and the following year it was accredited as a junior college. Under President William Landeen's leadership, it achieved denominational accreditation and senior college accreditation from the Northwest Association of Secondary and Higher Schools in 1933. At that time, Walla Walla College was the largest Seventh-day Adventist college with an enrollment of 450 students.

Professional Schools and Graduate Programs

The first professional entity was the School of Theology, developed in 1918 as a divinity school whose students would be exempt from the draft in World War I. During the summers of 1934, 1935, and 1936, WWC faculty, along with faculty from other Adventist colleges, taught graduate theology courses on the Pacific Union College campus for the Advanced Bible School, a forerunner of the Seventh-day Adventist theological seminary at Potomac University and then at Andrews University.

Other professional schools followed: during the tenure of George Bowers, the only scientist president in the university’s history, the School of Nursing and the Edward F. Cross School of Engineering opened in 1947. Three other schools were formed from existing departments in 1999: the School of Education, the School of Business, and the Wilma Hepker School of Social Work. Each of these schools maintains accreditation through their respective professional accreditation organizations.

The first graduate program was a Master of Science in biology, established in 1948 and focused on marine biology research conducted near Anacortes on the Puget Sound. A permanent research station was developed there in 1954. Master’s degrees in education, psychology, social work, engineering, and an interdisciplinary degree in cinema, religion, and worldview followed. The university awarded its first Doctor of Social Work degrees in 2022.

The Great Depression and World War II

Although enrollment fluctuated during the college’s early decades, it managed to stabilize during the early years of the Great Depression because the institution shifted from the semester to the quarter system, thus making it possible for students to attend classes for six months (two quarters) and to work for six months.

Following national trends, Walla Walla College’s enrollment dropped during World War II as many young men, who had significantly outnumbered women on campus before the war, entered military service. By 1945 the college enrolled two and a half times as many women as men. As men returned to campus when the war ended, enrollment doubled between 1945 and 1947, surpassing the 1,000-mark for the first time.

During the World War II era, some faculty members were drawn into government service: School of Theology dean Vernon Hendershot spent the war in San Francisco as the government’s leading expert in Malay propaganda, and physics professor George Kretschmar relocated to New Jersey to participate in top-secret radar research. Walla Walla College alumnus and former president William Landeen, an Army major, directed the denazification of German K-12 schools in the years immediately after the war ended.

Postwar Growth

Another natural and extended period of growth took place as Baby Boomers began to enter college in 1964; enrollment peaked at over 2,000 during the 1979-1980 school year under N. Clifford Sorenson’s presidency.

In the 1970s, during the presidential tenure of Robert Reynolds, Walla Walla College initiated what became an extended, sporadic discussion of a name change to Walla Walla University, since the school was identified as a comprehensive, master’s-level university according to the Carnegie Classifications of the American Council on Education. Reynolds also introduced the concept of shared governance, relying on faculty governance committees to advise the administration in many areas and incorporating student leaders into key committees.

Mission and Vision

In the late 1990s, while W. G. Nelson was president, the shared governance system intensively studied the school’s mission statement and developed a statement of vision and philosophy, first published in the 2001-2002 bulletin. It continues to articulate the identity of Walla Walla University:

Vision

A community of faith and discovery committed to the following core values:

Excellence in thought

Generosity in service

Beauty in expression

Faith in God

Philosophy

Walla Walla University is founded on Christian teachings and values as understood and appreciated by the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Central to these teachings is the belief that every person is created in the image of God as a being of inestimable value and worth, imbued with powers of intelligence, stewardship, and creativity akin to those of the Creator. Walla Walla University, therefore, seeks in its mission to foster the unique gifts of every individual within this Christian community of faith and discovery. Committed to excellence in thought, the University seeks to impart a broad knowledge of the arts, sciences, and professions by careful instruction and open inquiry at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Recognizing that God is the source of all truth, goodness, and beauty, the University seeks to convey to students a wisdom that translates academic achievement into responsible citizenship, generous service, a deep respect for the beauty in God’s creation, and the promise of re-creation through Jesus Christ.

Commitment to Service

While the updated mission statement was created in the twenty-first century, it captured the values that had formed Walla Walla University from the beginning. “Service” to the world, particularly in foreign missions, was a consistent theme early on, and in 1918 the graduating class installed the “Gateway to Service” brick pillars on campus, which remain alongside College Avenue and are commemorated in the call letters of the Walla Walla University radio station, KGTS.

Many students prepared for mission service during the early twentieth century, and they were consistently advised by veteran missionaries to strive for academic excellence and to complete a full baccalaureate degree in order to handle the rigors of the mission field. By 1930, 248 Walla Walla College graduates had entered overseas mission service. During and after World War II, Malay and Chinese languages were taught on campus to prepare future missionaries.

More recently, as needs in mission fields have changed, “service” at Walla Walla University has come to have a broader meaning. Students may act as “Christian service volunteers,” typically involving a year away from school in an overseas or domestic location, or participate in summer “literature evangelism,” summer-camp work, Associated Students of Walla Walla University overseas projects, Engineers without Borders infrastructure and construction activities, and a variety of human rights and environmental endeavors. Beginning with its centennial year, 1992, the school has symbolized its commitment to service with campus-wide days of community service.

College to University

The lengthy discussions about changing the institution’s name from “college” to “university” came to fruition in 2007, during the presidency of John McVay, when the name was formally changed to Walla Walla University.

Second Century Strategic Vision

Following the name change, McVay guided the university through a master planning process to translate the institution’s vision and philosophy statement into specific initiatives. The Sabbath Jubilee decade (2013-2023) was dedicated to enhancing the university’s response to its vision statement, strengthening its financial foundation, beautifying the campus, sharing music and the arts with the larger community, launching the Center for Humanitarian Engagement, prioritizing balance and wellness in academic life, transforming the general studies curriculum, and making Walla Walla University a Center for Sabbath Celebration.⁷ The plan was designed to make the university responsive to fluctuations in demographics and the workplace.

Since 1892 Walla Walla University has encountered challenges, from fires, floods, epidemics, and pandemics to the Great Depression and two world wars. It is one of the few surviving private higher education institutions from among the dozens that sprang up in Washington around the time of statehood, and it can trace its longevity to a consistent emphasis on holistic education in a Seventh-day Adventist framework, professional specialties founded on a strong liberal arts core, and an ongoing commitment to service.

Presidents

William W. Prescott (1892-1894), Edward A. Sutherland (1894-1897), Emmett J. Hibbard (1897-1898), Walter R. Sutherland (1898-1900), Edwin L. Stewart (1900-1902), Charles C. Lewis (1902-1904), Joseph L. Kay (1904-1905), Marion E. Cady (1905-1911), Ernest C. Kellogg (1911-1917), Walter I. Smith (1917-1930), John E. Weaver (1930-1933), William M. Landeen (1933-1938), George W. Bowers (1938-1955), Percy W. Christian (1955-1964), William H. Shephard (1964-1968) Robert L. Reynolds (1968-1976), N. Clifford Sorenson (1976-1985), H. J. Bergman (1985-1990), Niels-Erik Andreasen (1990-1994), W. G. Nelson (1994-2001), John C. Brunt, Interim (2001), N. Clifford Sorenson (2001-2002), Jon L. Dybdahl (2002-2006), John K. McVay (2006-2012), Steve Rose, Interim (2012), John K. McVay (2013- )

Sources

Aamodt, Terrie Dopp. Bold Venture: A History of Walla Walla College. College Place, WA: Walla Walla College, 1992.

McVay, John. “Word from the President: A Decade of Sabbath Jubilee.” Accessed February 20, 2023. https://www.wallawalla.edu/fileadmin/Sabbath/PRES.2018.Sabbath_Jubilee_web.pdf

Olsen, O. A. Letter to E. A. Sutherland, December 28, 1892. Seventh-day Adventist Archives Presidential Letterbook 8 3-16-92. General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, Silver Spring, Maryland.

Rogers, Joel C. Life Sketch. Claude Thurston Collection. Walla Walla University Archives, College Place, Washington.

[Thurston, Claude.] 60 Years of Progress: The Anniversary History of Walla Walla College. College Place, WA: The Color Press, 1952.

White, Ellen G. Ellen G. White to J. E. Graham. July 14, 1890. Letter 25a, 1890. Ellen G. White Estate.

White, Ellen G. Ellen G. White to A. J. Breed. February 5, 1905. Letter 61, 1905. Ellen G. White Estate.

Notes

1. Unless otherwise noted, historical details in this entry are drawn from Terrie Dopp Aamodt, Bold Venture: A History of Walla Walla College (College Place, WA: Walla Walla College, 1992). Academic information comes from Walla Walla College and Walla Walla University bulletins available at https://www.wallawalla.edu/academics/bulletins/archive/.↩

2. Ellen White to J. E. Graham, July 14, 1890, Letter 25a, 1890, accessed December 18, 2022, egwwritings.org↩

3. O. A. Olsen to E. A. Sutherland, December 28, 1892 (General Conference Archives Presidential Letterbook 8 3-16-92).↩

4. Joel C. Rogers Life Sketch, Claude Thurston Collection, Walla Walla University Archives.↩

5. [Claude Thurston], 60 Years of Progress: The Anniversary History of Walla Walla College (College Place, WA: The Color Press, 1952), 178.↩

6. Ellen White to A. J. Breed, February 5, 1905, Letter 61, 1905, accessed December 18, 2022, egwwritings.org.↩

7. See John McVay, “Word from the President: A Decade of Sabbath Jubilee,” accessed February 20, 2023, https://www.wallawalla.edu/fileadmin/Sabbath/PRES.2018.Sabbath_Jubilee_web.pdf.↩