Northland College was founded in 1892 with a vision and a promise. The vision of a school that would provide an education for all students of the north country, a region decimated by the “great cutover”—the clear cutting of the northern pine forests. The promise of an institution dedicated to people at the margins, from immigrant farm families and laborers in the forests and quarries to Native youth from the Ojibwe reserves created by the Treaty of 1854.
In many ways, Northland College should not still be here. The College survived two global pandemics and local typhoid epidemics. Two world wars and a host of undeclared conflicts crushed enrollments. Alice Chapple was the only graduating student in 1945. Fire nearly took down three buildings in the first thirty years. And the school has faced financial calamity from the beginning. The Panic of 1893 almost broke the College in its infancy. The Board issued bonds and scrambled to pay its bills. Financial exigency almost closed the school in 1898 and again in 1978.
The College has survived and gone on to flourish, like a phoenix from the ashes of each crisis, recovering and restoring a deeper vision and greater promise for new generations. It helps to hold fast to the legacy of heart and grit that has shaped the College through it all. Facing this newest and perhaps most profound crisis, it’s incumbent on all of us who care for the College to consider the values and virtues that have characterized the institution all along.
Some call it the “spirit of Northland.” The College has soul. There’s something about Northland that grabs your heart and won’t let go. A part of its soul is its capacity for risk, for visionary thinking to meet difficult times. The College adopted the first comprehensive environmental commitment in the nation a year after the first “Earth Day.” The Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute soon followed. As “True Northland” faculty say today, the College’s mission has never been more relevant.
The soul of the College runs deep. Northland teaches and models how to live a deeper life. That’s been true from the beginning. When community members laid the cornerstone, they dedicated the school to embody “a deeper life.” And when the fledgling college chose a motto, they looked to the scriptures, the Book of Isaiah, proclaiming that there’s a “higher way” for us all to live. A higher way and a deeper life. The soul of Northland. Northland College has endured because of the depth of its moral vision and the promise of a healed land, a healed people, a healed nation and world. Let’s honor the higher way and promise of a deeper life by helping the little school by the big lake stay strong and true.
