Beloit College
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Beloit College is a liberal arts college in Beloit, Wisconsin and a member of the Associated Colleges of the Midwest. Its current president is John Burris, and its enrollment stands at roughly 1,300 undergraduate students. The campus is notable for numerous prehistoric Indian mounds.
Founding
Beloit College, the first post secondary education institution in Wisconsin, was founded by a group called Friends for Education, which was started by seven pioneers from New England who agreed that a college needed to be established soon after arrival in Wisconsin Territory. The group raised funds for a college to be founded in their new town and convinced the territorial legislature to enact their charter for Beloit College into law on February 2, 1846. The first building for the college (called Middle College) was built in 1847, and it remains in operation today. Classes began in the fall of 1847, and the college's first degrees were awarded in 1851.History
The first president of Beloit was a Yale University graduate named Aaron Lucius Chapin, who served as president from December of 1849 until 1886, and under whose direction the college became widely known for scholastic achievement and for its willingness to experiment with new curricular approaches. The college remained very small for almost its entire first century with the enrollment only topping 1,000 students with the influx of World War II veterans in 1945-1946. The "Beloit Plan", an innovative year-round curriculum introduced in 1964, comprised of three full terms and a "field term" of off-campus study, brought the college increased national attention.Among Beloit's more notable alumni are Roy Chapman Andrews, Robert Lee Morris, and Lorine Niedecker. Teresa Heinz Kerry holds an honorary doctorate from Beloit College.
One of the aforementioned Indian effigy mounds, in the shape of a turtle, inspired Beloit's symbol (and unofficial mascot).
Present day
Beloit College remains nationally known for its innovative curriculum, which retains many aspects of the "Beloit Plan" from the 1960s. Beloit has a good reputation in anthropology and geology, owing still to Roy Chapman Andrews's expeditions. Beloit's students have placed well in the Association for Computing Machinery annual programming competition: 1990, Beloit placed 11th; 1991, 19th. They have often received "Meritorious" certificates for exceptional solutions in the Mathematical Modelling Competition. In the 2006 college rankings by U.S. News & World Report, Beloit was shortlisted for "Study Abroad" (56% of students do) and "First-Year Experience". It was also ranked highly for percentage of students living on-campus. In 2000, Beloit was included in the book Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools You Should Know About Even if You’re Not a Straight-A Student (ISBN 0140296166). The 1999 National Study of Student Engagement ranked Beloit in the top 20% of five benchmark categories measuring the quality of the student experience, one of just four schools to achieve this ranking.The college long hosted the Beloit Poetry Journal, but the editor, Professor Emerita Marion K. Stocking, has retired to Maine and now runs the journal there. In 1985 the complementary Beloit Fiction Journal began, and has published an annual collection of short contemporary fiction every year since. The establishment of the Mackey Chair in Creative Writing has brought a new nationally-known author to campus annually for several years, including Billy Collins, Bei Dao, Ursula K. Le Guin, Amy Hempel, Denise Levertov, and Robert Stone. Beloit biology faculty member John Jungck along with Nils S. Peterson, CEO of From the Heart Software, co-founded and run the [BioQUEST], while Brock Spencer maintains [ChemLinks]. Both are special-interest groups on the reform of science education. Beloit has had a faculty and student exchange program with Fudan University in China since the 1980s.
The Beloit College Geology Department continues a tradition of excellence in geology that began with T.C. Chamberlin more than a century ago. Today the department combines a rigorous course load with mandatory field methods and mandatory field research. The department is currently a member of the Keck Geology Consortium. Started by the Keck Family, the philanthropic family most noted for forming the popular children's' show Sesame Street, the Keck Consortium is a research collaboration of several similar colleges across the United States, including Amherst College, Pomona College, and Washington and Lee University to name a few. The Consortium sends undergraduate students worldwide to research and publish their findings.
Since 1998, the college has become known for the annual "Mindset Lists," written by Professor Tom McBride, summarizing pop culture references which are allegedly meaningless to incoming college freshmen or to their parents.
Extra-curricular activities at Beloit play an important role, with intramural Ultimate having a high level of participation among students. In 2004, the college unveiled a renovation plan that would tie the campus more effectively to the community. Recently, Beloit College students broke the world record for the longest game of Ultimate by playing for over 72 hours [link].
In 2006, Beloit officially announced that it was attempting to raise 100 million dollars. This campaign would attempt to fund a new science building, an increased endowment, and many other campus improvements.
Prominent departments
Athletics
Beloit College is a member of the Midwest Conference, NCAA in Div. III and fields varsity teams in football, baseball, softball, volleyball, men's and women's basketball, men's and women's golf, men's and women's cross country, men's and women's tennis, men's and women's track & field, men's and women's soccer, men's and women's swimming.
Prominent alumni
- Roy Chapman Andrews, naturalist and archaeologist
- James Arness, actor
- Evan Montvel Cohen, co-founder of Air America Radio
- Tom Hulce, actor
- Teresa Heinz Kerry (honorary)
- Pat Kilbane, comedic actor
- Michael J. Koss, founder of Koss stereophones
- Robert Lee Morris, jewelry designer
- Lorine Niedecker, poet
- Margie Planton, politician
- Jameson Parker, actor
- Walter Robinson Parr, Chicago pastor
- John Thorn, sports historian
- Amy Wright, actress
- Thomas Crowder Chamberlain, geologist, class of 1866, professor (1873-1882), president of the University of Wisconsin (1887–1892), and professor of geology and director of the Walker Museum at the University of Chicago (1892–1919)
- James Woodward Strong, class of 1858, first president of Carleton College (1870-1903)
External links
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