Bucknell University took its name from the trustee who rescued it
For its first four decades, this Pennsylvania college was simply the University at Lewisburg. Then, in 1881, facing financial ruin, it turned to one of its founding trustees, William Bucknell, whose $50,000 gift kept it alive. Five years later the grateful board voted unanimously to rename the whole institution after him.
The school began with a group of Baptists from a church in central Pennsylvania who wanted an institution offering separate high schools for boys and girls, a college and a theological seminary. The state granted a charter on February 5, 1846, on one condition: that $100,000 be raised before it received full corporate status. Its preparatory school opened that year in the basement of a Lewisburg Baptist church, and the first commencement, in August 1851, graduated seven men. James Buchanan, later the 15th US president, sat on the board.
A Female Institute opened in 1852, but women were not admitted to college courses until 1883. David Jayne Hill, a graduate who led the college from 1879 to 1888, argued for a university where every branch of knowledge was open regardless of sex, though he stopped short of proposing that men and women study together. Demand grew quickly enough that a new hall had to be built for the women's department.
The Depression cut enrollment, so in 1933 Bucknell lent several professors to start a junior college in Wilkes-Barre, which became independent in 1947 and is now Wilkes University. The same era produced a campus master plan by architect Jens Larson that still guides building today, giving the grounds their consistent red brick and Georgian style. The football stadium, built in 1924, was later renamed for alumnus Christy Mathewson, a Hall of Fame pitcher for the New York Giants.
Today about 3,900 undergraduates study on a campus of roughly 450 acres above the West Branch of the Susquehanna River, with a faculty ratio of about one to nine. Engineering has long been a strength, and a quarter of students take a double major.
Source: Bucknell University
