Faith and reason: The history of Concordia College
By Craig McEwen
The Forum - 11/28/1999
They came to the Red River Valley in the late 1800s, Norwegian Lutheran immigrants in search of a new life and a strong educational upbringing for their children.

By the turn of the century, a small group of pastors and parishioners had opened a college in Moorhead.

They called it Concordia, a term meaning "harmony, concord, union," and an ecumenical slogan referring to the 1890 marriage of three Lutheran church synods.

They found a home in the defunct Bishop Whipple School, built by Red River Valley Episcopalians in 1882 and named to honor Bishop Henry W. Whipple.

The $30,000 building and campus, situated on a six-acre country plot, accommodated 60 boarding students and 40 day scholars. The school closed in 1887 due to a lack of students.

On Oct. 15, 1891, its doors re-opened after having been purchased by the Lutheran contingent for $10,000. Initially a high school program attended by 12 students and taught by three teachers was offered.

College students didn't arrive on the Concordia campus until 1907 when the first college level courses were offered. The first bachelor's degrees were awarded in 1917.

That same year Concordia College consolidated with Park Region Luther College, which opened at Fergus Falls, Minn., in 1892.

Professor Ingebrikt F. Grose, an English teacher at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn., was named school administrator. His salary was $600 per year.

Because the campus was located "out in the country" with fields of corn surrounding it, Concordia students were derisively called "corn cobs" or "corncobbers." Decades later the term "cobbers" was coined and continues to be the nickname for the 2,900 students who attend the same school today, but on a much larger campus around which the city of Moorhead has grown.

World War I

Shortly after the August 1914 outbreak of World War I, a Home Guard unit that included 80 Concordia College students began to train in the campus gymnasium.

Four years later a Student Army Training Corps unit was established on campus. By then, 22 students and faculty had been called to active duty, several of them serving on battlefields in France. The SATC unit disbanded when the war ended on Nov. 11, 1918.

New buildings began to dot the campus through the 1920s and 1930s under the leadership of J. N. Brown, Concordia's fourth president.

The college also owned a farm south of Moorhead called the "institute for cow culture." The farm supplied produce, meat, potatoes, eggs and dairy products to the college boarding department.

The dairy herd's sire, a Holstein named "College King Bessie Man-O-War," won major prizes at Red River Valley livestock shows. The school's Holstein herd set national production records.

The farm, and others owned by Concordia, were sold at the outbreak of World War II when farm workers became scarce.

World War II

As men and women began to enlist for duty in World War II (1941-1945), Concordia College enrollments dropped 33 percent from a high of 545 students to a wartime low of 365 students.

Concordia participated in a defense training program and became home to the 71st Army Air Force College Training Detachment.

More than 30 Concordia College students and staff were killed during the war, which lasted from Sept. 1, 1939, to Sept. 2, 1945.

Prior to war's end, enrollments at Concordia were headed upward with 449 students registered in 1944.

By 1949, enrollments had almost tripled with 1,277 students attending the four-block campus valued at $444,000 and employing 29 faculty.

By the 1950s, Concordia's teaching faculty numbered 172, nearly half of whom held doctorate degrees. Today the college employs more than 600 people, 237 of them faculty.

Campus growth

The Rev. Joseph Knutson, a Grafton, N.D., native, was named Concordia president in 1951. One of Knutson's priorities was to provide adequate facilities for growing enrollments.

Work had begun on a new auditorium/gymnasium. The structure collapsed that April resulting in a legal battle with architects, builders and insurance companies. Furthermore, a shortage of steel brought on by the Korean War delayed construction until April 1952. The building opened that fall.

The next major building project, Carl B. Ylvisaker Library, began in 1955 using a volunteer fund-raising program that has become the stimulus for four decades of campus growth.

C-400 Club

That year, college regents E.T. (Gene) Paulson and J. Luther Jacobson posed the idea of recruiting 400 people to donate $1,000 each to pay for the new $400,000 library.

Paulson and Jacobson each chipped in $1,000 and the C-400 Club was born. "We thought that if our idea failed, Concordia would still have our $2,000. But we were lucky," said Jacobson in 1962. "Early refusals might have discouraged us, but the first 10 persons we asked joined the club. After that nothing discouraged us."

C-400 has since become the catalyst for major fund-raising campaigns like the 21st Century Fund, expected to raise $60 million by next April. Already that goal has been surpassed with $65.1 million pledged to provide funding for student financial aid, faculty and curriculum development, technology updates, capital improvements and to expand Concordia's endowment fund.

In addition to the initial library fund campaign, C-400 raised capital for the following projects: $500,000 to fund construction of Lorentzen Hall, the campus administration building completed in 1966; $667,000 for the Frances Frazier Comstock theater (1966); $850,000 for a library addition, language village construction, remodeling Old Main, student aid and campus beautification (1968); $700,000 for the Knutson Student Life Center (1975); $750,000 to remodel Old Main, debt retirement, financial aid (completed 1976); $700,000 to renovate Grose Hall and debt retirement (completed 1977).

In 1978, a Founders Fund campaign was announced with a goal of raising $10.7 million over three years: $5 million for biology and home economics classrooms, $3.75 million for annual support and $2 million for an endowment fund.

Five years later, Founders Fund II was commissioned with a goal of raising $21.5 million - $14.5 million to grow the endowment fund and $7 million for operating expenses. When completed, the campaign had raised $26.2 million.

The next venture, a three-year Centennial Fund announced in 1991, raised $58.5 million, widely surpassing the $46.5 million goal set to again expand the campus endowment, provide faculty support, student scholarships and campus construction.

As of April, Concordia's endowment fund totaled $70.4 million, growing from $2.4 million in 1974 to $66.5 million in 1998 when the college Board of Regents established the Paul J. and Mardeth L. Dovre Endowment for the Center for Faith and Learning, to "help students and staff explore the dynamic relationships between faith and learning, belief and action."

Dovre, a 1958 Concordia graduate who became the school's eighth president in 1975, retired this year.

During his tenure the campus grew immensely. Student enrollments peaked at 2,999 in Fall 1993. Working with students was Dovre's greatest joy. "I know that what I will miss the most is my contact with students," he said after 24 years as campus president. "I'll miss the liveliness of an academic community."

During the 1990s more than $12 million in campus construction has been completed including Olson Forum, a $5.9 million sports and fitness center completed in 1994; the $2.7 million Olson Skyway that crosses above Minnesota Highway 75 (8th Street South) to provide access to both sides of the campus; a $3.4 million expansion and renovation of Hvidsten Hall of Music, completed this fall.

The $2.3 million Olin Art and Communications Center, completed in 1986, was funded by a grant from the Olin Foundation.

Annual C-400 Club appreciation dinners have attracted a long list of famous speakers including: Jackie Robinson, the first black major league baseball player; legendary trumpet player Al Hirt; Broadway baritone actor and vocalist Robert Goulet; journalists and news commentators William F. Buckley Jr., Charles Kuralt, Edwin Newman, Paul Harvey, Morley Safer and Tom Brokaw; actors Red Skelton and Charlton Heston; opera star Beverly Sills and country music Hall of Fame recipient Tennessee Ernie Ford.

By 1973, the C-400 club had 3,000 members. In 1985 membership was just short of 10,000 and today totals 20,500.

Language villages

In 1961, associate education professor Gerhard K. Haukebo and German professor Erhard Friedrichsmeyer developed a language camp program for students ages 7 to 18.

Billed as "the next best thing to being there," the camps capitalized on the ability of children to learn languages more easily than adults.

There are now 12 Concordia Language Villages - Chinese, Danish, French, Finnish, German, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and English - located throughout northern Minnesota.

Since 1961, more than 107,000 participants from all 50 states and more than 25 foreign countries have attended those villages with an enrollment this summer alone of 6,058 students. Annual participation totals almost 9,500.

The Norwegian connection

It was learned early in 1939 that Crown Prince Olav and Crown Princess Martha of Norway would be visiting New York.

Concordia College invited the prince to be that year's commencement speaker. Prince Olav consented, spending four hours on campus during the 48th commencement ceremony at which 83 seniors received their college degree. During that same ceremony, Prince Olav received the first honorary doctorate degree granted by Concordia.

Olav became king of Norway in 1957, returning to Concordia in October 1982 for a third campus visit and recalling that in 1939 he had urged the college to keep its windows open to Norway.

The college has done that, as evidenced by the visit of King Harald V and Queen Sonja to the campus in 1995.

A new president

In October, Rev. Thomas W. Thomsen was inaugurated as Concordia's ninth president.

In reflecting on the school's 108-year history, Thomsen likens Concordia's purpose today to that of Norwegian immigrants arriving in the Red River Valley in 1890.

Their top priorities were to make a successful transition for their families into a new culture and educate their youth to become leaders of this country, he says.

Concordia students today are entering an era of unprecedented change, Thomsen says.

"We will focus on the successful transition of our students into a new, broad, global community," he says. "Even more so now, we need to ask how can we prepare our youth for leadership positions."

As set forth in the Concordia College mission statement adopted in 1960: "The purpose of Concordia College is to influence the affairs of the world by sending into society thoughtful and informed men and women dedicated to the Christian life."

As Concordia College enters a new millennium, that mission statement remains as strong and as valid as the day it was penned, Thomsen says.

"It is tied to our past but it also is tied to our future," he says. "It's a mission statement that is very responsive to the current culture and their needs."