Sometimes Baker University seems isolated and protected from the rest of the world, but some events, like war, penetrate the surrounding countryside and change campus life.
Some wars bring drastic change, but others leave university life nearly untouched.
“During wars there are generally huge drops in the male population,” University Archivist Brenda Day said. “During the Civil War, it became pretty much a girls’ college, but not officially.”
During the Civil War, the men followed one professor and enlisted in the Union Army since Baker was an abolitionist stronghold. Day said a diary from the time indicates the competition between the female students for the remaining men was intense.
Women rolled bandages during World War I. They gathered grease and aluminum during World War II. They gave up stockings and made banners.
They also played sports.
“The men left, and women had more opportunities they wouldn’t have had opportunity to take – academics, debate, sports,” Day said.
A World War II memorial in front of Mabee Hall and a plaque at Liston Stadium for World War I remember the lives of the 45 men who died in the two wars.
Day said it wouldn’t have been a complete shock when students heard of a death of a peer.
“It’s odd because we would be shocked,” she said. “It was more understandable. (Professors) didn’t automatically expect students to outlive them. They weren’t so removed from death.”
And while service was expected in the Civil War and the World Wars, Vietnam ushered in a new mindset.
“Students were not so inclined to sign up and follow,” Day said.
While Zeta Chi and Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternities closed during World War II, the fraternities were full, and Baker enrollment peaked during the Vietnam War while draft deferment was still an option.
Jerry Weakley, vice president for endowment and planned giving and a 1970 Baker graduate, said Baker was different than other campuses at the time.
“When I first came here it was much quieter than what I remember reading in the national press was happening on larger campuses,” Weakley said.
While compiling information for Baker’s sesquicentennial celebration, Day searched for anti-war information, but only found a photograph of a 1960s-era student protester.
Senior Scot Rogers wrote a research paper to try to find the cause of the lack of Baker protests, and he attributed it to the upper middle class backgrounds of Baker students of the time.
Weakley said when he was a freshman in 1966, the campus was much quieter than other universities, but that changed after the Tet Offensive in 1968 when it became apparent the conflict would not be ending swiftly.
“That was the point at which the campus became more active,” he said. “We didn’t have riots; there was more voice within the student body and the faculty and staff.”
He remembered military recruiters being booed and a flag being burned on campus.
Following graduation, Weakley attended graduate school at the University of Kansas where he experienced some of the radical acts of protests Baker never felt. As a teacher’s assistant, he was asked to stay in a building overnight to protect it from firebombing.
“In the 1960s, Baldwin was a very sleepy, rural town that just happened to have a college campus,” Weakley said.