Early campus shuttle for Goucher College

Maryland Historical Society

Goucher College, a coeducational, residential, liberal arts institution of higher learning in Towson, Maryland, was founded in 1885. Originally chartered as the Woman's College of Baltimore City, the institution was organized under the leadership of Methodist minister John Franklin Goucher who became its second president. In 1909 the college honored its principal benefactor by changing its name. First located in the northern part of Baltimore City, the college decided in the 1920s to relocate to Baltimore County on a 421-acre tract near Towson. In 1955 the move to the new campus was finally completed. In 1986 the college became coeducational. Today the college has over 1,300 undergraduates and another 800 students in graduate and professional studies programs on its 287-acre campus.

Early History
The impetus for a woman's college came from the Methodist Episcopal Conference of Baltimore and especially John Goucher. Goucher was born in Pennsylvania in 1845 and attended Dickinson College, where he received his doctorate of divinity and laws. His first pastoral assignment was in Baltimore. There he met and married the wealthy Mary Cecilia Fisher. At a time when state colleges were opening their doors to women and private philanthropists such as Matthew Vassar were funding superior separate but equal institutions for women in other states, there was no college in Maryland that women could attend.

At Goucher's suggestion and after the fundraising efforts of the women of the Methodist Educational Association along with generous gifts of land and money from Mary Fisher and John Goucher, the college opened in 1888 with 140 students who paid $100 tuition. The mission of the college was a conventional one-the formation of womanly character for womanly ends-but the means was an excellent education similar to that of men studying at nearby Johns Hopkins University. By the end of President Goucher's tenure in 1908 the college had three buildings, a gym recognized as one of the best in the country for women, 350 students, and a faculty of 32 offering four "courses"-classical, modern languages, natural science, or mathematical-with potential for double concentrations, and "specials" in art, music, and elocution. Goucher College had also been recognized as the second institution in Maryland meriting a chapter of the academic honor society Phi Beta Kappa.

The early days of the college were difficult financially. Lacking any endowment at first and later an insufficient one (today the endowment is over $140 million), the college was dependent on student tuitions. If admissions faltered, the budget suffered as it did intermittently in the 1920s and 1930s. By this time the development of the northern part of Baltimore city restricted the college's physical expansion. In the 1920s President William Guth purchased 421 acres from an estate near Towson. But as the college struggled with declining enrollments through the Depression, the move was delayed. In an imaginative effort to raise money the college appealed to all alumnae and current students to contribute $421 dollars, one for every acre at the site of the new campus. For a few years the college bused students back and forth the eight-mile distance between the two campuses.

The relocation was finally completed in 1955 under the presidency of Dr. Otto Kraushaar. Both the president and the trustees held as a priority creating a campus with distinguished architecture. Having chosen a residential plan of dormitories built of stone, with the dormitory named after Mary Fisher Goucher the first completed building on the new campus, the trustees picked the well-known architect Pietro Belluschi to design a college center completed in 1963. By this time Goucher was well known for its academic excellence and for its innovative curriculum practices. These included dividing the academic year into three semesters of ten weeks during which students took three classes meeting four days a week with Wednesdays devoted to lectures and research.

Modern History
In 1973 the board of trustees chose as the college's eighth president its first female one. Dr. Rhoda Dorsey, a professor in the history department and a former dean of the college, was educated at Smith College and received her doctorate from the University of Minnesota. During her presidential tenure of twenty years, enrollments continued to drop as young women who fit Goucher's high admissions standards increasingly preferred coeducational institutions. After some discussions about merger with Johns Hopkins and the opposition of many students and some faculty, under Dorsey's leadership the college began admitting men in 1986. Currently men compose one-third of the student population.

The admission of men did not change the mission of the college to provide an outstanding education offered in small classes often on interdisciplinary topics. In 2004, under the leadership of Sanford Ungar and aided by substantial increases in both undergraduate and graduate applications as well as alumna giving, Goucher embarked on an ambitious building plan as well as a strategic program to increase diversity on campus and to provide international opportunities for student study abroad.

Knipp , Anna Heubeck and Thaddeus Thomas. The History of Goucher College. Baltimore: Goucher College, 1938.

Musser, Fredrick. The History of Goucher College. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.