St. College Faculty Correspondence Collection (1900)

Overview

The St. College Faculty Correspondence Collection is a digital assemblage of primary‑source documents dating to the spring of 1900. Housed by the Arke Institute, the collection consists of scanned letters, resolutions, pledges, voting records, and related administrative materials that illuminate faculty conduct and governance at St. College. The items are presented as high‑resolution JPEG scans with accompanying OCR transcriptions and are cataloged as a single “Collection” entity in the PINAX repository.

Background

St. College, a small liberal‑arts institution operating in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, experienced internal disputes over academic standards, faculty behavior, and the issuance of “outside diplomas” (credentials granted without full institutional approval). The correspondence captured in this collection was generated during the 1900 spring session, a period marked by a faculty vote on proposed reforms and a series of resolutions aimed at restructuring college regulations. The Arke Institute, which now curates the material, lists the creator of the collection as “Unknown,” reflecting the archival provenance of the original documents.

Contents

• Correspondence (Letter) – An OCR‑read letter (ID 01KCJ7ET4A5GCKTPXSP49GFDDP) in which the author, a faculty member, expresses refusal to sign an outside diploma and calls for a “reconstruction of regulations.” The text references prior resolutions, pledges, and a recent faculty vote, and it articulates a personal resolve to leave the institution if reforms are not enacted.
• Administrative Records – Items coded as session1900spring (01KCJ7F5PKHR3STCET47WM6RR7), votingspring1900 (01KCJ7F960TCTH2CA4SN45FM0T), resolution (01KCJ7FCQMYMPK9BQQWMJ5A79A), pledge (01KCJ7FHGGSDB23GZZ6X7ZP0HX), and reconstructionofregulations (01KCJ7FNKF0A3Q789FM3EZ4T6K). These documents collectively record the procedural outcomes of the faculty’s deliberations.
• Contextual Entities – References to stcollege (01KCJ7EFWGP436CBTC1MNX6MPZ), arkeinstitute (01KCJ7EJZKF8YV9H8AQC5A9XM2), and the overarching cause (01KCJ7FSX4WJG9XKHREZGJRS8Z) provide institutional and thematic framing.

Scope

The collection covers a narrow temporal window—primarily the spring term of 1900—and is geographically confined to St. College. Topics include faculty ethics, institutional governance, the issuance of external diplomas, and attempts at regulatory reform. While the collection is limited to a single correspondence and its associated administrative artifacts, it offers a focused glimpse into early‑twentieth‑century higher‑education challenges and the internal dynamics of a small college community.