By Emily Fox and Kathryna Hoyman · Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor
The concept of celebrating a college’s 150th birthday is a dizzying one, especially for a four-year undergraduate student. It is almost like showing up to the party of someone you’ve only known for a few months – how can you stand alongside their life-long friends and claim to appreciate who they are?
Throughout this semester, we hope to bless our readers by providing intriguing bits of Grove City College’s context, figuratively introducing its new friends to its old friends and acquainting them with the past.
While this history is informative and exciting, our lack of context does not change the wonder of our experience of the college in its present state. The current student body is the figurehead riding the bow, getting an influential front seat to the college’s encounter with the world as it is now, not as it was.
We, who are a part of this school, have the honor of taking up the relay this college has been running since its founding, a race characterized not by physical exercise, but by the exercise of its values of faithfulness, excellence, community, stewardship and independence.
Rarely has the maxim “brick by brick” been more appropriate to reflect on than now, as we four-year students celebrate an institution whose age extends past ours by many decades. We are a small piece of the college’s history, but still important to its legacy. After all, the students who came before us spent four short years at Grove City College, and each of their experiences has contributed to the character of the college we study at today.
It sounds cliché, but Grove City is vastly different from other colleges and even other Christian colleges. The culture and values of the college have developed and built upon each other as each class has entered the doors of the dorms for the first time and walked across the quad for the last with their hard-earned degree. We say this a lot, but our time here matters.
This spring, we’ll gather with alumni and look back at how far the campus has come since its beginning 150 years ago, remembering the people and events that have shaped what it stands for today. That legacy has been passed down to current students, and we have been blessed with the responsibility of continuing to influence this institution so that future students can look back at our history with pride for the next 150 years.
