Foreword
Dancing with the Kobzar


History is still about stories. It is about people and events and ideas that have shaped the past. It is about forces both discernible and obscure that influence the present and guide the future. The twenty-five-year anniversary edition of Bluffton College’s first history assessed “early experiments in Mennonite education.” This new history, commemorating BC’s centennial, extends that earlier effort. Seventy-five years later we continue to consider and appreciate the Bluffton College experiment. The hundred-year anniversary also provides an occasion to celebrate persons who have shaped a distinct vision of a Bluffton College able to enrich the broader stream of Mennonite higher education.

A part of BC’s singular story is reflected in the selection of Perry Bush as author of this centennial history. I first met Dr. Bush—”Perry,” as his colleagues and many of his students know him—at a 1994 Goshen College conference on “Anabaptist Vision(s) in the Twentieth Century: Ideas and Outcomes.” The conference was designed to highlight and critique formative forces, institutions, ideas, and persons that shaped Mennonites during the Harold S. Bender era. Perry delivered a paper on “Mennonite Visions and the New Evangelicals.” A young scholar, Perry was launching a college teaching career—as a Californian who had come just shortly before to BC from outside the Anabaptist mainstream. Perry’s passion for his subject, flair for storytelling, and commitment to rigorous scholarship and thoughtful historical analysis were evident.

A subsequent encounter with Perry was equally memorable. I had just arrived in 1996 as new president at Bluffton College, a possibility I had not remotely imagined when first meeting Perry. Part of my orientation was to attend the traditional college talent night, organized annually to welcome new students. Perr was emcee. He forever endeared himself to those apprehensive freshmen by his enthusiastic welcome, self-effacing humor, and wholly unselfconscious demonstration of the “Beaver yell.” He exhibited in that raucous setting many of the qualities that make him ideally suited to write the Bluffton story. These include keen appreciation for BC history and traditions, curiosity about what makes BC the institution it is, love of students and of his discipline. Then there is that delightful ability to laugh and put things into perspective—even to the extent of turning uninitiated students into Beaver yellers.

The completion of a small college’s first century is an auspicious occasion for reflection. Considering the past provides perhaps the most reliable glimpse we have into the future. Even as a relative newcomer to Bluffton College, I knew the choice of writer for the BC history would be critical and difficult. There was a story here that needed to be told. With an emerging reputation for impeccable scholarship, a vivid and accessible style, and an outsider’s distance combined with deep commitment to Anabaptist faith, Perry seemed ideally suited to piece together the narrative and to examine the patterns in the unfolding drama.
At this juncture in BC’s life and its relationship with the church, it was important to select a historian who could tell the story criti-cally, honestly—and with appreciation for the lives and commitments which make BC history instructive. Professor Bush’s brisk prose style along with careful documentation of sources offers a timely achievement that will shape our understanding of the pro-mise and possibility of a small Mennonite school in northwest Ohio

And it will answer the question, How did Bluffton College come to be the thriving college it is in the Mennonite Church yet remain unlike all other Mennonite colleges? How did this college come to be “more than Mennonite,” as President Elmer Neufeld put it when he observed, “Bluffton should not be seen as somehow less than Mennonite for its diversity, but rather more than Mennonite, with a stronger Christian peace church witness growing out of this experience” (see p. 256)? That is the story Perry Bush set out to tell. I commend this history to alumni, faculty, staff, and BC friends who love this place. I commend it also to fellow educators who know well the challenges faced by small liberal arts colleges desiring strong denominational ties. A story both sobering and inspiring, it stirs reflection while documenting one institution’s first century as an experiment in Mennonite higher education.
—Lee Snyder, President, Bluffton College


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