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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
Dancing with the Kobzar
orders:
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