OBERLIN COLLEGE

private coeducational institution of higher learning at Oberlin, Ohio, offering programs in liberal arts and music. It was founded in 1833 as the Oberlin Collegiate Institute to educate ministers and schoolteachers for the West. It was named for the Alsatian pastor Johann Friedrich Oberlin. It adopted its present name in 1850. Oberlin was coeducational from its beginning, and it was the first college in the United States to adopt this policy. Oberlin also admitted blacks on an equal footing with whites, and it became a station on the Underground Railroad by which fugitive slaves escaped to freedom in Canada. Charles Grandison Finney, the college's president from 1851 to 1866, was a well-known evangelist. Charles Martin Hall, an alumnus who had in 1886 developed a cheap method of making aluminum commercially, bequeathed to the college several million dollars for the endowment and the construction of Hall Auditorium. Oberlin now consists of a college of arts and sciences and the Oberlin Conservatory of Music (1865), which is one of the oldest professional music schools in the United States.