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Western Campus

Catherine Couretas

Oxford, Ohio, now home to only one university, at one point in time housed five different institutes of higher learning, including Miami University.

In the 1850s, three schools for women and two schools for men existed in Oxford, with Miami operating as a university only for males, according to Valerie Elliott, assistant university archivist and head of the Smith Library of Regional History.

Elliott said that the Oxford Theological Seminary for men was open from the 1830s through the 1850s before it moved to Illinois. The seminary was located at the corner of Church and Poplar Streets and is the only property of the five schools that Miami did not eventually acquire.

The three female schools all eventually assimilated into what is now Miami, Elliott said.

The Oxford Female Institute was the first of the female schools to open in Oxford, Elliott said, opening in 1849 before construction on the building had finished.

The second women's school was the Western Female Seminary, which was chartered in 1853 and opened in 1855 in what was later known as Western College for Women.

Finally, the Oxford Female College received its charter in 1854 and opened in 1856, where the Marcum Conference Center stands today.

"Oxford didn't really have any industry," Elliott said, explaining why there were so many schools in Oxford. "Education was the reason Oxford was here."

She added that the female colleges were created to balance out the men's schools.

"Women's schools were established here because parents wanted their daughters to have equal opportunity for higher education," Elliott said.

The first of many mergers occurred in 1867, when the Oxford Female College absorbed the Oxford Female Institute, where the Marcum Conference Center is now, retaining the name Oxford Female College.

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In 1882, the college realized it could not afford to maintain the property and moved to the old location of the Oxford Female Institute on College Avenue in the same building where the Oxford Community Arts Center is located today, Elliott said.

"The old location became what we would today call a private psychiatric hospital," Elliott said about the Marcum location, which was sold when the female college moved.

Miami University purchased the hospital in 1925 and turned it into the men's dormitory, Fisher Hall. This building was eventually torn down to build the Marcum Conference Center.

In 1906, Elliott said Oxford Female College was rechartered as the Oxford College for Women, purchasing various nearby properties including an athletic field west of Elm Street and a few homes to house students and its president. When the college closed in 1928, Miami purchased the buildings and used them as women's residence halls for nearly 70 years.

In 1904, the Western Female Seminary became the Western College for Women and remained in operation until 1974, when it closed due to financial problems.

"Separate women's schools were no longer as popular," Elliott said. "They were private and more expensive. Western College would have had to raise a huge endowment to survive."

After the Western College for Women shut down, the School of Interdisciplinary Studies, also known as the Western College Program, came to take its place, according to Mary Jean Corbett, interim director of the Western program.

Tom Schleiter, who plays guitar for the band Powerspace, graduated from the Western College Program in 2008.

Schleiter says that he came to Miami specifically for what the Western College Program had to offer.

"I was looking for schools that offered interesting music majors," Schleiter said. "I didn't want to be a regular music major."

Schleiter graduated with a degree in music production and a minor in entrepreneurship. He said he enjoyed the flexibility of the program.

"My favorite part was getting to design my own major and trying to do something different," Schleiter said. "I could do exactly what I wanted to do."

Schleiter was able to take some music production classes online and had internships at different recording studios, both of which he said had a great impact on his career.

"I think it helped a lot," Schleiter said. "You spend a lot of time figuring out what your interests are."

Schleiter entered the program at just the right time, as the Western College Program was discontinued for new students in 2006 by then-Miami president James Garland, according to Corbett.

Though the program was discontinued, Miami still offers some of the interdisciplinary studies courses that used to be offered to students in the Western program.

Corbett said the School of Interdisciplinary Studies functioned at Miami as a separate division, like the Farmer School of Business, and that now the development of a new program is underway.

"We're designing a major that students will be able to enter into within the next couple of years," Corbett said. "Students will be able to develop their own individualized program of study."

Corbett added that she has already recruited eight faculty members for the new program, all of who are very excited to get started.

"In the meantime, because the Western Program is housed in Peabody Hall, we're kind of starting up a new living learning community for next year called 'Activism and Engaged Learning,'" Corbett said.

She said that the earliest the curriculum will be ready for the new major will be the 2010-11 academic year, due to the process the university must follow to approve courses.

"We want to design something for students to create their own major," Corbett said. "We want it to be something special and distinctive on Miami's campus."


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