Valparaiso University: The Poor Man's Harvard and Its Lutheran Second Life

Valparaiso University in northwestern Indiana has lived at least two distinct lives, and the second one saved it.

The school was first established in eighteen fifty-nine as the Valparaiso Male and Female College, a Methodist institution that opened its doors to women at a time when coeducation was a genuine experiment. The Civil War nearly killed it, enrollment collapsed, the school could not pay its bills, and it closed in eighteen seventy-one.

The revival came in eighteen seventy-three, when an Indiana educator named Henry Baker Brown relaunched it as the Northern Indiana Normal School. Brown had a singular vision: make college so affordable that any working-class family could send a child. Tuition was almost nothing. Room and board were cheap. Students could pay in installments. By the early nineteen hundreds the school had become one of the largest in the country, nicknamed the Poor Man's Harvard, with enrollment reaching some six thousand students at its peak. Brown believed that higher education was not a luxury for the elite but a practical tool for ordinary people.

Enrollment declined after Brown's death, and by the early nineteen twenties the school was struggling again. In nineteen twenty-five, the Lutheran University Association, a group of German-American Lutheran clergy and laity who wanted a major university in their community, purchased the campus for five hundred fifty-nine thousand dollars. That purchase ushered in Valparaiso's modern identity as one of the largest Lutheran-affiliated universities in the United States.

Today, sitting along what was once the Lincoln Highway corridor through northern Indiana, the university draws students of all backgrounds to its programs in law, engineering, and the arts, carrying forward, in its own way, Brown's original conviction that education should be within everyone's reach.