Shaping the Vision
How do you create a university? Records show that Reverend William Bacon Stevens and the rest of Lehigh’s new Board of Trustees looked to well-known colleges like Yale and Harvard for inspiration. It is also possible that they considered the curriculums at Union College and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Finally, they asked for advice from individuals like Thurston R. Jencks, a Massachusetts educator. Jencks wrote a lengthy treatise on his ideas for Lehigh, which seems to have had little impact. Ultimately, the Trustees had few models from which to draw on. So, they came up with their own vision, with they outlined in a manuscript they simply called “Plan of the L.U.”
