Birth of a Mission

Introducing the AIC Legacy Series

As the United States commemorates 250 years of history, American International College is reflecting on its own legacy—the people, values, and experiences that have shaped the institution and its impact across generations.

The American International College Legacy is a new storytelling initiative exploring the College’s past, present, and future through the voices of faculty, students, alumni, community partners, and leaders. This series begins with a look at AIC’s founding and the mission of opportunity that has guided the College since 1885.

We begin with a look at AIC’s founding through the perspective of Professor John Rogers, whose research and interest in the College’s history provide insight into the vision that shaped AIC and the mission that continues today.

A Chapter in American History

An introduction by John W. Rogers, PhD, Professor of Economics, American International College

In researching the history of American International College, I have been struck by the vision that inspired its founding and the ways that mission has endured for more than 141 years. With the United States commemorating its 250th anniversary, this is an especially fitting time to reflect on the institutions whose histories are woven into the broader American story. AIC is one of those institutions.

Founded in 1885 by the Reverend Calvin Amaron, the College was established to provide educational opportunity to French Canadian immigrants and their families at a time when access to higher education was limited. From the beginning, AIC embraced forward-thinking ideas, including educational opportunities for both men and women and a curriculum designed to prepare students to contribute to American society. Under Amaron’s successors, the mission expanded to serve students from all backgrounds, particularly those who might not otherwise have had access to higher education.

What stands out throughout AIC’s history is the consistency of its purpose. While the students, programs, and communities the College serves have evolved, its mission of expanding opportunity through education has remained constant.

I invite you to explore the story of AIC’s beginnings and consider how the vision of its founders continues to shape the College today.

The Birth of a Mission: Reverend Calvin Amaron and the Founding of American International College

by John W. Rogers, PhD, Professor of Economics, American International College

In January of 1892, the New York Times carried an entry on the plans of New England Colleges to exhibit their achievements at the upcoming World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. In attendance at a meeting to plan the event was President Eliot of Harvard, along with the heads of MIT, Wellesley College, and other well established New England institutions. Also in attendance was the President of an institution that had arrived on the scene only six years earlier, the French Protestant College, recently relocated from Lowell to Springfield, Massachusetts. What was a French Protestant College, and how did its President, the Reverend Calvin Elijah Amaron, come to be included so quickly in the august body of New England college presidents?

The Reverend Amaron was indeed a visionary. His mission for the College that he founded was crystal clear – but at the same time deeply flawed by ethnic prejudice – and marked him as a product of the intellectual history of his time. The son of Swiss missionaries who were recruited by the French-Canadian Missionary Society, Calvin Amaron was born in the Province of Quebec in 1853. He was educated at one of the four Protestant private schools established in the province for the small minority of French-speaking students who did not want to attend parochial schools. In 1877, he graduated from McGill University in Montreal with honors in philosophy, returning to McGill for a master’s degree in 1880. He was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in Canada, but accepted a position in Lowell, Massachusetts to work on evangelizing the rapidly growing French Canadian population of New England.

Recognizing the need for educational institutions to support his evangelization, Amaron founded the French Protestant College in Lowell in 1885, with the help of ministers from the Massachusetts Home Missionary Society, a Congregational organization. The following year, he resigned from this position as pastor to become president of the college. Two years later, the college moved to Springfield.

Amaron was a product of the ethnic, religious, and linguistic conflicts that – while little known in the United States – play a key role in the history of Canada. His mission sprang from these conflicts, and they fueled his zeal as an educator. It was the work of his successors to bend his brilliant vision to a broader and more practical end, suited to the needs of the twentieth century and a country that was itself being transformed by the immigrant experience.

During the second half of the 19th century hundreds of thousands of French-Canadian immigrants migrated south to work in the factories of New England which at that time was the industrial heartland of America. By 1900 they numbered over a million or ten percent of the region’s population. Amaron was convinced that the hold of the Catholic religion and the desire of priests to maintain separate parochial schools with instruction only in French would hinder the assimilation of these immigrants into the mainstream of American life. He was convinced that the failure of Canada – or at least the French speaking segments – to develop a dynamic commercial economy was due to this spirit of separatism reinforced by what he considered the backward-looking approach of the Catholic Church to education as well as to social and political life.

Amaron saw education and intellectual activity as the core of his evangelical mission. In 1885 he published The Evangelization of the French Canadians of New England, a pamphlet summarizing the missionary work being done by his church in Lowell and asking for funding to support the new college that was to play a key role in this work. In 1886 he and a group of ministers formed the French Publishing Society, bringing out a weekly journal, Le Semeur franco-américain (the French-American sower), published in Ware, Massachusetts. Amaron became the editor of the English language version of the paper and eventually the manager of the publishing company which he subsequently moved with the College to Springfield. In 1889, reincorporating as the French Evangelical Publishing Society with Amaron as director and English language editor, it published a new weekly in both French and English. In 1891 Amaron recruited a friend from Montreal, the Reverend Laurent-Edouard Rivard, to join the staff of the College and to edit Le Citoyen franco-americain (the French-American citizen). Two years later, Amaron resigned his positions as president of the College and editor in chief to travel in Europe. He then returned to Montreal, where he continued his work as a publisher and evangelist for the cause of French Protestantism until his death in 1917.

Amaron clearly laid out his views in a series of articles that he gathered and edited to form his major work, published in 1891. Your Heritage: or New England Threatened is an articulate and impassioned call for evangelization through education. Its views reek with the suspicion verging on paranoia that sometimes characterized the reaction of entrenched Anglo-Saxon and Protestant populations to new immigrants and different religions. Without stretching the historical analogy, it is reaction that might be compared to current debates over the spread of Islam and its threat to established Western and Judeo-Christian values.

Amaron saw the wave of French speaking, Catholic immigrants as part of a broad challenge to American values. The “Romish” Church intended to segregate French people from the mainstream of American life, just as it had done in Canada. “So long as thousands of French children that now fill our cities can be kept out of the American public schools and placed in the French Roman Catholic schools, which are a facsimile of the institutions of Quebec, taught by the nuns, largely in French, and in the old routines, they will develop a French Canadian Ultra-montane colony….The sooner we understand that in the very nature of things there is no reconciliation possible between Ultra-Montanism or Jesuitism and true Americanism – and by that I mean a Christian republican government – the better both for the slaves of Romanism and the nation.” In speaking of Ultra-Montanism, Amaron was invoking the cause of anti-clericalism that ran throughout liberal thinking in the nineteenth century. Anti-clericals in the Catholic countries of Europe saw the Church as an institution apart, one that demanded obedience to the Pope above obedience to one’s country and that looked with suspicion on modern notions of free speech, free choice, scientific inquiry, commerce, and open lifestyles. Other contemporary manifestations of this thinking were the “nativist” or Know-Nothing strain in American politics; the Kulturkampf – Bismarck’s struggle with the Catholic Church in Germany; the anti-clerical movement in France that led to disenfranchising Catholic schools and religious orders; and the constant tension between the Vatican and the newly formed Kingdom of Italy, a tension only resolved by the Concordat of 1929.

Amaron was a product of his time and a prisoner of the social context that produced him – a Protestant in the province of Quebec dominated by the Catholic Church. One cannot excuse his prejudices, but one can try to understand them and to look beyond them to his broader mission of a college that would “create a class of dedicated men and women to act as leaders among the French Canadians.” When he left the College, his successors seem to have understood this need to change his passion into a more inclusive mission. The Reverend Samuel H. Lee, who became the third president of the College, was a graduate of Yale, an ordained Congregational minister, and a former professor economics at Oberlin College. His vision extended beyond Reverend Amaron’s overwrought fear that New England would go the way of Quebec but continued to embrace Amaron’s desire to offer opportunity to new Americans. His efforts to attract foreign students other than French Canadians were successful. By 1908 enrollment had grown from 43 when President Amaron left in 1893 to over one hundred. This included a strong commitment to the education of women, something that had been part of Amaron’s vision from the beginning. Clara Partridge was hired as the first women’s principal and President Lee led a major fund-raising effort to construct a dormitory for women. The College value system also evolved beyond the sectarian approach espoused by Reverend Amaron. While Christian in orientation, it was non-denominational and focused on character rather than creed.

The inclusive nature of the vision and mission became even more evident under the leadership of the Reverend DeWitt Mallary, a graduate of Amherst College and the Union Theological Seminary. With the name changed to American International College, he was able to position the institution as a champion of education and opportunity for immigrants. He made this an intellectual as well as an educational mission with the publication of a scholarly journal, the monthly magazine, Immigration. The first edition appeared in April of 1909 and the publication ran for six years. It sought to provide scholarly coverage of all issues related to immigration in an effort to dispel the prejudices generated by a massive influx of foreigners pouring into the United States in the years leading up to World War I. The journal encouraged generosity and understanding by the American people toward the new arrivals and focused on the many ways that training and education could help them become productive workers and effective citizens, including the work being done by American International College.

In perhaps its finest hour, in 1913 Immigration entered a debate with President-emeritus of Harvard, Charles Eliot – the same President Eliot who had accompanied Calvin Amaron to the Chicago World Exposition twenty years earlier.  Eliot had published an article based on his observations from a trip around the world. President Eliot urged that immigration laws be changed so as to exclude admission of single men who had a tendency to marry American women with evil consequences resulting from this “mixture of races.” He observed that “the real assimilation of the foreign born will take centuries; that the amalgamation or blending of races through inter marriage is not only extraordinarily slow but is doubtful as to the strength and viability of the offspring; … that different races should not cross; only kindred races should marry.” The editor of Immigration took direct issue with President Eliot, showing that the problems faced by young single men were due to unsatisfactory labor conditions and poor living arrangements in the labor camps to which many were consigned. And he also challenged the scientific evidence for inherent racial differences, pointing out that all human variants are themselves mixtures and that there is no evidence for “racial distinctions in blood.”

With these statements, the mission of American International College as a place of opportunity and assimilation had been definitively clarified. While Reverend Amaron had launched this mission with passion and eloquence, his point of view was flawed. His successors kept the spirit of the mission alive but moved it to a higher level and made it directly relevant to the challenges facing the country at the beginning of a new century. The subsequent history of American International College was built on these strong foundations.