How to Write Institutional History

Learning from Wheaton College

I’ve still got a month of teaching and grading left in the 2023-24 year, but I’m starting to let myself think more intently about the exciting project coming up on the other side of Commencement: a fall sabbatical dedicated to researching the women’s history of Bethel, preceded by some oral history interviews over the summer.¹

As I noted in my sabbatical announcement, I’ve done a decent amount of institutional history in recent years. But I’m still pondering some of the challenges inherent to that type of historical work. For example, as I put it in a follow-up post, “I don’t have the same kind of distance from my subject that I do from most of the other topics I tend to study and teach,” yet I still need to adhere to my discipline’s core expectations:

I’m still composing a narrative account of the past on the basis of historical evidence, in conversation with what previous scholars have concluded. I’m still using what are often called “the 5 C’s of historical thinking.”

So while I’ve started to do the groundwork for my research, I’ve also been looking for models of how historians in general — and Christian historians in particular — have studied well their own institutions. There are several good examples of this, but one that’s especially relevant for me is the report published last fall by Wheaton College’s historical review task force (HRTF)² on race relations, which I’ve been discussing this week with my students in Intro to History.

In 2021, Wheaton’s board of trustees commissioned a task force to do four things:

1) [to] clarify what we know—and to explore what more can and should be known—about the history of race relations on the campus of Wheaton College;

2) understand the impact of past events on present realities, including the experience of ethnic minorities;

3) identify ways to make Wheaton’s history of race relations more readily accessible and widely known to all generations of all College constituencies; and

4) determine—in view of the supremacy of Jesus Christ—what aspects of this history need to be celebrated more intentionally, lamented more deeply, or repented of more specifically.

I wanted to share the resulting report with my students for three reasons: