Founded in 1968, Mount Vernon Nazarene University is located only 45 minutes northeast of Ohio’s capital city of Columbus. It was build on the original Lakeholm Farm ground owned by Ulysses S. Grant’s Secretary of the Interior, Columbus Delano, and the original house still on the property dates back to the post-Civil-War era. In November 2003, the Lakeholm Mansion received an Ohio Historical Society marker.
Starting with nothing but mud and cornfields, early school administrators, including first president Dr. Stephen Nease, along with a team of volunteers, built Mount Vernon Nazarene University from the ground up. Using available barns and local churches for classrooms, the first class of 191 pioneer students came seeking something more than an education. Nease coined MVNU’s motto, “To seek to learn is to seek to serve.” Those first students and generations who followed gained an understanding that education is a lifelong process and that they are preparing not only for a career, but also for meaningful service to God and humankind.
Since the beginning, bricks have multiplied to provide needed classroom space, dormitories and apartments. A chapel and a library have risen in colonial architecture where farmland once stood. A few of the original buildings remain to remind the visitor of what once stood on the grounds. That dairy barn used for the first meals on campus, the icehouse, and, of course, Lakeholm Mansion remain to link the campus to its origins. And that is a large part of the charm of a university landscape that is attractive and pleasing to the eye. The beauty of the old has not been entirely destroyed or replaced but, in many cases, tastefully enhanced.
There has always been a deep commitment to continuing the careful stewardship that had contributed to making the farmstead an outstanding example of ecological harmony. At the time the campus property was acquired, the college retained the groundskeeper--a Hungarian refugee who fled his homeland at the time of the Russian occupation in 1945 and never learned much English, to tend the flowers, trees, and lawns. His legacy of hard and skillful service set the example for the dedicated staff that has grown over the years as the campus has expanded. Early on, there was established the tradition known as Blue-Green Day. This is one day set aside in the spring when students, staff, faculty, and administrators join together to plant flowers and trees to beautify the campus. MVNU takes great pride in its green space.
Over the past thirty years, Mount Vernon Nazarene University has experienced a steady growth in enrollment. It has grown in spite of dire national forecasts that a diminishing student pool would threaten the existence of small colleges lacking substantial endowments. At the approach of the turn of the millennium, the enrollment has passed the 2,000 mark. The curriculum has expanded to include Adult and Graduate Studies, with degree programs for non-traditional students in Associate of Arts in General Studies, Bachelor of Business Administration and graduate programs in religion and education.
At each step the college has maintained strong ties with the founding Nazarene denomination. Nearly a century after the denomination was founded, churches on the college's educational zone send approximately 800 students and contribute almost $2 million through local church budgets to the University each year. The board of trustees is composed of the superintendents of the various districts on the University zone, along with pastors and lay people elected by representatives of the individual churches in Ohio, West Virginia, and eastern Kentucky. Many of the faculty members completed undergraduate training at one of the Nazarene institutions.
Students and faculty are expected to attend chapel services three times a week. And the campus community is challenged to experience hands-on service through ministry courses, internships, community projects, and mission trips. The short-term mission program, "Joining Hands," involves training students and faculty for spring break and summer trips to Belize, Brazil, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Haiti, Hungary, India, Israel, Kenya, Romania, and Mexico as well as inner-city ministry in New York City, Orlando, and Indianapolis. Increasingly, graduates spend a short-term assignment serving, for example, in South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, China, and the Czech Republic.
The University is poised to implement the resolve of the board of trustees to facilitate continued growth. In 1999, the University purchased the neighboring 128-acre Pinecrest Farm. In 2002, we transitioned from College to University status. There are plans to establish a center for global mission and ministry studies to provide training and consultation services with a specific emphasis on compassionate ministries around the world. And MVNU has established Adult and Graduate Studies branch campus facilities at Polaris, Newark, Lima, and Gahanna, beginning this fall, Cincinnati.
In the end, none of the physical elements of the college has meaning devoid of the dedicated people who have invested their resources, talents, and their faith. What the giants--those pioneers and their descendants who gave of themselves and their resources--seem to have in common is their ability to dream. They could envision an institution of higher learning where there were cornfields and grazing cattle. They were the visionaries who helped make the miracle. We look forward with great anticipation where God will lead MVNU in the future.