Manchester University is located in North Manchester, Indiana and dates back to 1860 in its original incarnation as the Roanoke Classical Seminary, founded by the United Brethren Church in Roanoke, Indiana. The move away from academy and Bible school status came in the 1920s. Manchester College, as it then became, merged with former Methodist seminary Mount Morris College in Mount Morris, Illinois in 1932.
Before university status came in 2012, the same year a second campus was opened in Fort Wayne. Other notable markers in its history included becoming the first college to offer an undergraduate Peace Studies (1948) and it was the site of a speech by Dr Martin Luther King Jr. in February 1968. He addressed a packed house for a speech on ‘The Future of Integration’. In 2016, Manchester University launched the US’ first masters’ degree in pharmacogenomics at the Fort Wayne, the site of a state-of-the-art pharmacy school.
Manchester University has 1,600 students from 28 states and 20 countries. It offers them more than 60 areas of undergraduate (bachelor of arts, bachelor of science), graduate (associate of arts, master of athletic training, master of science in pharmacogenomics) and professional study (doctor of pharmacy) over four colleges: pharmacy, natural science and health sciences; arts and humanities; education and social sciences and business.
Among Manchester’s departments, the department of history and political science is one of the oldest and prestigious. It has produced many distinguished alumni and had a number of noted faculty, including professor of medieval history Andrew Cordier, one of the co-founders of the United Nations. Through Cordier, Manchester became the only college in the United States to hold NGO status with the United Nations. This status has helped to attract a number of distinguished figures to speak there, reported to include Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Jr., Barry Goldwater, Ralph Nader, and Jesse Jackson.
Notable alumni include: inventor Max Bechtold; NFL player Herb Banet, NFL coach Mike DeBord; Nobel Prize winner in polymer chemistry Paul Flory; Randy Dormans, animator at DreamWorks SKG; American journalist Charles Franklin Hildebrand; Albert G. Milbank, professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and co-faculty director of the Princeton Project on National Security.
There are also over 60 student societies on offer, ranging over sports, faith, spirituality, politics and music.
