Allegheny has moved from hidden jewel to respected national leader. Alumni who once had to explain where they went to college, now see nods of respectful recognition when they say, “I went to Allegheny College.” U.S. News & World Report — which always has ranked Allegheny as one of the nation’s Top 100 National Liberal Arts Colleges — now identifies Allegheny as the USA’s No. 1 “Up and Coming” National Liberal Arts College. Newsweek ranks us No. 20 in the nation for academic rigor — just behind Harvard and just ahead of Duke.

And we remain one of the colleges featured in every edition of Loren Pope’s Colleges that Change Lives — the seminal book on the nation’s greatest liberal arts colleges.

The College has attracted a faculty of premier teachers and researchers – one of the best in the nation – and invested to retain them.

We have beautified our campus. Allegheny always has been idyllic. Now it is breathtaking.

Forty-five percent of our graduates immediately go on to graduate school; within five years, 80 percent of Allegheny graduates are continuing to pursue their educations.

We are an acknowledged U.S. environmental leader. And we are the nation’s No. 1 leader in the noble quest to make political debate more civil through the annual awarding of the Allegheny College Prize for Civility in Public Life at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

On Graduation Day, Allegheny now is a destination for national commencement speakers such as E.J. Dionne and Douglas Brinkley, and honorary degree recipients such as Arnold Palmer and Tom Ridge.

There is yet one unattained achievement that stands between us and an unmistakably certain future of greatness. And that is to increase our endowment.

The wagon carried three tons of books. The journey started in Boston, at the home of one James Winthrop, a Boston judge and close friend of Allegheny patriarch William Bentley. Judge Winthrop possessed one of the most coveted private book collections in the United States. Lamenting that his own children had not inherited his love of books – but knowing that a young college on the American frontier had – Winthrop bequeathed the bulk of his collection to Allegheny College. And so the books were loaded on wagons and sent 600 miles west. From Boston. To Albany. To Buffalo. To Meadville. More than 3,000 volumes in all.

It was an extraordinary gift. And it instantly gave Allegheny one of the leading academic libraries – and one of the most sterling academic reputations – in the young United States.

It was, in a sense, Allegheny’s first capital campaign, and our first transformative gift. And it put Allegheny on the national map. Allegheny’s first President, Timothy Alden, in 1824 received an unsolicited letter, congratulating the College on its “good fortune of having become the objects of donations so liberal.”