Multnomah University
private non-denominational Christian university in Portland, Oregon
Multnomah University (MU) was a private Christian university in Portland, Oregon, United States. It provided undergraduate, graduate, and certificate programs in both in-person and online settings. In 2023, the school announced it would be closing as Multnomah University on May 1, 2024, becoming the Multnomah campus of Jessup University.
History
On February 14, 1936, John G. Mitchell called a meeting of Portland-area ministers and Christian businessmen to discuss the idea of creating a Bible school in the Pacific Northwest. Mitchell, working with B.B. Sutcliffe, Willard Aldrich, and others, founded the Multnomah School of the Bible that year.
In the following October, classes began with 49 students and a half-dozen faculty in a former mortuary.
B.B. Sutcliffe served as the first president from 1936 to 1939. Later, in 1943, Willard Aldrich became the president of the school. At 34, Aldrich was the youngest president of any college in the United States. Aldrich served as the president until his retirement in 1978.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Multnomah University” is private non-denominational Christian university in Portland, Oregon. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Multnomah, University and private, not as a finished interpretation.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6935185. Authority coordinates are 45.526, -122.577. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2023, 2024, 1936 and 1939.
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This entry incorporates text from “Multnomah University” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.