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St. Norbert College

private Catholic liberal arts college in De Pere, Wisconsin

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 12, 2026
Entity authorityQ7590859
Source-derived summary

St. Norbert College (SNC) is a private Norbertine liberal arts college in De Pere, Wisconsin, United States. Founded in October 1898 by Abbot Bernard Pennings, a Norbertine priest and educator, the school was named after Saint Norbert of Xanten. In 1952, the college became coeducational. As of April 2023, the school's enrollment is 2,009 students.

History

St. Norbert College was established when Abbot Bernard Pennings, a Dutch immigrant priest from the Premonstratensian Berne Abbey of Heeswijk, the Netherlands, founded the college to train young men for the priesthood. Francis Ignatius Van Dyke, a seminarian, was the first and, at the time, only student. St. Norbert is the world's first and only institution of higher learning sponsored by the Premonstratensian order.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “St. Norbert College” is private Catholic liberal arts college in De Pere, Wisconsin. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Norbert, College and private, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1898, 1952, 2023—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1898-10. For this dossier, Norbert, College and private is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “private Catholic liberal arts college in De Pere, Wisconsin” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7590859. Authority coordinates are 44.445, -88.069. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1898, 1952 and 2023.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
Verify next

The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “St. Norbert College”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow St. Norbert College primary sources, St. Norbert College archive and Norbert research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “St. Norbert College”?
  2. What terminology or title could unlock a more precise catalogue search?
  3. Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from St. Norbert College” 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.