Thiel College
Private Lutheran liberal arts college in Pennsylvania
Thiel College (, ) is a private college in Greenville, Pennsylvania, United States. It is affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and is one of the smaller colleges in the region with about 100 full-time and part-time faculty members.
History
Founded in 1866 as a coeducational institution known as "Thiel Hall", the college started as a result of a meeting between William Passavant and A. Louis Thiel. At the Lutheran Church Pittsburgh Synod convention in Greensburg in 1869, it was decided that Thiel Hall would become a college and serve western Pennsylvania from an initial campus in Philipsburg (now known as Monaca). Four years later, on September 1, 1870, the college received a charter from the government of Pennsylvania and relocated to Greenville, where it was incorporated as Thiel College.
On August 1, 2016, Susan Traverso became the 20th and the first female president of Thiel College.
Today, Thiel is home to about 110 full- and part-time faculty members. According to the US Department of Education, the school has just under 1,000 students in attendance.
Thiel College awarded Amelia Earhart an honorary degree in 1932. In his book The Search for Amelia Earhart, author Fred Goerner said, "The most satisfying recognition, however, came from her father's alma mater, Thiel College of Greenville, Pennsylvania in the form of an honorary Doctor of Science degree."
Thiel was also the first institution to grant an honorary degree to Fred Rogers in 1969.
“Thiel College” enters the record as private Lutheran liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Thiel, College and Private can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Thiel 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.