Chancellor University History

The story of the founding of Chancellor University is one that shows how responsive the University has been to the ever changing needs of the Cleveland business community. In the early 1800s, the requirement of businesses for employees and managers with basic accounting knowledge and good penmanship led itinerant "penmen" (who sometimes also taught accounting) to move from city to city, advertising to teach various styles of penmanship in courses of varying lengths. Eventually, with the growth of the cities during the early 1800s, these penmen started to create the first business academies, commercial institutes, or mercantile colleges.

Early in his life an Ashtabula, Ohio, Platt R. Spencer, Sr. worked to develop a system of penmanship which he referred to as Semi-Angular, but which eventually became nationally known as the "Spencerian" style. As a boy, it is said that Spencer practiced his style of penmanship by writing in the sand along the shores of Lake Erie by his home in Ashtabula, and that at the age of eight, he spent the first penny he earned to purchase a piece of foolscap paper upon which to practice his alphabet.

Whether just stories or not, it is definitely known that Spencer first became an itinerant penman in the late 1820s, while maintaining a home and farm in Ashtabula. At the same time, he became an early advocate of the Temperance movement, making his first speech about it in 1832, and possibly helping along the passage of one of the first Temperance ordinances in the United States in Geneva, Ohio. He was also an early abolitionist, associating with Joshua Giddings and Benjamin Wade. Spencer was also Wade's penmanship instructor, being requested by Giddings to give his partner lessons. Giddings became a famous Congressman and fiery abolitionist, and was a founder of the Republican Party (Giddings and Wade's law office has been preserved at Hale Farm in Bath, Ohio, and is the landmark for where the GOP was formed).

Spencer's style of penmanship was easier to master than other alternative styles at the time, and was taught by copying letters and business forms from copybooks, the first of which was printed and sold in 1848. This Spencerian system of writing became the most commonly taught and used style during the early industrial age of this country, in part because of its founder's involvement with the College.

Chancellor University was founded in 1848. Two institutions seem to be the starting points for the University. On September 6th, 1848, R.S. Bacon, formerly one of the proprietors of a Cincinnati Mercantile College, opened a mercantile college on W. 3rd St. Just five months later, in early February of 1849, Ezekiel G. Folsom also opened a similar institution, called Folsom & Child's Commercial Institute to teach Penmanship & Book-Keeping.



Folsom, born in Ashtabula County, seems to have been well known to Clevelander's having taught penmanship off and on in the growing town since 1842, when at age 21 he first advertised to teach a class of penmanship. He probably came to Cleveland because of the presence of other family members (one first cousin was an early President of Ohio City's Council during the "bridge war", and another was the contractor who straightened the Cuyahoga river's channel to the lake). Folsom was also well known, because while a student at Oberlin College, he founded, in 1845, E.G. Folsom & Wm. Trimble's Academy. The Academy lasted five years, seemingly until Folsom's graduation. Like most academies or institutes of the time it taught writing and book-keeping, and later became known as the Oberlin Commercial Institute. In 1859, Platt R. Spencer, perhaps drawn to Oberlin because of his abolitionist views, started a "Chirographic Institute", which later merged with the Commercial Institute (perhaps upon Folsom's graduation and removal to Cleveland). This institution was intimately affiliated with Oberlin College until the end of the Civil War.

Folsom himself seems to have left the Oberlin institution he founded sometime after his graduation from Oberlin College in 1849 and henceforth devoted himself to his new Commercial Institute in Cleveland. The Commercial Institute became Folsom's Commercial College when it was incorporated in May, 1851, and some of the most influential businessmen in early Cleveland history, Mather, Eells, the Severance brothers, and Sherwin, acted as his "visiting committee." Shortly after its incorporation, Folsom's Commercial College merged with Bacon & Co.' s Mercantile College, and became the surviving entity with Mr. Folsom remaining as its president, with the College taking 1848 as its founding date.

During this early period Folsom was joined by one of his students, H. B. Bryant, who became the early College's, "Professor of Science of Accounts" about 1853. The next year, W. E. Stratton and J. W. Lusk, both formerly students of Platt R. Spencer the founder of Spencerian Penmanship, joined with Bryant, and with Spencer's assistance created the first Bryant & Stratton College, known in 1854, as Bryant, Lusk & Stratton. Bryant and Stratton quickly devoted themselves to founding, acquiring, or partnering with business colleges across the country, and by 1857 they owned or were partners with institutions in Albany, Buffalo, New York City, and Chicago.

In the next year (1858), E.G. Folsom's Commercial College merged with that growing "chain" of institutions with Folsom eventually moving to Albany, New York to run what would become Albany Business College. The president of the merged colleges was Folsom's former student, faculty member, and competitor, H. B. Bryant. At about the same time, another mercantile college had been founded by the name of Hollister, Felton, & Townsend's Mercantile College. This college briefly became the Cleveland Commercial College before it, too, merged with Bryant & Stratton. The surviving entity of the merger became Bryant, Folsom, Stratton & Felton's College, with E.R. Felton, becoming the president of this merged institution for several years (with his partner Wheeler temporarily becoming the president during the Civil War).

Mr. Felton at some point split off from the college and founded a competing institution named the Cleveland Business & Telegraphic College in 1865, later changing its name to the Union Business Institute. The Cleveland Bryant & Stratton College took in another partner and became the Bryant, Stratton & Perrin Commercial College, with Perrin being the resident principal until it was merged or acquired by Felton & Bigelow's Union Business Institute, with E.R. Felton, for the second time becoming the institution's president. By this time in the mid-1860s the Bryant and Stratton's chain had eventually reached a total of between 48 and 52 affiliated business colleges, the largest and most successful of the "chains" of business institutions that were founded at the time. After 1867, this chain collapsed, probably because of the death of Stratton.

E. G. Folsom, W. E. Stratton, and J. W. Lusk, among many others, were disciples of Platt R. Spencer, Sr.. They and countless others were taught by Spencer, either at his "Log Seminary" in Geneva, Ohio, or during one of his many trips around the country during the falls and winters in the 1830s. Spencer also founded or purchased a commercial or mercantile college in 1852 in Pittsburg, but sold out after a couple of years because of illness. He and his sons then joined with Bryant & Stratton in the late 1850s and 1860s, becoming faculty members and/or partners with these men in several of institutions until the dissolution of the chain occurred in 1867. Several became presidents of these institutions in places like Washington, D.C., Milwaukee, and Cleveland.

In 1868, P.R. Spencer, Jr., removed the Spencerian Institute of Penmanship from Geneva and joined with Union Business College, eventually become the institution's president in 1876 and changing the name to the Spencerian Business College. However, by 1881, Spencer, Jr., stepped down for the veteran penman, E.R. Felton, who for the third time once became the institution's president. In 1895, the college was again incorporated and Henry T. Loomis became its president. This was followed seven years later by the college being acquired by three former administrators of the Buffalo Bryant & Stratton College, with Seamen Van Vliet becoming the institution's new president. Van Vliet soon retired and after only two years, in 1904, Ernest E. Merville assumed a presidency which would continue for almost four decades. During his tenure the academic program was expanded and strengthened with several bachelor-level programs, and the college became affiliated in 1915 with the Rufus P. Ranney Law School, which after closing temporarily due to World War I, became the Lake Erie School of Law until it eventually closed in 1933 because of a lack of students during the Great Depression.

In another development, in 1894, two of the Spencerian Business College's faculty, Frank L. Dyke and David. N. Berkey, founded their own business college, named Berkey and Dyke College. This institution was separate from Spencerian College until World War II, when the president of the then, Dyke School of Commerce, Jay Gates, bought the Spencerian College, and merged the staffs, faculties, and names of the institution, to become Dyke & Spencerian College. This name was eventually shortened to Dyke College in 1958.

In 1965, Dyke College became a non-profit private institution of higher education, and this event was shortly followed in 1971, by the election of the College's 14th president, John C. Corfias, who moved the College towards the goals of becoming regionally accredited (NCA candidate in 1974, and received fully accredited status in 1978, two years ahead of schedule). In 1973 the College began offering an external degree program and during this same year was unanimously elected a member of the Cleveland Commission on Higher Education.
On June 24, 1979, Jay Rockefeller delivered the keynote speech at the Dyke College commencement, the college his great grandfather attended 124 years earlier (then called Folsom's College). In his opening remarks Mr. Rockefeller stated, "While this is the first occasion I have had to visit Dyke College, I can assure you I have not overlooked the fact that it was here that my great-grandfather learned how to run a business. And I want to take this opportunity to thank you personally for the obviously fine teaching job you did. I thank you, my wife thanks you, my children thank you."

Five years later, in 1984, the College moved from its location on East 6th Street (where it had been located for 25 years) to the Columbia Building at 112 Prospect Avenue. In 1995 Dyke College was renamed David N. Myers College (becoming Myers University in 2000) in honor of 1922 graduate and benefactor David Myers. In 1995 Arnold G. Tew was elected the College's 15th president and this same year the College began offering online classes.

Chancellor University launched its first graduate program in January 2000 and Paul C. Feingold succeeded Arnold Tew as the University's 16th president in April of 2001. During Dr. Feingold's tenure, the University moved from the Columbia Building to MidTown Cleveland, renovating and occupying both the former University Club / Stager-Beckwith mansion from 2004-2008, and its current location beginning in 2005 at the northeast corner of 40th and Chester.

In July 2006, Richard J. Scaldini became the University's 17th president.

In 2008, the University was acquired by private ownership and renamed Chancellor University with George Kidd succeeding Dr. Scaldini as its 18th president.

In September 2008, Chancellor University celebrated 160 years of quality education in northeast Ohio. Today, the institution that educated John D. Rockefeller, Harvey Firestone, and Theodore Ernst as well as tens of thousands of northeast Ohioans for careers in business, is a premier global institution offering educational opportunities to an international student body. With Chancellor University, students have the opportunity to improve their lives, careers, and communities through education.