ore than one hundred years ago, on 17 December 1891, the new building of the Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry was dedicated. This event attracted the usual luminaries: Levi Morton, the vice president of the United States, Robert Pattison, the governor of Pennsylvania, educators, and religious leaders. More remarkable guests were Andrew Carnegie, "representing the achievements of the manufacturing world, and Thomas A. Edison, 'the sovereign genius of the electric world' [whose presence] indicated the interest of these two great branches of human activity, of which the Drexel Institute is to be a part." 1 After Bishop Henry Potter of New York pronounced the invocation to the dignitaries seated in the building's grand auditorium and to the officials of the school seated on the stage, the Honorable Chauncey DePew gave a lengthy dedicatory address. In it, he related the history of higher education back to the medieval world of Abelard and ended with lavish praise for this new institution. Its students would not become academics, clerics, and lawyers, the products of the ancient universities, but rather they would work in industry and the sciences. Focusing on business and commerce, and including women among its students, this would be a peculiarly American institution, free of social class divisions, rooted in the values of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The new building was a direct reflection of the intentions of its founder, Anthony J. Drexel (1826-1893). Unlike most American colleges, whose Gothic-detailed buildings on green lawns, framed by ancient trees, recalled the origins of colleges in English religious communities, this was squarely situated on an urban corner, two blocks from the lines of the Pennsylvania Railroad and adjacent to the Allison Car Works. The building's design was different as well; its walls were of a bright buff brick and terra cotta with ornament derived from classical sources, though following no specific European prototype. The two-hundred-foot square building covered an acre. Its masses were disposed as two wings punctuated by regularly spaced windows on either side of a central block, which contained a broad archway. At the peak of the arch was affixed a peculiarly nineteenth-century emblematic nude figure representing "the Genius of Knowledge," which supported a tablet emblazoned with the name of the new institution-not Drexel College but rather Drexel Institute, linking it to the workingmen's educational movement of industrial England and Germany of the late nineteenth century. The inner face of the archway was ornamented with rondels containing busts that represented the giants of the arts and sciences taught by the Institute. For poetry there was Goethe; Raphael for painting; J. S. Bach for music; Michelangelo for sculpture; and Shakespeare for drama. To these well known giants were added others appropriate to the broader interests of the Institute: for physics, Faraday; for mathematics, Isaac Newton; for natural history, Humboldt; for navigation, Columbus; for architecture, William of Sens, the medieval master-builder of Canterbury Cathedral; and for politics, Thomas Jefferson.