history.htm-History

At 50 years of age, the University of Hartford is young as universities go. Yet its roots go back some 130 years, when Hartford city residents with famous last names like Stowe, Clemens, and Colt founded the Hartford Society for Decorative Art. That society later evolved into the Hartford Art School, one of the three founding colleges incorporated as the University of Hartford in 1957.

The Art of Famous Ladies
The city of Hartford’s navigable rivers attracted industry in the 19th century, and its urbane lifestyle drew men and women of letters as well as business tycoons. Author Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mrs. Samuel Clemens (wife of Mark Twain), and Mrs. Samuel Colt, he of firearms manufacturing, formed the Hartford Society for Decorative Art in 1877 and located it a decade later at the Wadsworth Atheneum, the oldest public art museum in the nation.

For the next 70 years, the Atheneum would provide a creative and nurturing environment for the Hartford Art School. One thing was missing, however, and that was the school’s ability to grant degrees to its students. In 1949 it addressed that shortcoming by partnering with Hillyer College. By the mid-1950s the art school had an international reputation but had completely outgrown its quarters. It needed a new location, but where?

The original Hillyer College sprang up from evening courses offered to young men at the one-year-old YMCA of Hartford in 1879. About a decade later, a former Civil War general, Charles Tudor Hillyer, gave land to the YMCA for a new building. Hillyer Institute of the YMCA was created in 1893, becoming Hillyer Junior College in 1937. Mindful of the societal impact of the industrial revolution, the overriding theme of the school was technology.

In 1947, Hillyer Junior College became Hillyer College and separated from the Y. This early Hillyer College would eventually be divided up, re-emerging as early versions of four of the university’s present schools and colleges: the School of Business Administration (now Barney School of Business), the College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Education (now the College of Education, Nursing and Health Professions), and the College of Engineering.

Samuel I. Ward, a Hartford industrialist, gave his electronics school to Hillyer College in 1952. The school, renamed the Ward School of Technology, was one of the first to train technicians in a new medium called television. In 2003 it would join with the College of Engineering and the Department of Architecture to form today’s College of Engineering, Technology, and Architecture..

What is known today as The Hartt School was born in the 1920s as an informal arrangement between two well-known but very different personalities. Julius Hartt came to Hartford in 1906 as a musician and teacher, but he would become the city’s cultural conscience. More suited for scholarship and musical performance than entrepreneurship, Hartt found his alter ego in the dynamic Moshe Paranov. Together they formed the music school that would bear Hartt’s name.

Paranov put the Hartt College of Music (which became the Hartt School of Music in the 1960s after joining the university) on the map and on the radio as well, embracing the new medium and serving as music director for 20 years at WTIC in Hartford, one of the largest stations in the early days of radio. In the 1990s The Hartt School changed its name once again to reflect its expansion into other performing arts besides music.

By the early 1950s, Hartt, like Hillyer and the Hartford Art School, had a space problem. Thanks to the public profile Paranov had built for the school, Alfred C. Fuller, of door-to-door brush-selling fame, pledged the $1 million capital that would make Hartt an attractive merger partner for the art school and Hillyer.

Hillyer College purchased some 150 acres of farmland on Bloomfield Avenue in 1955 and began to dream of a university for Hartford. After several years of labyrinthine negotiations among the three schools, the University of Hartford was chartered on Feb. 21, 1957. Vincent Brown Coffin, an insurance executive, was chosen as the first chancellor in 1959. He was followed by Chancellor Archibald Woodruff in 1967, and Presidents Stephen Joel Trachtenberg in 1977, Humphrey Tonkin in 1989, and Walter Harrison in 1998.

The new university’s first building--today’s Hillyer Hall--opened in 1960. In 1967, after other academic buildings had opened, the university welcomed its first on-campus residents. In succeeding years, the university grew in both size and stature, adding a dramatic U-shaped complex, the Harry Jack Gray Center, which encompasses classrooms, auditoriums, an art gallery, a restaurant, bookstore, and Mortensen Library.

The University’s most ambitious building project yet is the new, $34 million Integrated Science, Engineering, and Technology complex, which opened in 2005. The project includes major renovations to the adjacent Dana Hall, one of the original buildings on campus. Construction began on the Mort and Irma Handel Performing Arts Center, just down the road from the University's main campus, this past summer at the city's gateway. Meanwhile, sparkling new turf athletic fields for soccer, baseball, and lacrosse are providing a home-field advantage that the Hawks and the entire University community can be proud of.

The Hartford Art School, the Hartt School of Music, and Hillyer College were all in search of the same thing in the 1950s: appropriate space. Each had something to offer to a merger, and together they would form a unique combination of curriculum and teaching disciplines. In 1966 the board of regents added the College of Basic Studies to the mixture. Renamed Hillyer College in 1992 in honor of the university’s founding school, its purpose was and is to offer an intensive, two-year program in the liberal arts, combined with personalized attention, to prepare students who did not perform well in high school for a bachelor’s degree.

In 1991 Hartford College for Women (HCW) affiliated with the university. In response to a nationwide decline in enrollments at single-gender schools, HCW has been transformed into The Women’s Education and Leadership Fund, which supports women’s programming and curricula across the entire university. HCW’s Career Counseling Center, now known as The Center for Professional Development continues to serve the needs of both women and men in the community.

It seems fitting that an institution forged by the community should be an integral part of that community. Straddling the city of Hartford and the towns of Bloomfield and West Hartford, the university has always opened its doors in all directions. Hartt’s Community Division, which provides music, dance, and theatre instruction to more than 4,000 individuals of all ages every year, is one example. Another is our Division I athletics program, which draws thousands of Hawk supporters to campus. Hartford gained the top level of collegiate competitive sports in the 1984-85 academic year and now participates in 18 intercollegiate sports as a member of the America East Conference.

Through innovative teaching tools like the Engineering Applications Center and the Micro Business Incubator, students and faculty work with local companies to provide research and creative project management in support of business goals. And perhaps most distinctively, the university is host to two public magnet schools, one elementary and the other, a high school concentrating in science and engineering. No other university can claim one such public school within its borders. Such community engagement was what community leaders had in mind in 1957 when they created the University of Hartford.

Our increasing reputation for innovative programming and a caring faculty currently attracts more than 7,300 undergraduate and graduate students who are enrolled in 89 undergraduate majors and 33 graduate programs. Their choices run the gamut from architectural engineering to musical theatre to communication and beyond. Today’s University of Hartford has surpassed the founders’ original but modest plans for a local university in Hartford, becoming instead a vibrant and growing institution that draws students from 46 states and 53 countries. We have become a university for the world.