For a professor of history who likes to indulge in quiet dramatics, Robert College of Istanbul offers rare advantages: should the professor be speaking of Jason's route in search of the Golden Fleece, or should he be describing how Darius I crossed the Bosporus, he need only step to his classroom window to illustrate his point. "There," he can say, looking out at the water over the fortress of Rumeli Hissar, which Sultan Mohammed II built in 1452, "there is where it happened."
The oldest American college outside the U.S., Robert has for 92 years lived in the mainstream of Turkish history. It has survived wars, pestilence and revolution. Thus, as Historian Arnold Toynbee once wrote, it has fulfilled "one of the great educational needs of our time; its achievement has been to provide a home of learning, kept free from the fierce political controversies of the present age, in which young men of all religions and all nationalities have been able to receive a first-rate modern education." Last week, as its seventh president, Duncan Ballantine, 42, onetime head of Oregon's Reed College (TIME, Oct. 18), arrived to take over, Robert and its sister campus—the 65-year-old American College for Girls four miles away—had reason to believe that their best years still lay ahead.
Western Outlet. In a sense, Robert was forged out of history. It was during the Crimean War that Yankee Missionary Cyrus Hamlin, then engaged in baking and ferrying bread across the Bosporus to the starving patients in the British hospital at Scutari, met a traveling Manhattan philanthropist named Christopher Rhinelander Robert. The two men decided that Western culture should have an outlet within the Ottoman Empire. They began planning a college course that was to be in English; it would be "prosecuted without regard to nationality," and would be taught by men "of firm and symmetrical piety." In 1863, Robert opened. The campus' early years were a constant struggle.
During the 1870s, it suffered an epidemic of cholera, lived through the Russo-Turkish war, was reduced to an enrollment of only 128 after Sultan Abdul Hamid II issued a decree barring Moslem Turks from foreign schools. The 1890s brought another cholera epidemic. Then the country had an earthquake, and Turkey went to war with Greece. As the college was just recovering, the Young Turks revolted. Then came the Balkan Wars, World War I, the Kemal Ataturk revolution of the '20s, and the Great Depression. By 1944, when Ballantine's able predecessor, Floyd Black, took over, the college was $500,000 in debt. Only by the most stringent economies—"prowling about the halls," recalls one professor, "turning off lights, or more likely, unscrewing the bulbs so nobody else could turn them on"—was Black able to get Robert nearly out of the red.