Grinnell-in-China was funded by the joint efforts of Grinnell College and the local Grinnell Congregational church, under the supervision of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). A Chapel Day in 1913 started the fund-raising campaign at Grinnell and secured the first funds. However, Grinnell-in-China was officially launched in Dezhou 德州, Shandong province only in 1916. Initially it consisted of the Porter School for boys and the Wycoff School for girls but in the 1920s combined to become coeducational. Porter taught subjects such as math, western history, geography, science, music, the Bible, English, Chinese, the Chinese classics, and Chinese history. Wyckoff offered similar courses with the addition of courses more oriented to domestic activity, such as sewing or handiwork for the girls. The schools also offered extracurricular activities, especially athletics.
The last short-term teacher from Grinnell College, Donald Fessler, went to Grinnell-in-China at the end of his junior year in 1928. After he returned home in 1930, Grinnell’s relationship with the Chinese schools was effectively severed, due to the College’s financial woes during the Great Depression, declining interest in missionary work, rising nationalist sentiment in China, and the untimely passing of President John H. T. Main, arguably the biggest supporter of the program at the College.
Alice Reed, the Grinnell alumna who went to China in the 1910s and taught at the Wycoff Girls’ School, part of the Grinnell-in-China program, stayed on until the 1940s, however, even braving Japanese internment after Pearl Harbor.
Grinnell-in-China spearheaded recruitment efforts in China, utilizing existing missionary and alumni networks to spread the word among potential students, even though this exchange only yielded three Chinese alumni from the Porter School in Dezhou, Shandong province, among them Entang (Hsuehcheng) Hou, Grinnell’s very first Chinese alumnus who graduated in 1916. Whereas the number of Chinese students directly from Grinnell-in-China seemed small, its impact remained large, especially in north China, where Nankai (in Tianjin) and Tsing Hua (in Beijing) were also located.
