Bryant University

• 1. Introduction

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  Bryant University began in 1863 not as a place of liberal arts or science, but as a school for people who wanted to learn how to keep a ledger and write a business letter. Its founders, John Collins Bryant and Henry Beadman Bryant, built something practical. They named it after themselves and planted it in the chain of institutions that still operates today as Bryant & Stratton College. What no one could have predicted then is that this modest Providence bookkeeping school would one day sit on a 428-acre hilltop donated by the inventor of Tupperware, attract two former U.S. presidents in a single year, and build an endowment that grew by 169 million dollars in a single decade. How did a branch of a business-correspondence chain become a university with a motto in Latin, a superstitious archway, and a campus whose very land carries the names of families who still live nearby?

• 2. Downtown Providence

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  Butler Exchange stood at 111 Westminster Street on Kennedy Plaza in downtown Providence, and that was where Bryant held its earliest classes. The building has since been demolished, but in its time it was the physical address of a very particular ambition: teaching people how business communication worked. In 1878, a teacher at the school named Thomas Stowell purchased the Providence branch of Bryant & Stratton from the national chain. Stowell ran it until his death in 1916, when the school passed to new ownership and merged with Henry Jacobs' Rhode Island Commercial School, which Jacobs had founded in 1898. The merged institution became non-profit in 1949, and its first master's program arrived in 1969. By then, though, the school had already spent more than three decades on an entirely different piece of Providence real estate.

• 3. A Building and Its Curse

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  Isaac Gifford Ladd spent one million dollars constructing a building on Young Orchard Avenue on the east side of Providence in 1875. Ladd was an associate of Charles M. Schwab and a well-known figure in the U.S. steel industry. He built the structure as an expression of devotion to his new wife. His wife's response, according to the account that survived, was that she hated it. She reportedly hated the very idea of a building named in her honor. Ladd interpreted this as a rejection so complete that he later took his own life. The building stood empty until Thomas Marsden transformed it into Hope Hospital, which eventually became part of Bryant College as South Hall. The wrought-iron arch at the entrance to South Hall was the physical remnant of Ladd's doomed gesture. When Bryant moved from Providence to Smithfield, that arch traveled with the school. Students who arrived in Smithfield found it out of place on the new campus and began avoiding it. A rumor circulated that walking through the arch before graduation would cost you your degree. Worn paths formed around it as generations of students chose the long way around.

• 4. The Tupper Gift

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  Earl S. Tupper was an alumnus of Bryant and the inventor of Tupperware. In October 1967, he donated his 428-acre hilltop estate to Bryant College as the site for a new campus. Bryant thanked him in two ways: by naming the campus after him and by conferring an honorary Ph.D. in Humane Letters. The land Tupper gave had its own deep history. The old Emin Homestead and Captain Joseph Mowry homestead had occupied much of the land, and the Emin family farmed it for three generations from the late 19th century through the mid-20th century. Descendants of those original settlers still live near the campus today. The university established a scholarship for accounting students in tribute to the Emin family, and historical photographs of the homestead remain on display in the Alumni House. When Bryant moved to Smithfield in 1971, the famous archway made the trip as well, the only surviving physical connection to the College Hill campus the school was leaving behind.

• 5. College Hill and Brown University

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  From the 1st of August 1935 to 1971, Bryant College of Business Administration occupied College Hill near Brown University. Its first home there was South Hall, at the corner of Hope Street and Young Orchard Avenue, a building that had served as Hope Hospital and, before that, as the 19th-century residence of Byron Sprague, a nephew of manufacturer William Sprague III. Isaac Gifford Ladd also lived there at one point. When Bryant relocated to Smithfield, it sold the entire College Hill property to Brown University. The transaction covered 26 buildings on 10 acres of land, and Brown designated it East Campus. The building that had been South Hall became home to Brown's music department and was renamed the Orwig Music Center.

• 6. The Machtley Era

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  Ronald K. Machtley came to Bryant in 1996 as a former Navy captain and former U.S. Representative. He immediately convened faculty, students, and the board of trustees and announced a capital campaign. Over his tenure, the university built a new library, an athletic center, a communications and IT complex, a residence hall, and an interfaith center. It also renovated the main classroom building and the student union. The school's name changed from Bryant College to Bryant University in 2004. By 2007, the endowment had reached 171 million dollars, a net increase of 169 million dollars in just ten years. In 2017, Machtley became the highest-paid college president in the United States, at 6,283,616 dollars, which was 920,000 dollars more than the second-highest-paid peer. On the 28th of February 2008, former president Bill Clinton came to campus to campaign for Hillary Clinton's Democratic presidential nomination bid, the first time a sitting or former president or presidential candidate had spoken at Bryant. On the 17th of May 2008, former president George H.W. Bush delivered the commencement address and received an honorary degree. Within three months, two of the only three living former U.S. presidents had appeared on campus.

• 7. Campus and Buildings

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  The George E. Bello Center for Information and Technology is a 71,000-square-foot building housing the college library, designed by the New York firm Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects, the same firm that designed the Science, Industry, & Business Library for the New York Public Library. The Ronald K. and Kati C. Machtley Interfaith Center opened at the start of the 2009-2010 academic year in an 11,000-square-foot space. Gwathmey Siegel & Associates designed it as well. On the 9th of October 2010, the board of trustees dedicated the building in honor of President Machtley and his wife Kati. The center received a 2010 Honor Design Award from Faith & Form magazine and a Building of America Award from Construction Communications magazine for its use of sustainable materials. The John H. Chafee Center for International Business was named after the late Rhode Island senator and houses the World Trade Center and Export Assistance Center for the state. The most recent major addition is the Business Entrepreneurship Leadership Center, a 250,000-square-foot facility donated by Fidelity Investments in 2022, located at 100 Salem Street across from the main campus. That gift represents the largest real estate donation to Bryant since Earl Tupper gave his hillside estate in 1967.

• 8. The Seal and Motto

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  The Latin phrase at the center of Bryant's identity is "Cognitio. Virtus. Successus." It translates as Knowledge. Character. Success. The university's current motto, "The Character of Success," is a direct rendering of the same idea. The seal that carries this phrase places an ellipsoid globe at its center, flanked by quills representing business communication, the same purpose the school was built to serve in 1863. Behind the globe stands a torch for academic freedom and the spirit of inquiry. Framing everything is the Archway, the iron structure that traveled from Providence to Smithfield and now carries both the university's visual identity and the superstition that has kept students walking around it for generations.