The idea of a World College first emerged from the experiences in World War II of George Nicklin, then a young American soldier serving in Germany. Nicklin was one of the few members of his combat unit to survive the war, and while still in Germany he vowed to found a college dedicated to the peaceful coexistence of all the world’s inhabitants. By 1958, Nicklin had persuaded his local Friends Meeting in Westbury, New York, to support his idea through enlisting the help of the New York Yearly Meeting of Friends. Funds were raised and, in 1963, after receiving a 30 acre estate, called “Harrow Hill” in Upper Brookville, Long Island as a gift, the Committee on a Friends World College retained Dr. Harold Taylor to run an international summer program with children of UN delegates as a “test” to the Friends World idea. Though this planted the first seeds of an international curriculum, Taylor’s program and his own involvement with the incipient school had ended by the fall.

In the summer of 1965, the Committee on a Friends World College hired Dr. Morris Mitchell, a Quaker educator, pacifist and civil rights activist from Georgia, to direct the Friends World Institute, which would open its doors to students in the fall of that year. Before coming to Friends World, Mitchell had studied under John Dewey at Columbia Teachers College and had founded the Putney Graduate School of Education in Vermont. The Friends World model which emerged over the next few years owed its essential features to Dr. Mitchell. In it he integrated Quaker philosophy, Dewey’s experiential approach to education and a global curriculum intended to produce “world citizens.”

Dr. Mitchell initiated the Friends World Institute’s activities with less than $5000 in its bank account and the Harrow Hill estate as its only asset. In the system he proposed, Mitchell would bring the students to the world, rather than abstractly present bits of the world to classroom-bound students. Basing Friends World courses of study on the “world’s most urgent human problems,” he envisioned study centers in each of the world’s major regions, from where students would set out in groups of fifty on a world journey that would last the entire four years, each group spending a semester in each of the seven regions and a final semester in their home region writing a senior thesis. Students would document, analyze and reflect upon their learning in journals, a practice influenced by Quaker tradition and employed by Dr. Mitchell at the Putney School.

In the mid-sixties, Friends World enjoyed a cultural and political climate sympathetic to new directions in education. The demographic tidal wave of the post-World War II baby boom was beginning to break upon undergraduate institutions. The times also created a sympathetic environment for the values promoted by the internationalist-minded Quakers of the Friends World College Committee. Idealism was ascendant, expressed most clearly in the Peace Corps, founded by the Kennedy Administration.

Many college-age students were searching for alternatives to traditional education and Friends World College enrollment more than doubled. During those early years, centers emerged in Mexico, Denmark, Kenya and India, as well as in various locations in the USA and Canada. Dr. Morris Mitchell left Friends World in 1967, retiring to his native Georgia. His successor was Sidney Harman, a prominent Long Island businessman, under whose brief tenure a revised education model emerged. In 1968, Friends World settled into a new 93 acre estate in the Long Island hamlet of Lloyd Harbor, acquired from Mrs. Gerald M. Livingston. Later that year, the Regents of the State of New York granted a provisional charter for the establishment of an independent Friends World College. At the 1970 World Conference, students empowered to take responsibility for their learning by FWC’s consensual governing processes, pressed for fundamental changes. Harman oversaw the process by which Friends World education moved from a collective to an individual basis. The world journey was replaced by extended stays at regional centers; with each student free to choose whichever centers best suited his/her own academic needs. There were extensive area studies in the different centers, immersion into local cultures, intensive language programs, the hiring of indigenous faculty, individualized learning plans, academic advising and experiential learning projects. With these changes, Mitchell’s conception of global education was retained.

During the seventies, FWC continued to develop academically. In 1980, FWC’s Board hired a new president, Lawrence Weiss. Weiss moved on several fronts. He strengthened the faculty, advocated a more integrated curriculum and attempted to strengthen administration. Financial hardship stood between FWC gaining full accreditation. It would become necessary for Friends World to merge with an established university. In May 1991, the Board of Friends World College signed an affiliation agreement with Long Island University. Through this merger, Friends World gained full regional accreditation.

Under this agreement, the Friends World Program, as it would now be called, would retain its unique education mission and experiential approach, continue to recruit its own students, retain its policy of using portfolios and narrative evaluations in place of exams and grades, keep its extensive system of regional centers, and have its own Council of Overseers, as well as representation on the University’s Board.

In July 2002, Robert Glass was named Dean of the Friends World Program. Robert Glass led the Comparative Religions and Culture Program for three years, from 1997-2000. In September 2001, he assumed the position of interim dean, in addition to his duties as director of CRC. The Program’s headquarters remained at Southampton College until the fall of 2005, when FWP moved its World Headquarters to the Brooklyn Campus of Long Island University. The move to Brooklyn coincided with the introduction of the Capstone semester for seniors. The Capstone Semester was designed to enable seniors, as a cohort, to capitalize on the best of their FWP education and prepare students for life beyond graduation by supporting exploration of the students’ future academic and career goals.

In the fall of 2007, Friends World was renamed Global College and adopted a revised curriculum. Today, Global College has centers in Costa Rica, China, Japan, South Africa, India, and the USA, along with the sites affiliated with the Comparative Religion and Culture Program. As this program continues to evolve, those innovative approaches pioneered by Friends World, experiential learning, global studies and multiculturalism, are still at the heart of Global College.