The gubernatorial election of 1892 unnerved faculty members at Kansas State Agricultural College (KSAC). Voted into office by a “fusion” of Populists and Democrats, Governor Lorenzo Lewelling filled four vacant seats on the college's seven-member governing board, overturning a Republican Party majority for the first time in the college's history. These new regents included radicals such as Edward Secrest, a farmer who pledged to “change the order of things” at KSAC, and Christian Balzac Hoffman, a miller, banker, and politician who had founded an ill-fated socialist colony in Topolobampo, Mexico. Populist interest in KSAC intensified in 1897, when a different fusionist governing board promoted Professor Thomas E. Will to the college presidency. Born on an Illinois farm, Will attended a normal school before proceeding to Harvard University, where he chaffed within “the citadel of a murderous economic system.” When offered the chair of political economy at KSAC, Will had been lecturing, writing for reform periodicals, and serving as secretary of a Christian socialist organization called The Boston Union for Practical Progress. Although he never formally joined a Populist organization, Will shared the movement's commitment to erasing class distinctions in politics and education. Following Will's inauguration, a Populist regent exulted that the masses had finally “scaled the gilded halls of the universities.”

In September 1915, Minne Allen traveled from her native Germany to the United States, where her new husband Edward was set to begin a position as math instructor in the University of Michigan's College of Engineering. Although Minne was nervous about moving from cosmopolitan Berlin to a small college town and worried about the war ravaging Europe, she was excited to begin her married life. Four years later, the University of Michigan Board of Regents initiated dismissal proceedings against her husband, alleging that he had supported Germany in the recently concluded war. Even before Edward's removal, Minne had grown tired of the constant suspicion and surveillance that the university and her hyper-patriotic neighbors forced her and her husband to endure. She wrote to her mother:

They sat in the Cubberley Education Lecture Hall to hear visiting experts. More often they could be found meeting in reduced-size classes, or working on small-group activities. They usually took notes; sometimes they took field trips. They memorized lists and sat for exams, but they also watched films and acted out scenarios. Rather than take regular courses in the disciplines, they studied an integrated curriculum referred to as “Area Relationships.” Some faculty collaborated, team taught, and drew on students' prior knowledge. Even some administrators joined in the role-playing for the big culminating activity. The head of the program explained the reason for such a break from the traditional Stanford experience: “Special effort must be made to supply the student with points of view and methods of procedure which will enable him most quickly and most surely to survey a situation, analyze a problem, and formulate a solution.”

At the moment of its founding in 1911, Connecticut College for Women exhibited a curricular tension between an emphasis on the liberal arts, which mirrored the elite men's and women's colleges of the day, and vocational aspects, which made it a different type of women's college, one designed to prepare women for the kind of lives they would lead in twentieth-century America. Connecticut was a women's college that simultaneously embraced the established brand of education practiced by its prestigious Seven Sister neighbors and forged its own path by integrating elements of home economics, municipal housekeeping, and professional/clerical training into its academic program. For forty years Connecticut College for Women achieved a balance between those two opposing poles of its curriculum.