The college is scheduled to stop offering "academic activities" in May 2025 and transition "into a new educational enterprise that will carry on ENC's legacy" due to ongoing financial challenges.

[3][4] On September 25, 1900, several come-outer Methodist clergy and laymen affiliated with the 19th-century Holiness movement opened a co-educational collegiate institute at the Garden View House in Saratoga Springs, New York.

It was established to provide liberal education and ministry training in a preparatory academy, four-year college, and theological seminary.

[15] Having been the originator of the idea for establishing PCI and having already surveyed the Rhode Island location,[16] Fred A. Hillery had purchased the North Scituate campus on behalf of the association.

Quincy won out over New Haven, Connecticut because the educational standards were known to be higher in Massachusetts[26] In addition, president-elect Fred J. Shields would accept the position only if the college were to be located near Boston.

[31] On January 28, 1930, President Floyd W. Nease appealed directly to the General Court of Massachusetts for degree-granting authority, defending ed his petition before the Joint Committee on Education and the state House and Senate.

He cited financial records, campus improvement plans, and prominent community leaders; the bill passed in both houses and was signed by Governor Frank G. Allen on March 12, 1930.

[33] The next year under President R. Wayne Gardner, the trustees reaffirmed that the college would remain "distinctly interdenominational and cosmopolitan in service.

[41] ENC was admitted to the Association of American Colleges in 1944,[40] and an affiliation with Quincy City Hospital for nurses' training began in that same year.

[25] Starting in 1956, professors Timothy L. Smith and Charles W. Akers began to establish a community college for the city of Quincy.

[46] Under President Irwin in 1977, plans were made to relocate the college to a 125-acre (510,000 m2) parcel of land in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, by purchasing the faltering Charles E. Ellis School for Girls.

[56] In 1997, the college expanded beyond the metro Boston area for the first time, establishing a learning annex in central Massachusetts to serve as part of its adult studies division.

[65] The 21-acre (85,000 m2) main campus[66] of the Eastern Nazarene College is situated in the Wollaston Park neighborhood of Quincy, Massachusetts.

It was three stories and white, in Georgian architecture, with marble fireplaces in most of the rooms and large French windows on the first floor that "opened upon either little balconies or broad piazzas.

The main entrance, at the end of wide stairs, is pilastered and topped with a bracketed entablature, which frames an arched glass opening.

[82] Eastern Nazarene is also bound by a gentlemen's agreement not to actively recruit outside its respective educational region,[83] which extends southwest from Maine as far as Pennsylvania and Virginia in the United States[84][85] and provides trustees for the college.

[88] The now-defunct secondary school, the Pentecostal Collegiate Institute, was accredited by the New York State Education Department's board of regents upon its founding in 1900.

[96] According to some of the college's earliest and most influential figures, the Eastern Nazarene College has always existed with the idea in mind that one can be a Christian and an intellectual scholar: Bertha Munro, the first dean of the college is often quoted as having said that "there is no conflict between the best in education and the best in Christian faith"[97] and former history professor Timothy L. Smith, who began his career at ENC, is widely considered the first evangelical Christian to gain academic prominence,[98] while ENC alumnus and physicist Karl Giberson has worked to address the Creation-Evolution controversy and was executive vice president of the BioLogos Foundation until May 2011.

Eastern Nazarene emphasizes a blend of faith and other pursuits, from biology[103] to business,[104] and has won the John Templeton award for science-and-religion education.

[88] No student is required to be Christian to attend the Eastern Nazarene College,[88] but each traditional undergraduate student, upon registering, agrees to what is called a Lifestyle Covenant: to, among other things, "abstain from the use of illegal drugs, alcohol and tobacco, and to avoid attendance at bars, clubs, or other activities or places of entertainment that promote themes of inappropriate sexuality, violence, profanity, pornography or activities demeaning to human life.

[115] The John Templeton Foundation has also cited Eastern Nazarene College as an institution that builds character,[117] and the Quincy Patriot Ledger has said that the school's "deep religious roots make for a quiet campus and good neighbors.

Until 2002, there were four societies based on intramural sports competition, which included the "Kappa Cougars", the "Sigma Stallions", and the "Zeta Warriors".

[126] Locally, environmental management students have been involved in community cleanup programs[120][127] and archaeological investigations around Quincy.

Men's varsity sports include baseball, basketball, cross-country, golf, soccer, tennis, track and field, and volleyball.

Young Hall provides apartments for staff and married students, in addition to suites for upperclassman females and males.

[143] Samuel Young, Edward S. Mann, and Stephen W. Nease were all ENC alumni and presidents of Eastern Nazarene College.

[147] Alumnus Edward Thomas Dell Jr. was a published author, the editor of The Episcopalian from 1968 to 1973, and founder of two magazines, and he kept a running correspondence with C. S. Lewis, which is now archived in the Bodleian Library and at Wheaton College.

Nease served as executive director of three nonprofit human services agencies in Vermont, and as senior advisor for health care in the administration of Governor Peter Shumlin.

[150] David Bergers serves as the current director for the Boston Regional Office of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and attended Yale Law School after completing his undergraduate education at ENC.

[162] Chemistry professor Lowell Hall is the creator of "Molconn", which Pfizer uses to test drug potency,[163] and is emeritus program chairman of the Boston Area Group for Informatics and Modeling.