Eliza Baylies Chapin Wheaton, his daughter-in-law and a founder of the Trinitarian Congregational Church of Norton, persuaded him to memorialize his daughter by founding a female seminary.

[6] After their departure, Wheaton endured a period of fluctuating enrollment and frequent changes in leadership until 1850, when Caroline Cutler Metcalf was recruited as the new principal.

[7] Metcalf made the hiring of outstanding faculty her top priority, bringing in educators who encouraged students to discuss ideas rather than to memorize facts.

She led the seminary during a difficult time, when it faced competition from increasing numbers of public high schools and colleges granting bachelor's degrees to women.

[10] In 1897, at the suggestion of Eliza Baylies Wheaton, the trustees hired Samuel Valentine Cole as the seminary's first male president.

Preparing to seek a charter as a four-year college, Cole began a program of revitalization that included expanding and strengthening the curriculum, increasing the number and quality of the faculty, and adding six new buildings.

Wheaton received authorization to establish a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa in 1932, twenty years after achieving college status.

John Edgar Park, who became president in 1926, continued Cole's building program, and saw the college through the Great Depression, the celebration of its centennial in 1935 and World War II.

[16] Wheaton celebrated its Sesquicentennial in 1984/85 with a year-long series of symposia, concerts, dance performances, art and history exhibits, and an endowment and capital campaign.

She led the college in "The Campaign for Wheaton", to build endowed and current funds for faculty development, student scholarships, and academic programs and facilities.

Crutcher came to Wheaton from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where he served as provost and executive vice president for academic affairs and professor of music.

[19] He advocated and implemented programs to apply liberal arts teachings to social entrepreneurship and making the world a better place.

[23] The most popular majors, based on 2021 graduates, were:[24] Foundations courses focus on writing, quantitative analysis, foreign language study and non-Western perspectives.

In their first semester at Wheaton, all freshmen take a First Year Seminar in which they explore contemporary issues and gain academic skills needed for college-level study.

Wheaton also offers dual-degree programs, enabling its undergraduates to begin graduate-level study in studio art, communications, engineering, business, theology and optometry.

In 2014, the college won a $500,000 grant from the Sherman Fairchild Foundation to fund the IMAGINE Network, "an interdisciplinary, campus-wide collaboratory connecting spaces, people, resources and ideas.

[30] Wheaton guarantees funding for students pursuing unpaid extracurricular experiences, including internships, research, or any suitable experiential learning opportunity.

[31] The Wheaton Institute for the Interdisciplinary Humanities (WIIH) develops and exposes programming exploring liberal arts education's weight in the ever-changing and increasingly complex "real world.

[34] That's included a new partnership with MassChallenge to partner students with startups,[35] and led to a $10M commitment by the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation to continue expansion of social entrepreneurship programs starting in 2018.

[38] Wheaton also has an extensive Permanent Collection of artworks which are often implemented in classes and student projects,[39] including in some innovative learning experiences, like a semi-annual student-curated exhibition and student-driven provenance research.

Support for the most academically curious students extends beyond financial funding to include the cohort-based May Fellows program[44] and the Beard Hall living-learning community.

First prize went to two relatively unknown architects, Caleb Hornbostel and Richard Bennett, and while never actually built, accelerated the college's embrace of modernist architecture.

[29] Also included in that network are Arts spaces like the Wheaton Sculpture Studio (wood and metal working, ceramics, molding and casting, etc.

Wheaton fields 21 varsity NCAA Division III teams, nine for men and 12 for women, in addition to 14 club sports programs and a variety of intramural activities.