Amid the hum of campus events, you might hear a sound of distinction at Kalamazoo College. The tower of Stetson Chapel houses a set of eight English change ringing bells, one of only a few dozen towers of its kind in North America, and 2024 marked 40 years since their installation.

Each tower bell bears the college motto, Lux Esto, and each is inscribed with a Biblical quotation along with the name of a person associated with the college during its first century. The names include Titus Bronson, who was Kalamazoo’s first permanent settler; college co-founders Thomas W. Merrill and Caleb Eldred; first college president James A.B. Stone and his wife and coeducation pioneer, Lucinda Hinsdale Stone; founder of the First Baptist Church of Kalamazoo Jeremiah Hall; Madelon Stockwell, protégé of Lucinda Hinsdale Stone and the first woman graduate of the University of Michigan; and sixth college president Arthur Gaylord Slocum.

Yet for many students, faculty, staff and alumni, the bells are more than a treasured College artifact. They are woven into the fabric of daily life, from marking the beginning of weekly Community Reflections to announcing the annual Day of Gracious Living. The bells represent the sound of the deep traditions that shape K experiences, as forged by people like the late T. Jefferson Smith and his widow, Carol Smith. A long-time beloved math professor, Jeff Smith is credited with being the driving force behind bringing change ringing and the tower bells to Stetson Chapel.

The College first hired Jeff Smith in 1961. After his first year of teaching, he was offered a research position with the geophysical staff at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C. The opportunity proved to be too good to pass up, and yet in hindsight, was as vital to K as it was to him. A story in the Washington Post in 1963 said the National Cathedral was looking for recruits to learn how to ring its bells. The experience he developed guided Jeff Smith toward thinking that Stetson Chapel might be a site for change ringing.

“I just knew Jeff would be interested in that, and he was,” Carol Smith said. “And with the encouragement of the ringers at the Cathedral, he was properly introduced to the art and practice of change ringing.” 

The Smiths returned to K in 1967 when his work in Washington concluded. Stetson tower remained empty at the time—and throughout its first half-century in all—but Jeff created a week-long orientation course that addressed the mathematics behind change ringing with hand bells.

Two years later, Tom Farthing ’83—now an avid ringer himself—arrived as a student at K. His first exposure to change ringing was at a recruiting meeting in January 1980.

“Ringing bells was an interactive thing for me,” he said. “As my daughter once said, ‘It’s an idea social activity for introverts.’ I think he advertised the course in algebraic group theory. The students maybe were kind of interested in group theory, but they turned out to be really interested in change ringing, so that was the start of everything at Kalamazoo College.”

The active student group and Jeff’s enthusiasm helped convince the College to investigate whether the tower could hold eight swinging bells, weighing several hundred pounds each. College trustee Maynard Conrad raised funds to buy and install the bells, and in 1983—the year of the College’s sesquicentennial—then-President David Breneman gave the project its final approval. Tom Farthing’s wife, Chris ’85, was among the people who went door to door, talking to K’s neighbors about the bells and what to expect once they were installed. The bells were cast at Whitechapel Bell Foundry in London and installed on June 2, 1984.

“Whitechapel sent over one of their installers, Bill Theobald, who was this wonderful, curmudgeonly kind of man,” Chris Farthing said. “He is who many would think of as an English bell ringer, and he trained us. He was in Kalamazoo for several months. When it was safe for us to handle the bells, he said he could tell who was ringing them when he walked up to the tower based on how well the bells were striking.”

Fast forward 40 years and hundreds since have learned to ring at K, including students, faculty, staff, alumni and area residents. Stetson Chapel would also be the site of many change ringing firsts and records, including what was at the time the longest continuous piece of ringing, or peal, in North America.

With the retirement of Jeff Smith in 1993, there was no longer a natural way to recruit new ringers from the student population. The number of student ringers began to decline until, at a Commencement one spring, the tower had to remain silent for want of a band. To address this need, then President Eileen B. Wilson-Oyelaran formed an advisory group to recommend a sustainable ringing program at K that would encourage a steady stream of new student ringers into the tower year after year. She chose John Fink, professor emeritus of mathematics, to lead the group. Fink had been close and personal friends with Smith, and had learned to ring during a sabbatical in Oxford, England.

“Oxford has 21 towers, so bell ringing is a big activity there,” Fink said. “I decided before I went that I would learn how to ring, so Jeff taught me rope handling. When Jeff was here, there was a constant stream of new students coming into the tower because of his magnetism. He could just make you want to do it, and you couldn’t say no. But then Jeff retired, so we didn’t have faculty to steadily encourage students and replenish the tower. The people in the tower got older, and the tower personnel got more detached from the College. I rang with the band for a couple years, but we had three kids, two jobs and one car, and I was chair of the department, so something had to give. From maybe the late ’90s on, I sort of rang on the periphery for many years.”

Regardless, Fink was happy to serve alongside people such as Margaret Miller, who is a member of the Kalamazoo College Guild of Change Ringers. Together, they devised some recommendations on how to regenerate a sustainable program of ringers for College events and more.

“We determined that we needed to have a way to incentivize sticking with it long enough to learn how to do it well,” Miller said. “There had always been a PE credit available for change ringing, but it was designed for people to do an independent study who were already active ringers. We determined that we needed a formal course that anyone could sign up for.”

Miller, who started change ringing as an undergrad at Smith College in 1977, leads course instruction with Fink listed as instructor for administrative reasons.

“It’s not just an artificial connection to PE because there’s a connection for ringing between mind and body,” Fink said. “You have to know when to pull and how to pull it, to coordinate what you hear with what you pull and see. There is a lot for the body to do, and the patterns are bringing plenty to occupy the mind. It’s a perfect PE course in lots of ways.”

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