Susquehanna University is a four-year, co-educational, private liberal arts university in Selinsgrove, in central Pennsylvania, United States. Susquehanna University was founded in 1858 as The Missionary Institute of the Evangelical Lutheran Church by Benjamin Kurtz. Having already assisted in the founding of the Gettysburg Seminary (now Gettysburg College), Kurtz wanted to create another institution in an effort to expand a form of American Lutheranism that he and his contemporaries Samuel Simon Schmucker, founder and first president of Gettysburg College, and Samuel Sprecher, second president of Wittenberg College, advocated.