“Can the oversight of the religion and morals of the young men, long kept up in American Colleges,” President James McCosh asked an international audience of Presbyterian leaders in 1884, “be maintained any longer?” “Three-fourths to nine-tenths” of America’s colleges, McCosh observed, earnestly “continue to profess religion.” But state institutions, he noted, “scarcely profess to keep up any religion” lest they “offend” any religious minority. Some of the nation’s larger colleges also find it “vain” to give religious instruction to students. Yet the absence of religious education in “our secular institutions,” according to McCosh, was not the only problem facing American higher education. To avoid “the Infidelity” now evident in some parts of American higher education, many denominations were establishing their own institutions. Yet, in McCosh’s estimation, the academic quality of their faculties was so low that these institutions actually injured the cause of religion. “The time is over,” the brusque Scotsman insisted, “when men are to be appointed to our College chairs simply because they are pious or loud in their orthodoxy.” Unless Christian institutions have a faculty “equal in ability and scholarship” to the leading colleges and universities, the nation’s best students “will, in spite the efforts of ministers, flock to the Secular Colleges, which will then control them, and may use the intellectual life which they possess to the worst of purposes.” To McCosh, his colleagues at Princeton, and many peers at other institutions, parents and students should not have to choose between scholarship or orthodoxy. When Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard College, accepted an invitation to debate the role of religion in collegiate education two years later before the Nineteenth Century Club in New York City, McCosh welcomed the opportunity to present a case for preserving evangelical religion’s place in the halls of the nation’s leading academic institutions. At Princeton, evangelical ideals and practices helped the institution fulfill its dual purpose of meeting the nation’s need for educated leaders and, as the college’s first president termed it, serving as a “Seminary of vital Piety as of good Literature.”
Yingyi Ma. Ambitious and Anxious: How Chinese College Students Succeed and Struggle in American Higher Education. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2020. 312p. Paper, $35.00 (ISBN 978-0231184588).
