Religion and the Modern American University, 1910-1928

Princeton, read a trustees’ report in January 1927, “has always recognized a dual obligation to its undergraduates.” One side of this commitment involved providing “a curriculum which will meet the needs of a modern university” and the other involved creating within students “those spiritual values which make for the building of character.” Wilson had reshaped Princeton into a modern university and had left as his legacy an unyielding commitment to serving national interests. Undergraduate education, graduate training, and a variety of impressive specialized research programs enabled the university to help meet the nation’s need for liberal, civic-minded leaders and the demand for science and practical technology. Wilson and his successors in early-twentieth-century Princeton continued to insist, like their nineteenth-century predecessors, that Protestantism was indispensable to the public good and that civic institutions, such as Princeton, served public interests when they sought to inculcate students with a nonsectarian Protestant faith. In this way, the university, they believed, helped mainline Protestantism play a unifying and integrative role in a nation of increasing cultural and religious diversity. By doing so, they reasoned, Princeton, like other private colleges and universities, would maintain its historic religious mission to advance the Christian character of American society. During the presidency of Wilson’s successor, John G. Hibben, controversies challenged the new configuration of Princeton’s Protestant and civic missions. These controversies, however, helped to strengthen the new ways in which the university attempted to fulfill its religious mission in the twentieth century. In liberal Protestantism, the university found a religion that was compatible with modern science and the public mission of the university. Those traditional evangelical convictions and practices that had survived Wilson’s presidency were disestablished during Hibben’s tenure. Fundamentalists’ criticisms of the university hastened this process in two ways. Sometimes fundamentalist attacks upon the university convinced the administration to adopt policies that guaranteed the displacement of traditional evangelical convictions and practices. This was the case, for example, when fundamentalists’ condemnations of the theological liberalism of the university’s Bible professor accelerated the administration’s approval of a policy of academic freedom.

Religion and University Aspirations, 1868-188

“I have hitherto discouraged all proposals to make Princeton College a university,” President McCosh told the trustees in June of 1885. “I am of the opinion,” he went on to announce, “that the time has now come for considering the question.” Seizing the momentum from what many in Princeton considered a victorious debate with Harvard’s Charles W. Eliot, McCosh launched a formal campaign to make the College of New Jersey a university. He promised that his forthcoming paper, “What an American University Should Be,” would fully explain how and why the board should take this next logical “step” in the institution’s development. Although this was the first time that he officially broached the subject with the trustees, McCosh had long been laying the groundwork to build what he considered would be the crowning achievement of his presidency. With regard to this ambition, the trustees’ minutes preceding this announcement reveal a calculated plan by McCosh to convince the board that the college was making exceptional progress toward becoming a university. He would begin by winning the board’s approval for a particular reform or a new program on the grounds that it was essential if the institution was to advance its civic mission like its rivals, Harvard and Yale. Then, within a year or two, he would proclaim the reform or program a remarkable educational success and a major benefit to American society. The reorganization of biblical instruction in 1876 illustrates this process. Although McCosh had promised the Princeton community in his inaugural address that he harbored no plans to “revolutionize your American colleges or to reconstruct them after a European model,” the College of New Jersey experienced a gradual evolution toward becoming a university under McCosh’s leadership. Spurring consistent improvements in the faculty, curricula, and campus, McCosh led the college out of its antebellum educational doldrums, and, by 1885, he was ready, like his peers at Harvard and Yale, to lead his college into the promised land of American universities.

Education and Religion in the Nation’s Service, 1868-1888

“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.”

Making the University Safe for Democracy, 1902-1910

The service of institutions of learning is not private but public,” Woodrow Wilson proclaimed at his inauguration as Princeton University’s thirteenth president. “Princeton for the Nation’s Service,” the title of Wilson’s 1902 inaugural address, captured his vision of Princeton’s mission. The nation, Wilson believed, desperately needed the university. The nation and its affairs, he observed, continued to “grow more and more complex” as a result of industrialization and bureaucratization. Furthermore, as successive waves of non-Protestant and non- Anglo-Saxon immigrant groups—”the more sordid and hapless elements” of southern Europe, as he described them elsewhere—congregated in the nation’s growing cities, Wilson, like other Protestant leaders of his day, feared that America’s democratic society stood on the verge of chaos. The very fabric of American society seemed to be ripping apart under the weight of ethnic and religious diversity. Like other educators of the day, Wilson envisioned the modern university’s playing a crucial role in ordering the nation’s business and political affairs and shaping the aspirations and values of the American people. A university education, Wilson explained, was “not for the majority who carry forward the common labor of the world” but for those who would lead the nation and mold the “sound sense and equipment of the rank and file.” The university’s task was twofold: “the production of a great body of informed and thoughtful men and the production of a small body of trained scholars and investigators.” The latter function gave the university a larger civic mission than a college. According to Wilson’s vision, Princeton would not train “servants of a trade or skilled practitioners of a profession.” By enlarging the minds of students and giving them a “catholic vision” of their social responsibilities, Princeton instead would cultivate “citizens” who would live under the “high law of duty.” “Every American university,” Wilson concluded, “must square its standards by that law or lack its national title.” Wilson’s inauguration appeared to confirm the New York Sun’s assessment of his election: “the secularization of our collegiate education grows steadily more complete.”

Introduction

Princeton versus Harvard: this 1886 “battle of the Titans,” as one reporter described it, was not an athletic contest, and more was at stake than college pride. At a wintry February meeting of the Nineteenth Century Club at the American Art Gallery in New York City, a “large and fashionable” audience gathered to hear two combatants debate the question, “What place should religion have in a college?” Specifically, the question concerned the role of religious instruction and worship in collegiate education. Princeton College President James McCosh represented the denominational college and his counterpart at Harvard College, Charles W. Eliot, the neutral or nondenominational institution. Each president read his paper with a politeness befitting the Victorian sensibilities of the audience, yet beneath the decorum lay two very different understandings of the nature and role of religion in American collegiate education. McCosh had history on his side, but Eliot had the future on his. “Nearly all the older colleges, such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton,” McCosh explained, “were founded in the fear of God, with the blessing of heaven invoked; they gave religious instruction to the students, and had weekly and daily exercises of praise and prayer to Almighty God.” Compulsory religious instruction and worship, McCosh insisted, were essential to the intellectual and moral well-being of students—America’s future leaders—and so, ultimately, to the welfare of the nation. Princeton, as with many other institutions established before the Civil War, was officially a nondenominational college chartered in 1746 to serve the general public. In reality, however, Princeton, was a de facto denominational college that met the educational needs and upheld the intellectual ideas of Presbyterians and the larger Protestant community. Because the older American colleges promoted a nonsectarian Protestantism, which would not give offense to any evangelical denomination, McCosh reasoned, they upheld the faith of most Americans and performed a public service. At Princeton, this traditional approach was still readily evident in the late nineteenth century.

The Travails of Becoming a University, 1888-1902

In bringing the College of New Jersey to the brink of university status, McCosh stood on the verge of the promised land. As the nineteenth century was coming to a close, alumni, professors, and trustees in Princeton, like those at many other American colleges and universities, were eager to see the institution position itself so that it would be better able to meet society’s need for moral and thoughtful leaders, practical knowledge, and scientific expertise once the nation entered the twentieth century. With the future direction of the institution hanging in the balance, the choice of who should succeed McCosh divided the college community along the same lines as had emerged earlier over both the alumni’s attempt to secure direct representation on the Board of Trustees and McCosh’s failed attempt to make the college a university. Whereas McCosh harmoniously upheld the college’s dual mission through the breadth of his scholarly interests, the warmth of his evangelical piety, and the force of his personality, the two candidates who vied for the presidency after his resignation possessed only a portion of McCosh’s qualities and appealed to only one part of the Princeton community. Francis L. Patton appealed to those primarily, though not exclusively, interested in preserving Princeton’s heritage as an evangelical college. According to McCosh, the “older men” among the trustees, faculty, and alumni “want a minister,” and on these grounds, the forty-five-year-old Patton seemed like a natural successor to McCosh. A native of Bermuda, Patton had graduated from University College of the University of Toronto; had attended Knox College, also of the University of Toronto; and had graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1865. Ordained that same year in the Old School Presbyterian church, he served as pastor of a church in New York City. Cyrus H. McCormick (1809-1884), the farming machine magnate and patron of conservative Presbyterian causes, persuaded Patton to accept a position as the Professor of Didactic and Polemical Theology at the Presbyterian Seminary of the Northwest (later McCormick Theological Seminary) in Chicago in 1873.