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Higher Criticism and Higher Education at the University of Chicago: William Rainey Harper's Vision of Religion in the Research University

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Michael Lee
Michael Lee*
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame
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Extract

On September 18, 1890, an enthusiastic and portly man on a train from Chicago to New Haven scribbled in a notebook. The man was William Rainey Harper, and the contents of his notebook would become the plans for The University of Chicago. Upon arriving in New Haven, he wrote a letter to John D. Rockefeller, who would finance Harper's vision for a university. Harper wrote,

On my way from Chicago the whole thing outlined itself in my mind and I have a plan which is at the same time unique and comprehensive, which I am persuaded will revolutionize study in this country…. It is very simple but thoroughgoing.

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Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 48 , Issue 4 , November 2008 , pp. 508 - 533
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 History of Education Society 

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References

1 I would like to thank James Turner, who read and commented on an earlier draft of this article. I would also like to thank the HEQ's anonymous reviewers, who provided insightful and helpful suggestions.Google Scholar

2 Goodspeed, Thomas Wakefield, William Rainey Harper (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928), 110–111.Google Scholar

3 Harper to Rockefeller, September 22, 1890, Rockefeller, John D., Correspondence of the Founder and His Associates, 1886–92, Box 1, Folder 11, Special Collections Research Center, The University of Chicago Library.Google Scholar

4 Mayer, Milton, Young Man in a Hurry (Chicago: University of Chicago Alumni Press, 1957), 20.Google Scholar

5 One reason Harper declined the offer was that he feared that the Baptists in Chicago could not properly fund the university. See Harper, William Rainey, “The Old and New in Education,” The Trend in Higher Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1905), 118–134.Google Scholar

6 Goodspeed, , William Rainey Harper, 110.Google Scholar

7 “The Charter of the University,” The University of Chicago Official Bulletins (1891–92), 4, Copy in the Special Collections Research Center, The University of Chicago Library.Google Scholar

8 William Rainey Harper to the Board of Trustees, February 7, 1891, Box 12, Folder 14, William Rainey Harper Personal Papers, The University of Chicago Library.Google Scholar

9 In 1815 and in the years immediately following, four American students (Everett, Edward, Ticknor, George, Bancroft, George, and Cogswell, Joseph Green) went to Göttingen to pursue advanced studies. In the years that followed, German universities rose in popularity and thousands of American students matriculated in them. See Charles Franklin Thwing, The American and the German University (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1928), 12–39. In Americans and German Scholarship, 1770–1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), Carl Diehl writes that these four endured considerable religious anxieties as they encountered German critical examination of scripture. Also see Vogel, Stanley M., German Literary Influences on the American Transcendentalists (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955); One Long, Literary Pioneers: Early American Exploreres of European Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935); and Herbst, Jurgen, The German Historical School in American Scholarship: A Study in the Transfer of Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1965).Google Scholar

10 There were exceptions. In the early nineteenth century, men like Andrews Norton, Moses Stuart, and Edward Robinson made original and scholarly contributions to the field of biblical studies. Brown, Jerry Wayne, The Rise of Biblical Criticism in America, 1800–1870: The New England Scholars (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1969).Google Scholar

11 Although his work is dated in some respects, historian Laurence Veysey gives a useful account of the story of the development of higher education in the nineteenth century. According to Veysey, American colleges were transformed into research universities by following the German model in the second half of the nineteenth century. Recently, other historians, such as James Turner, have correctly pointed out that Veysey oversimplified the story and the process of change was far more complicated. Nonetheless,’ the college of the early nineteenth century was drastically different from the university in the late nineteenth century. See Veysey, Laurence R., The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1965); Turner, James, “The ‘German Model’ and the Graduate School: The University of Michigan and the Origin Myth of the American University (written with Paul Bernard)” in Language, Religion, Knowledge: Past and Present (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 69–94; and Diehl, Americans and German Scholarship, 50–69, 148.Google Scholar

12 In all his writings about education, Harper seldom mentions Germany as a source of inspiration. Nor does he mention if he drew upon American sources. Other than two recorded speeches, one delivered at Johns Hopkins University and the other at Yale University, Harper's writings are practically devoid of references to other American graduate schools. Harper, “The Contributions of Johns Hopkins,” The Trend in Higher Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1905), 151–55; and “Dependence of the West Upon the East,” The Trend in Higher Education, 135–39.Google Scholar

13 Marsden, George, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Reuben, Julie A., The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996).Google Scholar

15 With a few exceptions, religion is largely absent from the historical research on Harper and the University of Chicago. Neglecting the Christian influences on his academic vision is surprising given that he was a biblical scholar and wrote copiously about religion and education in the Biblical World, The Hebrew Student, and Hebraica. James, P. Wind focuses on “the religious vision that Harper carried into his University presidency.” He argues that Harper believed that the University, with a religious zeal, should seek after universal truths. Wind also observes that Harper believed that the University should take on a messianic role by spreading democracy across the globe. Marsden also discusses Harper's “low church” religious convictions and educational ideas. However, he notes that religious loyalties would not last at Chicago. Marsden writes, “Explicitly Christian rationales for the ideals for the American university did not long outlive William Rainey Harper. By the 1920s, such expressions would seem vestigial. The fatal weakness in conceiving of the university as a broadly Christian institution was its higher commitments to scientific and professional ideals and the demands for a unified public life. In light of such commitments academic expressions of Christianity seemed at best superfluous and at worst unscientific and unprofessional.” In contrast, this article focuses on Harper's vision of the University as the savior of Christianity. See James P. Wind, The Bible and the University (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987); Marsden, The Soul of the American University, 265.Google Scholar

16 wrote, Tappan, “However amiable his character, however pure his religious creed according to the judgment of any sect or party, if he have not the requisite literary or scientific qualifications, he is of no account.” Tappan, Henry P., University Education (New York: G. P. Putan, 1851), 20; quoted from Marsden, The Soul of the American University, 107.Google Scholar

17 Marsden, The Soul of the American University, 108.Google Scholar

18 White, Andrew Dickson, The Warfare of Science (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1876), 8; Lindberg, David C. and Numbers, Ronald L., “Introduction,” God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 2.Google Scholar

19 Philology reigned as one of the most innovative and rigorous fields of academic research in nineteenth-century Germany. However, the German innovators of the historicist biblical criticism did not invent the idea of a historical examination of the sacred scriptures. In the sixteenth century, Erasmus had already subjected the Bible to philological critique. In the late seventeenth century, Benedict Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes, Richard Simon, and Samuel Fisher examined the Bible historically and philologically as well. See Richard H. Popkin, “Spinoza and Bible Scholarship,” in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, ed. Garrett, Don (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 383–407, and Turner, James, The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 339–340.Google Scholar

20 For a summary of the “neologians,” their methods, and conclusions, see Thomas Albert Howard, Religion and the Rise of Historicism: W.M.L. De Wette, Jacob Burckhardt, and the Theological Origins of the Nineteenth-Century Historical Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 34–37.Google Scholar

21 For a history of antebellum biblical criticism, see Brown, The Rise of Biblical Criticism; Gura, Philip, The Wisdom of Words (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981); Norton, Andrews, Remarks on a Pamphlet Entitled, “‘The Latest Form of Infidelity’ Examined” (Cambridge: John Owen, 1839); and Stuart, Moses, Critical History and Defence of the Old Testament Canon (Andover, MA: Morrill and Wardwell, 1845).Google Scholar

22 The literature on secularization in America is extensive. Two good accounts are: Turner, James, Without God, Without Creed (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985) and Kuklick, Bruce, Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).Google Scholar

23 Marsden, George, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism: 1870–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).Google Scholar

24 For a history of the First Great Awakening, see Stout, Harry, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1991). For a history of the Second Great Awakening, see Hatch, Nathan, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989).Google Scholar

25 Marsden, , Fundamentalism and American Culture, 56.Google Scholar

26 Sandeen, Ernest, “The Princeton Theology: One Source of Biblical Literalism in American Protestantism,” Church History 31, no. 3 (1962): 307–321; Turner, James, “Charles Hodge in the Intellectual Weather of the Nineteenth Century,” in Language, Religion, Knowledge: Past and Present, 31–49; Hodge, Charles, Systematic Theology (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, and Company, 1874), I, 1–103; and Warfield, Benjamin B., The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1948).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 Darby, John Nelson (1800–82) developed the dispensationalist system of interpretation while pastoring in Ireland. Dispensationalism was first introduced to North America by Inglis, John (1813–79). Eventually, Dwight L. Moody (1837–99), an enormously popular evangelical leader, encouraged the spread of this theology to his followers. See Evenson, Bruce J., God's Man for the Gilded Age: D.L. Moody and the Rise of Modern Mass Evangelism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) and Crutchfield, Larry, Origins of Dispensationalism: The Darby Factor (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1992).Google Scholar

28 Marsden, , Fundamentalism and American Culture, 54.Google Scholar

29 Quoted from Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 17; Letter to Frederic Hedge, quoted in Weisenburger, Francis P., Ordeal of Faith: The Crisis of Church-Going America 1865–1900 (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959).Google Scholar

30 Harper, , “Editorial,” Biblical World 2 (August 1893): 81.Google Scholar

31 Ibid.Google Scholar

32 Ibid., 82.Google Scholar

33 Ibid., 84.Google Scholar

34 Ibid. In his critique, Harper referred to the commentaries of Matthew Henry, a seventeenth-century Puritan. That many modern Christians placed their confidence in a three-hundred-year-old commentary testified to the woeful and inadequate state of contemporary Christian knowledge of the Bible, believed Harper.Google Scholar

35 Harper, , “Editorial,” Biblical World 24 (November 1904): 324.Google Scholar

36 Harper, , “Editorial,” Biblical World 24 (October 1904): 245.Google Scholar

37 Ibid.Google Scholar

38 Ibid.Google Scholar

39 Harper, , “Editorial,” The Biblical World 24 (November 1904): 324–26.Google Scholar

40 Goodspeed, William Rainey Harper, 13–14.Google Scholar

41 Whitney was a leading scholar in philology in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1854, he assumed a new Yale chair, tided “Professorship of Sanskrit and its relations to kindred languages, and Sanskrit literature.” In 1869, he helped organize and was the first president of the American Philological Association. See “William Dwight Whitney,” American National Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Alter, Stephen G., William Dwight Whitney and the Science of Language (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).Google Scholar

42 William Dwight Whitney to Daniel Coit Gilman, 1880, Gilman Papers. Quoted from Alter, William Dwight Whitney and the Science of Language, 212.Google Scholar

43 Early in the eighteenth century, Old Testament scholars suspected that there were several narrative sources for the Pentateuch. During the next century and a half, proponents of multi-authorship steadily accumulated evidence. Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) in his Prolegomena to the History of Israel (1883; tr. 1885) concluded that the prophetic literature and law appeared to be the product of two entirely different cultures and worlds. He concluded that the history recorded in the Old Testament did not represent accurate events but the reconstruction of the past that reflected the theological perspective of later writers, rather than the beliefs of early Israel. He believed that the primitive period of early Israelite history was typified by a natural religion lacking the monotheism of later religion and that the Law and monotheism were read into animagined past by later writers. Wind, 50–57.Google Scholar

44 Harper, , “Editorial,” Hebrew Student 2 (April 1882): 218.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

45 Ibid.Google Scholar

46 Harper, , “Wellhausen's History of Israel,” Old Testament Student 5 (March 1886): 319; Wind, 57.Google Scholar

47 Harper, , “Editorial,” Hebrew Student 2 (1882): 218.Google Scholar

48 Harper, , “Editorial,” Biblical World 11 (May 1898): 291; “Editorial,” Ibid., 12 (September 1898): 148.Google Scholar

49 Ibid.Google Scholar

50 Harper, , Biblical World 1 (January 1893): 3.Google Scholar

51 Ibid., 4.Google Scholar

52 Harper's belief in growth through struggle was in keeping with the intellectual spirit of his age. For example, William James believed that religious ideas were continually developing out of experience and history. James, William, Will to Believe, and Other Essays on Popular Philosophy (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1897). Historian Grant Wacker has argued that a hallmark of Protestant liberal thought was the belief that God revealed himself through the flow of history. Liberals rejected the notion of a pristine and complete revelation that needed to be preserved. Rather, liberals believed that God continually adapted his message in his relationship with the human race. Wacker, Grant, Augustus H. Strong and the Dilemma of Historical Consciousness (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1985), 11.Google Scholar

53 Harper, , “Editorial,” Biblical World 2 (August 1893): 85.Google Scholar

54 Harper, , “Editorial,” Biblical World 4 (April 1894): 246.Google Scholar

55 Harper, , “Editorial,” Biblical World 5 (November 1894): 420; Ibid., 1 (January 1894): 5.Google Scholar

56 Harper, , “The Pentateuchal Question.” Hebraica 5 (October 1888): 73.Google Scholar

57 Ibid.Google Scholar

58 Green, W. Henry, “The Pentateuchal Question. II. Gen. 12: 6–37,” Hebraica 6 (January 1890): 109.Google Scholar

59 Warfield, , Inspiration and Authority, 212–14.Google Scholar

60 Sandeen, , 314. Several scholars have noted that Warfield's mentor, Charles Hodge, despite his impressive erudition, never understood the idea of historical change. Warfield inherited his mentor's shortcomings. See Turner, James, “Charles Hodge in the Intellectual Weather of the Nineteenth Century,” in Language, Religion, Knowledge (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 31–49 and Nichols, James Hasting, Romanticism in American Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 60. Strong, Augustus H., an evangelical contemporary of Warfield and Harper, also dealt with the challenges of higher criticism and historicism. He attempted to maintain evangelical interpretive commitments but more seriously engaged with historicism than did Warfield. See Wacker, Grant, Augustus H. Strong and the Dilemma of Historical Consciousness. Google Scholar

61 F.B. Beale to Harper, February 8, 1894, Box 2, Folder 3, Harper Papers.Google Scholar

62 A.E. Harmon to Harper, February 19, 1894, Box 2, Folder 3, Harper Papers.Google Scholar

63 Harper to Goodspeed, December 28, 1888, Box 1, Folder 3, Thomas W. Goodspeed Papers, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.Google Scholar

64 Ibid.Google Scholar

65 This particular letter is addressed simply to “My dear friend” and is not signed. It is typed and therefore one cannot guess, from the handwriting, the identity of the writer of the letter or for whom it was intended. The Special Collections Research Center at The University of Chicago Library has no record of the author or recipient of the letter. But, the letter makes reference to “your daughter” and a description of the content of the class in the Old Testament and a method of interpretation that is consistent with Harper's. Therefore, one may reasonably conclude that the letter was written from Harper to Strong. Harper [to Strong], January 4, 1889, Box I, Folder 2, Harper Papers, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.Google Scholar

66 Ibid. Harper was not alone in potentially losing his teaching position over questions of orthodoxy. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Charles A. Briggs of Union Seminary, Preserved Smith of Lane Seminary, and A.C. McGiffert of Lane and Union Seminary were censured for the “heresy” of questioning biblical inerrancy. Loetscher, Lefferts A., The Broadening Church (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1957), 61.Google Scholar

67 Harper, , “Editorial,” Biblical World 24 (November 1904): 324.Google Scholar

68 Harper, , “The Spirit of Inquiry,” The Biblical World 23 (March 1905): 164.Google Scholar

69 Harper, , “Editorial,” Biblical World 24 (November 1904): 325.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

70 Ibid.Google Scholar

71 Harper, , “Shall We Go Forward?” Biblical World 6 (June 1895): 405.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

72 Harper, , “Editorial,” Biblical World 4 (April 1894): 246.Google Scholar

73 Ibid.Google Scholar

74 Recently, historians have pointed out that the distinction between a college and a university in America has often been overstated. See Turner, James and Roberts, John H., The Secular and Sacred University (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 154 and Turner, James and Bernard, Paul, “The German Model and the Graduate School,” The American College in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Geiger, Roger L. (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000), 222.Google Scholar

75 Harper, , The First Annual Report, 1892, 148, copy in the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.Google Scholar

76 writes, Harper, “The Work of Professors and Teachers. Each resident professor or teacher shall lecture 36 weeks of the year, 10–12 hours a week; no instructor shall be required to lecture more than this amount.” The University of Chicago, Official Bulletin, No. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, January 1891) 12; The First Annual Report, 1892, 148, unpublished.Google Scholar

77 The President's Report July 1892–July 1902 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1903), xxv.Google Scholar

78 Ibid., xxi.Google Scholar

79 Harper, , “Editorial,” Biblical World, 24 (November 1904): 324.Google Scholar

80 Willard J. Pugh has shown that in reality the University of Chicago did not quite live up to the aspirations of Harper. The work of instruction and professional training eclipsed pure research. The scope of this paper, though, is primarily concerned with Harper's ideal vision for the University and less with the actual functioning of the University. Pugh, Willard J.A., “‘Curious Working of Cross Purposes’ in the Founding of the University of Chicago,” History of Higher Education Annual XV (1995): 93–126.Google Scholar

81 Harper wrote in the first official President's Report, “… no donor of money to a university… has any right, before God or man, to interfere with the teaching of officers appointed to give instructions in a university… when an effort is made to dislodge an officer or a professor because of political sentiment or the religious sentiment…, at that moment the institution has ceased to be a university, and it can not take its place in the rank of universities….” The President's Report, July 1892–July 1902 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1903), xxi.Google Scholar

82 Opinion was hardly uniform. Many university leaders, such as Arthur T. Hadley of Yale and Andrew S. Draper of Illinois, believed universities had the authority and obligation to censor their professors.Google Scholar

83 Laurence R. Veysey has suggested that Harper defended academic freedom as a form of damage control. In 1895, Bemis, Edward W., a young University of Chicago professor who held antimonopolistic views, did not have his contract renewed. The need to please Rockefeller and thereby preserve the university surely influenced Harper. After the Bemis affair, public opinion crystallized against the university. Five years later, history appeared to repeat itself. In 1900, Stanford University had become entangled in controversy when the school's sole trustee, Jane Lathrop Stanford, demanded that David Starr Jordan, Stanford's president, fire E.A. Ross for his political activities. Jordan caved under the pressure and forced Ross out and, as a result, seven professors resigned in protest and the school suffered economically. According to Veysey, morale at Stanford reached the lowest point ever to be observed at a major university. Harper would have certainly wanted to avoid another public scandal at his school, especially given that his own reputation had already been tainted by a similar incident. Thereafter, according to Veysey, Harper shunned censorship to improve the public image of the university. This article does not dispute these motives that historians like Veysey have pointed out but draws attention to a personal and theological source for Harper's desire for academic freedom. Only when a scholar was free from denominational interference, the authority of people like Augustus Strong, and the meddling of trustees, Harper believed, could he research and discover truth. Veysey, 368, 400–406. The standard study of academic freedom in America is Richard Hofstadter and Walter Metzger, The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955).Google Scholar

84 Harper acknowledged the leadership and influence of Harper, Johns Hopkins., “The Contributions of Johns Hopkins,” The Trend in Higher Education in America.Google Scholar

85 Harper, , “Shall We Go Forward?” 405.Google Scholar

86 Harper, , “The University and Democracy,” The Trend in Higher Education, 1–34.Google Scholar

87 Ibid., 27.Google Scholar