Early American Attempts to Integrate Faith and Higher Education
Jeffrey Bouman, Director of the Calvin College Service Learning Center
Minds in the Making

"The atmosphere of the University has always been friendly to the nurture of religious life so far as it has been created by the influence and life of those who have been charged with the work of instruction, the larger number of whom have been in active sympathy and co-operation with the various branches of the Christian church."¹

-Martin D'Ooge, University of Michigan, 1893

"What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" Second-century church father Tertullian asked this question in what was probably one of the first written expressions questioning the ways that the Christian religion and higher education should interact with each other.² The academy has wrestled since then with how, or whether, to integrate religious faith with higher learning.   On the one hand there is Athens, bastion of worldly philosophy, now represented by the so-called secular, objective, scientific method of inquiry and discovery.   On the other hand there is Jerusalem, symbolic city of that way of knowing informed in large part by faith in an ephemeral, spiritual world of unseen realities.   The environment in today's academy continues this wrestling, as evidenced by a lively contemporary debate.   At American universities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this question was played out both inside and outside the classroom as evangelical Christianity gave way to a more progressive, liberal Protestantism.

With the exception of explicit courses in moral philosophy and evidences of Christianity, evangelical faculty members in American higher education during the mid-nineteenth century rarely if ever intentionally integrated religious faith and learning within their curricula.

The connection between the two was largely assumed - all truth was God's truth.   The casual fusion of faith and learning that resulted played a role in the marginalization of religious thought in the modern American university between 1850 and 1920.   For students, however, religion may have remained less marginal.   Students at Brown University, Cornell University, and the University of Michigan during this period experienced the confluence of religious faith and higher education in ways that provide an increased understanding of the intersection between faith and knowledge during the rise of the American university.

The conversation regarding the place of religion in American colleges and universities is currently as vigorous as ever and shows no signs of retreat.³  Whether one asks if science and theology can find common ground, or if a campus Christian group can bar gay members from its leadership, dealing with religion is a fact of life for many students, faculty and administrators in higher education.   Historian George Marsden has provided a lightning rod of sorts for this discussion with his numerous historical publications, as well as his contemporary philosophical musings on the issue.⁴  Not only have Marsden and others such as Jon Roberts, Jim Turner, Julie Reuben, D.G. Hart, Paul Kemeny and Douglas Sloan wondered aloud whether Christian scholars should approach their scholarship through lenses of faith, they have also recently begun to examine and chronicle important shifts in practice made by leaders in higher education.⁵

While it is self-evident that American higher education has changed dramatically over the course of its nearly four centuries, historian Bruce Leslie has warned that "we must resist the temptation to anachronistically read later social and economic conditions backward, assuming that 'modernization' was inevitable and overdue."⁶  In fact, legislators and boards of regents in control of colleges and universities in the mid-nineteenth century had a variety of options for re-shaping the relationship between religion and higher education, each requiring a keen awareness of the larger societal context to which institutions of higher learning belonged.

It has been fashionable among the educated elite since at least the late nineteenth century to foretell the imminent demise of popular religion.   And yet outside of Europe, there is little evidence that religious belief is even declining.   Indeed, religious devotion continues to grow in unexpected ways worldwide as evidenced by recent global conflicts, the rise of the religious right in American politics, and an emerging literature detailing the phenomenal growth of Christianity in countries outside of North America and Europe.⁷  Yet the face of American religion has changed as time has gone forward, and there is much to learn from these changes.  

In the immediate postbellum era in the 1860s and 70s, the relationship between society and religion in America was dramatically transformed, in some ways parallel to the dynamic era in which we find ourselves today.   The rising tide of agnosticism of the late nineteenth century may have its parallel in current post-modern thought.   As contemporary scholars begin to recognize the logical inconsistencies of a pervasive relativism, so in the light of biblical criticism, scholars of the 1880s began to doubt the previously unquestioned existence of an omniscient God.   And the mid-nineteenth century circling of Protestant wagons against the influx of immigrant Catholics may be matched today by an evangelical culture that protects itself against the secular humanist culture of the day through means such as the home-schooling movement, Christian schools and colleges, Christian popular culture, and Christian political positions that drive elements of both liberal democratic and conservative republican movements.

American Educational Reforms; The Nineteenth Century Context

Early in the nineteenth century, a few American men of learning went to Germany for their education and returned home eager to transplant the serious German commitment to cultured scholarship ( bildung ), to academic learning ( wissenschaft ), to a students' freedom in learning ( lernfreiheit ) and to a professor's freedom in teaching ( lehrfreiheit ).⁸  Change proved elusive, however, and in 1828, the Yale Corporation issued its organic and definitive response to calls for a radical shift in American higher education curricula.   The report reaffirmed the importance of the classical curriculum, claiming that a rote recitation of Latin and Greek, as well as a smattering of mathematics and a minimal amount of general science provided both of the essential elements to a learned person, the discipline and the furniture of the mind.   Furniture was the general knowledge that all learned men should master, centered around the Greco-Roman classics, and discipline was the ability to train the mind's faculties to approach and solve the intellectual problems of the day.   Yet contrary to some popular critiques, the Yale Report did allow for, portend, and even welcome eventual changes.

In 1850 Francis Wayland at Brown University published his Report to the Corporation of Brown University on changes in the system of collegiate education , which set the stage for less stringent entrance standards as well as important changes in the curriculum, including the notion of elective courses.   In 1851, two years before being named the first president of the University of Michigan, Henry Philip Tappan wrote his own treatise, University Education , which similarly called for substantive changes to the classical curriculum.   Tappan argued for the abatement of the American college founding movement in order to give the state universities a sufficient chance to centralize states' resources in order to provide an education approaching that available in Europe.⁹  In 1868, Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White teamed up to found a private research university with state land-grant funding that would provide, in Cornell's famous motto, "an institution where any person can find instruction in any study."¹⁰  These earlier impulses eventually found concrete expression, leading to a complete overhaul of the classical curriculum in America by the 1880s.   This shift, while borrowing heavily from the English and the German models, hung on to Scottish ideas of a Common Sense Realism philosophy, and wove the whole package into a characteristically unique American reform.

While change came more slowly at small liberal arts colleges, the American reforms at state and land-grant universities included a dramatic shift away from the traditional, classical curriculum toward a much more practical curriculum premised on the idea that the nation needed a greater increase in engineers and scientists than statesmen and preachers.   It became an open question what "furniture" might be needed to address the problems of a nation emerging on to the world market and political stage.   Debates about the canon of worthwhile knowledge, however, had been present much earlier in American colleges, and they remain today.

Other significant intellectual shifts occurred concurrently.   In Germany, intellectuals began to place the Bible under the scrutiny of the scientific method, a process which, when viewed through the lens of positivism rather than faith, revealed what seemed to be a wonderful collection of mythical stories rather than an authoritative revelation from God.   Indeed, this process of higher criticism called into question the very existence of an all-powerful God of history.  

Charles Darwin's revolutionary scientific ideas challenging the accepted view of a supernatural creation by God emerged near the height of these questions and added fuel to the growing fire of skepticism.¹¹  Change wrought by these powerful forces was exacerbated by the rapid influx of students into institutions of higher education prompted by the admission of women and the development of attractive scientific and practical courses in the multiplicity of newly founded colleges and universities.

The rapid increase in the size of the leading universities prompted the growth of faculty bodies in general, as well as individual departments.   As faculty size expanded, institutions decentralized and the cohesion that had once marked American colleges and universities waned.   Knowledge, once considered attainable as a complete body, fragmented into specialized disciplines.   Research in these disciplines grew, but it was no longer assumed that an educated person would know at least a little bit about everything.   Rather, it became apparent that increasing specialization would be required if faculty were to keep up with the burgeoning results of ongoing research.   The days of the "renaissance man" of college faculties were numbered.   Meanwhile, student involvement in extra-curricular activities such as athletics, Greek letter societies, and literary and religious societies expanded.

The Course in Moral Philosophy

The course in moral philosophy developed during the late eighteenth century as a means of providing a unifying element to the curricular experience of undergraduates studying the classical curriculum.   Until the 1870s, it occupied the pinnacle of the curriculum, taken by graduating seniors and usually taught by the college president.   Historian Alonzo Guelzo makes the case that to most enlightened academics by the late nineteenth century, this course was considered "an intellectual child. of a highborn father (philosophy) and lowly mother (morality)."   It was, according to Guelzo, "the offspring of a misbegotten attempt to blend Enlightenment science and Protestant theology." ¹²  Also called moral science, or mental, or intellectual philosophy, this course was sometimes identified as "the science of what ought to be."¹³  Essentially, the course was a way for a college president to ensure that his students understood how to live "Christian" lives armed with their new college or university knowledge.¹⁴ 

This curricular stalwart was shaken apart in the wake of the rise of agnosticism, the fragmentation of the curriculum, and the discoveries of Charles Darwin.¹⁵  Historian James Turner noted,

The curricular consensus was weakened by a general loss of agreement on whether or not God existed -- when the existence of the Creator began to appear dubious, the unity of creation no longer seemed axiomatic.¹⁶ 

This resulted in the course in Moral Philosophy itself fragmenting into multiple directions.   As the elective principle expanded in the 1870s and 1880s, students shared less and less of a common education.   Most tellingly, the old Moral Philosophy course itself disintegrated, giving birth in its death to several of our present academic specialties: economics, philosophy, sociology, political science, and, less directly, anthropology.¹⁷ 

To explore the manifestations of these curricular shifts and the resulting implications for the integration of faith and learning on American campuses, I examined the lives of students at three well-known universities, Brown, Michigan and Cornell.   I selected these institutions for a variety of reasons.   They represent an array of geographic locations and institutional types, and each figures prominently in any discussion of religion as a part of nineteenth century academe.   Most importantly, an intriguing social and intellectual cross-fertilization existed between and among students, faculty and administrators at these three universities between 1850 and 1920.  

For example, John D. Pierce, the first Superintendent of Public Instruction in Michigan, and one of the shapers of the educational component of the Michigan constitution, was a graduate of Brown.¹⁸  Professors James Boise, Henry Simmons Frieze, and President James B. Angell were all graduates of Brown who spent considerable portions of their careers at Michigan.   President Andrew Dickson White of Cornell was appointed professor of History at Michigan in 1857, (the first full-time appointment in any American university in that discipline), and later went on to found Cornell University.   Despite having attended Yale, White credited a visit to Yale by Brown president Francis Wayland with providing him the inspiration to an ambitious career in diplomatic and educational pursuits.¹⁹  The Reverend Dr. Moses Coit Tyler, considered by many to be among the founders of American Literature, began his teaching career at Michigan in 1867 and was lured to Cornell by White in 1881.   Charles Kendall Adams, one of White's first students at Michigan, replaced White as Professor of History in Ann Arbor, and later succeeded him as president at Cornell.   President Francis Wayland of Brown and President Henry Tappan of Michigan were contemporaries with competing ideas for reforming American higher education at mid-century.   Both attended Union College under the supervision and mentoring of sixty-year reformer president Eliphalet Nott.

Because of the intertwining nature of these relationships, in addition to the excellent reputation that each school enjoyed, these institutions, with their geographic, historical, and institutional variations, serve to represent well some of the diversity of religious thought in American higher education between 1850 and 1920.   Brown University, a colonial college founded by Baptists in 1764 was from its founding an open-minded and tolerant institution with regard to religion.²⁰  The University of Michigan, an early state university originally founded in 1817, is described by many as an unusually religious publicly supported institution.²¹ And Cornell University was founded in 1868 in a populist spirit, open to all comers, regardless of politics, religion, academic interest, or other distinction.²²

Previous studies have focused on the institutional role of religious faith among the leaders at colleges and universities.²³  Other influential historians of American higher education have been the conventional group from the 1950s and 1960s, Richard Hofstadter, Frederick Rudolph, Laurence Veysey, John Brubacher and Willis Rudy.²⁴  These conventional scholars, for all of their valuable contributions, generally tended to write from the perspective of a theory of great men, and focused their attention on large research institutions and their presidents.   They produced 'landmark' works with sweeping and definitive generalizations.   Glossed over in their work were the particular experiences of individuals other than the president, as well as a clear sense of distinctions within institutions.   In the 1970s the traditional view was presented with a serious challenge.   Historians of education took a closer look at antebellum colleges and so-called "universities," and concluded that the connection between Protestantism and these institutions had been grossly overestimated, and that the colleges had actually been influenced primarily by local movements driven by economic and political exigencies.²⁵ 

Yet the extent to which intellectual learning and religious faith have ever been fully integrated by faculty and students within the university experience has not been adequately examined.   The closest research to date on this question has been Paul Kemeny's excellent analysis of Princeton.²⁶  Where Princeton was in many ways the quintessential university to examine on this question, and Kemeny did so with a level of detail unmatched by other recent larger scale projects, his study did not go far beyond the analysis of faculty and the curriculum.   Students' experiences have been generally under-examined in the written history of American higher education. As historian David Allmendinger put it,

Students are the most difficult members of a collegiate community to study.   A book about students does not deal directly with the articulate classes of the collegiate community - its faculty and officials.   For the historian, students are a silent people.²⁷ 

While difficult to get at comprehensively, a better understanding of the experiences of students provides a voice often missing from historical accounts.   Research that has looked at students has largely ignored their experience with religion, while studies into the religious nature of institutions and their leaders, have largely excluded students from their analyses.

At mid-century in American higher education, Protestant evangelicals had clear control over the leading American colleges.   Over the three decades between 1850 and 1880 a liberal Protestant movement arose to accommodate both subjective religious mysticism and objective scientific empiricism.   Historian Julie Reuben argued that in the wake of the rise of science and this emerging liberal Protestantism, secularization and religious marginalization were the natural results of these evangelical and liberal Protestant leaders' inability to coherently integrate faith and learning.²⁸ In this project I examined the curricular transition as it related to the imparting of Christian faith, and the overall experiences of students with religious faith at Brown, Michigan and Cornell.   I explored whether this transition from evangelical to liberal Protestant control was foreshadowed by curricular or policy decisions made by evangelical leaders, and if students during this period encountered an integration of religious faith within their university experience, in or out of the classroom.

Rather than looking expansively at these three universities and their general institutional relationship to religion, my project explored students' experiences with religious faith during the college years at these three institutions, in both curricular and extra-curricular settings.   By doing so, it brings us closer to the actual experiences of students and faculty on this question, and brings together the lives of students in the comprehensive fashion in which they were lived.   I examined students' notebooks, letters and reflections, faculty lecture notes, textbooks and remembrances, as well as secondary material such as newspaper articles describing the religious tenor of nineteenth and early twentieth century American higher education.

My findings, in brief, point to some of the following conclusions.   At mid-century in American universities such as Brown and Michigan, the primary means for students to experience religious faith outside the classroom was in the chapel, during morning prayers or at the Sunday sermon usually given by their clergyman president.   Cornell differed in that it was not founded until nearly 1870 and did not give its presidency to a clergyman.   It did however, despite its rhetoric of openness, place attendance at chapel exercises and Sunday services at the top of its means for requiring Cornell students to experience Christian faith.   As the century wore on, as in other areas, students organized themselves into religious societies and developed a sense of mission toward their campuses, and their worlds.²⁹  Affluent religious philanthropists supported this idea, as evidenced by buildings donated to either the campus or the specific Christian group at the three campuses by prominent Christian alumni - Barnes Hall at Cornell, Rockefeller Hall at Brown, and Newberry Hall at Michigan.³⁰ 

In addition to addressing students' spiritual needs, early Christian student groups originally functioned in the capacity of student service organizations, often organizing central housing, employment, and general orientation clearinghouses and activities; but they also provided Christian students with an outlet for discussion on topics increasingly unlikely to show up in their courses.   They debated questions of ethics and social issues such as temperance, the right of suffrage for women, and the problem of evil in the world.   They also increasingly began to send representative missionaries, either individuals or groups, into the foreign mission field to spread the Christian gospel on behalf of their colleges.

By the 1890s at Michigan and Cornell, the courses in Moral Philosophy and the Evidences of Christianity had disappeared, and the religious element of the curriculum had diffused into a blend of Social Science, Political Economy, and History courses.   Located particularly in the newly formed Social Sciences, these courses included Christian principles in a wider variety of offerings designed to be more responsive to actual social problems.   At Brown, while the course in Ethics and the Evidences of Christianity persisted into the twentieth century, President Andrews replaced the course in Moral and Intellectual Philosophy with a course in Practical Ethics in the early 1890s.  

Faculty members also wrote lengthy religious articles for the campus newspapers, taught Bible courses both on campus and at local churches, and advised a variety of student Christian groups.   Not all faculty and students participated in Christian activities, of course, but at each institution, to varying degrees, the presence of such a sub-culture was clear and unambiguously Christian.   The ambiguity lay not in religion, but in shade of Protestantism.

Political Economy and Sociology, perhaps more than the other disciplines, played the role of mediator between old and new academic cultures.   Intellectual historian Robert Crunden noted that the first generation of social scientists "resembled nothing so much as a private club for Protestant clergy interested in mitigating the impact of industrialism on America."³¹  At Brown, James Q. Dealey and Lester Ward played this role; at Michigan, it was Charles H. Cooley, Fred Taylor, and Henry C. Adams; Cornell also employed Henry C. Adams early on, as well as Walter Willcox, and invited Frank Sanborn, the secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Charities, to give a course in Modern Philanthropy as early as 1885.

Focusing on the second half of the Great Commandment (love God, love your neighbor) issued by Jesus, horizontalist reformers emphasized a Christianity that was charged with bringing about a kingdom of righteousness in this world rather than waiting for it in the world to come.

Despite tension, uncertainty, and an occasional breakdown, these young progressives channeled their urges to help people into professions that had not existed for their mothers and fathers.   Men and women found that settlement work, higher education, law, and journalism all offered possibilities for preaching without pulpits.   Over the long term, their goal was an educated democracy that would create laws that would, in turn, produce a moral democracy.   The place for Christianity was in this world.³² 

The faculty at all three institutions joined the movement toward a social science-led integration of Christian principles into the curriculum. The demise of the stalwart course in Moral Philosophy then, was less a result of secularization than a movement toward a more meaningful integration of religious faith with the learning enterprise.   The new focus enabled students to connect their faith to their study in more practical ways.   Co-curricularly, all three institutions were involved heavily in the settlement movement, as well as in other popular avenues for alleviating human suffering such as war drives and rural extension education.

At Brown, Michigan, and Cornell the largest and most active student organizations were the student Christian associations, the YMCA and YWCA; and church and Sunday School attendance, as well as participation in summer missionary conventions, remained central to many college students' life experiences during the university years.   These facts reflect the persistence of a liberal Protestant ethos on campuses despite traditional academic accounts of the secularizing tendencies of American research universities.³³ Well into the twentieth century many professors remained religious but failed to incorporate religious faith into their formal curricula.   However, under the rubric of liberal Protestantism these faculty members did offer public lectures, publish their ideas and contribute informally in other ways to the maintenance of a religious ethos on their campuses. Ultimately, many students were able to successfully integrate religious faith into their daily intellectual lives throughout the entire period.   Interestingly, as evidenced by the persistence of evangelical campus groups and the burgeoning growth of evangelical colleges and universities in recent years, a similar effect may be occurring today.³⁵  

Contemporary Implications

Broadening our understanding of what constitutes intellectual influence on student's lives to include extra-curricular activities such as religious activism, Bible study, campus group membership, and student leadership opportunities raises important questions about the legitimacy of viewing the work of faculty in teaching and research as the exclusively essential intellectual work of a university.   In the contemporary American environment that is again asking fundamental questions about the role of higher education in the development of democratic citizens, this distinction must be clarified.⁴⁴  If indeed the central intellectual work of universities is carried on only in traditional venues supervised by faculty, the university must explain scholarship that suggests that student affairs staff and other non-faculty personnel participate in the overall formation of students, intellectually, spiritually, and emotionally by weaving together a "seamless coat of learning."

This study is relevant in a twenty-first century America where many colleges and universities continue to wrestle with their core religious identities.   Theologian James Burtchaell has recently detailed the demise of relationships between denominational colleges and their sponsoring churches, but case studies cited by theologians Richard Hughes and William Adrian report a growing interest on the part of both Catholic and Protestant colleges and universities to retain and strengthen their identities as Christian institutions.⁴⁵  The analysis also speaks to a postmodern environment in American higher education, wherein having a specific point of view with which to approach a field of study, whether Marxism, feminism, critical theory, or religious faith, has become acceptable practice.⁴⁶

Between 1850 and 1890 university students heard and talked a great deal about Christianity.   Faculty and college presidents appealed to these students' minds in their attempts to inculcate a strong and vibrant Christianity in them.   Between 1890 and 1920 students went and did something about their religious faith.   As the Progressive era surfaced and grew, faculty and other influential leaders turned increasingly to appeals to students' hearts and hands as the primary means of encouraging a vibrant faith.   This shift from students' minds to their hearts and hands reflected a societal shift within Protestantism, not from sectarianism to secularism, but rather to an open and tolerant nonsectarianism that allowed Christianity to be redefined with broader, more inclusive boundaries, and to be presented as a movement with a relevant message for a broken humanity.   It also reflected a growing willingness on the part of religious members of the academic community to allow their faith to be removed from the public arena of the university, its curriculum, and to be cordoned off into the private realm of student groups such as the YMCA.   At the dawn of the twenty-first century, this process can inform both institutions and individuals interested in what part religion can play in American higher education.  

Summary

My research makes several contributions to our understanding of moral formation in the history of American higher education.   It points out the complexity involved in understanding religious influence on students, academic leaders, and their institutions.   It also demonstrates the inadequacy of the presently accepted model of religious change at American institutions of higher education, which posits the dramatic and sudden shift from sacred to secular.   In his prefatory comments to Jon Roberts and James Turner's recent work, The Sacred and the Secular University , John Wilson offered the following helpful synopsis of this changing paradigm.

As the modern college and university curriculum took shape, there was less overt hostility to religion, or rebellion against its authority, than we often suppose.   Indeed, the development of disciplines and their associated professional guilds did not comprise an exclusive realm of secular knowledge.   Rather these bold ventures at once acknowledged the forces shaping the modern world and sought to adapt the older tradition of collegiate scholarship and teaching to a necessarily new era.   As we contend with yet another period of rapid change in contemporary universities, we might take confidence from their achievement as well as undertake to learn from their mistakes.⁴⁸

Liberal Protestantism emerged during the late nineteenth century as a new embodiment of the ideals of the Christian faithful, but with a nature that was more elastic and more conforming to society.   Students and faculty at Brown, Michigan, and Cornell all experienced this shift in ways that are well worth examining for the light they shed on the effect of this transition on the primary players within American higher education.   A careful look at the effects of this shift within Protestantism on the purveyors and the constituents of American higher education provides a lens through which we may gain helpful insight for comprehending contemporary shifts away from modernist, positivistic, scientific notions of reality.   It also illuminates the contemporary conversation related to the place of religion in what is understood to be a predominately secular institution.   Increasingly, there is a place for religion in the mainstream dialogue.

The college-to-university transition of the late nineteenth century, particularly as it was made manifest in the shift from a traditional to a modern curriculum, was complex.   Historians have often conflated this epistemological evolution - from an evangelical Protestant conception of knowledge as divinely inspired, finite and discoverable, to the scientific, positivistic notion of knowledge as infinite and ever new - with the secularization of the university.   However, it is simply not the case that the shift happened quickly or that in it religion was defeated and removed from the university by secular forces.   By and large, faculty members in American higher education either remained evangelical or affiliated with a more progressive liberal Protestantism.   But with a few notable exceptions, both groups failed to systematically include their religious beliefs explicitly in their curricula.   This failure, by most accounts, led to the relegation of religious ideas to the periphery of the academic curriculum.   However, such a marginalization of religious thought did not mean that religion ceased to be important in the minds of presidents, in the mission of the university, and in the lives of students and faculty, both on and off campus. For students in particular, religion remained more central.   Students at Brown, Cornell, and Michigan during this period experienced the confluence of religious faith and higher education in ways that provide a greater understanding of the intersection between faith and knowledge during the rise of the American university.

1 Martin L. D'Ooge (Ed.). Religious Thought at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI: The Register Publishing Co., 1893) ix.

2 See Nicholas Wolterstorff, "Tertullian's Enduring Question," in John Wilson, (Ed.)., The Best Christian Writing 2000 (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000) 304-330.   The chapter was reprinted from The Cresset , Trinity, 1999.   Wolterstorff cites Tertullian's quotation as originating in Prescriptions against Heretics 7 .

3 A comprehensive list of articles and letters to the editors of various publications would be long, but a few recent examples are: Edward Davis, "God's Relationship to the Natural World," Chronicle of Higher Education , September 14, 1994; Carolyn Mooney, "Devout Professors on the Offensive," Chronicle of Higher Education , May 4, 1994; Peter Monaghan, "Evangelical Colleges Urged to Fight Anti-Intellectual Bias," Chronicle of Higher Education , February 28, 1997; Alan Wolfe, "A Welcome Revival of Religion in the Academy," Chronicle of Higher Education , B4, September 19, 1997; James Turner, "Something to be Reckoned With: The Evangelical Mind Awakens," Commonweal , January 15, 1999; Alan Wolfe, "Catholic Universities Can be the Salvation of Pluralism on American Campuses," Chronicle of Higher Education , February 26, 1999; Vincent Kiernan, "Can Science and Theology Find Common Ground?," Chronicle of Higher Education , April 30, 1999; Douglas Sweeney, "Taking a Shot at Redemption," Books and Culture , May-June, 1999; Emily Greisinger, "A Hermeneutic of Faith," Books and Culture , July-August, 1999; Beth McMurtrie, "A President's Forceful Vision Divides the World's Largest Baptist University," Chronicle of Higher Education , July 23, 1999; Peter Laurence, "Can Religion and Spirituality Find a Place in Higher Education?" About Campus , November-December, 1999; Beth McMurtrie, "A Christian Fellowship's Ban on Gay Leaders Splits Two Campuses," Chronicle of Higher Education , A51, May 12, 2000; Alan Wolfe, "The Opening of the Evangelical Mind." Atlantic Monthly , October 2000; Alan Wolfe, "What Would Jesus Do at Baylor?" Chronicle of Higher Education , B20, October 3, 2003; and Stuart Silverstein & Andy Olsen, "Evangelical Colleges Make Marks in a Secular World: Enrollment Rates and Public Acceptance Are Up as Scholarship Moves Toward the Mainstream."   Los Angeles Times , November 30, 2003; Neil Swidey, "God on the Quad: New England's Liberal College Campuses Have Become Fertile Ground for the Evangelical Movement, Which is Attracting Students in Record Numbers.   But After They Graduate, Will They Keep the Faith?"   Boston Globe , November 30, 2003; and Amanda Paulson, "Religious Upsurge Brings Culture Clash to College Campuses."   The Christian Science Monitor , December 10, 2003.

4 Along with his book, The Soul of the American University (Oxford University Press, 1994), Marsden co-edited (with Bradley Longfield) The Secularization of the Academy (Oxford University Press, 1992) and wrote The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (Oxford University Press, 1997).   He has also produced numerous articles and chapters which include, but are not limited to: "The Ambiguities of Academic Freedom," Church History , 62, (June, 1993) 221-36; "Pluralism, Yes. Religion, No!"   Planning for Higher Education, 22 , Spring 1994; "Church, State, and Campus," New York Times A23 , April 26, 1994; "Christian Advocacy and the Rules of the Academic Game," in Bruce Kuklick and D.G. Hart, Religious Advocacy and American History (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman's, 1997);    "Liberating Academic Freedom," First Things , December 1998; "The Task of the Scholar in the Christian University," Lutheran Education , September/October, 1999; "The Meaning of Science for Christians: A New Dialogue on Olympus," in David Livingstone, D.G. Hart, and Mark Noll, Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and "The Incoherent University, The Hedgehog Review , (Fall, 2000), 92-105.

5 See Jon Roberts and James Turner, The Sacred and the Secular University , (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); D. G. Hart, The University Gets Religion: Religious Studies in American Higher Education , (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Paul Kemeny, Princeton in the Nation's Service: Religious Ideals and Educational Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Julie A. Reuben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996);   George M. Marsden , The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief ; and Douglas Sloan, Faith and Knowledge: Mainline Protestantism and American Higher Education , (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994).

6  W. Bruce Leslie, Gentlemen and Scholars: College and Community in the "Age of the University," 1865-1917 , (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992) 257.

7  See Peter L. Berger, "The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview," in Peter L. Berger, (Ed.), The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics , (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman's Publishing Company; Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999), 6-9.   See also Mark A. Noll, "Who Would Have Thought?"   Books and Culture , November-December, 2001.   Noll outlines some of the proceedings of a recent conference on World Christianity held at the University of Pretoria, South Africa.   He points out that over the course of the twentieth century the percentage of the world population that is Christian held steady at close to one-third, mostly due to unforeseen growth in China, Korea, parts of India and most of Africa that would have surprised any futurist at the beginning of the last century.   Of course, as Berger and Noll mention, Christianity is not the only growing religion globally, but as the focus of the current project, it is in this case highlighted.

8 See Mark A. Noll, "Christian Colleges, Christian Worldviews, and an Invitation to Research," William C. Ringenberg, The Christian College: A History of Protestant Higher Education in America (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdman's, 1984), 26.   Noll reports that of 700 American scientists listed in the 1900 edition of Who's Who, 300 had studied in Germany.   See also Jon H. Roberts & James Turner, The Sacred and the Secular University (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) 40, 91.

9 Henry Tappan, University Education (New York, 1851) 44.

10 Morris Bishop, A History of Cornell , (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962), 74.

11 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (New York: Heritage Press, 1859; reprinted 1963).

12 Alonzo C. Guelzo, "'The Science of Duty': Moral Philosophy and the Epistemology of Science in Nineteenth Century America" in David Livingstone, D.G. Hart, and Mark Noll, Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) 267.

13 William C. Ringenberg, The Christian College: A History of Protestant Higher Education in America (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdman's, 1984), 67.

14 See James H. Fairchild, Moral Science or the Philosophy of Obligation (New York: American Book Co., 1892).

15 For a helpful overview of the origin and a definition of agnosticism, see James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America , (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985) 171-73.

16 James Turner, "Secularization and Sacralization: Speculations on Some Religious Origins of the Secular Humanities Curriculum, 1850-1900," in Marsden and Longfield, The Secularization of the Academy ; 76.

17 Turner, "Secularization and Sacralization," 77.   See also Mark A. Noll, "Christian Colleges, Christian Worldviews, and an Invitation to Research," in Ringenberg, The Christian College , 28.

18 Martin John Hershock, Liberty and Power in the Old Northwest: Michigan, 1850-1867 .   (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1996), 78.

19 Andrew D. White, Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White .   (New York: The Century Co., 1907), 256-57.

20 See William H. Tolman, History of Higher Education in Rhode Island .   (Washington DC: United States Bureau of Education, Government Printing Office, 1894) 23; and Martha Mitchell, Encyclopedia Brunonia .   (Providence: Brown University Library, 1993).

21 See Alan Creutz, "Piety and Intellect in the Western Wilderness."   In Blouin, F. X. & Vinovskis, M. A.   (Eds.).   Michigan: Explorations in its Social History .   (Ann Arbor: Historical Society of Michigan, 1987) 131-159; Willis F. Dunbar, The Influences of the Protestant Denominations on Higher Education in Michigan, 1817-1900 (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1939); Norman Drachler, The Influence of Sectarianism, Non-Sectarianism, and Secularism upon the Public Schools of Detroit and the University of Michigan, 1837-1900 (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1951); Elizabeth M. Farrand, History of the University of Michigan.   (Ann Arbor: Register Publishing House, 1885); Burke A. Hinsdale, (I.N. Demmon, ed.), History of the University of Michigan .   (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1906); Kent Sagendorph, Michigan: The Story of the University .   (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co, Inc., 1948); Wilfred B. Shaw, The University of Michigan .   (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Howe, 1920); Shirley S. Smith, James Burrill Angell: An American Influence .   (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1954).

22 See Morris Bishop, A History of Cornell University .   (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University); Laurence Veysey, The Emergence of the American University .   (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965) 60.

23 See Jon Roberts and James Turner, The Sacred and the Secular University , (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); D. G. Hart, The University Gets Religion: Religious Studies in American Higher Education , (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Paul Kemeny, Princeton in the Nation's Service: Religious Ideals and Educational Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Julie A. Reuben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996);   George M. Marsden , The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief ; and Douglas Sloan, Faith and Knowledge: Mainline Protestantism and American Higher Education , (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994).  

24 Richard Hofstadter and C. DeWitt Hardy, The Development and Scope of Higher Education in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952); John Brubacher and Willis Rudy, Higher Education in Transition (New York: Harper and Row, 1958, rev. 1968, 1976); Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A History (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1962, 1990); and Laurence Veysey, The Emergence of the American University , (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965).

25 For a helpful discussion that puts the revisionist project into historical perspective, see Geiger, The American College in the Nineteenth Century , (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000), 2-9. Revisionist historians who have challenged the traditional version of the history of American higher education include: Alan Creutz, "From College Teacher to University Scholar: The Evolution and Professionalization of Academics at the University of Michigan, 1841-1900" (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Michigan, 1981).   Creutz's work outlines in careful detail the process by which the profession of college professor evolved from the clerical model of the antebellum colleges to the professional, research-based model of the research universities.   The noteworthy element of his research is that this process was indeed gradual and did not take place as rapidly as traditional Whig scholarship implied.   Colin B. Burke, "The Quiet Influence: The American Colleges and Their Students" (PhD. Dissertation, Washington University, 1974); Colin B. Burke, American Collegiate Populations: A Test of the Traditional View (New York: New York University Press, 1982); Natalie A. Naylor, "The Ante-Bellum College Movement: A Reappraisal of Tewksbury's Founding of American Colleges and Universities," History of Education Quarterly 13 , 1973, 261-74; James McLachlan, "The American College in the Nineteenth Century: Toward a Reappraisal," Teacher's College Record , December, 1978, 291-92; David F. Allmendinger, Jr., Paupers and Scholars: the Transformation of Student Life in Nineteenth Century New England (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975); Douglas Sloan, "Harmony, Chaos, and Consensus: The American College Curriculum," Teacher's College Record 73 , no. 2 (December, 1971); David B. Potts, "American Colleges in the Nineteenth Century: From Localism to Denominationalism," History of Education Quarterly, 11 , Winter, 1971, 363-66; David B. Potts, "'College Enthusiasm!' as Public Response, 1800-1860," Harvard Educational Review, 47, no. 1 , February, 1977, 30; David B. Potts, Baptist Colleges in the Development of American Society, 1812-1861 , (PhD. Dissertation, Harvard University, 1967); James Turner, "Secularization and Sacralization: Speculations on Some Religious Origins of the Secular Humanities Curriculum, 1850-1900," in Marsden and Longfield, The Secularization of the Academy ; and D. G. Hart, "Faith and Learning in the Age of the University: The Academic Ministry of Daniel Coit Gilman," in Marsden and Longfield, The Secularization of the Academy , 107-145.

26 Kemeny, Princeton in the Nation's Service: Religious Ideals and Educational Practice , 1998)

27 David F. Allmendinger, Jr., Paupers and Scholars: The Transformation of Student Life in Nineteenth-Century New England (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975), 5.

28 Reuben, The Making of the Modern University , 13.

29 YMCA chapters were founded at Michigan in 1858 and at Brown in 1881; Cornell sponsored a Christian Association for students from its founding in 1868.

30 Newberry Hall was built in Ann Arbor in 1892, funded by private donations and owned outright by the Student Christian Association; Lane Hall was built in 1916 for the Michigan YMCA chapter with a matching gift from John D. Rockefeller.   At Brown, Rockefeller Hall, later known as Faunce House, was built in 1904, also with gifts from John D. Rockefeller, whose son John Jr., had been involved in the Brown YMCA during his undergraduate years between 1893-1897.   Barnes Hall was built in Ithaca for the Cornell University Christian Association in 1887-88 with a gift from trustee Alfred Barnes.

31 Robert Crunden, Ministers of Reform: The Progressives' Achievement in American Civilization, 1889-1920 (New York: Basic Books, 1982) 81.

32 Robert Crunden, Ministers of Reform: The Progressives' Achievement in American Civilization, 1889-1920 (New York: Basic Books, 1982) 14-15.

33 Traditional histories alluded to include the aforementioned Richard Hofstadter and C. DeWitt Hardy, The Development and Scope of Higher Education in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952); John Brubacher and Willis Rudy, Higher Education in Transition (New York: Harper and Row, 1958, rev. 1968, 1976); Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A History (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1962, 1990); and Laurence Veysey, The Emergence of the American University , (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965).

34 See, for example, W. D. Wilson.   "The Early History of Man," The Cornell Era (February 16, 1871). W.D. Wilson, "Philosophy and Theology," The Cornell Era (May 3, 1872).   W.D. Wilson, "The Identity of the Forces of Nature."   The Cornell Era , (September 27, 1892). W.D. Wilson, "A Few Words with Scientific Men."   The Cornell Era , (November 15, 22, 29, 1892).   James B. Angell, "Religious Life in Our State Universities," The Andover Review, Vol. XIII, No. LXXVI , April, 1890.   Martin L. D'Ooge (Ed.). Religious Thought at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI: The Register Publishing Company, 1893; and William H.P Faunce, Facing Life.   New York: The Macmillan Company, 1928.

35 See Beth McMurtrie, "Crusading for Christ, Amid Keg Parties, and Secularism," Chronicle of Higher Education , May 18, 2001; Leo Reisberg, "Enrollments Surge at Christian Colleges," Chronicle of Higher Education , March 5, 1999; and and Stuart Silverstein & Andy Olsen, "Evangelical Colleges Make Marks in a Secular World: Enrollment Rates and Public Acceptance Are Up as Scholarship Moves Toward the Mainstream."   Los Angeles Times , November 30, 2003; Neil Swidey, "God on the Quad: New England's Liberal College Campuses Have Become Fertile Ground for the Evangelical Movement, Which is Attracting Students in Record Numbers.   But After They Graduate, Will They Keep the Faith?"   Boston Globe , November 30, 2003; and Amanda Paulson, "Religious Upsurge Brings Culture Clash to College Campuses."   The Christian Science Monitor , December 10, 2003.

Footnotes 36-43 correspond to a deleted portion of this excerpt.

44 See Ernest Boyer, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate .   (Princeton, NJ: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1990); Robert G. Bringle, Richard Games, & Edward A. Malloy, Colleges and Universities as Citizens .   (Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 1999); Association of American Colleges and Universities, Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College (Washington DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2002); and Campus Compact, President's Declaration on the Civic Responsibility of Higher Education .   (Providence, RI: Campus Compact, 2000).

45 See James T.   Burtchaell, The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from their Christian Churches .   (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman's, 1998); and Richard T Hughes & William B. Adrian, Models for Christian Higher Education: Strategies for Success in the Twenty-First Century .   (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdman's Publishing Company, 1997).

46 One other possible way to interpret the results of my research is to ask the question whether the contemporary university is yet fully secular.   Multitudes of campus Christian groups (in addition to many other religious groups) thrive on all American state university campuses, and one could argue that this presence constitutes a substantial religious presence, implicitly influencing large numbers of students and faculty.  

47 In some ways this transition from an analytical model to an activist model of Christian academic expression runs parallel in today's contemporary Christian higher education as expressed respectively by the Reformed and the Anabaptist traditions.   Theologian Richard Hughes cites the differences between Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan and Goshen College in Goshen, Indiana as exemplifying these differences.   He cites a Goshen professor who notes that while "the Reformed model (Calvin) tends to be cerebral and therefore transforms living by thinking, the Mennonite model (Goshen), on the other hand, transforms thinking   by living and by one's commitment to a radically Christocentric lifestyle.   In Hughes, Models for Christian Higher Education , 6.

48 John Wilson, "Introduction," in Jon Roberts and James Turner, The Sacred and the Secular University , (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 16.