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

Editor's Note: This article is excerpted from the author's dissertation, which in 2004 was awarded the American Educational Research Association Division J Outstanding Dissertation Award, Dimond Dissertation Award from the School of Education at the University of Michigan, and Best Dissertation Award from the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan.

Summary

The casual fusion of faith and learning in nineteenth century American higher education 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.

Headings

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Key Statements

• "The conversation regarding the place of religion in American colleges and universities is currently as vigorous as ever and shows no signs of retreat."

• "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."

• "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."

• "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.'"