Curriculum, Accreditation and Coming of Age of Higher Education

Perspectives on the History of Higher Education

Roger L. Geiger, Roger L. Geiger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351523929
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

This latest volume in Roger Geiger's distinguished series on the history of higher education begins with a rare glimpse into the minds of mid-nineteenth century collegians. Timothy J. Williams mines the diaries of students at the University of North Carolina to unearth a not unexpected preoccupation with sex, but also a complex psychological context for those feelings. Marc A. VanOverbeke continues the topic in an essay shedding new light on a fundamental change ushering in the university era: the transition from high schools to college.The secularization of the curriculum is a fundamental feature of the emergence of the modern university. Katherine V. Sedgwick explores a distinctive manifestation by questioning why the curriculum of Bryn Mawr College did not refl ect the religious intentions of its Quaker founder and trustees. Secularization is examined more broadly by W. Bruce Leslie, who shows how denominational faith ceded its ascendancy to "Pan-Protestantism."Where does the record of contemporary events end and the study of history begin? A new collection of documents from World War II to the present invites Roger Geiger's refl ection on this question, as well as consideration of the most signifi cant trends of the postwar era. Educators chafi ng under current attacks on higher education may take solace or dismay from the essay "Shaping a Century of Criticism" in which Katherine Reynolds Chaddock and James M. Wallace explore H. L. Mencken's writings, which address enduring issues and debates on the meaning and means of American higher education.

An Ambiguous Purpose: Religion and Academics in the Bryn Mawr College Curriculum, 1885-1915

Katherine Sedgwick

From its establishment in the early 1880s through the 1910s, Bryn Mawr College was governed by members of the Gurneyite branch of the Orthodox Society of Friends, a strain of Quakerism that was distinctly evangelical throughout the late-nineteenth century. Eighty-five percent of Bryn Mawr’s founding trustees also served on the Board of Managers of intensely Gurneyite Haverford College, the men’s college two miles away from Bryn Mawr and the model of education that Bryn Mawr’s leaders intended to follow. Despite this, Bryn Mawr quickly developed into a secular institution. Explanations for this usually start and stop with M. Carey Thomas, Bryn Mawr’s second president, but this article argues that a thorough understanding must in fact begin with the college’s Board of Trustees. During Bryn Mawr’s first thirty years they led the college in conflicting directions, sometimes pursuing academic excellence as the most important goal, other times pursuing religious orthodoxy, and occasionally attempting to pursue both.

One of the most enduring themes in the history of higher education in the United States is that of secularization. This story typically begins in the decade following the Civil War, when the nation’s better colleges and infant universities steadily began disengaging themselves from their religious moorings. By the end of this process, truth was no longer received through divine revelation, but rather was to be discovered through scientific study. The purpose of higher education was therefore no longer the transmission of known truth, but the exploration of new truth; knowledge burgeoned and became increasingly specialized. As part of this process, religion’s place in the academic life of institutions moved away from the prescriptive and towards the investigative: religion became something to be analyzed and dissected, not something to be accepted unthinkingly. By 1920 a new, secular, vision of the purpose of higher education had taken hold and dominated the research universities and many of the more advanced colleges; this vision eventually became the standard in most of American higher education.

Of course, this sketch oversimplifies a progression that was bumpy and varied. Nevertheless, it is a fairly accurate sketch of the historiography related to secularization in the academy.¹ Earlier histories tended to depict this transformation as inevitable, pitting backwards “old time” college leaders against enlightened university builders who sought to excise religion from higher education. More recent work has dramatically improved our understanding of this process, showing that secularization was more often the result of efforts to maintain a form of religiosity in the self-consciously non-sectarian universities.² All agree that higher education was remade in the half-century following the Civil War: by 1920 institutional forms, educational purpose, and the role of religion all bore little resemblance to their antebellum counterparts. As Bruce Leslie and David Potts suggest, those colleges that chose to remain colleges also partook of these transformations, often reconfiguring their religious elements even while often attempting to remain faithful to their religious foundations.³

Given this emerging interpretive consensus, there has been surprisingly little scholarship focused on the shifting place and purpose of religion in the curriculum itself during this time. The work that has been done tends to focus on attempts by scholars to use their disciplines to defend religious belief, but not on what they taught their students or why. When focusing on the intellectual side of this history—namely, the ideas behind educators’ changing views on religion—scholarship also tends to examine the conflict between various denominational views and that of the emerging “scientists” of religion, rather than considering issues of educational philosophy and pedagogy. In his 1999 book, The University Gets Religion, D.G. Hart offered one of the first synthetic accounts of the origin and evolution of religion as a legitimate academic discipline between the 1920s (when it began in earnest) and the mid-1990s. Yet because his object of study was explicitly the emergence of departments of religious studies, Hart gives only a cursory overview of the so-called Age of the University, a period in which the place of religion in the curriculum changed dramatically, yet before it emerged as a fully recognized academic discipline.⁴

Since religion is such a fundamental part of the story of this period, it is vital to understand what college leaders were trying to do, and what they actually accomplished, when they made decisions and policies about religious pedagogy in their curricula. In this article I focus on these issues, examining the place and function of religion in the curriculum of one college—Bryn Mawr—and comparing it to Haverford, the college on which Bryn Mawr was ostensibly modeled. This story starts in the 1870s when Orthodox Quaker Joseph Taylor first laid plans to found a women’s college, continues through Bryn Mawr’s opening in 1885, and concludes in 1915, by which point Bryn Mawr had ceased to offer undergraduate coursework focused on religion or scripture even as an object of study, much less as a guide to pedagogy.

Religion disappeared from Bryn Mawr’s curriculum within twenty-five years of opening, and was gone from its official educational purpose not long afterward. The men who had ultimate charge of the college—its trustees—were not seeking to lead it away from religion, and in fact made ongoing attempts to establish and keep it as a thoroughly Christian institution. Nevertheless, by 1910 they had essentially failed; religion at Bryn Mawr was entirely unofficial and voluntary, and the college ceased to be called or considered “Christian” by any who knew it.⁵ Yet this was not principally because the trustees lost battles over the direction of the college. Instead, secularization occurred at Bryn Mawr very much over the objection of its Orthodox trustees, in part because of their efforts on behalf of religion and their own ambivalence over the educational mission of the college.

Quaker Higher Education and Quaker Theology, 1800-1900

Bryn Mawr College was founded by members of the Orthodox branch of the Society of Friends, the same denomination that, fifty years earlier, had founded Haverford College, the first Quaker college in the country. Both colleges (Haverford for men, Bryn Mawr for women) were begun in order to promote advanced learning in a distinctly Quaker style. As with any denomination, Orthodox Quakerism had numerous distinctions of belief and practice that set it apart from the rest of Protestantism. Yet nineteenth-century Orthodox Quakers shared many other Christian denominations’ belief in the inerrancy of biblical scripture, and in salvation through Jesus Christ, the Son of God who was crucified and resurrected. Orthodox Friends also believed that ministers had a legitimate role to play in their religious communities, although they did not consider ministerial authority to be absolute, and held that God revealed himself to each person through the Inner Light.⁶ Quakerism’s distinctiveness is an important part of this story, but it is equally important to note that the Quaker trustees who established Bryn Mawr were fundamentally Christian, in the same vein as Presbyterian, Methodist, or Baptist college founders of the nineteenth century.

Compared to many other Christian denominations, Quakers came to college founding late. Haverford, Earlham (IN), and Guilford (NC), the three Quaker colleges that claim antebellum founding dates, all began as boarding schools. In 1856 Haverford was granted its petition to the Pennsylvania legislature for the right to grant baccalaureate degrees, although it claimed that prior to this its instruction had been as rigorous as that of any other college in the country.⁷ Earlham’s college charter was granted in 1859, and Guilford’s in 1889. While a spate of Quaker colleges were begun following the Civil War, the denomination was ultimately responsible for a total of thirteen: seven Quaker colleges followed in 1869, 1870, 1873, 1885, 1891(2), and 1898, and three Quaker Bible colleges were begun in 1892, 1899, and 1917, the first two of which became liberal arts colleges in 1957 and 1965, respectively.⁸

Thomas Hamm, a leading historian of Quakerism and Quaker education, attributes Quakerism’s “lag” behind other denominations in college founding to two main causes. First, since the 1650s Quakers had regarded advanced education as an abominable “distraction from the tried and tribulated ways that led to holiness and salvation.” Second, even after higher education became more desirable to some Friends after 1850, most retained a steadfast commitment to the notion that ministers not only did not need formal training, but that it could harm them, as it was all too likely to deafen them to the promptings of the Holy Spirit.⁹ With the exception of the Quaker Bible colleges, which grew out of the Quaker holiness movement, Quaker were never interested in training a professional ministerial class. Instead, they wanted only a learned laity and a “guarded” education—meaning closed to non-Friendly influences and people—for their youth.

A doctrinal split in 1827 rent American Quakerism into two distinct sects, the Hicksites and the Orthodox. Hicksite Friends denied the unique deity of Christ (at best he had achieved divinity, but was not born with it) and therefore the efficacy and necessity of his death and resurrection, deemphasized the authority of the Scriptures in favor of the Holy Spirit-guided Inner Light in each person, and objected to doctrinal tests for ministers.¹⁰ Orthodox Friends objected to each of these “innovations;” for them, Christ and his atoning sacrifice was the central truth of their faith, bolstered by the inerrant authority of Scripture and confirmed by the inward guidance of the Holy Spirit. The Orthodox held the Inner Light to be as authoritative as Scripture, and maintained many other Quaker distinctions such as plain speech and dress, and silent Meeting for Worship, but the central tenets of their faith made them, according to Hamm, “not much different from … Evangelical Protestants.”¹¹ Both sides, of course, attested that they were upholding the “true” version of the Quaker faith established by George Fox and his followers.

Prior to this, Quakerism had never developed a systematic theology, and the Hicksites’ separation forced the development of one. Haverford owes its beginning partially to a fear felt by many Friends that the Hicksite “heresies” stemmed from a lack of sufficient biblical knowledge.¹² Within six years of the rift Haverford’s doors opened “in order to preserve [Orthodox Quaker] youth from the contaminating influences of the world,” and where “the minds of the pupils [may] be at the same time imbued with the principles of the Christian religion, as always maintained by the Society of Friends….”¹³ In 1846 Haverford made an early move away from “narrow sectarianism” by changing its statutes to allow admission to non-Friends, although this was motivated by financial concerns as much as a desire to extend the college’s influence beyond the confines of the Society.¹⁴ Even so, Haverford insisted on educating all its students, regardless of personal religious convictions, in a “Friendly” way.¹⁵

As late as 1910, Haverford still required daily Scripture study, recitations on the Bible, and courses in Christian and Quaker doctrine and ethics during each class year. Attendance at First- and Fifth-Day Meetings was also mandatory. But it had also become an exemplar of the emerging small-college ideal. It had electives, offered multiple courses of study in addition to the “classical” course, and had gained a national reputation; Digby Baltzell noted that its president, Isaac Sharpless, was the most respected small-college president of his day.¹⁶ In other words, over the course of the late nineteenth century Haverford moved decisively away from the sectarian institution of its founding, but it did so while remaining firmly a Quaker college. Haverford’s educational and religious development in the late nineteenth century is relevant to this story because in 1880 Bryn Mawr’s trustees envisioned the college they were planning as a “female Haverford,” dedicated to offering women precisely what Haverford had offered to young men for fifty years.¹⁷ The continuing development of Orthodox Quakerism throughout the nineteenth century affected both these colleges.

The Development of Evangelical Quakerism, 1840-1900

After the 1827 Hicksite separation, the Orthodox branch of Quakerism itself split in the 1840s, although not quite as severely. Joseph John Gurney, an English Quaker who toured America between 1837 and 1840, sparked this second split with his preaching about the Bible. Orthodox Quakers maintained that Scripture was inerrant and authoritative, but Gurney “carried these ideas to their logical conclusion” by elevating Scriptural revelation above direct or inward revelation from the Holy Spirit. Daily Bible study and family devotions were therefore critical. This view of scripture led Gurney to promote other evangelical notions, arguing, for example, that justification preceded sanctification, whereas many Quakers traditionally held that justification came at the end of a long process of disciplined sanctification. Gurneyite Friends therefore began placing a significant emphasis on individuals’ conversion experience, something that had been relatively foreign to the Society. Hamm argues that the majority of Orthodox Quakers in America were developing in this theological direction already, and would have gotten there even without Gurney. But his popularity did provoke opposition from some Orthodox Friends who held that scriptural and personal revelation were equally authoritative, and that scripture needed little study because direct religious experience was usually more relevant. These minority Wilburites departed from Orthodox Meetings starting in the 1...