Reflections on the challenges to the church-related college.

IN JANUARY 1915, William Fraser McDowell, a former college president and then Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and Henry Churchill King, president of Oberlin College, were in Chicago to address the opening session of meetings called to found the Association of American Colleges. They were in Chicago, but where were they coming from, I wondered as I read their words.

Here I was preparing remarks for a journal called Liberal Education, and among the words that do not appear in either talk are liberal, liberating, liberal arts, liberal education, electives, athletics, admissions, extracurriculum, universities. Once President King refers to curriculum. Neither mentions compulsory chapel. They both sound tired.

Why did I think that much that I was reading had been said with much more freshness, certainty, and style a hundred years earlier? Was I being ushered into the last days of the college president as moral philosopher, McDowell and King discoursing in the tradition of the moral philosophy courses taught by Mark Hopkins, Francis Wayland, Eliphalet Nott, and all the rest? The difference, of course, was that McDowell and King were not teaching young college students. They were talking to their peers.

Both men were born in 1858, both were 1879 graduates of Ohio sectarian colleges, both received advanced degrees in theology in 1882. McDowell has been described as an "ecclesiastical statesman." King was the author of books on applied Christianity. Both were veterans of the Christian lecture circuit.

McDowell was a master of exhortation, in the tradition of the circuit-riding Methodist preacher. King's assignment was to implement McDowell's passion, to present the methods and strategies for attaining what McDowell referred to as a fundamental necessity: "Making youth, while in college, Christian if it is not Christian when it comes to college."

The session at which McDowell and King spoke was jointly shared with the Council of Church Boards of Education, an organization charged with addressing the needs and problems of sectarian colleges. The Council's meeting would have taken place somewhere even if the idea of founding the Association of American Colleges had not been lurking around for a while and its birth been scheduled to coincide with the Council's meeting. There was probably no more appropriate group with which the founders of AAC might have met.

The academic disciplines that had sprung forth from the impact of German scholarship on the new American universities also held annual meetings. But it was their meetings that were an aspect of the Christian colleges' troubles. The American Historical Association, the American Chemical Society, the Modern Language Association, and other bands of professional scholars were announcements of the splintering and abandonment of the prescribed course of study with which the Christian colleges had nurtured generations of students headed for the ministry and the old professions. Their meetings would not have provided an appropriate or comfortable environment for colleges in search of an instrument for dealing with the challenges that the very existence of the new academic associations symbolized.

The Council of Church Boards of Education, on the other hand, already represented many of the colleges that would become founding members of AAC. Both McDowell and King were active in the educational bureaucracies of their denominations. When McDowell addressed the gathering as "very dear Brethren," a Christian fellowship of educators, not a gathering of professional scholars, was being embraced.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Challenges to the colleges

Whatever the drift of McDowell's and King's remarks, the American college was in trouble not because it was Christian. The problems were many. There were too many colleges. Not enough high school graduates to fill them. Not enough philanthropy to support them. More new knowledge than they could handle, too much old knowledge (Latin and Greek) that too few wanted. In the meantime, the great state universities that erupted after the Civil War and the successful new models--Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and most recently the University of Chicago--all argued that indeed the day of the small denominational college was over.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

As for the Christian nature of the college, each college was as Christian and sectarian as it wanted to be or needed to be or could be. The colleges were responding to the world certainly more than McDowell wanted. They had all been unabashedly Christian once, and all were now less Christian than they had been. What was going on was a process in which the Christian college one way or another was shedding or diluting its Christian nature.

The talks by McDowell and King launched the first annual meeting of AAC, but did their presence on the program constitute an endorsement of the sectarian Christian college? The assembled college presidents heard Bishop McDowell declare that their colleges confronted "such a crisis as the Christian colleges never faced in this world before," but what did that have to do with their being in Chicago in January, 1915?

Surely, the placement of the McDowell and King talks on the eve of the day given over to creating the organization did serve as a sort of invocation, acknowledging the origins of the American college initially as an expression of religious purpose and then of evangelical Protestantism. But was the crisis about being a Christian college or perhaps simply about being a college? The colleges represented at Chicago all were Christian in one way or another--was there any institution other than the University of Virginia that chose to disassociate itself from religion? They were overwhelmingly Protestant (Notre Dame and Creighton were the only Roman Catholic founding members of AAC). They had assembled because their colleges were in trouble, not because they had been summoned by the blare of Christian trumpets. The problem as defined by McDowell was that the colleges and the world were not Christian enough. That, however, was not a particularly original evangelical diagnosis for the world's problems. It had been heard before.

Purposes of the meeting

The gathered college presidents were surely attentive. Most of them symbolized and documented the westward movement of the Christian college and the denominational rivalries that spawned more colleges than were needed or could be afforded. Nonetheless, these were not talks that confronted the problems that were troubling the leaders of higher education in 1915, and the founders of AAC surely knew it. In fact, once the organization was duly organized, sessions were devoted to a consideration of how a busy college president should handle the demands on his time and to a need for efficiency and standardization in the modern college. One evening the presidents of Grinnell, Wesleyan, Allegheny, Goucher, Augustana, and Macalester became spokesmen for "types of American colleges," making clear that the new association was a coming together of diverse institutions with particular agendas that, while they could loosely fit under the umbrella of "Christian college," needed more than an umbrella to withstand the torrents of change that were upon them.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Indeed, the era of the small Christian college as the defining institution of American higher education had ended, and it was no secret to those in attendance in Chicago. In both McDowell and King, assertive in their faith and determined in their mission as they may be, there is an implicit nervousness, a not quite openly stated admission that the sectarian college was flirting with obsolescence.

McDowell acknowledges a "reaction against sectarianism," supposing "that all of us are just a little bit ashamed of being denominationalists." The trouble, he continued, is that being Christian but non-sectarian leads to being non-sectarian about Christianity itself. The compromising of the Christian culture of the American college was a process that began early in its history and became everywhere apparent by the end of the nineteenth century. Colleges once defined by prayer meetings now took their directions from the gentlemanly pretensions of Greek letter fraternities and intercollegiate athletic rivalries. When baseball practice required the cancellation of evening prayers, what was one to think? In the classrooms German-trained holders of the Ph. D. degree and their American counterparts were intruding intellectual values into a world where piety had prevailed. And looming over the academic scene was the developing American university, firmly non-sectarian if not godless, hard-headed in its attention to vocations and new professions, welcoming to every subject and person, and withal popular.

The response of McDowell and King to these developments was to bring the American college student to Christ (McDowell) and to do so by permeating the collegiate experience with "the ideals and standards of Christ" (King). Many other presidents and their colleges, while in no sense rejecting these easily applauded sentiments, concluded that they were inadequate to the crisis.

Colleges in transition

Let it be said that King's course of study and academic philosophy for Oberlin were pretty much the same as that of any other first-rate college that was accommodating the new subjects. King's reference in his talk to a social consciousness as a desirable outcome of Christian education makes him a spokesman for the social gospel and for middle-class Progressivism, a defender of the old values endangered from below by Roman Catholic and Jewish immigrant masses in the grasp of city political bosses and from above by the gross immorality of capitalists and their political minions in Washington. And his description of a broad course of study that pays attention to the Greek, Roman, and Judaic origins of Western culture, that stresses "the scientific spirit and method," and that elevates "esthetic appreciation" to a central purpose of an adequate education--these goals mark him as an imaginative and liberal educator whose mission is to keep the colleges from falling behind. Only in his insistence that the college must evangelize its students does he hark back to a much earlier time.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

If a never-ending religious revival was a questionable solution to the crisis that McDowell had proclaimed, what others were possible? Certainly the choice offered in 1884 by a professor of government at Columbia University sounded more like a death sentence than an opportunity. In that year John W. Burgess broadcast a warning to most of the colleges that formed AAC in 1915: "I confess that I am unable to divine what is to be ultimately the position of Colleges that cannot become Universities and which will not be Gymnasia. I cannot see what reason they will have to exist. It will be largely a waste of capital to maintain them, and largely a waste of time to attend them. It is so now."

What had these threatened colleges--still alive and represented at Chicago in 1915--done to defend themselves from Burgess's predicted future? Some shed their denominational affiliations, allowing them more easily to be all things to all men. Some decided to offer diluted academic programs, abandoning the old required liberal curriculum and moving into career programs, especially those of relevance to the local economic and social climate. Some simply acquiesced in the flow of history. Mark Hopkins's Christian (Congregational) Williams became an outpost of a wealthy Protestant (Episcopalian) upper class. Others accepted the challenge and became universities in fact (Brown) or in name only (Wesleyan, CT). But all of them rolled with the demographics: Young people weren't going to college any more in large numbers in order either to find Christ, or having found Him spend their lives serving Him. And, finally, 179 of them decided that they needed to band together as the Association of American Colleges.

Old Eastern institutions that were handling their problems in a regional way and that had severed denominational connection if they had ever had them--Amherst, Bowdoin, Dartmouth, and Williams--were not among the founders. On the other hand, a great number of colleges that had decided to call themselves universities (but were not), including Wesleyan in Connecticut, Denison in Ohio, and Lawrence in Wisconsin, were among the founders. While there were universities in the founding membership that at the time or eventually would deserve to be called universities--Duke, George Washington, North-western, Stanford--among the missing were all the state universities as well as Chicago, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.

The founding membership did include Albertson (ID), Andrews (MI), Baker (KS), Carroll (WI), Eureka (IL), Creighton (NE), Graceland (IA), Hendrix (AR), Linfield (OR), Park (MO), Wilmington (OH), as well as Wesleyan Universities in Connecticut, South Dakota, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Ohio, and West Virginia. Among them were institutions that were guided by or would try to be--the talks with which the founding meeting began. For a few no solution would be enough.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Yet for the rest, as well as all those absent in 1915 that would join in the years ahead, the founding of AAC was an adventure in shared aspirations. If it was a confrontation with unwelcome problems, it was also a declaration that the American college would establish standards and move on.

The clear moral tone of the opening addresses provided AAC with a mission that would require that it pay attention to values and moral issues, not only to the challenging issues of institutional governance. In AAC the founding colleges created a community in which college presidents, guided to a significant degree by the traditions represented by McDowell and King, would become responsible caretakers of the American college and of liberal education itself.

To respond to this article, e-mail [e-mail], with the author's name on the subject line.

FREDERICK RUDOLPH is Mark Hopkins Professor of History, Emeritus, at Williams College.