Founded by Friends : the Quaker heritage of fifteen - Scarecrow Press

x Thomas D. Hamm
most of the elite colleges and universities of the United States today,
schools such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Amherst, Williams, Oberlin,
Kenyon, Carleton, Duke, Northwestern, Bowdoin, Dartmouth, and Columbia.
Even state schools saw the inculcation of Christian faith as part of
the task of education. Today, many colleges and universities continue
some sort of affiliation with the church that founded them. Yet many of
these “church schools” show little interest in religious life or in contributing
to their sponsoring denominations and in fact often see this disinterest
as entirely appropriate to their mission to embrace within their faculties
and student bodies a wide variety of believers and nonbelievers and
to defend the right of teachers and students to challenge any Christian orthodoxy.
Historians who have studied this process have found that it tended to follow
a common course. Even before the Civil War, American colleges found
themselves under increasing pressure to provide an education that would be
useful for those in secular professions or callings instead of focusing primarily
on training clergymen. Their alumni would be physicians, attorneys,
and businessmen. The same held true for women’s colleges that opened in
the antebellum period, although, given the gender expectations of the period,
they focused more on producing teachers or “Republican Mothers”
and wives who could inculcate virtue and good citizenship in their sons and
daughters. After the Civil War, the Darwinian revolution and the growing
professionalization of higher education produced a sea change in college
faculties. The emphasis was increasingly on expertise rather than on religious
orthodoxy; higher education was inevitably affected by scholars who
questioned received doctrines ranging from the age of the earth to the Virgin
Birth. Increasingly, the mark of a good college was the number of Ph.D.s
rather than the clerical standing of its faculty. And even faculty with religious
commitments (which most continued to have) tended to separate
those commitments from their teaching. Religious life was something apart
from the classroom. Simultaneously, the continuing role of college as a force
for social status or mobility meant that parents and administrators increasingly
looked with favor on the creation of a college student culture of fraternities
and sororities, athletics, and other forms of competition. Later came
pressures to allow smoking and dancing on campus. By the early twentieth
century, many colleges concluded that intellectual respectability (and financial
viability) required a kind of compartmentalization: they would encourage
and nurture religious life on campus but separate from academic life
and usually in nonsectarian ways. By the 1960s, that often meant abolishing
mandatory chapel and eschewing any attempt to continue the practice of in
loco parentis.
Some colleges, of course, did not choose that path; Wheaton in Illinois
is probably the best-known example. In the twentieth century, they were