nineteenth-century ears (such as those of historian George Bancroft) sounded “commercial”: young men were being trained to “sell” their Greek and Latin.73 Elitist notions that higher education ought to be economically useless—its purpose being to form the mind and character of select youths—worked against the development of specialization.
In Germany, by contrast, professors were expected to develop, and devote themselves to, a circumscribed field. There, the subject area (classics, for example) would be construed—as Carl Diehl puts it—less like “a public park in which anyone is free to wander as he wishes,” and more like “some kind of restricted collective farm, owned and intensively cultivated by a select group of inhabitants.”74 In America, proponents of the “restricted collective farm” model of the professoriate, such as President Charles Eliot at Harvard, waged an upward struggle against those who preferred a leisurely Sunday outing in the college park, available to all whose class background allowed them to dress and speak “decently.”
Professors at American theological seminaries fared only somewhat better than their counterparts at colleges. A telling example is provided by the career of Philip Schaff, unarguably nineteenth-century America’s most distinguished church historian. When Schaff arrived at Union Theological Seminary in 1870 after his tenure at Mercersburg Seminary in Pennsylvania, he was first given a chair in “Theological Encyclopedia and Christian Symbolics” (i.e., an introductory outline of the various theological subdisciplines, plus the study of Christian creeds). From there, he transferred to the chair in Hebrew; next, to the chair in New Testament Exegesis; and at last, in 1887, a few years before his death, to the chair of Church History. This example illustrates how fungible were the categories of theological teaching—and how central the study of the Bible remained. In addition, the fact that Union, like other seminaries, employed only one professor of church history suggests how wide that professor’s chronological reach would need to be.
A second step toward specialization is signaled by the creation in the 1890s of departments as organizational units within colleges and universities: here, the University of Chicago provided the model. Previously, the cluster of instructors in any subject was insufficient to constitute a department. Until 1870–1871, the Harvard College catalogue listed course offerings by which classes of students (first-year, second-year, and so on) enrolled in them, not by the departments offering them.75 Only in 1891, for example, were there enough history teachers at Harvard to constitute an official History Department.76 With professors grouped with (allegedly) likeminded colleagues, the self-identification of the professoriate by discipline could not but become stronger.
The rise of professional societies at the end of the nineteenth century is a third indicator of increased academic specialization.77 Although the American Philosophical Association was founded in 1743, most professional societies in the Humanities were products of the nineteenth century: the American Oriental Society was founded in 1842; the American Philological Association, in 1869; the Modern Language Association, in 1883; the American Historical Association, in 1884.78 The Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis, the first professional society devoted to a specialized area of religious studies, dates to 1880,79 and the American Society of Church History (to be discussed in Chapter 1), to 1888. The new professional associations, Jurgen Herbst argues, worked to “weaken the claim of a college as the locus of professional identity, and to give the scholar a new persona as a practitioner of his discipline. Thus he began to think of himself less as a teacher, and more as a historian, a biologist, or an anthropologist.”80
Only from the 1880s onward did professionalization enable historians in America to distinguish themselves from lay amateurs and become (as Gabriele Lingelbach puts it) “self-referential.” Now, a man—I use the term advisedly—might strive for prestige and recognition within his own disciplinary community through research and publication.81 Research was increasingly imagined as producing knowledge, as posing and attempting to answer questions, not merely passing down commentary on older texts.82
Likewise, the founding of university presses (Johns Hopkins boasted the first, in 189183) and field-specific journals prompted greater professional specialization.84 In 1825, Charles Hodge of the Theological Seminary at Princeton founded the Biblical Repertory85; this journal, along with Andover’s Bibliotheca Sacra, established in 1843, served as important conduits for theological scholarship in mid-nineteenth century America.86 The New Englander (later to become the Yale Review), founded in 1843, disseminated the “New Haven Theology,” while the Mercersburg Review (established in 1849 and managed by Philip Schaff and John W. Nevin) served as the conduit for the “Mercersburg Theology.”87 The American Theological Review, which began publication in 1851 and whose editors often included Union Seminary professors, went through several name-changes as it furthered the views of the New School wing of the Presbyterian Church. Later in the century (1881) appeared the first issue of the Journal of Biblical Literature.88 William Rainey Harper, as President of the University of Chicago, encouraged each department to publish a field-specific journal. In the first year of the University’s operations (1892), Biblical World and the American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures were established, and in 1897, the American Journal of Theology, which later combined with Biblical World to form the Journal of Religion.89 These journals, from earliest to latest, were important stimuli to creating a sense of a discipline (albeit broadly defined) and of their readers as “professionals.”
Growth in faculty numbers and in specialized publication spurred the enlargement of seminary and university libraries, which nevertheless developed much more slowly than professors desired: seminary boards of directors frequently underestimated the cost of providing an ever-increasing supply of books and journals, most of which were produced in Europe.90 The difficulties of establishing adequate seminary libraries will be detailed in Chapter 2.
Still another sign of specialization was the institution of sabbatical leaves, initiated at Harvard in 1880: the shrewd President Charles Eliot hoped that offering sabbaticals might lure outstanding professors from other institutions to Cambridge.91 Yet even earlier, we may note, seminaries were granting professors time away from teaching duties, with financial assistance for travel and study, as is evidenced by the careers of the Union Seminary professors in particular. These points will be illustrated in the chapters that follow.
The Elective System and the Seminar Method
Two other developments within American colleges and universities in the mid-to-late nineteenth century also contributed to more advanced study in all fields, including religion: the elective system and the seminar method.
For much of the century, all students took the same prescribed curriculum throughout their college careers. Introducing a curriculum in which students were given at least some choice in their courses—the elective system—was hotly contested. Electives, promoted by President Eliot of Harvard in 1869,92 allowed for greater specialization than had the prescribed curriculum. In Eliot’s view, they made “scholarship possible,” for not all subjects would be taught at the elementary level.93 The elective principle, in effect, allowed colleges to become universities.94
Detractors of the elective system, however, argued that American youth entering college were not sufficiently prepared to make an elective system feasible.95 Admitting that American education was not yet equal to its German or British counterparts, President James McCosh of Princeton claimed that forcing a European model on America would only worsen the situation.96 Electives, some feared, might encourage students to abandon rigorous work in languages and mathematics.97 McCosh charged that the elective system allowed students to slack off, choosing
