out music, art, French plays and novels.98) Students, he insisted, need discipline to keep them from going to ruin.99 If we cannot prevent the evils of the elective system at Harvard, he exhorted, “we may arrest it in the other colleges of the country.”100 Yet McCosh conceded that some few undergraduate students with strong preparation might benefit from elective work in specialized subjects, such as Sanskrit.101 By the 1890s, however, enthusiasts of the new order deemed a regimen of required courses a remnant of “mediaeval” times, whose partisans, to be consistent (one writer claimed) should “only ride in stage coaches and read by tallow drips.”102
The introduction of the seminar method—developed first in classical philology in Germany and passing to History—similarly afforded opportunities for more advanced instruction in a field.103 The customary methods (student recitation of textbook material, or professors’ lectures) had not encouraged student initiative or research. The historical seminar was introduced to America in 1869 by Charles Kendall Adams at the University of Michigan and was adopted by Henry Adams at Harvard in 1871.104 Thereafter, the seminar became especially associated with the Johns Hopkins University.105 Entrepreneurial historian Herbert Baxter Adams traced the evolution of the modern seminar from scholastic methods, elaborating its growth “from a nursery of dogma into a laboratory of scientific truth.”106 Praising seminar arrangements at German universities, Baxter Adams was afire with a “scientific” vision of history: he likened seminars to laboratories and books to mineralogical specimens.107 By this standard, teaching by textbook and class recitation seemed hopelessly antiquated.108 The introduction of seminar teaching in church history will be discussed in Chapter 2.
Graduate Education and the Ph.D.
Still another marker of increasing academic specialization was the creation of the graduate school.109 Instituting graduate studies in America had been a topic of discussion since the 1830s, with no positive results.110 The college retained its place as the distinctive institution of American education.
Of key importance for the development of graduate education in America was the creation of fellowships to fund advanced study, the impetus for which was spurred by the British university system. A great impact was apparently made by Charles Astor Bristed’s book of 1852, Five Years in an English University. Bristed claimed that advanced study at Cambridge and Oxford had been enabled by the fellowships those universities offered.111 In the early 1870s, Princeton, Columbia, and Harvard began to encourage and subsidize foreign study for their especially promising graduates; Johns Hopkins would make such study systematic.112
Here again, seminaries appear in the forefront: American seminaries, Natalie Naylor argues, pioneered the provision of financial aid for postcollegiate study.113 Providing students with financial assistance for seminary education constituted a first step toward a system of graduate fellowships.114 As for post-seminary education, Yale by 1876 was offering graduate scholarships for further study at its seminary or in Europe or Palestine.115 In 1877, Union Seminary established two “Prize Fellowships” enabling some graduates to continue their studies in Germany. The first recipient was Francis Brown, later to serve as Professor and then as President at Union.116 Other notable recipients of Union’s “Prize Fellowships” included Edward Caldwell Moore (a student notetaker in Roswell Hitchcock’s classes), who won the award in 1884, spent two years in Germany, and eventually became a professor at Harvard Divinity School; and Arthur Cushman McGiffert, who received the fellowship in 1885 for doctoral work with Adolf von Harnack in Marburg, and who succeeded Philip Schaff as Professor of Church History at Union.117
Newly minted theology professors returning from Germany began to organize seminars, urge the study of primary sources, and assign research papers—all considered novel moves. As early as 1850–1851, Henry Smith at Union Seminary reported that the seniors in his church history class had been assigned “two or three subjects for special investigation”; in 1852, “each student had prepared three dissertations upon assigned topics.”118 Although these “dissertations” were surely not very advanced, they constituted a step toward the research model.119 Some decades later, the church historian at Harvard, Ephraim Emerton, listed paper topics from which his students might choose; his approach, and his students’ efforts, are detailed in Chapter 2.
The first Ph.D.s in any subject awarded in America were at Yale in 1861.120 The Yale doctorate required candidates to pursue two extra years of study beyond the completion of the Bachelor’s degree, with high attainment in two different fields.121 Twenty years later, Johns Hopkins raised the bar by requiring at least three years of post-collegiate study for the doctorate.122 Between 1870 and 1900, the number of students in American graduate programs increased from 50 to about 6000.123 This dramatic statistic illustrates in the academic arena Henry Adams’s claim that these decades largely changed the face of American life. It is nevertheless sobering to note that as late as 1884, only 19 members of Harvard’s entire faculty of 189 held the Ph.D.124
Doctoral programs in religion or theology in the United States, however, were products largely of the twentieth century. Seminaries were slower than universities in offering doctoral work under their own auspices—although the titles of some early university dissertations suggest that students wrote theses on topics pertaining to religion under the supervision of other departments.125 At Yale, for example, such students received their degrees through the Departments of Semitics or Philosophy.126 Of the schools featured in this study, Harvard Divinity School began to grant a Th.D. in 1914 or 1915, Union Theological Seminary in 1917 (no degree was actually awarded until 1924), and Princeton Theological Seminary in 1940.127
Yale’s situation was complex. Unlike some other seminaries, the Divinity School at Yale never offered a Th.D. At some point the Divinity School began to award the Ph.D., administered by faculty holding rank in the Divinity School and the Graduate School.128 In the 1920s, a Department of Religion within the University was established, a move apparently linked with the Yale Corporation’s decision no longer to require compulsory chapel.129 When a graduate program within the Department of Religion was established in 1963, M.A. and Ph.D. work was repositioned under the auspices of the (renamed) Department of Religious Studies.130
University Ph.D. programs in religion at Princeton date to 1955, and at Columbia, to 1946.131 Of schools I hope to consider in a further study, the University of Chicago inaugurated a Ph.D. in religion in 1892, and the Catholic University of America, founded as a research university, offered a S.T.D. in 1889 and a Ph.D. in 1940.132
By 1971, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) study Graduate Education in Religion, commonly known as the “Welch Report,” counted 52 Ph.D. programs in religion in the United States and Canada, of which 20 had been established since the 1960s. The decline of the divinity school as a center of graduate education was evident: by 1970, 41 percent of Ph.D. students in religion held no professional degree.133 The seminary was losing its preeminence as the conduit to the Ph.D.
Seminaries, despite their obvious defects, were the first purveyors in the United States of post-collegiate education in any Humanities-oriented subjects.134 Amid lack of funds, buildings, faculty, books, and libraries; with programs that scarcely differentiated elementary from advanced work; with poorly prepared students; and with denominational leaders aggressively seeking to control educational programs and oversee the rectitude of faculty and students, seminary professors forged ahead.135 Their effort to found the discipline of early church history on American shores is the subject of the chapters that follow.
