was first taught within the College. In 1778, Ezra Stiles was designated “Professor of Ecclesiastical History,” a post he retained throughout his Presidency of Yale until his death in 1795.63 In the 121 years between the College’s founding in 1701 and the organization in 1822 of the “Theological Department” (which became the Divinity School), Yale emerged as a distinguished center of theological studies, with Jonathan Edwards just one of its stars.64
The creation of the Theological Department in 1822 was prompted by fifteen students’ petition to remain at Yale College after their graduation to receive further instruction. To meet their needs, churches contributed funds to secure a new professor in theology, and some members of the existing College faculty were reassigned to divinity.65 Historians of Yale credit both the disestablishment of Congregationalism in Connecticut in 1818 and the religious revival at Yale College in 1820 with fostering the desire for theological study.66 A college degree (or even college attendance) was not a strict requirement for admission, and many students did not stay three years. As at other institutions, awarding the Bachelor of Divinity degree at Yale came later: in 1867.67
The Yale Theological Department was relatively conservative in comparison to Harvard and Union.68 Its conservatism matched that of the College as portrayed in the famous Yale Report of 1828. Called “the most influential educational statement of the antebellum period” by historian Julie Reuben, the Yale Report defended the classically oriented curriculum against proposed changes. The purpose of a Yale education, the Report claimed, was to “discipline” mental faculties and to form character, not to impart knowledge or enlarge the mind’s “furniture.”69
Theological study at Yale (as at Harvard) faltered in the mid-nineteenth century. Whereas circa 1840 the enrollment in the Theological Department had stood at about 87, by 1858 it had fallen to 2270—in contrast to Princeton’s 130, Andover’s 123, and Union’s 114 in the same period.71 Professorial replacements were stalled and financial difficulties abounded;72 student interest had shifted from theology, formerly Yale’s special glory, to biblical studies, a subject not yet prominent at Yale.73 The School nearly closed after the Civil War, but was saved by the fund-raising activities of the younger Timothy Dwight.74 And with the arrival of Wünderkind William Rainey Harper at Yale in 1886, biblical studies were invigorated.75
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century commentators alike note the neglect of church history at Yale.76 Although in the College, history had been made a separate subject in 1847 and a professorship established in 1865, the Divinity School lacked a permanent position in the subject.77 Finally, despite the hardships of the Civil War era, gifts enabled the establishment in 1867 of a chaired professorship in church history, named for Titus Street.78 The focus of Yale Divinity education now shifted from theology to biblical and historical studies, deemed the “best preparation against infidelity of the day.”79 George Fisher, who had been appointed in 1854 as College Pastor and Professor of Divinity, assumed the new Street Professorship of Church History.80 When Fisher retired in the early twentieth century, he was succeeded by Williston Walker, who had received his Ph.D. from Leipzig.81
The development of graduate education beyond ministerial training at the Yale Theological Department, as at other seminaries, came late—especially considering that the first Ph.D.s awarded in America were at Yale (1861).82 By 1876, graduate scholarships had been instituted to provide for a year of post-ministerial study at the Seminary or abroad. Professors, however, were unclear what role this extra year should play. That they still thought of these students as ministers rather than as future scholars is suggested by their questions: would churches wish their ministers to have a fourth year of education, and if so, who would pay for it?83
The awarding of doctorates in religion at Yale, as noted above, had a complex history. At some point, faculty from the Divinity School and the Graduate School began to offer the Ph.D. under the auspices of the Divinity School, but when a graduate program within the University Department of Religious Studies was established in 1963, M.A. and Ph.D. work was repositioned there.84
Union Theological Seminary
Union Theological Seminary, founded in 1836, offered a more liberal brand of Presbyterianism (New School) than Princeton’s.85 Less tied to a hardened Calvinism and willing to work with other Protestants, especially Congregationalists, for religious and social improvement in America and beyond, New School Presbyterians found their views supported in Union’s charters. The Seminary’s Plan and Constitution stated that it would be open to “all men of moderate views and feelings, who desire to live free from party strife, and to stand aloof from all extremes of doctrinal speculation, practical radicalism, and ecclesiastical domination.”86 Qualified men from “every denomination of evangelical Christians” were invited to attend.87 In the Seminary’s first year, 23 students enrolled; by its fourth year, enrollment had grown to 120.88
Although some critics deemed a large city an inappropriate location for a seminary,89 a plot of land was leased in what is now the area around New York University—“well uptown,” a contemporary commentator wrote, “quite on the outskirts of the city.”90 It was not a propitious moment to found a seminary in New York: the Great Fire of 1837 rendered would-be patrons unable to meet their financial commitments.91 Moreover, unlike Harvard and Yale, Union was not affiliated with a university.
New York City in the mid-nineteenth century was awash in social change. Not only had the population grown tenfold in the century’s first sixty years;92 “new money” had also arisen to challenge the hegemony of a homogeneous upper class who had previously imagined themselves the city’s cultural legislators. Union, Thomas Bender argues, set out to exploit the opportunities of a metropolis, capitalizing on the financial and intellectual life of the city.93 The Seminary profited from large gifts given by business entrepreneur James Roosevelt (father of Franklin D.) and from banker James Brown (of the family that would later merge businesses to become Brown Brothers Harriman), establishing chaired professorships in Theology, Hebrew and Cognate Languages, Sacred Literature, Sacred Rhetoric and Pastoral Theology, Church Polity, and Mission Work.94 As the Seminary grew, it sought larger quarters. With the financial assistance of New York’s wealthy, it moved progressively uptown: first, in 1884, to buildings on Park Avenue between Sixty-Ninth and Seventieth Streets, and then, in 1910, to its present location on Morningside Heights.95
Union’s professors, whose meager salaries—allegedly $2500 per year, but often less, or occasionally nothing96—distinguished them from the moneyed elite, nevertheless benefited from their relationships with businessmen and entrepreneurs. Seminary professors elsewhere joked that their colleagues in New York “lived among millionaires.”97 Despite their relative penury, the Seminary’s professors were considered sufficiently genteel to associate with the Dutch aristocrats of old New York (the Schuylers),98 and be financially assisted by capitalists (Charles Butler) and commercial publishers (Charles Scribner).99 Philip Schaff was so well connected that W. H. Vanderbilt’s son-in-law, Eliott Shepard, threw a party in 1882 at his new mansion on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Second Street for members of the American Bible Revision Committee (of which Schaff was chair) and 300 or so “friends” to celebrate the Revision’s publication.100 Some Union faculty enjoyed membership in the Century Club, “headquarters for a clubbish, genteel culture.”101 They were invited to lunches that included thirteen artery-numbing courses102 and to dinners at Delmonico’s, the favored restaurant of New York elites.103 Even professors who lived in rented houses had spacious enough quarters to entertain 125 of the delegates to the Evangelical Alliance meeting in 1873.104 Intellectual and cultural capital, it appears, compensated for the professors’ lack of cash. Many wealthy New Yorkers were then invested in the relatively liberal brand of Protestantism that Union represented.
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