APPENDIX I
THE PILLARS OF PAROCHIAL PURPOSE:
Religious Piety, The Collegiate Way, and the Moral Curriculum
This excursion through Ursinus College catalogs from the early days to the 1970s seeks to trace the themes that supported the parochial purpose--religious piety and the collegiate way. A report on the old "moral curriculum" in nineteenth century American colleges supplements this excursion. The report casts light on the parochial emphases that would have characterized Ursinus's original curriculum but that waned as academic professionalism rose.
The newly founded Ursinus was as sanguine as any religiously driven college in giving primacy to the moral development of students. The founders started an institution "where the youth of the land can be liberally educated under the benign influence of Christianity." After Ursinus's first shaky decade, its 1881 catalog touted recent additions to the spare curriculum. It held them up as evidence that the college could equip students for "any worthy calling in life." The moral fervor behind Ursinus's educational program then rang forth in the following passage (opened with an awkward diffidence of phrasing):
But it is desired to emphasize its [the college's] aim to give
chief prominence to the moral and religious element of education
as of supreme value. Without true views of life, and right principles
for its government, the acquisitions of learning only increase man's
power for evil." (p. 24)
Early on, Ursinus began to hire professors from graduate schools where the research disciplines developed on the European model. Professional practice, however, had to take second place to the faculty's "highest duty." That was to attend to the religious interests of the students. The college expected faculty to labor for the "spiritual welfare" of their students. The day of classes opened and closed with "suitable devotions." And every student had to attend--the start of a chapel requirement that lasted almost to the 1970-1976 period. (p. 27)
Ten years later, the 1891 Ursinus catalog still was affirming that the college had the right fix on truth and morality based in religion. It continued, however, to cast its religious principles as a kind of matrix for education in "modern civilization." That modern note becomes more prominent when we see that the 1891 course offerings included a new scientific course of studies running parallel to the original classical course. Course offerings with university-sounding labels appeared in the curriculum as markers of the rise of professional practice: inorganic chemistry, botany, psychology, physics, zoology, social science, English literature, history of philosophy, astronomy, geology.
Another significant change appeared in the 1891-92 catalog, the first to appear after the retirement of the first president, John H. A. Bomberger. A verbatim excerpt from the 1869 act of incorporation by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania made its first appearance in the opening section. However, statements about "Apostolic Christianity" and the faculty's "highest duty" to look after students' religious welfare remained. The daily religious devotions morning and afternoon remained a requirement. Required religion study for all undergraduates continued, with the focus on the sophomore study of "English Bible." Students continued to live by requirement in college dormitories under the "benign influence." These requirements, without rhetorical fanfare, became the principal vehicles for perpetuating the parochial purpose as time went on.
In the 1896-97 catalog, prose about the religious basis of truth disappeared almost completely. The legislative excerpt, appearing since 1891-92, after Bomberger's departure, seemed to move the college's mission from a Biblical to a civic foundation.
Meanwhile, the professionalizing of the college continued. The 1900-1901 catalog listed five courses of study, up from the two of a decade before. (The "Literary Course for Ladies" that appeared in the 1891 catalog as a third variation disappeared by 1900-1901.) The five courses of study (we would call them majors) were classical, mathematics-physical, chemistry-biology, history-political, and modern languages. Graduation requirements now included a course offering in psychology and philosophy and a laboratory course.
By 1930-1931, when President George L. Omwake's long administration had matured, the balance of parochial purpose and professional academic practice appears to have reached an equilibrium. That equilibrium lasted until America came unhinged in the late 1960s. The V-12 program in World War II and the influx of veterans after the war temporarily and superficially disturbed the balance but without lasting effect. The 1930-1931 catalog highlights the parochial purpose by quoting the founders' familiar reference to "the benign influence of Christianity." Students still had to attend daily chapel, down from two sessions to one a day. However, the course in English Bible disappeared from the set of graduation requirements in the 1929-30 catalog, just the year before. Psychology and then philosophy became requirements. Students still had to live in dormitories under the supervision of Christian men and women who would guide their moral behavior.
It is worth pausing over this persistent requirement. It lies at the bottom of the social code that became such a sticking point between the students and the administration in the late 1960s and in the 1970-76 period. The college touted the beneficial effects of its student living conditions from the early days. The 1883-84 catalog, under the rubric "Internal Arrangements," stated:
The Domestic Department is under the immediate supervision
of the Faculty, giving to the household, so far as possible, the
character of a well-ordered Christian family.
This vision of intentional orderly Christian living persists throughout the college's history. President Omwake must have valued it highly. As soon as he became president in 1913, the new catalog (1913-1914) gained a wholly new section on "Domestic Life." This celebration of the residential experience--of "the collegiate way"--gives us a reference point for understanding the parochial purpose of the college as it moved away from a direct religious formulation:
The college aims to provide thoroughly healthful, wholesome
and homelike conditions in the residences for both young men
and young women. The boarding department is made an
educational asset in the institution. All resident students take
their meals in a large, cheery dining room constructed on
artistic and thoroughly sanitary lines. The meals are prepared
in a spacious, well-lighted, sanitary kitchen with complete
modern equipment.
This paragraph lasted for many years in the catalog. The paragraph that followed it in 1913-1914 explained the educational rationale for the amenities so glowingly described:
By controlling the conditions under which the students live, the
college provides a physical basis for its higher functions that
insures not only health of body and joy of life, but greatly
promotes mental efficiency and success in intellectual
pursuits.
Perhaps it was unfortunate that this explanation dropped out of the catalog when Norman E. McClure became president in 1936. It might have made it easier for students to understand the college's stand on the social code when they objected to it in the 1970-1976 period.
Omwake's revision of the parochial purpose in his first year in office extended well beyond the valued living arrangements. The 1913-1914 description of "College Principles" shows that the pursuit of the collegiate way moved Ursinus away from the fervid assertion of Apostolic Christian truth in the earlier years. It appears that Omwake broke off the explicitly religious expressions of the parochial purpose and segregated them into the specific requirements of chapel and Bible study. The catalog discussion of college principles shows that the purpose survived in social custom, attached by only tenuous strings to basic denominational tenets.
The college, it asserted, "opposes unnatural distinctions among its students. Equal opportunity for all is provided and a wholesome spirit of fraternity throughout the entire body is encouraged." After explaining that self-governance took place by students through their organizations for men and for women, the passage turned to the hard facts of student social commitment:
Since the institution is organized on the group basis, class rivalry
and its attendant evils are extraneous.
Later in the Omwake era a pledge taken by each student gave teeth to this vision of "equal opportunity" in the social life of the campus: "Each student pledges himself on admission to abstain from every form of rushing or hazing." (1930-1931 catalog) Italic type emphasized the pledge. (Perhaps the pledge was so important because the threat of rushing and hazing was so real!) At some religiously founded colleges, students still would have been signing pledges of belief in specific religious doctrines rather than pledges to behave themselves. The emphasis on a wholly social concern and the absence of a religious reference both speak to the change that had taken place in the parochial agenda of Ursinus by the 1930s.
The "College Principles" section of the Omwake-era catalogs concludes with a statement of aim that is equally strong on social obligation and barren of religious reference. It asserts that the aim of Ursinus
is to train its students, through the performance of their social
and civil obligations and duties, in those virtues which will fit
them for the extraordinary responsibilities of educated men and
women in after life.
Because of this expectation, the college said it reserved the right to exclude students from its enrollment--a disciplinary sanction that would resound into the contentious 1960s and 1970s.
The college's social expectations of students and graduates expressed in the 1930-1931 catalog still appeared intact in the catalog of 1950-51. However, the college no longer required the pledge.
The scales holding the college's parochial purpose on one side and its steadily enriched academic offerings on the other side clearly tilted greatly in favor of academic professionalism by this time. But the college's lack of doctrinal narrowness, of specific religious formulation, did not mean that it had abandoned its parochial purpose. For the several decades leading up to the centennial, the combination of behavioral expectations we have traced in the catalogs fulfilled that purpose. Students had to go to chapel and take a religion course or later a course in philosophy, a formal requirement that was free of any doctrinal constraints. And they had to meet a set of demanding requirements for responsible social behavior in their living arrangements. Under this regimen, students who kept up an appearance of decent social behavior were free to develop their moral and religious convictions on their own.
The college was able to reach a modern balance in this way perhaps because its parochial purpose from the beginning reflected the simplicity of "low church" German Reformed theology and practice. Of even greater importance may have been Ursinus's freedom from the start from ecclesiastical control. There was no governing authority above that of the college's independent, self-perpetuating board of directors. Early catalog copy declared for a breadth of religious inclusiveness and against narrow sectarianism. The 1881 catalog said that the faculty watched over the religious welfare of students "in no sectarian spirit, but in full accordance with an enlarged charity which recognizes the claims of all branches of the Evangelical Protestant church, as the only representative of Christian Catholicity." Bomberger may have drawn the line on Roman Catholics in his view of Christendom, but he took in more of the flock than other Protestant denominational leaders of his time.
The 1891 catalog copy may have come from a pen other than Bomberger's, for it uses some new language; but it reaffirms the openness:
...the institution is in no sense sectarian, excepting as it is avowedly
and distinctively Evangelical Protestant. In this respect it stands
forth as a legitimate product of strong and unwavering faith in the
principles and life of Apostolic Christianity, revived in the
Reformation, as comprehending the purest system of truth and
morality...
"Apostolic Christianity" was the biblically centered expression of Reformed theology championed by Bomberger in the controversies leading to the founding of Ursinus. It lacked the disciplinary rigidity that might have come to Ursinus if the college had been under the control of an ecclesiastical body. The college was never a creature of Bomberger's denomination, the German Reformed Church. From the start, it was free of church control. The catalog of 1881 pointedly informed its prospective students that Ursinus was "not under any formal Ecclesiastical or Synodical control." It went on to say, however, that it had the "approval and endorsement" of the General Synod of the Reformed Church in the United States." The need for the distinction lay in the rift that the Bomberger movement had made in the Reformed church leading up to the college's founding. But for this review, it is important because it emphasizes Ursinus's independent status.
This cursory look at catalogs of the past shows that the parochial purpose of Ursinus established conditions from the outset that would allow its professional practice to advance with less intrusion than might be found at colleges more closely identified with particular religious organizations. At the same time, it shows that the freedom of the college from narrow doctrine did not release it from a persistent compulsion to shape the social behavior of students.
Indeed, the very lack of discipline by an ecclesiastical authority allowed programming for moral education to veer away from the religious emphasis found at the outset. As academic disciplines gained identity in their own right, and were thought of less as instruments of moral education, the college had little difficulty in shifting to social behavior as the expression of its parochial purpose--that is, toward the "collegiate way." The college was free to redefine this purpose pretty much as circumstances demanded. This became critically important in the late 1960s, when President Helfferich undertook to draw over the purpose of the institution a cloak of secular conservative ideology unimagined by his religiously oriented predecessors.
By 1970, the purpose to shape the social behavior of students might have appeared to be unconnected to the original parochial purpose embodied in "Apostolic" or "low church" Christianity. But as this sampling of catalog copy suggests, there was a line of descent. The debate over principles and priorities from 1970 to 1976 demanded much time and energy partly because of past institutional experience. The college had clearly tilted to favor the professional practice of the scholarly disciplines at the expense of its parochial purpose. Its parochial purpose, on the other hand, still counted for something, although it manifested itself now in social rather than in religious terms. Many felt that it informed the unique style of the college, its ethos.
***
Dennis O'Brien, former president of Bucknell University and the University of Rochester, usefully provided us with a supplemental view of the parochial purpose of colleges in an article entitled "The Disappearing Moral Curriculum" (The Key Reporter, Vol 61, No. 4, Summer 1997). His study complements the above analysis of piety and the collegiate way at Ursinus by describing the old curriculum of "mental discipline." That curriculum--dubbed the "moral curriculum" by O'Brien--combined with religious piety and the collegiate way in support of the parochial purpose of nineteenth century colleges.
When he read the old catalogs of a group of colleges, O'Brien found what he calls the "moral curriculum" of a century ago. The moral curriculum centered on study of the Bible and the classics. Its reason for being was to recover from the canon, both sacred and profane, the truth about human life. By imitating in class the best ideas about life and by practicing these ideas outside class, students would become morally upright and socially productive citizens by the time they graduated.
O'Brien explains that the moral curriculum weakened and changed under the pressure of the research revolution in universities. Taking place in the second half of the nineteenth century, just as many liberal arts colleges were opening and dedicating themselves to the moral curriculum, the research revolution set up a powerful counterforce. It began transforming study of the traditional canon into the study of new intellectual disciplines. It began making researchers into professionals with primary allegiance to their disciplines. The objective of the new disciplines and their new professional practitioners was not to facilitate recovery of received truth. The objective was to discover truth piece by piece through the emerging methods of inquiry in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Philosophically, the new professional practice posited that final truth was currently unattainable, a future goal laboriously to strive for. This contrasted with the certainty of truth on which the moral curriculum, with its definitive interpretations of the Bible and the classics, rested.
For O'Brien, the contradiction between recovery of certain truth in the moral curriculum and discovery of a conditional and problematic truth in the modern professional disciplines explains the metamorphosis of curricular objective in the colleges he surveyed. For us, his findings augment our account of piety and the collegiate way at Ursinus.
END
APPENDIX I: THE PILLARS OF PAROCHIAL PURPOSE
BACK TO BEGINNING, AN INTERPRETATION