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 easy courses and professors. (As examples of such at Harvard, McCosh singled 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.