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The Protestant Enlightenment Revisited: Daniel Coit Gilman and the Academic Reforms of the Modern American University

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2009

Extract

An exchange took place at the end of the nineteenth century between William Rainey Harper and Dwight L. Moody that makes little sense to those who study American intellectual life at the end of the twentieth. What is remarkable about this incident is not that Harper, the president of the University of Chicago, a new institution dedicated to promoting science, advanced research and graduate education, invited Moody, the leading revivalist of the Gilded Age, to speak at one of America's most promising new universities. To be sure, our understanding of the educational reforms associated with the founding of research universities rarely encompasses the transatlantic revivals of Moody and his song leader, Ira Sankey. And Harper's invitation to Moody could reasonably be compared to the contemporary practice of conferring honorary degrees on civic leaders and celebrities not known for their interest in higher education but whose reputation could well benefit the degree-granting institution. What is exceptional in this exchange is Harper's assessment of the similarities between his university and Moody's revivals. While Harper acknowledged the use of different means, he thought his and Moody's aims were the same. ‘I do not understand’, Harper wrote, ‘that you, as a matter of fact, represent any other position than that which is actually maintained here at the University. The differences between us are merely differences of detail.’

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Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

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25 ‘Our national schools of science’, offprint, Gilman papers, 28; ‘The inauguration of President Wheeler at Berkeley, October, 25, 1899’, in Launching, 230; ‘Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University, New Haven’, in University Problems, 148; ‘Christian resources’, 282, and ‘Research – a speech delivered at the convocation of the University of Chicago, June, 1903’, in Launching, 251. Gilman relied on Spencer's progressive interpretation of Darwinism. For Spencer's influence, see Moore, Jim, ‘Herbert Spencer's henchmen: the evolution of Protestant liberals in late nineteenth-century America’, in Durant, John R. (ed.), Darwinism and divinity: essays on evolution and religious belief, Oxford 1985, 76100Google Scholar, and Livingstone, , Darwin's forgotten defenders, 4856Google Scholar.

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27 ‘Research’, 251; ‘Characteristics’, 97; ‘Remembrance’, 150; ‘Utility’, 55. For the prevalence of these sentiments in American learning during this period see Hollinger, , ‘Justification by verification’. Bozeman, Theodore Dwight, Protestants in an age of science: the Baconian ideal and antebellum American religious thought, Chapel Hill 1977Google Scholar, demonstrates the doxological character of antebellum science.

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