William Rainey Harper

American educator

• Born: July 26, 1856
• Birthplace: New Concord, Ohio
• Died: January 10, 1906
• Place of death: Chicago, Illinois

As the president of the University of Chicago during its formative years, Harper was a major figure in the reshaping of American higher education.

Early Life

William Rainey Harper was the son of Samuel and Ellen Elizabeth (née Rainey) Harper. His forebears on both sides were Scotch-Irish immigrants; his father was a small-town dry goods merchant. Intellectually precocious, Harper entered the preparatory school of the local Muskingum College at the age of eight, was graduated to the college itself at ten, and received his bachelor of arts degree in 1870. By that time, he had acquired sufficient fluency in Hebrew—the study of which became his lifelong passion—to deliver the salutatory oration at graduation in that language. For several years, he worked in his father’s store while keeping up his study of languages.

In 1872-1873, Harper taught Hebrew at Muskingum College. In September, 1873, he began graduate work at Yale. He received his doctoral degree in philology in 1875; his dissertation was titled “A Comparative Study of the Prepositions in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Gothic.” He served as principal of the Masonic College (in fact, a glorified high school) at Macon, Tennessee, from 1875 to 1876, and taught Greek and Latin in the preparatory department of Denison University in Granville, Ohio, from 1876 to 1878. Although his family background had been Presbyterian, he became a Baptist while at Denison.

In 1879, Harper moved to the Baptist Union Theological Seminary located in Morgan Park (a Chicago suburb) to teach Hebrew. In addition to earning a bachelor of divinity degree, Harper developed while at Morgan Park a set of correspondence courses in Hebrew, a series of Hebrew textbooks, and a summer course in Semitic languages and biblical studies that became the model for similar courses across the country.

Harper was founder and editor of two journals: the Hebrew Student (renamed first the Old and New Testament Studies and then the Biblical Scholar) and Hebraica (which later became the American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures). In 1886, he went back to Yale as professor of Semitic languages in the Divinity School. Teaching at Yale, he gained a national reputation as a scholar, organizer, and editor. A major factor in his growing prominence was his association, dating from the summer of 1885, with the Chautauqua Institute; Harper’s connection with the institute included the principalship of its college of liberal arts.

In 1890, Harper was offered the presidency of the newly planned University of Chicago, to be established under Baptist auspices with major funding provided by the multimillionaire John D. Rockefeller. Before accepting, Harper laid down what he thought should be the guidelines for the institution. After the trustees accepted his proposal in December, 1890, Harper entered upon one of the most remarkably successful episodes in university building in history. By the time the University of Chicago opened in the fall of 1892, he had recruited the nucleus of a topflight faculty; he would go on to make the university into one of the world’s great academic centers.

Life’s Work

Harper’s first love was teaching; throughout his years as president of the University of Chicago, he continued his classroom work. Unlike most of his fellow academic empire builders, he was a distinguished scholar in his own right. He was a major figure in the revival of Hebrew scholarship. In 1902, he published a detailed and exhaustive study, The Priestly Element in the Old Testament ; three years later there appeared the companion The Prophetic Element in the Old Testament (1905), along with his monumental Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Amos and Hosea (1905). Although a professing, even devout, Christian, Harper was an adherent of the so-called higher criticism—that is, the application to the scriptural text of evidentiary tests drawn from philology and history.

While affirming that the authors of the Bible were divinely inspired, Harper believed that their language reflected the linguistic, cultural, and religious context of their time. He accordingly insisted that critical scholarship would not undermine belief but rather would assist modern readers in understanding the real meaning of the Word of God as revealed through the Bible.

After becoming president of the University of Chicago, Harper continued for a time his association with Chautauqua and his journal editorships. He served on the Chicago Board of Education from 1896 to 1898, but the bulk of his energies was devoted to building his university. Along with a detailed conception of the University of Chicago, Harper had the advantage of starting from scratch and thus having neither hallowed traditions nor vested interests to overcome. He had the further advantage of finding in John D. Rockefeller a benefactor who kept his hands off university matters; Rockefeller rarely proffered advice even when asked.

Harper could thus proceed with the plans he had outlined when accepting the presidency: the division of the year into four quarters with the summer quarter an integral part of the academic year, division of the undergraduate program whereby the first two years (the junior college) would be devoted to general education and the second two (the senior college) to more specialized study, faculty control of athletics, establishment of a university press, and structural organization of the institution along departmental lines. He was determined from the start that Chicago should not be simply an undergraduate college, but a center for graduate training and advanced research.

Probably the most distinctively innovative aspect of Harper’s plans for the University of Chicago was its extension program. The inspiration came from Harper’s messianic zeal to spread his own enthusiasm for learning; the model largely came from his association with Chautauqua, which had in turn based its program upon the example of the English university extension movement.

Chicago’s Division of University Extension had three major alternative programs of study. “Lecture-Study” involved traveling instructors giving a locally based series of lectures, one per week for six or twelve weeks; discussions with the instructor at the time of the lecture; and weekly written exercises based upon a printed syllabus. “Correspondence-Teaching” allowed students to pursue course work entirely via mail. Off-campus evening classes in the Chicago area provided classroom work for those who could not attend regular courses because of their jobs. Extension students could earn undergraduate and even graduate credit, but the larger aim was to bring culture to the uncultured. “If culture is not contagious,” the University Record declared in 1903,

it should be… more or less infectious, and every person who is reaping some of the rewards of the earnest labors of scholarly men should see that something is done to bring others into touch with the same spirit.

Harper had his difficulties. One was the pressure to make the university into a Baptist institution in fact and not simply in name. The president and two-thirds of the trustees were required to be Baptists; the initial plans had envisaged compulsory chapel attendance for undergraduates. A man without much interest in theological debates, Harper parried questions from fundamentalist-minded Baptists about where he stood on the authority of the Bible with the equivocal answer that while the Bible was “in a very unique sense ’inspired,’” there was simultaneously present a “human element.”

Harper followed a similar balancing act regarding university policy. He exhorted the students to attend the voluntary religious services; he instituted strict moral supervision over undergraduate housing, activities, and publications; he even—to his eventual regret—acceded to sex segregation in the classroom for the first two undergraduate years. He successfully resisted, however, any screening of the faculty on the basis of religious belief. From the start, the faculty included a number of Jews; Jewish donors played an important part in supplementing the Rockefeller gifts.

Another difficulty faced by all university chief executives of the time was the pressure for conformity on political, social, and economic issues. The failure to renew in 1895 the contract of economist Edward W. Bemis, an outspoken critic of monopolies, led to widespread charges that the University of Chicago was under the thumb of Standard Oil. However, the Bemis case was the exception—and his firing appears to have been attributable primarily to his personal shortcomings. Under Harper, Chicago gained the reputation of a bastion of academic freedom. “In the University of Chicago,” he affirmed in his decennial report,

neither the Trustees nor the President… has at any time called an instructor to account for public utterances.… In no single case has a donor to the University called the attention of the Trustees to the teaching of any officer of the University as being distasteful or objectionable. Still further it is my opinion that no donor of money to a university… has any right… to interfere with the teaching. Neither an individual, nor the state, nor the church has the right to interfere with the search for truth, or with its promulgation when found.

Establishing a new university was an arduous task. The most serious problem was money. Harper’s ambitions were constantly threatening to outrun the institution’s financial resources, and the result was continuing friction between him and a dollar-conscious board of trustees. Harper successfully induced Rockefeller, however, to come up with additional funds at critical junctures. At a time when the average faculty salary ranged from fourteen hundred to fifteen hundred dollars annually, Chicago was paying as much as seven thousand dollars to department chairmen. Having such resources to work with gave Harper the leverage to build a distinguished faculty—often by raiding less generously endowed schools.

The faculty during the first year included men who had achieved or were on their way to achieving leadership in their disciplines: Hermann E. von Holst in history, J. Laurence Laughlin in economics, Jacques Loeb in biology, Carl D. Buck in philology, and George Ellery Hale in astronomy. Later Harper brought in such future giants as historian J. Franklin Jameson, philosophers John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, economist Wesley C. Mitchell, Egyptologist James H. Breasted, and physicist Robert A. Millikan. Some would later depart Chicago—because, like Dewey, they became disappointed at failing to receive the financial support that they had been led to expect or because, like Loeb, they received offers too generous to refuse. Most, however, imbued with Harper’s vision for the university, would remain there for their full academic careers.

A man with a keen advertising sense, Harper engaged from the start in an active publicity campaign to attract students. A larger student population was seen as evidence of the university’s prestige—and more tuition money added to its financial resources. Simultaneously, he pushed forward with an aggressive program of physical and institutional expansion.

The Ogden Graduate School of Science was established in 1892 and within a few years was enrolling more than five hundred students doing graduate work. The Kent Chemical Laboratory was added in 1894, the Ryerson Physical Laboratory the same year, and the Hull Biological Quadrangle three years later. The Haskell Oriental Museum was completed in 1896. The Yerkes Astronomical Observatory, featuring one of the world’s most advanced telescopes, was opened at Lake Geneva, in Wisconsin, in 1897. The College of Commerce and Politics (later renamed the School of Commerce and Administration) was organized in 1898, the School of Education in 1901, the Law School in 1902, and the School of Religious and Social Service in 1903-1904.

The Decennial Celebration of 1901 was marked by the laying of the cornerstones of five new buildings along with the publication of a twenty-six-volume set of papers and monographs by faculty members. (“No series of scientific publications,” Harper boasted, “so comprehensive in its scope and of so great a magnitude has ever been issued at any one time by any learned society or institution.”) The broad range of programs offered by the University of Chicago led to its becoming popularly known as “Harper’s Bazaar.”

Harper exercised strong centralized control over the institution. Deans were his appointees; he retained final say on faculty appointments and promotions. He was deeply immersed in the details of even the physical plant—and the university’s imposing and architecturally unified campus owes much to his fascination with systematic planning. However, he largely eschewed the role of autocrat.

Harper was willing to listen to others and profit from their advice; he even had a sense of humor. He was sufficiently flexible to abandon his own ideas when their implementation proved impracticable—for example, he abandoned the Greek requirement for the A.B. and agreed to make Hebrew optional in the divinity school. As John D. Rockefeller observed, “He knows how to yield when it is necessary in such a way that no sting or bitterness is left behind, and very few men in the world know how to do that.” Although there was a short-lived faculty revolt in 1902, Harper ruled more by the force of his personality than by administrative fiat. After talking with Harper, an admirer recounted, one emerged “slightly dazed but tingling with the excitement of a new project, uplifted by a vision of ultimate possibilities, vibrant with a sense of power, for a brief moment feeling indomitable.”

Harper had married Ella Paul, the daughter of the president of Muskingum College, on November 18, 1875. The couple had a daughter and three sons—one of whom, Samuel N. Harper, would become a member of the University of Chicago faculty in Russian history. A man of prodigious energy, Harper had the reputation of “a dynamo in trousers.” For years, he went to bed at midnight and rose at dawn. Eventually overwork began to take its toll on even his robust constitution. “To the unthinking mind,” he confessed in an address to students,

the man who occupies a high position… is an object of… envy. If the real facts were known, in almost every case it would be found that such a man is being crushed—literally crushed—by the weight of the burdens which he is compelled to carry.

He admitted that “with each recurring year it has required greater effort on my part to undertake this kind of service.” In 1904, he was found while undergoing an operation for appendicitis to have a cancerous infection that proved inoperable. X-ray treatment similarly proved ineffective. He died January 10, 1906, at only forty-nine years of age.

Significance

Harper’s monument was the University of Chicago. He had succeeded in building within the brief span of a decade and a half one of the world’s great institutions of learning. As of 1910, the university boasted the third largest total student enrollment in the country—behind Harvard and Columbia. Columbia was its only rival in the areas of graduate training and faculty research. At the same time, Harper had maintained a balance that kept in mind the separate needs of undergraduates. There were gaps in the record: Library facilities remained inadequate, the support available for research was uneven, and Harper himself was too prone to follow the model of the older, established universities on the East Coast.

The most striking example of the latter was in regard to the law school, when he opted for the Harvard case-method approach rather than the more innovative ideas of political scientist Ernst Freund. Harper set the pattern for what became a long-term weakness in the university faculty appointment policy—too much emphasis upon bringing in established “stars” from outside while neglecting nascent talent within. His successors lacked his genius for combining organizational skills of the highest order with a larger educational vision. Nevertheless, the University of Chicago was firmly established as a major university. The first dean of the university’s law school penned his fitting epitaph: “He had the mind and manners of a captain of industry, but he had the heart and soul of a scholar and a sage.”

Bibliography

Goodspeed, Thomas Wakefield. A History of the University of Chicago: The First Quarter-Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1916. A detailed “bricks and mortar” account drawing upon the author’s personal knowledge as a fund-raiser and secretary of the board of trustees.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. William Rainey Harper: First President of the University of Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928. A hagiography by one of Harper’s close associates. Although Goodspeed did utilize archival materials, the work’s major strength lies in the author’s firsthand knowledge of the man and situation.

Gould, Joseph E. The Chautauqua Movement: An Episode in the Continuing American Revolution. New York: State University of New York Press, 1961. Deals extensively with Harper’s association with Chautauqua and its relation to the University of Chicago extension program.

Lester, Robin. Stagg’s University: The Rise, Decline, and Fall of Big-Time Football at Chicago. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Harper’s innovations extended outside the classroom and onto the football field. Amos Alonzo Stagg was the university’s first football coach, and the first tenured coach at a university. Stagg and Harper built a team of national repute that changed the public’s perception of college football. This history of Chicago’s football team describes the relationship between the two men and university life in the school’s initial years.

Nevins, Allan. Study in Power: John D. Rockefeller, Industrialist and Philanthropist. 2 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953. An excellent biography that relates the early history of the University of Chicago to Rockefeller’s larger philanthropic activities.

Storr, Richard J. Harper’s University: The Beginnings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966. The first volume (and only one published so far) of a planned multivolume history of the University of Chicago, this work is the most thoroughly researched and fullest account of the institution’s founding and formative years.

Veysey, Laurence R. The Emergency of the American University. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965. An excellent and perceptive analysis of the transformation of American higher education during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Harper emerges as probably the most attractive of the empire builders of his time.