Harvard Steps Out

Harvard College was built around a sturdy religious core. Its Puritan founders, "dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches," dedicated their new school to supplying an intelligent one. The first endowed Harvard professorship (established in 1721) was a chair of divinity.

In 1816, when the Divinity School became a separate department of the university, it began with a faculty of President John T. Kirkland and four professors.

After 136 years, the Harvard Divinity School now has only three full-time professors, including its dean, 79-year-old Willard Sperry, who is also Harvard's "chaplain." Its ten other faculty members are borrowed from other schools of the university or are part-time lecturers. The 100-man student body is far below the enrollment of such theological schools as Yale's and Chicago's. The school's paltry $1,000,000 endowment makes it a university stepchild. The last big drive for more money was made by President Charles W. Eliot in 1879.

Prim Reputation. Why has Harvard's Divinity School lagged behind? Part of the answer is that, although avowedly nondenominational, it has long been known chiefly as a training, ground for Unitarian clergy. This gave Harvardmen of other denominations little incentive for supporting the school. Another reason is sheer neglect. While Harvard graduates talked proudly of their law school, or their undergraduate philosophy courses, the Divinity School, its endowment steadily falling behind, was of interest only to a small group of alumni who admired its prim, scholarly reputation.

In 1946, after years of embarrassing deficits, President James B. Conant appointed a committee of educators and alumni to consider whether the sinking school could be salvaged. Two years later, the committeemen turned in their report. The recommendation: retain and strengthen the Divinity School. Harvard, the report argued, needed to become once more a "strong center of religious learning," capable of making its influence felt both in the U.S. ministry and throughout the university itself.

Religious Literacy. This week President Conant announced a long step in that direction: a campaign to raise $5,000,000 from Harvard alumni and general subscription. With added grants from university funds, this amount would boost the Divinity School's endowment to a prosperous $7,000,000. Given the money, Harvard Divinity plans to create a larger faculty, enroll more students, increase the number of courses (some of which can be used to backstop the weak program of undergraduate religious instruction).

To help pick additional faculty members (and a new dean to replace retiring Dean Sperry), the Harvard Corporation appointed a board of distinguished Protestant clergymen, including Reinhold Niebuhr of Union Theological Seminary, Methodist Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, Episcopal Bishop Angus Dun and Presbyterian Henry Sloane Coffin. Harvard's hope: to make the school a stronghold of ecumenical Christian education among the clergy, a means for correcting what President Conant's committee called "religious illiteracy" among undergraduates.

To realize this hope, Harvardmen, as of this week, had already given $500,000.

This week the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut began its own drive to raise $1,000,000 to fight the forces "which undermine the Christian way of life." Main object of the drive: building ten churches, new student headquarters at Yale and the University of Connecticut.

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