Who was Charles Eliot Pt 2: University Reform and Religion

 Charles W. Eliot, University Reform, and Religious Faith in America, 1869-1909

Found another good article, this one on Eliot's efforts to reform Harvard when he was first hired as president, with an emphasis on religion. Eliot was a Unitarian (not the same as a Unitarian Universalist), which is broadly in line with what I figured (some kind of non-fundamentalist Christian). He worked hard to keep Harvard non-denominational, but didn't make much effort to curb religion in general. He seems to have firmly believed that science would help advance mankind's knowledge of God.

“They can show how physics, with its law of the conservation of energy, chemistry

with its doctrine of the indestructibility and eternal flux of atoms, and

biology with its principle of evolution through natural selection, have brought

about within thirty years a wonderful change in men's conception of the universe.

If the universe, as science teaches, be an organism which has by slow

degrees grown to its form of to-day on its way to its form of to-morrow, with

slowly formed habits which we call laws, and a general health which we call

the harmony of nature, then, as science also teaches, the life-principle or soul of

that organism, for which science has no better name than God, pervades and

informs it so absolutely that there is no separating God from nature, or religion

from science, or things sacred from things secular”

 Harvard actually maintained mandatory morning prayers longer than most other universities (though this was more the desire of the board than Eliot's, he doesn't appear to have fought it too hard.)

A couple other religion quotes by Eliot:

“A really learned minister is almost as rare as a logical Sermon.”

“millions of thoughtful men" believed "that ministers, as a class, and as a

necessary consequence of the ordinary manner of their education and induction

into office, are peculiarly liable to be deficient in intellectual candor...."

"Nobody has as yet shown how to teach morality effectively without religion."

“Religion should have its roots in the family and be nourished in the Church.

To this sacred keeping the public School and the public University should entrust

it. Our University is first reverent, and then free,-

Reverent of whatever shrine

Guards piety and solace for our kind,

Or gives the soul a moment's truce of God

and free, remembering that "Nothing that keeps thought out is safe from

Thought”

If he were alive today, I think he might've fallen into the "spiritual, but not religious" camp. He appears to genuinely believe in some higher power, and think some kind of faith is essential for good moral character, but isn't particularly attached to dogma, and unenthused by organized religion.

The paper also includes a couple of interesting quotes from others discussing Eliot and his reforms:

Theodore Lyman (Eliot's cousin, and an alumni board member):

Look here, you very young man: I know you! You are a chemist; therefore you have a powerful tendency to be an Atheist: because all scientifics are very bad Atheists; and yet that won't keep them from dying, and therefore they don't get ahead of us very pious persons.

What makes a good versus bad atheist?

Finally, I've written before about the weird duality of Eliot's influence on education. On the one hand, he studied in Germany, and was instrumental in replacing the old "classical" curriculum in American universities with an "elective" based one like he found in Europe (the meaning of elective seems to have changed significantly, and sounds more like what we'd call a major. I suppose any choice at all was elective back then). On the other hand, his work on T5FSOB, among other projects, positioned him (alongside Adler) as one of the most important figures in brining a traditional classical/liberal education to the masses. 

At the time Charles Blanchard (president of Wheaton College) said:

Early specialization which shuts men up to one small corner of the world and bids them delve, is not only a cause of narrowness and intellectual paralysis, but of infidelity and spiritual death as well.

    Which, I'd argue, is exactly what happened. We cram students into majors, let them dip their toe in other stuff just enough to pretend their well rounded, and turned college into a glorified vo-tech. Thus churning out endless streams of STEM-bros with no ethics, liberal arts majors who can't handle 8th grade math, etc., etc. (This could be a whole post unto itself. Maybe another day.)