Margaret Grubiak, this month’s Buildings & Grounds guest blogger, is an assistant professor of architectural history in the Department of Humanities at Villanova University.
Margaret Grubiak
Since I attended public universities, it was quite an adjustment for me to begin teaching a year ago at Villanova University, a Catholic, Augustinian university. Not only are my classroom conversations different—one of my classes is a freshman “great books” course in which we freely talk about the Bible and St. Augustine—but my experience of the campus is different as well.
Villanova—like countless colleges and universities across the United States, whether religiously affiliated or not—has a chapel. And like countless American colleges and universities, the chapel has an active life. Our chapel hosts alumni weddings, funerals, student masses, and individual prayer.
Yet there is a palpable difference in how religion is integrated into the campus here. Because Villanova is forthrightly Catholic, religion is allowed to pervade all aspects of campus life. A cross surmounts every major building, making the entire campus a reminder of the religious ideals to which Villanova subscribes.
But how do we see religion in universities that are public, or that once had a religious affiliation and no longer adhere to it, such as Harvard, Yale, or Columbia? A whole cottage industry of religious buildings now ring university campuses—think of Hillel Centers, Newman Centers, and Wesley Centers—to tend to the spiritual development of the university community. And chapels on these campuses continue to participate in the lives of students, faculty and staff members, and alumni.
Yet chapels are now peripheral to the mission of most American universities. Setting aside for the moment the Notre Dames and Baylors of American higher education, when we think of American universities we tend to think of secular places with secular missions. But this wasn’t always the case.
The chapel at Princeton U. (photo by Margaret Grubiak)
By the early 20th century, many American universities had given up their religious affiliations, but they hadn’t given up the idea of religious, moral, and social consciousness as a central aim of education. This showed on their campuses. Princeton and Harvard Universities and the University of Chicago all constructed chapels in the interwar years, answering Oxbridge’s call to educate the “whole student” and Princeton President Woodrow Wilson’s call to be in the nation’s service. Such ideas were bound up in religion and in the chapel. This was the heyday of the 2,000-seat chapel.
After this peak came decline. Princeton and Chicago constructed their enormous chapels just as mandatory chapel-attendance policies, which guaranteed a packed worship house, were softened or dropped. The student population was no longer wholly Protestant or even wholly Christian. After World War II and the dropping of the atomic bomb, universities felt the pangs of conscience, leading to such projects as Eero Saarinen’s small Massachusetts Institute of Technology Chapel. Yet this post-war spiritual revival on the campus petered out as religious pluralism, both in terms of belief and non-belief, was more widely acknowledged, secularism was more widely accepted, and science reigned supreme.
That’s not to say that college and university chapels have not been constructed. In 1992, Moshe Safdie completed the Class of 1959 Chapel at the Harvard Business School. The new Bigelow Chapel at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities (opened in 2004 and designed by Hammel, Green and Abrahamson) is stunning, but it is, notably, a project on a religious campus. Widespread and large-scaled chapel-building on campuses is a thing of the past. Is a religious, moral consciousness a thing of the past as well, I wonder—not in terms of personal observance but rather as a core institutional aim of the American university? If any sense of religious or moral responsibility on the university scale exists, I suspect it exists in the green movement.
Shortly before the 1928 opening of the pale-stone, neo-Gothic Princeton University Chapel, The Princeton Tiger published a cartoon of a child standing in front of the chapel and asking his mother, “Mummy, is that thing a white elephant?” The next time you walk by the chapel on your campus, I encourage you to ask yourself the same. —Margaret Grubiak
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