Publication: A Princeton Companion
Religion, The Department of. Speaking at the 1957 Alumni Day Luncheon in honor of Harold W. Dodds who was soon to retire as president, President Pusey of Harvard said:
``Because of a blindness which has infected much of modern education, Princeton appeared almost alone to be blazing a new trail when she set out to build a strong Department of Religion. This may well prove in time to have been not the least memorable achievement of an administration filled by constructive advance.''
President Pusey was referring to a development in American higher education little noted outside Princeton in 1940, but by the early 1950s frequently emulated by many private colleges and universities and, more recently, by state universities and colleges.
By the appointment of George F. Thomas in 1940 as the University's first Professor of Religious Thought, Princeton was recognizing the lack of specific instruction in religion since the nineteenth century, when it had been taught as part of other academic disciplines, such as philosophy, literature, and history. More important, the University was affirming, in the words of the faculty committee created in 1935 to study the matter, that ``the study of religion . . . is an intellectual discipline, and as such has a proper place in the curriculum of instruction of a university which pretends to devote itself to liberal studies.''
Since the appointment of Thomas in 1940, the creation of a department in 1945, and the establishment of a graduate program in 1955, a strong group of teacher-scholars have together established the department's international reputation for excellent instruction and scholarship in religion. George Thomas in the Philosophy of Religion and R.B.Y. Scott in the Old Testament were honored authorities in their disciplines when they retired in 1968. Others, Horton M. Davies and John F. Wilson in the History of Christianity; Paul Ramsey in Religious Ethics; Malcolm L. Diamond and Victor Preller in the Philosophy of Religion; and Philip H. Ashby in the History of Religion, have striven to maintain the standards of excellence of Scott and Thomas. They, and their junior colleagues, know that they are engaged in a still pioneering and exciting endeavor. They receive frequent inquiries from other universities seeking to learn from Princeton's past experience, present methods, and future plans. Other members of the faculty have gone on to Brown, Duke, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Syracuse, the University of California at Los Angeles, Yale, and other universities from which they report that their Princeton experience was invaluable in developing their conception of religion as an academic discipline in the humanities.
But what of the undergraduate program, the primary reason for the department's existence? During Thomas's first year at Princeton, 21 students elected courses in religion. Fifteen years later, in 1955, over 700 students took at least one course in the department and 28 upperclassmen concentrated in religion. In the 1960s and 70s yearly enrollments were as high as 1,300, with as many as 69 concentrators. The majority of students concentrating in religion head toward careers in medicine, law, teaching, and business; they study religion because they recognize, in the words of the faculty committee of 1935, that it ``is an independent power, the study of which is worthy of an independent place . . . as an element of liberal culture and as one of the humanities.''
Nor has Princeton been content to pioneer only in the undergraduate study of religion. Since the establishment of the graduate program in 1955, Princeton, along with a few other universities not associated with divinity schools or seminaries, has been a leader in establishing high standards for the scholarly study of religion. Its Ph.D.'s now teach in colleges and universities in the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, and the Union of South Africa. A comparative study of graduate education in religion sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies in 1971 reported: ``Princeton is clearly established in the front rank according to all the objective indices and has been the most rigorously disciplined.''
The 1935 faculty committee's careful study of the place of religion in the study of the humanities, the appointment of George F. Thomas with his dedication to teaching and concern for scholarly rigour, the vigorous support of Presidents Dodds, Goheen, and Bowen -- all of these have combined to establish Princeton as the leader in an area of study that before 1940 was almost totally ignored by the leading universities of America.
Philip H. Ashby
From Alexander Leitch, A Princeton Companion, copyright Princeton University Press (1978).