During an orientation gathering, a parent of a first-year student raised the question: Is the school affiliated with a church? Pausing to formulate an answer, the complexities of the matter became much clearer to me. It brought into focus the question of how a college begun by a Presbyterian pastor and long (though loosely) associated with a Presbyterian congregation becomes an institution that now refers merely to its “religious heritage.”
The simple answer points to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Andrew Carnegie established the Foundation in 1905 to provide pensions for college teachers. The following year Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, keen to secure a pension for a retiring faculty member, turned to the Foundation. But there was a hitch. Sectarian schools were ineligible for Carnegie pensions, since they presumably received financial support in exchange for church control. Moreover, the Foundation discouraged sectarian education because of its supposed interference with the search for truth.
The lure of Carnegie pensions encouraged a number of schools to break formal ties with their founding denominations. Certainly, money mattered. Schools like Coe were in no position to proffer the kinds of pensions provided by the Carnegie Foundation. Yet the reasons behind changes in the church-college relationship are more complex and reflect an underlying ambiguity. Changes in the context of the relationship, combined with the playing out of implicit tensions, have had a much more profound impact than the Carnegie Foundation alone.
Beginnings
The Rev. Williston Jones came to Cedar Rapids in 1849 as the first pastor of First Presbyterian Church. Committed to education, in 1851 Jones founded The School for Prophets to train young men for ordained ministry.
In 1853, Jones met a Presbyterian layman named Daniel Coe, who gave $1,500 for a school. Mr. Coe’s expressed wish was “to advance Education, Morality and Religion.” His donation came with two conditions: the school had to train students for more than ordained ministry and to admit women as well as men. The new school was short-lived, as was its successor, Parsons Seminary.
In 1875, the Coe Collegiate Institute came into being under the Presbytery of Cedar Rapids. As it became clear that the newly founded Presbytery was not up to shepherding a college, the Synod stepped in. Coe College was incorporated in 1881 under the Synod’s auspices.
Institutional leadership
Coe College was formally affiliated with the Presbyterian Church for the first quarter-century of its existence. An informal affiliation continued for another several decades, primarily embodied in the pastors and presidents who led First Church and Coe, who sought to establish a Christian college in Cedar Rapids. From the college’s perspective, Coe’s mission was intellectual as well as spiritual, to produce people who could minister to all kinds of human need. From the church’s perspective (in the Rev. Calvin DeVries’ words), “Religion without learning fosters intolerance, and learning without moral and religious dimensions fosters a valueless approach to human life and welfare.”1
Carnegie question
In 1906, when Robert Condit (an ordained Presbyterian pastor) was preparing to retire from the Coe faculty, the college repositioned itself so as to make Condit eligible for a Carnegie pension. The Synod agreed that this was in the college’s best interests, so the school became legally nondenominational.
As a practical matter, little changed. While the college had had denominational ties, it had never been sectarian in the sense of imposing denominational tests or tenets. It imposed (or presumed) Christian beliefs by requiring daily chapel service and Sunday worship. On the Sabbath students were to attend the “church of their choice” — and were to avoid “places of amusement.”
“Studied ambiguity”
Presbyterian-founded, yet non-sectarian, Coe College epitomizes the church-related colleges to which Richard Hutcheson Jr., referred in The Christian Century in 1988:
Viewbooks, bulletins, and promotional brochures express few religious claims. The schools sell themselves on the basis of academic excellence, programs offered, small classes. … There is a studied ambiguity in such colleges’ attempt to maintain some religious identification for the church constituency, and at the same time come across as open and nonthreatening to non-Christian constituencies (emphasis added).
Today, Coe’s publications nod in the direction of its Presbyterian roots, but the sesquicentennial Founders’ Day celebrations failed so much as to mention the college’s historical connection to the church. This reflects a central tension born of the founders’ commitment to their church and to the liberal arts, to nurturing sound ethics as well as the life of the mind, to enriching Christian faith and welcoming an increasingly diverse student body. It may also reflect the tacit understanding that, ultimately, ethics and faith cannot be imposed.
The educational marketplace is a second major source of ambiguity. A college must ensure its own survival, which hundreds of colleges have failed to do. Financial viability depends on donations and student enrollment, both of which involve a careful balancing act between attracting Presbyterians and not scaring off others.
Presbyterian church bodies, too, have practiced a type of “studied ambiguity” toward their affiliated colleges. For instance, in 1956, the Synod of Iowa described Buena Vista College as being under the Synod’s control, the University of Dubuque as under the General Assembly’s control, and Coe as completely free from denominational control. It gave each institution the same amount of financial support. After the Synod reorganized, it ended funding to all of the Presbyterian-related schools.
At about the same time, Coe sought a closer relationship with the Synod. The college said that severing the legal tie in 1907 should not be understood as diminishing the “vital” church-college relationship. It affirmed the Synod’s 1910 statement that “what makes a college Christian is not its legal connection with the Church, but rather the Christian character of its trustees, faculty, and students, its loyalty to Christian ideals. …”
The real question, then, is not why the church-college relationship has been relegated to something of purely historic interest, but what happened to the college’s distinctly Christian character? For more than a century, Coe’s Articles of Incorporation described the college as being “under religious influence,” then it quietly became a school with a “religious heritage.” Up until 1998, the college’s By-Laws stipulated that part of what was entrusted to trustees’ care was the maintenance of a “Christian Institution”; that entire section was subsequently dropped, though the By-Laws retain an article on the “Past Relationship to the Presbyterian Synod of Iowa.”
At Coe the waning of “religious influence” or “Christian character” has been most obvious in terms of campus life — the demise of the annual day of prayer for colleges, Religious Emphasis Week, vesper services, and Y.M.C.A. and Y.W.C.A. chapters, and so on. A century ago, at least half of the students were Presbyterians; virtually all were professing Christians; a number were bound for Christian ministry. Today, accurate tallies of religious preference are no longer available. Although chapel attendance was required into the 1960s, as early as 1925 the editor of the student newspaper quipped, “Coe’s average chapel sessions afford good opportunity for taking a nap or two. The conditions are ideal. There is not … much to disturb you.” Today, a small and committed slice of the school’s population attends the weekly ecumenical chapel service. Coe College began with required Bible courses during all four years of study, but since the 1970s students have been under no obligation to take religion courses.
The need to provide faculty pensions was one of a number of proximate or immediate causes of the diminution of religious influence on Coe’s campus, but the changing context of church-college relations has been the permissive cause. A history written for Coe College’s centennial (in 1951) refers to the waxing and waning of the campus’s religious spirit in terms of the “tenor of the times.” Parietal rules have given way to co-ed dorms. Educational philosophy has changed. Public education has been secularized. More generally, secularization is the permissive cause in the sense of not setting up enough obstacles to keep church-college relations from growing ever more distant. The changed context allows for a variety of changes, such as the changing role of prayer in the Coe community’s annual gatherings.
Yet even during this era of attenuated church-college relations, Coe’s Presbyterian heritage or Christian character crops up in various ways. For example, since 1997, Coe has had a full-time chaplain, and an anonymous (non-Presbyterian) donor has guaranteed continued funding for this position. Peer ministers, from a mix of denominations, work with the chaplain in the ecumenical religious life program. The College Hymn (“Our God, Our Help in Ages Past”) is sung at convocations. The college is affiliated with the Association of Presbyterian Colleges and Universities, and in 1999 the college and Synod reaffirmed their “covenantal relationship.”
This is the complicated legacy of a college’s — and church’s — “studied ambiguity.” Describing itself as a liberal arts college with a “religious heritage” is comfortable, non-threatening, and fairly accurate. For better or worse, it is also increasingly common.
1In the Heart of the City: A History of First Presbyterian Church, Cedar Rapids 1847-1997, by Allen Fisher and David Hay, 1997, p.117.
Lynda K. Barrow is a member of First Church of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and associate professor and Chair of the Political Science Department of Coe College in Cedar Rapids. Funding for researching and writing this article was provided by the Lilly Endowment through the Rhodes Consultation on the Future of the Church-Related College.
