english department - Digital Resource Commons - Oberlin College

ENGLISH AT OBERLIN: 1880-1960
By
Robert Longsworth
(May 2010)

Preface
This essay grew out of several years of delicious conversation with Geoffrey
Blodgett, whom I was privileged to reckon a very dear friend and whom I admired as an
incomparably able historian. His knowledge about and understanding of the history of his
alma mater, from which he retired in 2000 as Robert S. Danforth Professor of History, are
exemplified in his Oberlin History: Essays and Impressions (published posthumously by the
Kent State University Press in 2006). He told me that the Oberlin Department of English
deserved some study, and urged me to undertake the task. I deeply regret that his death
deprived me of his counsel during my attempt to follow his suggestion.
Happily, however, I have benefited from the discerning advice of several very astute
readers. Roland Baumann, Oberlin College Archivist until his retirement in 2008, has been
not only a thoughtful reader but also a generous and wise guide through the remarkably rich
archival material in his custody. The members of his staff--Ken Grossi, who is currently the
College Archivist; Tammy Martin; and Lisa Farrar--have been unstinting in their helpfulness.
Dewey Ganzel, John Hobbs, Robert Pierce, and David Young were long-time colleagues of
mine on the faculty of the Oberlin Department of English: all have read this essay, and all
have offered me (perhaps too gently, but always incisively) the benefit of their good
judgments. Robert Henn, whom I admired during his student days at Oberlin College and
who is completing his graduate study at the University of Wisconsin, graciously furnished
me his detailed and judicious perceptions about an early draft of the first chapter. Stuart
Friebert, Carol Ganzel, and Diane Vreuls have all given me encouragement as well as the
benefit of their own reflections on the essay.
I have tried here to trace what have seemed to me several important strands in the
history of the Department of English at Oberlin. I am acutely aware that I have been
extremely selective in the matters I have dealt with; and that my own training and experience
in the field of English have significantly shaped my interpretation of the evidence I have
2

found. That same awareness has led me to break off the account at the time (in 1964) when
I myself became a member of the department: my personal involvement in its affairs would
fatally compromise the disinterestedness to which I have (however feebly) aspired.
In carrying out this task, I have been embarrassed to discover how little, as a
practitioner, I knew about the origins and development of the field in which I toiled during
my working lifetime. I have the fond hope that this essay may beguile some of my
successors into better acquaintance with that fascinating subject.
Robert Longsworth
Oberlin College
Oberlin OH
6 May 2010
3

I. Parturition
On May 9, 1888, President James H. Fairchild convened a regular weekly meeting of the Oberlin
College Faculty. i Nineteen--all but one or two--members of the faculty were present. As usual, one of their
number opened the meeting with prayer. Then they took up the first item of business on their agenda. That
was the weighty question of whether an organization called the "Sons of Veterans" ought to be deemed a
secret society. ii Secret societies were anathema at Oberlin, and after reaching a decision that the Sons of
Veterans properly belonged in that category, the faculty resolved to inform any errant student members of
the organization that they were required to withdraw their memberships.
The second item of business before them was a report that had been submitted at the previous
meeting by a three-man, ad hoc committee on the English Professorship. As always, the minutes are silent
about any discussion provoked by the report, but indicate that the faculty duly accepted the advice of its ad
hoc committee and voted "that D. F. Bradley be recommended to the Trustees for the chair of Rhetoric and
English Literature." The action thus taken was intended to introduce the regular teaching of English
literature into the curriculum of the college.
This curricular innovation had been bruited about at Oberlin for nearly a decade. In his annual
reports to the Board of Trustees, President Fairchild had begun mentioning the desirability of establishing
such a chair as early as 1881. iii Financial constraints inhibited progress toward that goal for several years,
but in the spring of 1887 the Faculty had created the ad hoc committee to pursue "the question of endowing
and filling a chair of English." iv When in the following spring it brought in its recommendation for the
appointment of Bradley, the Committee said nothing about endowing or financing the chair. But President
Fairchild promptly extended the offer of appointment, apparently satisfied about growing enrollments and
the increased revenue stream that they provided.
What makes this action appear somewhat peculiar today is the absence of any training or experience
in teaching English literature on the part of person whom the committee recommended. Dan Freeman
Bradley, who was then 31 years of age, was a relatively recent alumnus of Oberlin, from which he had
received the A.B. degree in 1882 and the B.D. degree in 1885. v Not only was he innocent of any formal
study of English literature; but also he could boast even of only so much training in rhetoric—that subject
4

from among the ancient liberal arts that the faculty had given primacy in the proffered title—as was
available to all other Oberlin undergraduates and students of theology. Upon leaving Oberlin, he had served
as a Congregational minister, first in Steubenville, Ohio and then in Yankton, South Dakota--where
Fairchild's letter reached him. Unlearned as he was, he was clearly flattered by the summons from his alma
mater, and he acknowledged a strong temptation to accept it. After more than a month of indecision,
however, he wrote to decline the offer.
In his letter of refusal, Bradley told his "honored friend" (as he addressed Fairchild) that
I have long felt that this special line of work [that is, the teaching of English literature] had not been
fully developed at Oberlin, and I should rejoice to see the College going forward in this direction. I
feel too that every addition made to the Faculty hereafter should be made with a view to
strengthening the strictly evangelical idea of the College. More and more I feel the utter uselessness
of un-religious culture. I think too, that this chair should be at once established and filled.
Having recognized these reasons for accepting the offer, however, he itemized what seemed to him the even
more compelling reasons for declining: first, he had been trained "for preaching and doing the work of a
Pastor"; second, he had "no special training" for the "work" proposed, and reckoned that at least a year of
"such training" would be required; third, his departure from Yankton would precipitate an unwholesome
crisis there; and finally, "this Northwest [that is, the Dakota territory] is plastic, opening with life, filling up
with people who need earnest faithful work. Few are willing to take hold of it." vi
Bradley's reference to the "strictly evangelical idea of the College," his zeal for "religious culture,"
and his devotion to his frontier ministry clearly reflect a persistent missionary ardor in the affairs of Oberlin
College, and no doubt reflect the reasons for his nomination. After all, Oberlin had been founded in 1833 by
evangelical Christians for the avowed purpose of educating "gospel ministers and pious school-teachers" to
rescue "the growing millions of the Mississippi Valley" from faithless "perishing." vii Half a century later, the
College was still struggling to keep alive that historic sense of mission, as the effort to recruit its alumnus
testifies. Just such an evangelical yearning suffuses Bradley's letter of refusal; but the letter also both
wittingly and unwittingly reflects the pressure of external forces that were threatening to diminish the power
of those old verities.
The offer to Bradley exemplifies one way in which Oberlin had long sought to perpetuate its own
pristine sense of religious mission: it replenished its faculty from the ranks of its graduates. In his
magisterial history of its institutional beginnings, Robert S. Fletcher points out that "the second generation of
Oberlin professors were all Oberlin trained"; viii and even in 1888 eleven of the voting members of the
college faculty ix had themselves received the A.B. degree from Oberlin. Three of the others held other
5

Oberlin degrees (A.M. or B.D.). In turning to one of their own, therefore, these earnest keepers of the
evangelical flame must have been eager to protect the historic mission of their college.
Among the members of the faculty who voted on Bradley‟s appointment, three were interlopers. One
of them, with a recent A.B. degree from Indiana, only lasted a year. x The other two, however, would be
instrumental in changing the nature of the college. William Ballantine, who had an A.B. degree from
Marietta College, would succeed to the presidency of Oberlin just two years later, in 1891. And Frank
Fanning Jewett, who had been trained at Yale, would, as Professor of Chemistry and Mineralogy, contribute
significantly to the growing curricular program in the natural sciences.
Science, of course, was one of the forces that were transforming higher education and the world itself
in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859 had
launched a corrosive debate in North America about the compatibility of religion and science. As Frederick
Rudolph observes, "the conflict over Darwinism in the colleges was less a matter of whether evolution was
true than a matter of whether the old regime or the new regime would prevail, whether piety or intellect,
whether authority resting on received truth or on scientific evidence." xi
Behind--or coincidental with--the spreading faith in scientific evidence, however, lay a dramatic
external change in higher education. Though linked historically as offspring of the great English universities
at Oxford and at Cambridge, colleges and universities in the United States had slowly become aware of an
alternative model of what the university might be, and it was to be found in Germany rather than in Britain.
In the 19th century, German universities had become fertile soil for the growth of the natural sciences and for
other kinds of intellectual inquiry that threatened the comfortable assumptions upon which American
colleges depended. In a book published at the behest of the German government for the glorious Chicago
World's Fair (or Columbian Exposition) of 1893—itself an important cultural event that would have a strong
effect on Oberlin and even on its English Department—Friedrich Paulsen captured the flavor of this
powerful movement: "The older system of university instruction had started…from the assumption that truth
was given, [and] that education consisted in the transmission of this truth….The newer system starts from the
assumption that truth must be sought, and that it is the proper task of education to give the skill and the
impulse necessary to the search." xii
The shock waves stirred by that simple but radical shift in assumptions came slowly across the
Atlantic and into the Mississippi Valley. The impact of its arrival on Oberlin College can be discerned in
many and various ways, not the least of which was the establishment of a chair in English language and
literature.
6

At its founding and for several decades thereafter, Oberlin had adhered to the practice of requiring
its students to pursue a uniform course of study. Truth was given, after all, and the task of the College was to
transmit it. Therefore, the particular subjects studied at Oberlin were largely conventional. In some
conspicuous ways, however--after all, those zealous founders supposed that truth was revealed more clearly
to some believers than to others--they were notably eccentric. One such eccentricity was a reduction in the
emphasis on classical authors (because of their heathen beliefs) though not on the classical languages in
which they wrote. Early on, another had been the selective inclusion of two English poets--Cowper and
Milton--because of their exemplary Christian piety, and despite their employment of what was supposed the
inferior English language. By 1844, however, Cowper and Milton were gone, and while the college
curriculum afforded the student no choices, it was also quite orthodox as well as quite straitened. xiii
As the century wore on, that narrow course of study came under attack throughout America. A
central principle of German university education, the "elective system" under which students were permitted
to choose some of their courses, had breached the fortifications of the American college curriculum, first
meagerly at Harvard in 1819 but then in a sweeping fashion (and led by Harvard's President Charles William
Eliot) across the nation in the last third of the nineteenth century. xiv Oberlin itself succumbed grudgingly to
the onslaught in 1875 by deciding to adopt a very modest "scheme of elective studies." xv
Placing some responsibility for making educational choices on the student may have been only a
pallid reflection of one principle in the German universities--Lernfreiheit, it was called. But it was powerful
in its own right, and it came with the flickering shadows of two other central principles: Lehrfreiheit, or what
we know today as academic freedom for the instructor; and what in 1895 an admiring Nicholas Murray
Butler, the President of Columbia, called "the pursuit of science for its own sake." xvi
Dan Freeman Bradley must have glimpsed those shadows when he declined Oberlin's offer. His
discerning letter to Fairchild anticipated seminal changes in higher education--especially the growing
importance of professional training--even as it acknowledged the claims of Oberlin's own history. As for
himself, by refusing appointment he abjured neither his interest in higher education nor his affection for his
alma mater. He went on to serve two brief stints as a college president (at Yankton and Grinnell) and a long
forty-two year tour of duty on the Oberlin College Board of Trustees. xvii True to his calling, however, and to
Oberlin's training, he devoted the last decades of his life to the Christian ministry. He concluded his
vocational service with a long pastorate in nearby Cleveland, where he was also active as a political
reformer.
After its failure to secure Bradley, Oberlin did not manage to fill its new chair in English literature
until more than another year had passed. The man upon whom the mantle then fell was another interloper,
7

one who had spent that year in Germany, imbibing (as was increasingly fashionable among academic
Americans) the rich broth of learning in those fabled universities.
Curiously enough, the faculty at Oberlin had at least flirted earlier with the prospect of looking
beyond the ranks of its own alumni in order to fill the position. In fact, just two weeks before proposing
Bradley's appointment, the ad hoc committee had "reported" to the faculty "the name of E. P. Smith of
Worcester, Mass." xviii For several years, Edward P. Smith had been teaching English--rather more language
and rhetoric than literature--quite successfully at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Among his colleagues
there, he was known for his sometimes sarcastic but always vehement defense of including English language
and other liberal studies in the curriculum of an industrial training institution. xix
In the end, the faculty voted to "lay over" this recommendation, and it went no further. The minutes
tell us nothing about the reasons for the choice of the youthful, home-bred Bradley over the older and more
experienced Smith, but some argument about the future direction of the College is likely to have occurred.
At any rate, following Bradley's refusal and the lapse of another year, the faculty was invited to select
between two further candidates--neither an alumnus. At a special meeting held on August 8, 1889, the ad
hoc committee submitted the names of both "William Thomas of Knoxville, Tennessee," and "Prof. McEwan
[sic] of the Agricultural College, Michigan." xx The latter had an edge in experience: since 1880, Elias John
MacEwan had served as Professor of English Literature and Modern Languages at what would become
Michigan State University. After weighing the merits of the two candidates, however, the ten members of
the faculty who were present at the meeting voted "that our preference, in the statement made, is for Mr.
Thomas." Again, no explanation is offered, but some suspicion may have fallen on Professor MacEwan's
candidacy if "the statement made" by the ad hoc committee included the information that his resignation in
Michigan had been forced when a caustic comment about a colleague had been attributed to him. xxi
William Isaac Thomas, the successful candidate, was twenty-six years old when he accepted the
appointment and arrived in Oberlin in August of 1889 to become the College's first Professor of English. He
had been born in southwestern Virginia, the son of a dirt farmer who also served as a Methodist preacher. xxii
The preacher-farmer had moved his seven children to Tennessee, and William--the second child--had grown
up, as (more or less with tongue in cheek) he would later recall, "in the woods alone with a rifle, without a
dog, shooting at a mark, regretting the disappearance of large game and the passing of the Indian and of
pioneer life." xxiii At the age of seventeen, he had enrolled in the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. After
a desultory beginning, he responded to the encouragement of a teacher by becoming interested in Greek
literature; and eventually he became president of an undergraduate literary society.
8

His active engagement with a literary society was in fact less a harbinger of Thomas's devotion to
English literature than a sign of his intellectual curiosity and his sociable nature. The literary society was a
ubiquitous extra-curricular activity in American higher education during the nineteenth century. At its best,
as Rudolph suggests, it "imparted a tremendous vitality to the intellectual life of the colleges," xxiv stultified as
they were by the religious dogma they formally sought to inculcate. Literary societies--Oberlin itself had
five of them--were fundamentally student-run debating clubs. Thomas's participation in and leadership of
such an organization may be seen as early signs of his nascent enthusiasm for ideas and of the intellectual
ingenuity that would mark his professional life.
Immediately after receiving his A.B. degree from the University of Tennessee in 1884, Thomas was
employed by his alma mater to teach agriculture and natural history. Two years later the university awarded
him its first Ph.D. and assigned him teaching duties in Greek, Latin, German, and French. xxv Just as Bradley
was for Oberlin, he was then a favorite son in a paternalistic system of higher education. He managed to
secure a leave of absence in 1888, however, and set out to spend a year in Germany at the universities of
Berlin and Göttingen. In all likelihood he was on his return voyage when the Oberlin faculty voted "that
Prof. Ellis be requested to invite Mr. Thomas to visit us on his way to Knoxville." xxvi
John Millott Ellis, to whom this charge was given, was one of three colleagues who had been
designated by the faculty on May 18, 1887, as the ad hoc committee expected to grapple with "the question
of endowing and filling a chair of English." Indeed, the members of that committee are worthy of scrutiny
both in light of their task and in light of the way in which they discharged their duty. Ellis, who had
graduated from Oberlin in 1851, was one of those second-generation members of the faculty who had been
trained by Oberlin. He is thought by Fletcher to have "recaptured the spirit of the founders more completely
than did any of the other younger men." xxvii First employed as Professor of Greek, by 1889 he was in his
twenty-second year of service as Professor of Mental Philosophy and Rhetoric. In the following year, he
would be a popular candidate to follow Fairchild as President of the College, but his younger colleague
Ballantine would be chosen instead. xxviii
Fairchild himself was the second member of the ad hoc committee--and, of course, it was he, nearing
the end of his long service as president, who had begged Bradley to take the position. Charles Grandison
Finney, the great voice of mid-century evangelical religion in America and the second president of Oberlin,
had been a kind of tutelary genius for his presidential successor, though Fairchild had proven to be a more
cautious and much less tempestuous leader than he. xxix
The third member of the ad hoc committee was James Monroe, Professor of Political Science and
Modern History. Like his fellow-committee members, Monroe had been a part of the early and fiercely
9

evangelical Oberlin. He had received his A.B. degree in 1846, and had even begun teaching in the
preparatory department a year earlier. Unlike his colleagues, however, he had a wide experience of the
world beyond Tappan Square. He had interrupted his teaching career at Oberlin to serve as U. S. Consul in
Brazil (from 1863 to 1870) and as a Member of Congress (from 1871 to 1881); and he had become deeply
sympathetic with efforts to link Christian convictions with the amelioration of social and economic wrongs.
He gave benevolent encouragement and assistance in the early development of the social sciences at
Oberlin. xxx
Ellis and Monroe had probably been chosen for the committee not only for their long experience at
the College and their reputations for astute judgment (Monroe had been offered and declined the presidency
of the College in 1866), but also because both had taught courses in English literature and, more important,
in Rhetoric at Oberlin. Indeed, Ellis had succeeded Monroe as Professor of Rhetoric when Monroe had
interrupted his Oberlin service to take up his duties in Rio de Janiero. Rhetoric had been in the Oberlin
College curriculum from the beginning. In 1835 James G. Birney had been elected "Professor of Law,
Oratory, and Belles Lettres," but did not get around to taking up his appointment. xxxi James A. Thome, like
Birney an ardent abolitionist but unlike him a graduate of the Oberlin Theological Seminary, became
Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in 1838 and held that post until 1849 when the fiscal problems of the
college forced his departure. xxxii
The task of preparing evangelical preachers and teachers for the work of saving souls, after all,
entailed some training in the art of persuasion, and that was the province of Rhetoric. A fixture in education
throughout Europe for two millenia, Rhetoric needed only some careful pruning to suit the peculiarly narrow
aims of Oberlin and its kindred educational institutions, shaped as they were by strong doctrinal purposes. In
designing its early curriculum, Oberlin's founders had at hand a ready implement in the celebrated Elements
of Rhetoric published by Richard Whately in 1828. Whately was an Anglican, an Oxonian, and an academic
reformer who was part of the ferment stirred by Newman and the Tractarians. If his religious leanings were
notably at odds with the Calvinistic views of Oberlin's founders, his religious zeal was nevertheless
compatible with theirs. And he believed that rhetoric was not merely the art of persuasion, but more
properly the art of persuading others to accept what was true: his aim was "Persuasion, in the strict sense,
i.e., the influencing of the WILL." xxxiii
If a connection between the study of literature and the study of rhetoric is not immediately obvious,
nevertheless the two had become closely intertwined in the intellectual life of the eighteenth century. No one
had been more influential in affirming that connection than the redoubtable Scotsman, Adam Smith.
Between 1748 and 1751 Smith gave a series of lectures in Edinburgh "on the subject of English, its rhetoric
10

and its literature." xxxiv In his audience was Hugh Blair, who in 1760 became Professor of Rhetoric at the
University of Edinburgh and two years later was named Regius Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres.
Both Blair and Smith recognized as their patron Henry Home, Lord Kames, xxxv who in 1762 published a
widely-admired three-volume work entitled Elements of Criticism.
The works by Kames and Whately were the texts in rhetoric, logic, and criticism upon which the
training of students in the Oberlin Collegiate Institute (as it was first known) and subsequently Oberlin
College was based for more than three decades. Whately's Logic and Rhetoric carefully circumscribed the
nature of argumentation; Kames's influential text on aesthetics just as carefully circumscribed the nature and
boundaries of taste. Contrary to the proverbial notion de gustibus non disputandum est, Kames held that
there is a standard of taste common to all human beings, and that it "accounts clearly for that remarkable
conception we have of a right and a wrong sense or taste in morals, and also in the fine arts." xxxvi
These eighteenth century philosopher-rhetoricians had a strong influence on the curriculum of
Oberlin--as, indeed, on the curriculum of all other nineteenth century American colleges. It is significant, for
example, that Harvard College had secured the funding for its prestigious Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric
and Oratory in 1771, xxxvii thereby setting a curricular precedent that would be widely followed. Moreover,
the pedagogic fabric woven from the work of those forceful rhetoricians would make possible and also
produce a design for the emergence of English literary study.
On September 4, 1889, with its new Professor of English in attendance, the Oberlin faculty voted (1)
to have a term of required English Literature "for Juniors," permitting it to displace and postpone a required
course in Logic; (2) that the Professor of English "be given the Senior Rhetoricals," which entailed regular
written compositions and oral presentations; and (3) that Stopford Brooke's English Literature be "adopted
as [the] text book in Eng[lish] Lit[erature]."
These actions, recorded in the official minutes, not only reflect the intense corporate involvement of
the entire faculty in curricular details. They also imply the vital connections that were presumed to hold
between logic and rhetoric and literature. Furthermore, they suggest the faculty's persistent wariness about
the pressure (coming primarily from their students) to include in the curriculum any courses that might be
merely elective.
The selection of a text was particularly telling. Stopford Brooke's Primer of English Literature (to
give it its full title) had first appeared in 1876. There were comparable texts available--among them an
Introduction to the Study of English Literature (1869) by Henry Noble Day and a Philosophy of English
Literature (1884) by John Bascom. Both Day and Bascom were Americans, and both texts had been used
earlier at Oberlin. Day, indeed, was a Congregational minister who had come to Ohio to serve as a college
11

12
professor (at Western Reserve, until 1858), railroad president (the Cleveland and Pittsburgh Railroad), and
ultimately President of the short-lived Ohio Female College (from 1858-64). Bascom was a prolific writer
on a broad array of subjects. A graduate of Williams College and Andover Theological Seminary, in 1874
he had become president of the University of Wisconsin (where he also held a chair as Professor of Mental
and Moral Philosophy) after serving twenty years as Professor of Rhetoric at Williams. Like Brooke, Day
and Bascom viewed literature as above all a moral force. xxxviii
Brooke, on the other hand, was English; and his Primer had been commended in print by Matthew
Arnold. Arnold had an enormous following in America; it might even be said that he was the intellectual
obstetrician at the birth of English departments in American colleges, especially evangelical colleges. With
respect to religion, after all, Arnold had devised a credible way to deliver it from the terrifying warfare
between Germanic biblical criticism and traditional biblical literalism. The way, remarkably enough, lay
through literature--that is, through what Arnold liked to call "the best which has been thought and said in the
world." That celebrated phrase, first used in his essay on Culture and Anarchy (and not beyond being treated
after a while with some self-mocking levity by Arnold himself) began his review of Brooke's primer. xxxix
Brooke opened his Primer with an Arnoldian sentence--"the History of English Literature is the story
of what great English men and women thought and felt, and then wrote down in good prose and beautiful
poetry in the English Language." That Brooke was trusted by the faculty to serve as a reliable moral guide
for the Oberlin student may be inferred from his judgment of Milton, whose ascetic Puritanism was so
consonant with the Oberlin ethos: "To the greatness of the artist Milton joined the majesty of a clear and
lofty character. His poetic style was as stately as his character, and proceeded from it." xl
As for Matthew Arnold, he had visited Oberlin in person during his first speaking tour of America.
He gave his lecture on "Literature and Science" (one of three that he had brought with him for the tour) to an
audience gathered in the First Church on January 16, 1884. In the next issue of the student newspaper after
his appearance, a member of the Junior class (Olive Atwood) contributed an adoring essay about Arnold's
notion of culture; and an anonymous reporter provided a generally approbative account of the lecture. The
reporter was not uncritical, however: he judiciously assented to Arnold's claim for the primacy of the
humanities over the physical sciences, but took issue with his preference for Greek literature and language
over "modern literature and history." xli
That the reporter shrewdly perceived and reproved Arnold's skepticism about the value of studying
English literature probably reflects the strong enthusiasm for such study that was already present among
undergraduates at the time. Nevertheless, for a traditionalist Arnold's skepticism no doubt mitigated the
threat of curricular change that his views implied, for the classic languages and literature (which Arnold

13
indeed venerated above the modern languages and literature) xlii had long been enshrined in the evangelical
college curriculum.
Five years after Arnold's visit, when William Isaac Thomas began to offer courses as Oberlin's first
Professor of English, an editorial in the Review saluted "the growth in Oberlin's curriculum," and singled out
especially "Anglo-Saxon and English Literature" as "a great advance on old things." xliii That mention of
Anglo-Saxon points toward another important force in the emergence of Oberlin's attention to English.
The interest in Anglo-Saxon noted at Oberlin and elsewhere derived ultimately not from a vision of
belles lettres, but rather from the historical study of language generally. In the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, thanks to the work of amateur scholars like Rasmus Rask, Sir William Jones, and the
Brothers Grimm, the phonological connections among the so-called Indo-European languages had been
recognized and explored. Their labors gave rise to the discipline of philology--or, as we have come to know
it, linguistics. The "academic institutionalization" of linguistic study, in turn, had (not unexpectedly) found a
home in German universities "in the second decade of the nineteenth century." xliv
Professor Thomas had himself encountered this institutional phenomenon during his year in
Germany, just before arriving at Oberlin. xlv He was also fascinated by and drawn to the study of folklore that
he had found in Germany. xlvi The linkage that Thomas and others discerned between literary texts and what
we would call popular culture can be connected to another and equally vigorous (though extra-institutional)
movement in England. There, in the second half of the nineteenth century the newly established Philological
Society had set out to produce a new dictionary of the English language. The fruit of this endeavor would be
the magisterial OED, or Oxford English Dictionary. As Simon Winchester suggests in his witty and
informative account of this protracted adventure, however, the eminent Victorian organizers of the project
wanted to record and exalt the language because it was the bearer of the "greatness and moral suasion and
muscularly Christian goodness" xlvii of imperial Britain itself.
The birth of Oberlin's English Department, then, was enabled by the propitious coincidence and
mutually reinforcing nature of these historical impulses. Clinging zealously to the religious certitude that
had created and shaped it, Oberlin College was nevertheless fending off the assaults of modernity. Scientific
discoveries, the growing student demand for greater choice in the objects of study, and the professionalizing
of the faculty: such threats to traditional Oberlin were (no doubt nervously and, for the most part, tacitly)
accommodated by the hiring of William Isaac Thomas.
A few years later, Thomas would write somewhat censoriously about the college to which he had
introduced the study of English language and literature. xlviii By then he had become a full-fledged
sociologist. When he first joined the Oberlin faculty, he was still relatively fresh from the Appalachian piety

of his forebears. Despite the worldly experience of his study abroad, he willingly took his turn (as every
member of the faculty was expected to do) in opening meetings of the faculty with prayer and in contributing
an occasional "Thursday Lecture" to the community. xlix He also admitted later that his relatively brief stint in
Oberlin had been among the happiest experiences of his life. l His own rapid intellectual growth (fed largely,
as he would recall, by his extensive reading in the work of the great social Darwinist, Herbert Spencer li )
would lead him to leave Oberlin after three years to enroll as a graduate student in the new University of
Chicago. But at the time of his arrival in 1889, the struggles between modernity and academic tradition,
between religious truth and the rising clamor of doubt, between sacred text and profane language were
engaged in a short-lived truce. And William Thomas embodied that truce as he gladly led his students by the
still waters of English literature in the serene Anglican light cast by Matthew Arnold's cultural standard-
bearer, the Reverend Stopford Augustus Brooke.
14

II. Infancy
Almost twenty years before Oberlin acquired a Professor of English, its faculty had voted to require
of undergraduate students the study of French and German, lii and in 1873 James King Newton had become
instructor in both languages. The introduction of study in modern languages, usually at the expense of
offerings in the classical languages, had by that time become widespread in American colleges: liii it reflects
in them a more or less urgent but also more or less reluctant accommodation both with modernity and with
demands for curricular practicality. liv
Newton had been born in Wisconsin and served as a Union soldier in the Civil War. lv About a year
after his military service ended, he enrolled as a student at Oberlin. He remained from 1867 to 1870, but left
without a degree when (and probably because) he married Frances Estabrook, who was Principal of the
Ladies Department at Berea College. When he assumed his teaching duties at Oberlin, he was granted an
honorary (A.M.) degree, and he was granted professorial rank after two years. Though his appointment
reflected the traditional practice of cultivating homegrown talent without regard to special qualifications, he
became a vigorous, active member of the faculty and of his profession. Indeed, he was elected to the
Executive Committee of the youthful Modern Language Association of America at its fourth annual meeting,
held in Baltimore in February, 1887. lvi He also wrote a pamphlet, "A Plea for a Liberal Education," which
was the first publication of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in its "Modern Language Series."
The MLA, which would eventually become the professional guardian and guide of English
departments in U.S. colleges and universities, had been organized at a meeting of forty persons, held at
Columbia College in New York City, in 1883. lvii Its original purpose, as formulated by one early
commentator, was to "emphasize" the "belief 'that the modern languages have an equal claim with the
classics,' in modern education." lviii Four years later in Baltimore, Newton's heady elevation to the Executive
Council was eclipsed by the election of James Russell Lowell as President of the Association, whose
members took great pride in the patronage of that distinguished man of letters.
Lowell, after all, had been born to the linguistic purple. In 1855, he had succeeded a fellow-poet,
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as Smith Professor of Belles-Lettres and French and Spanish at Harvard. By
1887, he knew several languages, had spent the requisite year traveling and studying in Germany and Italy,
had been editor of the Atlantic Monthly and the North American Review, and had served a turn in London as
15

U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James. His leadership of the MLA, nominal though it seems to have
been, presaged the rapid growth in higher education of scholarly and pedagogical attention to literature rather
than language. As a biographer has said of him, "he considered it more important that his students learn to
appreciate and love the elegance and grace of literature…than to become familiar with the etymology of
words or the logic of grammar." lix That view--and its increasing popularity--proved hospitable to the growth
of English literature as an object of study, even at the expense of curricular attention to other modern
languages and their literatures.
By 1889, for example, Lowell's Harvard, which had become a major university, employed ten
teachers of foreign languages and thirteen teachers of English. lx That, of course, was the year in which W. I.
Thomas became Oberlin's first Professor of English. In the prior year, Newton's star had fallen in locally
catastrophic disgrace. Notwithstanding his eminence as an articulate internationalist, he had been accused of
plagiarism, was found guilty by his faculty colleagues, and was forced to resign his professorship. lxi His
professorial duties in language instruction were carried on by able successors, but the blow to professional
pride within the faculty was palpable.
Upon his arrival in Oberlin, Professor Thomas assumed responsibility for some of the instruction in
rhetoric and for the required course in English Literature that had been offered for several years by the
Professor of Mental Philosophy and Rhetoric, John M. Ellis (who, it will be recalled, was a member of that
"Committee on the English Professorship" that had recommended his appointment). In his second year,
Thomas doubled the amount of course work available in English literature. His curricular plan was explicitly
approved by the faculty, and a copy of the plan in his own hand-writing was appended to the minutes of the
meeting at which it was considered. lxii Ellis, in his single required one-term course, had dealt with the
history of the English language, early English literature, Langland (the presumptive author of Piers
Plowman), and Chaucer. With occasional help from Professor James Monroe, he had also made available
two elective courses for Juniors: one dealt with "Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Coleridge," under
the rubric of "English Classics"; the other furnished more Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, augmented
by unspecified works of Spenser, Bacon, Addison, Pope, Cowper, and Scott--all under the capacious rubric
of "English Literature." lxiii From the required course, Thomas eliminated Langland and added a
Shakespearean tragedy as well as works from a textbook called Longer English Poems. To the course on
"English Classics" he added Book I of Spenser's Faerie Queene; from it he removed Wordsworth and
Coleridge so that he might include them in a new course on "Nineteenth Century Literature." Despite the
title, it dealt only with poetry (including works of Byron, Shelley, Keats and Tennyson). He designed two
other new courses, both of them elective: one dealt with "Old and Middle English," the other with
16

"American Literature." For the course on American literature, he chose a textbook in which the prolific
writer and editor Horace E. Scudder had assembled poems by Longfellow, Whittier, Bryant, Holmes,
Lowell, and Emerson.
Thomas's English curriculum is notable (though by no means unusual among coeval programs of
study) for its attention to philology, to early writers for whom moral and historical authority could be
claimed, lxiv to poetry at the expense of prose, and to the omission of writers (like Dryden, Pope, Swift, Dr.
Johnson, and even the once-vaunted Cowper) between Milton and Wordsworth. It is remarkable for its
inclusion of a course on American literature, despite its narrowness--not every English department deigned
to acknowledge the work of native writers at that time. lxv
And the course on Robert Browning was a fascinating gesture of personal diplomacy. It affirmed the
new professor's independence and contemporaneity--for Browning was then a modern writer, having died
only a little less than a year before Thomas proposed to devote an entire course (albeit a half-term and
elective course) to him. At the same time, Browning was "one of the most famous persons in the English-
speaking world." lxvi The Rev. Stopford Brooke closed his Primer with an adulatory passage about Browning
and Tennyson--"great poets," he wrote, "who have illuminated, impelled, adorned, and exalted the world in
which we live." lxvii A less kindly and much more recent critic disparagingly has described the "late-Victorian
view of Browning as a…Christian poet…whose chief accomplishment was his vindication of the intellectual
and religious adequacy of Victorian middle-class life." lxviii No doubt for that very reason, Thomas's choice
of Browning did not arouse opposition, but it hinted at the intellectual independence that would mark the
young English professor's later career. Tennyson would have been a safer and more conventional subject for
a course devoted to a relatively contemporary writer. lxix
By 1893, Thomas had induced the faculty to approve his offering a course in "Epic Poetry," including
works in several classical and modern languages; and he proposed in the following year to offer a course in
comparative drama. lxx The proposed course was never offered, however, because Thomas left Oberlin in
1893, and his successors were content with a more conventional curriculum. Indeed, by 1900, Thomas's
courses in American literature, in Epic Poetry, and in Browning had been discarded. His successor briefly
offered a course in Tennyson. The rest of the curriculum established by Thomas had been conventional
enough to survive his departure.
When Thomas left Oberlin, he had served the institution for only four years. In April of 1893, he was
dispatched to Chicago, with the blessing of the faculty, to supervise the mounting of Oberlin College's own
display at the fabled World Columbian Exposition, or Chicago World's Fair. lxxi At about the same time, he
obtained a two-year leave of absence in order to pursue graduate study--not in English, but rather in
17

Sociology--at the fledgling University of Chicago. It seems clear that he had become increasingly
uncomfortable with Oberlin's strenuous insistence on religious observances and with the conventionality of
his teaching assignments. Most important, as he would later recall, he had been reading the work of Herbert
Spencer and had found it more engaging than his study of philology or literary history. lxxii
His separation from Oberlin appears to have been amicable. Indeed, President William Ballantine, in
his annual reports to the Board of Trustees, twice indicated that Thomas would be away for only two of the
three annual terms, lxxiii though it is not certain that he returned to Oberlin in either year. In addition, Thomas
borrowed money from Oberlin College to subsidize his graduate study in Chicago, and struggled for many
years following to repay the loans. lxxiv
When Thomas left for Chicago, the college reached into the ranks of its preparatory department (then
called the Oberlin Academy) to replace him. The man chosen was Wilfred Wesley Cressy. Cressy, born the
son of a clergyman in 1867, had moved as a boy from his birthplace in Maine to Iowa, where he remained
throughout his collegiate study at Cornell College. From 1887 to 1890, he taught at a high school in
Minnesota. There he met and married Lillian Fitz, a young woman from St. Paul, whereupon he promptly
enrolled as a graduate student in English Literature at Harvard. Armed with his Harvard master's degree, he
had been brought to Oberlin in 1892 as a tutor in English for the Academy. lxxv
The choice of Cressy was apparently a matter of expediency. At the time, the institution was not at
its most robust. Indeed, the college was undergoing considerable fiscal anguish. An economic depression
had struck the nation in 1893, and its recovery was both slow and uncertain. lxxvi In the wake of that
widespread dislocation, at Oberlin student enrollment fell; gift support diminished; and the financial need of
the diminished student body rose. Financially, Oberlin had never been strong; but this ordeal was
particularly difficult. lxxvii The college pared back expenditures, and members of the faculty even shouldered
part of the burden by agreeing to forego a percentage of their incomes. An intractable and persistent
budgetary deficit appears to have been a major reason for the resignation of President Ballantine in 1896.
In that same year, W. I. Thomas was awarded the Ph. D. in Sociology by the University of Chicago.
Meanwhile, Wilfred Cressy labored to maintain the curriculum in English at Oberlin. Cressy was able to get
a little help from a few young and transient instructors. James Watt Raine, for example, who had earned an
A. B. degree from Oberlin in 1893, offered courses in rhetoric and composition as well as five literary
courses during 1894-95--among them "Shakespeare," "The Old [mostly Elizabethan and Jacobean]
Dramatists," and "Scottish Literature." lxxviii Raine then left Oberlin for a series of pastorates before assuming
the chair of the English Department at Berea College. Frederick Monroe Tisdel, a graduate of Northwestern
(1891) with a master's degree from the University of Wisconsin (1893), was hired as Associate Professor of
18

19
Rhetoric and Oratory in 1894; his primary responsibilities included courses in composition and forensics,
but until his departure in 1898, lxxix in alternate years he also offered a course in Milton and a course in
Bacon.
Professor Cressy worried about the security of his position at Oberlin. This fretfulness may be
inferred from a candid letter of advice that he received and kept (despite the sender's concluding injunction
that he destroy it) from his immediate predecessor. Although the letter from Cressy that provoked Thomas's
candor does not survive, the letter from Thomas, dated 29 February, 1896, is worth quoting at length:
My dear Mr. Cressy [writes Thomas]:--
I wish I could talk this matter over with you, it would be a good chance to see what a 'cusser' I used to
be. I was in about the fix you are in now four years ago, except that there was by no means so cordial
approval of me or my work as there is of you. They simply reappointed me temporarily for a year. I believe
my conduct on that occasion was the correct thing, and believe you would do well to do pretty nearly the
same thing. I payed [sic] little attention to the matter. They didn't know whether I cared or not. Your work
is splendid, and you have no real occasion to be disturbed by this, unless it cuts a figure in your salary--as no
doubt it does. There are two or three things pretty clear. You will eventually leave Oberlin. But you don't
want to jump before you see pretty well where you are going to land. It is a long sight easier to get
transferred than it is to get a new job when you are out of one. Furthermore a man will never get a job where
there are not some disagreeable features--theological or other. I could to this day not say under oath to what
a degree I was or was not a hypocrite in Oberlin, and I don[']t care a rap for the question, and never did. I
simply thought it best not to run my horns into things other people loved and sweated over--it was not in my
line of business. But I confess I had a sneaking feeling sometimes. The same feeling comes over you and
Mosher (!) [James Mosher, Instructor in Singing from 1892 to 1902] sometimes, no doubt. But that is not
important. Oberlin is a mighty good place to serve an apprenticeship in. Don't you worry, the students are
thinking more of you than anybody there. So just keep your head, and hold on to your job until you are
ready to throw it up.
But as to business. I should, I believe, apply for a year's leave of absence, and I believe I should
spend it abroad. You know the English crowd here better than I do, and to come here at present would be
advisable only with reference to getting a foot-hold. But that would not be a good plan, I think. You know
more than these fellows, but if you should come and study they would regard you as a student, and if you
received an appointment it would be at the end of the line, and you should have a long and dismal procession
before you, and your own work would be correcting themes. Your appointment would come as a
recommendation of the department, and you would be an inferior in rank. If you study abroad and then come
as a professor already, your appointment will be from [President William Rainey] Harper direct, and he can
put you anywhere he pleases, and you will be independent and equal in rank with the others, or at any rate
not so far down the line. Remain on good terms with [Oberlin College President] Ballantine. He is a friend
of Harper. I can give you a boost, too, at the proper time. While you are away, you might suggest by letter,
or through some friend, that a permanent appointment would be agreeable. You might put the question
direct, without any explanation, It would be taken to mean th[at] you will return if it is done. Do not give
any sign that you expect to leave the place finally for good and all. If they think you are making them a
stepping stone they will try to keep you down.
Now, my dear fellow, you can arrange to go abroad for two years if you want to. I went, and took a
new wife, and every cent I used was borrowed money, and I hadn't a foot of real estate. I am still in debt, but
who cares! I am paying it off. Moreover when you go abroad don't study your eyes out. Take some time to
see the country and teach Mrs. Cressy to drink beer. If you can use part of your property to enhance your

20
own market value you will be wiser than to keep it to breed more. There is more or less hocus-pocus in
the phrase 'graduate study abroad,' but in the year of our Lord 1896 it tips the balance. Make it two years, if
you possibly can…. lxxx
Thomas was a shrewd observer of academic politics. It is clear that he understood very well the
dynamics of Oberlin's strong heritage of faculty governance. He knew and instructed Cressy about the
somewhat obscure way in which institutions like Oberlin used their sundry discretionary powers to send
signals (in this case, apparently, a shorter than usual term of reappointment to express some degree of
displeasure). Even more impressively, his advice about strategies of response to such signals reflects the
temperament of a good poker player: an inscrutable public demeanor can mask intensely calculating private
behavior.
Thomas's shrewdness here is especially poignant in light of his own later experience at the hands of
the University of Chicago. After achieving renown as a founder of the "Chicago School" of Sociology,
Thomas was arrested in 1918 (along with the wife of an American army officer) by the FBI in a local hotel
and charged with violating the Mann Act. The President of the University--without any protest from the
faculty--immediately fired him, and broke his contract with the university's press. The charges were thrown
out of court, but Thomas remained a pariah at the University of Chicago throughout the rest of his long and
impressively productive scholarly life. lxxxi
Thomas's letter to Cressy is also engagingly perceptive and aptly cynical about the professional value
of study in those hallowed German universities. Moreover, it reflects his grasp of the growing role of
academic departments in establishing and carrying out policies and programs. Such departments had slight
formal standing at Oberlin, but they had gained a footing among universities. Cressy must have asked
Thomas's advice about approaching the English Department at the University of Chicago for a job. The
notion was not altogether absurd. First of all, most members of that department had come from Harvard,
where Cressy had pursued graduate study. Furthermore, in 1899, he would publish a version of selections
from Pope's translation of the Iliad for high school students, in which his co-editor was William Vaughn
Moody, then a member of the English Department at Chicago (and later a well-known poet and
playwright). lxxxii Departments are bureaucracies, however (as Thomas with his burgeoning interest in
sociology clearly understood), and bureaucracies tend swiftly to bureaucratize their labor. In the case of
teaching English, its practitioners have perennially lamented the drudgery of reading and correcting student
compositions, and have found ways to inflict that drudgery disproportionately on the most junior among
them. In advising Cressy, Thomas anticipated just such a purgatorial experience if he were to have the
department rather than the supra-departmental university as his patron.

21
At the time when Thomas dispensed this advice to Cressy, the teaching of English composition had
also become a mainstay of the English faculty at Oberlin. When in 1887-88 curricular offerings were first
organized and presented in the annual catalogue as the "Description of Work Performed in the Several
Departments of Instruction," three courses in "English Literature" were listed separately from the numerous
courses in "Rhetoric and Elocution," "Rhetorical Exercises," and "Advanced Rhetorical Work." In the
following year, all of those courses were listed under the departmental designation of "English Language and
Literature." In 1890-91, "English Language and Literature" was again listed separately, this time from the
department of "Rhetoric, Composition, and Vocal Expression." In 1893, "English Language and Literature"
became merely "English." In 1894, when Frederick Tisdel arrived to teach rhetoric and oratory, several
elective courses in composition were included in the list headed "English," while required courses in rhetoric
(for freshmen) and composition (for sophomores and juniors) were listed separately. In 1896, Tisdel wrote
in his brief annual report to the president that he and Cressy had formed a "plan to connect the work in
English Composition as closely as possible with the work in English Language and Literature." lxxxiii In
effect, traditional instruction in rhetoric had thus been divided into composition and elocution (later to be
called speech), with the composition (instruction in writing) having been wedded to philology (or instruction
about written texts). lxxxiv
As William Riley Parker has observed, "the teaching of freshman composition…quickly entrenched
English departments in the college and university structure" lxxxv at the end of the nineteenth century. The
impact of the curricular merger of composition with literature (or philology) can be felt in a striking gesture
made by Oberlin's relatively new president, John Henry Barrows, in 1900. Addressing the Board of Trustees
in his first annual report, he devoted a paragraph to the need for an "enlarged teaching force" before
lamenting that a continuing deficit in the annual budget--the aftershock of that economic depression that had
precipitated his predecessor's resignation--together with a minuscule endowment (a chronic problem then at
Oberlin as elsewhere) precluded his doing anything about it. In the following paragraph, however, he
asserted that whatever else could not be done for those reasons, it was "imperative" to employ "at least two
men [sic], of the highest rank in scholarship and teaching," to provide for the "teaching of our noble English
language and literature." lxxxvi
Earlier in that first year of Barrows's presidency, the Department of English (such as it was) and the
entire community had been twice jolted, first by Wilfred Cressy's sudden departure from Oberlin (in
October, for reasons of ill health), and then a few months later (in February) by his death in New Mexico.
Cressy had not taken W. I. Thomas's advice to study in Germany. Indeed, he appears to have soldiered on
uncomplainingly at Oberlin. Thomas had actually written (and Cressy had again kept) a later letter in which

22
he reported briefly on a meeting with President Ballantine (presumably in Chicago), saying that Ballantine
had identified the "opposition" to Cressy's "advancement" as based on "religious grounds," urging him to
"show yourself at church oftener, at least." lxxxvii Whether or not he followed that prudent advice, he served
Oberlin well in the seven years that elapsed between Thomas's departure and his own untimely death.
As we have seen, he co-operated with Tisdel in merging the study of English composition with the
study of English literature. He revised the curriculum, most notably by eliminating Thomas's courses in
Browning and in American literature. In 1893-94, the faculty had dropped English literature as a general
requirement for students, and that had led to the elimination of a broad survey course. Cressy reduced the
range of courses but increased the number of courses that were offered every year. In 1888-89, students
could elect from among nine courses (that is, three per term) in English literature. Four courses in
Shakespeare led the others in popularity (with 74, 79, 38, and 43 students enrolled in them respectively). A
course on "Prose Writers of the XVIIIth and XIXth Centuries" (which Cressy had introduced in 1892-93 and
which included essayists like Addison, Steele, Swift, Johnson, Lamb, DeQuincey, Macaulay and Carlyle but
also a group of novelists--Defoe, Fielding, Scott, Jane Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot) drew
44 students, while courses in Anglo-Saxon, Early Middle English, Chaucer, and Bacon drew fewer than 20
each. lxxxviii
Cressy endeared himself to President Ballantine and others in 1894 by visiting several secondary
schools in Ohio. Ballantine wrote in his annual report for the year that "no doubt the large size of the present
Freshman class is due in great part to the zeal and wisdom with which he performed his difficult duty." lxxxix
Ballantine expressed the hope that these journeys might be continued in future years, but it is not clear that
they were.
Lyman B. Hall, one of Cressy's colleagues, was keeping a journal through this period. A few of his
scattered references to the young English teacher shed light on some of the difficulties that Cressy was
experiencing at Oberlin, including the behavior that elicited the disapproval that Thomas reported to Cressy
after his meeting with the President. For example, in an entry for February 17, 1886 (that is, just before
Thomas wrote the letter that I have quoted at length), Hall noted "a five hour Faculty Meeting in which our
budget was adopted and voted…to give Cressy two more years of teaching with the understanding that his
training has been insufficient to make him Prof. of Literature." xc The issue of "adequate training" is
interesting: Cressy's only advanced degree was a master's from Harvard, but few other members of the
faculty (including Hall) could boast of a doctorate. To be sure, Cressy had not spent time in Germany (as
Hall and several other members of the faculty had); and that slight disadvantage may have prompted
Thomas's entertaining suggestion about teaching Mrs. Cressy to drink authentic German beer. The more

important issue, as acknowledged by Ballantine in his subsequent conversation with Thomas, must have
been the peculiar "religious grounds." For two years later, when Cressy was finally granted permanent
appointment, Hall questioned that decision, indicating reservations (which he attributes to others but
implicitly shares himself) "in view of his [Cressy's] feeling about family prayers and his critical temper upon
preaching[,] missionary operations[,] church opposition to the theatre, etc." xci
Nevertheless, during that year in which he was granted permanent appointment Cressy had
undertaken additional duties as "Dean of the College Department," in which role he bore responsibility for
the discipline of male students. xcii Such an assignment would appear to represent a sort of endorsement for
his general abilities and value to the college.
After his death, Cressy's body was returned to Oberlin for burial. His funeral was held in the college
chapel on February 14, 1900. According to the Oberlin News, Professor King "paid a beautiful tribute…,
speaking of [Cressy's] devotion to his work, his faithfulness to duty and other traits of character." xciii
Professor Hall, who attended the service, was a little more acerbic. He confided to his journal that "the
attendance of students was not very large. King made the only remarks offered and they were quite brief.
They seemed admirable to the members of the Faculty who knew the difficulties of the position but I hear
that the students thought them quite inadequate." xciv
Another colleague, Edward Dickinson, then Professor of the History of Music and Pianoforte,
contributed a laudatory eulogy of Cressy to the student newspaper, the Oberlin Review. After praising
Cressy's worth as a teacher, scholar, and (presumably in his capacity as dean) disciplinarian, Dickinson
offered the fascinating observation about him that "with all [his] robust, manly temper he possessed in a rare
degree a certain quality which…may be called in the more general sense womanly." xcv
The first decade in which the teaching of English took root at Oberlin, then, produced a certain mild
turbulence. Its first professor had departed for greener pastures as a sociologist in Chicago; its second, after
a troubled tenure, died in harness at the age of thirty-three. But a curriculum had been put into place,
students were clamoring for its courses, and as the new century opened, President Barrows was prepared to
appoint two able "men" to carry the burden of its future. One of those "men" would be Alice H. Luce, who
was armed with a German Ph. D.--the first, it would be said, ever to have been awarded to a woman by the
University of Heidelberg. xcvi
23

III. Trailing Clouds of Glory
Alice Hanson Luce became the third successive Professor of English at Oberlin in
the fall of 1900. At thirty-eight years of age, she was older than her predecessors had
been when they had joined the faculty. Three years of study in Germany, a Ph. D.
degree, and authorship of a scholarly monograph xcvii gave her professional qualifications
that were notably superior to theirs; and, unlike them, she arrived with four years of prior
collegiate teaching experience. xcviii The duties of her professorship, however, were
secondary to those of her administrative appointment as Dean of the Women's
Department. She had been brought to Oberlin primarily to replace the formidable Adelia
A. Field Johnston in that position.
Mrs. Johnston had been a major force in the ethos of the college, and for years
had been the only female present at meetings of the faculty. Indeed, after relinquishing
her duties as Dean she remained on the faculty as Professor of Mediaeval History, and
continued to wield considerable influence on the college and in the village (to the
beautification of which she devoted her energies) until her death in 1910. xcix Meanwhile,
with Professor Luce preoccupied by heavy administrative tasks, the principal
responsibility for managing the Department of English fell to a younger male colleague,
whose arrival at Oberlin followed hard on her own, and whose appointment amounted to
a slight enlargement of the department.
That colleague, Charles Henry Adams Wager, came to Oberlin, like Luce, with a
Ph. D. degree (earned at Yale, however, rather than at a German university); and, like
Luce, with teaching experience in English at two other collegiate institutions--in his case,
at Centre College (in Kentucky) and at Kenyon College. He would remain at Oberlin for
the rest of his life, directing departmental affairs with growing (and uncommon) authority
and earning the devotion of innumerable admiring students.
In the first year of their service at Oberlin, however, Wager and Luce undertook
only relatively modest changes in the curriculum that they inherited from the hapless Mr.
Cressy. Wager offered a new survey course in the History of English Literature as well
24

as the usual courses in Old English prose and poetry and in Shakespeare. Luce offered a
course that she called "Nineteenth Century Masterpieces": it replaced a pair of courses
that Cressy had designed, on 18 th and 19 th century prose and poetry. Luce also expanded
the title of Cressy's course on "Chaucer" into "Chaucer and the Fourteenth Century."
Further curricular changes were compelled by a decision of the faculty in 1902 to
abandon a three-term academic year in favor of the semester system. Instead of three
courses each term, Wager and Luce contrived to offer four courses in each semester--and
to expand the curriculum by offering some of those courses in alternate years. Luce took
over the teaching of Shakespeare and expanded her "Chaucer and the Fourteenth
Century" to fill two semesters. Wager added courses in "Spenser and the Minor Poets of
the Elizabethan Period," "Milton," and "Eighteenth Century Poetry." This curriculum, it
may be noted, omitted altogether as objects of study the novel; drama except for
Shakespeare; American literature; and even, apart from Shakespeare and Milton,
seventeenth century poetry.
The change in the calendar was driven at least in part by fiscal considerations. It
was reckoned that tuition-paying students would be less likely to drop out for an entire
semester than they had been increasingly inclined to do for one of the three annual terms.
A steadier stream of revenue was therefore expected (and seems to have resulted). On
the other hand, revenue was already growing, for the annual enrollment in the College of
Arts and Sciences had been rising steadily. In the lean years of the late 19 th century, all
of the several divisions of the institution--the College of Arts and Sciences, the School of
Theology, the Conservatory of Music, a Department of Drawing and Painting, and the
Preparatory Department--had suffered from declining enrollments. In 1898-99, total
enrollment had fallen to 1, 208. But over the next five years the figure grew by a third, to
1, 618--and more than half that growth was in the College of Arts and Sciences. c
That growth in enrollment was steady throughout the first decade of the 20 th
century, and led inevitably to an expansion in the size of the teaching faculty. The
Department of English was the greatest beneficiary of that expansion. In 1900,
Professors Luce and Wager had a single junior colleague; ten years later, the two senior
professors enjoyed the fellowship of three junior instructors.
25

The primary justification for the sturdy growth in the size of the English
Department was the demand for instruction in English composition. Over the closing
decade of the 19 th century and the opening decade of the 20 th , the Oberlin faculty had
permitted a gradual diminution in the specific course work required for graduation,
allowing for a concomitant growth in the range of elective courses; but it had actually
doubled the amount of work required in English composition. Professors Luce and
Wager bore the brunt of the inflated demand that resulted from the combination of
increased enrollment and extended requirement. Neither acquiesced cheerfully in the
added burden. Indeed, they mounted a strenuous protest.
In those days it was customary for the annual report of the president to the
Oberlin Board of Trustees to include invited statements from the several professors in the
College. The first such statement from Charles Henry Adams Wager boldly urged "the
establishment of a Department of English Composition, presided over by a trained
student of the subject." ci In the following year, he abandoned his request for a separate
department of English Composition, but plaintively recalled "the suggestion of my last
report, that…addition be made to the staff of English instruction" in order to improve
offerings in English composition. cii In his third year, however, his fury was in full spate
and his argument was incandescent: "It is humiliating, considering the attention paid to
Composition elsewhere," he wrote, not only that Oberlin's courses in English
Composition were so meager, but also that some of those courses must be entrusted to
"untrained hands." ciii Those "untrained hands," in fact, were his own: "in the first place,"
he noted, "I came to Oberlin with the understanding that I should have no work in
Composition, and in the second place, I am without special training for such work." civ
These solemn cries for relief from the burden of teaching English Composition
were a harbinger of things to come. They reflect a combination of noblesse oblige and
vocational irritation that would characterize attitudes in the Department of English
throughout the 20 th century. On the one hand, as Professor Wager somewhat
unguardedly put it in his first report, "the gifts and the discipline essential to the
interpretation of literature or to the study of linguistics are quite different from"--though
he did not go so far as to say explicitly that they are more lofty than--"those that enable a
teacher to stimulate young men and women to what is, in its degree [italics mine],
26

creative work," cv that is, English Composition. On the other hand, "no subject," he
acknowledged, "is more truly cultural" than English Composition, and "none [is] so well
calculated to render students sensitive to the effectiveness of refined and forceful
speech." cvi Professor Wager thus recognized the curricular importance of teaching
students how to write, and (after his first rash proposal for establishing a separate
department for that purpose) even accepted the English Department's responsibility for
meeting that instructional obligation. He merely wished to shift the burden to other
shoulders than his own--and to that end undiplomatically asserted that "it is not necessary
that a large expense be incurred. Among the very recent alumni of Harvard and
Michigan, I am confident that a well-trained man could be found, in every way suited to
our purpose." cvii So much for the "special training" that he professed to lack.
The complaints were heard and a remedy was supplied: the English Department
expanded in size, and Professor Wager was emancipated from the burden of teaching
English Composition. By 1910, when enrollment in the College of Arts and Sciences
alone first rose above a thousand, four young instructors, with the help of one associate
professor, labored to "render" all of its freshmen "sensitive of refined and forceful
speech" by offering a two-hour, required year-long course in "Composition" that was
divided into 15 sections. Five instructors helped the same associate professor to render a
like service to sophomores, through a two-hour course labeled "Composition:
Exposition," and divided into 11 sections. cviii In that year, the associate professor and two
of the instructors--all of whom also taught courses in literature--held master's degrees.
Two of the instructors were recent female graduates of Oberlin itself, and taught only the
courses in Composition. cix
In arguing the case for instructional reinforcements in English Composition,
Professor Wager bewailed the concomitant paucity of offerings in English Literature. At
the outset of his service, he had instituted an introductory course in the History of English
Literature, which left him time to offer only one meager course in "the linguistic aspect
of English" (that is, History of the English Language), and reduced the number of
advanced offerings in English literature to four year-long courses--three of them in the
hands of Professor Luce (namely, "Chaucer," "Shakespeare," and "Nineteenth Century
Masterpieces"), who remained burdened by her administrative duties as "Dean of the
27

Women's Department." Wager himself was offering in alternate years a two-semester
course in Old English Literature and two semester-long courses in Spenser and Milton.
He complained rather vaguely that "there are several important periods that we are now
compelled almost wholly to neglect," but he was content to hope for only "one more
advanced course in Literature." cx
When a third person joined the ranks of the Department of English in 1903,
Professor Wager assigned to him the courses in English Composition. Professor Luce
departed in the following year, whereupon she was replaced by another junior instructor--
in consideration of which Wager assumed responsibility for offering all of the advanced
course work in English Literature, from Old English through Victorian Prose and Poetry.
His junior minions taught not only the various courses in English Composition but also
that survey course in the History of English Literature, which had been made a
prerequisite for the advanced courses.
The first two junior instructors that Wager recruited under these circumstances
were Ernest Sutherland Bates and Harry James Smith. It should not be allowed to pass
unnoticed, to be sure, that throughout Wager's campaign for reinforcements in English
Composition, Miss Mary Eleanor Barrows--a graduate of Smith College (in 1897) and
daughter of John Henry Barrows, the Oberlin College president who had died suddenly in
June, 1902--had been teaching four or five sections of the freshman course in English
Composition. cxi In their annual reports, Professor Luce scrupulously acknowledged and
Professor Wager blithely neglected to mention Miss Barrows's service. By 1904,
however, Miss Barrows had married and left Oberlin to accompany her husband in the
development of his career.
As for Ernest Sutherland Bates: born in Gambier, Ohio, he came to Oberlin at the
age of twenty-four, with a baccalaureate and a master's degree from the University of
Michigan. He stayed for two years, then left to pursue the Ph. D. degree at Columbia
University. Columbia published his dissertation (A Study of Shelley's Drama The Cenci).
He went on to teach at the University of Arizona and University of Oregon, and to
publish two biographies (on Mary Baker Eddy and William Randolph Hearst), cxii several
books on U.S. government, cxiii and at least two books on religion. cxiv He died in 1939. cxv
28

Harry James Smith, who joined Bates as a junior member of the English
Department in the wake of the departures of Professor Luce and Miss Barrows, was a
native of New England. He had received the A. B. degree from Williams College in
1902 and the M.A. degree in English from Harvard in 1904. He had spent a year between
Williams and Harvard as an assistant in biological laboratories (including Woods Hole)
and a summer cycling around Europe. At Oberlin, one year of teaching English
Composition and a survey of English literature was enough for him. Indeed, by
Hallowe'en of that year, he was writing to his sister that "this Freshman work, although it
does bring visible returns, simply destarches one....[The] instructor…has to shoulder the
weight of an uninterested class…; if you get their attention it is by sleight of hand,
chameleon changes of plan, attitude, humor. I cuddle now, now I exhort, now rage
leoninely--and the circus game keeps them tolerantly entertained." cxvi Smith's
pedagogical insight seems impressively timeless. And then, too, when the earliest signs
of spring appeared in Oberlin, this young New Englander grew homesick: "This tame,
flat, muddy country has its good points, I suppose," he wrote to a friend. "There is a walk
out the railroad I take almost every day--just sky, and sunset, and long, open stretches of
dark fields; it has a kind of expansiveness that is impressive--but when one thinks of
Berkshire, all this becomes insipid and commonplace." cxvii That sentiment, too, might be
heard in the corridor of a 21 st century building at Oberlin. In any case, classroom
discontent and topographical restlessness reinforced in Smith a longing for what he called
a "search for the Golden Fleece," cxviii and he left at the end of the year to test his own
literary mettle in New York City.
His success there was swift. The Atlantic Monthly began publishing his short
stories; two of his novels were published (Amédée's Son, in 1908, and Enchanted
Ground, in 1910); and the Fleece truly turned golden in 1910 when his first play (a
comedy of manners entitled Mrs. Bumpstead-Leigh) became a smash hit on Broadway.
In writing for the stage, he had found his vocation, and despite a few box-office failures,
he enjoyed at least two more successes (with A Tailor-Made Man, in 1917, and The Little
Teacher, in 1918) before his sudden death in a Canadian automobile accident in 1918. cxix
If Professor Wager was disappointed by the transience of these and several other
young instructors, he was nevertheless gladdened by the appointment in 1907 of Philip D.
29

Sherman, who proved much more durable: Sherman remained at Oberlin until his
retirement in 1942. Wager had tried to lure him to Oberlin in 1905, but Sherman had
joined the faculty at Ohio Wesleyan University instead, and a year later had gone to
Louisville, Kentucky, to teach at a preparatory school. cxx Perhaps regretting his earlier
decision, Sherman had written to Wager in the spring of 1907, and he received an
enthusiastically encouraging response. With Wager's support, President King tendered
an offer of appointment: Sherman would serve as Instructor in English for two years at a
salary of $900 per annum, and the appointment was made "with a view to
permanency." cxxi
A striking echo of Oberlin's religious heritage rang in Wager's first reply to
Sherman's letter of inquiry: "will you," he asked, "be careful to say whether or not you
are a member of any church?" Wager, who was himself an Anglican, was delighted
when Sherman professed himself to be a sheep of the same fold. A religious test of
eligibility for appointment was thus clearly implicit in the correspondence between
Sherman and Wager. The sectarian bond between them, however, represented a very
mild drift toward tolerance. If Anglicans may be supposed to have enjoyed a certain
prestige elsewhere, nevertheless neither the College nor the Congregational Church that
was its historic partner (and was still afforded a local pride of place) had welcomed the
establishment of an Episcopal Church in Oberlin when it had arrived back in 1855. cxxii
Sherman, whose only advanced degree was a master's in German Literature from
Brown University (1903), not only taught from the outset a remarkably wide array of
courses, but also introduced novelty into the departmental curriculum by offering a year-
long, three-hour course in the English novel. Furthermore, he bore responsibility for a
year-long, albeit only two-hour course in American Literature. cxxiii
During the first decade of the 20 th century, the literary curriculum of the
Department of English not only expanded with the growth in the instructional staff, but
unsurprisingly it also became increasingly hierarchical. In the annual catalogue, the
courses in English Composition were listed as a group and as separate from the courses in
literature. cxxiv In 1900, all the courses in English Literature were equally available to
students as electives. Gradually, however, some courses were either recommended or
explicitly designated as prerequisite to others. Thus, for example, in the catalogue for
30

1906-07, published in May, 1906, English 1 (that "History of English Literature"
introduced by Professor Wager) was specified as a prerequisite for courses in "Theory of
Poetry," "Victorian Prose and Poetry," "Early 19 th century Poetry and Prose," and also the
new course in American Literature. More broadly, it was recommended as initiatory for
"students who intend to specialize in English Literature" (there was as yet no system of
majors in place) as well as "for students who desire only a general acquaintance with
English Literature." cxxv English 3 ("Old English Literature") was recommended as
preparatory to courses in "Chaucer and the Literature of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Centuries" and in "The History of the English Language." A breath-taking year-long
course in "Shakespeare and the Drama of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries" was
available without prerequisite, but was frankly "conducted by means of lectures and
tests," and bore the warning that "the plays are read rapidly, with regard chiefly to such
general matters as structure, characterization, and significance." cxxvi These arrangements
may be seen as part of a broader effort within the college to impose order on a growing
array of elective courses. In March, 1911, that effort would culminate in an action by the
faculty to institute a system of majors.
As for the curricular content of the courses offerings in English Literature, the
tutelary genius was perhaps A History of English Literature, the textbook prescribed in
1902 and (according to successive catalogues) for several years thereafter in the course
(English 1) that bore its name. It first had been published in 1902 and would be destined
for such success in the field that, mutatis mutandis, it was still flourishing in an eighth
edition issued in 1966. Its authors, William Vaughn Moody and Robert Morss Lovett,
were young instructors at the University of Chicago who had served an apprenticeship as
undergraduates at Harvard under the encouraging eye of Barrett Wendell. cxxvii
A vagrant note may be permitted to intrude here. Oberlin College maintained a
kind of unofficial but curious traffic with the University of Chicago for many years after
its founding. The nature of that traffic appears to have been circumstantial rather than
purposeful, but the most conspicuous outward sign of its inward if not particularly
spiritual grace would be the elevation of Robert Hutchins, Oberlin native and college
alumnus whose father had been on its faculty, to the presidency of the University in 1929.
And among the several notable connections that may be found in the unfolding story of
31

English as a discipline, one involves Robert Morss Lovett and William Isaac Thomas. In
the twilight of his life, Lovett wrote a memoir in which, looking back on his faculty
service at the University of Chicago, he mentioned William Isaac Thomas as an "intimate
friend," though he devoted only two brief paragraphs (and one poignant anecdote) to
Thomas. He said nothing about Thomas's flirtation with English literature (nor about his
famous dismissal from the university), but what he remembered about him bears quoting
at length:
He came to the university in a small administrative position, created for
him by President Harper, to take his degree in sociology in a department of
which he became the most distinguished member. Sociology in the last century
seemed to be divided between the theorists, insterested in a philosophy of
society, and the philanthropists, interested in practical amelioration. Thomas
turned the attention of his pupils to the actual phenomena of social life by case
studies and statistics. He made sociology a science.
I came to know Thomas well on one long day in a summer quarter when
he received news that one of his boys had been drowned at the resort in Michigan
where his family was staying. There was no train until evening, and all day we
sat together, talking of this and that, but always his mind returned to the
question--which? It was not Bill, the oldest, because Bill could always take care
of hiimself. It was not Ed, because Ed was too cautious to be caught in a
situation he couldn't handle. It could not be the youngest boy because the others
would never have given him up. cxxviii
The young editors of A History of English Literature extended the largely
Arnoldian principles that had guided the Rev. Stopford Brooke in his pioneering literary
history: from the long sweep of imaginative writing in English, works and writers were
selected in substantial abundance (thereby establishing the celebrated canon), summarily
described, and weighed in a moral and cultural balance. For Brooke, the gathering
grandeur of English literature (and by that he meant English poetry) had reached its
zenith in William Wordsworth, whose work he described as "a force to soothe and heal
the weary soul of the world, a power like one of nature's, to strengthen or awaken the
imagination in mankind." The religious undertone of that description is not incidental,
either, for he went on to say of Wordsworth that "few spots on earth are more sacred than
his grave." cxxix
For Moody and Lovett, Wordsworth was indeed a powerful presence, but for
them the zenith was visible rather in Matthew Arnold, whose writing exemplified a
32

subtler religious purpose: "He was a prophet and a preacher, striving whole-heartedly to
release his countrymen from bondage to mean things, and pointing their gaze to that
symmetry and balance of character which has seemed to many noble minds the true goal
of human endeavor." cxxx Character: that talismanic term was just powerful yet slippery
enough to bind Oberlin College at the outset of the 20 th century to its earliest avatar in the
19 th . Pummeled by waves of secularism, modernity, scientific inquiry, and social change,
the institution had retreated from the certitude and narrowness of its baptismal ardor; but
it found in "character" a conceptual means of adapting its early evangelical mission to the
new age. Thus, in the Catalogue…for 1896-97, this proclamation made its first
appearance:
From the beginning of its history Oberlin has been an avowedly Christian
College, and has steadily aimed to build on the deepest and most solid convictions
of the best Christian people. It has sought to furnish an atmosphere in which
parents desiring the completest education and the highest development in
character would gladly place their children. Its fundamental convictions have
been that all truth is one and to be fearlessly welcomed; that character is supreme;
that Christ is the world's one perfect character and completest revelation of God;
and that the church is the one great world organization for ideal ends.
That paragraph appeared without any editorial change in the annual catalogues of
the college for nearly forty years. It was finally softened and abbreviated in 1935, and
only then did the word "character" disappear. The term connoted--and for many writers
no doubt still connotes cxxxi --rich moral worth and self-conscious moral agency. It was
powerfully embedded in the moral discourse of the 19 th century: John Stuart Mill, for
example, had said, in his essay On Liberty, that a person "whose desires and impulses are
not his own, has no character." cxxxii And for Oberlin in the early 20 th century, the most
conspicuous and indefatigable expositor of "character" as a principle of academic purpose
was its President, Henry Churchill King. His earnest (and successful) linkage of the term
with the aims of Oberlin College can be found in many of his published works. By way
of example, a particularly notable instance may be found in a sermon that he preached in
Oberlin on December 16, 1906.
Acknowledging the problem of adjusting the college's regulations to the
increasingly bothersome problem of student restiveness, he argued the case for a certain
flexibility in what he shrewdly called "detailed administration," while insisting on the
33

inflexibility of the "great aims": "we stand," he proclaimed, "for truth, for character, for
Christ, for the Church." cxxxiii This sermon was delivered in the wake of a decision to
discontinue the institutional requirement that every student "attend the morning church
service on Sunday," cxxxiv and may be seen as a defense of that historic act, even though he
did not mention it specifically. cxxxv Lifting the requirement of weekly participation in
worship at a local church clearly signified an accommodation with forces of social
change. cxxxvi It softened a college disciplinary code that was draconian even by the
standards of the day at other colleges and universities. cxxxvii
For Matthew Arnold, the "Sea of Faith" could be heard
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world. cxxxviii
At Oberlin, a comparable retreat might have been measured by the secularization of the
curriculum and the attrition of regulated piety.
In such an ethos, the curriculum of the English Department was implicitly useful
as a kind of shock-absorber. The literary works to which its students were exposed had
the salubrious quality of reflecting the stern moral purpose that King identified with the
primacy of building "character"; on the other hand, those works were secular--which
allowed students and teachers alike a quiet disengagement from the explicit or exclusive
connection of that same purpose with the life of Christ and the pre-eminence of the
church. An awareness (however dim) of this mediating function can be discerned as
operating subtly through the organization of the departmental curriculum.
Beyond the introductory work in Composition and the historical survey of English
literary history, courses were at first arranged in terms of chronology, from "Old English
Literature" through 19 th century prose and poetry; yet despite some advisory efforts to
suggest plausible sequences (like studying Old English before studying Chaucer), all
advanced literary courses were available for election by all students. Furthermore, after
the institution of the major system, the survey course in the History of English Literature
was abandoned. In its stead, a course entitled "Masterpieces of English Literature" was
offered for the majority of students who desired "some knowledge of English letters
without specialization," cxxxix
34

At the same time, a relatively constraining program of advanced courses was set
out for English majors. That program for majors specified, in the sophomore year, a
semester course in "Eighteenth Century Literature" or in "Shakespeare and the Drama of
the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries" or in "American Literature"; in the junior year,
"Victorian Prose" and "Shakespeare" or "Tennyson and Browning"; and in the senior
year, both "Old English" and "The English Novel" as well as one of the following: "The
Political Philosophy of Edmund Burke," "Chaucer," or "Literature of the English
Renaissance." It is not easy to find a reasoned pattern in this precisely-specified
sequence, nor did the English Department offer any explanation for it. Nevertheless, the
courses specified can be seen to have suited the prevailing ethos of the college. Thus,
many of them pointed students toward the value of prior or collateral studies in history, cxl
and many of the course descriptions took pains to situate the study of literature in a broad
social, political, cultural, or ideological setting.
This literary curriculum was neither conspicuously belletristic nor narrowly
philological in its scope: rather, it accommodated the study of literature implicitly to the
explicit aims of the college: to provide "the completest education and the highest
development in character." In the end, to be sure, it should not be supposed that this
approach set Oberlin's English Department apart from its peers. It did not. It simply
represented a local adaptation to what was, after all, a national trend in higher education
toward expanding the study of English literature. cxli
35

IV. As the Twig Is Bent
Efficiency: a deceptively simple word with complex, even quasi-theological
ramifications for American culture. The word had become a mantra as the twentieth
century dawned: it seemed to promise a solution to a vast array of problems that had
arisen in the wake of the technological and industrial development that followed the Civil
War. The aim of efficiency, after all, had been integral to the rapid industrialization and
growth in technology that Americans had warmly embraced during what Mark Twain
memorably designated “the Gilded Age.” cxlii Not surprisingly, then, the rage for
efficiency touched colleges and universities. As one writer has suggested, “efficiency
became more than a byword in the educational world; it became an urgent mission.” cxliii
President Eliot of Harvard published a book entitled Education for Efficiency. cxliv And
Oberlin College established a committee charged with determining how its own
efficiency—as well as that of other institutions—might be measured.
In November, 1908, Oberlin‟s president, Henry Churchill King, devoted an
extensive part of his annual report to a discussion of “Tests of Efficiency as Applied to
the Work of the College.” cxlv He acknowledged, to begin with, that “the rigorous
application of the test of efficiency in the industrial and business world almost forces a
similar application in education.” cxlvi Although efficiency might be a comparatively
elusive educational goal, he thought it worthy of strenuous attention—and the faculty
committee charged with the inquiry opened its initial report with the confident assertion
that “the primary test of the efficiency of a college must always be the character of its
graduates.” cxlvii
Behind this vigorous inquiry lay a certain anxiety about the altered role of the
small college in the great scheme of learning. William Rainey Harper, the guiding force
behind the building of the University of Chicago in the last decade of the 19 th century,
published at the beginning of the 20 th a trenchant pamphlet entitled “The Prospects of the
Small College.” cxlviii What he saw was an educational landscape that had been altered by
the rapid growth of universities; the steady improvement of secondary education; the
36

diminution of religious sectarianism; and the spread of professionalism, with its demand
for more and more specialized training. President King and the Oberlin faculty saw those
same forces at work—and so, for that matter, did the alumni. In June, 1909, during the
Commencement exercises, the organized alumni held a symposium at which they, too,
addressed the “Tests of Efficiency as Applied to College Education.” One of their
number warned apocalyptically that the small college would disappear if its graduates
were to be “the idlers, the spendthrifts, the dilettantes, the vapid loiterers, the neurotics
and degenerates, the scoffers and cynics” whose vices he thought most threatening to the
future of the “human race” (and implicitly, of course, to the future of American
business). cxlix Instead, he proposed that Oberlin‟s aim ought to be to devise the best
possible “system of training men [sic] to be self-reliant, resourceful and willing to assume
responsibility.” cl
In the years that immediately followed the articulation of these concerns, Oberlin
took several steps to address them. It created a new administrative position, called “Dean
of the College of Arts and Sciences” (efficiency, after all, can be costly and must be
bureaucratic). It abandoned the Oberlin Academy, its longstanding preparatory division
(thereby recognizing the standardization of public and private schooling among its
clientele throughout the nation). For the first time, it limited the number of students that
would be admitted in any given year (largely, it would seem, as a budgetary precaution).
And it drew two sharp boundaries to limit the promiscuity with which students might
elect courses from within the curriculum: first, by establishing a set of general
requirements; and second, by mandating the completion of what would be known as a
“major.” The Department of English was affected by all of these changes—but
especially by the last.
In the re-conceived curricular system adopted by the faculty in 1911, cli two years
of English Composition were firmly specified within the scheme of general requirements.
And among the thirty-one areas in which “courses of instruction” were offered during the
following year, nineteen were outfitted with majors. clii The faculty had envisioned the
majors as “a scheme for general training” that would “give organization and some
intensive work;” but had explicitly disavowed any aim to “send out students specially
trained in a single department.” cliii In the implementation of this scheme, there would be
37

no major in English Composition; cliv but Professor Wager undertook to marshal the
curricular offerings in English literature into a major. clv His first attempt to do so
involved an explicit progression of courses: the sophomore would take either “Eighteenth
Century Literature” or “Shakespeare and the Drama of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries,” and also “American Literature.” The junior would take “Victorian Prose”
and either “Shakespeare” (a course distinctive from the sophomore‟s broad survey: this
one entailed a “somewhat detailed study of six plays”) or “Tennyson and Browning.”
The senior would take “Old English” and “The English Novel” and one of the following:
“The Political Philosophy of Edmund Burke,” “Chaucer,” or “Literature of the English
Renaissance.”
It is difficult to tease out of this program a clear rationale either for what was
included—after all, “Theory of the Drama,” “Early Nineteenth Century Poetry,” and
“Milton and the Literature of the Seventeenth Century” were all excluded—or for the
order in which the courses were to be taken. This conceptual fuzziness probably explains
the tinkering that went on over the next several years. In 1912-13, for example, the
department (perhaps influenced by the multitudinous approach that had been adopted by
the departments of History and Mathematics) offered not just one but five different
majors: these were identified as “Teachers‟ Course,” “History of Modern English
Literature,” “English Drama,” “English Poetry,” and “English Prose.” This dazzling
scheme allowed all courses in the department to be accommodated in some kind of major
and also specified for students in each major a progression of courses to be taken; but it
also led to the addition of three curricular offerings—one in “Comparative Literature,”
for the Teachers‟ Course and the major in the history of Modern English Literature; one
in “Theories of Poetry Exclusive of the Drama,” for the major in English Poetry; and one
in “The Principles of Literary Criticism,” solely (apparently) for the major in English
Prose.
By 1916-17, the five distinct English majors had reduced themselves to two—a
“teachers‟” and a “general” major. The general major was undiscriminating—it required
at least thirty-two hours of elective courses in English, of which up to eight might be
taken in “the Department of English Composition.” The teachers‟ major was more
explicit, specifying several courses and the order in which they should be taken: first
38

American Literature, then “The Classics in Translation” (which included the Iliad,
Odyssey, Aeneid, Divine Comedy, several Greek tragedies, and poems of Theocritus),
“Shakespeare and the Drama of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” “Old and
Middle English,” as well as a “Teachers‟ Training Course.” In 1929-30, the “Teachers‟
Major” was abandoned (though its constituent courses remained) and the uniform
demand of thirty-two hours in English (with a limit of eight in composition) was applied
to all students who declared a major in the subject.
During these first two decades in which the English major was being sculpted, the
courses offered by the department underwent very few changes. An introductory course,
for example, which was prerequisite for all advanced courses and open to all
undergraduate students, was a fixture throughout the period. Yet its substance wobbled
about somewhat. At first it was entitled rather grandly “The Masterpieces of English
Literature,” though the writers designated (Malory, Addison, Goldsmith, Burns, and
Lamb among them) might even to a contemporary have seemed somewhat less masterly
than several who were ignored (like Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, and
Wordsworth). By 1920, that course had been reshaped. It was called simply
“Introduction to the Study of Literature,” and (omitting all reference to specific writers or
to presumptive “masterpieces”) it modestly aimed to provide “the proper method of
approach” to all literary works generically for “those who feel the need of direction in
their general reading.” clvi
As for the advanced courses, they covered most of the historical periods and
literary genres that were canonized by such reputable works as Moody and Lovett‟s
History of English Literature. A few peculiarities, however, are perhaps worthy of
remark. The offering of two distinct courses in Shakespeare—one surveying all his
works and the other attending closely to just a handful of the plays—was a fixture of the
departmental curriculum for most of the twentieth century. All of American Literature
was squeezed into a single year-long course (from which, incidentally, both Herman
Melville and Henry James were absent as late as 1930). Until his retirement, the
venerated (and venerable) Mr. Wager offered a year-long course in the writing and
thought of Edmund Burke. He also sought to make English majors aware of the heritage
that Matthew Arnold had proclaimed during his visit to Oberlin, by developing a course
39

called “The Classics in Translation.” Mr. Jelliffe offered a course (also extended
throughout the year) in Tennyson and Browning. Other poets gradually crept into that
course, but it did not become “Victorian Poetry” until 1934. In that same year,
Modernity gained a foothold in the departmental curriculum, too, as courses in “The
Modern Novel” and “Modern Poetry” (both of them acknowledging both British and
American works) became available. A prospective course in "Modern Drama" was listed
in the catalogue at the same time, to include "Continental" as well as British and
American drama, though it was not actually offered until 1936-37.
Throughout this period, the heaviest pedagogical investment of the department
was in the teaching of English composition. For many years, all students who were
enrolled in the college were required to complete two year-long courses in composition.
Eventually, the requirement of a second year was eliminated; but during each semester of
the academic year 1934-35, for example, members of the department offered twenty-one
sections of the basic course in composition.
On the one hand, this service to the college required a large staff—and thereby
afforded a sturdy numerical growth for the Department of English. On the other hand,
Professor Wager‟s early and persistent distaste for teaching composition reflected a
profound and enduring bias within the profession. As Robert Scholes has pungently put
it, "the culture of English departments was structured by an invidious binary opposition
between writing teachers and literary scholars….Teachers of literature became the priests
and theologians of English, while teachers of composition were the nuns, barred from the
priesthood, doing the shitwork of the field." clvii At Oberlin, that bias was embedded in a
hierarchical system of teaching assignments. Throughout his long service as chair of the
department, Mr. Wager regularly taught only advanced courses in literature—usually four
of them in each year. His slightly junior lieutenants, Messrs. Jelliffe and Sherman,
typically offered three advanced courses in literature, and perhaps a single section (or
even an advanced course) in composition. Their younger colleagues were permitted to
offer one or two advanced courses in literature, but only after they had been granted what
was then called “permanent appointment.” The new recruits—and, it ought to be noted,
all the female members of the department—were expected to devote themselves entirely
to the teaching of English composition.
40

As the years passed and the department flourished, many young teachers came
and more or less swiftly departed. But some stayed, and through their personalities,
professional inclinations, and varying talents, the department acquired a kind of solidity
within the institution as a whole. Much the most imposing of these figures was that of
Charles Henry Adams Wager himself.
“Mr. Wager”—the politely formal name by which he appears to have been
universally called in private and in public by students, alumni, and colleagues not only
during his lifetime but long after his death—chaired the Department of English from the
time of his arrival in 1900 to the day of his retirement (for reasons of ill health) in 1935.
However genial, his rule was firm and was informed by a strong sense of hierarchy and
by a distaste for the teaching of English composition. Though learned and even scholarly
by habit and by inclination, he published very little, and he expected little scholarly
publication from his departmental colleagues. He was best known within the institution
as its pre-eminent teacher. His former students were apt to speak or write of him with
reverence, justifying the effusive claim by the colleague who composed his memorial for
the Oberlin Alumni Magazine: “Generations of Oberlin students….owe to
him…refinement of taste, sanity of judgment, accuracy of understanding.” clviii Those
former students reserved a special note of awe for the privilege of traveling to the Wager
homestead on West College Street, where the venerable professor liked to hold his
classes. One of those fortunate acolytes, who would himself enter the professoriate,
wrote to Wager from Harvard in the spring following his graduation from Oberlin: “I am
specially thankful for the afternoons I spent at your home—when I wasn‟t up to the
conversation I could always fall back on the tea, cup cakes and cigarettes.” clix
The most celebrated course to have been offered in that gracious salon was called
“Burke.” Although Wager had received his Ph.D. at Yale under the guidance of the
estimable medievalist Albert Stanburrough Cook, and although his sole scholarly
monograph (based on his doctoral thesis) was an edition of the fifteenth century English
romance known as The Seege of Troye, clx and although he taught classes in Old and
Middle English off and on throughout his career, the pedagogical lodestone of his years
at Oberlin was the eighteenth century politician and philosopher Edmund Burke. To an
observer looking backward over the intervening century, Wager's devoting an entire year-
41

long course to Burke seems rather peculiar. Since his departure the Department of
English has never seen fit to revive such a course, and Burke has received scant attention
even in the courses that have introduced students to eighteenth century literature. Indeed,
it would be a remarkable English major of today who could identify from memory any of
Burke‟s writings.
Wager himself was a little defensive of his curricular eccentricity. The notes for
his introductory lecture to the class survive, written in his clear, fine hand on the small
sheets of paper that he characteristically employed. In that lecture, he defended Burke‟s
literary qualifications by arguing that “the first and highest value of literature is to
introduce us at first hand to the thoughts of great minds.” Burke‟s, he asserted, was a
great mind. Perhaps even more tellingly, he suggested that Burke‟s “conservatism, his
sense of history, is particularly needed as a corrective of much of our thinking….[There
is a] special need of him in a time like the present, lest we lose the good, as well as the
evil, in our political and social inheritance.” clxi The course first made its appearance in
1908, clxii and Wager offered it regularly until the year before his retirement. One can
only speculate about what “in our political and social inheritance” led Wager to employ
Burke as a corrective, and yet the temptation to speculate seems irresistible.
For several years, the Oberlin Alumni Magazine featured a regular column by
Wager. He gave his column the formal and faintly self-deprecating title “To Whom It
May Concern,” and his essays were appealing enough to his provincial audience that he
collected and published them in two volumes, both of which bore the same title. clxiii The
essays sparkle like carefully-polished jewels, but their subjects are customarily small and
uncontroversial. One deeper matter that occasionally surfaces, however, is the ominous
specter of Modernism. Wager clearly saw that talented artists like James Joyce and
Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot had to be reckoned with, but he was not of their ilk. At
one point, he set his face against the chaotic world glimpsed in the works of those writers,
confessing instead to “an incurable…addiction to the cult of unity, of wholeness, of
integrity.” clxiv A passionate reader and a discerning critic, Wager must have turned to
Burke not only for his seminal role as the philosophical voice of conservatism but also
because, in the shrewd assessment of a contemporary expositor, “Burke preferred the
poet to the philosopher” clxv as a voice of moral suasion.
42

Indeed, it is not difficult to see in Wager‟s building of an English Department a
strong and remarkably successful effort to keep Modernism at bay. The colleagues he
chose (or, more precisely, persuaded the college president to choose) were like-minded in
their conservatism, in their defense of literary orthodoxy, in their distaste for controversy,
and in their professional restraint. Few of them, for example, had acquired doctoral
degrees at the time of their employment, and few engaged in scholarly publication. One
notable exception (though only in terms of professional training) was Arthur Irving Taft.
Like Wager, he received his Ph.D. degree from Yale; like Wager, he published his
dissertation (though it took longer); clxvi and like Wager, he contributed no further
scholarly publications to his profession. clxvii He retired from Oberlin in 1947 and died in
Florida in 1951.
P.D. Sherman, whom Wager rejoiced to welcome as a colleague in 1907,
remained a vital prop in Wager‟s department—and (though he too was innocent of
scholarly publication) contributed indefatigably to the broader life of the college. In
effect, he established the institution‟s public relations program (at first called with quaint
directness the “Publicity Bureau”), sending out a deluge of news releases and happily
traveling about northern Ohio to talk about the college in a variety of places to a variety
of audiences. He coached student debating teams, superintended the “Illumination
Night” (involving strings of Japanese lanterns festooning Tappan Square) for annual
Commencement programs, and was among the founders and a principal faculty sponsor
of the extracurricular Oberlin Dramatic Association. clxviii In the community, he belonged
to and even presided over the Exchange Club; he gave an annual address on Armistice
Day to members of the American Legion; and he compiled a regular column of anecdotes
for the local paper under the nom de plume of Peter Pindar Pease II. clxix As a faithful
parishioner of Christ Episcopal Church, he was pleased to report himself superintendent
of its Sunday School and occasional leader of services at its Amherst (Ohio) outpost. clxx
For the Department of English, this jack-of-all-trades taught an array of diverse
courses. He developed and regularly offered courses in the English Novel (which began
with Sir Walter Scott, ignoring the 18 th century) and in American Literature; and he
remained the curricular authority on “Milton and the Seventeenth Century.” He also
supervised the two-semester “Teachers‟ Training Course,” designed “to equip seniors and
43

qualified juniors for the teaching of English in secondary schools.” clxxi His teaching
career at Oberlin ended abruptly and acrimoniously in 1942 when he embroiled himself
in a quarrel with the editor of the student newspaper. He precipitated the quarrel with a
letter to the town newspaper in which he hinted darkly at “subversive” connections
between international Communism and a speaker who had been invited to address an
intercollegiate conference to be sponsored by students at Oberlin. The student editor
challenged Sherman‟s use of innuendo and misuse of facts, and Sherman responded with
a patronizing rebuke that contained a sneering reference to the editor‟s Jewishness. clxxii
Sherman‟s behavior elicited a strong expression of revulsion that was published in
the Oberlin Review on May 1, signed by 55 members of the Oberlin faculty, including
most of his departmental colleagues. Meanwhile, he had written a surly letter to one of
those colleagues (Warren Taylor), threatening legal action for “remarks aimed at
discrediting me as a teacher and as an American citizen.” clxxiii The tempest ended in
Sherman‟s peremptory—and virtually coerced retirement, announced by the local
newspaper at the end of May, with his effort to save face by claiming a desire “to have
more time for travel and research essential to completing his critical edition of Thoreau‟s
„Walden.‟” clxxiv The promised edition never appeared. But Sherman did bequeath his
library (he had been an ardent bibliophile) to the Brown University Library, where it
reposes as part of the Henry Lyman Koopman Collection.
Wager brought to Oberlin several other young teachers who lacked the Ph.D.
degree but were willing to undertake the task of improving students‟ writing abilities
through required courses in composition. Among them, for example, were three
siblings—all of them Oberlin alumni whose mother and two maiden aunts had been
long-time residents of Oberlin. Surnamed Durand, their eldest brother (Edward Dana)
would distinguish himself as a federal bureaucrat and would serve as an Oberlin College
Trustee for forty years (from 1912 to 1952). George Harrison Durand, who had been
pressed into service as Instructor in English during the interim between Cressy‟s
departure and Wager‟s arrival, was brought back in 1911-12 as Associate Professor, and
may have hoped for a continuing senior appointment, but was lured back to Yankton
College, in Sioux Falls SD, whence he had first been lured to Oberlin, by being made
Vice President as well as Professor of English. Earlier, in 1907-08, his elder brother
44

Walter Yale Durand had served as Associate Professor of English, having been enticed
away from Phillips Academy in Andover, where he was head of the English Department,
but ill health forced him to resign (and to move to Washington, D.C., where he, too,
became a federal bureaucrat). Their younger sister Alice May served for a year, in 1909-
10, as Instructor in English; but left for marriage to a lawyer, Henry Edgerton, who
eventually became Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals (also in Washington).
In the first two decades of Wager‟s rule over the Department of English, several
other women came and went as teachers of English Composition. Mary Barrows, who
served from 1900 (the year of Wager‟s arrival) to 1904, was the daughter of the college
president, John Henry Barrows, who died in office in June, 1902. Her departure
coincided with her marriage. Mary Belden, who began teaching in 1909, remained until
1915. She departed to complete the Ph.D. at Yale, clxxv after which she took a position at
Elmira College. She returned to Oberlin in 1929 to serve for a year as a sabbatical
replacement, and may have hoped to stay on, but those hopes were dashed. Esther Ward,
who taught from 1910 through 1918, also left for marriage. Barrows had been a Smith
graduate; the other two had received baccalaureate degrees from Oberlin. All three
served at the rank of Instructor, as did Edna Brownback, who, at the closing of Oberlin‟s
preparatory Academy in 1916 began teaching English composition for the college, and
continued to do so until her retirement in 1924, after which until her death in 1936 she
bore the honorific title of “Instructor Emeritus.” Florence Joy came from Iowa as
Instructor in English in 1918, and returned there (at the same rank) in 1925.
Another woman whose appointment Wager arranged was Ruth Murdoch
Lampson. Ruth Lampson was a native of Akron who had received her A.B. degree from
Middlebury College in 1902 and then returned to Ohio to wed her childhood sweetheart,
Everett Jefferson Lampson. clxxvi They moved to Oberlin, and Wager discovered in her an
inquiring intelligence and a fondness for literature. Late in her life—she lived to the age
of 96—she recalled cheerily the terms on which Wager offered her a job: she would
never progress beyond the rank of Assistant Professor, and virtually all of her teaching
would be in English composition; but she could be sure of the job for as long as she
wished to keep it. clxxvii She acquired a master‟s degree from Oberlin soon after she began
teaching at the college.
45

The list of young men who came to teach English composition and soon left for
other places is interesting in its own right. clxxviii One or two stayed on, however. Jesse
Floyd Mack, for example, with a baccalaureate and a master‟s degree from Oberlin as
well as a master‟s degree from Harvard, was made Assistant Professor of English in
1918. His appointment was eventually made permanent, and in due course he was
assigned courses in “Wordsworth and His Contemporaries,” in “Restoration and Early
Eighteenth Century,” and in “Eighteenth Century Literature.” He retired in 1943, and
had the satisfaction of seeing his daughter Laurine (whose husband Andrew Bongiorno
would serve on the faculty of the Oberlin English Department for more than forty years)
become an Instructor in Fine Arts at Oberlin and then later at Wellesley College; and his
son Maynard become Professor of English at Yale.
Another young man who had a long career in the Oberlin English department was
Robert Archibald Jelliffe. He arrived in the same year as P.D. Sherman; but his interest
was much more focused. When he was given the rank of Associate Professor, in 1910, it
was “with the understanding that within three years [he] will take additional study
looking to a doctorate degree.” clxxix Jelliffe toiled away for several years at meeting
requirements for the Ph.D. at Yale (where he had been an undergraduate), and finally
succeeded in 1926. clxxx Meanwhile, Wager entrusted to him and Sherman the
superintendency of the courses in composition—Jelliffe‟s professional engagement with
which was reflected in the publication of textbooks, clxxxi as well as occasional articles and
reviews in College English. When he began to offer courses in literature, he dealt first
with Shakespeare and later with Victorian Prose. He even published an undistinguished
novel, entitled (with a nod to Shelley) Shattered Lamp. clxxxii When Charles Wager
retired in 1935, it was Jelliffe who succeeded him as head of the English Department, and
he continued in that role until his own retirement in 1949.
The institution in which these stalwart teachers labored had changed remarkably
in the first quarter of the twentieth century, as the man who had presided over that change
gave way to a successor. In 1927, Oberlin‟s home-grown Henry Churchill King, who
had championed “efficiency” in education and the importance of personal character in
moral development, retired from the college presidency; and the trustees replaced him
with a distinguished literary scholar, Ernest Hatch Wilkins—an authority on Dante,
46

Petrarch, and the Italian sonnet—who was at the time serving as academic dean of the
undergraduate college at the University of Chicago. During King‟s tenure (and largely
owing to his perspicuity), Oberlin had lost some of its Christian Puritanism and some of
its obdurate provincialism, but it had gained enormous wealth and had begun to pride
itself on a certain cosmopolitan veneer. The wealth had come through King‟s assiduous
cultivation of potential benefactors at a time of explosive growth in the popularity of
philanthropy. And though the pre-eminent philanthropists Carnegie and Rockefeller had
contributed to Oberlin‟s expansion, its principal benefactor had been one of its own:
Charles Martin Hall, who had grown rich as a principal stakeholder in the Aluminum
Company of America, had been a graduate of the class of 1885 and served on the college
Board of Trustees from 1905 until his death in 1914.
The institution to which Wilkins came in 1927 had an endowment of $13.5
million. Its College of Arts and Sciences had a student body of 1300 and a faculty of 93
supported by an administrative staff of 22. clxxxiii The campus had benefited from
landscaping by the firm of Frederick Law Olmsted and by buildings erected under the
design of Cass Gilbert. The college had begun to be somewhat selective in its admissions
practices, and the student body was almost evenly divided between males and females.
The vaunted cosmopolitanism was perhaps more prospective than real—48% of its
students were from Ohio; and when the immediately contiguous states were reckoned in,
the figure rose to 65%. Moreover, when the indefatigable P.D. Sherman wrote to the new
president from the hinterlands of Ohio, where in 1928 he himself had been foraging for
prospective students, he complained that too many high school principals continued to
suppose that Oberlin was still narrowly training up preachers and teachers. Sherman
shrewdly urged Wilkins to scatter abroad some new and up to date publicity. clxxxiv
With Wilkins newly at its helm, however, Oberlin was clearly prospering. It had
weathered the changes in higher education better than most comparable colleges, and the
faculty of its English Department was both busy and well-suited to the generally pre-
professional training of late adolescents in which it was engaged. The average class in
composition contained about 20 students; the average class in literature, about 34. clxxxv
The future looked rosy, and Mr. Wager was able to enter his customary plea for
reinforcements in the teaching of English composition and to proclaim about literature
47

that it “is the supreme interpreter of life and of the heart of man.” clxxxvi Neither he nor
Wilkins could have foreseen the struggles that lay ahead in the next two decades, first
with the coming of the Great Depression and then with the ordeal of the Second World
War.
48

V. Growing Pains
When Charles Martin Hall died in December, 1914, unmarried and childless, he
bequeathed from his fabulous wealth to his alma mater an amount worth about twenty
times its annual expenditure. clxxxvii His wealth derived from the commercial application
of a discovery that he had made, under the tutelage of the Professor of Chemistry at
Oberlin College, in the year following his 1885 graduation. clxxxviii What he had
discovered was a process of electrolysis through which the metal aluminum might be
extracted from the ores--such as bauxite--in which it was invariably to be found. As his
fortune had grown, so had his bond with Oberlin College. He was awarded an honorary
M.A. degree in 1893, he was elected to the Board of Trustees in 1904, and he was
awarded an honorary doctorate in 1910.
Hall's legacy, however, did not immediately come into the possession of the
College. It was not until 1927, thirteen years after Hall's death, that Oberlin was able to
claim ownership of the "Charles Martin Hall Endowment Fund." clxxxix When the funds
became available, however, the institution set about putting them to good use. Faculty
salaries were adjusted, cxc a Director of Admissions was employed, student scholarship aid
was increased, and plans for new buildings were launched.
Understandably, the new financial munificence encouraged a kind of euphoria
among the denizens of Oberlin. In the Department of English, for example, a certain
hopefulness was apparent in Professor Wager. With an eye to expanding resources, he
shrewdly informed his dean of a "pressing need": "appointing some man of special
training in composition to offer one or two advanced courses and relieve Professors Mack
and Taft of their sections of Freshman Composition." He went on to explain that "the
adequate sponsoring of Honors students in English makes it necessary that all the senior
members of the department be set free from elementary courses." cxci By 1930, his
petition for an expanded staff had succeeded: in that year, two young instructors were
added. Neither had "special training in composition," although both had master's
degrees--Chester Shaver (who had received his A.B. from Oberlin in 1928), from

Harvard; and Warren Taylor (with an A.B. from Vanderbilt), from Chicago. The two
newcomers would both continue to teach at Oberlin until they reached the statutory age
for retirement, but each at the outset taught only courses in composition--four of them
every term, in fact. And, to be sure, neither Professor Mack nor Professor Taft--nor any
other full professor, for that matter--would thereafter be encumbered with the chore of
teaching Freshman Composition.
As Head of the English Department, Professor Wager had developed a curricular
scheme that was conspicuously hierarchical. And his recruitment policies were designed
to reinforce that hierarchical arrangement. Young instructors were enlisted at relatively
meager salaries to teach several sections of the required freshman composition course.
After a few years of such seasoning, and if they had not departed for greener pastures
elsewhere, they were usually assigned a section of the elementary course in literature--
"an introduction to the aims and methods of literary study" which was quite airily
"intended alike for students who purpose to specialize in English Literature and for those
who feel the need of direction in their general reading." cxcii Meanwhile, the five full
professors taught all of the advanced courses in English Literature, occasionally
swapping them back and forth to accommodate leaves of absence or other needs. The
perceived burden of teaching composition was eventually eased further for the most
senior assistant professors (though only after they had achieved the status of what was
called "permanent appointment") by a grant of permission to offer a single advanced
course in literature.
This comfortable arrangement might have continued indefinitely except for the
coming of the Great Depression that followed the stock market crash of 1929. The
economic corrosion reflected in that event was staggering for the United States as a
whole: "From the top of prosperity in 1929 to the bottom of depression in 1933, GNP
dropped by a total of 29 percent, consumption expenditures by 18 percent, construction
by 78 percent, and investment by an incredible 98 percent. Unemployment rose from 3.2
to 24.9 percent." cxciii Notwithstanding its sumptuous endowment, Oberlin, too, felt the
crushing effects of this dramatic change. Enrollment shrank and investment earnings
dwindled. By 1933, the Board of Trustees was voting to cut tuition charges and had
adopted a plan for reducing salaries. In the following year, President Wilkins lamented
50

that "the actual cost to us per student per year is about $750 in the College of Arts and
Sciences and about $1,000 in the Conservatory of Music, whereas we are now charging
only $225 for a year's tuition in the College and only about $350 in the
Conservatory." cxciv
In these straitened circumstances, the college chose not to inflict the drastic pain
of immediate termination on any continuing member of the faculty, but it nevertheless
found ways to spread its budgetary misery across the entire staff. Thus, in 1933, all
salaries were reduced--the lowest by 11% and the highest by up to 19%, on a graduated
scale. cxcv Even more drastic measures were conceived for the young instructors in the
Department of English, however, none of whom had yet been granted assurance of that
delicious condition of "permanent appointment," and all of whom were potential
candidates for eventual sacrifice in the effort to balance the budget. There were five of
them--and the College Committee on Appointments (in consultation with the President
and with the Head of the English Department) struggled to find a means of juggling their
perceived merits with their individual economic circumstances. In successive meetings
on February 17 and 21, 1933, the committee finally decided on reappointments for the
following year, but on notably different terms: two of the five would suffer no change in
salary, two would receive half salary for half-time teaching, and one would be placed on
unpaid leave for two successive years. All were to be warned that they could not expect
subsequent reappointment. cxcvi
Two of the five were the young instructors that Professor Wager had recruited in
1930. The unpaid leave was inflicted on Chester Shaver, while one of the two reductions
to half-time was aimed at Warren Taylor. On the same day as those actions were taken,
Wager wrote a letter to Taylor, assuring him that "it was I that proposed the solution that
was adopted," and further explaining his rationale: "not because I did not wish to have
Chester remain, but because his circumstances seemed to me more favorable than
yours." cxcvii As it happened, both men were absent from and unpaid by Oberlin for
several of the next few years. Chester Shaver went to Cambridge, Massachusetts and
toiled away at Harvard, which granted him a Ph.D. degree in 1937 for a thesis on The Life
and Works of Henry Glapthorne (a relatively obscure Caroline dramatist and poet).
Warren Taylor returned to Chicago, preparing to work under the eminent literary critic
51

R.S. Crane on a dissertation about Shakespeare's use of rhetorical figures. When he was
well along in that task, he discovered that a rival--a student of G.L. Kittredge at Harvard--
had beaten him to the topic, so he began anew, eventually completing a thesis with the
kindred title Tudor Figures of Rhetoric. Like Shaver, he was awarded the Ph.D. in 1937.
Both returned to Oberlin with their doctorates, and both were put back to work teaching
multiple sections of Freshman Composition. There is some evidence that they were
planning together to write and publish a textbook in composition, cxcviii but nothing came
of the scheme.
Furthermore, though they returned to an Oberlin College from which Professor
Wager had retired as Head of the English Department, his successor, Robert A. Jelliffe,
contentedly kept in place the hierarchical scheme that Wager had devised. Jelliffe had
made one significant curricular change: at the outset of his term, he instituted three
courses in twentieth century literature ("Modern Drama," "Modern Poetry," and "The
Modern Novel")--but they, too, were taught by senior members of the staff.
As economic hard times persisted at Oberlin across the decade of the 1930s, there
were very few changes in the staffing of the English Department, except for Wager's
retirement and the unexpected death of one of those younger instructors. cxcix By the end
of the decade, however, Oberlin's financial distress had relaxed sufficiently that the
Committee on Appointments found itself in the unaccustomed position of learning about
the attempt of another institution to lure away one of the young English instructors who
had been helping to satisfy the institutional appetite for freshman composition. His name
was John Diekhoff, and (having gained a Ph.D. degree and then having edited a scholarly
text published by Oxford University Press under the title of Milton on Himself) he had
received an offer of employment from Queens College. The committee responded by
adopting a resolution aimed at "improving the professional prospects of Mr. Diekhoff to
encourage his remaining here," specifically through an advance in rank and a "broadening
of his field of teaching." The resolution went on to note that "since Mr. Diekhoff's case is
representative of others in the department, the committee inquires what the possibility is
of reallocation of teaching assignments such that junior members of the department will
have more opportunity to share advanced instruction and that elementary instruction will
be shared by the senior members of the staff. The action of the committee will be guided
52

y the prospects indicated for junior members of the staff in the answer to this
question." cc
Nothing came directly of this initiative--Diekhoff himself accepted the offer from
Queens (and thereafter taught at several other institutions before becoming an
administrator at Case Western Reserve University in 1956); but the episode may be
presumed to have had an unintended consequence in the staffing practices of the
Department of English. Rather than abandon its hierarchical approach to the distribution
of teaching assignments, the department developed a more or less systematic program of
what came to be known as "rotating instructorships," whereby young professionals with
new (or prospective) Ph.D. degrees were employed to bear the heavy curricular traffic in
freshman composition while permanent members of the staff offered all the courses in
advanced literature. That such a policy was understood to exist can be inferred from a
mild dispute that was taken to the Committee on Appointments in the year following
Diekhoff's departure. At that later time, another young instructor named Robert Mayo
wrote to the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences (who chaired the committee) to
express some concern about his peremptory dismissal. Mayo was one of those several
graduates of Oberlin (he received his A.B. degree in 1932) who had been brought back to
serve as instructors--chiefly in freshman composition. In his letter to the Dean, he did not
question the fact of his dismissal; rather, he complained that in the absence of a stated
rationale for the program of rotating instructorships of which he was a casualty,
prospective employers might suspect that Oberlin had a darker reason for terminating his
employment. Minutes of the committee record that the Dean read this letter to the
committee at a meeting held on April 9, 1941--and that "after an hour's discussion, no
action was taken." cci Although his request was refused, Mayo successfully landed a job
that led finally to his permanent employment elsewhere. ccii Oberlin was unable or
unwilling to find a way to acknowledge its policy of "rotating instructorships," but the
Department of English blithely employed the unacknowledged policy for another fifteen
years.
During the difficult period through which Oberlin languished in the grip of the
Great Depression, the Department of English made few changes in its curricular
offerings. And those offerings more or less reflected the way in which they had been
53

cobbled together as the number of staff in the department had increased. With respect to
English poetry and prose writings, most historical periods were represented, although
everything before the 14th century was lumped into a course entitled "Early English," and
in the realm of prose fiction a single course in "the English Novel" sufficed. As for
literature written in the United States, one broad survey course called "American
Literature" appears to have been thought adequate. Two separate courses continued to be
offered in Shakespeare--one that purported to cover all of his plays together with those of
Marlowe and several of their contemporaries; and another that entailed "a somewhat
detailed study of selected plays." In 1934, Professor Jelliffe altered the title of his course
on "Tennyson and Browning" to "Victorian Poetry," and in that same year all of
Professor Wager's courses were--along with himself--quietly retired: "Burke" was gone
for good, along with "English Prose Style" and "The Classics in Translation."
Specialization seems to have been little valued--Jelliffe himself, for example,
taught a range of courses from Chaucer and Shakespeare through Victorian Poetry to
Essay Writing; and when he introduced modern literature to the curriculum, he assigned
himself the course in Modern Poetry. On the other hand, the young instructors who had
been affected by the scheme that required them to leave Oberlin for temporary periods--
and, presumably, at some financial sacrifice to themselves--in order to acquire Ph.D.
degrees brought back not only the advanced degree but also the experience of specialized
training. Yet their teaching assignments did not advance accordingly. To be sure, when
the course on Edmund Burke vanished with the retirement of Professor Wager, some
effort seems to have been made to replace it in kind; but rather by sweetening the pot of
seniority than by accommodating the sharpened skills of junior faculty members. Burke
had been a special interest of Wager's, and if none of his colleagues shared that
enthusiasm, they seem to have noted with some envy the terms on which he had offered
the course--not in a classroom and not during the statutory daylight times but rather at his
home during the evening hours. The flavor of just such a special course was thus
retained in the offering of a seminar, the topic of which varied from year with the
interests of the man (never the lone woman who was at least a titular part of the coterie)
to whom it was assigned.
54

The creeping claims of specialization can nevertheless be inferred from the
subject matter of the successive seminars. Thus, in the year after Wager's retirement the
honor of offering a seminar passed to his long-serving colleague Philip Sherman, who
announced as his topic "Subjects in American Literature." In the following year,
Professor Jelliffe took the seminar himself, employing as his general subject "Theories of
Poetry." Then it was the turn of Professor Mack--rank and hierarchy were plainly at
work in assigning responsibility for the course--and he undertook "The School of Taste in
the Eighteenth Century," followed in the next year by Professor Taft on "Social Ideas and
Ideals in Victorian Literature." cciii Each of these successive topics was simply a variation
on--or to some degree an extension of--the subject matter in an established course that the
instructor offered. That changed, however, when in the following year responsibility for
the seminar was given to Andrew Bongiorno: he chose a topic that was distinctive from
the course in "Milton and the Seventeenth Century" that had been entrusted to him when
he had been deemed senior enough for an advanced literature course. cciv Bongiorno's
topic was "Principles of Literary Criticism," with a preponderance of attention devoted to
Aristotle. In choosing this topic, Bongiorno clearly looked to the topic of the dissertation
for which he had received the Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1935: Castelvetro's
Commentary on Aristotle's Poetics. ccv When Chester Shaver was chosen to offer the
seminar in the year following Bongiorno, he selected as his topic "English Prose Style
Since 1500," which also represented a divergence from the single advanced course that
he had been allotted ("Early English")--and may have been a gesture of filial piety toward
Professor Wager, who had once regularly taught such a course. In the subsequent year,
the seminar was again assigned to Professor Sherman, whose earlier "Subjects in
American Literature" was discarded in favor of "Thoreau and the Concord Group"--
another indication that specialization was increasingly afoot.
As the decade of the 1930s waned, Oberlin began to recover its budgetary
confidence; but by then the campus was alive with debate about the threatening events
that were playing out in Europe. The military resurgence of totalitarian regimes in Spain
and Italy and Germany alarmed many students, faculty, and alumni--and some responded
with proclamations of pacification while others favored preparations for the war that
55

loomed. Even the columns of the Oberlin Alumni Magazine reflected that deepening
concern with international affairs.
The curriculum of the English Department, however, was largely impervious to
the cultural tempest that was brewing in the world beyond Oberlin. The subject matter of
its curriculum was fundamentally aloof from the cultural challenges of modernity; and a
student who chose to major in English was strictly forbidden to take more than three
courses--about a quarter of the total required--that dealt with "modern" literature. Even
the descriptions of those courses suggest a fairly timid approach to the subject: at
Oberlin, "modern" literature dealt chiefly with the "trends" and "ideas" in the twentieth
century prior to the Great Depression. ccvi Whatever intellectual guidance the English
major may have received in fashioning a course of study had to come from his or her
academic advisor--who was the Head of the Department--rather than from a published
explanation or even inferentially from information about the advanced courses that were
offered. The advanced courses themselves were a kind of patchwork of historical periods
("Early English" and "Eighteenth Century Literature"), literary genres within historical
settings ("Victorian Prose," "Victorian Poetry"), major writers in their literary and
historical contexts ("Shakespeare; the Drama of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries," "Wordsworth and His Contemporaries," "Chaucer and the Fourteenth
Century," "Milton and the Seventeenth Century"), broad surveys ("American Literature"),
and surveys of literary genres ("Modern Prose," "The English Novel"). Prerequisite for
enrolling in any of these courses was the two-semester introductory course (English 1, 2)
that, as I have noted, was vaguely described as "an introduction to the aims and methods
of literary study" equally appropriate "for students who purpose to specialize in English
literature and for those who feel the need of direction in their general reading." ccvii
War finally came, of course, and it had a profound impact on the student body at
Oberlin. Many of the able-bodied male students were drafted; the college opened its
doors to offer its educational resources to military units, a change which led to
unaccustomed summer-time operation; and events around the globe engaged the attention
of even the least attentive undergraduate. In that maelstrom, members of the Department
of English offered courses in English Composition and its introductory literature course
56

throughout the year to students in mufti and in military uniform alike; and continued to
offer its advanced literary courses to a shrunken body of undergraduate English majors.
In the long view, however, during the decade of the 1940s what was of greater
moment for the Department of English than World War II or its local repercussions was a
succession of changes in staff. The old guard--those men with whom, like a feudal
chieftain, Professor Wager had built his department--reached the age of mandatory
retirement and slipped away from active service. Philip Sherman was pushed out
prematurely in 1942; Jesse Mack left in 1943; and Arthur Taft departed in 1947. In 1948,
Robert Jelliffe alone remained from that coterie of elders. In that year, he was still Head
of the Department, and its sole full professor. When he, too, retired, in 1949, his younger
colleagues staged a procedural rebellion that betrayed an accumulation of frustration and
distrust: they wanted better salaries, swifter promotions, and a bigger piece of the
curricular pie. To achieve their ends, they were determined to act collectively and to
water down the power of the department Head into a rotating chairmanship. They took
their case to the Dean.
57

VI. Coming of Age
In 1949, upon the retirement of Robert Archibald ("Arch") Jelliffe as Professor of
English and head of the department, Acting Dean Howard Robinson notified members of
the Department of English that Andrew Bongiorno would succeed Jelliffe as its chair. In
terms of service Bongiorno was senior to his seven tenured colleagues--though the
conventional term was "permanent appointment" rather than "tenure"--and he had been
promoted to the rank of full professor in the previous year.
Acting more or less in concert, those eight tenured members of the department
had written to the dean asking that the departmental chairmanship be a rotating office.
The dean did not immediately agree to their request, but he described Bongiorno's
appointment as limited, at least initially, to a term of three years, which would simply
postpone the resolution of the matter. Meanwhile, he invited his petitioners to explain
how the department proposed to govern itself under a rotating chairmanship.
In response to the Dean's perplexity, the eight petitioners ccviii developed and, at a
meeting held on November 7, 1949, formally adopted ccix what would come to be known--
at first somewhat officiously and eventually with an undertone of risibility--as the
"Constitution of the Department of English." This document vested power over decisions
concerning curriculum, appointments, and budget in a "Council" ccx to be comprised of the
tenured members of the department--that is, themselves--with one of them to serve as
chairman for the purpose of carrying out their wishes.
The proposed scheme reflected discontent with the authoritarian rule under which
they had labored throughout their service at Oberlin. If in such a power-sharing
arrangement they sought to nurture a spirit of collegiality, however, they were also at
pains to exclude from that privilege their current and future junior colleagues. Indeed,
the final item in their "constitution" provided that "it is necessary at this time…to inform
instructors that there is no possibility of advancement within the next ten years."
Recalling this resolution at a later time, when it had come under fire from the Dean and
58

members of the College Faculty Council, ccxi Andrew Bongiorno acknowledged as its
consequence that the Department of English had been "divided--though not officially--
into a senior staff teaching all the elective courses and some sections of the introductory
course in the study of literature, and a junior staff teaching the remaining sections of the
introductory course and all the sections of English composition." ccxii
In effect, then, a rebellion against the perceived tyranny of the departmental
headship institutionalized another form of tyranny--the invidious and long-standing
(though until then uncodified and somewhat capriciously invoked) practice of employing
"rotating instructorships" in the Department of English. The eight colleagues frankly
hoped by this means to clarify and strengthen their own expectations for improvement in
salary and promotion in rank. In later years they would attempt to mitigate their
discriminatory treatment of junior colleagues by claiming that they had been led to
believe that the College would permit no more than eight tenured positions in the
department. This claim is somewhat baffling, for in fact over the course of the following
decade the department was able to secure permanent appointment for three junior
colleagues who were singled out for special treatment. ccxiii And in the end, whether or not
the policy worked to the benefit of those who had devised it, the cost it exacted was great
in terms of the wound inflicted on the principle of collegiality and in terms of
departmental prestige within the college faculty.
Routinely across the 1950s, this policy entailed the appointment of several young
men (and a very few women) for an initial term of two years, with an option of renewal
for no more than two additional years. The salary offered to each was at the bottom end
of the institutional scale; and to earn that salary the instructor was invariably required
each semester to teach three sections of elementary English composition--by this time
renamed "Techniques of Reading and Writing"--and one section of the "Introduction to
the Study of Literature," a course that was prerequisite to all the advanced courses in
English literature. He or she was not permitted to teach any of those advanced courses.
In employing this system, those eight tenured members of the English Department
no doubt simply saw themselves enjoying in their turn the fruits of a long and arduous
apprenticeship: after all, they had strong memories of having been denied for many years
the privilege of teaching advanced courses--even after completing their doctoral degrees.
59

And all of them remembered toiling away instead at the task of teaching multiple sections
of the basic course in English composition--a course that was both presumed to be slight
in subject matter and known to be extremely demanding of time and attention in the
weekly reading and correcting of a written theme from each enrolled student. On the
other hand, all of them had kept their jobs at Oberlin through that annealing experience--
though now they set about denying that same prospect to the young apprentices who
would follow them.
Meanwhile, in the wake of the cultural cataclysm wrought by World War II,
higher education was undergoing a transformation of which Oberlin College may have
been only dimly aware but from which it manifestly benefited. Abetted by a
governmental program that made financial aid available to military veterans, high school
graduates in rapidly increasing numbers across American saw and sought opportunities
for social and economic betterment through the pursuit of further education. All
institutions of higher learning prospered as a consequence, and prosperity permitted them
a certain refinement of purpose. For example, selective colleges like Oberlin found
themselves more or less deliberately moving away from what Frederick Rudolph
characterized as their "commitment to the all-around boy which their genteel traditions
encouraged" toward the "training of an intellectual elite." ccxiv Rudolph's use of gender-
specific language is telling: few of those institutions were co-educational. Oberlin was,
however, and what was true for the boy was as true for the girl. Oberlin's co-educational
tradition therefore enabled that shift in mission to take place with relative ease. One
measure of its success could be seen in the vocational choices of its graduates: indeed, the
College would take conspicuous pride throughout the rest of the twentieth century in the
number of its students who went on to earn doctoral degrees and to join the
professoriate. ccxv
In 1949, however, despite this looming change in higher education and in Oberlin
itself, those tenured members of the Oberlin English Department probably supposed that
they could staff their rotating instructorships with teachers who (like themselves, at an
earlier time) would enter their chosen profession with no loftier credential than a master's
degree. As professional opportunities beckoned undergraduates, however, and as
graduate students increasingly saw the doctoral degree as vital to their own professional
60

success, more and more of those rotating instructors were hired with the Ph. D. in or very
near at hand. With such credentials, their enforced transience at Oberlin, coupled with
their pedagogical confinement to introductory courses, led them inevitably to resentment
of what Andrew Bongiorno himself would eventually acknowledge to be the
“conspicuous injustice” of their “inferior status.” ccxvi
Over the course of the decade that followed Jelliffe's retirement and the invention
of a departmental consitution, fourteen young scholars came and (with increasing
frequency) went under this invidious system. The cumulative effect of such turnover was
jolting. Thus, in preparation for the opening of the academic year 1958-59, the
department had five of these revolving positions to fill. One of the five who arrived to
occupy those positions was Dewey A. Ganzel, who had just received his Ph. D. from the
University of Chicago. He took Oberlin‟s offer over a comparable offer from the
University of Virginia, somewhat comforted by the assurance of his dissertation advisor
that the circumscribed appointment was not a matter for worry because Oberlin would be
“a good place to move from.” ccxvii Near the end of Ganzel's third year of service,
however, the University of California at Berkeley approached him with the unexpected
offer of a tenure-track position. When he courteously informed Dean Hellmuth about the
offer, the dean consulted the chairman of the Department of English, who at that time
was Andrew Bongiorno. He, in turn, consulted (as the infamous “constitution” required)
his tenured colleagues, who urged that Ganzel‟s temporary appointment be made
permanent. With the support of the dean, then, the College Faculty Council voted in
May, 1961, to recommend that he be granted tenure.
Ganzel‟s tenured colleagues in the Department of English appear to have seen in
this extraordinary gesture an emollient to the policy of “rotating instructorships.”
Furthermore, under some earlier prodding from the dean and College Faculty Council in
1960, they had also taken some modest steps to placate the victims of that policy: on
December 9 of that year they informed the dean that they had approved “in principle the
desirability” of permitting junior faculty members to teach a very small number of
advanced courses and of asking senior faculty to teach one or two sections of an
elementary course. ccxviii Accordingly, early in the following academic year they proposed
to the dean and College Faculty Council that tenure be granted to Carl Peterson and
61

Howard Collins, the other two young scholars who had been hired along with Ganzel in
1958 and were still employed at Oberlin. ccxix
These proposals for tenure were denied, though the blow was softened when both
men were reappointed for a further two years. Explaining the decision, Dean Hellmuth
pointed out to the department that a case for scholarly distinction was by then an essential
first step toward the award of tenure. Neither of the two young scholars had completed
requirements for the Ph. D. degree, however, and neither had been tested by having to
offer an advanced course. The Council of the English Department squirmed under this
rebuff, but in the following semester--as indeed, their prior conciliatory efforts had
provided--they would afford both Peterson and Collins the opportunity to teach a single
advanced course. Collins subsequently resigned, and Peterson (who was awarded the Ph.
D. degree later in the year by the University of Wisconsin) was indeed granted tenure.
But before the tempest abated, Dean Hellmuth had written with devastating bluntness to
Professor Bongiorno, who again was chairing the department:
The English Department at Oberlin [he said] is a dedicated, conscientious, hardworking,
loyal department. But it is not regarded either inside or outside of
Oberlin as one of the outstanding departments of the College. The hope that the
Department‟s reputation can soon be improved to match the best departments at
Oberlin has encouraged the Council and me to seek and expect very high quality
in the younger men who are recommended for tenure. These decisions over the
next few years will determine the quality and reputation of the Department for
the next generation. It was disappointing that each of the two men recommended
for tenure in the fall of 1961…seemed to be, at least at that stage of their
development, not as well qualified as any of the faculty members recommended
for tenure by the other departments of the College. ccxx
Thenceforth, each junior member of the staff was indeed afforded an opportunity to teach
at least one advanced course, and the policy of “rotating instructorships” quietly expired.
It took nearly three weeks for Professor Bongiorno to reply to Dean Hellmuth's
letter of sharp reproof--a delay that Bongiorno attributed to his careful consultation with
his colleagues. When the reply came, however, Dean Hellmuth's pejorative remarks
about the reputation of the English Department were studiously ignored. ccxxi Instead, it
rather timidly and defensively suggested that the department was adapting more quickly
than a casual observer might suppose to its short-term and long-term staffing needs.
62

During that troubled period of "rotating instructorships," the senior members of
the department who had thereby comfortably ensconced themselves in their positions
were moved to make few changes in the curriculum. Following the lead of several other
departments, however, they finally developed a stated rationale for the major in English.
It was first published in the catalogue of courses to be offered in 1952-53:
The major in English is designed to acquaint the student with the thoughts,
feelings, and ideals that have been expressed in English and American literature,
to heighten the student's appreciation of excellence in literature, and to develop
his powers of interpretation and criticism. ccxxii
This statement remained unchanged in the catalogue for fifteen years. ccxxiii In its
emphasis on "thoughts, feelings, and ideals," it contains a watery reflection of Professor
Wager's by then largely discredited conviction that literature "is the supreme interpreter
of life and of the heart of man." ccxxiv Its mention of "interpretation and criticism" at once
acknowledges and blandly obscures the intense debates about the nature of literature that
had raged among practitioners of various methods of reading to which John Crowe
Ransom had famously given the name of "the New Criticism." ccxxv In its generality and
breadth, the statement may be seen more or less self-consciously to have aimed at
affirming the value of liberal education at a time when Oberlin College was joining with
other undergraduate institutions in grappling with a widespread view that higher
education ought to be practical and vocational in nature. Indeed, a statement on "the
liberal arts education," which was appearing annually as part of the introductory section
of the college catalogue, pointed proudly (if somewhat defensively) to the vocational
success of Oberlin graduates; ccxxvi but the Department of English was content with a
rather smug profession of faith in itself and its curriculum.
That hearty expression of faith actually masked some tremors of doubt and
disagreement. Courses in the literature of modernity were offered, for example, but
English majors were warned against taking more than one of them. Some courses were
organized around the importance of genre ("The English Novel"; "Victorian Poetry"),
others around the importance of historical period ("Chaucer and the Middle Ages,"
"Eighteenth Century Literature"). Course descriptions furnished glimpses of diverse
critical perspectives on the part of those senior professors: thus, Warren Taylor surveyed
American literature by examining "major works in which the American consciousness of
63

values has gained expression," while Andrew Bongiorno grounded his "Principles of
Literary Criticism" in "a thorough study of Aristotle's Poetics and Rhetoric," and Chester
Shaver modestly concerned himself with "trends in English poetry" when he dealt with
"Wordsworth and His Contemporaries."
Such differences were, in fact, of long standing--and in later years would grow
both in variety and in fractiousness. Back in 1939, Robert Archibald Jelliffe himself had
seized an opportunity to set down some of his own thoughts on the teaching of English
literature, by transforming the drab requirement of an annual report on the year's work
into a prospectus for the following decade. He had begun by remarking that the four full
professors who were then responsible for the study of English literature (and whose
prospective retirements were the cause of his ruminations) approached the topic in four
different ways--one concerned with philosophy, another with "mode of life and manners,"
another with biography and history, and himself with "literature as a revelation and
interpretation of life." ccxxvii He thought this variety "altogether admirable," and he
wanted to see it perpetuated in their successors. To achieve that end, he urged a
deliberate nurturing of the most able young instructors and a systematic weeding out of
weak ones.
Ironically, Jelliffe's brief essay can be read as anticipating the destructive effect of
that later policy which denied a future at Oberlin to all young instructors. But it also
furnished an unintended glimpse into the conceptual vagueness on which the study of
literature had been and would continue to be based, not just at Oberlin but throughout the
profession. That wider problem may be discerned in a lengthy statement about the "aims
of literary study" published by PMLA in 1938. ccxxviii It was noted more trenchantly a
decade later by Stanley Edgar Hyman, who wondered at "the organized use of non-
literary techniques and bodies of knowledge to obtain insights into literature." ccxxix All of
the approaches that Jelliffe had described, after all, relied on methodologies that were
devised by or for other academic disciplines; and each to some extent treated literary
works as specimens for demonstrating the viability of a borrowed methodology.
It is not surprising, then, that when members of the English Department drafted
the statement about the major that they inserted into the catalogue in 1952, they (like
Jelliffe before them) appear to have been content to obscure--or at least to omit mention
64

of--their differences. One act of housekeeping, however, is worthy of remark: in the year
after they published their statement about the major, members of the department quietly
tidied up the way in which the curriculum was arranged by reordering and renumbering
the courses that they offered (so that, for example, the course on Chaucer had a lower
number than the course on Shakespeare).
After examining the interplay between theories of literary criticism and the study
of literature, Wallace Martin has suggested that "the 1950s appear to mark the end of an
epoch that commenced with the founding of English studies." ccxxx If members of the
English Department at Oberlin sensed such a momentous change in the offing, they were
content for the moment to preserve the old order. Half a century on, their approach to the
teaching of English literature seems to have been as defiantly (if individualistically)
complacent as their approach to staffing was stultifying.
Nevertheless, change was upon them. And to their credit, however they may have
resented it, they appear to have taken to heart the Dean's rueful hope that they might seek
to improve the reputation of the department. Whether intentionally or unintentionally,
the granting of tenure to Dewey Ganzel may be seen as the crucial event in bringing
about several changes that would implicitly address that problem. Ganzel, for example,
would go on to spearhead the College Faculty decision in 1967 to abolish English
Composition as a requirement for graduation at Oberlin--an action that promised for a
while to end the longstanding tension between the teaching of composition and the
teaching of literature. ccxxxi He was then made Chairman of the English Department in
1970. By that time, a majority of those eight querulous colleagues who had made
common cause together on the retirement of “Arch” Jelliffe were themselves retired. It
was, significantly, Ganzel who fully implemented the principle of collegiality that lay
inchoately behind their own quaint “constitution”: in 1970, the junior and senior
members of the staff shared equally in the teaching of introductory and advanced courses;
and a separate departmental “Council” had ceased to exist.
65

WORKS CONSULTED
Note: This study relies heavily on several documents that are deposited in the Oberlin
College Archives. Each documentary source is identified in the end-notes, but none are
cited individually in the following list of published materials.
Alexander, Jennifer K. The Meanings of Efficiency. Ph. D. dissertation, University of
Washington, 1996.
Ambrose, Stephen E., ed. A Wisconsin Boy in Dixie: Civil War Letters of James K.
Newton. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961; repr. 1989.
Andresen, Julie Tetel. Linguistics in America, 1769-1924. London: Routledge, 1990.
Annual Reports of the President and Treasurer of Oberlin College. Issued each year by
Oberlin College, beginning in 1879.
Applebee, Arthur N. Tradition and Reform in the Teaching of English: A History.
Urbana IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1974.
Arnold, Matthew. Mixed Essays. London: John Murray, 1903.
Barnard, John. From Evangelicalism to Progressivism at Oberlin College, 1866-1917.
Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1969.
Bascom, John. Philosophy of English Literature, a Course of Lectures Delivered in the
Lowell Institute. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1884.
Bates, Ernest Sutherland. "Smith, Harry James," in Dictionary of American Biography,
vol. 17. New York: Scribners, [1937].
Berlin, James A. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-
1985. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987.
Bergonzi, Bernard. Exploding English: Criticism, Theory, Culture. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1990.
Bongiorno, Andrew. Castelvetro on the Art of Poetry: An Abridged Translation of
Lodovico Castelvetro's Poetica d'Aristotele Vulgarizzata et Sposta. Binghamton
NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1984.
Brooke, Stopford A. Primer of English Literature. London: Macmillan, 1876.
Bulmer, Martin. The Chicago School of Sociology: Institutionalization, Diversity, and
the Rise of Sociological Research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
66

Burke, W. J., and Will D. Howe, eds. American Authors and Books, 1640 to the Present
Day. New York: Crown, [1962].
Cashman, Sean Dennis. America in the Gilded Age: From the Death of Lincoln to the
Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. New York: New York University Press, 1984.
Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Oberlin College, for the College Year, 1887-8.
Oberlin: Oberlin College.
Cohen, Paul E. "Barrett Wendell and the Harvard Literary Revival," New England
Quarterly 52 (1979: 483-499.
Coser, Lewis A. Masters of Sociological Thought. 2nd ed. Prospect Heights, IL:
Waveland, 1977.
Court, Franklin E. Institutionalizing English Literature: The Culture and Politics of
Literary Study, 1750-1900. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992.
____________. The Scottish Connection: The Rise of English Literary Study in Early
America. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001.
Coyle, William, ed. Ohio Authors and Their Books. Cleveland: World, [1962].
Craig, Norman C. "Charles Martin Hall--the Young Man, His Mentor, and His Metal,"
Journal of Chemical Education 63 (1986): 557-59.
Day, Henry Noble. An Introduction to the Study of English Literature; Comprising
Representative Masterpieces in Poetry and Prose. New York: Scribner, 1869.
Digest of Decisions on the Constitution, Rules and Regulations of the Sons of Veterans,
U.S.A. Indianapolis: William B. Burford, 1890.
Directory of American Scholars. 1st (1957) and subsequent eds. New York: R. R.
Bowker.
Dumenil, Lynn. Freemasonry and American Culture, 1880-1930. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1984.
Eliot, Charles W. Education for Efficiency, and The New Definition of the Cultivated
Man. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, [1909].
Erickson, Lee. Robert Browning: His Poetry and His Audiences. Ithaca NY: Cornell
University Press, 1984.
Fletcher, Robert Samuel. A History of Oberlin College from its Foundation Through the
Civil War. Oberlin: Oberlin College, 1943.
67

Foster, R. F. W. B. Yeats: A Life. Vol. 2: The Arch-Poet, 1915-1939. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003.
Francis, Mark. Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2007.
Frederick, Marcia Stanley, ed. Baccalaureate Sources of Ph. D.s: Rankings According to
Institution of Origin. Lancaster PA: Office of Institutional Research, Franklin and
Marshall College, 1982.
Frohnen, Bruce. Virtue and the Promise of Conservatism: The Legacy of Burke and
Tocqueville. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1993.
Fuess, Claude Moore. Amherst, the Story of a New England College. Boston: Little,
Brown, 1935.
Gardner, John. Grendel. New York: Knopf, 1971.
Garraty, John A., and Mark C. Carnes, eds. American National Biography. 24 vols.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Glenn, Cheryl; Margaret M. Lyday; and Wendy B. Sharer, eds. Rhetorical Education in
America. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004.
Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1987.
____________, and Michael Warner, eds. The Origins of Literary Studies in America: A
Documentary Anthology. New York and London: Routledge, 1989.
Harper, William Rainey. The Prospects of the Small College. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1900.
Heymann, C. David. American Aristocracy: The Lives and Times of James Russell, Amy,
and Robert Lowell. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980.
Honan, Park. Matthew Arnold: A Life. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981.
House, E. H. "The Martyrdom of an Empire," Atlantic Monthly 47 (May, 1881): 610-
623.
Hunt, Lester H. Character and Culture. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997.
Hyman, Stanley Edgar. The Armed Vision: A Study in the Methods of Modern Literary
Criticism. New York: Vintage, 1948.
68

Janowitz, Morris, ed. W. I. Thomas on Social Organization and Social Personality:
Selected Papers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.
Jelliffe, Robert Archibald. A Handbook of Exposition. New York: Macmillan, 1914.
Jelliffe, R[obert] A[rchibald]. Shattered Lamp: A Novel. Boston: Marshall Jones, 1935.
____________. Types of Exposition: Form, Style, and Substance. New York: Farrar and
Rinehart, [1937].
Johnson, Nan. Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in North America. Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1991.
Kames, [Lord] Henry Home. An Abridgement of the Elements of Criticism, ed. John
Frost. Philadelphia: Towar, J. & D. M. Hogan, 1831.
Keeler, Harriet L. The Life of Adelia A. Field Johnston. [Cleveland: Britton Publishing
Co., ca. 1912.]
Kelley, Brooks Mather. Yale: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974.
Kitzhaber, Albert R. Rhetoric in American Colleges. Dallas: Southern Methodist
University Press, 1990.
Kliebard, Herbert M. The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893-1958. New York
and London: Routledge Falmer, 2004.
Kuhn, Madison. Michigan State: The First Hundred Years. [East Lansing:] Michigan
State University Press, 1955.
Kupperman, Joel J. Character. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Lampson, Ruth Murdoch. In Other Days: A Golden Age Remembered. Oberlin: Press of
the Times, 1961.
Levine, David O. The American College and the Culture of Aspiration, 1915-1940.
Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1986.
Lovett, Robert Morss. All Our Years: The Autobiography of Robert Morss Lovett. New
York: Viking, 1948.
Lucas, Christopher J. American Higher Education: A History. New York: St. Martin's,
1994.
Machann, Clinton. Matthew Arnold: A Literary Life. New York: St. Martin's, 1998.
69

McElvaine, Robert S. The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941. New York: Times
Books, 1984.
McKinnon, Christine. Character, Virtue Theories, and the Vices. Peterborough, Canada:
Broadview, 1999.
McMurtry, Jo. English Language, English Literature: The Creation of an Academic
Discipline. Hamden CT: Shoestring Press, 1985.
Manolescu, Beth Innocenti. "Traditions of Rhetoric, Criticism, and Argument in Kames's
Elements of Criticism," Rhetoric Review 22 (2003): 225-242.
Marsden, George M. The Soul of the American University: From Protestant
Establishment to Established Nonbelief. New York: Oxford University Press,
1994.
Martin, Wallace. "Criticism and the Academy," in A. Walton Litz, Louis Menand, and
Lawrence Rainey, eds., The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 7:
Modernism and the New Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000): 269-321.
Miller, Thomas P. The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the
British Cultural Provinces. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997.
Montgomery, James Riley; Stanley J. Folmsbee; and Lee Seifert Greene, To Foster
Knowledge: A History of the University of Tennessee, 1794-1970. Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, 1984.
Moody, William Vaughn, and Robert Morss Lovett. A History of English Literature.
New York: Scribner's, 1909.
Moran, Michael G., ed. Eighteenth-century British and American Rhetorics and
Rhetoricians: Critical Studies and Sources. Westport CT: Greenwood, 1994.
More, [Sir] Thomas. The Apologye of Syr Thomas More, Knight, ed. Arthur Irving Taft.
London: Early English Text Society [O. S. 180], 1930.
Moyer, Harvey. "Results Derived From the Study of Plagiarism in General, & the
Charge Against Prof. Newton." Undated pamphlet in the Special Collections of
the Oberlin College Library.
Newton, James King. "Japanese Treaty-Revision: Its Necessity and Our Responsibility
Therefor," Bibliotheca Sacra 44 (Jan., 1887): 46-70.
"Notes," in The Nation 62 (April 9, 1896): 289.
70

Oberlin Alumni Magazine. Oberlin College: for the Alumni Association, vols. I (1904) et
seq.
Oberlin College Alumni Catalogue 1833-1936. Oberlin: Oberlin College, 1937.
Oberlin College Archives. [Various documents, as cited in Notes.]
Oberlin College Bulletin. Issued annually, 1900-1984.
Oberlin College. Course Catalogue. [Issued annually, under various titles, 1834present.]
The Oberlin News. Vols. I (1900) et seq.
Oberlin News-Tribune. Vols. I (1930) et seq.
The Oberlin Review. Vols. I (April 1, 1874) et seq.
Ohmann, Richard. English in America: A Radical View of the Profession. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1976.
Palmer, D. J. The Rise of English Studies: An Account of the Study of English Language
and Literature From Its Origins to the Making of the Oxford English School.
London: Oxford University Press (for the University of Hull), 1965.
Parker, William R[iley], "The MLA, 1883-1953," PMLA 68.4, part 2: Supplement
(1953): 3-39.
____________."Where Do English Departments Come From?," College English 28
(1967): 339-351.
Paulsen, Friedrich. The German Universities: Their Character and Historical
Development, tr. Edward D. Perry. New York: Macmillan, 1895.
Percival, Milton Oswin. Specimens of Exposition and Argument. New York: Macmillan,
1908.
Ransom, John. The New Criticism. Norfolk CT: New Directions, 1941.
Reuben, Julie A. The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and
the Marginalization of Morality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Rokicky, Catherine M. James Monroe: Oberlin's Christian Statesman and Reformer,
1821-1898. Kent OH: Kent State University Press, 2002.
71

Rudolph, Frederick. The American College and University: A History. New York:
Knopf, 1968.
Ryals, Clyde de L. The Life of Robert Browning: A Critical Biography. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1993.
Schelling, Felix E. "The Fifth Annual Convention of the Modern Language Association
of America," Modern Language Notes 3 (Feb., 1888): 38-41.
Scholes, Robert. The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline.
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998.
Smith, Harry James. Letters of Harry James Smith. Boston and New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 1919.
Smith, Timothy L. "Righteousness and Hope: Christian Holiness and the Millenial
Vision in America, 1800-1900," American Quarterly 31 (1979): 21-45.
Standley, Fred L. Stopford Brooke. New York: Twayne, 1972.
"Statement of the Committee of Twenty-Four," PMLA 53, Supplement (1938): 1367-
1371.
Streeter, Robert E. One in Spirit: A Retrospective View of the University of Chicago on
the Occasion of Its Centennial. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Thomas, Calvin. "The Fourth Convention of the Modern Language Ass'n.," Modern
Language Notes 2 (Feb., 1887): 25-26.
Thomas, William Isaac. "Life History," in Paul J. Baker, ed., "The Life Histories of W. I.
Thomas and Robert E. Park," American Journal of Sociology 79 (1973): 246-
250.
____________. Sex and Society: Studies in the Social Psychology of Sex. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1907.
Turner, Mark. Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Tymeson, Mildred McClary. The Two Towers: The Story of Worcester Tech, 1865-1965
Worcester, MA: 1965.
Vanderbilt, Kermit. American Literature and the Academy: The Roots, Growth, and
Maturity of a Profession. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986.
72

Wager, C[harles] H[enry] A[dams]. The Seege of Troye; Edited From Ms. Harl. 525,
with Introd., Notes, and Glossaries. New York: Macmillan, 1899.
____________. To Whom It May Concern. 2 vols. Boston: Marshall Jones, 1936, 1938.
Whately, Richard. Elements of Rhetoric: Comprising the Substance of the Article in the
Encyclopaedia Metropolitana. London: John Murray, 1828.
Winchester, Simon. The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English
Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
73

i
Records of the meetings of the faculty are preserved on microfilm in the Oberlin College
Archives, together with a trove of valuable material upon which I have been able to draw
in the preparation of this essay. Roland Baumann and the members of his staff have been
extraordinarily helpful, both with the provision of that material and with the sharing of
knowledge about the collection and about the history of the institution.
ii
"Sons of the Veterans of the Civil War" had been founded in 1881 by and to perpetuate
the principles of the Grand Army of the Republic, a very influential fraternal body for
membership in which only veterans of the Union Army in the Civil War were eligible
and which had drawn upon the model of freemasonry for its organization. (See, for
example, the pamphlet entitled Digest of Decisions on the Constitution, Rules and
Regulations of the Sons of Veterans, U.S.A. [Indianapolis: Wm. B. Burford, 1890].) For
the widespread popularity at that time of secret fraternal organizations, see Lynn
Dumenil, Freemasonry and American Culture, 1880-1930 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1984).
iii
In that year, he included "History and English Literature" along with Pure
Mathematics, Elocution and Rhetoric, and Economics and Political Science as desirable
additions to the curriculum. See his Annual Report of the President for 1880, published
by Oberlin College, p. 8.
iv
See Minutes for May 18.
v
See, for example, the biographical sketch furnished by the Oberlin College Archives,
and available online at
vi
This letter, dated June 19, 1888 from "Yankton, Dak.," is among the Fairchild papers in
the Oberlin College Archives. An earlier letter from Bradley in the same collection,
dated May 22, 1888, acknowledges receipt of Fairchild's letter of appointment and
promises an eventual but not an immediate decision.
vii
The words quoted are from a "prospectus" drawn up by the founders and printed in
various contemporary newspapers. See Robert Samuel Fletcher, A History of Oberlin
College From Its Foundation Through the Civil War, esp. pp. 118-120.
viii
History, p. 689.
ix
They were members of what was then called the "Department of Philosophy and Arts,"
to distinguish it from the School of Theology, the Conservatory of Music, and the
Preparatory Department (later the Academy). For the faculty roster, see the Catalogue of
the Officers and Students of Oberlin College, for the College Year, 1887-8. The
educational background of members of the faculty can be found, for example, in the
Oberlin College Alumni Catalogue 1833-1936 (published by the College at Oberlin on
March 1, 1937).
x
His name was Percy Bentley Burnet.
xi
The American College and University: A History (New York: Knopf, 1968), p. 347.
xii
The German Universities: Their Character and Historical Development, tr. Edward D.
Perry (New York: Macmillan, 1895), p. 62.
xiii
See Fletcher, History, esp. pp. 364-72; and 694ff.
xiv
See Rudolph, American College, esp. pp. 290-306.

xv
See John Barnard, From Evangelicalism to Progressivism at Oberlin College, 1866-
1917 (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1969), pp. 44ff.
xvi
See his "Introduction" to Paulsen, German Universities, p. xxi.
xvii
See the Biographical Sketch of Bradley in the Oberlin College Archives, and the
notice of his death in the Oberlin Alumni Magazine 36:3 (December, 1939), p. 7.
xviii
See Minutes of the regular meeting held on April 18, 1888.
xix
See Mildred McClary Tymeson, The Two Towers: The Story of Worcester Tech, 1865-
1965 (Worcester, Mass.: 1965), esp. pp. 52 and 75; and, for a photo of Smith, p. 53.
xx
See the Minutes of the special meeting held on August 8, 1889.
xxi
When informed that a laboratory was to be built for a professor of agriculture,
MacEwan was reputed to have described it as a "ten-thousand dollar building for a ten
cent professor." See Madison Kuhn, Michigan State: the First Hundred Years ([East
Lansing:] Michigan State University Press, 1955), p. 175. A decade later, MacEwan
would become Professor of English at Kalamazoo College, where he remained until his
death. I am grateful for this information to Sarah Roberts, Assistant Archivist at
Michigan State University. The ad hoc committee probably had information about
MacEwan (both his qualifications and his tribulations) from George T. Fairchild, brother
of Oberlin's president and MacEwan's predecessor. See Kuhn, esp. pp. 94-96.
xxii
Biographical information about Thomas is from Lewis A. Coser, Masters of
Sociological Thought, 2 nd ed. (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland, 1977), pp. 530-36.
xxiii
Thomas, "Life History," ed. Paul J. Baker, American Journal of Sociology 79 (1973),
p. 246.
xxiv
American College, p. 138.
xxv
See James Riley Montgomery, Stanley J. Folmsbee, and Lee Seifert Greene, To Foster
Knowledge: A History of the University of Tennessee, 1794-1970 (Knoxville: University
of Tennessee Press, 1984), pp. 96, 119.
xxvi
From minutes of a special faculty meeting held on August 8, 1889.
xxvii
History, p. 692. See also Barnard, From Evangelicalism, pp. 12-13.
xxviii
The presidential succession was in fact considerably fraught at this juncture in
Oberlin's history. See, e.g., Barnard, pp. 69-71.
xxix
See Fletcher, History, esp. pp. 899-902.
xxx
For biographical information about Monroe, see Fletcher (esp. p. 390); Barnard, From
Evangelicalism (esp. pp. 53-55); and Catherine M. Rokicky, James Monroe: Oberlin's
Christian Statesman and Reformer, 1821-1898 (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2002),
esp. pp. 171-197. For a wider view of the social gospel movement in higher education
(with which Monroe and other Oberlin leaders were in sympathy), see George M.
Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to
Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), especially chapter 10.
xxxi
Fletcher, History, p. 194. Two years later, Birney would become Secrtary of the
Anti-Slavery Society.
xxxii
Thome was one of the "Lane rebels" (see Fletcher, History, p. 183 et passim), and
after leaving the faculty would go on to serve as a member of the Oberlin Board of
Trustees from 1851 to 1873. See also Fletcher, p. 495.
xxxiii
"Introduction" to Elements of Rhetoric, p. 6.
75

xxxiv Franklin E. Court, Institutionalizing English Literature: the Culture and Politics of
Literary Study, 1750-1900 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 18.
xxxv For a treatment of the relationship among these three men, see Court,
Institutionalizing, esp. pp. 17-38.
xxxvi The quotation is taken from an abridged version of Kames's work, because just such
an abridgement (in this case by John Frost, Philadelphia [1831]) is likely to have been
used at Oberlin. See Chapter 25, "Standard of Taste," p. 298.
xxxvii It is also significant that when Harvard finally got around to filling the position in
1806, its first incumbent was John Quincy Adams, son of the second President of the
United States who would himself later become the sixth President.
xxxviii Bascom, for example, enunciated "a general truth, that moral influences, the ethical
tone of sentiment, the spiritually perceptive powers are pre-eminently united to works of
literary art" (p. 5); Day tried to make what was known about linguistic history fit the
biblical account of the Tower of Babel (see pp. 1ff), and offered Milton's Paradise Lost
as the "one poem in our literature which challenges rivalry with the greatest epics of the
world's history" (p. 520).
xxxix Arnold later published his review, entitled "A Guide to English Literature," in Mixed
Essays (London: John Murray, 1903), pp. 180-204. For the self-mockery, see, for
example, Clinton Machann, Matthew Arnold: A Literary Life, p. 143.
xl Primer, p. 167.
xli See the Oberlin Review, vol. 12 (January 19, 1884). For an account of Arnold's
speaking tour, see Park Honan, Matthew Arnold: A Life (NewYork: McGraw-Hill, 1981),
esp. pp. 393-408. Honan writes that Arnold "asked for whisky" at Oberlin (p. 405),
which may to some degree explain the Review reporter's evasive qualms about his
"manners."
xlii For a discussion of Arnold's views on this matter, see, e.g., Honan, Life, p. 415.
xliii Vol. 17 (April 1, 1890).
xliv See Julie Tetel Andresen, Linguistics in America 1769-1924 (London: Routledge,
1990), p. 13. Although Andresen argues that American linguists were much less narrow
in their conception of linguistics than German scholars, she concedes the influence
exerted through this "institutionalization" within the widely-admired German
universities. Furthermore, though the terms "philology" and "linguistics" are by no
means synonymous (and protracted ideological skirmishes have been fought in the name
of connotative distinctions between the two), both reflect a broad area of growing
scholarly activity during the nineteenth century. The importance of German linguistic
study had been impressed upon the English-speaking world by the publication of The
Science of Language by Max Müller in 1861-63. See William Riley Parker, "Where Do
English Departments Come From?," College English 28 (1967), p. 345.
xlv See Coser, Masters, p. 532.
xlvi Coser relates Thomas's interest in folklore to the delight that he had taken as a young
man in discovering some of the folkways of his native Tennessee: see Masters, pp. 531-
32.
xlvii The Meaning of Everything, p. 43.
xlviii In a letter (speculatively dated April 8, 1896) to his erstwhile colleague, Wilfred
Cressy, Thomas offered his opinion that Oberlin "is going to pieces, or is going to have a
76

evival of religious fanaticism." A few weeks earlier (in a letter dated 29 February) he
had told Cressy that "I could to this day not say under oath to what degree I was or was
not a hypocrite in Oberlin." Both letters are in the Oberlin College Archives.
xlix
Lists of titles for the locally prestigious Thursday Lectures were occasionally
appended to faculty minutes. On March 20, 1890, Thomas lectured on "Some Historical
Fallacies," and on June 18, 1891, he spoke on "Browning."
l
See "Life History," p. 247.
li
The epithet is crude; Spencer was an intellectually complex figure. See Mark Francis,
Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2007). In this admirably nuanced study, Francis suggests that Spencer "sensed the
coming of the modern world and through his writings transmitted this excitement to
others" (p. 8)--among them, no doubt, William Isaac Thomas.
lii
The vote was taken on 8 March, 1871, according to minutes on microfilm in the
Oberlin College Archives. Prior to that, some students had been granted special
permission to substitute one or the other language for some specified course, usually in
Latin or Greek.
liii
See Rudolph, American College, esp. pp. 112ff.
liv
As Kuhn notes, for example, President Fairchild's brother George, newly appointed
Professor of English Literature at the State Agricultural College in Michigan, "introduced
French [into the curriculum there] in 1866 after persuading the faculty that it should be
required of every student because potential scientists must not only write effectively but
must keep abreast of foreign research." See Michigan State, pp. 94-95.
lv
A fascinating record of his service can be found in Stephen E. Ambrose, ed., A
Wisconsin Boy in Dixie: Civil War letters of James K. Newton (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1961; repr. 1989).
lvi
For an account of this meeting, see Modern Language Notes 2 (1887), pp. 25-26.
lvii
See William R. Parker, "The MLA, 1883-1953," PMLA 68.4, part 2: Supplement
(1953), esp. pp. 3-29.
lviii
Felix E. Schelling, in "The Fifth Annual Convention of the Modern Language
Association of America," Modern Language Notes 3 (1888), p. 39, quoting William
Pepper, Provost of the (host) University of Pennsylvania.
lix
C. David Heymann, American Aristocracy: The Lives and Times of James Russell,
Amy, and Robert Lowell (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980), p. 107.
lx
See Parker, "MLA," p. 12n.
lxi
Newton's story is a lamentable case study in scholarly impropriety. It also attests to the
professional honor as well as the personal solicitude of his colleagues at Oberlin. In
January, 1887, he published an essay on "Japanese Treaty-Revision: Its Necessity and
Our Responsibility Therefor" in Bibliotheca Sacra, a journal edited by Oberlin Professor
George Frederick Wright. He was accused of employing--without proper attributioninformation
from an essay on "The Martyrdom of an Empire," published in the Atlantic
Monthly of May, 1881, by E. H. House. Back in Oberlin, it was suggested by way of
mitigation of Newton's offense that he had first written the essay for oral delivery as a
"Thursday lecture"--that important showcase for local talent--and that he had neglected to
revise it fastidiously for publication. House's charge was irrefutable, however, and the
editors of Bibliotheca Sacra published an apology (see Vol. 45 [April, 1888], p. 384.)
77

President Fairchild wrote Newton a touching letter of regret and personal esteem on April
2, 1888, at the time of Newton's resignation. Newton himself went on to secure a
teaching position at Pomona College, but died in 1892 and was buried in California.
Faculty deliberations on the matter are recorded in the official minutes. Fairchild's letter
may be found among his personal papers in the Oberlin College Archives. A spirited
defense of Newton was published as a pamphlet, entitled "Results Derived From the
Study of Plagiarism in General, & the Charge Against Prof. Newton," by a student,
Harvey Moyer. Many years later, Yeijiro Ono, a college alumnus (1887) who had been a
student of Professor Newton's established a scholarship prize fund in honor and in
memory of Newton. Ironically, the prize was (and still is) to be awarded "to the [student]
writer of the best essay on oriental subjects that will promote the better understanding
between the western and eastern nations." See Oberlin Alumni Magazine 15 (January,
1919), p. 112.
lxii The approval was voted on October 14, 1890.
lxiii See the Catalogue…of Oberlin College for the College Year, 1888-9, p. 87.
lxiv Apropos of the inclusion of Spenser, for example, it is noteworthy that Stopford
Brooke had called the Faerie Queene "the first great ideal poem that England had
produced" (Primer, p. 115) and had found in it "almost the whole spirit of the
Renaissance under Elizabeth, except its coarser and baser elements" (p. 114).
lxv In support of this assertion, Kermit Vanderbilt, in American Literature and the
Academy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), makes use of an
unpublished study on this topic by John S. Lewis. (See esp. pp. 109-111.)
lxvi See Clyde deL. Ryals, The Life of Robert Browning: A Critical Biography (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1998), p. 250.
lxvii See p. 248.
lxviii Lee Erickson, Robert Browning: His Poetry and His Audiences (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1984), pp. 16-17.
lxix By 1892, Thomas specified The Ring and the Book for his course on Browning. That
long and remarkable work displays Browning at his most ambiguous and enigmatic with
respect to moral certitude and narrative veracity--a hint, surely, of the intellectual
restlessness which would soon prompt Thomas to leave Oberlin.
lxx See Catalogue…for the Year 1892-93, p. 79.
lxxi On April 17, 1893, the faculty formally granted him a leave of absence from April 25
to 29 for this stated purpose!
lxxii See "Life History," p. 247. This shift in his interests is also reflected both in the
comparativist focus of the new courses he was developing at Oberlin ("Epic Poetry" and
"The Drama") and in the course descriptions he wrote for them--including the mention of
"collection of sociological data from the works read." See Catalogue…for the Year
1892-93, p. 79.
lxxiii These reports were dated February 28, 1894, and February 27, 1895.
lxxiv Some indication of this struggle may be found in a series of letters from Thomas to
the college Treasurer between 1894 and 1907. Writing to President Henry Churchill
King on February 23, 1907, Thomas offered assurances that royalties from the sale of his
recently-published book (Sex and Society) would enable him finally to discharge this
obligation. These letters are held by the Oberlin College Archives.
78

lxxv
Biographical information about Cressy may be found in his obituary, published in the
Oberlin News on February 13, 1900.
lxxvi
For a brief description of this phenomenon (which featured the famous march of
"Coxey's Army" from Ohio to Washington, D.C.), see Sean Dennis Cashman, America in
the Gilded Age: From the Death of Lincoln to the Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New
York: New York University Press, 1984), esp. pp. 242-46.
lxxvii
See Rudolph's informative chapter on "Financing the Colleges" in American College
(pp. 177-200). Even Charles William Eliot, in his famous inaugural address as President
of Harvard, had remarked that "luxury and learning are ill bed-fellows" (quoted on p.
196). Educational philanthropy was rare, and balancing the books was always difficult:
as Rudolph trenchantly notes, for most colleges "the choice was a simple one: the
colleges could either pay their professors to teach or they would pay their students to
enroll" (p. 197), and in order to stay open they chose the latter course.
lxxviii
See "Courses of Instruction" in the Catalogue…1894-95. pp. 90-95.
lxxix
Tisdel (1869-1954) went on to serve as president of the University of Wyoming
(1904-1908) and as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of
Missouri (1921-1939).
lxxx
This letter is preserved in the Oberlin College Archives.
lxxxi
Thomas died in New York in 1947. To its credit, the American Sociological Society
elected him to its presidency in 1926; he also taught occasionally at the New School for
Social Research in New York, and in his seventy-third year held a visiting appointment at
Harvard. For an account of the episode and its aftermath, see Coser.
lxxxii
The text book, entitled The Iliad of Homer, Books I, VI, XXII, XXIV, was issued by
Scott, Foresman. For biographical information about Moody, see John A. Garraty and
Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1999).
lxxxiii
See Oberlin College Annual Reports 1895 (Oberlin, 1896), p. 39.
lxxxiv
For at least a decade before Tisdel's appointment, instruction in rhetoric at Oberlin
had been in the hands of William Benton Chamberlain, whose title embraced both
Elocution and Rhetoric. He had been employed first in the Conservatory of Music
because of his interest in the human voice, and then in the Theological Seminary for the
training of preachers. As a volunteer, he directed the choir of the First Church in Oberlin
for several years--and he left Oberlin reluctantly, in order to help found a school of sacred
music at the University of Chicago. (See "In Memoriam: William Benton Chamberlain,
1847-1903," a pamphlet privately printed at his death.)
lxxxv
"Where Did English Come From?," p. 347.
lxxxvi
The new president was the Rev. John Henry Barrows. See Annual Reports (1900),
pp. 8-9. As noted below, he did manage to appoint two persons to the department, but
one of those "men" was female--Alice H. Luce.
lxxxvii
This later letter, from the collection in the Oberlin College Archives, is undated by
Thomas, but a penciled note offers April 8, 1896 as a likely date. Thomas identifies
Henry Churchill King as Cressy's leading antagonist with regard to his religious behavior.
Ironically, King delivered Cressy's eulogy--and also succeeded to Oberlin's presidency
two years later when Barrows died in office.
79

lxxxviii
See course descriptions in the several annual Catalogues; and Cressy's "Report of
the Department of English" that is included with the President's Annual Report for 1898
to the Board of Trustees.
lxxxix
See p. 4. Cressy wrote several letters to his wife Lillian during the period of his
travels around northeastern Ohio, reporting tersely about his itinerary and touchingly
lamenting his absence from "my dear Bunny," "My dearest Lilly," "My Dear Darling,"
etc. The letters are preserved in the Oberlin College Archives.
xc
Hall's journals are preserved in the Oberlin College Archives. Roland Baumann, the
College Archivist, has given permission for them to be quoted here.
xci
See the entry for June 10, 1898.
xcii
For his report in this capacity, see the President's Annual Report for 1898, pp. 14-15.
His responsibilities seem to have been clear enough, but there appears to have been some
ambivalence about his title. In a Memorial Minute adopted by the Trustees on March 7,
1900, his title is "Dean of the Faculty"; in the Catalogue for 1899-1900, he is listed as
"Dean of the College Men."
xciii
See the issue of February 16, 1900.
xciv
A fine historical irony: Hall notes in his journal and the Oberlin News confirms that
on the day of Cressy's burial another funeral was held in Oberlin--the eulogist for which
was the Rev. Dan Freeman Bradley, who had declined appointment to the position that
Cressy had come to occupy. The decedent was Mrs. Royce, in whose home Bradley had
lived as a student.
xcv
Review, February 15, 1900, p. 301. Today a simple dark granite monument in
Oberlin's Westwood Cemetery marks the final resting place of Wilfred Wesley Cressy
(1867-1900) and his wife Lillian Fitz Cressy (1866-1897).
xcvi
See her obituary in the Mills College Quarterly, 25, 5 (1940), p. 104.
xcvii
The Ph. D. degree had been conferred in 1896 by Heidelberg University. Her edition
of The Countess of Pembroke's Antonie (a sixteenth century drama) had been published
in Germany in 1897. Of the 40 faculty members with professorial rank at Oberlin in
1900, only eight held the Ph. D. degree. Several others could boast of honorary
doctorates, and one held an M.D. degree.
xcviii
Following her return from Germany, Luce had taught for a year at Smith College and
then for three years at Wellesley. She had received the A.B. degree from Wellesley in
1883, following which she had taught for a decade in various New England preparatory
schools before beginning her graduate study. See, e.g., Catalogue of Oberlin College for
the Year 1900-1901, p. 16.
xcix
See Harriet L. Keeler, The Life of Adelia A. Field Johnston ([Cleveland: Britton
Publishing Co., ca. 1912]), esp. pp. 187ff.
c
A useful tabular presentation of the enrollment history at Oberlin may be found in the
Alumni Catalogue 1833-1936, published by Oberlin College in 1937: see pp. 74-79. The
growth in early 20 th century enrollment was aided modestly by the introduction of a
summer session in 1900. The Department of Drawing and Painting, begun in 1885, was
folded into the College of Arts and Sciences in 1912.
ci
Annual Reports…for 1900, p. 113.
cii
Annual Reports…for 1900-01, p. 44.
ciii
Annual Reports…for 1901-02, pp. 111-112.
80

civ Loc. cit.
cv Annual Reports…for 1900, p. 113.
cvi Loc. cit.
cvii Annual Reports…for 1901-02, p. 112.
cviii See Catalogue…for 1909-10 (which included "Announcements of Courses of
Instruction Offered for the Year 1910-11"), pp. 145-147.
cix Philip D. Sherman, who held the rank of Associate Professor, received his A.M.
degree from Brown University in 1903 and joined the faculty at Oberlin in 1907. Robert
A. Jelliffe received his A.M. degree from Yale University in 1910, but had already joined
the Oberlin faculty in 1907. Milton Percival had received his A.M. degree from Harvard
University in 1907, and joined the Oberlin faculty in that same year. Mary M. Belden,
who had received her A.B. degree from Oberlin in 1903, had held professorial
appointments at Blackburn College, Whitworth College, Emporia College, and Elmira
College before joining the Oberlin faculty in 1909. Alice Mary Durand had received her
A.B. degree from Oberlin in 1906, and joined the Oberlin faculty in 1909. During 1910-
11, Professor Wager enjoyed a leave of absence. An older instructor, Vernon Charles
Harrington, who held a degree in theology from Andover Seminary (1894) and an
honorary L.H.D. degree from the College of Wooster (1908), had joined the Oberlin
faculty in 1908. See the "Register of All Members of the Teaching and Administrative
Staff--1833-1936," in the Alumni Catalogue 1833-1936 (Oberlin, 1937), pp. 87-144; and
the list of "Members of the Faculty and Other Officers" in the Catalogue…for the Year
1909-10, pp. 17-45.
cx Wager's case is presented in Annual Reports…for 1901-02, p. 112. Course offerings
are listed in the published annual Catalogues of Oberlin College.
cxi See, for example, the "Statistics of Instruction" furnished in the Annual Reports…for
1902-03 (esp. p. 126, for enrollment in English courses) and for several years thereafter.
cxii Mary Baker Eddy: the Truth and the Tradition, with John V. Dittemore (New York:
Knopf, 1932); and Hearst, Lord of San Simeon, with Oliver Carson (New York: Viking,
1936).
cxiii For example, The Story of Congress, 1789-1935 (New York: Harper, 1936); and The
Story of the Supreme Court (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill [1936]).
cxiv The Bible Designed to Be Read as Living Literature (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1936); The Friend of Jesus (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1928).
cxv See his biographical entries in William Coyle, ed. Ohio Authors and Their Books
(Cleveland: World Publishing Co. [1962]); and W. J. Burke and Will D. Howe, eds.,
American Authors and Books, 1640 to the Present Day (New York: Crown [1962]).
cxvi Letters of Harry James Smith (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919), p. 29.
cxvii Letters, p. 34. (Dated 11 March, 1905.)
cxviii Letters, p. 31.
cxix See Smith's entry in the Dictionary of American Biography (New York: Scribners
[1937]. Interestingly, it was written by his erstwhile Oberlin colleague, Ernest
Sutherland Bates.
cxx See correspondence in the Oberlin College Archives.
cxxi From the correspondence of Henry Churchill King, in the Oberlin College Archives.
cxxii See Fletcher, History, 583-84.
81

cxxiii
American Literature had been absent from the curriculum for several years after
Cressy's death until the year before Sherman took up his post. A transient young
instructor, Gilbert Lee Pennock, had offered it in 1905-06. (See the Catalogue for that
year.)
cxxiv
For a shrewd analysis of such courses in U.S. colleges and universities, see James A.
Berlin, Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985
(Carbondale IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987). Berlin describes three
different "approaches to the teaching of writing" at the outset of the century: one rooted
in applying the concept of correctness, another in cultivating an aesthetic elitism, and a
third in validating personal experience. (See esp. pp. 35-51.) In terms of this framework,
the courses at Oberlin were closest to what Berlin calls the "current-traditional" model
based on the concept of correctness as the principal objective.
cxxv
See p. 120.
cxxvi
See p. 121.
cxxvii
See Paul E. Cohen, "Barrett Wendell and the Harvard Literary Revival," New
England Quarterly 52 (1979): 485. Both editors had interesting though indirect
connections with Oberlin. Moody, for example, had been involved with Oberlin's Mr.
Cressy in the publication of a textbook: Pope's The Iliad of Homer, Books 1, 6, 22, and
24, which had been "edited for school use by Wilfred Wesley Cressy and William
Vaughn Moody," had been published by Scott, Foresman in 1899. In All Our Years, an
autobiography published by Lovett in 1948, he mentions William Isaac Thomas as an
"intimate friend," but does not mention Oberlin in connection with Thomas. See pp. 98-
99.
cxxviii
All Our Years: The Autobiography of Robert Morss Lovett (New York: Viking
Press, 1948), p. 98. The drowning took place in 1904--it was reported, for example, in
the Chicago Tribune (July 19, 1904), p. 2. The victim was the youngest of Thomas's
three sons, as Lovett rather abruptly notes ("It was the last")--perhaps because he did not
recall that the boy's given name was the same as his own.
cxxix
See p. 234.
cxxx
A History of English Literature (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1909), p. 336.
cxxxi
See, for example, Joel J. Kupperman, Character (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1991); Christine McKinnon, Character, Virtue Theories, and the Vices
(Peterborough, Canada: Broadview Press, 1999); and Lester H. Hunt, Character and
Culture (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997).
cxxxii
From Chapter III, "Of Individuality." This quotation is cited by the Oxford English
Dictionary, 2 nd ed., as historical evidence for its definition of "character," 12a. In this
part of his 1859 essay, Mill argued that "the same strong susceptibilities which make the
personal impulses vivid and powerful, are also the source from whence are generated the
most passionate love of virtue, and the sternest self-control."
cxxxiii
The sermon, delivered in the Second Congregational Church, was entitled "The
Moral Life of the College: Ideals and Principles"; and it was printed in the Oberlin
Alumni Magazine 3 (January, 1907): pp. 134-146. I have quoted here from p. 145.
cxxxiv
See the Oberlin Catalogue in years prior to 1907, s.v. "Admission and Regulations."
cxxxv
A month before delivering the sermon, King had been at pains to justify the decision
in the columns of the Oberlin Alumni Magazine. See vol. 2 (November, 1906): pp. 66-
82

67. There, he had noted the difficulty of enforcement as a principal reason for what he
hoped to persuade his readers was a matter of "detailed administration" rather than a
significant change in policy.
cxxxvi John Barnard, in From Evangelicalism to Progressivism at Oberlin College, 1866-
1917, remarks on this decision as part of his contention that "the College passed
[smoothly] from a preoccupation with the salvation of the soul to a determination to
reform society." See p. 126.
cxxxvii See, e.g., Barnard, esp. pp. 22ff.
cxxxviii "Dover Beach," 26-28.
cxxxix See Catalogue…for the Year 1910-11, p. 160.
cxl In 1911-12, for example, Professor Sherman's catalogue description of "American
Literature" called "a working knowledge of American history…desirable"; and for
"Victorian Prose" Professor Wager suggested that "this course may well be preceded or
accompanied" by a History Department course in the "Constitutional History of
England."
cxli Even in its admissions policies, Oberlin at the beginning of the 20 th century was
interestingly specific in what it demanded of a successful candidate. The formulation of
those demands underwent some changes from year to year, but in every case insisted on
mechanical correctness in writing, on a knowledge of "the fundamental principles of
rhetoric," and on evidence of having read a certain number of privileged texts. The
emphasis on correctness in writing and on rather wooden rhetorical principles reflects
widespread trends that, for example, Albert R. Kitzhaber described in his valuable 1953
dissertation on Rhetoric in American Colleges, 1850-1900, published in 1990 by the
Southern Methodist University Press. As Kitzhaber noted, "Composition teaching
became…drudgery of the worst sort, unenlivened by any genuine belief in its value,
shackled by an unrealistic theory of writing, and so debased in esteem that men of ability
were unwilling to identify themselves with it permanently." (See p. 226.) The list of
literary works is quaint, including among its 34 named writers only two women (Mrs.
Gaskell and George Eliot) but admitting seven Americans (among them Washington
Irving, George Washington, Daniel Webster, and James Russell Lowell but not James
Fenimore Cooper, Abraham Lincoln, Edgar Allan Poe, or Ralph Waldo Emerson).
Chaucer's "Prologue"--but none of the Canterbury Tales--is on the list. Arnold,
Tennyson, and Browning make the list but Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth do not.
Dickens is represented only by A Tale of Two Cities; Thackeray by Henry Esmond; and
Richard Blackmore's Lorna Doone is in their company.
cxlii See Jennifer K. Alexander, The Meanings of Efficiency. Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Washington, 1996.
cxliii Herbert M. Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893-1958 (New
York and London: Routledge Falmer, 2004): 76.
cxliv (1910)
cxlv See especially pp. 97-134.
cxlvi See pp. 97-98.
cxlvii Ibid., 140.
cxlviii Published by the University of Chicago Press in 1900.
83

cxlix
J. J. McKelvey (class of 1884), in the “Commencement Number” of The Oberlin
Alumni Magazine 5 (1909): 399-400.
cl
Ibid., 401.
cli
The College Faculty approved these arrangements at a special meeting on 13 March,
1911, in response to a report from an ad hoc “Committee on Curriculum and Degrees”
spawned by the extensive study of the “Tests of College Efficiency.” See microfilm
minutes in the Oberlin College Archives.
clii
For information about the implementation of these plans, see the section on “Courses
of Instruction” for the academic year 1911-12, published in the Catalogue of Oberlin
College for the Year 1910-11 (Oberlin, 1911), pp. 126-243. Economics and Sociology
comprised a single department but offered two distinct majors; History offered distinct
majors in “English and American History” and in “European History”; Mathematics
offered three options—one for prospective secondary teachers, one for prospective
engineers, and one in preparation for graduate study.
cliii
This explanation can be found in the report that was adopted by the College Faculty.
cliv
Other curricular areas that chose initially not to mount a major were: Archaeology and
Art; Astronomy; Bible and Christian Religion; Bibliography; Drawing, Painting, and
Design; Hebrew; Italian; Mineralogy; Oratory; Physiology and Hygiene; and Spanish.
For most, though not for English Composition, the stated rationale was an insufficient
number of offerings.
clv
The College Faculty left to the heads of departments the design of the majors.
clvi
See the course description in the Annual Catalogue (Oberlin, 1921), p. 66.
clvii
In The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 35-36.
clviii
Robert A. Jelliffe, “Charles Henry Adams Wager,” Oberlin Alumni Magazine 36
(October, 1939), p. 4.
clix
Arthur Hogue, letter dated 9 March, 1929, in the personal papers of Charles H.A.
Wager held by the Oberlin College Archives. Hogue (1906-1986) became Professor of
History at Indiana University and was the author of Origins of the Common Law
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966).
clx
(New York: Macmillan, 1899).
clxi
From the personal papers of Charles Wager in the Oberlin College Archives.
clxii
Its original title was “The Political Philosophy and Oratory of Edmund Burke.”
Admission to the course was at the discretion of the instructor, which (among other
things) enabled Wager to limit enrollment to a number that could be accommodated
comfortably in his home at 292 West College Street.
clxiii
After an initial version published under the auspices of the Oberlin Alumni
Association in 1928 (Chicago: Robert O. Law), the two volumes of essays appeared in
finished form in 1936 and in 1938 (Boston: Marshall Jones).
clxiv
See “Transitions,” in To Whom It May Concern (1936), p. 60.
clxv
See Bruce Frohnen, Virtue and the Promise of Conservatism: the Legacy of Burke
and Tocqueville (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), p. 43.
clxvi
An edition of The Apologye of Syr Thomas More, Knyght (London: Early English
Text Society, 1930). His Ph. D. degree had been awarded by Yale in 1916.
84

clxvii With respect to this paucity of publication, my colleague Robert Pierce attributes to
Frederick Binkerd Artz (an alumnus of Oberlin who was a member of the Department of
History from 1924 until his retirement in 1962) the cutting phrase that "the Oberlin
Department of English is known from one end of Professor Street to the other."
clxviii See Andrew Bongiorno, “Philip Darrell Sherman, 1881-1957,” Oberlin Alumni
Magazine 53 (March, 1957), pp. 16-17.
clxix See Oberlin News-Tribune (May 28, 1942), p. 1. His column was called “Under the
Elm,” and he took his pen-name from an early inhabitant of the village. In this same
account, it is reported that Sherman had also received “the honorary degree of Doctor of
Literature” from Parsons College.
clxx In the Oberlin College Annual Reports (Oberlin, 1913, 1914).
clxxi The phrase is taken from the description of English 35-36 in the Annual Catalogue of
Oberlin College for 1935-36.
clxxii Sherman‟s initial letter appeared in the Oberlin News-Tribune on March 12; the
student editor (Victor J. Stone, who would eventually become Professor of Law at the
University of Illinois—and an Oberlin College Trustee) responded on March 16; and
Sherman‟s rebuke was published in the student newspaper (the Oberlin Review) on
March 26, 1942. The speaker maligned by Sherman was Joseph P. Lash, whom a
biographer has described as “the most prominent and persistent campus radical leader in
depression-era America” (Robert Cohen, in John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds.,
American National Biography 13 [New York: Oxford University Press], p. 218), and who
late in life himself became a celebrated biographer. See, for example, Eleanor and
Franklin (New York: Norton, 1971), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. In a fine
irony, the featured speaker at the conference to which Lash had been invited—its topic
invited speculation on what might follow the world war then in full spate—was Eleanor
Roosevelt.
clxxiii Taylor carefully preserved the letter, and it can be found among his personal papers
in the Oberlin Archives.
clxxiv See the Oberlin News-Tribune (May 28, 1942), p. 1.
clxxv Her 1919 dissertation was published in 1929: entitled The Dramatic Work of Samuel
Foote, it was volume 80 of the Yale Studies in English.
clxxvi She published a charming memoir about her girlhood: In Other Days: A Golden Age
Remembered (Oberlin: Press of the Times, 1961). Only in its final chapter does she
allude to her teaching career, and that in the form of “A Dream” that sentimentally recalls
the presence of troops on the Oberlin campus during World War II.
clxxvii Personal communication with the author.
clxxviii Among them, for example: Earl Augustus Aldrich (1910-16), a graduate of
Harvard, who became a mainstay of the English Department at Drew; William S. Ament
(1909-12), an Oberlin graduate who returned to serve the college as its Alumni Secretary
for three years (1921-24) before becoming Professor of English at Scripps College;
Lester M. Beattie (1914-18), who went on to teach at Carnegie Institute of Technology
and to publish (in 1935) a biography of John Arbuthnot, the friend of Swift and Pope;
Leslie L. Hanawalt (1923-26), who became Professor of English at Wayne State
University, of which he wrote an institutional history, A Place of Light (1968); Vernon
Charles Harrington (1908-10), who went on to teach at Middlebury College; Amos Reno
85

Morris (1912-14), who became Professor of English [Music?] at the University of
Michigan; and Milton O. Percival (1907-10), who became Professor of English at the
Ohio State University and published critical studies of William Blake and Herman
Melville as well as collaborating with his Oberlin colleague R. A. Jelliffe on a textbook,
Specimens of Exposition and Argument (New York: Macmillan, 1908).
clxxix From “Recommendations by the General Council to the Trustees of Oberlin
College”, dated May 27, 1910 [in the Oberlin College Archives].
clxxx The title of his dissertation was “Wycliffite Tracts in English.”
clxxxi See, for example, not only Specimens of Exposition and Argument, with his
erstwhile colleague Milton Oswin Percival (New York: Macmillan, 1908); but also A
Handbook of Exposition (New York: Macmillan, 1914), and Types of Exposition: Form,
Style, and Substance (New York: Farrar and Rinehart [1937]).
clxxxii (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1935). Only five hundred copies were printed, intended
for a series that the publisher identified as “University Club” novels.
clxxxiii See the Annual Report for 1926-27, esp. pp. 8-9; and for 1928-29, esp. pp. 62-3.
clxxxiv See correspondence with Sherman in the Wilkins papers, Oberlin College Archives.
clxxxv See, for example, the Annual Report for 1926-27, p. 82.
clxxxvi Ibid., p. 48.
clxxxvii According to the Treasurer's Report in 1915, total expenditures for the year were
just over $509 thousand. (See Annual Reports of the President and the Treasurer of
Oberlin College for 1914-1915, p. 355.) Hall left over $10 million to Oberlin in his will.
(See biographical note in the Oberlin College Archives.)
clxxxviii See Norman C. Craig, "Charles Martin Hall--the Young Man, His Mentor, and His
Metal," Journal of Chemical Education 63 (1986):557-59.
clxxxix In that year's report, the Treasurer laconically announced that "in the distribution of
the assets of the estate of Charles M. Hall, Oberlin College received a total of 82,348
shares of the Preferred Stock of the Aluminum Company of America." See Annual
Reports of the President and the Treasurer of Oberlin College for 1926-27, p. 159.
cxc The average increase was about $500: see Annual Reports of the President and the
Treasurer of Oberlin College for 1927-28, p. 13.
cxci In Annual Reports of the President and the Treasurer of Oberlin College for 1927-28,
p. 132.
cxcii This vague descriptive terminology can be found regularly in catalogs of courses that
were issued during this period.
cxciii Robert S. McElvaine, The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941 (New York:
Times Books, 1984), p. 75.
cxciv Annual Report of the President, 1933-1934, p.7.
cxcv The scheme adopted, and the fiscal crisis that produced it, was summarized by
President Ernest Hatch Wilkins in his annual report, dated November 17, 1933 (see
Annual Report…,1932-1933, pp. 2-3.
cxcvi See minutes of the Committee on Appointments in the files of the Dean of the
College of Arts and Sciences in the Oberlin College Archives.
cxcvii From correspondence files of Warren Taylor in the Oberlin College Archives.
86

cxcviii
This inference is based on discussion about "the sentence" and "the paragraph" in
correspondence between the two men, from the files of Warren Taylor in the Oberlin
College Archives.
cxcix
His name was Kenneth F. Williams. A product of Oberlin College (A.B., 1926;
M.A., 1927), he died on August 5, 1938.
cc
See minutes for March 15, 1940.
cci
See minutes in the Oberlin College Archives. Mayo consulted his colleague Warren
Taylor before submitting his letter; a draft of his letter and a copy of what appears to be
the Dean's response can be found in Taylor's correspondence files in the Oberlin College
Archives. In the (unsigned and unaddressed) statement attributed to the Dean, Wittke
offers the view that "as far as I am concerned, there is no established policy of 'rotating
instructorships' in the English department, or elsewhere," but he goes on to offer the
opinion that it is "good administrative policy to urge instructors, in large departments
where promotions [are] not likely to occur for many years to come, to move elsewhere
where the opportunities for professional advancement might be more immediate."
ccii
Northwestern University appointed him Instructor in English for the academic year
1941-42, following which he served for four years in the U.S. Army before returning to
Northwestern, where he rose through the ranks to become Professor of English in 1961.
(See Directory of American Scholars: A Biographical Directory, 5th ed. [New York:
Bowker, 1969], vol. II.)
cciii
For descriptions of these courses, see the Annual Catalogue of Oberlin College,
beginning with the issue published in 1935 and then in the years immediately following.
cciv
In 1930, the Committee on Appointments had voted to grant him "permanent
appointment as Instructor in English," while transmitting a suggestion "to Mr. Wager that
Mr. Bongiorno should proceed with graduate study as soon as it may be possible for him
to do so." See minutes of February 19, in the OCA. The course in Milton bears
Bongiorno's name as instructor in the catalogue published in that same year, and in the
years thereafter except when he was absent--absent, for example, in order to pursue his
graduate studies as urged.
ccv
A revised edition of this text was eventually published as Castelvetro on the Art of
Poetry: an Abridged Translation of Lodovico Castelvetro's Poetica d'Aristotele
Vulgarizzata et Sposta (Binghamton NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies,
1984).
ccvi
See descriptions for the courses numbered 3-8 in the annual catalogues for this period.
ccvii
Quoted titles and descriptions are taken from the Bulletin of Oberlin College:
General Catalogue Number 1938-1939 and Announcements for the Sessions 1939-1940but
the information can be found virtually unchanged in annual catalogues for the late
1930s and early 1940s.
ccviii
In addition to Bongiorno himself, they were Chester Shaver, Warren Taylor, Ralph
Singleton, Stanton McLaughlin, Frank Roellinger, Andrew Hoover, and (most junior
among them with only seven years of service at Oberlin) Elizabeth Foster.
ccix
Minutes of this meeting are included among the files of the English Department in the
Oberlin College Archives.
ccx
The term was derivative: it had been in college-wide use for some time at Oberlin to
denominate the tenured members of the faculty when they met as a group.
87

ccxi
Yet another distinctive "council." In a reorganization and by-law revision carried out
by the Board of Trustees in 1946, the Council that was comprised of all the tenured
members of the faculty was eliminated, and the term was applied instead to a body of
eight colleagues who were elected to represent all the members of the faculty. For a
relatively terse explanation of the reorganization--though it omits any mention of the
heated controversy that led to it--see the Annual Report of the President, 1945-1946, pp.
4-5.
ccxii
From a letter in the files of the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, now in the
Oberlin College Archives. Dated February 17, 1962, it was sent by Bongiorno to Dean
William F. Hellmuth.
ccxiii
The three were W. Arthur Turner, William Sellers, and Thomas Whitaker.
ccxiv
The American College and University, p. 492.
ccxv
See Marcia Stanley Frederick, ed., Baccalaureate Sources of Ph. D.s: Rankings
According to Institution of Origin (Lancaster PA: Office of Institutional Research,
Franklin and Marshall College). In this study, which examined 867 undergraduate
institutions in America, Oberlin College led in all but two of the fields surveyed in terms
of the number of its alumni who (from 1920-80) had earned the Ph.D. degree. For an
expression of satisfaction and pride in this information, see "Tappan Square Notebook" in
the Oberlin Alumni Magazine 79 (Summer, 1983), p. 27.
ccxvi
From the letter dated February 17, 1962 (see above).
ccxvii
This information is based on the author‟s conversation with Mr. Ganzel.
ccxviii
Chester Shaver, who was chairing the department at the time, transmitted this report
to Dean Hellmuth. See files of the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences in the
Oberlin College Archives.
ccxix
Two of the five had already departed: John Gardner, who would go on to win fame as
a novelist with the publication of Grendel in 1971; and George Soule, who would
eventually earn tenure in the English Department of Carleton College, his alma mater.
ccxx
He took the unusual precaution of sending a draft of this letter to President Carr, who
approved it. It was sent on October 4, 1962. See files of the Dean of the College of Arts
and Sciences in the Oberlin College Archives.
ccxxi
This letter, dated October 22, 1962, may also be found in the files of the Dean in the
Oberlin College Archives.
ccxxii
Oberlin College Bulletin, vol. 50. See pp. 44-45.
ccxxiii
In the catalogue for 1967-68 it was altered to assert that the "major in English is
designed to train the student in the interpretation of the main genres of literature (lyric
poetry, drama, and fiction), to acquaint him with representative works in the main periods
of English and American literature, and to aid him in forming critical standards." See
Oberlin College Bulletin, vol. 65, p. 91.
ccxxiv
See supra, chapter IV.
ccxxv
Most famously, in The New Criticism (Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions, 1941).
The first sentence of its first chapter reads, "Discussion of the new criticism must start
with Mr. [I. A.] Richards."
ccxxvi
See, for example, the Oberlin College Bulletin, vol. 50, pp. 3-4.
ccxxvii
The report is dated January 14, 1939, and can be found in the Oberlin College
Archives.
88

ccxxviii
See "Statement of the Committee of Twenty-Four: The Aims of Literary Study,"
PMLA 53, Supplement (1938): pp. 1367-1371. Professor Jesse Floyd Mack was one of
the twenty-four signatories, along with his son Maynard Mack of Yale.
ccxxix
The Armed Vision: A Study in the Methods of Modern Literary Criticism (New
York: Vintage Books, 1948), p. 3.
ccxxx
See "Criticism and the Academy," in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism,
vol. 7: Modernism and the New Criticism, ed. A. Walton Litz, Louis Menand, and
Lawrence Rainey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 321.
ccxxxi
The vote was taken at a meeting of the College Faculty on December 6, 1966.
Ganzel had guided the shaping of the decision and its presentation to the faculty in his
role as chair of the Educational Plans and Policies Committee. His principal antagonist
was his colleague, Warren Taylor, among whose papers (in the Oberlin College
Archives) can be found notes about the controversial nature of the action.
89