White Elephants on Campus: The Decline of the University Chapel in America, 1920–1960 by Margaret M. Grubiak (review)

By presenting the history of the plans for and construction of chapel buildings on private university campuses, Margaret M. Grubiak advances the argument that colleges and universities in the United States became secularized in the twentieth century. With the end of mandatory chapel services, more religiously diverse student bodies, and the rise of scientific perspectives, religion, she argues, moved from the center of the university’s mission to its periphery. What is new about this secularization argument is the author’s use of campus architecture to make a case.

Focusing, for the most part, on “elite Protestant universities that had the choice of continuing a religious identity or negotiating a new relationship with religion in the modern era” (p. 3), Grubiak contends that seemingly contradictory circumstances of the building of huge new chapels (University of Chicago and Harvard), the canceling of plans to do so for financial reasons (Yale and Johns Hopkins), and the building boom of smaller and more neutral chapels in the post–World War II era (Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Illinois Institute of Technology) all constitute evidence for secularization. This line of reasoning seems thin in some places: if canceling building plans for financial reasons indicates a removal of religion from central campus priorities, why does not the building boom of the 1950s indicate a return of religion to top priority lists? And how does the hiring of two of the most important modernist architects to build smaller-in-scale chapels—Eero Saarinen at MIT and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at Illinois Institute of Technology—indicate that these universities somehow slighted these chapels? In addition, claims about chapel buildings and secularization require that the author include more thorough histories of reception and building utilization.

The specific histories of the planning and building of several university chapels are an excellent contribution. Especially interesting is Grubiak’s inclusion in her study of nonchapel buildings that were given religious meaning and design: the Cathedral of Learning skyscraper at the University of Pittsburgh and Yale’s neo-Gothic Sterling Memorial Library.