Milwaukee’s Jesuit University: Marquette, 1881–1981 (review)

This handsome hard-bound publication is a centennial history of Milwaukee’s Jesuit Marquette University from its beginning in 1881 to 1981. It replaces the history written by Raphael N. Hamilton, S.J., The Story of Marquette University (Milwaukee, 1953). The book is intended to encompass three main areas of Marquette life—an administrative history, the history of student culture, and the way in which Marquette functioned as “Milwaukee’s University.” I would add to these stated goals an additional academic history of the university. The Jablonsky text is strongest as a critical narrative of primarily the institutional and academic history of Marquette, written for historians, rather than as a coffee-table volume used by former undergraduates who might want to recall their time at the Jesuit university.

John M. Henni, the first Catholic bishop of Milwaukee, had envisioned a college for his diocese from the beginning of his tenure in 1843, but it would be almost forty years before that hope became a reality. The need to find a religious order to operate such an institution, create the lower schools to feed it, and locate funds for such an enterprise were some of the reasons for the delay. Finally by 1881 the Jesuits opened a liberal arts college in Milwaukee and, of course, followed their Ratio Studiorum. By 1887 five students graduated from the college program. A local medical college proposed an affiliation with Marquette, which launched Marquette into university status in 1907. This was followed by the purchase of a law school in 1908, the opening of a department of engineering in the same year, a school of business and a journalism program in 1910, and a conservatory of music in 1911. The Jesuits were not well prepared to integrate the addition of these “vocational” programs into the old Ratio, but attempts were made to weave rhetoric, literature, history, and philosophy into the new programs wherever possible. Large numbers of non-Catholic students, many poorly prepared in the liberal arts and studying vocational programs, and even the inclusion of women, made Marquette a different kind of institution from the traditional Jesuit college. But the Jesuit liberal arts orientation was not relinquished—by the 1920s students in the professional schools were required to spend their first two years taking liberal arts courses in the College of Arts and Sciences.

So sooner had Marquette become a university when it began offering graduate education. By 1922 a formal graduate school headed by a dean came into existence. Five years later, master’s degrees, which were terminal degrees at that time, were available in chemistry, economics, education, English, German, history, Latin, philosophy, and physics. Within twenty years it was natural that doctoral degrees would be offered, especially in philosophy and biology, yet Marquette’s library and faculty were not perceived as equipped to take on the rigors of upper-level programs. Thus in 1940 the Association of American Universities recommended the termination of the Marquette doctoral programs and the reduction of many of its master’s programs. It was not until 1957, with a new library and an improved faculty, that the university resumed the offering of doctorates in philosophy and biology, followed by theology in 1963 and many others in the years to come, making Marquette a respected international center of learning at the highest levels.

Reaching this apex was the product of a long run of presidents, countless sleepless nights for administrators, financial ups and downs, the burden of two world wars, the great depression, the turmoil of the 1960s, and the generous contributions of many donors. The history of the university frequently reads like the history of the American nation with its financial and political booms and busts.

The attempt at reproducing student “culture” is not as successful as the administrative and academic narratives. It is handled with the same professionalism characteristic of the rest of the book, but there is little by...