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

In a 1927 Princeton student cartoon, a child looks at the university’s huge new Gothic chapel and asks his mother, “Is that thing a white elephant?” (2). In this excellent study, architectural historian Margaret Grubiak explores the debate over such buildings. She examines university leaders’ aspirations, architects’ plans, and the response of students and alumni at several historically Protestant elite universities. These include Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, and Pittsburgh. Grubiak argues that chapels like Princeton’s were part of a not-too-successful twentieth-century effort to retain a central role for religion in these universities’ missions.

She investigates four architectural strategies used by designers. First, new chapels advertised the significance of religion through their large size. Second, following a common liberal approach to tensions between religion and intellectual life, the chapels made an emotional rather than an intellectual appeal for the importance of religion through beauty and the evocation of mystery. Third, planners gave chapels central locations, often pairing them with libraries as centers of campuses. Lastly, in a very engaging chapter she explores how non-ecclesial buildings such as Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning and Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library employed ecclesiastical designs to communicate that “all learning was sacred and the mission of the university in part religious” (94).

Many disputed the claim that these chapels were needed for the university to educate the “whole man” (19). Some Protestants at Princeton thought its chapel was too Catholic and sensual in form and thus antagonistic to an intellectual religious life. At Yale and Johns Hopkins, plans for grand chapels were gradually abandoned. Even the innovative cathedral-like academic buildings at Pittsburgh and Yale invited not only religious reverence for learning, but also the mockery and trivialization of religion.

Through an examination of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Grubiak suggests that after World War II, while the desire to ground scientific learning in religious morality remained strong, modern aesthetics and the need to house diverse worship services resulted in small campus chapels with little traditional iconography. Henceforth religion, in both architecture and practice would be found on the margins rather than at the center of university life.

Assessment of the current life of these chapels is beyond the book’s scope. In an epilogue, however, she discusses a 2006 controversy over a cross in Wren Chapel at William and Mary. This and general observations leads her to conclude that these buildings are indeed now “white elephants,” expensive monuments with a diminished and unclear role (126).

This lean, engaging, smartly illustrated book is ideal for classroom use in courses on American higher education, architecture, or religion. Grubiak thoroughly grounds her argument in the historiography on religion in higher education. Fewer connections are drawn to developments in religious architecture. More attention to the relation of these buildings to historic Protestant spatial practices might place today’s decentralized approach to campus religion in a different light. Discussion of these buildings’ place in the history of American religious architecture would also strengthen the connections she draws between campus chapels and trends in American religion. Nonetheless this focused, insightful book is essential reading for all interested in religious architecture or the place of religion in higher education.