OCCASIONAL PAPERS 
 ON THE HISTORY OF 
 BOSTON COLLEGE 
 
 REV. TIMOTHY BROSNAHAN, S.J. 
 
 Boston College President, 1894-1898 
 National Spokesman for 
 Jesuit Liberal Education 
 
 Rev. Charles F. Donovan, S.J. 
 University Historian 
 September 1996 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2016 
 
 https://archive.org/details/revtimothybrosnaOOdono 
 

 When Boston College's presidential baton was passed from Father J. 
 Donald Monan to Father William P. Leahy last July 31, the transition 
 understandably merited and received national attention. Change in 
 the leadership of an institution of Boston College's current prestige 
 and academic prosperity is of national interest. Such was not the case 
 a century ago, however, when Father Timothy Brosnahan succeeded 
 Father Edward Devlin as president in 1894. Boston College, then only 
 three decades old, was small— indeed, tiny compared with the large 
 and complex institution of today— but it enjoyed youthful optimism 
 and self-assurance, qualities that were bolstered when the new presi- 
 dent, Father Brosnahan, suddenly became America's leading spokes- 
 man for Jesuit higher education. 
 
 Father Brosnahan prefaced the first College catalogue of his re- 
 gime with an essay entitled "System of Education," which gave a schol- 
 arly exposition of the vision and methodology of Jesuit education. 
 He enlarged the essay the following year and in that form, except for 
 the modification and then the omission of the original opening para- 
 graph some decades later, Brosnahan's statement on Jesuit education 
 appeared in every annual Boston College catalogue through the aca- 
 demic year 1951-1952, a proclamation repeated for 57 years. 
 
 Brosnahan was too modest to affix his name to a catalogue essay. 
 While it was well known that he had authored it, only after his death 
 was official acknowledgment made of his authorship. In 1916 The 
 Woodstock Letters, a Journal of American Jesuit activities and events, 
 contained an 18-page obituary of Father Brosnahan. Writing of 
 Brosnahan's Boston College presidency, the chronicler noted: "He 
 wrote the summary of the aims and methods of Jesuit liberal educa- 
 tion which he published in the annual catalogue of the College and 
 which was afterwards used by other colleges of the Province for the 
 same purpose." * 
 
 [ 1 ] 
 
 ■ 
 
Actually the observation in the obituary that the Brosnahan piece 
 was used by other colleges "of the Province" was an understatement. 
 The Province referred to was the Maryland-New York Province, which 
 then included the eastern states from Maryland to Canada. A survey 
 of American Jesuit colleges from coast to coast revealed that during 
 Brosnahan's lifetime (he died in 1915) his statement was used in its 
 entirety for one or more years at Santa Clara College in California 
 and Gonzaga College in Spokane. It appeared with some changes but 
 in recognizable form in the catalogues of St. Louis University as well 
 as of Canisius College in Buffalo and St. Joseph's College in Philadel- 
 phia. And there were definite evidences of influence from the Bros- 
 nahan statement in the catalogues of the University of Detroit and 
 John Carroll College in Cleveland. 
 
 After Brosnahan's death, and therefore after the date when the 
 obituary stated that his declaration concerning Jesuit liberal educa- 
 tion was used by other eastern Jesuit colleges as their own catalogue 
 statement, his words were adopted as written for Boston College by 
 Xavier College in Cincinnati and Loyola College in Baltimore and 
 were used with slight modifications by Spring Hill College in Ala- 
 bama, Rockhurst College in Kansas City, and Seattle University in 
 Washington, while Creighton College in Omaha and Marquette Uni- 
 versity in Milwaukee had catalogue statements with definite echoes 
 of Brosnahan. 
 
 In most of these colleges the Brosnahan statement, either in exact 
 or derivative form, was used for only a few years, but the fact that it 
 was used by so many colleges in so many parts of the country and that 
 the period of its adoption by various colleges extended all the way 
 from 1903 to 1932—38 years after it first appeared in the Boston Col- 
 lege catalogue— gives it authenticity and importance as a reflection 
 of and an influence on American Jesuit education. 
 
 One of the early historians of American higher education, Louis 
 Franklin Snow, wrote in 1907 of the Report of the Yale Faculty of 
 1828 (which will be compared with the Brosnahan statement later): 
 "The reverent regard paid to this formulation of collegiate ideas by 
 twenty-five years of reference in the Yale Catalogue gives it the sanc- 
 tity of a charter, a constitution or a bill of rights in our collegiate 
 history." The same can be claimed for the Brosnahan statement and 
 its appearance for more than twice twenty-five years in the Boston 
 College catalogue. Another historian of American higher education, 
 Frederick Rudolph of Williams College, based his claim for the im- 
 portance of the Yale Report of 1828 not on the honor accorded it in 
 successive Yale catalogues but on its influence on other colleges. He 
 spoke of Yale and Princeton in the early nineteenth century 
 
Father Brosnahan was 38 years old when he became president. 
 
 becoming national colleges, unlike provincial Harvard. He wrote: "By 
 sending out enthusiastic young graduates to found colleges in the 
 barbaric West and South and by training clergymen to become col- 
 lege presidents, Yale and Princeton . . . were in a position to define 
 what the American college would be. The report of 1828 gave them 
 their rationale. The first catalogue of Beloit College in 1849 carried 
 the assurance that its course of study was 'drawn up exactly on the 
 Yale plan.' " ^ If becoming a statement of purpose for other institu- 
 tions gave the Yale Report a place in American collegiate history, it 
 would seem that the Brosnahan manifesto has equal claim. 
 
 [ 3 ] 
 
Title page of the College catalogue in which Father Brosnahan first published 
 his statement on Jesuit education. 
 
 [ 4 ] 
 
The introductory paragraph of Brosnahan's statement deserves 
 special attention. Instead of opening with catalogue rhetoric, Brosna- 
 han starts with what reads like a footnote to a scholarly treatise: 
 
 The educational system of BOSTON COLLEGE is substantially 
 that of all other colleges of the Society of Jesus. Since the publication 
 of the Monumenta Germaniae Paedagogica by the German gov- 
 ernment, and the Great Educators' Series by Scribner's Sons, those 
 who are desirous of making either a scientific or historical study of 
 that system have abundant sources of information. To these publi- 
 cations are referred readers interested in studying the detailed work- 
 ing of the system and the practical method of applying its principles 
 as elaborated in the Ratio Studiorum. 
 
 The Monumenta Germaniae Paedogogica is an imposing scholarly 
 series of 34 volumes that were published between 1886 and 1906. 
 (There is a set in O'Neill Library.) Individual volumes are devoted to 
 educators such as Comenius and Pestalozzi, and four volumes (II, V, 
 IX, and XVI) are on the Ratio Studiorum, that is, the educational 
 method and system of the Jesuits. It is worth noting that the fourth 
 and final volume on Jesuit education in the series appeared in 1894, 
 the year that Brosnahan wrote his catalogue statement. 
 
 Most of the volumes in the Monumenta Germaniae Paedogogica se- 
 ries consist of documents and commentary in the German language, 
 but the four volumes on the Jesuits are principally in Latin. It is un- 
 likely that immigrant parents in Roxbury or South Boston would be 
 moved to read four heavy tomes on education even if the books were 
 available and if the parents could read Latin. Was this reference by 
 Brosnahan, therefore, pretentious or, if you will, a bit of academic 
 showboating? Hardly. It would seem that the opening paragraph was 
 addressed not to the students or their parents but to an American 
 collegiate audience Brosnahan felt the catalogue might reach. Con- 
 temporary and subsequent events show that in the late nineteenth 
 and early twentieth centuries Jesuit colleges had some problems in 
 relating to the wider university community, especially regarding ad- 
 mission of Jesuit college graduates to professional and graduate 
 schools. Brosnahan may well have hoped to acquaint some non-Jesuit 
 educators with the rich and impressive history of Jesuits in education. 
 
 This hypothesis is borne out by Brosnahan's second reference, 
 namely, the Great Educators' Series by Scribner's Sons. The series 
 was edited by Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia Univer- 
 sity and one of the most influential educators of his era. It consisted 
 of a dozen small volumes on such educational figures as Aristotle, 
 
Alcuin, Abelard, Froebel, Rousseau, and Horace Mann. In 1892 a 
 volume entitled Loyola and the FAucational System of the Jesuits appeared. 
 The author was Father Thomas Hughes of St. Louis University, who 
 was later to establish himself as a major figure in American Catholic 
 scholarship through the publication of his four-volume work. History 
 of the Society of Jesus in North America, Colonial and Federal. Why didn't 
 Brosnahan mention Hughes' name and the obviously relevant title of 
 his book? He no doubt would have had he been addressing Catholic 
 parents, who would naturally have confidence in such a book written 
 by a Jesuit. But Brosnahan seems to have had in mind an audience 
 that might not have been impressed by a then little known Jesuit but 
 that would give credence to a volume published as part of the Scribner's 
 series and sponsored by Nicholas Murray Butler. 
 
 If this reading of Brosnahan's intention in his first paragraph is 
 correct, it gives heightened significance to the rest of his document, 
 whose eight paragraphs are given here: 
 
 Education is understood by the Fathers of the Society in its com- 
 pletest sense, as the full and harmonious development of all those 
 faculties that are distinctive of man. It is not, therefore, mere in- 
 struction or the communication of knowledge. In fact, the acquisi- 
 tion of knowledge, though it necessarily accompanies any right sys- 
 tem of education, is a secondary result of education. Learning is an 
 instrument of education, not its end. The end is culture, and men- 
 tal and moral development. 
 
 Understanding then, clearly the purposes of education, such in- 
 struments of education, that is, such studies, sciences or languages, 
 are chosen as will most effectively further that end. These studies 
 are chosen, moreover, only in proportion, and in such numbers as 
 are sufficient and required. A student who is to be educated will not 
 be forced, in the short period of his college course and with his 
 immature faculties, to study a multiplicity of the languages and 
 sciences into which the vast world of modern knowledge has been 
 scientifically divided. If two or more sciences, for instance, give similar 
 training to some mental faculty, that one is chosen which combines 
 the most effective training luith the largest and most fundamental 
 knowledge. 
 
 The purpose of the mental training given is not proximately to 
 fit the student for some special employment or profession, but to give 
 him such a general, vigorous and rounded development as will 
 enable him to cope successfully even with the unforeseen emergen- 
 cies of life. While giving the mind stay, it tends to remove the insu- 
 
 [ 6 ] 
 
larity of thought and want of mental elasticity, which is one of the 
 most hopeless and disheartening results of specialism in students 
 who have not brought to their studies the uniform mental training 
 given by a systematic college course. The studies, therefore, are so 
 graded and classified as to he adapted to the mental growth of the 
 student and the scientific unfolding of knowledge; they are so cho- 
 sen and communicated that the student shall gradually and har- 
 moniously reach, as nearly as may be, that measure of culture of 
 which he is capable. 
 
 It is fundamental in the system of the Society of Jesus that differ- 
 ent studies have distinct and peculiar educational values. Math- 
 ematics, the Natural Sciences, Language and History are comple- 
 mentary instruments of education to which the doctrine of equiva- 
 lence cannot be applied. The specific training given by one cannot 
 be supplied by another. 
 
 Furthermore, Language and History have always been held in 
 esteem as leading factors in education. Mathematics and the Natu- 
 ral Sciences bring the student into contact with the material aspects 
 of nature, and exercise the inductive and deductive powers of rea- 
 son. Language and History effect a higher union: they are manifes- 
 tations of spirit to spirit, and by their study and for their acquire- 
 ment the whole mind of man is brought into widest and subtlest 
 play. The acquisition of Language especially calls for delicacy of 
 judgment and fineness of perception, and for a constant, keen and 
 quick use of the reasoning powers. A special importance is attached 
 to the classic tongues of Rome and Greece. As these are languages 
 with a structure and idiom remote from the language of the student, 
 the study of them lays hare before him the laws of thought and logic, 
 and requires attention, reflection, and analysis of the fundamental 
 relations between thought and grammar. In studying them the stu- 
 dent is led to the fundamental recesses of language. They exercise 
 him in exactness of conception in grasping the foreign thought, and 
 in delicacy of expression in clothing that thought in the dissimilar 
 garb of the mother-tongue. While recognizing then, in education 
 the necessity and importance of Mathematics and the Natural Sci- 
 ences, which unfold the interdependence and laws of the world of 
 time and space, the Jesuit system of education has unwaveringly 
 kept Language in a position of honor as an instrument of culture. 
 
 Lastly, the system does not share the illusion of those who seem to 
 imagine that education, understood as an enriching and stimulat- 
 
 [V] 
 
ing of the intellectual faculties, has a morally elevating influence 
 in human life. While conceding the effects of education in energiz- 
 ing and refining imagination, taste, understanding and powers of 
 observation, it has always held that knowledge and intellectual de- 
 velopment of themselves have no moral efficacy. Religion only can 
 purify the heart, and guide and strengthen the will. 
 
 The Jesuit system of education, then, aims at developing side by 
 side, the moral and intellectual faculties of the student, and send- 
 ing forth to the world men of sound judgement, of acute and rounded 
 intellect, of upright and manly conscience. And since men are not 
 made better citizens by the mere accumulation of knowledge, with- 
 out a guiding and controlling force, the principal faculties to be 
 developed are the moral faculties. Moreover, morality is to be taught 
 continuously; it must be the underlying base, the vital force support- 
 ing and animating the whole organic structure of education. It 
 must be the atmosphere the student breathes; it must suffuse with its 
 light all that he reads, illumining what is noble and exposing what 
 is base, giving to the true and false their relative light and shade. 
 
 In a word, the purpose of Jesuit teaching is to lay a solid sub- 
 structure in the whole mind and character for any superstructure of 
 science, professional and special, also for the building up of moral 
 life, civil and religious. 
 
 As an expression of educational philosophy, Brosnahan's statement 
 admittedly sounds dated as one would expect of something written a 
 century ago. It uses the language of a faculty psychology long out of 
 vogue. But the language doesn't vitiate the concepts. If, for example, 
 instead of writing about training mental faculties, Brosnahan spoke 
 only of educational results— or, from his frame of reference, of facul- 
 ties translated into action— such as logical reasoning, perceptive read- 
 ing, swift detection of sophistry, grace of written and oral expression. 
 
 Opposite Page: In 1857 Father John McElroy purchased land in the South 
 End. The lot fronted on a main thoroughfare, Harrison Avenue, with Concord 
 and East Newton Streets on either side and James Street at the rear. The 
 Jesuit residence and the stately church of the Immaculate Conception were 
 built facing Harrison Avenue. The College, shown here as it was in the Bros- 
 nahan era, was on James Street. The rear of the church may be seen at the 
 extreme right of the photograph. Father McElroy's original building of 1863 
 did not extend behind the church. In 1888, to accommodate growing enroll- 
 ment, the College building was extended by 50 feet at both ends. 
 
 [ 9 ] 
 
he would be in line with the most up-to-date jargon about education 
 for performance or competency-oriented education. Brosnahan dis- 
 plays more faith in the specific or exclusive utility of certain subjects 
 to develop particular skills than most educators would now admit, but 
 there are still stout advocates of the disciplinary value of certain sub- 
 jects, as witness the literate physician, Lewis Thomas, who in his best- 
 seller, The Medusa and the Snail, proposed classical Greek as a better 
 basis for admission to medical school than Medcats."* Be that as it 
 may, the purpose of this paper is not to defend Brosnahan's state- 
 ment or urge its present relevance but to assert its historical signifi- 
 cance. 
 
 To return to the Yale Report, it has by no means been hallowed by 
 all educational historians. Since it was a chief factor in postponing 
 the advent of electivism, its influence has been considered baneful 
 and reactionary by some. Writing a half century ago, Yale's historian 
 George Wilson Pierson observed that no judicious account of the rise 
 and decline of the elective system had yet been written because the 
 issue was too controversial and the facts themselves were still in dis- 
 pute. He acknowledged that from a pro-electivism view, Yale played 
 the heavy villain in the curriculum drama. "For example," he says, "an 
 antholog)' of statements on Yale's blind obduracy against the elective 
 system may be compiled from R. Freeman Butts, The College Charts Its 
 Course (1939)— the most extensive and able but nonetheless extremely 
 partisan application of the Dewey-inspired progressive philosophy of 
 education to the historical development of American colleges." ^ 
 
 A more generous view of the Yale Report was taken by Yale histo- 
 rian Ralph Gabriel, author oiThe Course of American Democratic Thought. 
 In 1958 he wrote a book entitled Religion and Learning at Yale in 
 which he set the 1828 Report of the Faculty against a background of 
 the burgeoning materialism and apparently limitless prosperity of 
 America. He associated the Report of 1828 with the attack of Emerson 
 and the Transcendentalists on a pervasive and almost overwhelming 
 materialism they saw growing in the country. Gabriel wrote: 
 
 Eight years before Emerson published Nature the writers of the 
 Report of 1828 in public debate opposed to popular materialism a 
 philosophy that derived from a tradition older than Christianity. 
 Erom classical Greece by way of the Renaissance had come down an 
 ideal and vision of human possibilities . . . The authors of the 
 Report turned it into a manifesto directed to their fellow citizens in 
 America.^ 
 
 To illustrate his point Gabriel called attention to the following elo- 
 quent passage from the Report: 
 
Can merchants, manufacturers and agriculturalists derive no 
 benefit from high intellectual culture? They are the very classes which, 
 from their situation and business, have the best opportunities for 
 reducing the principles of science to their practical applications. 
 The large estates which the tide of prosperity in our country is so 
 rapidly accumulating will fall mostly into their hands. Is it not 
 desirable that they should he men of superior education, of large 
 and liberal views, of those solid and elegant attainments, which 
 will raise them to a higher distinction than the mere possession of 
 property; which will not allow them to hoard their treasures or waste 
 them in senseless extravagance; which will enable them to adorn 
 society by their learning . . . and to make such an application of 
 their wealth as will be most honorable to themselves and most ben- 
 eficial to their country? 
 
 . . . Light and moderate learning is but poorly fitted to direct 
 the energies of a nation, so widely extended, so intelligent, so power- 
 ful in resources, so rapidly advancing in popidation, strength, and 
 opulence. Where a free government gives full liberty to the human 
 intellect to expand and operate, education should be proportionably 
 liberal and ample. When even our mountains and rivers and lakes 
 are upon a scale which seems to denote that we are destined to be a 
 great and mighty nation, shall our literature be feeble and scanty 
 and superficial? ^ 
 
 The Yale Report was not a succinct statement of purpose for a 
 college catalogue as was Father Brosnahan's little piece. It was a ma- 
 jor faculty report that occupied forty-six pages of rather small print 
 when published in The American Journal of Science and Arts. Yet there 
 are significant similarities between the two documents. 
 
 Brosnahan calls liberal education the full and harmonious devel- 
 opment of all the faculties that are distinctive of man. The Yale Re- 
 port says, "In laying the foundation of a thorough education it is nec- 
 essary that all the important mental faculties be brought into 
 exercise . . . The mind never attains its full perfection, unless its vari- 
 ous powers are so trained as to give them the fair proportions which 
 nature designed." ^ 
 
 Brosnahan asserts that, since mental development is the end, such 
 studies are chosen as will most effectively further that end. The Yale 
 Report makes the same point: "Those branches of study should be 
 adopted which are best calculated to teach the art of fixing the atten- 
 tion, directing the train of thought, analyzing a subject proposed for 
 investigation; following with accurate discrimination the course of 
 
 [ 11 ] 
 
Eiom u Annual Prize Debate 
 
 The rulfon Debating Society-^i^ten College 
 
 “Should the Ui\lted -5t^c^|fAi^rvene to tcrmiiAutc the 
 StrllWt^CuP^ 
 
 COLI^^^ffALU TUESDAY, APRIL 27, 1^97, 
 
 At El^t o’doct? P. M . 
 
 NO ADMITTANCE DUPINC THE DEBATE. — ^ 
 
 During Father Brosnahan's presidency, Fultonians debated the issue of 
 American military intervention in Cuba. 
 
 argument; balancing nicely the evidence presented to the judgement; 
 awakening, elevating, and controlling the imagination; arranging with 
 skill the treasures which memory gathers; rousing and guiding the 
 powers of genius." ^ 
 
 Brosnahan speaks of the educational values of mathematics, the 
 natural sciences, of history and languages, especially the classics. In 
 the Yale Report we read: "From pure mathematics [the student] learns 
 the art of demonstrative reasoning. In attending to the physical sci- 
 ences he becomes familiar with facts, with the process of induction, 
 and varieties of probable evidence. In ancient literature, he finds some 
 of the most finished models of taste. By English reading he learns the 
 powers of the language in which he is to speak and write. By logic and 
 mental philosophy he is taught the art of thinking, by rhetoric and 
 oratory, the art of speaking." 
 
 Brosnahan says that special importance is attached to the classic 
 tongues of Rome and Greece. The Yale Report spends eight pages 
 establishing the same position, saying in sum that "Familiarity with 
 the Greek and Roman writers is especially adapted to form the taste 
 and to discipline the mind, both in thought and diction, to the relish 
 of what is elevated, chaste, and simple." 
 
 Brosnahan insists that the purpose of liberal education is not to fit 
 the student for some special employment or profession but to give 
 him a general and rounded development that will enable him to cope 
 with even the unexpected contingencies of life. The Yale Report puts 
 
it this way: "... the object of the undergraduate course is not to 
 finish a preparation for business, but to impart that various and gen- 
 eral knowledge which will improve and elevate and adorn any occu- 
 pation." 
 
 From the similarities in substance and expression between the two 
 documents, one might be tempted to conclude that Brosnahan had 
 the Yale Report before him as he composed his statement. But that is 
 unlikely. Sixty-six years elapsed between the two statements. Indeed 
 the Yale Report may be better known in the latter part of the twenti- 
 eth century than it was in the last decade of the nineteenth century 
 simply because the systematic study of the history of American higher 
 education and of the college curriculum is an undertaking of the last 
 half century. The point in Juxtaposing the two documents is to argue 
 that if the Yale Report is a classic in the evolution of the American 
 college curriculum, the brief exposition of Jesuit liberal education by 
 Father Brosnahan deserves a somewhat comparable place of honor. 
 
 In one important respect Brosnahan parted company with the Yale 
 Report. In so long a document, it is almost a fugitive reference-just a 
 sentence or two— but the Yale Report does claim for liberal education 
 some dividends in morality and character. It states: "The great object 
 of a collegiate education ... is to give that expansion and balance of 
 the mental powers, those liberal and comprehensive views, and those 
 fine proportions of character which are not to be found in him whose 
 ideas are confined to one particular channel." It also asserts that the 
 product of a liberal education "has an elevation and dignity of char- 
 acter which gives him a commanding influence in society and a widely 
 extended sphere of usefulness." 
 
 In contrast to what may be called the moral optimism of these 
 brief statements of the Yale Report is the flat contrary assertion of 
 Brosnahan: 
 
 ... the (Jesuit) system does not share the illusion of those who 
 seem to imagine that education, understood as an enriching and 
 stimulating of the intellectual faculties, has a morally elevating 
 influence in human life. While conceding the effects of education 
 in energizing and refining imagination, taste, understanding and 
 powers of knowledge, it has always held that knowledge and intel- 
 lectual development of themselves have no moral efficacy. Religion 
 only can purify the heart and guide and strengthen the will. 
 
 In this passage Brosnahan echoes a second educational classic of 
 the nineteenth century, Newman's Idea of a University, with which he 
 can hardly have been unfamiliar. The occasion for Newman's work 
 
Father Brosnahan continued the nineteenth century tradition of 
 awarding sterling silver medals for excellence in each academic discipline. 
 
 was a series of lectures in connection with the opening of a Catholic 
 college in Dublin. While giving tribute more eloquent than that from 
 either Yale or Boston College to the refining powers of liberal secular 
 learning, Newman insisted that without theology, without religion, 
 such education was imperfect and incomplete. He summed up his 
 case in these memorable words: 
 
 Knowledge is one thing virtue is another; good sense is not con- 
 science, refinement is not humility, nor is largeness and justness of 
 view faith. Philosophy, however enlightened, however profound, gives 
 no command over the passions, no influential motives, no vivify- 
 ing principles. Liberal Education makes not the Christian, not the 
 Catholic, but the gentleman. It is well to be a gentleman, it is well to 
 have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid equitable, dis- 
 passionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of 
 life; these are the connatural qualities of a large knowledge; they are 
 the objects of a University; 1 am advocating I shall illustrate and 
 insist upon them; but still, I repeat, they are no guarantee for sane- 
 
 [ 14 ] 
 
tity or even for conscientiousness; they may attach to the man of the 
 world, to the profligate, to the heartless, . . . 
 
 Quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a 
 thread of silk; then may you hope with such keen and delicate in- 
 struments as human knowledge and human reason to contend 
 against those giants, the passion and the pride of man. 
 
 If the authors of the Yale Report had had an opportunity to read 
 Newman they would probably have agreed with him. Their work grew 
 out of a challenge to the classics in education and they concentrated 
 their response on an exposition of the values of traditional secular 
 learning. Not so Father Brosnahan. In his compact ten paragraphs he 
 adopts the comprehensive view of Newman, embracing both secular 
 liberal learning and religion. 
 
 Thus from the comprehensiveness and clarity of his Boston 
 College catalogue statement as well as from its wide acceptance by 
 American Jesuit colleges, Father Timothy Brosnahan earned the title 
 of national spokesman for Jesuit liberal education. 
 
 There is another claim Father Brosnahan has to that title, better 
 known than his catalogue statement. It is his elegant reply to Presi- 
 dent Eliot of Harvard, who in 1899, one year after Brosnahan retired 
 from the presidency of Boston College, made some derogatory re- 
 marks about Jesuit education in an Atlantic Monthly article. This is 
 alluded to only briefly, because of its probable connection with the 
 Boston College catalogue statement. 
 
 Charles W. Eliot became president of Harvard in 1869, when Bos- 
 ton College had not yet granted a degree, and he proceeded to send 
 tremors through the collegiate world by introducing electivism for 
 undergraduates. For Harvard at least, Eliot blew the Yale Report right 
 out of the water, and of course Harvard set the pattern for others. 
 Eliot enjoyed the role of reformer or revolutionary, but the next three 
 decades were stormy ones for him because of his curricular changes. 
 In 1886 the presidents of Yale, Brown, Dartmouth, Wesleyan and other 
 New England colleges approached the Harvard Board of Overseers 
 to try to head off some of Eliot's changes.'® In 1884 and again in 1885 
 in articles in the Princeton Review^^ and the New EnglandeP^, Presi- 
 dent Noah Porter of Yale directly attacked Harvard's abandonment of 
 the Greek requirement for the A.B. degree. The tone of reproach 
 and alarm may be gathered from two sentences of Porter's: "We should 
 naturally look for counsels of conservatism to our oldest and wealthi- 
 est university, surrounded as it is by a community which is sensitive to 
 many of the noblest and best traditions of generations of cultivated 
 men. We confess our disappointment at both the matter and form of 
 
its breach with its own honored past and with its associates of the 
 present generation."^^ 
 
 In 1885 the Nineteenth Century Club of New York sponsored a 
 debate between Eliot and President James McCosh of Princeton on 
 electivism in college. Something of the flavor of McCosh's presenta- 
 tion can be gained from the following excerpts: 
 
 From the close of Freshman year on it is perfectly practicable for 
 a student to pass through Harvard and receive the degree of Bach- 
 elor of Arts without taking any course in Latin, Greek, mathemat- 
 ics, chemistry, physics, astronomy, geology, logic, psycholog, ethics, 
 political economy, German or even English! 
 
 . . . Tell it not in Berlin or Oxford that the once illustrious uni- 
 versity in America no longer requires its graduates to know the most 
 perfect language, the grandest literature, the most elevated think- 
 ing in all antiquity. Tell it not in Paris, tell it not in Dublin, that 
 Cambridge in America does not make mathematics obligatory on 
 its students. Let not Edinburgh in Scotland and the Puritans in 
 England know that a student may pass through the once Puritan 
 college of America without having taken a single class in philoso- 
 phy or lesson in religion. 
 
 These details are given to indicate the level and style of controversy 
 President Eliot was engaged in for three decades and to put in per- 
 spective his seemingly gratuitous and intemperate aspersions on Je- 
 suit education during the last year of the nineteenth century. If Eliot 
 ever perused the Boston College catalogue (and that is not entirely 
 unlikely in view of certain problems about admission of Boston Col- 
 lege students to professional schools at Harvard in which Eliot be- 
 came personally involved), he would have read this sentence in Father 
 Brosnahan's statement on Jesuit liberal education: "While giving the 
 mind stay, it tends to remove the insularity of thought and want of 
 mental elasticity which is one of the most hopeless and disheartening 
 results of specialism in students who have not brought to their studies 
 the uniform mental training of a systematic College course." Eliot 
 would have judged the Jibe about specialism as Just one more attack 
 on the elective principle he had championed. 
 
 At any rate, having led the attack on the traditional college cur- 
 riculum, Eliot decided to take the gospel of electivism to the second- 
 ary school and wrote an article on that subject in the course of which 
 he ridiculed the education in Moslem countries according to the Ko- 
 ran and the curriculum of Jesuit colleges, unchanged, as he said, for 
 
four hundred years, as examples of curricular prescription that must 
 rely on divine inspiration since human wisdom could not justify thern.'^' 
 
 Naturally such a frontal attack by the president of Harvard caused 
 consternation in Jesuit circles. We do not know whether Father Bros- 
 nahan, then a professor at Woodstock College, ajesuit seminary, was 
 asked to write a rejoinder or volunteered to do so. In either case we 
 can assume that his well-received exposition of Jesuit education that 
 had appeared for the prior six years in the Boston College catalogue 
 made him a natural spokesman for the Jesuits on this occasion. 
 
 Brosnahan submitted to the Atlantic Monthly an article replying to 
 Eliot's animadversions on Jesuit education, but it was rejected by the 
 editor on the grounds that the magazine did not publish articles in 
 controversy. The article appeared in the Sacred Heart Review , which 
 hardly reached the same audience that had read Eliot's remarks. It 
 was, however, printed in pamphlet form and circulated among educa- 
 tors and editors around the country. 
 
 Brosnahan's reply to Eliot was a model of urbanity and rhetorical 
 skill. For decades after its publication its role in American Jesuit col- 
 legiate history was acclaimed. Jesuits and Jesuit college alumni felt 
 vindicated by Brosnahan's able presentation, and in some Jesuit rheto- 
 ric classes for a few decades afterwards the article was admired and 
 studied as an example of polished dialectic. There was delightful irony 
 in a visit paid to the Boston College dean of faculties in the mid-1970s 
 by a Boston College student who had taken a year off after his sopho- 
 more studies. He spent his sabbatical sampling courses at other 
 colleges in the area, some at Harvard, where he visited a course on 
 effective writing in which the class was using Father Brosnahan's re- 
 ply to President Eliot as a model. The student expressed his outrage at 
 the fact that he had spent two years at ajesuit college without ever 
 hearing of Brosnahan, but had became acquainted with him across 
 the Charles! 
 
 In May 1996, a hundred and two years after Father Brosnahan 
 penned his understanding of and apologia for liberal education for 
 the College catalogue, a distinguished committee of Boston College 
 faculty and administrators, the University Academic Planning Coun- 
 cil, published an academic blueprint for entrance into the new 
 millenium. The document lauds and embraces the Jesuit tradition of 
 liberal education. The title of the document is a ringing challenge to 
 carry strengths of the past into the future: "Advancing the Legacy." 
 As we face that challenge, we recall with gratitude the significant role 
 Boston College's tenth president. Father Timothy Brosnahan, played 
 in enunciating the Jesuit liberal arts tradition and his considerable 
 contribution to the legacy we are now called upon to advance. 
 
 [ 17] 
 
When Bapst Library was constructed (1924-28), a unique seal was 
 carved into the stone above the fireplace of the impressive third floor 
 chamber of what is now Burns Library, where in recent years the Board 
 of Trustees has met. An imaginative portrayal of the evolution of the 
 University from its South End site to its location and splendor in Chest- 
 nut Hill, the seal can also be interpreted as representing the transition 
 from the Brosnahan to the Gasson era. An academic tree of life has its 
 roots planted in the original campus but also seemingly in the phrase 
 whereby the University seal proclaims its spiritual and academic roots: 
 Religioni et Bonis Artibus. Gasson Hall seems to rest on the branches 
 of the tree, with Bapst Library and Devlin Hall on either side, apparently 
 resting on echoes of the University seal. 
 
 [ 18 ] 
 
ENDNOTES 
 
 1. "Father Timothy Brosnahan," Woodstock Letters, Vol. 45 (1916), p. 106. 
 
 2. Louis Franklin Snow, The College Curriculum in the United States. 
 Privately published in New York in 1907, p. 142. 
 
 3. Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University. New York: 
 Alfred Knopf, 1962, p. 130. 
 
 4. Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail. New York: Viking, 1979, 
 pp. 137-8. 
 
 5. George Wilson Pierson, Yale College. New Haven: Yale University 
 Press, 1952, Vol. 1, p. 630. 
 
 6. Ralph Henry Gabriel, Religion and Learning at Yale. New Haven: Yale 
 University Press, 1958, pp. 103-4. 
 
 7. "Original Papers in Relation to a Course of Liberal Education," 
 
 The American Journal of Science and Arts, Vol. XV (1829), pp. 323-4. 
 
 8. Ibid., p. 301. 
 
 9. Ibid., p. 300. 
 
 10. Ibid., p. 301. 
 
 11. Ibid., p. 329. 
 
 12. Ibid., p. 323. 
 
 13. Ibid., pp. 308-9. 
 
 14. John Henry Cardinal Newman, The Idea of a University. London: 
 Longmans, Green and Co., 1898. Discourse V, "Knowledge Its Own End," 
 
 pp. 120-121. 
 
 15. Charles W. Eliot, "Recent Changes in Secondary Education," The 
 Atlantic Monthly, 84 (October 1899). 
 
 16. Erederick Rudolph, Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate 
 Course of Study since 1636. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1977, p. 181. 
 
 17. Noah Porter, "Greek and a Liberal Education," Princeton Review, 
 
 Vol. 60 (September 1884), pp. 195-218. 
 
 18. Noah Porter, "A Criticism from Yale of the Last Harvard Educational 
 Move — Greek and the Bachelor's Degree," New Englander, Vol. 44 (May 
 1885), pp. 424-35. 
 
 19. Ibid., p. 435. 
 
 20. Cited in Thomas J. Wertenbaker, Princeton: 1746-1896. New Jersey: 
 Princeton University Press, pp. 306-7. 
 
 21. Op. cit., p. 443. 
 
 22. Sacred Heart Review, ] 2 Lnu 2 iry 13, 1900. 
 
 Illustrations courtesy of the Boston College Archives. 
 Photographic reproductions by Gary Gilbert. 
 
 [ 19 ] 
 
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