1937 was not one of humankind’s better years. The Japanese invaded China and set about massacring POWs and civilians. Warplanes with the Nazi German “Condor Legion” bombed Guernica on behalf of nationalist (fascist) Spain , part of a brutal civil war raging there. Amelia Earhart disappeared over the Atlantic, the Hindenburg airship exploded, and striking workers were killed by police in Chicago. In the USSR, Stalin began a characteristically brutal and counterproductive purge of officers in the Red Army.
It also marked the death of Clarence Barbour, at the time, the 10th president of Brown University. This distinction alone would have been sufficient to mark him out for memory. In the fullness of time, history revealed him to be significant for another reason: he was the last graduate of Brown to be its president, and the last clergyman to be president of any Ivy League university.
That last bit is more consequential than one might think. While people today have come to see Ivy League university presidents as scientists, administrators, and scientists or academics, that is a comparatively recent phenomenon. From the middle of the 17th century through the middle of the 19th century — 200 years — the opposite was true, with a background as a practicing clergyman being practically (if not legally) a requirement for university leadership.
In fact, of the 172 people to lead an Ivy League university (Brown, Cornell, Columbia, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, UPenn and Yale), 77 of them have been clergy — a whopping 45%. The breakdown skews more dramatically the older the school in question — 60% of Harvard’s leaders have been clergymen. The number is also 60% for Princeton — its first non-clergy president being none other than Woodrow Wilson. 52% of Yale’s presidents have come from the clergy. Those older schools have more leaders on which to draw, more data points, purely by virtue of there being more time for leaders to emerge (too, one should consider the comparatively shorter lifespan of a person living in the 17th, 18th, and 19th century).
That all came to an end — a final end — in 1937, with Dr. Barbour.
People thinking about faith in the context of 1937 will also likely recall Father Coughlin, a popular figure on the radio who spoke a lot about faith in the specific context of Christianity and nationalism. In spite of auspicious beginnings as a broadcaster, he eventually went on to express sympathy for Hitler and Mussolini, and promulgated a virulently anti-semitic world view. Coughlin’s is not the sort of faith I’m talking about.
A great deal of the longevity of the ivy league president as clergyman can be attributed to the amount of time the Ivies have been around —Harvard began functioning in the 17th century, and the school we call UPenn today had three decades in the 18th century as something less than a college, during which time its only non-clergy leader, [the only non-clergy leader of any Ivy League school before the 19th century] was no less illustrious a figure than Benjamin Franklin. Columbia began as King’s College in the 18th century. Yale, a small school in Old Saybrook at the beginning of the 18th century.
Another thing that needs to be taken into consideration is that the students studying at Ivy League universities which were led by clergymen up until the mid-19th century (or, in Brown’s case, the mid-20th century) were all male until the 20th century. And the clergymen were, well, clergymen, not clergywomen.
University leadership has changed to reflect the priorities of the students at those schools, and also to mirror the faces and give voice to the various ethnic, cultural, and religious (or irreligious) identities there. Who counts in the USA has changed since 1637, dramatically. The Ivies have changed (they were not even Ivies at first, they were simply places that people could continue their studies beyond secondary school).
The arguments in favor of continuing the modern habit of appointing administrators, faculty, business leaders and researchers as presidents of the most powerful and prestigious American universities are overwhelming — so much so, I’d say, as to be almost irrefutable. Likewise the arguments against replacing the current model with the model before — clergy — are quite compelling.
But here we are, nearly a century later, and it’s time to reevaluate the decision to break with tradition. Not in the sense of “change our minds about,” but simply look at the decision in plain terms, to consider — understanding that the decision was made a long time ago and not in any kind of organized way — whether things have on the whole been better than they would have been otherwise. The Ivy League universities (the powerful and influential universities) that beginning in the mid-19th century and continuing through to the mid-20th century replaced religious and faith-based leadership with secular professionals was done without fully appreciating the consequences. We know this to be true because no decision taken in the present can fully account for its impact on the future.
The future of the people who decided that the Ivies would not have clergy for presidents is our present, and the present, when it comes to Ivy League leadership feels… subpar. Doesn’t it? I can’t be the only one. I live outside New Haven, a graduate of Yale, a former employee there (I left in 2023 to train Ukrainian soldiers prior to their counteroffensive), and have had a near- front row seat to their struggles to find a replacement for the current president, Peter Salovey.
Salovey is probably about as close as one can get to a secular university president who emulates the impact of a president drawn from the clergy — someone who has always been interested in the purpose of a student’s life, the end to which they turn their education on human, if not spiritual, terms. He has been effective as a fundraiser, accessible to students and faculty during a particularly turbulent time, and a capable administrator. Yale’s “For Humanity” capital campaign feels very much of a piece with what Timothy Dwight V (a Congregationalist Minister and the president responsible for reorganizing Yale into Yale University) would have seen as the point to a college education. Salovey isn’t a Congregational or Baptist minister, but 200 years ago, he might have been.
He’s also an outlier, in a sense — most of the modern Ivy League presidents are not so touchy-feely, so student focused, dedicated to student wellness in a personal and professional way. Salovey’s predecessor, Richard Levin, was far more typical of the modern Ivy League president. Levin put the wheels in motion that have led to the rebirth of New Haven from a dying industrial city to an upscale and gentrified regional hub for biotech and science. Levin was (and, presumably, is) as much a social and urban visionary as he was an administrative guru, more popular with alumni than students.
In spite of the variety of backgrounds and greater overall effectiveness of the modern-day Ivy League president, something has been lacking in the education of young adults since the practice of appointing leaders from among the clergy stopped. I can speak authoritatively about the past two Yale presidents because I’ve seen and interacted with them and their words for decades. Neither Levin nor Salovey, and no Ivy League president that I have heard of or from in my lifetime, spends much time talking about faith, let alone centers it as a critical component of what it means to be an adult.
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Something that has been forgotten in the modern era is that faith is one of the core components of a healthy adult society. I mean that in the religious sense, old-timey religion, and in the interests of transparency the way I mean it is faith that Jesus Christ died for your sins, though I’m well traveled and believe that the faith I have manifests itself without Jesus in other religious traditions and for other people.
Faith is difficult. If one doesn’t have a person in one’s life who understands this —a friend, relative, or trusted religious authority — one might go one’s entire life without wrestling with faith or understanding what it is or why it’s worth engaging. If one does not know faith — if one has skipped along its surface like a stone skips across water — even to discuss faith will seem absurd or perhaps obscene.
I came about faith slowly and quietly, almost by accident. It happened for me during a pilgrimage in Cyprus, to a mountaintop shrine to the Virgin Mary, which had been a shrine to Aphrodite in the past, and before that, a shrine to — well, we don’t know the details of the before, merely its outlines. Some fertility goddess.
Meditating in the presence of this shrine, kept up by a monastery of (Greek) Orthodox monks, I came to the understanding that my life — up until that point “faithless,” strictly speaking, contemptuous of faith, fully secular and scientific — had become entranced by a vision of the world that amounted to a logical and rhetorical cul de sac — that it (and I) had become an ouroboros of solipsism, constantly chasing self-satisfaction without real reflection. The mechanism I devised to break out of this endless and self-defeating respite was to decide in that moment to believe in Jesus, the way that I’d been told to believe, the way I’d read about believing, although at that moment, I cannot say that I did — nor do I now without actively choosing to. The word for that choosing, that active belief? Faith.
In one sense, my education helped prepare me for that moment. It must have, because the paths of the past all lead to and through the present. In another sense it didn’t — much of my education frustrated faith, or actively worked against it. At Yale, faith was not stressed as an important component of education (on the contrary, it was actively and vocally derided). Looking back on things I believe this is because few faculty and no administrators even understood faith — or if they did, they saw that as a private matter, not a thing to be described to or discussed with students, and certainly not as a formal part of their education.
Of course there were student groups on Yale, and there are churches in New Haven — my congregation is among them. But this is not the same as attending a university that makes faith a pillar of existence. No, on the whole I’d say my education as a young man was structured to view faith as something bad, or foolish. The texts I read across the years culminated in works written by 20th century writers who’d grown up at a time when religious dogma was the institution, when faith was the inescapable thing. Now, we’re living in the mirror image of that paradigm.
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Since coming to understand faith, and using part of my energy and willpower each day to maintain it, I’ve been able to see its utility to the individual. As a humanist and a democrat who believes that the utility of anything builds upward from its base, I believe that civilization begins with the individual, and individuals require faith, or some form of faith-replacement.
And we’re talking about faith, real faith. It’s easy to find cheap and ineffective substitutes for faith, things people slot into the space faith would otherwise occupy —all the various diversions the world provides, from hedonism to escapism to radicalism. Faith, spiritual faith, is difficult, it demands something from the individual in return for nothing at all. It’s easy to fake. There are active incentives to pretend that one is faithful while indulging in faithlessness (particularly in places where institutional religion is strong and the powerful are attracted to the clergy over some other pursuit such as business). Faith provides nothing immediate to individual attempting to cultivate a reservoir of faith in themselves.
But the costs of widespread faithlessness are substantial. A nation of faithless citizens cannot muster the collective willpower to make decisions. It cannot trust. It cannot come together for large plans or projects, it cannot win in war, it is capable only of a thin and pitiable existence, masked perhaps by wealth, or resources, or the happy coincidence of living in a country that is, itself, a monument to the faith of one’s ancestors.
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Common wisdom as well as the fast pace of technological and scientific development state that a modern western secular education is better than any other. Over the past century, institutions such as Ivy League colleges have produced more and at a greater pace than any other system in human history. It has been so productive, if you believe the worst-case scenarios about Artificial Intelligence, it’s possible you could see it forming the end of human education, and maybe the end of history. The presidents of secular universities have presided over this intellectual flowering.
At the same time, flowers wilt and wither; petals drop to the ground to rot and become new dirt for new flowers. Below the surface, fungi and worms and roots and wrestle, producing from bulbs and seeds a new season. What sort of society are we building, what sort of society are we educating, with the current lot of university presidents? With the academics and scientists and financiers and business leaders and generals?
We are not “building” a society at all — we are managing a society that was built, in which people believed (or, in which they “had faith”) and now for the most part no longer do. Now, Ivy League presidents are (per a recent WSJ article) part time administrators, part time mediators, and part time full time fundraisers. For what does one raise money? For an institution, for research, for progress — not for a cause so simple and humble as “faith.”
And yet, faith endures — its absence is not evidence of its death, merely another vehicle by which to grow and expand the bottom line. But every human has within them the potential for faith, even the most faithless, those such as myself to whom faith does not come naturally or easily. Because once one has forced oneself to believe, once one has engaged one’s Will to see what cannot be seen, to embrace that which must be embraced, a whole world of possibility emerges. Once that happens, it is as though the universe’s symphony breaks into harmonious song — everything becomes sensible and synchronous, the cathedrals, the town halls, the public squares and train tracks and missteps — one understands that there is a purpose, and (if not the details of the purpose) that life is organized, somehow, inside that purpose.
As I said, one does not have to experience that faith in Christian terms. I do, because that is how things are for me, but there are many other means by which to adopt and cultivate faith.
For the purposes of this piece, it is important to reiterate here that this was not part of my education. Faculty and university leadership were not men and women of faith themselves, save for the chaplain (faith having been sequestered, named, and certified into its proper place). Students such as myself were — as they are today — left to their own devices.
It was not until I was in the military that I began to regularly encounter leaders for whom faith was not just important but an essential part of their lives — Christian leaders in my Army infantry units, Muslim leaders among our Afghan allies. At the time I could not see the appeal of cultivating faith, though I respected these leaders and warriors for their brave acts of self-sacrifice. At that time I did not believe that faith was necessary for sacrifice, as I, a faithless person, was capable of sacrifice. What I didn’t understand then, but do now, is that to sacrifice over and over, to place sacrifice at the center of one’s life, to lay it all aside for a belief in the possibility of some purpose greater than oneself is necessary for civilization to avoid falling into chaos, despair, fragmentation, and war.
Our businesspeople, our industry, our government, our children, and our universities are sick with faithlessness. Unless we are able to remedy that, we will be very lucky to avoid some or all of those great calamities, if it isn’t already too late. It’s also possible that we’ve gone too far down this road of faithlessness.
In any case, it might not be a bad idea to look at clergy for university presidents in the Ivy League, and beyond. Either to help avert an age of troubles, or, if that’s impossible, to hasten a time after the catastrophe when faith is needed again to rebuild.
The Local Blind Spot 