In this week’s installment of our recurring series bringing you the history of Princeton University and its faculty, students, and alumni, the sophomores conduct their annual end-of-year book burning ritual, women are enrolled in a course for the first time, and more.
June 25, 1980—Ernest Gordon, Dean of the Chapel since 1955, retires.
Ernest Gordon, undated. Dean of Religious Life and of the Chapel Records (AC144), Box 35.
In this week’s installment of our ongoing series bringing you the history of Princeton University and its faculty, students, and alumni, the University Chapel is dedicated, a professor spirits a Chinese dissident to safety, and more.
May 30, 1928—The University Chapel, which replaces the destroyed Marquand Chapel, is dedicated in a Sunday morning service. It is the largest such chapel in the United States.
Princeton University Chapel, May 29, 1928. Associated Press photo. Historical Photograph Collection, Grounds and Buildings Series (AC111), Box MP30, Image No. 744.
In this week’s installment of our ongoing series bringing you the history of Princeton University and its faculty, students, and alumni, Swedish royalty visit campus, mysterious postcards from Boston arrive, and more.
April 11, 1935—Compulsory chapel attendance is abolished for juniors and seniors; it will be abolished for sophomores in 1960 and freshmen in 1964.
Princeton University Chapel, January 13, 1932. Historical Photograph Collection, Campus Life Series (AC111), Box MP30, Image No. 771.
With the policy that young lovers of the same sex may no longer sign the marriage register and that Michael Beer and Jason Rudy will have a retractory asterisk placed by their entry, neither side of the aisle gets what it wants. … No one who has attended ours, the most pragmatic of all universities, should be surprised. –Micah Weinberg ’98, “Stuck in the Middle of the Road,” Progressive Review, November 1997
Eighteen years ago today, the first same-sex wedding was held in the Princeton University Chapel. Gay marriage was not legal in New Jersey (nor anywhere in the nation) so the ceremony was a symbolic one rather than a legally binding contract. The couple were both Princetonians. Michael Beer earned his Princeton degree in 1995 and had been a graduate student in plasma physics when he met Jason Rudy ’97, an English major. They had begun dating three years prior to the event and had been living together for two. Knowing that the marriage would not be legally recognized, Rudy told the Princeton Alumni Weekly, “With the exception of a stronger sense of commitment and emotional security, opening a joint bank account, and getting a new set of towels, nothing much will change.”
Editorial cartoon, Progressive Review, November 1997.
When news of their plans to marry in the Chapel appeared, it invited heavy criticism for the Assistant Dean of Religious Life, Sue Anne Steffey Morrow, who performed the ceremony. Though primarily concerned with the precedent set by having a same-sex wedding in the Chapel, another issue that troubled some students and alumni was that Beer and Rudy were atheists, while the wedding was heavily laden with the trappings of Christian tradition. Other responses were supportive of Morrow and of the couple.
Continue reading
Today’s post is written by Rev. Frederick Borsch ’57, former Dean of Religious Life and the Chapel 1981-1988.
Or, since lore had it that alumnus and plutocrat Harvey Firestone had donated a goodly part of the over two million dollars for building the Chapel, it was also “Firestone’s Folly.” We heard that this sobriquet had been given by earlier critics who would have preferred that the money be used for laboratories, libraries and faculty salaries. At the time, however, President Hibben had acclaimed the Chapel as Princeton’s two million dollar witness against materialism!
Ernest Gordon became the Chapel’s Dean in 1955. He was “earnest” all right (a little joke of ours), but what a change he brought to the worship with his Scot’s burr, his energetic faith and dramatic story of conversion to Christianity during his four years in a miserable Japanese concentration camp. A handsome man with a certain winsomeness about him (still seen in the film), he invited Billy Graham to campus for what was in affect a mission to undergraduates.
Later Gordon would twice invite (over a number of protests) Martin Luther King, Jr. to the Chapel’s pulpit and preside over the Chapel during the civil rights movement, then a memorial service for Dr. King, turmoil and protests over the Vietnam War–some of these gatherings taking place in the Chapel. As part of all that, a measure of interest in religion grew, but not necessarily in formal church-going. By 1964 all Chapel requirements had finally been dropped as the University became still more secular in outlook and at the same time more diverse in terms of religions. I had to wonder if Dean Gordon did not wince to himself when, at the end of the film, he commented on how important the Chapel was for undergraduates although far fewer were coming to his Sunday morning services than in earlier years.
Truth in blogging: in 1981 I succeeded Ernest Gordon as Dean, and one can read something more about his ministry, the Chapel and the times in my forthcoming Keeping Faith at Princeton: A Brief History of Religious Pluralism at Princeton and Other Universities (Princeton University Press, 2011).
–Frederick Borsch ‘57