The Vassar Chronicles | A history of the Chapel : serving spiritual needs since 1904

Jon Cruz Columnist

This past week, Vassar celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of its Chapel. It might seem odd to today’s students that a non-religious school would have such a building. But in fact, Chapel Services were a required part of campus life for decades, and the removal of such services from student life sparked a series of discussions and debates that continue to affect us today.

The Chapel itself was the gift of Mary Shaw Thompson, Class of 1877, and Mary Morris Pratt, Class of 1880, two generous alumnae who shared in the growing concern on campus that the College’s cramped quarters for religious service were no longer able to comfortably accommodate college students. The campus’ original chapel was located in Main Building—the building was expanded by the no-longer-standing annex to the front of the structure, known by all as “Uncle Fred’s Nose”—and larger campus gatherings, including religious ones, were sometimes held a few strides away in Avery. For religiously-minded campus members, however, these quarters were not enough; the fact that Vassar, though officially “non-sectarian” (but, as we will learn, not entirely non-religious), had mandatory chapel services only made the need for a new chapel seem all the more urgent.

The cornerstone for the new structure was laid on Oct. 4, 1902 in a somewhat elaborate ceremony that included revelry, music, and speeches. Key among these presentations was the student body’s rendition of “Hark, Alma Mater,” sung at key events such as Serenading and Founder’s Day, and a popular piece for song at chapel services in Main. The words themselves were fitting for a college dedicated to equal (and excellent) education, but also particularly suited to dedicating a building meant both to promote inner reflection and to lead the way towards illumination. The opening words set the tone for the piece:

Hark, Alma Mater, through the world is ringing
The praise two thousand hearts have brought to thee
Thou, who dost hold the torch of truth before us,
To light our pathway in the years to be.

The building itself—designed by Shepley, Putnam & Coolidge—is Norman in design, an architectural style rarely seen in North America. The base is trimmed with Ohio sandstone, while the building itself is made out of Cape Ann granite. Large enough to hold 1,400 students, the building itself is 143 feet long, 90 feet wide, and 56 feet high. While the view from the outside is dominated by the impressive and imposing materials used to facilitate its construction, the view from the inside has a more genteel—but no less impressive—feature: the stained glass windows dotting the building. The windows themselves are designed both by the firms of La Farge and of Tiffany; the latter donated the impressive rose window and many of the smaller windows found that memorialize particular students.
However, it would be impossible to talk about the Chapel without discussing the musical instrument that dominates the interior of the structure: the college’s massive pipe organ. Alexandre Guilmant, a renowned organist originally from France, had the opportunity to play the new piece in front of an audience.

The instrument, which was intended to play both religious and non-religious music, was designed by Hutchings-Votay of Boston and installed at the time of the Chapel’s opening two years after the cornerstone was laid. Quite advanced for its time, the device included a “roll-player,” very similar to the types of automated pianos that make use of a sheet of paper with bumps and dimples in order to know what keys to hit. The resulting recital, with the lack of a human artist, would often sound quite technically perfect but somewhat heartless; nonetheless, the feature was popular and used as a teaching aide for students who were enrolled in music classes. By May 1907, the College organist’s comfort with the roll-player was used to present renditions of numerous famous orchestral works, including those by Wagner, Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and others; the Chapel even saw the world premiere of a number of minor, but interestingly-titled pieces, including Saint-Saens’s “Fantasie poiur Orgue Aeolian.”

The organ used today contains the same casing as the original, but the instrument itself was replaced in 1967. The new design, more technically proficient and certainly no less impressive, was made by a long-serving campus organist and religious activist, Donald Pearson.

While the College correctly anticipated the organ’s use for nonreligious functions, it might have been surprised that chapel services were no longer made mandatory a mere twenty-two years after the building’s construction. Certainly, though the Chapel today sees its fair share of packed audiences—concerts, guest speakers, and presentations—its days as a daily stop for each students is probably over. (Of course, this is not to discount the work of the staff in the Office of Spiritual Life, who have made great strides to distance the school from its history as an institution that celebrated all religions…that were Protestant Christian.)

The College had never professed to be a religiously-affiliated institution, but Vassar, like most American colleges of the nineteenth century, had religious men as administrators from the start. Nearly all of Vassar’s earliest presidents, from Milo P. Jewett and John Raymond forward, were ministers; all gave sermons and praised Jesus Christ at campus-wide events. Diaries and letters from the earliest Vassar students show that some found many of the services tedious, but it was hard to imagine college without them.

The 1920s brought with them a liberalization of many avenues of American social life, even if class structures became more rigid than ever. People began to recognize that compulsory attendance in religious services was more likely to turn off individuals not inclined to religion even further, rather than help convert them. There was also growing recognition at Vassar that not all students worshipped in similar ways. Of course, much of this early dialogue focused on Catholicism, and later Judaism; also, despite the presence of Buddhist and Muslim students from abroad, little thought was given to religious affiliations not prominent in America.

In the place of compulsory chapel came the Vassar Community Church, a group perceived as an “extracurricular activity” by the administration. Without an Office of Spiritual Life, it was this group’s responsibility to provide spirituality services on campus, to bring in outside authorities to preside over religious services, and to promote (as years went by) interfaith dialogues. Even this organization, however, faced scrutiny from students and administrators. Some questioned the campus’ continued Protestant bias—rather than give a Catholic priest equal footing on campus with a local minister in terms of a chaplain position, the school decided to eliminate the position—while others, including longtime religion professor Florence Lovell, called for the construction of a second, smaller, more intimate chapel that would promote religious life for those who wished to engage in it.

Sarah Gibson Blanding, sensing the changing times, remained resolute, and felt that the following objectives should be set down by Vassar:

“The College encourages students to attend worship services; it is a desirable part of the Vassar program for students to participate from time to time in corporate worship.”

A participant in these dialogues, Ada Klett Bister, demonstrated that not everyone was as enthusiastic about shedding mandatory chapel services: “Although I am against compulsory attendance at our chapel and Sunday services,” she noted in an opinion piece in The Miscellany News, “I feel that one morning a week, say Monday chapel time, could well be used almost regularly for a required assembly to give us the experience of being together to think through a worthwhile concern.” Though not overtly religious—one might see connections to the modern Vassar’s active promotion of non-organized “spirituality” among students who are interested in such avenues—suggestions like Bister’s were still framed in the mindset that a Protestant leader would preside over such occasions.

Certainly, these calls for active direction might appear out of character for us today, looking at a school that now has no religious affiliation (and, indeed, has been named a school at which the students are “most likely to ignore God on a regular basis”). Perhaps the more lasting element of these discussions were the calls from some faculty members to examine why professors encouraged students to think about economics and politics in classes, but not religion. “Why don’t we do the same thing in the field of religion?” questioned one professor.

It would seem that, while the College has moved away from implicitly mandating a religious life for its students, the suggestions of the dialogues that came out of the Chapel’s construction and loss of its role as a daily gathering place for students have been, at the least, put into some amount of action.