Daniel Bays has done it again, this time with a co-editor, Ellen Widmer. He has put together yet another wonderfully researched, well organized, and carefully and beautifully written set of articles that deal with, in this case, various aspects of the educational system that were a major part of the larger Western missionary enterprise in China. This new volume focuses on the major colleges and universities that major Western mission groups established in China. Thus China's Christian Colleges can be seen as a book that builds on the foundations that venerable and talented China missions historians such Jesse Lutz and Ralph Covell have constructed in their narratives of the network of Christian colleges and universities established by Western missionary organizations in China.
The book is organized into five major parts and I shall introduce each of these and discuss, very briefly, the nature of the articles each part contains.
The first part is titled “The Call: The Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions.” Terrill E. Lautz explores the backgrounds and qualifications of those who became administrators and faculty of these mission-funded educational institutions. Lautz, himself a former officer of the Luce Foundation which gave support to the first of Bays's efforts, explores the completed questionnaires. This data supplies excellent material that he uses to provide a deep understanding of what mission and college administrators were looking for in the candidates for faculty.
The second part of the book, “Foundations of the College Enterprise,” covers a variety of subjects. The first of these chapters, examines the architecture of Christian college campuses. Jeffrey W. Cody gives us a detailed and very clearly written study of the way Americans planned and then built a number of the major university campuses in China. We come to understand the Western models for this special type of site as well as the ways that these architects and planners attempted to integrate certain Chinese styles or touches into the buildings, even as they made sure the structures were true to their Western roots.
The buildings featured in site plans and drawings that Cody included resembled the one such hybrid building I know best after years of my use of the gigantic and impressive home center of the Maryknoll Mission based in Ossining, New York. Maryknoll was the first major American-based Catholic mission order that send its brothers and sisters to various parts of southern China over the course of the first half of the twentieth century. The space and the layout the campus were of great importance and much time and thought was spent in trying to put all the details in place, as Cody, a historian of architecture, shows us.
Ryan Dunch, the heir apparent to Daniel Bays as the “master” of the mission studies field, discusses the battle between theology and science in the development of the curriculum of the colleges. His article is followed by a very different sort of piece—a study of the links between the Seven Sisters and the women's colleges of both western Massachusetts and China. This chapter focuses on Jin Ling in Nanjing (now Nanjing University) and is a fascinating and disturbing look at the ways one's position can define—and destroy—one's life.
Part 3 focuses on issue of curriculum and the way individual careers were defined by their work in a given missionary college or university. Edward Yihua Xu focuses on battles between those favoring the teaching of Chinese and those who argued for the need to teach English at the famous Episcopalian university, St. Johns in Shanghai. Helen Schneider examines what she terms “The Professionalization of Chinese Domesticity” in her chapter, and Alison W. Conner studies the teaching of “Anglo-American law at Soochow University.”
Part 4 discusses the “Wider Ramifications” of the Christian college enterprise in China. Susan Rigdon, for example, examines the teaching of civic duty in her article titled “National Salvation.” Jia-feng Liu then follows this piece by focusing on the plans for the colleges in the postwar period, plans thwarted by civil war and the victory of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its military forces in October 1949. The final article in this section, co-written by Paul Daniel Waite and Peichi Tung Waite, deals with the role of the Christian colleges in the founding Harvard-Yenching Institute.
Each article in the final section of the book, part 5, titled “Beyond China,” provides comparative perspectives. The first, by Yuko Takahashi, deals with American colleges in Japan, and the second, by Ted Widmer, looks at one American protestant educator in Turkey.
I think I said enough to give the reader a clear sense of what the editors and the authors of the articles have done to bring to life the complex world of the Christian college and university network in pre-CCP China. This volume is, as I have conveyed, one that is very well organized and fits neatly into its place. Therefore, the editors have been able give us a clear and systematic means of expanding what we know about Chinese educational institutions as major centers of education within the vast network of the People's Republic of China's college and university system. This book is a triumph on many levels and must be read by all interested in the missionary enterprise and all interested in the way Americans have tried to push forward their benevolent—and now quite controversial—cultural, intellectual, and religious agenda for change.
