In June 2001, I filed into Princeton University's magnificent neo-gothic chapel to hear Garrison Keillor deliver the baccalaureate address to my graduating class. This annual interfaith service is one of the few times when the roughly 2000-seat building fills anywhere near capacity. If memory serves correctly, Keillor contrasted a typical Sunday morning in the university chapel and in the country church of his youth. In the former, a small congregation in an ornate, colorful cathedral hears a compact, bland sermon designed to inspire all protestants; in the latter, a capacity congregation in a compact, bland building hears an ornate, colorful sermon designed to inspire fear of hell in all protestants.

Margaret Grubiak's book seeks to make sense of a massive Catholic-style cathedral built by protestants to cater to generic religious impulses on a secular campus. The “white elephants” of the title are university chapel buildings on the campuses of elite secular universities, namely “an expensive but unwanted or useless thing” (1). One might expect such buildings to predate the era when these institutions “secularized” in the decades around 1900 by distancing themselves from their denominational heritage. But the chapels Grubiak considers—including Princeton's—instead originated in the years immediately following that initial period of change. As Grubiak aptly summarizes existing scholarship, new ideals of dispassionate scientific research and disciplinary specialization, along with desire for influence beyond a particular denomination led many universities to decrease religion's role in intellectual life. Yet they sought to retain a role for religion in character formation.

White Elephants on Campus analyzes chapel building campaigns between 1920 and 1960 to unpack the ambiguities of this new role. As Grubiak notes, building campaigns are expensive and thus reveal an institution's priorities. Even more so, buildings constitute a university's public face: they literally embody its values. As universities dropped or decreased required chapel services while investing in huge new libraries and laboratories, erecting new chapels—or even buildings that looked like chapels—affirmed a continuing role for religion. Their architectural specifics signaled the nature of that role.

Grubiak grounds her argument in the architectural history of representative elite private universities: Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Yale, MIT, and, somewhat incongruously, the University of Pittsburg (because it built a truly remarkable structure called the Cathedral of Learning). She also refers more briefly to religious architecture at Columbia, ITT, and William and Mary. Grubiak focuses on private, non-denominational institutions because they were neither subject to a particular religious body nor bound to honor the separation of church and state. Such institutions had a relatively free choice “of whether and how to reframe their relationship with religion” (7).

Using these institutions, Grubiak documents a chapel building push in the 1920s and 1930s and uncovers several approaches to setting religion's relevance in stone. Building a large chapel at the center of campus, often opposite the library, could communicate the complementary nature of divine and human wisdom. Other universities made the same point by constructing libraries or classroom buildings in the style of a cathedral. Grubiak's detailed reading of the architectural symbolism of Yale's Sterling Memorial Library is particularly intriguing and instructive. Meanwhile, gothic architecture sought to lure students toward higher values by appealing to their emotional and aesthetic ideals rather than their intellectual ones.

Yet Grubiak argues these clear—and expensive—affirmations of religion simultaneously reveal its shrinking relevance within higher education. Chapel building projects sometimes called forth antagonism from secular alumni or could not muster sufficient funds. Ambiguous buildings like the Yale library could be read either as support for religion or as parody of it. Although a national religious revival in the 1950s produced an attendant revival in chapel construction, by that time widespread acceptance of pluralism sought to make space on campus for all faiths and none. The results were smaller-scale and less distinctive chapels like the one at MIT. In the end, Grubiak claims, chapels built from 1920 to 1960 failed to secure a central role for religion in elite private universities and remain instead an awkward monument to the attempt.

Grubiak demonstrates how these building campaigns inform our understanding of the changing role of religion on campus, but does not always clarify how representative they were. Situating her examples more explicitly within broader American higher education would give her thoughtful case studies more weight. (Her contextualization is stronger for the 1950s than for earlier decades.) Additionally, I wonder how these schools' architecture may have correlated with their student population. Most of Grubiak's institutions were all-male. Did their approach to embodying religion draw inspiration from their sense of training society's elite in terms of sex as well as class? How would they compare to the Seven Sisters analyzed in Alma Mater, Helen Horowitz's classic architectural history of women's higher education (New York: Knopf, 1984)? Finally, would incorporating other types of campus religious spaces nuance Grubiak's argument? She notes the proliferation of campus denominational centers in the 1950s, but already by the early twentieth century many campuses boasted YMCA buildings, like the one she briefly mentions at Johns Hopkins, to house this immensely popular student protestant association.

Quibbles aside, Grubiak's case studies are quite suggestive, and I wish she had taken the further step of stating more directly how they refine the existing narrative of collegiate religion established by George Marsden, Julie Reuben, Jon Roberts, James Turner, and others. Still, relating architectural innovations to this process is compelling in and of itself. Most notably, Grubiak proves that “chapels in colleges and universities are never neutral spaces” (125). To have one is to make a statement. So is to design it in a particular way or not have one at all. The exigencies of campus architecture forced administrations to take a stance on religion.