Bradley's new direction would never be supported by its founder

The following is a modified version of a reflection presented at the Bradley University Senate meeting on Dec. 14, 2023. It was offered in response to the administration’s decision to cut 61 faculty positions and 15 academic programs.

I am from the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. We are one of the departments affected by Monday’s announcement. Our two programs, representing two majors and three minors (Philosophy, Religion and Ethics) will be eliminated. Only philosophy courses will continue to be taught in a service role. Of our current six faculty positions, all tenured, two will be retained and four eliminated.

I wish to reflect less on my department and more on what these cuts mean from the broader perspective of Bradley University’s identity. I will make two points:

First: the program eliminations announced by the administration will degrade the educational mission of our institution as envisioned by Mrs. Bradley. That mission requires that alongside programs preparing students for careers, there must be centers of learning where the pursuit of knowledge is its own goal.

Second: the administration, in carrying out these cuts and in its avowed intent to create robust online programs, has shown little interest in key element of Mrs. Bradley’s bequest — the creation and nurturing of a campus community that would contribute to the well-being of the Peoria area.

Facing this crisis, each of us might be tempted to retreat to our own corner, seeking to protect what is dearest to us. I would suggest, however, that Mrs. Bradley’s vision should inspire us to provide leadership, modeling for the entire Bradley community a solidarity in the face of the cuts. That solidarity must derive its strength from the values and identity that we can discern in Mrs. Bradley’s efforts at the founding of our institution.

During my interview for the position I now hold, I was told of Mrs. Bradley’s vision articulated in our founding charter, that “the aim of the Institute shall be to furnish its students with the means of living independent, industrious, and useful lives by the aid of a practical knowledge of the useful arts and sciences.” At that time, I felt that there was little in that statement with which I could personally identify. I saw Mrs. Bradley as a local entrepreneur who had established a polytechnic school during an intense phase of industrialization in American history. She gave the school its principle aim of conveying practical arts to students who in turn would serve the needs of the captains of industry.

The word “useful” in the charter signaled to me that Bradley as an institution understood its students within a utilitarian worldview that conjured the familiar metaphor of cogs in a gear. I naively assumed that my values, acquired in the study of the humanities, were antithetical to the ethos of the institution. The institution for me was schizophrenic, harboring a large number of pragmatically oriented programs arrayed in contrast to a smaller number of disciplines premised on the simple joy of discovery and of growing knowledge as an end in itself. I became resigned to thinking of the institution as holding within itself an irreconcilable dichotomy.

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Happily, in time, I came to see that Mrs. Bradley held a broader vision. Seeking to gain a better understanding of Mrs. Bradley, my initial search for materials revealing her mindset turned up little. Other than the polytechnic’s charter, there were no letters, journals, diaries, or notes. The only evidence of her handwriting was a signature in a family Bible. Lacking direct evidence of her views, I nonetheless discovered that our library possessed the accession catalogue of her personal library, which, upon her death, became part of the Bradley Library collection. This list contains a broad range of titles, including numerous works on English and American history, a biography of Abraham Lincoln, and works of literature like Charles Dickens’ "Bleak House" and popular novels like Lew Wallace’s "Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ."

Mrs. Bradley, who had been educated as a child on the Indiana frontier, apparently developed a wide range of intellectual interests through her adulthood. The collection reveals her Christian faith and heritage, but also something quite intriguing. It contained poet journalist Sir Edwin Arnold’s "Light of Asia" or "The Great Renunciation," a biography of the Buddha in verse, published in 1879. More intriguing was the two volume proceedings of the first World Parliament of Religions that was held in 1893 at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. That historic meeting brought luminaries of the world’s religions to the U.S for the first time. Through the Parliament, Americans came to learn of Hindu Vedanta from the great philosopher and social reformer Vivekananda and about the Zen tradition of Japanese Buddhism from Shaku Sōen, the master of D.T. Suzuki, whose works on Zen and East Asian Buddhism invited generations of Americans, including myself, to go to Asia in pursuit of understanding this tradition in depth.

Mrs. Bradley never left Peoria, but she clearly sought to cultivate a window on the world and on human experiences vastly different from her own.

It stands to reason, then, that Mrs. Bradley founded her institute with commitment to classical foundations. Otherwise, why would she have invited William Rainey Harper, a scripture scholar trained at Yale and first president of the University of Chicago, to be Bradley’s first president? How is it that John Dewey, the great American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer at the University of Chicago, was asked to go around the country recruiting faculty for the new Bradley polytechnic?

If Mrs. Bradley had a narrow vision for education at her new institution, how is it that she invited John Lancaster Spalding, the first Roman Catholic Bishop of Peoria, to deliver one of the institution’s early guest lectures on the value of a liberal education in institutions of higher learning?

Lastly, how is that in the very first paragraph of the charter she instructed that her institute would “include a department of ethics in which instruction shall be given in the principles of morality and right living as exemplified in the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.” This reveals Mrs. Bradley as taking full measure of the humanity of the students who would study in her institution.

Mrs. Bradley established a school that gave space to intellectual wonder, to the joys of research, and importantly to the formation of character and the nurture of the human spirit. She hoped that graduates could lead lives that were financially secure but that would continue, as she had, cultivating a life of the mind and of the spirit.

Bradley, if it is to be true to its founder’s vision, on the one hand must retain and renew its commitment to the practical arts. I hope my colleagues in these areas that have been cut will speak eloquently to the damage that this will do to our institution. At the same time, our school must equally retain and renew its commitment to the areas of learning that challenge the human intellect and spirit, instilling the practical arts with meaning, purpose, wonder, and vibrancy.

To suggest that the dedicated study of math and physics, the study of languages, the study of cultures and international relations, the study of religion, and the study of philosophy — which is the earliest and most foundational discipline in our Western tradition — are no longer needed is to suggest that depriving our future students of such experiences of wonder and exploration and moral growth are not really necessary to their humanity.

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I would like to return for just a moment more to the word “usefulness” in Bradley’s charter. While originally interpreting this word in a utilitarian context suggesting that graduates would lead useful lives as tools or pawns of industry or of the economy, I came to realize that I was likely in error. The charter’s employment of this word might in fact reflect the influence on Mrs. Bradley’s worldview of the 18th century philosopher, scientist, mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg. We know that Swedenborg’s doctrines were prevalent throughout Illinois during Mrs. Bradley’s lifetime. We also know there were prominent members of the Swedenborg faith in Peoria. When their church experienced a fire, we know that Mrs. Bradley arranged for their community to meet in the space occupied by her Unitarian community. In Swedenborg’s theology, the term “useful” refers to the divine, cosmic purpose of a created being. Swedenborg, in his work "Divine Love and Wisdom," asserts that if a created being is to be useful, “it must be for the sake of others.”

In other words, Swedenborg was asserting that human meaning and purpose are only achieved in the service of others. Put another way, a person realizes her or his usefulness only in the creation of community. By extension we can infer that Mrs. Bradley, in calling for the graduates of her institution to lead useful lives, was in fact exhorting them to live lives of purpose based on service of others and the creation of community. What that means for us today is that Bradley as an institution can only be considered useful when it serves and furthers the well being of communities in the Peoria area.

I find it difficult to understand how that obligation can be fulfilled by the decisive turn away from foundational programs and a concerted turn toward online education. In the end, we must not forget that Bradley is an institution built on human tragedy. How does any woman recover from the unspeakable loss of every one of her children and her beloved husband? Yet here we are. May we each day be as useful in our interactions with each other, with our students, and with Peoria area communities as she has been to us.

Dr. Daniel Getz is an associate professor of philosophy and religious studies at Bradley University, where he has taught for 32 years.