William Rainey Harper
(1856-1906)
William Rainey Harper was born in New
Concord, Ohio, on
July 26, 1856, the son of a storekeeper. Referred to by one writer
as a "child genius," Harper entered
ten. Following graduation, he worked as a clerk in his father's gen-
eral store. At age eighteen, he received a Ph.D. from
Yale.
Several years later. Harper was
given a professorship at the Bap-
tist Union Theological Seminary in Morgan Park, where
he taught
Hebrew and biblical scholarship. While there, he met Thomas
Goodspeed, who was a trustee of the "first"
that had been founded on land donated by Senator Stephen A.
Douglas. Goodspeed attempted to get Harper to assume
the pres-
idency of the institution, which was then in
financial difficulty, but
Harper returned to Yale as a professor of the Bible. Goodspeed
later
prevailed on John D. Rockefeller to commit to the funding of
a new
Harper to become its president.
As president. Harper was dedicated
to the spread of learning
far and wide in the service of mankind. His principal vehicle was
a program called the University Extension that called for lectures
for college credit at locations throughout the city and for corre-
spondence courses for students throughout the world.
So suc-
cessful was Harper at attracting scholars to the
university that it
was said to be the only institution in the history of higher learn-
ing to spring into existence with a world-renowned
faculty. He
managed, as well, to include women on the faculty and in admin-
istrative positions, and fully a quarter of the
students were female.
When he brought Amos Alonzo Stagg to the university
to start a
football program (Stagg had been a former student of
Harper's at
Yale), he replied to faculty critics of the move that "the
of
abundant was his energy, so forceful his intellect and his pres-
ence, that
the newspapers of the time referred to the institution as
"Harper's university."
Harper became a member of the Club June 7, 1892. He
presented two papers: Art Among the Hebrews (May 16,1898)
and
Semitic Literature as Illustrated by the Code of Hammurabi
(January
30, 1905). At age forty-nine, learning that he had incurable
cancer. Harper nevertheless continued to shoulder his responsi-
bilities as president of the university until his
death on January 10,
1906.
Read before the Club: November 2, 1998
Two other Literary Club members played important roles in the
founding of the
effort to raise funds locally to secure the Rockefeller gift. Additionally,
when the university opened, Martin A. Ryerson was president of the
board of trustees, and
Among other things, they were responsible for the architectural design of
the campus. Both of them devoted the remainder of their lives to the
welfare of the institution.