Abstract

This essay examines the teaching of composition at Harvard University alongside the teaching of rhetoric at Boston College by returning to a published debate over education reform between Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard, and Timothy Brosnahan, SJ, president of Boston College. The debate, contextualized alongside each school’s curriculum, captures the religious tension at the heart of the turn from rhetoric to composition during the end of the nineteenth century. A reprise for understanding education as religious and rhetorical, Brosnahan's resistance to Eliot’s narrative of “the new education” exposes the unseen religious assumptions behind Eliot's attempt at secularizing the American university.