University of Chicago - Timeline Event

John D. Rockefeller, William Rainey Harper

1890

After the first University of Chicago went bankrupt in 1886, its former sponsor, the American Baptist Education Society, approached oil magnate John D. Rockefeller about funding a new university. The new University of Chicago imitated the German model of a progressive, disciplinary university. From its inception, the University of Chicago admitted female and black students. It also incorporated the best of German Higher Criticism in its adjunct Divinity School, which immediately became a major center for theological modernism. For the next 50 years, its Bible faculty were closely involved in the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy that wracked the Northern Baptist Convention.

Rockefeller was vital in the university's prosperity. He gave the institution $35 million over his lifetime, helped its first president, Bible scholar William Rainey Harper, attract donations from Chicago philanthropists, and subsequently wooed top scholars from around the nation by offering nearly double the going salary for professors.

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