VASSAR COLLEGE
POUGHKEEPSIE - NEW YORK l260l
At a Meeting of the Faculty of Vassar College held
October eighteenth, nineteen hundred and seventy-eight,
the following Memorial was unanimously adopted:
J. HOWARD HOWSON, l894-l978
When J. Howard Howson retired, in 1959, he had been
Professor of Religion and Chairman of his Department for
thirty years. He died in January of this year.
Born in Totonto, Canada, in l894, he was reared in the
Puritan tradition. He graduated from the University of Toronto
in l9l6. In l9l7, he became an officer in the Northumberland
Fusileers and began serving with the British Expeditionary
Forces in France. He fought two years in frontline trenches
without wound from shellfire but, just before the Armistice,
was burned by gas. When released from the hospital, he
returned to Canada and went West in search of an outdoor
life. He dug coal in Alberta for nine hours a day and, at
night, taught English to fellow miners. Then he worked on
government lands in Northwest Canada.
He came to New York City in 1920, at age 26, to study at
Union Theological Seminary. l923 was a banner year: he
received the B.D. degree, maqna cum laude, from Union, and
its Travelling Fellowship; Columbia Teachers College awarded
him an M.A.; he was elected Fellow of the National Council
for Religion in Higher Education; and he married Lillian
Campbell. He taught at both Union and Teachers College for
the next two years and then, for three, at Hamilton College.
Howard Howson joined the Vassar faculty in 1929, on the
Frederick Weyerhaeuser Chair. He created Religion 105, a
course in which he introduced generations of Vassar students
to scholarly study of the Judeo-Christian tradition. His
course in the history of religions helped to pioneer Asian
studies in the curriculum. He taught for years in the Vassar
Summer Institute of Euthenics, on ethics and religion,
adolescent psychology, and mental hygeine and the family. In
the early nineteen forties, he taught summer courses in marriage
at Michigan State. Later in the'forties, the Rev. James A. Pike
then Rector of Christ Episcopal Church, Poughkeepsie, publicly
attacked his liberal approach to the study of religion.
That attack was not Mr. Howson's only link with the
community. He belonged to the First Congregational Church,
to the local chapter of the League for Industrial Democracy,
and to the Dutchess County Society for Mental Health, in all
of which he held elective office. After retiring from Vassar,
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he taught a course in religions of the world at Dutchess
Community College.
His wife, Lillian, died in l946. They had three children--
John, Carol, and Christine--who grew up in the college community.
In l947 he married Alice Guest, of the Department of English,
later Study Counselor, who survives him.
He spoke countless times in chapel, which then met daily.
Francis White Field '36 has recalled that one clique of
students attended day after day, so handsome was Mr. Howson,
until they discovered that he was married. Then they dropped
chapel. Mrs. Field also recalled this touch of his teaching:
In l932...it was still the custom to assign specific
seats to new students in a classroom, at least until
everyone got well acquainted. Being tall, and having
a name that began with "W", I had spent my life so
far at the end of the line or the back of the room.
Not so in Howard's class. He had decreed that W, X,
Y, Z should be in the front row. That is how my
appreciation of him got off to such a good start.
Howard Howson had a consideration for persons that was at
once deep and unsentimental. Over the years, one member of
the Vassar community after another turned to him for counsel.
We close with some words of his own. They come from an
address on "Academic Freedom“ that he gave during the McCarthy era:
Academic freedom involves much more than society's
recognition of the role of the scholar as the re-examiner
of our cultural heritage. Academic freedom involves
society's legitimate expectation that the scholar as teacher
will educate scholars as competent as himself, with an
- integrity equal to his own, with independence of judgment
~ comparable to that he claims for himself. This means that
he must create in his classes an atmosphere of mutual intel-
lectual respect, in effect, a miniature scholarly society
of students, under the guidance of the teacher. This involves
the recognition of obligations on both sides.
On the side of the teacher there must be a recognition
of the student as a person in his own right. He is a creative
person with his own aspirations, his own aptitudes and inter-
ests for which no apology need be made. He is no tabula rasa
on which the teacher inscribes the truth as he knows it; no
empty vessel waiting for the truth to be poured into him. if
he is to be initiated into the society of scholars he must be
treated in such a way that he has a growing respect for him-
self as a scholar. This means that he must learn that dis-
cipline of scholarship that will take him back to the living
data of knowledge with tools that will enable him to distin-
guish the important from the trivial, the significant from
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the insignificant, the more permanent from the ephemeral.
the student is to think fearlessly, the scholar as teacher
must acquaint him with points of view and conclusions othe
than the teacher's own in such a manner that he as student
is free to accept other possibilities without any sense of
disloyalty to his teacher or fear of censure by him. lf
the student is to think creatively, the scholar as teacher
must be perceptive, and appreciate the significance to the
student of efforts that may be pitiably faltering when
compared with the assured strides of the mature scholar.
This calls for humility in the very area of the scholar's
sense of power.
Respectfully submitted,
Elizabeth M. Drouilhet
John H. Glasse
Edward R. Linner
October l8, 1978