Harvard University

Harvard University appears as more than an academic setting in the lives recounted here: it is a place where philosophical ambition, religious doubt, and spiritual change meet. For Thomas Kelly, it offered advanced study and later became the setting of a painful examination failure. For Douglas Steere, it was first a challenge to belief and then part of a wider return to prayer and faith.

Kelly’s Graduate Studies

In the fall of 1930, Kelly took a year’s leave from Earlham to study at Harvard. He believed its faculty included the most influential group of philosophers in the Western world. His studies were directed by Alfred North Whitehead, a British mathematician whose philosophical starting point lay in the sciences. That approach suited Kelly, who had majored in science; Harvard thus gave him an opportunity to pursue philosophy through a mode of inquiry that connected with his earlier education.

The year at Harvard did not resolve the tension between Kelly’s intellectual and religious commitments. He already held that God could be known through mystical experience, while he also wanted to establish himself as a competent scholar and philosopher. After his studies, he did not want to return to Earlham and the Midwest. The Depression left no other college teaching opportunities, however, and he went back, working long hours on his scholarship and doctoral dissertation. His return marks an important contrast in Harvard’s role: the university had offered an intellectual opening, but it had not yet supplied a place in which Kelly felt at home.

The Examination and Its Aftermath

Kelly’s later connection to Harvard turned on his doctoral dissertation examination. While in Hawaii, he received an offer from Haverford College, which seemed to fulfill his hopes of returning to a Quaker community and working among people interested in mysticism. He had hoped to defend his dissertation at Harvard before leaving for Hawaii, but the faculty advised him to wait until he returned. At Haverford, the examination finally took place—and ended disastrously.

The failure was a severe personal blow. Kelly’s son described its force as if the world had caved in on his father. Kelly’s wife feared that he might suffer a fatal breakdown, attempt suicide, or fall into a depression from which he would not recover. Douglas Steere and Haverford’s president assured him that the failure would not affect his position at the college and would not be made public. Those reassurances contained the immediate professional damage, but they did not erase the gravity of the experience.

In late 1937, Kelly described being shaken by an experience of Presence that he had neither sought nor expected. The account suggests that the Harvard failure may have left him more receptive to God, though it presents this as a possibility rather than a certainty. By January 1938, his way of speaking had changed: instead of describing mystical experience as an academic subject or something observed in others, he spoke from his own experience of Divine Presence. Harvard’s significance in this sequence therefore lies partly in the sharp reversal between examination failure and a spirituality that became personal and publicly expressed.

Steere’s Encounter with Doubt and Prayer

Harvard also formed part of Steere’s early religious search. After a professor urged him to study philosophy there, he found that the first year of study swept away what little faith he had. The new ideas he encountered left little room, as he saw it, for belief in God, and he reached a point of profound discouragement. His experience differs from Kelly’s: for Steere, Harvard’s intellectual environment initially unsettled faith rather than serving primarily as a place to pursue a dissertation.

A meeting with a Chinese student who described his conversion from communism to Christianity helped open another path. Steere also encountered students from the Episcopal Divinity School near Harvard who gathered for silent prayer at noon. He did not become a regular participant, but the meetings introduced him to prayer as a lived practice. By the end of that first year, his faith had been renewed, a change he attributed to silent prayer. He later understood the contemplative life as a continuing discovery of Christ in unexpected places. The account thus presents Harvard not as simply hostile or supportive of belief: the same period of philosophical disruption also brought Steere into contact with a practice that helped restore faith.

A Longer Academic Connection

Steere’s studies at Harvard continued beyond that first year of doubt. After two years he qualified for doctoral work, but before he could begin it he received a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees. He discovered the Quakers there, and came to understand their meetings as a place where he experienced Christ’s indwelling spirit. After returning to the United States, he completed a PhD at Harvard in 1931 with a dissertation on Friedrich von Hügel, a liberal Roman Catholic philosopher and theologian whose book The Mystical Element of Religion was relevant to Steere’s scholarly subject.

The two men’s Harvard histories bring together the institution’s academic and spiritual dimensions without making them identical. Kelly’s Harvard years led into a prolonged return to Earlham, intense work, and an examination failure whose emotional consequences were grave. Steere’s first year there shook his belief, while his contact with silent prayer helped renew it; he later returned to complete doctoral work. In both accounts, intellectual study and religious life remain in tension, but neither story reduces the university to a single influence. Harvard is at once a destination for philosophical training, a setting of distress, and a point in the longer development of two distinct spiritual lives.