Introduction and Overview

[p. 1] The ideals of a people, their aspirations and convictions, their hopes and ambitions, their dreams and determinations, are assets in their civilization as real and important as per capita wealth or industrial skill.
—Frederick Jackson Turner, 1910

1.1 Higher Education, the YMCA, and the Ideals and Work of a People

On April 8, 1903, University of Illinois President Andrew S. Draper delivered an address on the University of Illinois before the Association of Officers of State Institutions at the Executive Mansion in Springfield. Draper, a New York State native who began his ten-year service as President in 1894, provided in his brief address a broad overview of the origins, purpose, work, and resources of the University. He began by reminding his audience that the University of Illinois was a public, land-grant institution, brought into being in part because of the funds made available through the National Land-Grant Act of 1862, signed into law by Illinois’ own Abraham Lincoln. The Land-Grant Act, Draper declared, was an epoch making statute in world education. It grew “out of the natural trend of a democratic society unparalleled in the freedom of its thought.” It was the expression of a people who “dared to believe that the operations of the colleges ought to guide the thinking of freemen towards the great ends for which democracies are set up, and that the schools should have something to do with the hand-work as well as with the sophistry and the religion of a people.”¹

In Draper’s view, the educational work of land-grant institutions had to be based both on a recognition of modern industrial conditions, and on an embrace of the developing ideals of democratic life. The people of the new democratic age, Draper declared, “would not assume that the power to think and the right to feel stopped with the theological masters of an age when modern society had not got upon its feet.” Education in the land-grant setting would “supercede dogmatic [p. 2] methods of teaching which had grown out of one form or another of human bondage, and had sprung from conditions which had passed, or were fast passing away.” The new education was to be democratic in spirit, “more evenly balanced than any which had gone before it.” It would recognize the rights and potential contributions of all.

Turning to the University of Illinois, Draper proclaimed that

Its high mission is to bind men together in a democracy of learning, and to extend the noblest fraternity in all the wide world. . . . It stands on the plane of the common brotherhood, and its doings are beyond the control of bigotry or of partisanship, of corporate power, of social cast, or of wealth. It holds that woman has the inherent right to the same educational liberty and the same intellectual opportunity as man. Its face is to the sunlight. It is not backing its way into the future with sorrowing eyes upon idols in the remote and shadowy past. It cherishes culture, but it knows that any culture worth having must come through work. It encourages philosophy, but a philosophy which keeps its feet upon the earth, which sees through the eye of courage and uplifts the common life.²

For Draper, the work of the University of Illinois had a spiritual dimension which he viewed as being related to its embrace of science and its democratic or civic purpose. He said that it

nourishes the life of the spirit, but it neither submits nor objects to any creed; it is not for free thinking which has no havens or anchorages; it is for freedom in a faith based upon scientific facts and logical thinking, and it encourages worship in any form. It stands for all men and for equality of opportunity; its sympathies are as high as heaven, and as broad as the boundless universe of matter and of life.³

While the University was to contribute to the public or common interest (the “commonwealth,” in the language of the day) through scientific research that led to the discovery or creation of new knowledge, Draper held that its main purpose was to be understood [p. 3] in human terms. Near the end of his address, he declared that

Above all else we know that the prosperity and influence of the State and the happiness of her people must turn upon the training, the industry, and the outlook of her young men and women. We are not unmindful of the solemn responsibility of our trust, and we are striving to guide and direct the young men and women of Illinois, in whatever line of work they may choose, so that they may not only become sure-footed citizens with a proper appreciation of the obligations of public service, but also that they may honor industry of every kind, and be filled with the purpose and the power to produce something which will quicken the moral strength and enlarge the honest wealth of all.⁴

The themes touched upon in Draper’s address are rich and striking: freedom, the religion of a people, the ideals of democratic life, an evenly balanced education, a democracy of learning, educational liberty, the life of the spirit, equality of opportunity, public service, moral strength, the honest wealth of all. To a large extent, these themes belonged to the nineteenth century. It was in that century that such ideals as a “democracy of learning” and “equality of opportunity” were first applied, however tentatively and imperfectly, to American higher education. Ironically, in the twentieth century, a century which opened with great hope and optimism for the advance of such ideals, they would soon be viewed by many as anachronistic. Democratic, moral, and spiritual ideals were rapidly pushed aside, flattened, or submerged in land-grant institutions, to be replaced by an increasingly business-like pursuit of “scientific” knowledge—of “efficiency,” economic growth, productivity, and professionalism—through supposedly “unbiased” or “neutral” expertise and technologies.

Draper’s address is interesting in part because it reveals that during a critical period in American higher education—those few decades on either side of the turn of the last century when land-grant institutions underwent enormous expansion—a “balanced” education based on a unity of spiritual, intellectual, and material [p. 4] aims could still be boldly and publicly imagined and pursued. While there were growing hopes for the potential contributions of science and scientific research to the improvement of American life and society, these hopes were not yet in Draper’s time severed from civic and spiritual ideals and convictions. The work of public, land-grant universities was still understood by many to be broadly liberal and practical, in pursuit of the spiritual, civic, and vocational ideals of the American people. This reflected one interpretation of the spirit of the Land-Grant Act of 1862, which had called for the creation of a system of higher education devoted to the “liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.”⁵

During his tenure as President of the University of Illinois, Draper oversaw dramatic growth which offered promise of fulfilling the liberal and practical goals of land-grant education better and more completely than ever before. When he began his presidency in 1894, the University consisted of 6 buildings and 80 faculty members, with 810 students and a biennial budget of $492,000. When he left in 1904, it had grown to 27 buildings and 350 faculty, with 2,779 students and a biennial budget of nearly $2 million.⁶ Yet as Draper delivered his address in 1903, near the end of his tenure as President, he stood at the edge of a gradual shift in the culture and focus of land-grant education which would increasingly make it difficult for students and faculty to pursue a balanced education, with a unity of spiritual, intellectual, civic and vocational dimensions under broad liberal and practical aims. This shift involved a triumph of economics over civics, of specialized research over teaching, of expert-dominated technology and knowledge transfer over a more collaborative “democracy of learning.” It dissolved the nineteenth century synthesis of scientific knowledge, religious and philosophical idealism, and progressive, social-reform optimism.⁷ It involved, as the historian Julie Reuben has recently argued, a dramatic shift in how intellectuals viewed “truth.”⁸

While in the late nineteenth century it was assumed that “truth” had spiritual, moral, and cognitive dimensions, during the first half of the twentieth century this broad conception of truth was abandoned. It was replaced by a view of knowledge that drew sharp [p. 5] distinctions between “facts” and “values.” The ideal of educational balance was replaced by narrow disciplinary specialization, and the pursuit of a liberal and practical education was replaced by the pursuit of a liberal or practical education.⁹ The ideal of a practical democratic citizenship, of the citizen “filled with the purpose and the power to produce something which will quicken the moral strength and enlarge the honest wealth of all,” was replaced with the ideal of a detached, objective scientific and technical expertise, based on a professionalism stripped of its civic practices and purpose, tied more to visions of economic efficiency, upward mobility and the enjoyment of the fruits of a consumer culture than to the creation of a democratic commonwealth.¹⁰

•••

There were two independent associations present on the University of Illinois campus at the time Draper delivered his 1903 address that stood at odds with this developing shift in culture and focus. In their own way, these associations declared themselves to be in sympathy with Draper’s broad vision of a balanced education devoted to an integration of personal and public aims with civic, vocational, and spiritual dimensions. Draper took note of them in his address, the centerpiece of which was a building-by-building tour of the campus grounds. Reaching what was then considered the “south” side of the campus, Draper pointed out a house on the southwest corner of Wright and John streets:

That building on the corner over there, just over the border of the campus, is the property of the University Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Associations. It is a fine property. The Associations have seven or eight hundred student members, and are the most efficient organizations of their kind in the West. They assist new students in finding homes and getting started, and are at all times forceful in promoting religious activity in the University community.¹¹

The University YMCA and University YWCA—two separate organizations—shared the twelve-room house on the corner of [p. 6] Wright and John streets. It had been jointly purchased in 1899. Once known as “Curry Cottage,” it was renamed “Association House” during the time it was occupied by the YMCA and YWCA.

Both the University YMCA and YWCA were founded at the University of Illinois in 1873, only six years after the University itself was founded, though the YWCA ceased to function for a time, to be reestablished in 1884. Each of these associations was a part of a powerful intercollegiate movement of campus YMCAs and YWCAs in Canada and the United States, which established a federation in 1888 called the Student Volunteer Movement (SVM). By 1905, the SVM included associations from over 650 campuses, giving it a presence on over half of all institutions of higher learning in North America.¹²

The “object” of the University YMCA, as stated in the Illinois Student Handbook of 1904-1905 (a joint publication of the YMCA and YWCA), was

To befriend and help men who need friends and help; to apply in practical college life the principles of the Christian faith; to stimulate men to develop a well-proportioned, all-around manhood; to train men for intelligent, aggressive Christian work; to bring to bear upon the University life a vigorous and healthful religious influence;—in short, to prepare an army of men to go out from the institution to become religious and spiritual leaders, in their communities, as they will there become the business and social and intellectual leaders,—this is the mission of the Young Men’s Christian Association.¹³

While much of the work of the University YMCA at the time this mission statement was written was personal in nature, having to do with such things as Bible study and the provision of various services to individual students, it is also clear that those involved in the University YMCA hoped that it would be a vital public force which would influence university life as a whole. Indeed, the same year the above statement was published, a report from a national meeting of secretaries (i.e., paid staff) of student YMCAs declared that they stood for the development of campus YMCAs that “embrace all the students—all faculties. The whole range of the moral [p. 7] and religious life of the students and the whole range of the moral and religious life of the institution so far as this can be done by a voluntary organization.” By 1909, it was widely urged that the campus YMCA “should be in the middle of college life where it can influence the ideals of every department of college activity.”¹⁴

The work of the University YMCA at the University of Illinois must, I believe, be understood in terms of this ambitious public mission. At its best, the University YMCA has stood for a principle or belief once articulated by Frederick Jackson Turner: “The ideals of a people, their aspirations and convictions, their hopes and ambitions, their dreams and determinations, are assets in their civilization as real and important as per capita wealth or industrial skill.”¹⁵ With the embrace of this belief the University YMCA has stood with the University of Illinois, at its best. Each of these institutions at their public-minded best—one a part of a sweeping volunteer movement committed to the application of Christian principles to all aspects of life, and one a part of a great movement of democracy in higher education—have sought to tap and develop the ideals, aspirations, and convictions of a people through the work of building a better society. Persons engaged in each of these institutions over the years have not sought to promote a merely private, individualistic or abstract idealism, but a concrete public idealism expressed through work of all kinds. “Any culture worth having must come through work,” Draper said. It is public work especially—understood as the visible, creative efforts of a diverse mix of people that produces things of lasting importance to our communities and society—that holds promise of building a culture worth having.¹⁶

Today, as a voluntary, democratic association of both men and women, of young and old, of Christian and non-Christian, the University YMCA at the University of Illinois stands as an important resource for catalyzing public work both on and off the campus. While the general significance of the first two letters of its name—Y and M—has disappeared, and the distinctive meaning of the third letter—C—has shifted to a broad emphasis on spirituality, values, and ethics (partly in response to an increasing respect for and embrace of religious pluralism and diversity), the [p. 8] meaning of the letter “A”—Association—has grown. Today, its deepest promise is a promise of association. This brief study is devoted to an exploration of the evolving nature of this promise for the University YMCA over the course of its 125 year history, with an eye to its continuing relevance in today’s world.

1.2 The Promise of Association

A wide assortment of vibrant voluntary associations has long been an important feature of American life and culture. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in his classic book on democracy in America, based on observations from his visits to the country in the 1830s,

Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types—religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute. Americans combine to give fetes, found seminaries, build churches, distribute books, and send missionaries to the antipodes. Hospitals, prisons, and schools take shape in that way. Finally, if they want to proclaim a truth or propagate some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form an association. In every case, at the head of any new undertaking, where in France you would find the government or in England some territorial magnate, in the United States you are sure to find an association.¹⁷

Tocqueville believed that voluntary associations were key to the maintenance of liberty, the development of mutual understanding and respect, the solving of practical problems, and the broad sharing of political power in a democratic society. He wrote that “among democratic peoples all the citizens are independent and weak. They can do hardly anything for themselves, and none of them is in a position to force his fellows to help him. They would all therefore find themselves helpless if they did not learn to help each other voluntarily.” Tocqueville believed that “Feelings and ideas are renewed, the heart enlarged, and the understanding developed only by the reciprocal action of men one upon another.”¹⁸

[p. 9] Throughout American history, voluntary associations grounded in religious traditions—such as the YMCA, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—have held out a promise of providing an organized means for people to apply the principles of their faith traditions to the affairs of public life. Such associations have often served, as the authors of Habits of the Heart point out, as forces which temper utilitarian individualism with an ethic of concern for the common good.¹⁹ But as Sara Evans and Harry Boyte argue, they have also served as “free spaces” or “citizenship schools,” where people learn a variety of cooperative democratic skills as they debate and act on issues of public concern.²⁰

Saul Alinsky, the practical democratic theorist and community organizer who helped residents of Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood (the site of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle) learn to organize to better their conditions in the 1940s, understood that voluntary associations can be mechanisms for developing people’s capacities through political action and participation with popular education at its heart. Alinsky saw democracy as the work of what he called “people’s organizations.” He believed that people were the “motor” of democratic society, while the “organizations of the people are the gears.” People’s organizations, Alinsky wrote, are

those organizations in which they participate, which they own, and through which they express their interests, hopes, sentiments and dreams. These are organizations that are genuinely of the people, by the people, and for the people—organizations that by their very character formulate and articulate a dynamic democratic philosophy.²¹

Voluntary associations have also been understood as “mediating structures.” Such structures—according to Peter Berger and Richard John Neuhaus, who coined the term in 1977—are those institutions that stand between the private world of individuals and the large, impersonal structures of modern society. They “mediate” both by providing a means for people to transmit their beliefs and values into large-scale “mega-institutions,” thereby affecting [p. 10] their policies and actions, and by serving to protect people from the alienation and bureaucratic facelessness of modern life.²²

The concept of mediating institutions is tied to the idea of “civil society.” Though its meaning and significance is the subject of much debate, civil society can generally be understood as the space between the state and the private marketplace. As political theorist Benjamin Barber defines it,

Civil society is the domain that can potentially mediate between the state and private sectors and offer women and men a space for activity that is simultaneously voluntary and public. It shares with the private sector the gift of liberty; it is voluntary and is constituted by freely associated individuals and groups. But unlike the private sector, it aims at common ground and consensual, integrative, and collaborative action.²³

There are several reasons why a civil society filled with a thriving mix of civic associations is thought to be important. Civil society can be a locus of freedom and a bulwark against the state and its bureaucratizing, homogenizing, and colonizing tendencies. The associations of civil society can also be tremendously effective tools—in partnership with government—for solving social problems, improving community life, and developing people’s civic capacities and talents. Additionally, involvement in civil society builds what Robert Putman calls “social capital,” which he defines as “features of social organization such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit.”²⁴

The promise of association, then, has many dimensions, both personal and public. Throughout its history, all of the dimensions named above have been relevant, in varying degrees, to the work of the University YMCA. While there is abundant testimony that the promise of association through the University YMCA has been felt or expressed in deeply personal terms, it is equally clear that its promise has been deeply public. Today, when there is a renewed sense of the importance of voluntary associations for dealing with the problems and opportunities of our common life, we face the need to gain a new appreciation of the public dimensions of the [p. 11] promise of association. But perhaps most importantly, there is a need for us to gain an understanding of how personal and public promises might be linked or interwoven.

The search for a connectedness between spiritual, civic, and vocational ideals and practices that the University YMCA has pursued over the years is part of the on-going struggle for wholeness in a fractured, compartmentalized world. As a movement, the YMCA on the international level has historically stood for the whole person. This is communicated symbolically by its familiar three-part logo of a triangle, representing a unity of “body, mind, and spirit,” set within a circle which represents the understanding that individuals are not islands unto themselves, but members of a broader social and natural environment.²⁵ The logo and the theory behind it were developed in the late 1880s by Luther Gulick, a physician and physical education teacher. As Galen Fisher wrote in his history of public affairs work in the YMCA, Gulick

proclaimed that the YMCA ideal should be to develop well-rounded personalities, through a “fourfold program”—physical, intellectual, social, and spiritual or religious. Among the distinctive points in this conception were that all phases of personality should be developed together and that the “social” should be expanded beyond recreative social intercourse to embrace also the individual’s responsibility to help shape society around him.²⁶

The search for wholeness is, as Parker Palmer points out, fundamental to the meaning of religion. The Latin root of the word “religion” means to “rebind” or “bind together.” Palmer writes that religious traditions have offered people a grounding from which they might overcome brokenness and fragmentation through seeking a reconciliation of that which has been estranged. Such a reconciliation can only be achieved through engagement with a public world of diverse interests and perspectives.²⁷

Voluntary associations, whether they are religious-based or not, have been crucial mechanisms for tapping, directing, and unleashing the vast civic spirit and abundant energies and talents of the American people in the public work of building our commonwealth. [p. 12] Part of the civic mission of such associations has been not only to address public needs and problems through various programs and services, but to help develop a practical citizenship among the common people by offering opportunities for them to become involved and engaged in significant ways in serious public work. Over time, however, many voluntary associations—including the YMCA, which today is the largest nonprofit organization in the world—have to a large extent lost this part of their civic missions. They have become dominated by a therapeutic, professionalized culture of “service delivery” which has too often led both to a lop-sided focus on “personal growth” and to the erosion of space and opportunities for the involvement of ordinary citizens in matters of public concern.

Today, as Harry Boyte, Nancy Kari, John McKnight, and others have argued, government, educational institutions, and voluntary associations have too often encouraged a view of people as needy “customers,” consumers, or clients rather than creative citizens.²⁸ To counter this trend, one of the most important tasks of our time is to renew a work-centered understanding and practice of citizenship, where people are viewed as active producers of and contributors to our common world. We need to move from being a nation of passive consumers, disaffected customers, and victimized clients to becoming a nation of citizens, of creative co-participants in the care and development of our commonwealth. In pursuit of this task, we need to renew our voluntary associations by rediscovering the full promise of association.

For the YMCA at the University of Illinois, which celebrates its 125th anniversary in 1998, the full promise of association has involved an on-going search for ways to weave together civic and spiritual aims through work that connects personal and public concerns. Henry Wilson, who served as General Secretary of the University YMCA from 1916-1946, gave voice to this search when he proclaimed in 1933 that

This organization is indigenous to the campus community. Its purpose is in line with that of the University, which, in the large, is to make for a better citizenship. What can the Association [p. 13] do in order that spiritual values may be significant in the development of citizenship? Or what can the Association do to make for the recognition of the need of spiritual values in citizenship? If the training for citizenship is going to be significant it must make for attitudes which will render impossible bloodshed between races or social groups or international groups. It must reduce in America the human costs of prejudice and strife. This is a spiritual purpose and that spiritual purpose gives the Association a place of unusual importance in this community.²⁹

Today, a purpose that seeks to integrate civic and spiritual aims is as important and compelling as ever. It is my hope that by exploring the different ways such a purpose has been articulated and understood over the life of the Association, this study might offer inspiration for the work of strengthening its pursuit in the years to come.

1.3 Overview of Chapters

The three chapters that make up the core of this book (Chapters Two through Four) provide a focused study of the evolution of the University YMCA’s mission and work across the decades. The focus is placed on understanding both how and why the Association attempted to connect spiritual and civic aims in its articulations of mission and purpose and its program of work. This connection lies at the core of what I referred to above as the “promise of association.” It should be acknowledged, however, that association through the University YMCA has carried with it many different kinds of promises and possibilities. While some of these are noted in what follows, only the spiritual-civic connection is treated in detail.

Chapters Two through Four are each divided into three sections: an introductory section highlighting contextual and historical themes and issues; a middle section describing the Association’s mission, work, and institutional trends and dynamics during particular time periods; and a concluding discussion section focused on the spiritual-civic connection component of the promise of association theme. An attempt is made throughout each of these [p. 14] chapters to link the University YMCA’s story to the larger stories of the evolution of the YMCA in North America—including especially its student movement—and to changes and developments in American religious and political life. For the most part, these links are merely suggestive. They point to areas in need of much additional thought and research.

Chapter Two covers the first distinct era in the University YMCA’s history, the period from 1873-1916. It begins with the founding of the Association in 1873 and carries the story forward until 1916, when the Association’s longest-serving General Secretary—Henry Wilson—was hired. The hiring of “Chief” Wilson, as he was fondly called, marked a turning point in the University YMCA’s work, when it chose to abandon its first large facility and focus on strengthening its “religious movement” orientation. Chapter Three covers the second major era in the Association’s history, the period from 1916 to 1958, during which this focus was pursued. This was a key period for the Association, when it managed, despite two world wars and the Great Depression, to maintain a thriving program and successfully raise funds for and construct a major new facility which still serves the Association well today. Chapter Four covers the most recent era of the Association’s history. It begins in 1958, when J. Frederick Miller took over as General Secretary, and continues the story of the evolution of the University YMCA’s work and mission up to the present time. This is an era with three distinct periods. From 1958-1973, the Association embraced religious pluralism and sought to be the “intellectual religious center” of the campus. From 1973-1984, it turned its main focus away from both religion and the campus, choosing to focus instead on the surrounding community through a major program that provided services to troubled youth. In 1984, the focus shifted back to the campus, with a special concern for social justice.

The book concludes in Chapter Five with a brief summary, followed by a discussion of two of the key historical challenges to the work of connecting spiritual and civic aims and values. The first of these has to do with pressures the YMCA has faced to remain vague or broadly general in the religious, spiritual, and civic [p. 15] values and ideas it has embraced and promoted. The second has to do with the power of a compartmentalized or fragmented view of education and knowledge which promotes a radical separation between spiritual values and beliefs and the affairs of civic and economic life. The recognition that both of these challenges remain with us today underscores the continuing importance of the promise of an association committed to the pursuit of wholeness.

¹ Andrew S. Draper, The University of Illinois (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1903), p. 5.

² Ibid., pp. 7-8.

³ Ibid., p. 8.

⁴ Ibid., p. 22.

⁵ Land-Grant Act quoted in Edward Danforth Eddy, Colleges for Our Land and Time: The Land-Grant Idea in American Education (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956, 1957), p. 33. For a powerful articulation of the “balanced” education ideal, see Liberty Hyde Bailey, The State and the Farmer (New York: MacMillan, 1908). Bailey served as dean of the New York State College of Agriculture at Cornell University from 1903-1913. In addition to being a highly accomplished scientist, Bailey was the premier spokesperson for the democratic promise of the land-grant idea in American higher education.

⁶ These figures, which are for the Urbana campus only, are taken from Allan Nevins, Illinois (New York: Oxford University Press, 1917), p. 359. It should be noted that Nevins’ figures may not be accurate. Several other sources I have reviewed present somewhat different statistics. Still, the general trend of expansion and growth holds.

⁷ For an excellent, concise overview of this shift, see Douglas Sloan, Faith and Knowledge: Mainline Protestantism and American Higher Education (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994), pp. 1-34.

⁸ See Julie A. Reuben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

⁹ The best discussion of the significance of the conflict over the relative emphasis of liberal versus practical education in land-grant institutions can be found in Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977), pp. 143-170.

¹⁰ For an overview of higher education’s role in the rise of a narrow professionalism, see Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1976.

¹¹ Draper (1903), p. 17.

¹² Although I will focus on the University YMCA in the pages that follow, the history and work of the two associations have often been intertwined. Where it is necessary or important to do so, I will discuss both.

¹³ Illinois Student Handbook: 1904-1905, p. 10.

¹⁴ Quoted in William H. Morgan, Student Religion During Fifty Years: Programs and Policies of the Intercollegiate YMCA (New York: Association Press, 1935), p. 79.

¹⁵ Frederick Jackson Turner, “Pioneer Ideals and the State University,” in Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Dover Publications, 1920, 1996), p. 269.

¹⁶ See Harry C. Boyte and Nancy N. Kari, Building America: The Democratic Promise of Public Work (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996).

¹⁷ Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Harper Collins, 1850, 1969), p. 513.

¹⁸ Ibid., pp. 514, 515.

¹⁹ See Robert N. Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985, 1996), pp. 219-249.

²⁰ See Sara M. Evans and Harry C. Boyte, Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986, 1992).

²¹ Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals (New York: Random House, 1946), pp. 46-47.

²² See Peter L. Berger and Richard John Neuhaus, To Empower People: From State to Civil Society (Washington, D. C.: AEI Press, 1996).

²³ Benjamin R. Barber, “The Search for Civil Society: Can We Restore the Middle Ground Between Governments and Markets?,” in The New Democrat, 1996.

²⁴ Robert D. Putman, “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,” in the Journal of Democracy, Vol. 6, Number 1, January, 1995, p. 67. For more on the concept of social capital, see Robert D. Putman, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 163-185.

²⁵ Recently, the traditional YMCA phrase, “body, mind, spirit” has been reordered as “spirit, mind, body.” This was done in order to signal the importance of the spiritual or religious dimension of the YMCA’s work, which has increasingly been marginalized by a narrow focus on sports, recreation, physical fitness and health programming.

²⁶ Galen M. Fisher, Public Affairs and the YMCA: 1844-1944 (New York: Association Press, 1948), p. 61.

²⁷ See Parker J. Palmer, The Company of Strangers: Christians and the Renewal of America’s Public Life (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1981), p. 22.

²⁸ See Boyte and Kari (1996); John McKnight, The Careless Society: Community and Its Counterfeits (New York: BasicBooks, 1995); and John Kretzmann and John McKnight, Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community’s Assets (Evanston: Northwestern University, 1993).

²⁹ Henry Wilson, University YMCA Board of Directors minutes, June 22, 1933, p. 2.