Learning to be modern: American missionary colleges in Beirut and Kyoto 1860--1920

In 1874, ABCFM, the richest and one of the most conservative evangelical organizations in North America decided to open in Japan an English-language institution of higher learning with a largely liberal arts curriculum. This was a shift away from its policies against educational work that was not based solely on the Scriptures and done in the local language. This shift and therefore the genesis of Doshisha English School (today Doshisha University) in Kyoto, was in large part the result of the successful establishment a decade earlier of the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut. In the early 1860s, a group of renegade ABCFM missionaries, under the pressure from nascent Arab and expanding Jesuit schools, challenged a long-standing policy of their missionary board on secular education and asked for support in establishing a college, as opposed to a seminary. Their rebellion was successful, the Boston elders relaxed their policies, and in 1866 a college opened its doors in Beirut. Its successful establishment made a Christian college an acceptable use of missionary resources and a model that soon found fertile ground in Japan.;This thesis charts the connected history of the Syrian Protestant College (today the American University of Beirut) and Dōshisha English School in Kyoto (today, Dōshisha University) as sites that catalyzed the debates on religion and science and shaped the discourse on education, progress, and development both in their locales and in the United States. Besides being supported by the same missionary organization, the Beirut and Kyoto colleges were connected by a common benefactor - William E. Dodge, one of the richest merchants in New England who played a key role on both continents. The two colleges also share a particular institutional framework based on the model of nineteenth-century American colleges – a non-sectarian Christian institution with a liberal arts curriculum – such as Amherst, from which both the founders of the Beirut and Kyoto colleges graduated. Finally, their common role in the modern history of the Middle East and Japan connected the two campuses as they quickly became, and remain to this day, important intellectual spaces in their respective regions.