John Grier Hibben
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John Grier Hibben (Apr. 19, 1861 - May 16, 1933), philosopher, educator, and president of Princeton University, was born at Peoria, Illinois, on the day when Lincoln proclaimed a blockade of the Southern ports. He was the only son of the Rev. Samuel and Elizabeth (Grier) Hibben. The Hibbens were of Scotch and Scotch-Irish descent. His father came from Hillsboro, Ohio, to the pastorate of the Presbyterian church in Peoria, and on the outbreak of the Civil War volunteered for service as a chaplain in the Union army. He died in 1862 of one of the fevers prevalent in the camps. After his death, his widow, then a very young woman with a son one year old, was faced with serious financial problems. Elizabeth Grier was a native of Peoria, one of a large family of brothers and sisters with German strains in their ancestry. She was a woman of great initiative and resource, had an excellent mind, and later was one of the pioneers in the movement for woman's suffrage. Obtaining a position in a nearby ladies' seminary, she never wavered in her determination to give her son the best education possible. He attended the Peoria high school and entered the College of New Jersey in the fall of 1878. He never forgot his background as a high-school boy from the Middle West, and as president of Princeton was instrumental in modifying the entrance requirements for boys of promise from the Western public schools.
As an undergraduate he distinguished himself especially in mathematics and on graduation was awarded a mathematical fellowship. He was valedictorian of his class and its president from 1882 to his death in 1933. After graduation, in 1882, he spent a year in philosophical studies at the University of Berlin. On his return he entered the Princeton Theological Seminary, and while there taught French and German at the Lawrenceville School. It was at this period that he met his future wife, Jenny Davidson, the daughter of John and Adelia (Waite) Davidson, the former a native of Berwick, Scotland, and an eminent New York lawyer. On Nov. 8, 1887, Hibben and she were married.
He was ordained as a Presbyterian minister by the Carlisle Presbytery on May 19, 1887, having served the Second Presbyterian Church at St. Louis as a stated supply for a brief period previously. His next charge was at the Falling Spring Presbyterian Church at Chambersburg, Pa., where he remained four years. A throat ailment forced him to give up preaching and he went to his alma mater as an instructor in logic in 1891. He received the degree of Ph.D. in 1893 with a dissertation on "The Relation of Ethics to Jurisprudence," became assistant professor in 1894, and Stuart Professor of Logic in 1907. In 1912 he was elected fourteenth president of Princeton, succeeding Woodrow Wilson [q.v.], and retired in 1932 on the fiftieth anniversary of his graduation.
When he came to the presidency Princeton was torn by the controversies aroused in the latter years of Wilson's administration. Wilson's introduction of the preceptorial system in 1905 was an innovation with which Hibben was in accord. It had vitalized the traditional methods of instruction through lectures and recitations by supplementing them with small discussion groups in which students were brought into close contact with the instructors and stimulated to independent reading and study. When, however, Wilson proposed to reconstruct the whole social life of the college by eliminating the upper-class clubs and the life of the dormitories through the expedient of housing undergraduate students in quadrangles presided over by members of the faculty, there was a storm of protest from alumni and trustees. Hibben, while keeping aloof from the personal animosities and acrimonious debates involved, allied himself with the group opposed to the quad system, not because of sympathy with the vested interests of the clubs, but because he was convinced the project would alienate a large number of devoted alumni, whose loyalty was rooted in their class associations. Following Wilson's resignation in 1910 to become governor of New Jersey, there were two years of agitation, at the end of which Hibben was elected president, though not unanimously, chiefly on the ground that Princeton's first need was peace and that Hibben was best fitted to promote it.
His election was a victory for the anti-Wilson group, but in his inaugural address he declared that he represented no faction but a united Princeton. He encouraged larger alumni and faculty participation in the government of the university and was a resolute defender of academic freedom, protecting members of the faculty whose "radical" views brought irate protests to his office. The university endowment increased five-fold; the size of the faculty doubled; the four-course plan of study in the upper classes was initiated; the work of the scientific departments was greatly extended; and the schools of architecture, engineering, and public affairs were inaugurated. The great expansion in the field of science at Princeton during this period is attributable largely to Hibben's generous recognition of the leadership of Dean Henry B. Fine [q.v.].
Hibben's educational philosophy is revealed in essays to be found in A Defense of Prejudice (1911) and in occasional articles. He defended the ideas that underlie the traditional "liberal education," pleaded for the humanities, and, while he recognized the rôle of "pure" science, his own interest was in the transmission of old truth rather than in the discovery of new. To conserve the racial inheritance of the past and to vitalize it by fresh interpretation and adaptation seemed to him the chief function of the scholar.
His philosophical writings include: Inductive Logic (1896); The Problems of Philosophy (1898); Hegel's Logic (1902); Deductive and Inductive Logic (1905). All of these display his gift for mathematical precision of statement and lucid exposition. His books on logic, though later superseded, still constituted a valuable approach to the Hegelian system. His most enduring contribution is The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1910) in the Epochs of Philosophy Series, of which he was the general editor. His account of the development of Kant's philosophy is masterly, and he ranks Kant as the culminating thinker of the Enlightenment. The Kantian emphasis on moral freedom through intuitive recognition and willing assent to a universally binding moral law was the keynote of his ethics and the fulcrum of his opposition to all forms of utilitarianism and pragmatism. In "The Vocation of the Scholar," in the volume A Defense of Prejudice, he opposes the "creed of change" of which Professor William James [q.v.] is the most brilliant apostle, with this declaration of philosophical fundamentalism: "There are certain ideas which in the history of the race experience have become established for all time, for all places, and for all persons and things" (pp. 146-47).
Hibben was not an original thinker. His genius was explicatory rather than exploratory. His mind was a filter of past ideas rather than a fountain of fresh thought. His style at its best is distinguished for its lucidity, but often becomes dull from repetition of the obvious and the monotony of philosophical clichés. But whenever he touched on vital moral issues, his own unimpeachable rectitude of character and fervent ethical idealism sharpened his critical sense and vitalized his utterance. Hibben's interest in the life of the nation was keen. In the little volume The Higher Patriotism (1915--translated into Japanese, Chinese, and Spanish) may be discerned the deeper reasons for his ardent advocacy of the Allies in the First World War. Against the doctrine that "there is no law above the state" his ethical sense rebelled, and he declared, "No more damnable doctrine was ever uttered" (p. 35). From 1914 to 1917 he stirred large audiences with his appeals for national preparedness, and during the war dedicated his own and the university's resources to the service of the country. When peace came he joined the League of Nations non-partisan organization, worked for disarmament and conciliation, and was one of the first signers of a petition advocating the canceling of all war debts. He had supported the Eighteenth Amendment but changed his attitude, recognizing that it was unenforceable and in his own observation had effects the very opposite of its purpose. His association and friendship with Col. Charles Lindbergh, with whom he was in daily contact after the tragic kidnaping at Hopewell, N. J., intensified his interest in the suppression of crime.
He never held public office though he was often mentioned for an ambassadorship. There was a movement after his retirement in 1932 to elect him senator but he declined. The honor which he himself appreciated most was the establishment by several thousand alumni of the Hibben Loan Fund for students in financial straits. A scholarship in Princeton founded by a Yale alumnus also bears his name, as does a street in Princeton and a new mineral discovered by his colleague Alexander H. Phillips. His monument on the campus is the chapel, the nave of which bears his name.
Hibben combined a rare talent for conciliation with a robust tenacity to principle, and firmness of conviction with tolerance of difference. He wrote in praise of prejudice but his prejudices were generous and creditable to his character. He harbored no resentments and never interpreted a difference of opinion as a personal affront or an insult to the truth. He had the gift of dealing with independent minds and uniting their wisdom by the force of gentleness and tact. He was a stabilizer rather than a stimulator. Believing that "man is ordained to progress," he accepted the challenge of change and refused to identify change with decay. But for him progress was the mean between innovation and conservation, between new conceptions of truth and the tried wisdom of the ages.
On the afternoon of May 16, 1933, while he was returning to Princeton with his wife from Elizabeth, N. J., his car collided with a truck on a wet pavement and he died on his way to the Rahway hospital; he was buried in the Princeton Cemetery. His wife succumbed to her injuries a few weeks later. He left one daughter, Elizabeth Grier.
