Alumni Park, finished in 2018, sits on the historic site of UW’s YMCA building. Founded in 1881, the YMCA became the center of student social life for decades. It foreshadowed the Memorial Union, which would open in 1928, as a gathering place for students, a hosting site for extracurricular activities, and the social hub of campus. The YMCA itself was deeply entwined with the university. As late as 1913, the YMCA published the university’s official handbook which was distributed to every student. Handbooks included church directories and codes of conduct that reflected the dominant Protestant piety of the era. 

But the university was diversifying in religious representation and growing in size. In recent decades, Hillel, the center for Jewish campus life, and the Muslim Student Association have each grown larger. More recent Christian groups have become core members of the university religious community, including InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, The Navigators and Campus Crusade for Christ (now known as Cru). There are now more than fifty religious, Registered Student Organizations on campus. 

The university itself has transformed from a liberal arts college to an agricultural school to the more familiar look of a vast public research university, counting more than a dozen colleges with hundreds of fields, thousands of faculty and tens of thousands of students, representing billions of dollars of federal research money. The student population has also diversified, with close to 20% minority student body and more than 4,000 international students from more than 120 countries. 

The YMCA building itself was demolished in 1956, a sign of its declining centrality to student life. The overt spiritual heritage on this small plot of land can be seen at the far end of the park, where the seal of the university is carved into the ground. The Latin phrase ” Numen Lumen” translates into English as “God is the Light.” It was adopted in 1854, when the vast majority of the university community was Christian. Small, officially-designated “reflection spaces” in the two buildings that flank the park—the Memorial Union and the Red Gym—are evidence of how the university today both acknowledges and seeks to de-stress religious identity. 

Even then, however, the trajectory toward today’s pluralism was visible. The university’s first chancellor, John Lathrop, preferred the interpretation of the seal to be “The divine within the universe, however manifested, is my light”—a non-dogmatic sentiment that accommodated various monotheistic traditions in the nineteenth century, and a far wider breadth of traditions today. Now, students from more than one hundred countries, with dozens of religions and spiritual practices, make up the UW community. No matter what religion those who work live and learn at UW belong to, the university’s spiritual resources remain vast to those who seek them out.  

The large building in your view was opened in 1971 and carries the name of Helen C. White. It houses a popular student study spot, College Library, and a handful of academic departments, including the English Department. Helen White taught English at UW for forty-eight years, from 1919 to her death in 1967. As mentioned in a previous stop, she was the first woman to become a full professor in the College of Letters and Science. 

White was a lifelong devout Catholic and an expert in early modern religious literature, two passions that converged in her many books. She wrote important works on spiritual mystics like William Blake and, in another case, on the social criticism embedded in the religious literature of sixteenth century Britain. She also wrote well-received novels about early modern missionaries that combined detailed historical reconstructions and explorations of religious devotion and contemplation. 

White’s career at UW also included constant public and social engagement. She agitated against racial and gender discrimination on campus and was known by her many graduate students as an advocate for their interests. She served on dozens of organizational boards and represented the United States at UNESCO conferences following World War II. 

For most of her time at UW, White was a parishioner at St. Paul’s Catholic Church. Her career represents the growth of Catholic faculty at UW—there were more than 100 faculty associated with St. Paul’s by the 1950s. She also modelled  scholarly and personal religious integration that was replicated by other prominent UW faculty through the rest of the century. Later examples of such integration were Robert Kingdon, a prominent historian of the Protestant Reformation, and Michael Fox, a longtime professor of Hebrew and Semitic Studies who was also an ordained rabbi. There have been, and continues to be, hundreds of other UW faculty who have integrated their religious commitments into their scholarship. 

Return to Langdon Street and walk down the hill. Pass the Memorial Union on your left and then look to your left for the small Alumni Park. 

UW has been a leader in scientific research and teaching for more than a century. The rustic red brick walls of Science Hall are an imposing testament to this legacy. The building was erected in 1887, and has hosted more than a dozen science departments, from agriculture to zoology. As the university grew, Science Hall came to be known for its chief occupants. Notably, UW’s historic geography department. 

Science Hall has housed a number of notable Christian faculty. John Alexander, a geographer and department chair, was a longtime faculty member until he left in 1964 to become president of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, a national evangelical student organization that is headquartered in Madison.  

Science Hall also houses the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, a unique interdisciplinary center and program. For more than forty years, until 2011, Professor Calvin DeWitt taught students at the Nelson Institute and published on issues of ecology and stewardship from a Christian perspective. He is colloquially known as the “the modern day father of Christian environmentalism” and trained multiple generations of wetland biologists who are now working across the globe to preserve, steward, and draw attention to at-risk biospheres. 

Walk a few steps toward the lake to the intersection of Park Street and Observatory Road. On the opposite side of Observatory Drive stands a large, concrete building. This is your next stop. 

The Education Building, built in 1900 and renovated in 2011, houses UW’s School of Education, routinely ranked as one of the top programs of its type in the country. The School of Education was founded in 1930 and was seen by the university as a direct outgrowth of the Wisconsin Idea, a term first coined in the early twentieth century by UW President Charles Van Hise. The Wisconsin Idea stated that the studies and research at UW should benefit the entire state of Wisconsin. In Van Hise’s famous words, “the boundaries of the university are the boundaries of the state.” Later generations of UW faculty and administrators extended this vision to the nation and the globe. 

At its origins, the Wisconsin Idea was deeply informed by the dominant religious sentiments of the era, especially the Social Gospel movement mentioned earlier in relation to Richard Ely and John R. Commons. The Social Gospel tended to work for progressive political causes, and Wisconsin, called the “laboratory of democracy.” by Theodore Roosevelt, was a national leader in progressive reform. 

The Protestant origins of the Wisconsin Idea have largely been forgotten. Yet the Wisconsin Idea itself still shapes the focus and makeup of many of UW’s colleges and departments. Especially in fields like education, the Wisconsin Idea has continued to push UW to ground its research in the problems faced by Wisconsin communities and to prioritize student enrollment and placement in the state. 

Walk to the base of Bascom Hill and go left, walking north on Park Street until you are at the intersection with Langdon Street. On your left you should see the entrance to (the large red brick building known as) Science Hall. This is the next stop. 

Across Observatory Drive there is a small nature preserve named Muir Woods. It stretches down the hill to the shore of Lake Mendota. Muir Woods is named after John Muir, sometimes called the “Father of the National Parks” for his career as a preservationist and co-founder of the Sierra Club. Muir was born in Scotland in 1838 and when 11 years old immigrated to a farm near Portage, Wisconsin. He enrolled at UW in 1860 and lived in North Hall, the large building immediately to your right. Muir left UW in 1863 without graduating, but he remains one of the University’s most famous and storied alumni. 

Muir’s childhood was shaped by a deep Protestant piety, and he had memorized the bulk of the Bible by the time he was sixteen. Muir was the president of the major UW campus ministry at that time. He moved away from organized religion as an adult but remained a deeply spiritual Christian who saw his care for creation flow from his understanding of God the Creator. As he wrote in his journal in 1873, “God’s love covers all the earth as the sky covers it, and also fills it in every pore. And this love has voices heard by all who have ears to hear.” As one writer remarked of Muir, “Sequoias, are his cathedral.” 

These woods are a memorial to Muir’s contributions to the preservation of wilderness areas in North America. Muir said later in life, “I left one UW for another UW: the University of Wisconsin for the University of the Wilderness.” The woods are also where Muir went to find firewood for his stove in his dorm room in North Hall, and they are where Muir took his first lessons in botany as a student. Today they also help to conjure an image of what the entire southern shoreline of Lake Mendota looked like before extensive human development.   

Turn right and head down Bascom Hill. Stop outside the entrance to the Education Building for the next stop. 

You have probably heard of the idea of “academic freedom.” At UW, it has meant that anything that matters to the citizens of the state is worthy of study. Read the plaque to the left of the front door out loud. The plaque symbolizes the seriousness with which the university takes its commitment to the “continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.” 

These words are originally from an 1894 report by the UW Board of Regents in response to one board member’s accusations against Professor Richard Ely. He was one of the leading economists in the country. Ely was accused of teaching socialist doctrines, leading to an extensive investigation and several hearings. The 1894 report exonerated Ely and introduced the concept of academic freedom. It stated that the university should never censor or limit its members’ quest for knowledge.  

Ely was part of a cohort of Christian economists at UW in the early twentieth century. The group also included John R. Commons, Ely’s student and a founder of the American Institute for Christian Sociology. Commons was also a key shaper of the Wisconsin Idea, which we’ll talk about more at our next stop. Ely, for his part, was the founder of an organization called the Christian Social Union, which applied Christian principles to social problems. He advocated for child labor laws and for improved factory conditions.  

Ely and Commons were leading academics in the Social Gospel movement, which sought to apply Christian ethics to the problems of poverty, wealth inequality, and alcoholism, among other issues. Their work at the university made UW a national center for Social Gospel thought. At the same time, Ely and Commons laid the foundation for UW’s Department of Sociology. In their view, the first part of the ten commandments was about loving God, which you should learn about in church. The second part of the ten commandments was about loving your neighbor. They wanted the Department of Sociology to be a place for the academic study of what it means to love your neighbor. At UW, Ely was a staunch advocate of the model of student-run churches introduced by Bascom and encouraged denominational partnerships to influence student life.  

Turn right and head to the edge of the walkway. Look to the wooded area across the street for the next stop. 

Birge Hall, home of UW’s Department of Botany, was erected in 1910. It took its current name in 1950 in honor of Edward Birge, a prominent zoologist, educator, and two-time president of UW-Madison. Birge was one of the country’s first great experts on lakes. He contributed to Lake Mendota being nicknamed “the most studied lake in the world.” 

Birge, an attendee and teacher at First Congregational Church for most of his fifty years at UW-Madison, has the distinction of being UW’s first twice-appointed president. His second stint from 1918-1925 was filled with religious drama. Birge became a lightning rod at the height of the national antievolution movement. He was a target of politician and Christian fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan. In 1921, at a rally of thousands of students at the Red Gym, Bryan charged that, under Birge’s watch, UW was leading to the downfall of Christian civilization by teaching evolution in its classrooms. A public war of newspaper op-eds between the two ensued, with Birge insisting that biological evolution and Christianity were not necessarily in tension. In one of his final op-eds, Birge articulated a view of the relationship of modern science to Christianity that generations of faculty, staff, and students have embraced since. Birge said: 

I have taken part both in the religious and the scientific activities of the world in which I have lived, with no thought of conflict or even division between them. I have never found it necessary to justify religion to science or to excuse science to religion. I have accepted both as equally divine revelations, and both are equally wrought into the constitution of the world. 

Continue to the top of the hill and head toward Bascom Hall. Stop to the left of the main doors at the large plaque. 

South Hall, built in 1855, is the second oldest building on campus. It was the original women’s dorm before what is now Chadbourne Hall was built, and it is now home to the administration of the College of Letters and Science. Like all early buildings at the university, South Hall at one time possessed a chapel that was an active part of student life for decades. 

Besides daily prayer meetings, the chapel was periodically used for student pranks. In the 1860s some students led a cow into the chapel and tied it to a center pillar. When someone untied her, she ran down the hall, jumped through a window to the ground, and broke her leg. A student collection was taken up to reimburse the owner and pay the janitor for his services in cleaning up the mess. 

A century after it opened, and long after the chapel disappeared, South Hall was adorned with an overt religious artifact. The Class of 1955 gifted the university a plaque with a quote from the Gospel of John 8:32: “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Although the plaque cites the verse’s biblical source, it decontextualizes the saying. To put the statement in its fuller context, Jesus tells his followers that, if they hold to his teachings, they are truly his disciples—in which case “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Stripped of this theological context, the quote takes on a new significance as a testament to the university’s commitment to academic freedom and the pursuit of truth. Although its meaning has been secularized, the verse highlights the Bible’s continuing significance as a point of reference for the university’s educational mission. 

Continue up Bascom Hill until the walkway forks. Look left toward Birge Hall for the next stop.