J. Havens Richards

Richards was born into a prominent family that traced its lineage to colonial America on both his paternal and maternal sides.[7] His uncle was Orestes Brownson, a Catholic activist and intellectual.[8] On his mother's side, he was a descendant of James Kilbourne, a colonel in the U.S. Army who led a regiment on the American frontier in the War of 1812, founded the city of Worthington, Ohio, and became a United States Representative from Ohio.[9]

On his father's side, Richards's lineage included combatants in the American Revolutionary War, such as William Richards (his great-grandfather), who led a contingent of troops that took part in the siege at the Battle of Fort Slongo[10] and who later fought in the Battle of Bunker Hill as a colonel. Through William Richards, he traced his ancestry to James Richards, who was documented in 1634 as residing on the Eel River in Plymouth, Massachusetts.[2]

Richards as a young Jesuit

Richards's father sought to send all his children to Catholic schools but was at times unable to.[11] Therefore, Richards attended both Catholic and public schools in Jersey City.[2] At the age of fourteen, he quit school and took up work as a bookkeeper for his father. Four years later, the two of them moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where they worked in the steel industry.[5]

In September 1869, Richards enrolled at Boston College. The rest of his family joined him and his father in Boston in July of that year. Richards remained at the college for three years, where he was active in school sports,[5] before entering the Society of Jesus and proceeding to the novitiate in Frederick, Maryland, on August 7, 1872.[12] Upon entering the order, he changed his name to Joseph Havens Richards.[3]

At the end of his probationary period, Richards was sent to Woodstock College in 1874, where he studied philosophy for four years.[5] He then went to Georgetown University as a professor of physics and mathematics,[12] doing work in chemistry during his vacations.[5] In the summers of 1879 and 1880, he was sent by the Jesuit provincial superior to study at Harvard University.[13] In July 1883, he returned to Woodstock for four years of theological studies. The provincial superior made an exception for Richards to be ordained after only two years because his father was ill.[12] Therefore, on August 29, 1885, he was ordained a priest by James Gibbons, the Archbishop of Baltimore, in the college's chapel.[5] He completed his theological studies in 1887 and returned to Frederick to complete his tertianship.[12]

Though Richards sought to dispel the perception that Jesuit schools were of inferior quality than their secular counterparts, he maintained that the curriculum of the Ratio Studiorum should be preserved.[18] Therefore, he revitalized the graduate programs of the university, introduced new courses in the law school, and oversaw construction of a new law building in 1892. He also sought to establish an electrical, chemical, and civil engineering program, but this did not come to fruition.[19] For the first time, graduates of the university were authorized to wear a hood as part of their academic regalia.[20] Richards sought to induce prominent scholars to join the faculty of Georgetown; he recruited the Austrian astronomer Johann Georg Hagen and several distinguished scientists from the Smithsonian Institution.[17]

Richards at Healy Hall

Graduate courses in the arts and sciences were re-established in 1889, and courses in theology and philosophy returned to the university, which had previously been moved to Boston and then to Woodstock College.[19] Richards criticized the decision to relocate the theological training of Jesuits from Georgetown to the "semi-wilderness" of Woodstock, which was "remote from libraries, from contact with the learned world, and from all the stimulating influences which affect intellectual life".[21]

Richards expanded the School of Medicine by establishing a chair and laboratory of bacteriology; increasing the number of instructors in anatomy, physiology, and surgery; and improving the chemistry curriculum.[19] He also standardized the curriculum and increased its duration from three to four years.[17] The property of the medical school, which theretofore had been owned by its own legal corporation, was transferred to the President and Directors of Georgetown College, giving Richards authority over the appointment of professors.[19] Richards also desired to have a hospital adjoined to the medical school, but there was initially little interest in this among faculty and donors.[22] Eventually, Georgetown University Hospital was completed in 1898, and it was put under the care of the Sisters of Saint Francis.[23]

Richards worked with Bishop John Keane to address tensions with the newly established Catholic University of America, which was located in the same city and run by the American bishops.[24] Many feared that it would interfere with Georgetown University,[24] and it did indeed seek to take control of Georgetown's law and medical schools as its own. This proposal was approved by the Jesuit superior general, Luis Martín, who feared that the Vatican might suppress Georgetown altogether if it did not acquiesce. The faculties of the law and medical schools publicly protested the proposal, and Catholic University dropped its plans.[25] Eventually, an agreement was reached that Catholic University would focus exclusively on the graduate education of secular priests.[24]

Dahlgren Chapel (photo c. 1904)

Richards's most immediate task upon taking office was the completion of Healy Hall, construction of which began in 1877 under a predecessor, Patrick F. Healy, but whose interior remained unfinished. Richards was able to have the bulk of the work completed by February 20, 1889, the date on which the university began its three-day centenary celebration.[26] Within Healy Hall, he made improvements to Gaston Hall[27] and oversaw the start of work on Riggs Library.[28] Richards improved the university's astronomical observatory, placing Hagen in charge of it, which raised the stature of the university in scientific circles.[27]

In 1892 Richards received a donation from the socialite Elizabeth Wharton Drexel for the construction of Dahlgren Chapel of the Sacred Heart. That year, he also procured the library of historian John Gilmary Shea, which extensively documented the history of the Catholic Church in the United States.[22] Richards's presidency came to an end on July 3, 1898,[29] by which time he had experienced worsening health for two years.[30] He was succeeded by John D. Whitney.[15]

Richards also took up the cause of fighting discrimination against Catholics by prominent Protestant universities, especially those of the Ivy League. In 1893, James Jeffrey Roche, the editor of the Catholic Boston newspaper The Pilot, wrote to Charles William Eliot, the president of Harvard University, about the fact that no Catholic universities were included on the list of institutions whose graduates were automatically eligible for admission to Harvard Law School.[31] Eliot's response, which was published in The Pilot, was that the quality of education at Catholic universities was inferior to that offered at their Protestant counterparts. Richards and other Catholic educators had long believed that anti-Catholic discrimination had been at work at Protestant colleges.[13]

Richards sought a retraction from Eliot, writing to him that graduates of reputable Catholic colleges were better prepared to study law than any other college graduates, and he included information on Georgetown's curriculum. Eliot responded by adding Georgetown, the College of the Holy Cross, and Boston College to the list. Upon the provincial superior's instruction, Richards then unsuccessfully lobbied to have all 24 Jesuit colleges in the United States added to the list.[13]