Personal Life
Bowne was one of six children of upright parents raised in rural New Jersey, near what is today called Atlantic Highlands. Notably, the father, Joseph Bowne was a Justice of the Peace, a farmer, a Methodist preacher and a vocal abolitionist at a time when such a stand was controversial. The mother was of a Quaker family and also an abolitionist. As a youth Bowne was able to observe the example of parents who were unbending on points of moral significance, and particularly regarding the dignity of all persons. Later Bowne was instrumental in supporting integration in higher education, and he presided over the dissertation of the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from a U.S. University, John Wesley Edward Bowen (1855-1933), in 1891. In demeanor and bearing Bowne was very formal, even with his own family members, business-like and orderly. He followed the manner of personal discipline from which the Methodists originally took their name.
Bowne entered New York University in 1867 amidst the swirling new controversy of Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Simultaneously in 1867 he was examined and licensed to preach in the Methodist Church. He worked his way through college employed at his uncle’s grocery in Brooklyn while preaching and pastoring part-time. He studied the standard curriculum and was graduated with the Bachelor of Arts in 1871. Bowne’s formal ordination as a Methodist deacon followed in 1872 and he was assigned a congregation of rural Long Island at Whitestone. In 1873 the opportunity came to continue his studies in Europe. He studied mainly at Paris, Halle, and Göttingen, being most deeply influenced at the last of these by the empirical strain of Kantian philosophy prevailing in that age under Rudolf Hermann Lotze (1817-1881). Bowne worked as a journalist in New York City from 1874 until 1876 when he completed the Master of Arts at New York University. He accepted a call to the philosophy department at Boston University in 1877, refusing in turn attractive offers from Yale and the new University of Chicago as his reputation grew. In 1888 Bowne became the first Dean of the Graduate School at Boston University and held that position until his death.
Read more about this topic: Borden Parker Bowne
Famous quotes containing the words personal life, personal and/or life:
“A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“What had really caused the women’s movement was the additional years of human life. At the turn of the century women’s life expectancy was forty-six; now it was nearly eighty. Our groping sense that we couldn’t live all those years in terms of motherhood alone was “the problem that had no name.” Realizing that it was not some freakish personal fault but our common problem as women had enabled us to take the first steps to change our lives.”
—Betty Friedan (20th century)
“Since every effort in our educational life seems to be directed toward making of the child a being foreign to itself, it must of necessity produce individuals foreign to one another, and in everlasting antagonism with each other.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)