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Alborz College of Tehran, Dr. Samuel Martin Jordan and the American Faculty: Twentieth-Century Presbyterian Mission Education and Modernism in Iran (Persia)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2022
Abstract
The article addresses the twentieth-century social and cultural history of Alborz College (The American College of Tehran) in terms of its curricula, mission education, the faculty and Dr. Samuel Jordan, founder and president. The courses taught, from the natural sciences and humanities to business and journalism, shaped the lives and aspirations of so many of the graduates for decades. Of great importance were the academic training and personal lives of Dr. Jordan, Mary Park Jordan, and the American faculty, particularly those graduates from Lafayette College (Easton, Pennsylvania) who served as role models of modernity and generous public service that so enriched the lives of their young Iranian charges and won the hearts and minds of the Alborzi graduates.
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- Copyright © 2011 The International Society for Iranian Studies
References
1 Samuel M. Jordan, “Constructive Revolutions in Iran,” The Moslem World, xxv (1935): 347.
2 Young, Herrick B., Strange Lands and Wonderful People (New York, 1975), 89.Google Scholar
3 Cleveland, Harlan, Mangone, Gerard J., and Adams, John Clarke, Americans Overseas (New York, 1960), 23.Google Scholar
4 The expression, which was made by an anonymous Iranian parent, “became Dr. Samuel Jordan's favorite slogan for the work of the Tehran-based Presbyterian American Boys' School which he supervised as principal” (William N. Wysham, “Mr. Chips of Teheran,” Presbyterian Life, 1 November 1952, 13–14). In addition, see Young, Herrick B., Strange Lands and Wonderful People (New York, 1975 );Google Scholar Armajani, Yahya, “Sam Jordan and the Evangelical Ethic in Iran,” in Religious Ferment in Asia, ed. by Miller, Robert J. (Lawrence, KS, 1974), 23–36;Google Scholar and Armajani, Yahya, “Alborz College,” Encyclopedia Iranica, 1: 821–823.Google Scholar Wysham taught at Alborz College from 1920 to 1928, Young taught business and journalism at Alborz from 1925 to 1935, and Armajani taught ethics and was the Lincoln Hall resident headmaster at Alborz from 1933 to 1940.
5 The paper uses the 1932 name, “Alborz College” for the former American College of Tehran (1922–32) for ease and clarity in reading the text. Alborz College existed as the American Presbyterian college for nine years from 1932 to 1940. After 1945 when the school was reopened for classes under the control of the Iranian Ministry of Education, it was renamed “Alborz High School” or Dabiristan-e Alborz—a name it continues to use to the present day.
6 Alborz College was not the only American Presbyterian school established either in Tehran or in Iran by the American missionaries. See J. Richard Irvine's “Community and Iranzamin Schools in Tehran, Iran” (2009), a 17 page manuscript in which he describes the Presbyterian schools and colleges, such as the Urumia Medical College 1879–1918/1997, Alborz College 1924–40 and Sage/Damavand College 1935–40/1965–79 . He also details the founding of the K-12 Community School of Hamadan which later moved to Tehran, and the establishment of the K-13 preparatory international school called “Iranzamin, Tehran International School.” Irvine was first a Presbyterian missionary faculty member from 1951–67 at Community School, and then became the first and only Tehran headmaster of Iranzamin, 1967–80.
7 See Record Group 91, Series I and II in the Presbyterian Historical, and Heuser, Frederick, A Guide to Foreign Missionary Manuscripts (Santa Barbara, CA, 1988), 71–74.Google Scholar
8 Two other stations were established and then closed by the end of World War I—Salmas in the West Azerbaijan plains between Khoi and Urumia, and Qazvin in the northern plains between Tabriz and Tehran.
9 The medical missionary work had begun earlier in 1835 in Urumia, but formal hospitals known always as Marizkhaneh-ye Amrika'i (American Hospitals) were established at the same time in Kermanshah in 1882, in Tehran in 1890 and in Tabriz in 1913, with others opening in Mashhad, Hamadan and Rasht by the 1920s.
10 The history of Fidelia Fiske and Susan Rice—the first Mount Holyoke College (South Hadley, MA) graduates to arrive in Urumia, and to inaugurate the girls' boarding school known later as the “Fiske Seminary”—is found in the Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections, MS 0539 “Fidelia Fiske, 1816–66.” In addition, the Presbyterian Historical Society's archives in Philadelphia, PA have the 23pp. unsigned manuscript, MS T766 titled “Spiritual Peaks in the History of the Persia Mission” that records the early years of Fidelia Fiske and the Fiske Seminary in Urumia, 1–8.
11 The Lafayette, a campus weekly news bulletin, had three issues about the story of Arthur Boyce (Class of 1907) and his travel to Iran with Samuel Jordan to teach science (xxxiii, no. 25, 3 May 1907: 203; xxxiv, no. 6, 25 October 1907: 48; and xxxiv, no. 12, 6 December 1907: 93). In the lead 1907 issue (xxxiii, no. 15, 25 January 1907: 116), the weekly wrote that “[t]he college as a whole has taken this matter up [of the Lafayette-in-Persia project] and it must be successfully run through if from no other reason than college pride” (p. 116). The latter issue carried five pages (114–18) on the project and its finances, including Jordan's appeal for help to create “a good college” in Iran.
12 See Speer, Robert E., “The Hakim Sahib,” The Foreign Doctor. A Biography of Joseph Plumb Cochran, M.D. of Persia (New York, 1911);Google Scholar and the history of Dr. Cochran by Marjan Abdi, “An American Family Who Served Iran,” http://www.payvand.com/news/07/feb/1380, where the author cites Professor Esmaiel Yourshahian's novel, An Ja Keh Zadeh Shodam (Where I Was Born) on the life of Dr. Joseph P. Cochran, MD (1855–1905), the “Founder of Urmia's First Medical College.”
13 Armajani, “Sam Jordan and the Evangelical Ethic in Iran,” 31.
14 Armajani, “Sam Jordan and the Evangelical Ethic in Iran,” 31–32.
15 See Rowdon, Harold H., “Edinburgh 1910, Evangelicals and the Ecumenical Movement,” Vox Evangelica, V (1967): 64–67.Google Scholar The author follows the growing disenchantment of the Evangelical Alliance with the inclusion of liberal clergymen, such as R. F. Horton among the special delegates, as “another factor that has continued to serve as a wedge between evangelicals and the ecumenical movement” (67).
16 See the impressive research and analyses of Iran's modern social history that includes discussions of the American Presbyterian missionaries and their schools in Afary's, Janet Sexual Politics in Modern Iran (Cambridge, UK, 2009).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
17 In his paper “Historians and Asia: The Missionary Matrix of a Historiographical Revolution,” presented at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting in New York City on 3 January 2009 David A. Holliger points out that “the missionaries who were sent out to Asia after around 1910 were more likely than their predecessors to be highly educated, to have been influenced by the social gospel of Washington Gladden and Walter Rauschenbusch, and to have a historical perspective on Christianity … [their] more liberal starting points led missionaries to be more open to foreign cultures, and produced in the 1920s and 1930s a substantial but vocal minority of missionaries who began to describe themselves as ‘guests’ of the indigenous peoples whom they tried to serve” (2).
18 See epigraph to this article as well as footnote 4.
19 See Jordan, “Constructive Revolutions in Iran,” 347–53.
20 See Zirinsky, Michael, “Onward Christian Soldiers: Presbyterian Missionaries in the Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” in Altruism and Imperialism: Western Cultural and Religious Missions in the Middle East, edited by Tejirian, Eleanor H. and Simon, Reeva Spector (New York, 2002): 236–52.Google Scholar The Azerbayjani teachers and school administrators—Dr. Samuel Graham Wilson, principal of the Boys' Memorial School in Tabriz, and Howard C. Baskerville, the short-term teacher and Iranian hero—were but a few examples of the “progressive” Presbyterian education personnel. In addition, the women in the Zimmerman, Pittman and Wrights families of Tabriz were devoted Christians and passionate supporters of Iranian constitutionalism and democracy as seen in the diaries and letters of Sarah Wright (McDowell) to be published by the author in 2011.
21 See Zirinsky, Michael, “American Presbyterian Missionaries at Urmia During the Great War,” in La Perse et La Grande Guerre, ed. by Bast, Oliver (Téhéran, 2002), 353–72,Google Scholar for a detailed description of the Turkish-Kurdish west Azerbayjan war front, and the heroic actions of Rev. William A. Shedd (1876–1918), director of the Urumia mission and the medical legacy of Dr. Joseph P. Cochran (1855–1905). Also see Porterfield, Amanda, Mary Lyon and Mount Holyoke Missionaries (New York, 1997), 85–86Google Scholar for a Nestorian background to the Azerbayjan war front.
22 Jordan, “Constructive Revolutions in Iran,” 347.
23 Jordan, “Constructive Revolutions in Iran,” 348.
25 Samuel A. [M.] Jordan, “Startling Changes in Iran,” Women and Missions (April 1936): 6.
24 Jordan, “Constructive Revolutions in Iran,” 350–53.
27 Wysham, “Mr. Chips of Teheran,” 14.
26 Wysham, “Mr. Chips of Teheran,” 14.
28 Wysham, “Mr. Chips of Teheran,” 36.
29 The Ferdowsi Hotel dinner and the entire poem are in Boyce, Arthur C., “Alborz College of Teheran and Dr. Samuel M. Jordan, Founder and President,” in Cultural Ties Between Iran and the United States, ed. by Saleh, Ali Pasha (Tehran, 1976), 224.Google Scholar
30 Personal comments of Mrs. Kathryn Brown Jordan, the niece-in-law to Samuel Jordan, during a visit to her home in New Park, PA on 21 May 2009.
31 Irvine, “Community and Iranzamin Schools,” 4.
32 Boyce, “Alborz College of Teheran,” 177.
33 Boyce, “Alborz College of Teheran,” 170–71. The graduates are listed here by class seniority. Boyce adds that Mrs. Mary Park Wood Jordan “declared that she was also a Lafayette man” as an Alborz faculty member in the role of Professor of English, and music instructor. Boyce also notes that Reverend Charles R. Pittman, class of 1897, was “another Lafayette man in Persia who was engaged in evangelical work in Tabriz, and a strong supporter of the college in Teheran.”
34 Boyce, “Alborz College of Teheran,” 171. An estimate of the buying power of $16,000 ($400 times 40 years) with an annual inflation rate of 3.99 percent is $246,798 which only approximates the financial largesse from Lafayette College's faculty, students, and alumni for the period. See http://www.dollartimes.com/calculators/inflation.htm.
35 Hatch, D. Arthur, Biographical Record of the Men of Lafayette, 1832–1948 (Easton, PA, 1948).Google Scholar A special thanks to Diane Windham Shaw, Special Collections Librarian and College Archivist and her staff at David Bishop Skillman Library, Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania for their graciousness in gaining access to the records of “Lafayette-in-Persia” and the Lafayette alumni.
36 The information is taken from the typed scripted account, “Historical Sketch” in the Brainerd Society Records in the David Bishop Skillman Library at Lafayette College, Easton, PA, 1.
37 “Historical Sketch.”
38 Boyce, “Alborz College of Teheran,” 170.
39 Boyce, “Alborz College of Teheran.”
40 The brochure is part of the Kathryn Brown Jordan private collection of Jordan memorabilia, New Park, Pennsylvania, now at the Samuel Martin Jordan Center for Persian Studies at the University of California/Irvine, Los Angeles, CA, 2.
41 1932 brochure, 3.
42 1932 brochure, 7.
43 The approximate 2010 buying power of $240,000 with an annual inflation rate of 3.51 percent over the past seventy-eight years is $3,549,846.58, which puts Jordan's budgetary ambitions into perspective. See http://www.dollartimes.com/calculators/inflation.htm.
45 Jordan, “The Power Plant in Persia.”
44 Samuel M. Jordan, “The Power Plant in Persia,” Women and Missions (December 1929): 328.
46 Personal comments by Martha McDowell Dutton, the daughter of Dr. Phillip McDowell, in her home in Wooster, OH, on 23 July 2007.