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Required courses for Union students come in three divisions: Historical (the Old and New Testaments, Biblical criticism, church history) ; Philosophical (theology, Christian ethics, denominational doctrines); Practical (pedagogy, psychology and Christian leadership which includes preaching, church administration and finance, religious welfare work). During the first year, Union students get their first taste of practical field work as settlement-house teachers, Sunday-school leaders, Y. M. C. A. workers, assistant pastors in Manhattan churches. To help students pay their expenses, Union offers scholarships to the lower classmen.
Union's faculty, all but one of whom are ordained ministers, represent eight faiths. Students learn about preaching and praying from Presbyterian Coffin, Presbyterian Hugh Black, Baptist Fosdick. Specialty of Congregationalist Erdman Harris is expounding the technique by which he has worked successfully among students and young people. Methodist Harry Ward and Reformed Churchman Reinhold Niebuhr devote themselves to the church's social gospel. The United Free Church of Scotland's James Moffatt, famed for his translation of the Bible into modern English, specializes in church history. Congregationalist Robert Ernest Hume teaches comparative religions which he keeps up to date by such studies as the one he lately made of Harlem's Father Divine (TIME, March 16). Of Roman Catholicism students may learn by attending lectures by priests outside-a concession which avoids raising the question of whether 'the priests could expound their church's views on Union's "unhallowed" ground.
Not until their last year do Union men get around to specializing in a particular denomination. Then they spend an hour a week learning about it from a specialist in whatever "church polity" interests them. By examination time in the spring a Union Methodist should be well grounded in all that any Methodist should know; an Episcopalian should be able to answer the hard questions he will be asked before ordination to the diaconate; a Presbyterian can tell the difference between the Westminster and Auburn Confessions. The average member of Union's graduating class will be temporarily content with a B. D. degree, expect to present himself to a church and be ordained within a year, accept a modest job which his field work has probably already lined up for him.