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.