James Hampton Kirkland

James Hampton Kirkland was born and raised in Spartanburg, South Carolina.[1][2] His father, William Clark, was a Methodist pastor.[1] His mother, Virginia Lawson Galluchat Kirkland, lived in Abilene, Texas, by the early 1880s.[2]

Kirkland was educated at Wofford College in Spartanburg.[2] Two of his teachers were William Malone Baskervill and Charles Forster Smith.[2] It was Smith who suggested to Kirkland that he should study in Germany.[2] As a result, he left the United States in 1883.[2]

Kirkland enrolled at Leipzig University, where he studied "Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and Anglo-Saxon".[2] He received a PhD from Leipzig University in 1885.[2] His PhD thesis was published in 1886 as a pamphlet entitled A Study of the Anglo-Saxon Poem, the Harrowing of Hell (Grein's Hollenfahrt Christi).[3][4] It was an attempt to ascertain whether Cynewulf was the author of a poem entitled The Harrowing of Hell.[4] Meanwhile, Kirkland spent a semester at Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, followed by a few months in Geneva, Switzerland, where he started learning French.[2] He also visited Italy, Paris, and London.[2]

Kirkland was appointed Professor of Latin at Vanderbilt University in 1886.[1][2] Two of his colleagues were Baskervill and Smith, his former professors at Wofford.[2] Another colleague was Milton W. Humphreys, a Confederate veteran who also received a PhD from the University of Leipzig.[2] Two more colleagues had also studied at the University of Leipzig: Waller Deering and Alexander R. Hohlfeld.[2] He edited the works of Horace, a Roman lyric poet in a collection entitled Horace: Satires and Epistles, which he published in 1893.[3]

Meanwhile, Kirkland was appointed as chancellor in 1893.[5] He was only thirty-three years old.[2] According to Professor Edwin Mims, who served as the Chair of the English Department from 1912 to 1942, he was chosen for "his temperament, his training, and his personality."[6]

In 1895, Kirkland was a co-founder of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.[7] He served as its Secretary and Treasurer until 1908.[7] He was also a member of Phi Delta Kappa.[8]

Meanwhile, as the Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, Kirkland upheld the morale on campus when Old Main, a historic building on campus, caught fire.[1] Under his leadership, classes resumed the next day.[1] Nearly a decade later, in 1914, he oversaw the separation of Vanderbilt University from the Methodist Church.[1] By the mid-1920s, he moved the Vanderbilt University Medical School to a new building on campus, thanks to donations from the Rockefeller Foundation and the General Education Board.[1]

Kirkland published God and the New Knowledge with his colleague Edwin Mim and Oswald Eugene Brown in 1926.[3]

Kirkland remained Chancellor during the Great Depression. In 1933, he was forced to lower faculty salaries.[9] By June 1937, the budget had improved and he suggested raising the salaries back to their original levels.[9] He retired as chancellor on July 1, 1937.[8]

Mary Henderson Kirkland; by Adelia Armstrong Lutz

Kirkland married Mary Henderson.[2] They had one daughter, Elizabeth. Kirkland summered near Ahmic Lake in Canada with his family and his friend, Abraham Flexner, from the 1910s.[10]

Kirkland Hall

Kirkland died on August 5, 1939, in Ontario, Canada, where he was vacationing.[8] Old Main, Vanderbilt's administration building, was renamed Kirkland Hall in his honor.[1] Kirkland's papers are kept at Vanderbilt University Archives and Special Collections.