American educationist, born at Freetown, PE, Canada, on the 22nd of May 1854, of Dutch descent, his Loyalist ancestors having left New York in 1784. While a student at Acadia College, Wolfville, NS, in 1875, he won the Canadian Gilchrist scholarship in the University of London, from which he received the degree of B.A. in 1877 and that of M.A. in 1878, and in 1877–1880 studied in Paris, Edinburgh and (as Hibbert Fellow) in Heidelberg, Berlin and Göttingen. He was professor of English literature, political economy and psychology at Acadia College in 1880–1882, of metaphysics and English literature at Dalhousie College, Halifax, NS, in 1882–1886, and of philosophy (Sage professor) at Cornell University in 1886–1892, being Dean of the Sage School of Philosophy in 1891–1892. In 1892 he became president of Cornell University. He was chairman of the First United States Philippine Commission in 1899, and wrote (besides a part of the official report to Congress) Philippine Affairs—A Retrospect and an Outlook (1902). With J. E. Creighton and James Seth he founded in 1892 The Philosophical Review. He also wrote Kantian Ethics and the Ethics of Evolution (1881); The Ethical Import of Darwinism (1888); Belief in God (1890), and Agnosticism and Religion (1896).
In 1912 Schurman was appointed U.S. minister to Greece and Montenegro, serving one year. During the World War, when Germany began unrestricted submarine warfare, he urged that American rights be firmly insisted upon; he pointed out that the destruction of the “Lusitania” in 1915 threatened to efface the distinction between combatants and non-combatants long recognized by civilized peoples. In 1915 he was first vice-president of the N.Y. State Constitutional Convention. In October 1917 he was appointed a member of the N.Y. State Food Commission, resigning in June 1918 to go to France as lecturer to American soldiers under the auspices of the Y.M.C.A. He was opposed to many of President Wilson’s policies, especially in connection with Mexico, and also to Article X. of the Covenant of the League of Nations, believing that it would involve the United States in war. As early as 1913 he urged the independence of the Philippines in the near future; in 1914 he declared in favour of woman suffrage. He resigned the presidency of Cornell University in 1920. He was appointed minister to China in 1921. He was the author of The Balkan Wars 1912–1913 (1914, lectures at Princeton).
