James Taft Hatfield (15 June 1862 – 3 October 1945) was an American philologist and professor at Northwestern University where for many years he was the head of the German Department.

In a 1902 address to the Modern Language Association he asserted that the "brutish" age of commercialism not only threatened academia itself, but also excluded its scholars from contributing to the nation's welfare.

[7] That same year he responded to criticisms in the Evanston press that Northwestern's academics were aloof from the social life of the town with a rebuke that was even covered in newspapers outside the state: The real point of attack between the town and gown is the presumption of money, which has (occasionally perhaps) come to arrogate to itself the claim to control in spheres which do not lie in the jurisdiction of that unclean article.

We spend our precious time in working over our science for the easier comprehension of people who have more real admiration for a Bradley-Martin dinner or a Vanderbilt ball than the genius of Aristotle or Goethe.

His presidential address was characterised by literary scholar Jeffrey L. Sammons as "a conservative attack" on the threat to undergraduate curriculum standards posed by Realism, Modernism, and innovations in literary criticism,[2] In the address he complained of the "philistines" who were broadening the definition of literature to include "prospectuses for oil-burning furnaces and folders of omnibus lines.