Higher Education in Transition

History of American Colleges and Universities

Willis Rudy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351515764
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

At a time when our colleges and universities face momentous questions of new growth and direction, the republication of Higher Education in Transition is more timely than ever. Beginning with colonial times, the authors trace the development of our college and university system chronologically, in terms of men and institutions. They bring into focus such major areas of concern as curriculum, administration, academic freedom, and student life. They tell their story with a sharp eye for the human values at stake and the issues that will be with us in the future.One gets a sense not only of temporal sequence by centuries and decades but also of unity and continuity by a review of major themes and topics. Rudy's new chapters update developments in higher education during the last twenty years. Higher Education in Transition continues to have significance not only for those who work in higher education, but for everyone interested in American ideas, traditions, and social and intellectual history.

Part I
The Colonial College

1
Beginnings

Higher education in the United States has been molded and influenced by a variety of historical forces. On one hand, there are the patterns and traditions of higher learning which have been brought over from Western Europe. On the other, we find the native American conditions which have affected and modified the development of these transplanted institutions. Out of the interaction of these two essential elements and, most important, out of the growth of democracy in every area of American life, has developed a truly unique system of higher education.

English Influences

Oxford and Cambridge furnished the original model which the colonial colleges sought to copy. The prototype for the first English-American college was Emmanuel College, Cambridge University.¹ As we read the explicit statements left by Harvard’s founders, we find that the earliest Harvard College statutes were taken directly from the Elizabethan statutes of the University of Cambridge; that the phrase pro modo Academiarum in Anglia (“according to the manner of universities in England”) is to be found in the first Harvard degree formula; that early Harvard, like Elizabethan Cambridge, welcomed “fellow commoners” as well as serious degree students, “gentlemen” who paid double tuition for the privilege of residing in the college and dining with the Fellows; that even the names of the four college classes—freshmen, sophomore, junior sophister, and senior sophister—were borrowed directly from England.² In other points involving student discipline, curriculum, administrative regulations, and degree requirements, Harvard followed English college precedents as closely and faithfully as she could; and Harvard, in turn, became the great prototype for all the later colleges of English America.

As late as the middle of the eighteenth century, President Clap of Yale prepared himself for his administrative duties by borrowing histories of Oxford and Cambridge and seeking information from Americans who had secured English college degrees. When Clap waged his campaign of 1745 to secure a new Yale charter, he based it on a careful and detailed study of administrative practices at Oxford and Cambridge.³

Even at William and Mary, English influence soon challenged an earlier Scottish trend. From 1729 to 1757, eight of thirteen faculty members were Oxford men, and of these eight, seven had been in one way or another connected with a single college there, Queens College. After 1757, a battle raged almost continuously between this Oxford-bred faculty and the native Virginian Board of Visitors. By 1766 the Visitors “had rid the college of the last of that band of able Oxford graduates, ministers all of them, whose chief fault had been that their ties with England were too close, that they looked too blindly to their homeland.”⁴

In almost every case, however, the English colonists eventually found that the unique conditions of the American physical and social environment produced unexpected changes and modifications in their academic institutions. Some of these were destined to be of great importance for the later development of higher education in the United States.

It was soon discovered that it would be impossible to erect in English-America any great university collection of colleges such as existed at Oxford or Cambridge. For one thing, it was doubtful that the Crown would ever grant the required royal charter for such an American university. Besides, the land was too vast and the people too poor. The narrow fringe of British settlements which faced the broad Atlantic on one side and the trackless forests on the other represented what for that time was the far western frontier of English civilization. All that could be done under these circumstances was to establish a number of scattered, widely separated degree-granting colleges, thus diffusing educational effort.

After a time, still another colonial divergence from the English norm made an appearance. Because of the heterogeneity of the American population, collegiate boards of control were established which were interdenominational in makeup and at least one of which was completely secular. Nothing like this had yet been seen in the home country, although the University of Leyden in the Netherlands already followed this pattern.

Other modifications were due mainly to Scottish influence. The post-Reformation Scottish universities, unlike Oxford or Cambridge, were nonresidential, professionally oriented, and under the control, not of the faculty, but of prominent lay representatives of the community. At the College of William and Mary some of these Scottish ideas seem to have been influential from the very founding. Commissary James Blair, founder and first president, was a graduate of both Marischal College, Aberdeen, and the University of Edinburgh. Reverend William Smith, graduate of Aberdeen, exercised a great influence, as we shall see, over the curricular planning of both King’s College in New York, later Columbia, and the College of Philadelphia. John Witherspoon, Scotch theologian who came to the New World in 1768 to become president of the College of New Jersey, later Princeton, exerted an important influence over American higher education.

Although even Harvard was not immune to Scottish university influence,⁵ it was at William and Mary that it was felt most directly. The charter Blair obtained for the Virginia school resembled that of a Scottish “unicollege” institution. Like Aberdeen, Glasgow, King’s, and Marischal, it incorporated both a university and a degree-granting college by a single letter-patent. At the same time, a governing board was created, made up of members of the nonacademic community; this was, in characteristic Scottish fashion, to have real administrative authority over the college. Even William and Mary’s architecture reflected Scottish influence, as did Blair’s early plans for a course of study.⁶

As an afterthought on how different the development of higher education in the United States might have been if Continental rather than English precedents had been dominant, we might well look for a moment at the institutions of higher learning founded by the Spanish and French in America. Originally, the English and Continental European universities had a somewhat similar type of organization. Nevertheless, Oxford and Cambridge very early began to follow a largely independent line of development. By the time of the Renaissance, these English universities were changing into loosely federated associations of residential colleges.⁷ The Continental universities, on the other hand, were becoming nonresident graduate schools providing specific types of postbaccalaureate training.

The French and Spanish universities in America represented the later Continental type of university. When Charles V of Spain in 1551 founded “the Royal and Pontifical University” of Mexico and the University of San Marcos in Lima, Peru, he accorded them all “the privileges, exemptions, and limitations of the University of Salamanca.” This meant that they were definitely to follow the Continental model, because Salamanca was essentially a collection of graduate faculties in arts, theology, law, and medicine. Besides Mexico and Lima, eight other universities were chartered and opened for instruction before a single college appeared in English America. In all, the Spanish-Americans established twenty-three such institutions.⁸

In contrast, higher education in New France developed more slowly. It was not until the 1660s that Bishop Laval developed at Quebec a “great seminary” for advanced theological training. Although modem Laval University developed from this nucleus, in colonial times the Quebec institution never covered as broad a field as had the Spanish-American universities.⁹

Educational Aims

In each part of the New World, the European settlers sought to create as close an approximation as they could to the culture with which they had been familiar back home. The English-Americans, for example, were determined that their children should preserve those aspects of Old World civilization which their fathers held to be all important. In achieving this aim of the transmission and preservation of intellectual culture, higher education was the most valuable tool that lay at hand.

In this connection, the early Puritans in New England conceived of themselves as helping to bring about a translatio studii—i.e., a transfer of the higher learning from its ancient seats in the Old World to the wilderness of America. The founders of Harvard took for granted the essential continuity of Western learning—the direct link between the colonial American college and earlier institutions, such as the schools of Hebrew prophets, the Academy of Athens, the Palace School of Charlemagne, the medieval universities, and the Reformation academies. The precious veritas, for which the world was indebted to the Hebrews and the Hellenes, had been handed down from generation to generation, and now the settlers of the “Holy Commonwealth” must take up this torch of learning and carry it along.¹⁰

To be more specific, the desire of important religious denominations (such as the Anglican and Calvinist) for a literate, college-trained clergy was probably the most important single factor explaining the founding of the colonial colleges. This was the central element in the transfer of learning and intellectual culture as seventeenth-century Englishmen saw it. The Christian tradition was the foundation stone of the whole intellectual structure which was brought to the New World. It is equally important, however, to keep in mind that the early colleges were not set up solely to train ministers; their charters make it amply clear that from the very beginning it was intended that they also educate professional men in fields other than the ministry and public officials of various kinds. The civil society would thus get educated orthodox laymen as its leaders; the church would get educated orthodox clergymen as its ministers. This was the ideal which colonial higher education hoped to attain.

Under these circumstances, it is useless to argue whether the colonial colleges were intended to be theological seminaries or schools of higher culture for laymen. They were clearly designed to perform both functions, although in a strictly technical sense special vocational training for the ministry in distinct professional institutions did not develop in the United States until the nineteenth century. A historian of the College of New Jersey, writing in 1764, expresses the colonial point of view when he explains why that institution was founded at Princeton. The middle colonies, he says, labored under a disadvantage in not possessing a college of their own. The British universities, and even the colleges of New England and Virginia, were too far away. He then adds:

As the colonies increased, the exigencies of affairs, both of an ecclesiastical and political nature, became more and more urgent. Religious societies were annually formed, in various places; and had they long continued vacant, or been supplied with an ignorant illiterate clergy, Christianity itself, in a course of years, might have become extinct among them. Affairs of state also became more embarrassed for want of proper direction, and a competent number of men of letters, to fill the various political offices. The bench, the bar, and seats of legislation, required such accomplishments, as are seldom the spontaneous growth of nature, unimproved by education.¹¹

The view that the advancement and preservation of learning was one and the same thing as the training of literate ministers came easily to the New England Puritans; together with Presbyterians, Anglicans, and Lutherans, they accepted and carried on the traditions of the medieval Schoolmen. Like the Scholastics, they took for granted the fact that piety could not be separated from intellect; that religious faith should be rationalized. The Grace of God was indispensable, but not enough; philosophy and reason were also important, while knowledge of the arts and sciences was very useful.¹²

Perry Miller has cautioned us that this commitment to higher learning on the part of the founders of Harvard does not necessarily mean that they were motivated by “a disinterested dedication to the pursuit of learning in the abstract.” As a matter of fact, much of the early Puritan concern with higher learning has to be understood in the context of the attacks which were then being made on it from Antinomian and Pietistic quarters. Advocates of undisciplined religious enthusiasm and of a nonliterate ministry like William Dell and John Webster were demanding that religion be taken out of the monopolistic control of universities. Orthodox Calvinists were obliged to respond to this attack by upholding more firmly than ever the importance of formal curriculums, academic degrees, and syllogistic interpretation of the Scriptures. And in this defense of the higher learning, “Puritan divines stood shoulder to shoulder with Anglican priests.”¹³

All of this represented the continuance of the medieval university tradition in a New World Protestant setting. The medieval mind had conceived of the whole of human society as unified in Christ in terms of his royal, priestly, and prophetic roles. This threefold authority was seen as being embodied in three co-ordinate earthly institutions: the State, based on Law; the Church, founded on Revelation; and the University, upheld by Reason. To this day, this concept is preserved in the symbolism of the Western world by the gowns worn by justices in court, ministers in church, and professors and graduates at commencement.

The Puritan founders of the first colonial college derived this doctrine from Calvin and the writings of English divines like William Ames and John Henry Alsted. To the early Harvard scholars, the university man was in direct line of succession to the original prophets and apostles. The college was a local encampment of the universal “militia” of Christ. To be sure, the fundamental truth had been lost in Paradise, by Adam’s disobedient grasp for knowledge of good and evil. But all was not lost. Schools of the prophets, corporate bodies of disciplined and dedicated teachers, devoted to Christ, could at least in part rectify the primal error and safeguard knowledge, human and divine, from being further fragmented or perverted.¹⁴

The role of organized Christianity was important in the founding of eight of the nine pre-Revolutionary colleges. Only the College of Philadelphia was not at first specifically under church control, and it soon came under the dominance of Anglicans. In addition, the purpose of training students for the Christian ministry is specified in all colonial college charters with the single exception, again, of the College of Philadelphia. The Quakers, having no specially trained clergy, did not feel a great need for a college in colonial Pennsylvania. As a result, none was established in that province until the College of Philadelphia was chartered in 1755. Indeed, Philadelphia Quakers very quickly became hostile to the new institution when they discerned in it a threat to their own political dominance.¹⁵

The earliest printed rules of Harvard announced as the chief aim of that institution that “Every one shall consider the Mayne End of his life & studyes, to know God & Jesus Christ, which is Etemall life.”¹⁶ William and Mary, according to the pronouncements of its founders, was established in order to furnish the Church with a piously educated youth of good letters and manners, and also to propagate Christian faith among the Indians.¹⁷ Yale’s purposes paralleled Harvard’s. In 1701 it was declared to be a place “wherein youth may be instructed in the arts and sciences, who through the blessings of Almighty God, may be fitted for public employment, both in church and civil State.” In 1754, the president of Yale stated that “Colleges are Societies o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• PREFACE TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION
• PREFACE
• PART I THE COLONIAL COLLEGE
• PART II NINETEENTH - CENTURY IN NOVATIONS IN THE COLONIAL COLLEGE
• PART III THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES IN NINETEENTH - CENTURY AMERICA
• PART IV HIGHER EDUCATION IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
• PART V IN PERSPECTIVE
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index