One of the great clichés about higher education “pictures it as autonomous, a cloister, when the historical fact is that it has always responded, but seldom so quickly as today, to the desires and demands of external groups—sometimes for love, sometimes for gain, increasingly willingly, and, in some cases, too eagerly. … The internal illusion is that it is a law unto itself; the external reality is that it is governed by history.”
- Clark Kerr, 1963[1]
Dear Ruth,
My letter on professors who say they love teaching did not meet with your approval; your rejoinder charged me with cynicism, contempt, and vitriol. You described yourself as “irked on behalf of [your] profession.”
Fair enough! I know the feeling. That letter may have struck a cynical tone, but I too have been irked on behalf of my (former) profession.
It happened one day during a seminar, when a student named Dan said that the real reason it took four long years to earn a college degree was that the institution wanted more tuition money. It could easily be done in three.
“Well,” I said, or words to this effect, “it’s true that that in England a college education takes only three years [Dan was from England]. That’s because in England you declare your major right away, while we require you to take classes in lots of different subjects, called the liberal arts.
“Do you know why?” They did not and started to settle into their seats, having realized by this point in the semester what was about to happen. “In ancient times the artes liberales included everything from math and astronomy to history, music, and rhetoric. They were the subjects that were studied by free people, both because you needed leisure time to study them, and because they prepared you for political life, made you capable of exercising your liberty. So, a liberal arts education was traditionally reserved for the aristocrats, those who ruled the city and were at leisure to read and think, while their slaves did the farming and built the bridges. That was how it went for thousands of years, from ancient Greece to Oxford. [Here I may have looked pointedly at Dan.]
“But in America,” I continued, “most colleges and universities require the liberal arts, because we believe that everyone should be a free citizen, with the time and intellectual training conducive to participating in the grand project of collective self-government.
“What’s more,” I was on a roll now, “American colleges and universities are also powerful centers of scientific study, pushing the boundaries of human knowledge in a hundred directions at once, and far from being impractical or cloistered in an ivory tower, American higher education has a long history of pursuing practical advances in farming, machinery, and computers, contributing to the wealth and welfare of the nation as a whole.
“So yes,” I said, bringing it home, “it takes four years to earn an American college degree, but is that really too much time for us to help you become the kind of citizens and scientists and blessings to your communities that we expect each and every one of you to be?”
By the end I was practically singing “This Land Is Your Land.” The students were smiling, a few I swear were starry-eyed, won over by the beauty and nobility of the American collegiate ideal.
The thing is, though, afterwards I wondered how closely the reality of our situation matched the institution I described. The setting was right. Our campus was all gleaming new buildings and rolling lawns, its grounds and architecture suggesting at once a bucolic idyll and a space-age utopia. But what about us? I was an adjunct, underpaid and with no hope of a scholarly career. The students were in college, at least in part, because they had to be if they ever wanted a white-collar job, and who knows how many of them had taken on insurmountable debts to pay tuition, even as the rising number of college graduates further eroded the college wage premium. Students were massed on the quad, decrying the institution’s racism.
How to account for the disparity? Where did my ideas come from, and how had it all gone so wrong? I did what any scholar would do. I read about it. Even taught a class on the subject. What I found was the story of an institution that finally got what it always wanted but in doing so, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, summoned up forces far beyond its control.
1. “If we norish not Larning…” (1633 to 1842)
The history of American higher education begins, appropriately enough, with a fundraising letter. In 1633 the Boston minister John Eliot wrote to Sir Simonds D’Ewes (an English politician with Puritan leanings and a sizable inheritance) and requested money for a building large enough to house both students and books. The future of the fledgling Massachusetts Bay Colony, Eliot explained, depended on it: “for if we norish not Larning both church and common wealth will sinke.”[2] Like so many potential benefactors after him, Sir Simonds declined the ask, but eventually “it pleased God to stir up the heart of one Mr. Harvard (a godly Gentleman, and a lover of Learning, there living amongst us) to give one half of his estate … towards the erecting of a Colledge: and all his Library.”[3] With a few other donors, and the support of the local government, the colony had its first institute of the higher learning, a college modeled on the old English residential colleges at Oxford and Cambridge.
Eliot and his compatriots justified Harvard by what it could do for the community: train godly ministers and magistrates. In a roundabout way, this also justified the institution to itself and gave it a sense of mission. This was the beginning of American higher education’s long-standing promise to produce, in the words of historian Paul H. Mattingly, “not only trained minds but also a social leadership class.”[4]
Harvard’s mission was taken up by other colonial colleges such as William and Mary, Yale, and Princeton, all of whom tried to form godly gentlemen through a tightly regimented code of conduct and a classic liberal arts curriculum. Take Yale (please). Every son of Eli progressed through the same liberal arts coursework: first-year classes in ancient languages and logic; second-year classes in rhetoric, geometry, and geography; third-year classes on natural philosophy, astronomy, and mathematics; fourth-year classes on metaphysics and ethics, the last usually taught by the college president.[5] The moral code was equally prescriptive. To wit, “and if any Scholar Shall at any Time make any Rout, Disorder or Loud, Indecent Noises, Screamings or Hollowing or Shall call loud or Hollow to any other Scholar in the Presence of the President or Tutors, He Shall be fined not Exceeding Two Shillings.”[6] It all rested on the assumption that the faculty, equipped with authority and the right syllabus, could reliably lead young men from rude behavior and the basics of grammar to godly comportment and the loftiest truths of religion.
After the American Revolution, the colleges’ mission remained the same: train social leaders through the liberal arts curriculum, only now for the young republic as well as for particular Protestant denominations. Somehow, this gave local politicians the idea that they should have some say in collegiate affairs, in particular over staff appointments and curriculum; but although these colleges wanted state support, and to provide its leaders, they did not want to submit to state control. In the supreme court case of “The Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward,” Daniel Webster, arguing on behalf of the trustees, said that New Hampshire could not retroactively alter the school’s charter and make it more accountable to the governor. He ended his argument with a great rhetorical flourish: “It is, in some sense, the case of every man among us who has property of which he may be stripped, for the question is simply this: Shall our State Legislatures be allowed to take that which is not their own!”[7] Did governor William Plumer really believe his legal team would best the man who had out-argued the Devil himself? Colleges remained private, rather than extensions of the states.
The result was a curious and unstable situation. Unlike many European nations, the United States declined to create a national system of higher education, relying instead on the existing denominational colleges for advanced education and, increasingly, technological development and training. The colleges were happy to provide both, but as independent schools their funding was always in doubt.
Not everyone agreed, you see, that without “larning” church and commonwealth would sink. There were plenty of other ways for ambitious Americans to ascend into the nation’s leadership classes, so although antebellum colleges turned out social leaders, they did not produce the nation’s social leadership class. Hundreds of little colleges sprouted up across the American landscape throughout the 19th century, especially in the Middle West, but they were perpetually cash-strapped, reliant on tuition and wealthy benefactors, and most died off after a few years. Enrollment was minuscule, and the great majority of faculty members made around $600 or $700 a year, less than a typical adjunct today, even after adjusting for inflation.[8] In a moment of near-despair, Francis Wayland, the abolitionist president of Brown College, lamented “Can [a liberal education] not be made to recommend itself; so that he who wishes to obtain it shall also be willing to pay for it?”[9]
More often than not, the answer was no.
2. The Rise of the University (1862-1913)
Promising to inculcate good citizenship through a liberal arts curriculum was obviously not enough. Higher education needed another mission, another way to justify itself and convince American society of its importance.
The first development was a unique American innovation: the land grant. In 1862, congress passed The Morrill Act. Vermont Senator Justin Morrill’s idea was that the federal government could gift (grant) public land to the states, which could in turn sell the land in order to fund an institute of higher learning. These schools would be different from the old English college in a crucial way. Their prime mission would be to deliver direct economic benefits to the young states. As the legislation itself stipulates, “the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies, and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts … in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.”[10]
Morrill originally didn’t want the liberal arts at these schools at all. The classical elements in the old curriculum mostly survived because designing and funding a new institution from the ground up was wildly impractical. Some states chose to supercharge existing schools, including Rutgers in New Jersey, Cornell in New York, and Purdue in Indiana. Others founded new institutions, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Iowa.[11] Thus was a widespread technical and economic mission added to the older mission of moral formation. Institutes of higher learning could say (to their legislators and to themselves) that they deserved financial support because they were in turn contributing to the prosperity of the state.
Another development was underway in the late 19th century. Some schools, like the one in Iowa, started calling themselves universities rather than colleges. In doing so they were following the latest intellectual fashion from Europe: the German research university.
The aim of the research university was not technical progress or moral instruction (at least not directly). It was the free, disinterested pursuit of theoretical knowledge. So instead of teaching general courses on Latin or Greek literature to undergraduates, or practical farming techniques to the same, German professors delved deeply into a bewildering array of topics and imparted their esoteric knowledge to graduate students, who in turn aspired to become professors themselves. Thus, human knowledge would advance.
More often than not, American academics who observed the German university up close came home gaga for it. After studying philology in Leipzig and Berlin in the 1860s and 70s, James Morgan Hart described the university’s mission as nothing short of heroic: “The university of Germany does not attempt to train successful practical men … Its chief task, that to which all its energies are directed, is the development of great thinkers, men who will extend the boundaries of knowledge.”[12]
Some schools, like Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, were founded as universities. This was not the norm. Instead, as they had done with the land grant model, leaders in American higher education tended to drop the German research agenda on top of existing colleges. Most schools remained colleges, but other institutions rechristened themselves as the University of Minnesota, the University of California, and so on. Even Yale got hip, declaring itself a university in 1887. Although lagging far behind the research capabilities of German universities, American universities labelling themselves as such were making a statement. Their mission was the pursuit of knowledge, which was its own reward and justification. Although, incidentally, donors and the public ought to support it as well, for the sake of prosperity and democracy. As Charles Kendall Adams, the one-time president of Cornell and the University of Wisconsin, wrote in 1875, “It is too obvious to admit of question that there can be no intelligent guidance of the intricate affairs of state, without something of that discriminating knowledge which comes from a thorough training of the higher faculties. … Therefore the more higher education you can have in a state the better.”[13]
Along with these official justifications, colleges and universities were also, more quietly, offering unofficial ones. Namely, student life and sports. Students demanded emancipation from the strict liberal arts curriculum and the old college-style social control. They won both, especially since many professors were happy to offer specialized elective classes on their own research—and did not enjoy being responsible for student discipline.[14] Consequently, character formation largely moved out of the classroom and into the extracurricular realm. Students formed clubs, athletic leagues, and organizations of every kind that prepared them for civic and economic life in the emerging industrial nation. In their carefree sports and leisure, they also created our contemporary idea of undergraduate life, which schools were happy to sell the public. Because there was still one thing missing.
Money. All of these endeavors (moral formation, practical knowledge, theoretical advances, even football) were not translating into financial stability and they were certainly not bringing in enough money to realize the nascent universities’ intellectual and social aspirations. Even though the student body was growing fast, only 2.3% of Americans aged 18 to 24 years were enrolled in higher education in 1900.[15] Schools depended heavily on wealthy benefactors like the University of Chicago’s founding donor John D. Rockefeller, who was once serenaded by the grateful students: “John D. Rockefeller, wonderful man is he, / Gives all his spare change to the U. of C.”[16] Alas, after his initial gift, this turned out to be true. The University of Chicago ended the 1904-5 academic year with $25 in its bank account ($750 today).[17]
Though it looked like it might collapse at any moment, American higher education had now taken on something close to its present-day form. It braided together three distinct intellectual traditions: the English college, emphasizing moral formation; the American land grant, teaching practical know-how; and the German university, pursuing theoretical knowledge; plus, it had a healthy admixture of student life and sports for fun. There was nothing else in the world quite like it. It was something new under the sun. As is so common in human history, this innovative institution represented not a break with the past but a combination of old elements in a surprising and nearly accidental arrangement.[18] But wonder though it was, American higher education still had nothing like the central role that John Eliot imagined for it in 1633.
That was about to change.
To Be Continued! … In Part 2: War! (huh yeah) What is it good for? (Funding American higher education) Say it again, y’all!
[1] Clark Kerr. “The Future of the City of Intellect,” The Uses of the University. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Page 71.
[2] A college first proposed for Massachusetts Bay, 1633. American Higher Education: A Documentary History, Vol.1. Eds Richard Hostadter and Wilson Smith. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1961. Page 5.
[3] New England’s First Fruits. Ibid. Page 6.
[4] Paul H. Mattingly. American Academic Cultures: A History of Higher Education. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. Page 7.
[5] Yale Laws of 1745. American Higher Education: A Documentary History, Vol. 1. Page 56.
[6] Ibid. Page 57.
[7] Daniel Webster Argues the Dartmouth College Case, 1819. Ibid. Page 212. I can’t resist, here are the last lines of Webster’s speech: “It is, Sir, as I have said, a small College. And yet, there are those who love it. Sir, I know not how others may feel [glancing at the opponents of the college before him], but, for myself, when I see my alma mater surrounded, like Caesar in the senate house, by those who are reiterating stab after stab, I would not, for this right hand, have her turn to me, and say, Et tu quoque me fili! And thou too, my son!”
[8] Frederick Rudolf. The American College and University: A History, 2nd edition. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1990. Page 193.
[9] Quoted in Rudolf. Ibid. Page 198.
[10] The Morrill Act (1862) Public Law 37-108. Quoted in Essential Documents in the History of American Higher Education,ed. John Thelin. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.
[11] Mattingly, 102-4.
[12] James Morgan Hart. American Higher Education: A Documentary History, Vol. 2. Eds Richard Hostadter and Wilson Smith. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1961. Page 577.
[13] Charles Kendall Adams. Ibid. Page 668.
[14] After tripping over a stack of bricks while in pursuit of a student who had stolen a turkey, a German-born professor at the University of South Carolina was heard to exclaim “Mein Gott! All dis for two tousand dollars!” Quoted in Rudolf, 106.
[15] Mattingly, 229.
[16] Elizabeth Watkins Jorgensen and Henry Irvin Jorgensen. Thorstein Veblen: Victorian Firebrand. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1999. Page 66.
[17] Charles Camic. Veblen: The Making of an Economist Who Unmade Economics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020.Page 342.
[18] Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 14.