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Shaping The Idea Of The University: An Historical Analysis Of The Originsand Development Of The University Idea In European And American Thought

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Shaping The Idea Of The University: An Historical Analysis Of The Originsand Development Of The University Idea In European And American Thought

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Content T h is d i s s e r t a t io n h a s b e e n 64— 9619 m ic ro film e d e x a c tly a s r e c e iv e d HO DGM AN, R o b e rt S ta n le y , 1 9 2 4 - SH A PIN G T H E IDEA O F T H E U N IV ER SITY : AN H IS T O R IC A L ANALYSIS O F T H E O RIG IN S AND D E V E L O P M E N T O F TH E U N IV ER SITY IDEA IN E U R O P E A N AND A M ER IC A N TH O U G H T. U n iv e rs ity of S o u th e rn C a lif o r n ia , P h .D ., 1964 E d u c a tio n , h is to r y University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan SHAPING THE IDEA OF THE UNIVERSITY An Historical Analysis of the Origins and Development of The University Idea in European and American Thought by Robert Stanley Hodgman A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (Education) June 1964 UNIVERSITY O F S O U T H E R N CALIFORNIA THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY PARK LOS ANGELES. CALIFORNIA 9 0 0 0 7 This dissertation, written by ..... Rflhayt Hodgpan.............. * under the direction of h..(.^..Dissertation C om mittee, and approved by all its members, has been presented to and accepted by the Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y ' Dean Date June, .1964 DISSERTATION,COMMITTEE Chairmajt TABLE OF CONTENTS '* Chapter Page PART I. INTRODUCTION I. THE IDEA OF A UNIVERSITY................... 2 Purpose and T h e m e ................... 2 Definition and Basic Assumptions ........... 6 Point of V i e w ............................ 13 Summary of Content .................. 13 PART II. EUROPEAN ORIGINS OF THE UNIVERSITY IDEA II. ORIGINS IN CLASSICAL AND MEDIEVAL THOUGHT . . 20 Introduction............. 20 Platonic Conceptions of Higher Learning . . 21 Aristotelian Conceptions of Higher Learning 32 Divine Revelation as the Source of Truth . . 41 Medieval Ideal: Synthesis and Interpretation ...................... 49 III. RENAISSANCE HUMANISM AND THE RISE OF SCIENCE . 63 The Humanist Movement................... 63 The Rise of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 Renaissance Ideal: A Heightened Vitality . 83 The Triumph of R e a s o n ................... 93 Summary and Synthesis................... 102 IV. SOME MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF THE UNIVERSITY . . 110 Thomas Jefferson: The Freedom to Learn . . 110 John Henry Newman: An Enlargement of Mind . 113 Ortega y Gasset: A Cultural Synthesis . . . 122 ii Chapter Page Alfred North Whitehead: The Gift of Imagination.......................... 130 Karl Jaspers: The Search for Truth .... 135 Summary and Synthesis............. 141 PART XII. AMERICAN REALIZATION OF THE UNIVERSITY IDEA V. HISTORICAL BEGINNINGS, 1636-1860 150 Scholastic Heritage In the Colonial College 150 Early Proposals for a Public University . . 160 Philip Llndsley: Enemy of Sectarianism . . 165 Jeremiah Day: Bulwark of Conservatism . 171 Francis Wayland: The Need for Reform . . . 179 Henry Tappan: Visionary Prophet ..... 187 VI. THE FOUNDING OF AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES, 1860-1900: PART I . . . . ............... 199 Andrew Dickson White: The "Cornell Idea" . 199 Charles W. Eliot: Growth and Progress at Harvard ...................... 211 James McCosh: Prescription and Election . 226 VII. THE FOUNDING OF AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES, 1860-1900: PART I I ........................ 235 Daniel Colt Gilman: A Policy of Intellectual Freedom .................... 235 Noah Porter: Defender of the Classical College.............................. 246 William Rainey Harper: Monumental Energy— and Vision ...................... 259 Suosnary and Synthesis...................... 268 VIII. THE CONSOLIDATION OF RESOURCES, 1900-1925 . . 276 Woodrow Wilson: In the Nation's Service • 276 Charles Van Hlse: The "Wisconsin Idea" . . 288 ill Chapter Page Arthur Hadley: Education for Citizenship . . 296 A. Lawrence Lowell: Developing the Whole Man . . ............................... 304 IX. NEW GROWTH AND DIVERSIFICATION .. . . . . . . 313 Robert M. Hutchins: Experiment and Controversy.............................. . 313 James B. Conant: A Long-Range Human Enterprise............... 322 Whitney Griswold: In the University Tradition................................... 331 Suunary and Synthesis........................ 339 PART IV. THE ENDLESS QUEST X. THE UNIVERSITY IDEA: PAST AND PRESENT .... 343 The Historical Past........................... 343 The Historical Present .................... 354 BIBLIOGRAPHY.......................................... 368 iv LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1. Avenues Co Knowledge............. 109 2. A Synthesis of University Aims and Functions............................ 148 v I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. — Henry David Thoreau PART I INTRODUCTION CHAPTER I THE IDEA OF A UNIVERSITY The university is the intellect, it is science, erected into an institution. --Ortega y Gasset Purpose and Theme This dissertation is a study of the origin and development of an idea in our western tradition and, more particularly, of its realization in nineteenth and twentieth-century American society. If the word "idea" is taken to mean any coherent illustration of the workings of the human mind expressed in sign or symbol, then surely the efforts of the mind which have led to the building of colleges and universities across the continents of Europe and America is an idea. It is not a simple idea nor did it, like grey-eyed Minerva, spring full grown from the tem ple of man, but, like other ideas investing other Institu tions, it has grown in complexity and power over a period of 2500 years. And, although the institutions we call 2 universities today seem very different in structure and appearance from their ancestral forebears in Athens and Alexandria, the human impulse which brought them into being and the idea which informs them are largely the same. That impulse is man's desire to know and the idea is that of the disciplined search for truth in a climate of intellectual freedom. Primitive men in prehistoric times had no need for universities. Their epics, myths, and magical rites ex plained satisfactorily for them the nature of space and time, the workings of the natural world, and the events of human history. So long as there was no need to question these explanations, men could live out their lives in relative harmony. But after the introduction of writing and the consequent storing of written records, men began to realize that customs once regarded as sacred no longer prevailed, that great cities and empires could and did decline and disappear— in short, that no tradition, custom, or value was exempt from the erosion of time and the vagaries of memory. Once aware of the precariousness of human life, the decay of human institutions, the limita tions of human knowledge, certain exceptional individuals appeared--Socrates, Buddha, Confucius— and attempted to ask and answer the fundamental questions about man and his universe: What is life? What is knowable? What is the true nature of reality behind the flux of natural phenom ena? What is of central importance and value in human experience? The .activity of the investigator, the scholar, the learner began to acquire a significance never before realized, and the accumulation of verifiable knowledge became an end in itself.^* If it is true, as Carl Becker remarks, that "all of our superiority is in the accumulated and transmitted store of learning and the consequent power it confers upon 2 us," then the university as a storehouse of that learning and a prime factor in its transmission from one generation to the next becomes one of the crucial institutions divid ing the life of modem man from that of the primitive. It is this accumulated knowledge about the outer world of nature and the past history of mankind that places modem man in a position to emancipate himself from bondage to Ignorance and superstition, to subdue the physical world to his needs, and to shape his life in closer accord with the essential 1 Carl L. Becker, Freedom and Responsibility in the American Way of Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), pp. 51-54. 2 Ibid., p. 55. 5 3 nature or men and things. The university has played a vital role in this civilizing of men. It is the institution which has been responsible, historically, for accumulating and storing man's growing knowledge about himself and the world he inhabits; it is the institution charged with the task of distilling and synthesizing this knowledge and transmitting it to succeed ing generations of men and women; it is the institution which has more recently provided the laboratories, the libraries, and other facilities necessary to the advance ment of knowledge through scholarship and research. The purpose of this study, then, is to trace the idea of the university as it has evolved since the time of the founding of Plato's Academy, to identify some of the major intellectual forces which have shaped it over the last two thousand years, to trace briefly the history of the idea in Anerican thought, and, finally, to measure the extent to which the idea is expressed in the published essays and addresses of the most influential of America's university presldents. 6 The theme of this dissertation comes from a pro vocative book by the Spanish writer, Ortega y Gasset, entitled Mission of the University; I can state it no more clearly nor forcefully than does he: The European man represents, in the panorama of history, the being resolved to live according to his Intellect; and science is but intellect "in form." Is it perchance a mere accident that only the European has possessed universities, among so many people? The university JLs the intellect, it is science, erected into an institution. And this institutionalizing of intellect is the originality of the European compared with other races, other lands, and other ages. It signifies the peculiar resolution adopted by the European man, to live according to the dictates of his intelligence.4 Definition and Basic Assumptions The word "university" in this study refers to any institution of higher learning where scholars and teachers are engaged in the search for knowledge, the inter disciplinary sharing of knowledge, and the free and imaginative transmission of knowledge to young men and women. More specifically, In the later chapters that are devoted to American higher education, the term university ^Jose Ortega y Gasset, Mission of the University, translated by Howard Lee Nostrand (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1946), p. 74. designates only those academic Institutions beyond the secondary school which center their undergraduate curricu la on the liberal arts and offer graduate training In one or more of the professions. It Is only fair to warn the reader at this point, however, that the emphasis of this study Is not on the university as a physical entity but on the university as an Idea and an Ideal. What we will undertake to examine here Is the genius of the university, that spark of hope In the minds of free men which urges them on to full and free Inquiry and which may yet bring wisdom Into the world-wide conduct of human affairs. The university Idea Is the vision of man at the height of his creative powers— thoughtful, judicious, Inquisitive, and self-dlsclpllned. The ongoing task of the university as an Institution Is to develop and deepen that vision and to provide the conditions necessary to Its fulfillment. The basic assumptions of this study are as myriad and complex as the human mind Itself. One of them cer tainly Is that the primal impulses which move and govern the animal kingdom are operative in human beings, but that out of these irrational and determined Impulses, evolved through eons of time, have emerged the finest qualities of the human mind, the intellectual powers of judgment and selection, and the poetic and creative powers of the imagination. With this development, human life broke free from the restraining chains of pure matter and physical force, and launched upon a voyage of discovery and revela tion which in the twentieth century still has but barely begun. A second basic assumption is that the impulse to know is an inherent and ineradicable human trait and that one of the deepest single needs of civilized man is the need to understand himself and the physical world of which he is a part. This need finds expression in philos ophy, science, and art, and is the raison d'etre for all institutions of education, public and private, elementary, secondary, and higher. One could not deny that schools have been used for other purposes--for example, to deceive and propagandize as in the Germany of the 1930s— but no educational abuse or distortion has survived so long nor manifested itself so clearly in the literature as has this single driving impulse of the human mind, the need to know. Related to this, a third basic assumption is that there is something worth knowing, a Truth, or truths, which the human mind can grasp and which improves or enhances in some significant way the conduct of human life Those engaged in university teaching need to retain in all of their work an unassailable belief in the supreme value of truth, wherever it may be found. They need to make clear to those whom they instruct that what at one time passes for knowledge may, in fact, be erroneous, and that what is required of educated people is an attitude of intellectual liberality, a tolerance for ambiguity, a temper of continual search, and a suspicion of dogma and comfortable certainty. They need to remind their students that those who have been honored by posterity are very often those who were most unpopular in their own day, and that, consequently, intellectual honesty and moral courage are virtues of supreme importance. Above all, the univer sity educator must regard himself as the servant of truth and not a spokesman for this or that political or sectar ian interest. In the words of Bertrand Russell, "Truth is a shining goddess, always veiled, always distant, never wholly approachable, but worthy of all the devotion of which the human spirit is capable."^ Our discussion of the inquiring, the truth-seeking ^Bertrand Russell, Fact and Fiction (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1961), p. 156. mind leads Co still another assumption, which is that human freedom issues from knowledge. Stated another way, the more one knows and the more successfully one can organize and interpret what he knows, the greater will be his sense of freedom and independence. Knowledge is power and knowledge brings its material rewards; but, more importantly, knowledge brings freedom. Numerous examples may be cited of the working of free intelligence in the shaping of human cultures and human institutions. The great creative ages in.the history of western civilization appear to be precisely those times when in response to some present challenge, men became zestful, curious, eager to learn' and experiment with new approaches to old problems. And nothing is more certain than that the ages of decline in civilized societies are noticeably marked by a lessening of mental energy, a suspicion of all intel lectual activity, and a pronounced decrease in both mental i and physical freedom.** Historical accounts of the Fall of the Roman Empire, for example, give evidence not only of a loss of commercial and industrial energy, but also of Henry Osborn Taylor, Freedom of the Mind in History (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1924), pp. 63ff. 11 a loss of intellectual energy and a deep sense of spiritual 7 vacuity. Another related assumption is that all knowledge and all learning is process. Learning must look to the present and future, as well as to the past; the man, the university, the society that dwells only on the glories of the past is doomed. Spontaneity and originality of decision are of the essence in all successful learning and teaching. 'Know thyself," Socrates' famous dictum, per ceives that the man who understands his own mind and heart will never be the slave to custom. He will see that each event, each new experience, is unique, requiring a response that is both original and spontaneous. Whitehead contends, The foundation of all understanding . . . of human life is that no static maintenance of per fection is possible. This axiom Is rooted in the nature of things. Advance or Decadence are the only choices offered to mankind.8 Our last basic assumption Is that the most vitally alive man in any society is the one energized by and suf fused with the knowledge of his time— not a thin veneer of - - Ibid. g Alfred N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: New American Library, 1955), p. 273. 12 factual knowledge; not a quiz-show display of dates, names, and events; but a philosophical comprehension, synthesis, and integration of the learning accumulated to that point in time at which he lives. The educated man is one open to the whole reality of his culture, excited by the ideas of his time, and informed as to their genesis. The uni versity cannot serve as an extension and institutionaliz ing of man's intellect unless it is also saturated with the ideas which give shape and meaning to the lives of men. It must transmit these ideas imaginatively, economically, and with a minimum of distortion to each generation of young people and to all members of the society, young and old, who are capable of learning. Only when the university has ceased to be "an institution 9 exclusively for students, a retreat ad utum Delphini." can it begin to fulfill its great mission of Integrating and communicating "the vital ideas of the time,"^ of stimulating inquiry and the love for learning, of urging and aiding each individual to realize the full dimension of his own unique talents and abilities. 9 Ortega y Gasset, op. cit.. p. 77. 10 Ibid. 13 In the thick of life's urgencies and its passions, the university must assert itself as a major "spir itual power," higher than the press, standing for serenity in the midst of frenzy, for seriousness and the grasp of intellect in the face of frivolity and unashamed stupidity. Then the university, once again, will come to be what it was in its grand hour: an uplifting principle in the history of the western world.il Point of View In a very real sense the history of higher educa tion is a history of the conflict between the conservative and progressive impulses in human life; a conflict between the desire of men to hold on to, to protect, and to revere the past, and the equally strong desire to experiment, to create, to change and grow. Many educators wish to align themselves with one or the other of these impulses. Hence the progressive argues that he alone is able to change when change is called for, since the conservative is too rigidly bound by tradition. The conservative, on the other hand, holds that the progressive, lacking deeply- rooted values, is too quick to change and thus steers a course without purpose or direction. The progressive ^Ibid.. pp. 77-78. argues that in education we must take our cue from the best that man knows at the present time; the conservative that we should be guided by the best that man has learned in the past. The progressive maintains that any acceptable theory of higher education must take cognizance of measur able data and of the best-supported theories of modem science; the conservative holds that our most useful and valuable conceptions of knowledge,. truth* and the nature of learning come to us out of the wisdom of the past. Admittedly, the student of higher education must take a position during the course of his study, but it need not be to the exclusion of either one or the other point of view. The views of the progressives and conservatives are not necessarily irreconcilable. To some degree they can be reconciled by ascertaining the causes for conflict in point of view, by seeking to understand each of the different views, and then attempting to resolve the differences at a deeper and more inclusive level than that 12 represented by either contender. Throughout this dis sertation the writer has attempted to maintain just such 12 John Dewey, Experience and Education (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1938), p. v. 15 a reconciliation of viewpoint— a third position, as it were. The writer's point of view has determined the con tent of this essay. In a broad historical survey such as this, not everything can be included. A radical selection must be made, the very nature of which will reveal the writer's point of view and purposes for writing. But selection does not necessarily mean that pertinent material is being ignored, nor does it mean that concepts and relevant historical materials are being pared and dis torted to fit a preconceived notion. Every writer has the responsibility of being as accurate and as inclusive as his own knowledge and the materials of his research allow. Of the ultimate truth and fairness of this pre sentation the reader himself will have to judge. Summary of Content Any decision as to the point in history where one should begin to examine the development of man's concern with the spirit of higher education must be an arbitrary one. We who live in the societies of the west possess a bewildering heritage of mysticism and art from the far east; of philosophy, literature, and jurisprudence from 16 Greece and Rome; of religious inspiration from the Jewish prophets; of theological doctrine from the Church Fathers. And those of us in the English-speaking nations, at least, are indebted to Teuton and Anglo-Saxon for our language and for much in the fabric of our culture which is neither academic nor religious. Hence one may well question whether a study like this should begin with the culture of the ancient East, the writings of the Church Fathers, or the philosophy of classical Greece. No single study can encompass them all, and it would be presumptuous of the author to claim more than a superficial knowledge of the diverse traditions at work in the shaping of European and American intellectual life. For this reason, chapters two and three offer not 13 an intellectual history of western civilization but a brief analysis of what the writer has come to believe were four climactic moments in the development of that history. The first of these is the Platonlc-Aristotelian examina tion of the nature and value of human knowledge; the For an excellent Intellectual history of western civilization, see Crane Brinton, Ideas and Man. The Story of Western Thought (New York: Prentice-Ha11, Inc., 1950). 17 second is Che Augustinian analysis of the source of human knowledge; the third is the attempt in the Middle Ages by Thomas Aquinas and others to synthesize religious and secular thought; and the fourth is the beginning of the scientific and humanistic revolutions in the European Renaissance. Each of these has undeniably played a signif icant role in shaping the American vision of higher education. Chapter four surveys five more recent conceptions of higher learning as envisioned by dispassionate observ ers who have published their thoughts on the aims and functions of the university. These first four chapters, then, establish histori cal and philosophical perspectives for the material which follows in Part III. The guiding assumption in chapters two and three is that the university is an extension of the human intellect; thus some major historical determi nants which have shaped the intellectual adventures of men in western civilization are examined there. The assumption behind chapter four is that the idea of the university is definable and has been successfully stated a number of times by thoughtful observers, not with perfect 18 unanimity on all points, but with enough agreement to call for a synthesis. After these preliminaries, chapters five through nine delineate the basic alms of American universities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as these alms have come into focus and found expression in published addresses, reports, and essays of America's leading university presidents. The concluding chapter provides a summary, a restatement of theme, and an evalu ation of the vitality of the university idea in America today. PART II EUROPEAN ORIGINS OF THE UNIVERSITY IDEA CHAPTER II ORIGINS IN CLASSICAL AND MEDIEVAL THOUGHT . . . It is imperative to set up once more, in the university, the teaching o£ the culture, the system of vital ideas, which the age has attained. This is the basic function of the university. This is what the university must be, above all else.--Ortega y Gasset Introduction The university is no mere chance institution of society; it is not a haven for the impractical or the theoretical-minded, not a production line of credits, diplomas, and degrees. It is, rather, the embodiment of an idea almost as old as western civilization, the idea of scholarship and of intellectual advance along every line of human inquiry. The originating and guiding genius of the university is man's enthusiasm for learning, his desire to know. One need not belong to a university to live by this ideal, but the institution which lacks the ideal and fails to attract it is not a university. The university is an institution charged with the grandeur of 20 21 man's aspiration to seek, to know, to understand himself and the world about him. One must not conclude from this that the university is the sole proprietor of intellectual study. Often, the most creative of human endeavors have been originated by men outside the university; and just as often their re search and ideas have been at first rejected by the uni versity. The creative insights and teachings of men like Socrates, Dante, Spinoza, Goethe, and Kirkegaard all oc curred wholly outside the walls of organized institutions ♦ of learning. Nevertheless, once a new intellectual direc tion has been opened up, the university has always, sooner or later, taken possession of it, promoting its further development by new discoveries and applications, and pre serving it as part of its body of teachable materials. Platonic Conceptions of Higher Learning For more than a thousand years (ca. 700 B.C. to 400 A.D.) the civilizations flourishing along the eastern and northern shores of the Mediterranean thought about and experimented with ideas which still influence our daily lives. Among the first people to take active interest in the forms of human thought and in the possibilities for 22 human growth that free inquiry engendered, were the Greeks, more particularly the Athenians of the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ. They appear to have been the first people in recorded history to wonder about and to reason about the whole range of human experience, from the nature of physical substance to the nature of the divine. Historians depict fifth-century Athens as a place of unparalleled intellectual freedom, when Greek scholars and teachers were free to investigate and speculate on all questions, theoretical and practical, concerning matter and man/ Education of the Athenian citizen consisted of studies in literature, music, mathematics, rhetoric, phi losophy and gymnastics designed to train all of the powers of man into a single harmonious whole. The ideally edu cated Greek citizen was a man of action capable of partici pating in the thriving political and intellectual life of the city state. Athenian education did not include manual or vocational training or preparation for the numerous menial tasks which must be performed in any society. It was an aristocratic education denied to all but the *C. M. Bowra, The Greek Experience (New York: The New American Library, n.d.), pp. 177-199. 23 economic and intellectual elite. But the young Greek fortunate enough to have such an education was free to develop his powers and abilities in any way he chose, free to seek out the sophist, or "wise man," who he thought could teach him the most. Since man was the measure of 2 all things, let him make of himself what he could. One of the early great Athenian teachers, Socrates (4707-399 B.C.), spent his life goading his fellow citi zens to think for themselves, and challenging their con ventional notions of religion, knowledge and virtue. He compared himself to a gadfly whose purpose was to sting his fellows out of their mental apathy and indifference . to ignorance and evil. Though no formal institution of higher learning existed in his day, Socrates epitomized the essence of man's search for self-knowledge and for more creative intelligence in this world. The keenest of questioners, he conducted his inquiries so that they should lead to better conceptions of the good life, of truth and wisdom and justice. Huntington Cairns in the "Introduction" to The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollingen Series LXXI (New York: Random House, 1961). Socrates wrote nothing, himself; he only talked and questioned. What knowledge we have of him today comes by way of the writings of his fellow Athenians and stu dents. His best-known student, Plato (4277-347 B.C.), attempted to capture the Socratic spirit and philosophy in a number of remarkable dialogues in which Socrates always appears as protagonist. These dialogues profoundly influenced the thought of the ancient world, as they have influenced the thought of our own time. They have been praised as . . . the substance of Western thought, as the corrective for the excesses to which the human mind is subject, and as setting forth the chief lines of the Western view of the world as they have never before been delineated.3 The central insight of the dialogues is that reason, the logos. is an inherent force in nature steering all things from within; the natural world is a single organic whole, and man is not a passive observer standing outside and looking in upon it, but is himself an active and integral part of nature. In the Platonic view, the world is an intelligible system which men can come to know through rational analysis and disciplined intelligence. For Plato, 25 reality was invested not in the observable external world but in the mind or soul of man and in the universal ideas 4 which only the mind can conceive and contemplate. In Plato's philosophy, the idea of the Good is the noblest and most real of all ideas and potentially the most creative. The man who shuns beauty, justice, goodness in his own life, who seeks something less than the excellent in all his work, can never know happiness and the satis faction that comes from achievement. To encourage the development of intellect among his fellow citizens, Plato opened an Academy in Athens in the year 387 B.C. Here he taught the method of the Socratic dialectic and his own philosophical idealism. The Academy survived for more than nine hundred years, enjoying a longer life span than any similar academic institution in western civilization before or since.^ Its most famous pupil was Aristotle. Plato considered the problem of knowledge, its teachability, and man's desire for it in a number of the dialogues, but nowhere so persistently as in the Protagoras. This leisurely dialogue opens with a charming 4 Ibid. 5Ibid. 26 picture of Greek life: an eager lad awakens Socrates before daybreak and begs to accompany him to visit Protagoras, the sophist of Abdera, who has just arrived in Athens. Together, Socrates and the boy go to the home where Protagoras is staying and find several others already there waiting to learn. When the Athenians see Socrates, they want him to converse with Protagoras on the subject of wisdom, its meaning, and the success with which it can be taught by one to another. The Socratic argument, which ultimately prevails, is that wisdom is but part of a larger whole, "Virtue," which consists of five elements: wisdom, temperance, courage, justice, and holiness. All can and must be taught, Socrates argues, if the civilized state is to survive.** No man, Socrates concludes, who is truly virtuous, who has learned the full meaning of virtue, can ever commit evil, because evil in every instance results from the Ignorance of virtue. . . . No one willingly goes to meet evil or what he thinks to be evil. To make for what one believes to be evil, Instead of making for the good, is not, it seems, in human nature, and when faced with the choice of two evils no one will choose the greater ^"Protagoras," translated by W. K. C. Guthrie in The Collected Dialogues, edited by Hamilton and Cairns, p. 323. 27 when he might choose the Less.? This argument that wisdom is the only effective antidote to evil is developed again in Book VII of The Republic, where Plato likens the condition of ignorant men to that of prisoners chained in a cave and able to see only the shadows of other men and objects on the walls before them. A prisoner who by some circumstance was suddenly released from this condition and could turn and look at the objects themselves rather than at their shadows, would find the sight, at first, confusing and painful, and would be tempted to return to bondage. Even more painful would be his exposure to the light of the sun and to the things of the world outside the cave. However, in time, "he would be able to look upon the sun itself and see its true nature, not by reflections in water or phantasms of it in an alien setting, but in and by itself in its own place. He would recall his former bondage and what passed there for wisdom among his fellow prisoners and would feel for tunate indeed for the change in his condition. Such a man, 7Ibid.. p. 349. ®"The Republic," translated by Paul Shorey in The Collected Dialogues, edited by Hamilton and Cairns, p. 748. 28 Plato continues, would experience no desire to return, but, should he go down again and take his old place with his fellow prisoners and speak with them, he would only evoke their derision and laughter; they would not believe what he told them and would say that "he had returned from his journey aloft with his eyes ruined and that it was not 9 worthwhile even to attempt the ascent." The point of the fable is obvious; the ascent of man's reason to the region of the intelligible and true is fraught with difficulties, but even more difficult is the return "from divine contemplation to the petty miseries of men." Nevertheless (and the heart of Plato's argument is that such a return must be made), men who have never ascended the heights of wisdom and virtue can not ade quately preside over the state; nor can they who have once scaled the heights choose to remain there. Only those who do go down again among their fellow citizens and share their labors and honors can expect to participate in the conduct and guidance of the state and alleviate the gen eral sufferings of mankind. Plato then considers the method of educating such 9lbid., p. 749. 29 men and identifies as proper subjects for study: number, geometry, astronomy, harmony, and dialectics. Dialectics is properly last because it is "the discipline that will enable men to ask and answer questions in the most scien- 10 tific manner." Next, Plato names the qualities required of those who will be educated in this way and who will ultimately become the rulers of the state. The most stable, the most brave and enterprising are to be preferred, and, as far as practicable, the most comely. But in addition we must now re quire that they not only be virile and vigorous in temper, but that they possess also the gifts of nature suitable to this type of education. . . . They must have . . . to begin with, a certain keen ness for study, and must not learn with difficulty. . . . And we must demand a good memory and dogged ness and industry in every sense of the word.^1 Finally, Plato lists the conditions for effective learning and the sequence by which the student is expected to develop from his original state of ignorance to the ultimate condition of wisdom and civic leadership. The studies preliminary to dialectics must be mastered while the student is still young and taught not in the form of compulsory instruction but in the form of play: "A free soul ought not to pursue any study slavishly; . . . nothing 10 Ibid.. p. 765. U Ibid.. p. 767. 30 12 that is learned under compulsion stays with the mind." At the age of twenty, those who are ready will . . . gather the studies which they disconnectedly pursued as children . . . into a comprehensive survey of their affinities with one another and with the nature of things. . . . For he who can view things in their connexion is a dialectician; he who cannot, is not. Those chosen in such a manner then pursue the study of dialectic. Plato draws a very precise distinction between dialectics as a form of playful disputation and dialectics employed in the search for truth. They [the young and disputatious] delight like puppies in pulling about and tearing with words all who approach them. . . . But an older man will not share this craze . . . but will rather choose to imitate the one who consents to examine truth dialectically than the one who makes a jest and sport of mere contradiction, and so he will himself be more reasonable and moderate, and brine credits rather than discredits upon his pursuit.^ At the end of this lengthy period of study, the thirty- five-year-old student is sent "down into the cave again" and compelled to hold commands in war and other offices suitable to youth, where again he is tested for stability, 12 Ibid.. p. 768. 13 Ibid.. p. 769. 14 Ibid.. p. 771. 31 steadfastness and courage. At the age of fifty, those' who survive such tests and prove themselveB to be best in "every task and form of knowledge" finally take their place as office-holders, leaders, and statesmen for the betterment of the whole city. Plato would have his reader understand that his system of education is to be as avail able to women as to men. We have seen in these dialogues not only an educa tional ideal but evidence of the rigidifying of a curric ulum. During Plato's lifetime, formal institutions of higher learning began to take shape and gradually two different kinds evolved. One was the school of philosophy, exemplified by Plato's own Academy, which adopted the course sequence and purposes outlined in The Republic. Similar schools were Aristotle's Lyceum, the Stoa of the Stoics, and the Garden of the Epicureans. The second type of institution was the school of rhetoric, typified by Isocrates' Academy.^ These schools were concourses where young men gathered from all parts of the civilized world to talk with and learn from the great philosophers, ^For an excellent description of the several academies, see Edith Hamilton, The Echo of Greece (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1957), pp. 49-105. 32 statesmen, rhetoricians, and mathematicians of the day. They were not forerunners of the modem university; they lacked the formal structure and system of requirements so characteristic of medieval and modem schools. They had no governing boards, no system of examinations, no degrees, no regulations governing the quality, content or amount of instruction to be given. The educated Athenian was denoted by his speech, manner and abilities, not by his titles and degrees.^ But, as we have seen, Plato did prescribe a curric ulum to prepare the student for his idea of the good life, a sequence of studies that would reveal gradually the eternal truths and eternal patterns lying behind the apparent flux of life. And in Plato's studies we find a foreshadowing of the curriculum which later was to be known as the "seven liberal arts." Aristotelian Conceptions of Higher Learning The Athenian philosopher whose writings most deeply influenced the development of higher education, however, 16Ibid 33 was not Plato but his pupil Aristotle. Plato's mind was intuitional; like his mentor, Socrates, he sought truth through the dialectic of argument, and through meditation and introspection. Aristotle's method, on the other hand, was to observe, describe, and classify the phenomena of the external world, and to deduce from the obvious flux of facts and things the eternal principles of truth. In the Politics and again in the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle examines the question of the good life and the method by which the young are to be instructed to lead a life of virtue. In the Politics he distinguishes between education for practical pursuits and education for "higher accomplishments," and concludes that, although some subjects need to be studied for their utility, "to seek for utility everywhere is entirely unsuited to men 17 that are great-souled and free. He chastises the Spartans for making their boys animal in nature by labori ous exercise and for training their young men with the sole purpose of winning in gymnastic and military contests. ^"Politics," translated by H. Rackham and re printed in Three Thousand Years of Educational Wisdom, edited by Robert Ulich (Cambridge! Harvard University Press, 1950), p. 68. 34 "Honour and not animal ferocity should play the first part," he concludes, "for it is not a wolf nor one of the other wild animals that will venture upon^any noble hazard, but rather a good man."*-® in the Nichomachean Ethics^ Aristotle addresses himself to the problem of the good life and the best preparation for it. Drawing upon his observations of the ways by which men conduct their individual lives, he finds three "more or less reasoned conceptions of the Good, or Happiness, that seem to pre vail among them."^ The generality of men, he finds, identify the good with pleasure and, like Sardanapalus, desire only sensual enjoyment; men of refinement and men of action, on the other hand, identify the good with honor and seek the good opinion of their fellow men. The greatest good, however, and that which is its own mean and end, and which most completely involves the several faculties of man, "the highest thing in us," is the life of contemplation. "Contemplation is at once the highest form of activity . . . and also it is the most continuous, 18Ibid.. pp. 68-69. ^"Nichomachean Ethics," translated by H. Rackham and reprinted in Three Thousand Years of Educational Wisdom, p. 72. 35 for we can reflect more continuously than we can carry on any form of action."2^ Moreover what was said before will apply here also: that what is best and most pleasant for each creature is that which is proper to the nature of each; accordingly the life of the in tellect is the best and the pleasantest life for man, inasmuch as the intellect more than anything else is man; therefore this life will be the happiest.21 Thus Aristotle, though by a somewhat different argument, arrived at the Platonic conclusion regarding the place and value of intellectual activity in human life: The more a class of beings possesses the faculty of contemplation, the more it enjoys happiness, not as an accidental concomitant of contemplation but as inherent in it, since contemplation is valuable in itself.22 Like Plato, Aristotle would not argue that his ideal man who has ascended the lofty heights and contemplated truth should linger there; "It is by the practical experience of life and conduct that the truth is really tested, since 23 it is there that the final decision lies." And, although the contemplative man will find the possession of worldly 20 Ibid.. p. 83. 2^Ibid.. p. 85. 22Ibid.. p. 87. 36 goods something of a hindrance to him, still he "will need external goods to carry on his life as a human 24 being." Finally, Aristotle concludes, it is not enough simply to know what virtue is and to recognize it in our selves and in others; 'we must endeavor to possess and practise it, or in some other manner actually ourselves 25 to become good." Again like Plato, Aristotle considers the means by which young men are to be trained to a life of virtue. Discourses on ethics and theoretical discussion, though productive with some generous youth given "inborn nobility of character," are powerless to stimulate the mass of mankind to moral nobility. The mass of mankind, long ad dicted to the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pa'in, will neither hear nor understand the reasoning of one who tries to dissuade them from such habits. Passion is not answerable to reason but to force alone, he argues. He would have the behavior of most men formed not by educa tion in virtue, but rather by compulsion and punishment. "For although the virtuous man, who guides his life by 24 Ibid.. p. 86. 25Ibid., p. 88. 37 moral ideals, will be obedient to reason, the base, whose desires are £ixed on pleasure, must be chastised by pain, 2 f t like a beast of burden." Hence for both Aristotle and Plato, training of the ultimate powers of the mind in virtue and wisdom was re served for the select few, since the great mass of men, mired in the mud of their own base passions, were incap able of making an aesthetic response or following a phi losophical argument to its logical conclusion. Plato's Republic contained three classes of men, the philosopher- statesman who has contemplated the higher virtues and sources of wisdom, the soldier-guardian trained in military tactics and tested for courage in combat, and the great unenlightened mass of men, the prisoners of the cave, doomed for life to look upon the faint shadows of reality and who perform the menial duties necessary in the daily life of the city. Aristotle’s view of the comparative talents and abilities of his fellow citizens did not differ significantly from this. But where Plato's dualism, in essence, was between knowledge and action— the wise man governed and the base man worked— Aristotle's was between 26Ibid., p. 89. 38 leisure and manual labor. Only the man of leisure, in Aristotle's view, freed from the daily necessity of making a living, could realize the satisfactions of the contempla tive life. Aristotle never questioned the morality of slavery; indeed, he accepted as right and natural that a few free citizens should rest upon the backs of the great mass of slaves who performed the hard manual tasks of mining, manufacturing, agriculture, and trade. Thus, through the medium of Aristotle's philosophy, liberal studies became identified with those books and intellec tual activities which enabled a leisure class pleasantly to pass the time. And, because Aristotle exerted a greater influence on the thought and educational ideals of Western Europe than any other ancient figure, liberal studies be came synonymous with wealth, leisure, and physical comfort. It has taken more than two thousand years for western man to destroy the illusion that poetry, philosophy, music and art are in some way divorced from the everyday practi- 27 cal affairs of men. Even today, the arts and humanities are viewed suspiciously by many educators who fall to see them for what they really are— vital activities pervading 27 R. Freeman Butts, The College Charts Its Course (New York; McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1939), p. 25. 39 the whole fabric of human life. It may be no exaggeration to say that during the entire course of their great civilization, the Romans made few, if any, direct contributions to the developing spirit 28 of higher learning. Once the Roman legions had finished their work of building a powerful military empire, they turned to the culture of Greece for intellectual inspira tion and aesthetic values. For the educated Roman, the Platonic-Aristotelian distinction between ideal and actual, between intellectual and practical affairs, was sharpened into a clear disjunction of the life of the mind from the much less attractive physical, commercial, and political activities of dally life. In the declining years of the Empire, the fourth century A.D., a Roman citizen named Martianus Cape11a wrote a compendium of knowledge subdivided into seven academic areas: a trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, and a quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. The close similarity between Capella's seven studies and Plato's is readily apparent. Capella sought --------25------------------------------------------------------ Several writers cited above either state or imply this (cf. R. Freeman Butts, C. H. Bowra, and Henry Osborne Taylor). 40 to elevate the spiritual aspects of human life and, there fore, selected for his compendium only those studies which he thought would be of interest to celestial beings. The study of medicine he excluded because celestial beings had no earthly ills; he left out architecture because immortal spirits need never concern themselves with problems of physical habitation. Similarly, he excluded the natural and mechanical sciences because they are so closely related 29 to material and mundane affairs. This compendium of knowledge and the assumptions on which it is based are of interest because it was later adopted by the Church and served as the model for the Church school curriculum of the middle ages. Finally, in the medieval universities of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the masters and scholars took over this subdivision of knowledge as the basis for their courses of study. In taking over Capella's trivium and quadrivium, the schools and universi ties of the middle ages inherited a system of knowledge that was both highly prescriptive and confined almost exclusively to the intellectual and spiritual concerns of men. 29 Butts, o£. cit.. p. 25 41 Divine Revelation as the Source of Truth Classical civilization is conveniently thought to have ended with the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century A.D. For more than five hundred years after the barbarians swept over Europe and the Mediterranean, the political, academic, social, and economic institutions of Graeco-Roman origin lay in ruin. Only the Church managed to hold together during this long period of intellectual drought. People lived in small economically self-suffi cient villages and towns, most of them centered around a monastery or Church bishopric. Trade was infrequent; the Roman roads were abandoned, and travel was limited to foot or horseback. The country beyond the protective confines of city or village was lawless. Little writing was done during those centuries, and most of that was mere copy work. There was very little formal education for anyone. but, just at the beginning of those dark ages, a rather remarkable man appeared and put into words a phi losophical view which was to Influence sensitive and thoughtful men profoundly for the next thousand years. That man was Augustine (354-430 A.D.), sometime teacher and Catholic Bishop in the community of Hippo Regius in 42 North Africa. In his Study of History Arnold Toynbee distinguishes between two kinds of challenges that'evoke creative re- sponses in men. The first, the lower order, is the ex ternal challenge of a physical environment— a challenge which results in new agricultural methods, new techniques for mining and manufacturing, new ways of capturing and utilizing nature's energy. The second, the higher order, is inner and moral, occurring within the consciousness of individual men. Such a challenge is met only by periods of prolonged self-examination, resulting in a re-orienta- tion of basic beliefs and the attainment of new spiritual 30 dimensions. Augustine interpreted the challenges of his time— increasing barbarian pressure on the frontiers of the Roman Empire, economic upheaval within the Empire, the abrogation of time-honored freedoms and drift toward political despotism, never-ending threats to the growth and stability of the Christian church— as challenges re quiring profound inner responses. In a series of remark able documents, including the Confessions, a spiritual 30 Arnold Toynbee, Study of History, abridged by D.C. Somervell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946). 43 autobiography, On Free Will, and The City of God, he developed a theory of knowledge predicated on Divine 31 Illumination. Unlike Aristotle, who started with self- evident premises from which he deduced logical consequences, Augustine started from the revealed truth he found within himself and which God had planted in his soul. Truth, Augustine maintained, opens only to those who engage in philosophical meditation with their whole being; it is never merely intellectual, never a pure or isolated func tion of the understanding. The conditions for a knowledge of truth are purity of soul, love, and the worthiness that 32 comes from a life of purity. In a brief but unusual treatise, Concerning the Teacher. an account of a dialogue between himself and his fifteen-year-old son, Augustine held that, although words may signify objects and events, one can learn nothing of significance from them because the object or event must first be known before one can associate it with the word. Consequently, the student does not learn through the Basic Writings of St. Augustine, edited by W. J. Oates, translated by G. C. Leakie (New York: Random House, 1948), Vol. I, pp. 394-395. 44 medium of words but enploys words only to prompt the knowledge and the truth that lies within him. Here is August ine1s argument. For do teachers profess that it is their thoughts which are perceived and grasped by the students, and not the sciences themselves which they convey through speaking? For who is so stupidly curious as to send his son to school in order that he may learn what the teacher thinks? But all these sciences which they profess to teach, and the science of virtue itself and wisdom, teachers explain through words. Then those who are called pupils consider within themselves whether what has been explained has been said truly; looking of course to that interior truth, according to the measure of which each is able. Thus they learn, and when the interior truth makes known to them that true things have been said, they applaud, but without knowing that instead of applauding teachers they are applauding learners, if indeed their teachers know what they are saying. But men are mistaken, so that they call those teach ers who are not, merely because for the most part there is no delay between the time of speaking and the time of cognition. And since after the speaker has reminded them, the pupils quickly learn within, they think that they have been taught outwardly by him who prompts them.33 The philosophical justification for his concept of learning as self-discovery was worked out by Augustine in an earlier treatise, On Free Will, in which he distin guished three categories of being: first, that which is. the class of physical and inanimate bodies in the universe; 33 Ibid. 45 second, that which both is and lives, the class comprising plants and animals; third, that which .is, lives, and knows. the class comprising man who, by virtue of his reason, alone is capable of knowledge. Man's reason emanates from the soul, the soul controls the body, and God controls the soul. Hence, God, being the source of all truth and wisdom in the world, men can gain wisdom only through the contemplation of God and from the gradual realization of truth unfolding from w i t h i n .34 Again, in the words of Augustine: Man lives and, by reason, knows he lives. Beasts, whom man controls by virtue of reason or intelligence, lack this power, and in turn the knowledge that they live. By understanding, men lead a more perfect life, through the light of the mind. Knowledge . . . can only be good. • . . In comparison to all else, our happiness and joy are to be found in truth. Since in truth the highest good is known and held, and since this truth is wisdom, let us behold and grasp in it the highest good. This is our liberty when we subordinate ourselves to the truth. This is the meaning of "You shall know the'truth and the truth shall make you free."35 34These paragraphs are from "An Analysis of the Treatise on Free Will," in Basic Writings of St. Augustine, pp. 821 and 826. 35 Ibid. 46 Augustine despised the natural and mechanical sciences, believing them useful only insofar as they pro moted an understanding of the Bible and of Church doctrine. The external world held no interest for him except as its creation and existence pointed to the omnipotence of the Divine Creator. The essential concept in his philosophy is love. Love is universal, embracing all things, persons, objects of thought; it is man's innermost core; and it is the cause of all things, even of evil. True love is love of God. The man who is filled with it will everywhere see the good and do what is right.^ Augustine's deepest convictions regarding God, man, truth, and knowledge derived from his own intense mystical experience upon his religious conversion in the year 386. His conversion is dramatically described in the Eighth Book of the Confessions.^7 his great autobiography. After his conversion he withdrew for a time with a few friends to a retreat in Cassiciacum, where he realized for the first time his idea of a community of scholars living ^Ibid.; see the editor's "Introduction." 3?"The Confessions," translated by J. G. Pilklng- ton, in Basic Writings of St. Augustine, p. 154. 47 together and prompting each other to greater self-awarenessi Like Saint Paul, Saint Francis, Martin Luther, and Pascal, Augustine'8 extraordinary inner experience led to intense creative activity and to the most Important single concept in the whole structure of his thought— the conviction that all things must be and are God-centered. The Confessions is an account of an individual man's intellectual and spiritual odyssey and of his ultimate acceptance of a divine being in the universe who is the source at once of all truth, wisdom, and love. It is un questionably one of the great documents in western litera ture; it presents one of the most impressive and persua sive arguments for self-examination and self-knowledge ever penned: '. . . men go forth to wonder at the heights of mountains, the huge waves of the sea, the broad flow of the rivers, the intent of the ocean, and the courses of 38 the stars, and omit to wonder at themselves ..." Except for one brief period, Augustine did no pro fessional teaching, and, but for his tract Concerning the Teacher, wrote no document setting forth his ideas on edu cation. His significance today stems from the great 38 Ibid., p. 154. 48 originality of his thinking and the profound influence he exerted on later medieval thought, and consequently on the work of the medieval university. His was the tendency to original inward thought, to a radical thinking-through of problems, to a form of thinking which involved the whole man and not just the logical faculties. In effect, Augustine gave voice to an idea which has broad implica tions for higher education but is frequently denied or overlooked, the idea that one man cannot teach another, except on a superficial level. Augustine would agree with the conviction expressed recently by Carl Rogers who, in the course of a discussion at a Harvard University confer ence, remarked, It seems to me that anything that can be taught to another is relatively inconsequential, and has little or no significant influence on behavior. . . . 1 realize increasingly that I am only Interested in learnings which significantly influence behavior. . . . 1 have come to feel that the only learning which significantly influences behavior is self discovered, self-appropriated learning. Such self-discovered learning, truth that has been per sonally appropriated and assimilated in experience, cannot be directly communicated to another. As soon as an individual tries to communicate such experience directly, often with a quite natural enthusiasm, it becomes teaching, and its results are inconsequential.^ 39 Harvard Conference on "Classroom Approaches to Influencing Human Behavior," April 4, 1952. Medieval Ideal: Synthesis end Interpretation Some half dozen moments of deep philosophical insight have shaped the development of western Intellectual history. One of these, certainly, is the tlsie between Plato's birth and the death of Aristotle when most of the major philosophical questions about man and his place in the physical universe were raised and most of the answers, if not given, were at least suggested. Alfred North Whitehead, in our time, has remarked that all of western philosophy is but a series of footnotes to Plato.A second such moment is that of transition from the relative stability and unity of the Roman Empire to the disorder of its collapse and the subsequent cloisterly life of the Dark Ages. The work of Augustine stands as a symbol of this transition, he himself dying during the selge of his episcopal seat by the Vandals. From Augustine a somewhat dim and uncertain line leads to the culmination of medi eval formal thought in Scholasticism and to the life and work of Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), whose fi«— m Th^oiogjca ^®A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: The New American Library, 1948). 50 will here serve as Che symbol o£ still another profound shift in the intellectual history of the West. Between the fifth and twelfth centuries, European education was carried on by episcopal and monastic schools called into‘existence by the Church to replace the older imperial and municipal schools of Rome; these had., long since been swept away in the wake of barbarian invasion. Although the Church schools during these centuries un doubtedly depreciated secular and literary education, there is little question but that the educational ideal would have flickered and perhaps died without them. Not until the twelfth century do we again find indications of a real interest in the methods and fruits of intellectual inquiry. The twelfth-century revival in learning and in ideas, leading eventually in the thirteenth to a creative spurt of intellectual energy as great as any known in the classical world, was stirred by a series of conflicts between two cultures and two religions. Between 800 and 1200 A.D., while Europe recoiled from the Impact of bar baric invasion, the followers of Mohammed in Arabia and North Africa, the Muslims, were busy discovering, trans lating, and teaching the works of Aristotle. So success ful were they that the intellectual centers of Europe during this 400-year period lay not at Rome or Paris but at Cairo and Baghdad. As the Muslim tide moved steadily westward across North Africa and into Spain, it came into direct contact with and challenged the entire Christian world. The challenge erupted into brute conflict on many different fronts, but it resulted also in the re-discovery by Christian scholars of the works of Aristotle, Plato, and other Greek classical authors. Although the full extent of the influence of Arabian scholarship on European medieval thought is only beginning to be appreciated by historians, it is well known that the translation and commentaries of at least one Arab scholar, Averroes (1126- 1198), carried so much authority as to go unchallenged in 41 the West for 300 years. Even Thomas Aquinas, who so revered Aristotle as to call him "The Philosopher," as though there were only one, accorded Averroes the same respect by dubbing him "The Commentator." 41 Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, edited and annotated by Anton C. Pegis (New York: Random House, 1945), Vol. I, pp. 9-10. 52 The introduction of the organon of Aristotle into the thought of twelfth-century European man brought with it the central issue of scholastic philosophy. In the Greek tradition, as envisioned at least by Plato and Aristotle, man reaches up to the Divine with the possibil ity of becoming divine himself. In the Christian tradi tion, in the teachings of the Patristic Fathers, God in his infinite mercy reaches down to save the sinner. The very real chasm between Christian Faith and Hellenic reason had to be bridged, and a number of medieval philos ophers set themselves to the task. But, in every instance the resolution came by subordinating reason to faith. From Augustine, a Platonist, to Aquinas, the Aristotelian, every medieval philosopher reasoned in the categories of Greek 43 philosophy, but felt the Gospel of Christ. Keason alone, each argued, can never reveal the truth; the only source of truth is revelation, and the sole function of reason is to apprehend and interpret the truth revealed. The medi eval man's unquestioning belief in a basic spiritual order pervading the universe, and his deep faith in the essential 43 Robert Ullch, The Education of Nations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), pp. 27-35. 53 oneness of all things gave him a sense of belonging and a sense of unity that Is perhaps unique In history. Within that broad spiritual framework, disagreements and discrepancies could and did flare; for example, in the great debate between nominalists and realists concerning the existence of universals; or in the savage conflicts between Church and state. But such disagreements were always subsidiary to the abiding universal faith in the power and ultimate beneficence of the Divine Being. The most thorough and ingenious attempt to bring together into one great philosophical system the wisdom of the Hellenic world and the wisdom of the Christian world, to synthesize Aristotelian logic with Christian faith, was the Summa Theologies by Thomas Aquinas. At the very outset, Aquinas posed the central intellectual problem of his time. He asked, "Is Sacred Doctrine Nobler than Other Sciences?" and answered: Since this science is partly speculative and partly practical, it transcends all other sciences, speculative and practical. Now one speculative science is said to be nobler than another either by reason of its greater certitude, or by reason of the higher dignity of its subject-matter. In ^The Age of Belief, edited by Anne Freemantle (New York: Mentor Books, 1955). 54 both these respects this science surpasses other speculative sciences: in point of greater certi tude, because other sciences derive their certi tude from the natural light of human reason, which can err, whereas this derives its certitude from the light of the divine science, which cannot err; in point of the higher dignity of its subject- matter, because this science treats chiefly of those things which by their sublimity transcfend human reason, while other sciences consider only those things which are within reason's grasp. Of the practical sciences, that one is nobler which is ordained to a more final end, as political science is nobler than military science; for the good of the army is directed to the good of the state. But the purpose of this science, in so far as it is practical, is eternal beatitude, to which as to an ultimate end the ends of all the practical sciences are directed. Hence it is clear that from every standpoint it is nobler than other sciences Satisfied that he had demonstrated the supremacy of sacred science, Aquinas proceeded to examine what is per haps the fundamental issue of the book, the character of human wisdom. To the objection that sacred doctrine can not be wisdom, since it is acquired by study and not by revelation from God, Aquinas answered: This doctrine is wisdom above all human wisdoms not merely in any one order, but absolutely. For since it is the part of a wise man to order and judge, and since lesser matters can be judged in the light of some higher cause, he is said to be wise in any genus who considers the highest cause in that genus. Thus in the realm of building, he 45 Basic Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, pp. 9-10. 55 who plans Che form of Che house Is called wise and architect, In relacion Co Che subordinate laborers who Crlm the wood and make ready the stones: thus it is said, "As a wise architect 1 have laid the foundation" (1 Cor.ill.10). Again, in the order of all human life, the prudent man is called wise, inasmuch as he directs his acts to a fitting end: thus it is said, "Wisdom is prudence to a man" (Prov.X.23). Therefore, he who considers absolutely the highest cause of the whole universe, namely God, is most of all called wise. Hence wisdom is said to be the knowledge of divine things, as Augustine says. But sacred doctrine essentially treats of God viewed as the highest cause, for it treats of Him not only so far as He can be known through creatures just as philosophers knew Him— "That which is known of God is manifest in them" (Rom.1.19)—-but also so far as He is known to Himself alone and revealed to others. Hence sacred doctrine is especially called a wisdom.46 In the fifteen hundred years since Aristotle the idea signified by the word "wisdom" had clearly been trans formed. Plato, as we have seen, said wisdom was the contemplation of eternal, immutable, and intelligible ideas; Aristotle defined wisdom as knowledge of the first causes and principles of things; Aquinas considered wisdom "to be the knowledge of divine things." The meaning of no single word perhaps so sharply distinguishes the thought of medieval man from the classical philosophers. When Aquinas speaks of wisdom as "knowledge of the first cause," 46 Ibid.. p. 11. 56 his definition seems, on first view, identical with that of Aristotle; however, he has in mind not Aristotle but Augustine, who had sought to distinguish with absolute finality knowledge of divine things from knowledge of human things, and then to exclude all but divine knowledge from the domain of wisdom. Augustine's meaning is closer to Plato's than to Aristotle's; to Plato the soul must ascend from the realm of the visible to the realm of the Invisible, from the relative to the absolute, from the many to the one; to Augustine all wisdom is from God, for no man can be wise by his own efforts— he needs to be en lightened by Him. It is this meaning of wisdom that Aquinas has in mind, not Aristotle's practical and effi cient "knowledge of things to be sought for and of things to be avoided." But, if the meaning of this term distin guishes the mind of medieval man from that of classical man, so does it distinguish medieval man from Renaissance man, for, as we shall see, a chief characteristic of the intellectual activity of the Renaissance was the return 47 to classical authors and classical definitions and a ^Eugene F. Rice, Jr., The Renaissance Idea of Wisdom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), passim. 57 disavowal of the absolute authority of the Christian Church. The Sunma Theologica is not only a masterful attempt to bring peace between the contending factions of secular ism and religion; it is also a display of the scholastic form of argument at its best. The author first raises a question, then states the opponent's case in a series of arguments called "objections"; then he poses another series for the opposite view and, finally, through a chain of authorities and syllogisms, develops a conclusion in harmony with Augustine or with Aristotle, as the case may be. The device offers exceptional opportunities for the harmonious combination of Christian orthodoxy and Hellenic intellectuality. His initial questions, "What is Science?" "What is Wisdom?" and "Is the Existence of God Self- evident?" led Aquinas to develop an encyclopedia of knowl edge covering all fields of learning which were of inter est to medieval man (psychology, metaphysics, physics, physiology, natural history, morals), each subject being treated both from the point of view of science and logic, and from the point of view of Christian theology. The work of Aquinas is in the best tradition of man's quest for knowledge. In the words of Hastings Rashdall: 58 The work which Aquinas did for the Church of his day— the fusion of the highest speculative thought of the time with its profoundest spiritual convictions, the reconciliation of the new truths of the present with the kernel of truth embodied in the traditional creed— is a task which will have to be done again and again as the human mind con tinues progressive and religion remains a vital force within it. It will have to be done in a different spirit, by different methods, and with very different results from those of the Sumna. But in one respect the work of Aquinas is built on the solid foundation upon which all such ef forts must repose— the grand conviction that religion is rational and that reason is divine, that all knowledge and all truth, from whatever source derived, must be capable of harmonious ad justment . 48 For Aquinas and the other great schoolmen of the medieval ages, a principal object of scholarship was the unity of knowledge, the amalgamation of knowledge into a single scheme of salvation. In this respect the medieval scholar is closely allied to his intellectual forebears in antiquity. Thales held that water was the cause of all things. Plato's scheme was an ideally pyramided structure with the Idea of the Good at the apex. For Aristotle, knowledge was syllogistic, rational, unified; his work was a veritable encyclopedia of observation, Hastings Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, edited by F. M. Powicke and A. B. Emden ([London: Oxford University Press, 1936), Vol. I, pp. 368-369. 59 classification, and generalization. Augustine's knowledge was inspired by a strong religious faith and by the axioms of Church doctrine. For Albertus Magnus and his famous pupil, Aquinas, man's knowledge of spiritual and material things was a single great systematic compendium, inspired by God but intelligible to the rational faculties of man. In the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, the chief agencies through which this compendium of knowledge was made generally available were the monastic orders of St. Francis and St. Dominic, and the great emerging univer sities at Paris, Bologna, and Oxford. The precise origin of the medieval universities is obscure. These corporations of masters and students with their own laws, privileges and duties, fixed curricula and grades of formally certified attainment resembled nothing that had existed before them either in Europe of the tenth and eleventh centuries or in the ancient cities of Alexandria, Athens, or‘Rome. Until the end of the eleventh century, what little formal education was avail able was conducted in the church and cathedral schools and in the monasteries. Latin grammar and literature were the required studies, the primary object of the 60 student being to enter clerical life; for that he needed a thorough grounding in Latin, the language of the Church. Two factors in particular helped to shape the medieval universities during the twelfth century: one was a redis covery of Aristotle through Arabic translations; the other an increased commerce and mobility among all classes of people. These forces set in motion thousands of young men desirous of extending their general knowledge and of developing skill in some profession— in law, medicine, or theology. Vigorous popular disputations on metaphysics and theology by men like Abelard at Paris and Irnerius at Bologna attracted young men, eager to learn, to the flour ishing cities. Wherever the number of students and pro fessors in a cathedral school grew so large as to require organizing into a guild, a university would come into existence. At Paris, Bologna, and later at Oxford the youthful scholars needing the protection of organization would first establish student guilds, and then Universi- tates or corporations, each under its own rector. As the twelfth century gave way to the thirteenth, these organi zations grew in complexity and subdivided into schools of Arts for undergraduate study and Faculties of Theology, Law, and Medicine for the professions. The curriculum 61 for the lower degree of Bachelor of Arts conventionally consisted of four to five years of study In grammar, rhetoric, and logic, and the quadrlvlum of arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy— Plato's prerequisites to dialectics. Graduate study for Master's privileges normally required another three or four years. In Theology, at least at Paris, eight years were required for the degree of Doctor. It was a rare candidate who completed require- 49 ments for this degree before the age of thirty-five. The thirteenth-century revival of learning effected a further expansion of the curriculum. The works of Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy, and the Greek physicians, the new arithmetic based on Arabic numerals, and the texts of Roman law which were all made available through the labors of Arab scholarship stimulated a new thirst for knowledge in both religious and secular domains. What were the underlying causes for this amazing eruption of intellectual energy in the thirteenth century, the century that witnessed not only the Sumna Theologies of Aquinas but also that other great "summa," the Divina Commedia of Dante? There are no simple answers. One 49Ibid., pp. 355ff. 62 cause, certainly, was the rediscovery o£ Aristotle whose works provided both a new source of information and a new way of thinking. A second was the organization of students and masters into universities that provided new opportuni ties for testing and exchanging ideas and for intellectual stimulation and creative expression. Perhaps the most important single cause was the growing "state of inner disquietude"^ occasioned by the realization of sharp dif ferences between the practices and values in religious and secular life. Devout believers in the tenets of tradi tional Christianity were beginning to discover heretics and free thinkers not only among the Jews and Arabs flood ing into Europe, but also among their own number within the very walls of Christianity itself. In the opening decades of the fourteenth century not even the great masters of theology in the thriving universities nor the popes in Home could continue to claim exemption from the corrupting influence of pagan philosophy. The age of Renaissance Humanism had begun. 50 Ullch, oj>. cit.. p. 22. CHAPTER III RENAISSANCE HUMANISM AND THE RISE OF SCIENCE 0, wonder1 How many goodly creature are there herel How beauteous mankind is I 0 brave new world, That has such people in it'. - The Tempest. V,i., 182-5 The Humanist Movement The period of European Renaissance is generally thought to extend from the middle of the fourteenth to the end of the sixteenth century. It was an age of radical social change and one which has come to be widely admired for its achievements in the arts and literature, science and classical learning. But it will be the more limited Husianist movement within that wide spectrum of the Renais sance which will be of first concern to us here. The word "Humanism," from the Latin Studia Human!tatis. denoted initially a specific program of learning in the medieval Italian schools, and of professional teaching in rhetoric 64 and grammar. As the movement spread, the major Interest o£ the schoolmen came to focus on the study of classical Greek and Latin authors. Later, their interests ranged more broadly still and encompassed rhetoric and poetry, history and moral philosophy. Influential ttusianists like Petrarch and Boccaccio in Italy, Erasmus and Agricola on the con* tlnent of Europe, More and Colet in England examined extant Greek and Roman texts with studious care and devised new methods for Interpreting and criticizing them. Modem historical and philological criticism owes much to their labors.^ They exalted the literatures of Greece and Rome as expressions of the highest and best in man, and urged the schools, particularly the universities, to replace medieval Letin and scholastic dialectic with more liberal studies in classical literature and languages. Their own prose and verse, often imitative of Roman authors, gives evidence of their lively concern with ideals of literary i *• excellence. In an essay titled "On His Own Ignorance and That of Many others,"2 Petrarch (1304-1374) spoke of *The Renaissance Philosophy of Men, edited by Ernst Cassirer at al. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 12-13. 2Ibid.. pp. 47-133. 65 eloquence as the supreme virtue and suggested a strong preference for Cicero over Aristotle, a position requiring a good measure of personal courage in an age when Aristotle was still widely believed to be infallible. By the close of the fourteenth century, however, the authority of the Church had weakened to the extent that scholars could master the language of classical Greece and examine original manuscripts of pagan philosophers and poets. The old certainties of scholastic philosophy, the dogmas of an older dispensation, were giving way before the fresh winds of new scholarship, new questions, and new doubts. Listen to Petrarch, for example, as he describes himself to his friend Francesco Bruni: But let me tell you, my friend, how far I fall short of your estimation. It is not my opinion only; it is a fact: I am nothing of what you attribute to me. What am I then? I am a fellow who never quits school, and not even that, but a backwoodsman who is roaming around through the lofty beech trees all alone, humming to himself some silly little tune, and--the very peak of presumption and assurance-- dipping his shaky pen into his inkstand while slt- . ting under a bitter laurel tree. I am not so fortunate in what I achieve as passionate in my work, being much more a lover of learning than a man who has got much of it. £ am not so very eager to belong to a definite school of thought; I am striving for truth. Truth is difficult to discover, and, being the most humble and feeble of all those who try to find it, I lose confidence in myself often enough. So much do I fear to become entangled in errors that I throw myself into the embrace of doubt instead of 66 truth. Thus I have gravely become a proselyte of the Academy as one of the big crowd, as the very last of this humble flock: I do not believe In my facul ties, do not affirm anything, and doubt every single thing, with the single exception of what 1 believe is a sacrilege to doubt.3 One would have to search far to find a purer state ment of the Humanist attitude. Here is not the proud man sure of his own salvation but a man questioning the author ity of the past, doubting even his own faculties, neverthe less possessing a hearty appetite for hard intellectual labor. The last sentence comes much closer to the spirit of Descartes (1596-1650) than to that of Aquinas. The Humanist brushed aside the ancient theological disputes, the logic and metaphysics of Aristotle, and substituted in their stead the idealism of Plato, a modernized religious ethic, and, most important of all, the idea of the essen tial dignity and worth of the human personality. A domi nant note in Humanism is emancipation— emancipation of the senses of man, of the Intellect of man, of man's con science; emancipation from the rigid dogma of scholastic doctrine and authority of the Medieval Church.^ 3"A Self-Portrait," translated by Hans Nachod in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man. pp. 34-35. ^Robert Ulich, The Education of Nations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961^, pp. 38-44. This change from an older absolute faith in divine authority to a new sense of personal autonomy profoundly altered European man's conception of himself and of the world at large. Once a man comes to believe "that through skillful maneuvering be can capture the wind of the future into his sails, he will by necessity become a planner and an observer."^ As conceived by medieval man, the world was static and the individual had little personal power to change it. As conceived by Renaissance man, the world was dynamic and the individual, no longer a humble worker, became the bold entrepreneur Science and capitalism, technology and political liberalism worked not as causes for this radical shift in point of view, as many would believe, but as consequences emerging from it. The European universities continued to attract and train young scholars during the rise and spread of Humanism but were slow to adopt the Humanist attitudes and values. Aristotelianism continued to dominate, particularly in the undergraduate faculties of arts. At the University of Paris the schism between the philosophers on the arts faculty, 68 some of whom inclined toward Humanism, and the theologians in the powerful graduate faculty only widened, and their verbal battles continued unabated far into the sixteenth century. The Italian universities which had developed graduate faculties in medicine held fast to Aristotelian logic, metaphysics, and science, believing these studies to provide the best preparation for medical training. In spite of their philosophical conservatism, however, the universities did attract to their faculties some of the best minds of the age, and many of the most promising young men to their classrooms. Marsllio Flcino, "the most influ ential exponent of Platonism in Italy during the fifteenth century,taught in and for many years administered the Academy of Florence; and Galileo occupied a chair at the University of Padua from 1692 to 1610, where he taught Aristotelian philosophy and science. t But the most influential figure in the Humanist movement, despite his scholarship, or perhaps because of it, held the universities in disdain. He was the Dutch scholar Deslderus Erasmus (1466-1536) who attended the University of Paris for a short time as a student but ^Josephine L. Burroughs in The Renaissance Philos ophy of Man. p. 185. 69 o purportedly found little there of value. Hie intense dislike of the scholastics, of systematic theology and philosophy, of monasticlsm, on the one hand, and on the other his great love for the things of this world, his omnivorous reading in both Greek and Latin, and his life long efforts to make Latin a truly international language mark him as the most exemplary figure in the Humanist tradition. In his best known work, The Praise of Folly. Erasmus lashed out at the pretensions to learning of professor and bishop, pope and king. He ridiculed all religion based on learned doctrine and praised only the form of religious faith "displayed in Christian simplic ity"^- -the religious conviction that flows from the human heart. Many schoolmasters and professors, however, did brave the criticism of colleagues and attempted to incor porate the new ideas and new learning into school and university practice. One notable French reformer deserves • mention here because of his later influence on the Univer sity of Cambridge and thus ultimately on the colonial ®Bertrend Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945), p. 514. 9Ibid.. p. 515. 70 colleges In America. Petrus Ramus attacked the tenets of Aristotelianism and undertook a thorough reform of the existing liberal arts curriculum. He worked to systematize and simplify classical knowledge and to excise the unneces sary intricacies of medieval commentaries. He wrote new texts for all of the seven liberal arts and added texts in physics, ethics, metaphysics and theology. The results of his labors were considerable since not only did he contrib ute to the eventual freeing of the curriculum from ecclesi astical control but opened up possibilities for adding new studies in mathesmtics and science as well.^® The Renaissance figures who were perhaps closest to the spirit of Humanism were the imaginative writers and artists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, men whose names are everywhere familiar today: Rabelais, Shakespeaxe, Cervantes, Hichelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci. They were the men who expressed most clearly the essential Humanist atti tude toward life, an attitude of exuberance bounded on one side by a fading scholasticism and on the other by the new rationalism of the forthcoming age of science. Perhaps no single literary work better conveys this sense of delight *°R. Freeman Butts, The College Charts Its Course (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1939), pp. 35-36. 71 felt by the emenicepted sixteenth century men then Sheke- speere's The Tempest, In this superbly poetic pley, Prospero, e megicien, promises freedom to his feithful servent Ariel once their work on the islend hes been com pleted. Ariel's reection, of course, is one of intense joy but not for the freedom to fly off to some distent Elysium; rether, it is for the freedom to remein on the islend end by his own choice live "Under the blossom thet hengs on the bough." The true world of the spirit, Shake- speere would heve us believe, is not some distent heeven but this world innediete to our senses end experienced rightly. This is the theme of The Tempest reitereted egein end egein throughout the pley end it is the theme end essence of Reneissence Humenism. quickly spirit; Prospero: Thou shelt ere long be free. Ariel: Where the bee sucks, there suck I: In e cowslip's bell I lie; There 1 couch when owls do cry. On the bet's beck I do fly After summer merrily. Merrily, merrily shell I live now Under the blossom thet hengs on the bough. V,1,86-94 72 The Rise of Science In the fifteenth end sixteenth centuries e new European mentality disclosed itself. The fifteenth century was one of exploration, adventure, discovery and inven tion— stimulating the imaginations of men, quickening new speculation about the nature of the physical world. The discovery of Greek manuscripts revealing more fully than ever what the ancients had known, the Humanist call for more critical and exacting scholarship, a new generation of skillful, talented artists and writers impelled the western world into an entirely new epoch. The rise of the scien tific and experimental attitude, which is the chief intellectual characteristic of the modern mind, had been effecting a slow and silent revolution for generations. It had begun with the introduction of Aristotelian logic into the scholastic universities of the twelfth and thir teenth centuries and, despite the powerful Patristic- Arlstotelian syntheses by men like Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, it had worked to turn the powers of human reason gradually against the authority of theological 73 doctrine and divine revelation.In time, even the state ments of Aristotle came to be doubted. Many men paid a heavy price for their espousal of the new way of thinking; some like Michael Servetus and Giordano Bruno were burned at the stake; others like Galileo were imprisoned and forced to recant their published views; still others like Descartes withdrew manuscripts rather than risk publication and almost certain censure by the church. In the year 1600 the philosopher Giordano Bruno, who had languished seven years in prison on a charge of heresy, was burned at the stake in Rome, a victim of the inquisition. Perhaps no single event marks so clearly the origin of the modern temper. The death of Bruno, a martyr for the cause of free imaginative speculation, may be taken as a symbol of both an ending and a beginning. For cen turies prior to this date the outlook of man was dominated by custom, law, and religious dogma determined and con trolled largely by the Catholic Church. Ideas of truth, knowledge, the good life were ascertained not by critical analysis, not by experimentation and controlled observation, ^A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: The New American Library, 1948), pp. 3-7. 12Ibid. 74 but by the collective wisdom of religious councils.At the Council of Trent in 1551, for example, the Papal Legates who presided over the Council ordered that all opinions expressed by the members be in strict accord "with the holy Scripture, Traditions of the Apostles, sacred and approved Councils, and by the Constitution and Authorities of the holy Fathers."^ They further ordered that the Council members at all times "use brevity, avoid superflu ous and unjustifiable questions, and perverse conten tions. . . An important breach in this sort of dictum was made by Protestantism, which asserted that even General Councils may be subject to human error. Whitehead has described this gradual but dramatic shift in the attitude of the common man as "the most intimate change in outlook which the human race had yet encountered. Since a babe was bom in a manger, it may be doubted whether so great a thing has happened with so little stir."^ More concretely, Whitehead described the quality of 13lbld.. P. 9. l^Ibid. 15Ibid. 16Ibid., p. 2. 75 this change as one manifesting a balance between the human intellectual concerns for "abstract generalization" on the one hand, and "irreducible stubborn fact" on the other. The main task of the university, he concludes, is to transmit an0 maintain this balance. This new tinge to modern minds is a vehement and passionate interest in the relation of general principles to irreducible and stubborn facts. All the world over and at all times there have been practical men, absorbed in "irreducible and stubborn facts": all the world over and at all times there have been men of philosophic temperament who have been absorbed in the weaving of general principles. It is this union of passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract generalization which forms the novelty in our pres ent society. Previously it had appeared sporadically and as if by chance. This balance of mind has now become part of the tradition which infects cultivated thought. It is the salt which keeps life sweet. The main business of universities is to transmit this tradition as a widespread Inheritance from generation to generation.17 What Whitehead calls for is a pattern of education which alms at developing the complete man, an ideal espoused by both classical philosopher and the more enlightened Humanist scholar and Renaissance scientist. If it is to retain its poise, the human mind must ever seek to maintain the finest possible balance among contending opposites and bring into a single harmonious whole such 17Ibid., p. 3. 76 apparent disparities as fact against generality, unity against diversity, freedom against responsibility. Irving Babbitt has stated it precisely: The true mark of excellence in a man . . . is his power to harmonise in himself opposite virtues and to occupy all the space between them. By his ability thus to unite in himself opposite qualities man shows his humanity, his superiority of essence over other animals.18 It is instructive to compare these statements by Whitehead and Babbitt with a more recent description of qualities of thinking evidenced by National Merit Scholar ship Students given by T. R. McConnell, Chairman of the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of California. The theoretically inclined group tended to be thoughtful, reflective, independent, creative; responsive to complexities of the environment and to internal impulses; sensitive to others, penis- sive in relationships, and tolerant in attitudes, although somewhat lacking in determination and persistence. Students in this group chose majors in the natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences about twice as frequently as in the pro fessions or business. The group with applied inclinations tended to prefer physical activity to reflection. It pre ferred to deal with the simple and concrete rather than with the complex or Intangible; to be identi fied with power and authority and to be more Irving Babbitt, Literature and the American Colleen (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1908), p. 22• 77 directive then permissive in its relations with people. Students in this group chose majors almost exclusively in the technical fields and elected engineering three times as often as the natural sciences.« The author concludes that "Students with applied inclina tions and immediate vocational goals are much more likely to be found in institutions which offer a wide range of vocational curricula."2* * A further observation would be that schools which cater exclusively to either Inclination run exactly counter to the essential spirit of the univer sity which we are attempting to delineate here. Whenever an academic institution falls adequately to provide for the development in its students of both their general and special abilities, their theoretical and applied inclina tions, it falls short of the university idea. An important figure In the transition of European thought from the spirit of medieval piety to the spirit of modem science was Ren^ Descartes (1596-1650), French philosopher and mathematician. Descartes is truly a tran sitional figure. In his philosophy we find both a strong R. McConnell, A General Pattern for American Public Higher Education (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1962), pp. 28-29. 20Ibid., p. 29. Scholastic conviction in the deducibility of God and the seeds of an emphatic and Intense Individualism. Descartes' significance stems from his development of a new method for discovering truth. Refusing to let himself be restrained by the limitations of human knowledge, and expunging his mind of all former prejudices and ideas, he proceeded to think out what the constitution of the world and man must be if they are to be clearly understood. He examined all of the then-known sciences: physics, chemistry, astronomy, and anatomy, seeking methods and assvmvptlons common to them all. His conclusion was that the universe as a whole— including all of life, both human and animal--must be anal ysed and understood ultimately as a mechanical system.21 The method he developed for such thoroughgoing analysis is described in Part II of the now famous Discourse on Method. It consists simply of four rules: "I believed that the four following would prove perfectly sufficient for me, provided I took the firm and unwavering resolution never in 22 a single Instance to fall in observing them." 2*Rene Descartes, A Discourse on Method and Selected Writings, edited by A. D. Lindsay and translated by John Veltch (Hew York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1951). 22Ibid.. p. 15. 79 The first was never to accept anything for true which I did not clearly know to be such; that is to say, carefully to avoid precipitancy and prejudice, and to comprise nothing more in my judgment than what was presented to my mind so clearly and dis tinctly as to exclude all ground of doubt. The second, to divide each of the difficulties under exasrtnation into as many parts as possible, and as might be necessary for its adequate solution. The third, to conduct my thoughts in such order that, by commencing with objects the simplest and easiest to know, 1 might ascend by little and little, and, as it were, step by step, to the knowledge of the more complex; assigning in thought a certain order even to those objects which in their own nature do not stand in a relation of antecedence and sequence. And the last, in every case to make enumerations so complete and reviews so general, that I might be assured that nothing was omitted.23 The novelty of this method consists in its rejection of the Aristotelian principle that truth is to be discovered by deducing the particulars from the universal and asserting in its stead the principle that the universal can be dis cerned only by first perceiving clearly the individual instances and by reasoning Inductively from them. Knowl edge, for Descartes, was not the simple product of pure sensory perception but rather the clear vision of the intellect that used testimony of the senses as its starting 23Ibid. 80 point. The first subject to present itself to Descartes for study was his own being. His first firm conclusion, and the mo»t important in his philosophical system, was the principle that his own ability to doubt and to reason pro vided the clearest evidence of his own existence: . . . whilst I thus wished to think that all was false, it was absolutely necessary that I, who thus thought, should be somewhat; and as I observed that this truth, _I think, hence _I am, was so certain and of such evidence, that no ground of doubt, however extravagant, could be alleged by the sceptics capa ble of shaking it, I concluded that I might, without scruple, accept it as the first principle of the philosophy of which I was in search.24 The theory makes "mind" more fundamental and more certain than "siatter"; for the individual, his own mind is more certain than the minds of others. Furthermore, the theory makes thoughts, not external objects, the primary empirical certainties. Thus the Cartesian system evokes two inde pendent worlds, one made up of mind and thought, the other of matter, and each may be studied apart from and without reference to the other.25 Descartes never for a moment doubted which of the two worlds he himself preferred: 24Ibid.. p. 28. Z^Russell, op. cit.. p. 567. 81 . . . I may state that it was my conviction that I could not do better than continue in . . . devoting ay whole life to the culture of ay reason, and in aaking the greatest progress I was able in the knowledge of truth, on the principles of the aethod which I had prescribed to ayself. This aethod, froa the time I had begun to apply it, had been to ae the source of satisfaction so intense as to lead ae to believe that aore perfect or aore innocent could not be enjoyed in this life; and as by Its aeans I dally discovered truths that appeared to me of some importance, and of which other men were generally ignorant, the gratification thence arising so occupied my mind that 1 was wholly indifferent to every other object.26 After describing his method and establishing the . primary reality of his own thought, Including doubts, understandings, affirmings, denials, laaglnings, and feel ings, Descartes proceeded to develop his argument for the existence of God. Here, in line with his own religious proclivities, he reverted to scholastic doctrine by resur recting the ontological argument first educed by St. Anselm (1033-1109), Archbishop of Canterbury. St. Anselm had argued, "There is no doubt that there exists a being than • which nothing greater can be conceived, and it exists both in the understanding and in reality . • . and this being thou art, 0 Lord, our God."^ If we substitute the term ^Descartes, op. cit.. p. 23. 27Quoted by Anne Freemantle in The Age of Belief (Hew York: Mentor Books, 1953), p. 89. 82 "more perfect" for Anselm's adjective "greater," we have Descartes' argument posed a half millenium later: ". . . the Idea of a nature more perfect than mine, and which even possessed within itself all the perfections of which I could form any idea; that is to say, in a single word, which was God."2® Descartes was caught in a conflict between reason and authority which he never satisfactorily resolved. He had to find room in his philosophy for both individual autonomy, the power of human reason to arrive at truth by a process of rigorous observation and inductive logic, and the authority of the established Church, which he had no wish to deny or protest. Thus he concluded his Principles of Philosophy with the revealing and .equivocal paragraph: Nevertheless, lest I should presume too far, I affirm nothing, but submit all these my opinions to the authority of the church and the judgment of the more sage; and I desire no one to believe anything I may have said, unless he is constrained to admit it by the force and evidence of reason.29 In the philosophy of Descartes we find the same dualisms, conflicts, and antagonisms which plague the mind of twentieth century man and which subsequently were to 2®Descartes, op. cit., p. 29. 29Ibid.. p. 257. 83 underlie men's concerns for the functions, aims, and pur poses of the modern university. In brief, these are the conflicts between mind and matter, the subjectivity and objectivity of knowledge, intuition and observation; the conflicts between individual autonomy and established authority, between the religious view and the secular, between freedom to publish and censorship. But, above all, we find in Descartes those very intellectual qualities which Whitehead identified as most necessary to modern man: "a vehement and passionate interest in the relation of general principles to irreducible and stubborn facts."30 Renaissance Ideal: A Heightened Vitality The word "renaissance" is derived from the French renaitre meaning "to be bom again." A renaissance is a new birth, a revival. Today, we use the term specifically to name that transitional period in Europe between the medieval and the modem mind; a period characterized by enthusiastic and vigorous creative activity. The poetry of Petrarch and Dante foreshadowed the European Renaissance; the plays of Shakespeare and the philosophy of Descartes 30yhitehead, op. cit.. p. 3. 84 climaxed It. Dante's great poem, La Divina Comedia. like Aquinas' Summa. is permeated with scholasticism and refer ences to medieval life, but not so much as to be unreadable today. We might well ask wherein lies its university. Dante's poetic vision communicates today because it plumbs the deepest levels of human experience, extending into reaches of the human mind that the intellect alone can never understand. It is likely that the totality of human experience will never be dissected by the tools of logical analysis or the methods of science, for there is so much to be known, and the human mind is so circumscribed in its attempts to comprehend the universe. The intellect abstracts from experience only what it can understand; the ineffable, mysterious qualities of human experience can perhaps be- touched only through the medium of poetic or religious symbolism. The fashions of thought, philosoph ical systems, and Intellectual furniture of our minds change from one century to the next, from one generation to the next; but the deeper experiences of human life persist. It is these deeper facets that the poet, the mystic, the religious prophet can best express. Dante's poetry, on one level, is a synthesis of medieval thought, a union of Hellenic philosophy with Hebraic-Christian mysticism; but on another level it is a powerful symbolic expression of the essential harmony and rhythm which underlie all of human life,3^ So, too, is Shakespeare, that most imaginative and creative mind of the Renaissance, whose multitudinously varied world is richly Elizabethan, primarily and most pro foundly a poet of the hunan spirit. Shakespeare's histor ical plays show on the surface the pangs of national evolution; his comedies blend humor with paradisal eroti cism; his tragedies fuse the destructive powers of greed, pride, jealousy, and fear. But his total work is ulti mately a celebration of the conquest of love over hate, of life over death, of harmony over chaos.The sensitive poet, the sensitive man in any age has an instinctive awareness of a fundamental orderliness in Nature, of a basic harmony or unity--a sense of oneness— in the uni verse. That which is evil, negative, destructive, is dissonant and incomplete, a foreground of cacophony against the harmonious background. That which is beautiful, virtu ous, good, evokes a sense of completeness and wholeness in ^G. Wilson Knight, The Christian Renaissance (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1962), pp. 95*96. 86 the beholder--* sense of harmonious belonging. If higher education is to have impact not only on what a student knows but on what he feels, it must offer a vision of something real and enduring beyond the passing flux of immediate experience: something remote, yet possi ble, something that lends significance to the passing moment yet eludes apprehension, an ideal of the final good * beyond reach of mortal fingers. Call it what you will— Plato's ultimate reality, Augustine's revealed wisdom, Shakespeare's sense of ultimate harmony--the vision must be communicated if men are to find peace in their lives and grounds for an intelligently optimistic faith in the future. Every age should be a renaissance insofar as every age should convey to those living in it the spirit of vitality that comes from creative effort and from a sense of identity with mankind. In The Mission of the Univer sity. a book whose ideas Interlace this dissertation, Ortega writes, "The man who lives on a plane beneath the enlightened level of his time is condemned, relatively, to the life of an infra-man."33 This is a valuable insight, Jose Ortega y Gassett, The Mission of the Univer sity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944), p. 66. 87 but it fails to go far enough. The enlightened man is one who lives not only at the "height of his time" but, like Dante and Shakespeare, at the height of all time, beyond time, at one with his fellow man and with the natural world of which he is inheritor. This can only be achieved by searching below the levels of conscious knowledge and skills of the day for those facets of human experience which all men sense but few know. Ortega idealises the medieval university as an institution which successfully taught the culture, "the system of vital ideas" to which the age had attained. But the medieval university, like its offspring in all cul tures, was fettered by the fleeting values, ideals and practices of the age. The noted English historian Hastings Rashdall devotes three volumes to the origins and develop ment of the medieval university and concludes that at the height of its influence it "played the part of a European potentate" and "performed the function" which today is discharged by the press and the platform.34 In the work of preparing for the reformation of the Church "in its head and members," the university ^Hastings Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), p. 572. 88 played che pare of a European potentate. Her ambassadors travelled to all parts of Europe . . . with dispatches or missions to emperor, pope, or king, to princes, prelates, and universities, In the hope of establishing a European concert. And that such a concert was ultimately established Is due In very large measure to the peculiar and unique prestige of the university. . . . At this crisis In the history of Europe (1398) the univer sities performed the function which Is discharged at the present day by the press, by the platform, and even by the polling-booths. Two conditions had to be fulfilled by any body or Institution which aspired to constitute Itself the mouthpiece which the growing discontent against the protracted Schism demanded. It must be more than a merely national Institution, and It must be to some extent an ecclesiastical body. The University of Paris with Its four nations, the common mother of all northern universities, the recognized fountain-head . . . of "the streams of knowledge" which watered the whole Christian world, could claim something of that International character which medieval theory accorded to the Papacy and the &spire. Never, Indeed, did the university more completely Justify the position so often assigned to her by medieval panegyrists as the third of the great powers or organs of the European system.35 TWo centuries later, at the height of the English Renaissance, the English universities of Oxford and Cam bridge, at least, had so diminished in function and influ ence as to be little more than seminaries training ministers almost to the exclusion of all else. One English university undergraduate, Robert Creene, found so little intellectual challenge as to write: 35lbid.. PP. 72-73 89 For being at the University of Cambridge, I light amongst wags as lewd as myself, with whom I consumed the flower of my youth, who drew me to travel into Italy and Spain, in which places I saw and practiced such villainy as is abominable to declare* Thus by their counsel I sought to furnish myself with coin, which I procured by cunning sleights from my father and my friends, and my mother pampered me so long, and secretly helped me to the oil of angels, that I grew thereby prone to all mischief; so that being then conversant with notable braggarts, boon companions, and ordinary spendthrifts, that practiced sundry superficial studies, I became as a scion grafted into the same stock, whereby I did absolutely participate of their nature and qualities. At my return into England I ruffled out in my silks, in the habit of malcontent, and seemed so discontent that no place would please me to abide in, nor no vacation cause me to stay myself in; but after I had by degrees proceeded Master of Arts, I left the University and away to London, where . . . I became an author of plays, and a penner of love pamphlets.36 The Renaissance university was, in fact, an impoverished and ineffective institution, old-fashioned in curriculum, poor in discipline, and undistinguished in learning. Enrollment figures indicate how steeply it had declined. Oxford in the thirteenth century enrolled more than three thousand students; three hundred years later it enrolled fifteen hundred and was admitting only about two 3*From "The Repentance of Robert Greene, Master of Arts (1592)," anthologized in The Golden Hind, edited by R. Lamson and H. Smith (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1942), p. 687. 90 hundred new students each term.37 The decline can only be explained in terns of the forces which dominated European intellectual life of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and which acted as a strong tide against established tradi tion within the university. One of these, Humanism, resulted specifically in adding Greek and Latin classics to the arts curriculum. The strong impulses toward intellec tual liberation arid creativity that were the heart of the Humanist movement were little felt in the university. A second force, that of growing secularism, received its impetus from advances in science, mathematics and philos ophy, but none of these had a direct impact on university curricula. At this time the universities' intense and all- engrossing concern was with the third dominating force-- religious reformation. The Reformation grew in response to many factors: the discovery of a new world, invention of the printing press, increased literacy of people. Religious reformers capitalized on the last two factors and set up the Bible as the supreme authority in religious matters. Both Luther and Calvin taught that the individual must learn to read 370. C. Carmichael, Universities: Commonwealth and American (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959), p. 12. 91 and Interpret the Bible for h i m s e l f .38 By and large, the Reformation was a time of war fare, persecution and insane superstition from which no decisive victor emerged. But the conflicts did create a climate more hospitable to tolerance, reason and secularism than medieval life had ever known. The scientist, the philosopher, the religious reformer were safer in 1700 than they had been in 1500. But the immediate effect of the Reformation on the universities was to turn them into cen ters of theological and ecclesiastical controversy. Royal power often interfered. In 1600 Henry IV put the Univer sity of Paris under civil rule and tried to legislate reform in the curriculum; but the faculty, divided and warring between Jesuit and Huguenot, found no time for .the new spirit of science or the philosophy of Descartes. In Germany the universities were located in various small principalities, each dominated by a different prince who / insisted that his theological views, whether Lutheran or Catholic, prevail. By the end of the seventeenth century the German universities had reached the lowest Intellectual John H* Randall, The Career of Philosophy (Hew York: Columbia University Press, 1962), pp. 119-120. 92 level of their entire history.39 In the English colleges at Oxford and Cambridge Humanist scholarship and classical studies were not entirely Ignored but were used as new weapons In the waging of old battles. Theology continued as the predominant study and the required courses In the seven liberal arts were designed to train clergymen versed In Greek, Latin and Hebrew who would go forth and defend the religious doctrines of the particular sect which sup ported the college.4^ Hence In the European university of the seventeenth century, which served as a model for the American colonial college, four concepts clashed for supremacy. The first was the medieval idea of the seven liberal arts as consti tuting the entire undergraduate curriculum and affording the best preparation for later professional study. The second was the Renaissance idea of a curriculum steeped In classical languages and literature as the basis for a liberal education. The third was the Reformation Idea of higher education used to further sectarian purposes and prepare ministers who would defend and propagate the 39uiich, op. cit.. p. 178. 40Ibid.. pp. 90-91. 93 particular doctrine of the religious sect. And the fourth, largely ignored, was the idea of an enlarged and more flexible curriculum allowing for instruction in the new sciences and mathematics. As an Institution the European university of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was clearly on the wane, but as an idea the university survived in the renewed scholarship of the Humanists, the rigorous intel lectual discipline of the philosophers and new scientists, and the inspired vision and creative energy of poets and artists. The Triumph of Reason While Cambridge student Robert Greene, quoted above, was busily consuming the "flower of (his) youth" "amongst wags as lewd as (himself)" and Cambridge dons were exhorting their students to "reject not lightly the author ity of Aristotle,Francis Bacon (1561-1626) observed in his Advancement of Learning that the man who begins with certainties will end with doubts while he who begins with James Duport, quoted in W. T. Costello, The Scho lastic Curriculum at Early Seventeenth-Century Kyldge (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, l$58),p. 9. 94 doubts will end with certainties; the course, as we have seen, that Descartes chose to follow. Better perhaps than any man of his time, Bacon realized the full extent and significance of the intellectual revolution then in prog- i ress and articulated perfectly the antithesis between the deductive rationalism of the scholastic mind and the induc tive observational method of the modern. There are and can exist but two ways of investi gating and discovering truth. The one hurries on rapidly from the senses and particulars to the most general axioms; and from them as principles and their supposed indisputable truth derives and dis covers the intermediate axioms. This is the way now in use. The other constructs its axioms from the senses and particulars, by ascending continually and gradually, till it finally arrives at the most general axioms, which is the true but unattempted way.42 From our point of view today Bacon's inductive method may seem naive, assuming as it does that the simple accumulation of data will inevitably reveal to the perceiv ing mind, general truths. But, however inadequate this method may appear to the modem scientist, the value of Bacon's insight is inestimable, for he was the first to make his contemporaries aware of the fantasies which had 42"Novum Organum," reprinted in Three Thousand Years of Educational Wisdom, edited by Robert Ulich (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950), p. 308. 95 been wrought under the guiee of deductive logic end in the name of authority. Of the four species of idols which beset the human mind, Bacon noted, the last and perhaps the most Insidious are . • • idols which have crept into men's minds from the various dogpas of peculiar systems of philosophy . . . we regard all the systems of philosophy hitherto received or imagined, as so many plays brought out and performed, creating fictitious and theatrical worlds.43 Nevertheless, as Bacon wrote, the European univer sities from Cambridge to Salamanca, from Padua to Paris, slumbered in their scholastic traditions, their curricula uniformly dialectical, Aristotelian, and highly systema tized. The works of Descartes and Galileo, of Bacon and Harvey had had little impact on the status quo. But a revolution in the content and method of human thought was in progress, and the university, as an embodiment of that thought, was being challenged to either change with it or disappear from among the institutions of civilized men. The man who probably did most to effect the neces sary revolution In university curricula and teaching was a countryman of Bacon's, the philosopher John Locke (1632- 1704). In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 43Ibld.. p. 311. 96 published in 1660, Locke proposed to examine the "origin, certainty, and extent of human knowledge," As to the question of its origin, Locke's answer was simple and expressed in one word--experience. But he found two different kinds of experience to which the mind is subject. One is observation employed on external sensible objects. The other is observation turned inward to explore the internal operations of the mind. "These two, I say, viz., external material things as the objects of sensation, and the operations of our own minds within as the objects of reflection, are, to me, the only originals from whence all our ideas take their b e g i n n i n g s."44 Despite the claims of many of his critics and detractors, Locke was not a pure sensationalist. He argued that within every man there is a source of ideas which has nothing to do with sensible objects but consists rather of the operations of the mind: thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, willing, among others. It was this sort of experience which he called reflection, the "other" sensation. However, it was not on the issue of the origin of knowledge that Locke made his great contribution to the 44John Locke, An Essav Concerning Human Understand ing (London: George Routledge and Sons, n.d.-), p. 60. 97 development of western thought and consequently to the development of the university; Bacon and Descartes had made similar assertions before him. Rather, Locke's contribu tion stems from his belief in the sufficiency of reason for the discovery of truth and his conclusion that all human knowledge must ever be incomplete. « . . . it is evident, that the extent of our knowl edge comes not only short of the reality of things, but even of the extent of our ideas. . . . I do not question but that human knowledge, under the present circumstances of our beings and constitu tions, may be carried much farther than it hitherto has been, if men would sincerely, and with freedom of mind, employ all that industry and labour of thought in improving the means of discovering trutji which they do for the colouring or support of false hood, to maintain a system, interest, or party they are once engaged in. But yet, after all, I think 1 may, without injury to human perfection, be confi dent that our knowledge would never reach to all we slight desire to know concerning those ideas we have; nor be able to sunsount all the difficulties, and resolve all the questions, sriLgnt arise concerning any of them.^5 Locke's Essay served as a principal causative agent for the rise of English deism and the spread of European rationalism during the eighteenth century, and it provided the philosophical justification for the violent political revolutions that erupted in both America and France during the last quarter of that century. ^Ibid.. pp. 440-441. 98 Of Locke's professedly educational writings only one is of concern to us here* On the Conduct of the Under standing. originally Intended as a supplement to his Essay but published incomplete and unrevlsed after his death, considers the one problem of how best to cultivate the rational element in man, Locke argues that men are guilty of three miscarriages in using their power of reason; the first is to employ no reason whatsoever but to depend on the example of others; the second is to substitute passion for reason; and the third Is to use reason but use it fallaciously and incorrectly. The last fault appears most often in men who • . . see but one side of a matter * . . read but one sort of books . • . come in the hearing but of one sort of notions; . . • (men who) will not venture out into the great ocean of knowledge . to survey the riches that nature hath stored other parts with; . . .46 And how does one develop and learn to use this faculty of reason with which he is bon? Locke's answer is Practice: "It is practice alone that brings the powers of mind, as well as those of body, to their perfection."47 By practice 46xhe Educational Writings of John Locke, edited by J. W. Adamson ^Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1922), pp. 184-186. 47Ibid.. p. 191. 99 he does not mean the learning or memorising of rules but the sort of practice which results in the "habit of doing" without having to reflect on the rule. Nothing trains the reasoning power better than mathematics, he further con tends, since mathematics best exercises the mind in • • . observing the connexion of ideas and follow ing them in train • • . not that 1 think it necessary that all men should be deep mathemati cians, but that, haying got the way of reasoning, which that study necessarily brings the mind to, they might be able to transfer it to other parts of knowledge as they shall have occasions. In no other essay does Locke argue so clearly or persuasively for the autonomy of the individual human mind, for the sufficiency of reason, for independence in thought and judgment. . . . we are mightily beholden to judicious writers of all ages for those discoveries and discourses they have left behind them for our instruction, if we know how to make a right use of them, which is not to run them over in our hasty perusal, and per haps lodge their opinions or some resuirkable passages in our memories; but to enter into their reasonings, examine their proofs, and then judge of the truth or falsehood, probability or improbability of what they advance; not by any opinions we have entertained of the authors, but by the evidence he produces and the conviction he affords us, drawn from things themselves. Knowing is seeing, and if it be so, it is madness to persuade ourselves that we do so by another man's eyes, let him use ever so many words to tell us that what he asserts is very 100 visible. Till we see it with our own eyes and per ceive it by our own understandings, we are as much in the dark and as void of knowledge as before, let us believe any learned author as much as we w i l l . 49 This uncompromising attitude toward dogmatism and received systems of abstract ideas is thematic in the Essay Concern ing Human Understanding. Against the claims of authority, Locke repeatedly asserts the absolute necessity for inde pendence of mind. Compare, for example, the import of the above-quoted paragraph with these lines from the Essay: I hope it will not be thought arrogance to say, that perhaps we should make greater progress in the discovery of rational and contemplative knowledge, if we sought it in the fountain and made use rather of our own thoughts than other men’s to find it; . . . The floating of other men's opinions in our brains makes us not one lot the more knowing, though they happen to be t r u e .50 Finally, regarding the proper function of higher education, Locke maintains that it is not the business of education to make students perfect in any one science but rather to open and dispose their minds so as best to pre pare them to be capable of applying themselves to any one science when they come to it. 49Ibid., p. 227. 5°Locke, op. cit.. p. 55. 101 If men are for a long time accustomed only to one sort or method of thoughts, their minds grow stiff in it, and do not readily turn to another. It is therefore to give them this freedom that I think they should be made to look into all sorts of knowledge, and exercise their understandings in so wide a variety and stock of knowledge. But I do not propose it as a variety and stock of knowledge, but a variety and freedom of thinking; as an increase of the powers and activity of the mind, not as an enlargement of its possessions.51 Thus Locke finds reason and independent judgment the supreme powers of the human mind and sees education-- not training in a single skill or science, but general education across a variety of subject-matter areas--to be the surest means of training these powers. The philosophies of Bacon, Descartes and Locke, the sciences of Galileo, Harvey and Newton set the stage for the eighteenth century of intellectual enlightenment when reason emerged as the controlling force in human knowledge. To the thoughtful and educated man of the eighteenth cen- tury, the central power that guaranteed unity beneath the variety and diversity of external shapes, that assured an essential homogeneity within the apparent chaos of experi ence, was the power of reason centered no.t in God but in man, and the basic function and problem of education became Sllha Educational Writings of John Locke, p. 216. 102 one of developing that power. Summary and Synthesis We are now ready to examine some modern concepts of the higher learning and some of the specific forces at work in shaping the university idea as it developed during the nineteenth century in the United States. But first a sum mary is in order of those qualities of European thought which our too-brief survey in the last two chapters has revealed. If the university is an extension of the human intellect and represents man's resolve to live according to the dictates of his intelligence, we need to ask what those dictates are, what assumptions govern his thought, and by what methods he has learned to study himself and his world. Assuming our historical survey to be reasonably accurate, we can identify there a triad of dictates, a second triad of assumptions, and a third triad of methods. The word "dictate" will denote here a necessary direction * of human thought, one that is determined by the very nature of the human organism. Just as the needs for food and water are dictates governing the survival of the human body so are the needs to know and to reason dictates governing the direction of human thought. 103 The first of these dictates seems to be that man is essentially a curious animal; he needs to know, needs to discover the why of things. Life, Robert Frost has said, is an "ever-breaking newness" and thus every experience is potentially revelatory. Every moment contains its kernel of new knowledge to which the sensitive individual responds. Men cannot abrogate this need to know; they may cheapen or distort it as when they insist that all learning have utilitarian ends and all knowledge bear a certificate of deswnstrated usefulness, but they cannot destroy it. Regardless of how practical-minded the society may be or how thoroughly dominated by a single institution or vision of "truth," there will always be those curious, seeking, Socratic individuals who will seriously doubt the validity of established systems of thought and insist on asking new questions. The aspiration to know just for the sake of knowing is inherent in man and nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the kaleidoscopic intellectual history of western civilization. A second dictate of human intelligence would appear to be that it is limited. Neither an individual man nor a whole society can ever expect to know all that is knowable; as Locke pointed out, human knowledge is always partial and 104 incomplete. But this is a negative observation; more posi tive is the obverse side, that there appear to be no final or fixed limits to the possible extent of human knowledge. The average American citizen of today, for example, possesses much more accurate Information about the func tioning of his own body, the organization of his society and the structure of the physical universe than did the average Athenian of twenty-five hundred years ago, or even the average Londoner of five hundred years ago. This is not to say that the American is wiser in the day-to-day conduct of his affairs, but simply that he is more knowl edgeable and has access to more reliable information should he choose to use it. And, barring a world-wide holocaust, there is no reason to believe that the quantity and accu racy of man's knowledge will not continue to increase and that the complexity and intricacy of his thought will not also be augmented. Men can apparently go on learning for ever and the more they learn the more they will be able to learn. Human intelligence is a plastic instrument, a grow ing and expanding phenomenon in a viable and changing environment. The third dictate, emphasized by Aristotle and reiterated in the philosophies of Descartes and Locke and 105 throughout the eighteenth century, is that man by nature Is a reasoning animal. He Is ever seeking to relate cause to effect, evidence to hypotheses, premise to conclusion, and, even though later experience may prove his reasoning false, he will nevertheless continue to exercise the faculty of reason; he has no choice. One could argue further that this very power to reason is evidence of a basic order and meaning in nature. Through reasoning man hopes to discover that events In life, the details of experience, do not exist as fragmentary and isolated bits but relate to one another in a fundamental and harmonious system which in its totality is perhaps too large for the human mind ever to grasp. (The latter observation, however, must be perceived as an assumption in western thought, not as a dictate of intelligence.) The term "assumption," as distinguished from ''dic tate," will denote any deeply imbedded belief which an individual, once he becomes conscious of it, may choose to reject or accept. Thus most people in America today assume that democracy is the most desirable form of government, that public schools do educate, that technology has improved the quality of our lives, but one may choose not to believe any one or all of these. These are assumptions, 106 not dictates. Certainly many assumptions underlie western thought, but the following three seem more basic than most. The first is Platonic in origin but is expressed again in Augustine, in the work of such Renaissance figures as Erasmus and Shakespeare, and in most modern science. It is that the world is a coherent and intelligible whole accessible to the powers of human cognition and imagina tion. It is not knowable in the sense that observation and rational analysis can ever reveal its total complexity. But, to the man who learns how to combine successfully the logical and rational powers together with the powers of contemplation, imagination and intuition, the essential coherence--the underlying harmony of the cosmos--will stand revealed, Neither the scientist's analytic approach nor the poet's intuitive approach are by themselves sufficient; but, properly combined, they represent all the powers of apprehension that men possess and all that they ultimately need. A second assumption, also Greek in origin, is that the greatest happiness men can experience is that which derives from learning. The very act of learning may be found painful but the rewards of learning always seem to be an increased sense of peace, a greater contentment. The 107 contentment, however, Is never long-lasting for new doubts and uncertainties soon confront the learner. The condition of happiness which accompanies contemplation does not stem from a prolonged intellectual equilibrium but from a kind of inner gnawing that is never really satisfied, a sense of disquietude that impels the learner to inquire ever further into the ultimate nature of truth. This assumption under lies the endless questing of Socrates, the raillery of Erasmus against the scholarly pretensions of Church cleric and university master, Locke's insistence on freedom for intellectual inquiry and independence of thought. A final assumption in western thought would seem to be that there are but two avenues of knowledge open to men. The first, pursued by science, is the method of careful observation of the phenomena of the external world, fol lowed by the verification of hypotheses. The second, pursued by religious mystics and to a less extent by poets and philosophers, is the method of personal introspection resulting in an intuitive insight or revelation. This last assumption introduces the siethods by which western man has sought to enrich his store of knowl edge. Two of the methods have been named: the method of scientific Investigation, which begins with the data of 108 sensible experience and ends with the testing of hypotheses In the crucible of controlled experiment; and the method of the Imagination, which enables men to develop strong emo tional commitments to what they believe and not only to see the world as scientists but to feel the world as poets. The third method is a synthesis of the two, requiring that we learn to use both avenpes of knowledge to organize and systematize the data of experience and our interpretations of it.^ Some lines from Tennyson's Ulysses suggest a schematic arrangement for the ideas presented in this sum mary (exhibited in Figure 1). Perhaps the drawing will help the reader visualize the content, direction and scope of the initial chapters of this dissertation. If the reader is willing to accept the analysis offered here as a reasonably accurate one, then perhaps he will also accept this summary of dictates, assumptions and methods of know ing as the very base upon which the university in western civilization is constructed. ^For «n extended discussion of this point, see Philip Wheelwright, The Burning Fountain (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1054;. 109 FIGURE I AVENUES TO KNOWLEDGE . . .all experience is an arch wherethro' Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin lades For ever and for ever when 1 move. --Tennyson SYNTHESIS Method of Scientific Investiga tion Method of Introspec tive Self- Discovery Assumptions 3. Only two avenues to knowledge: Underlying knowledge derived from the European senses, knowledge derived from Thought contemplation 2. Learning is the only consis tently reliable source of human happiness. 1. The physical universe is a single, coherent and harmonious whole. Dictates of Human Intelligence 3. Man is a rational animal; he must reason. 2. Knowledge is always pairtial and Incomplete but human intelligence is plastic. 1. Man is a curious animal; he wants to know. CHAPTER IV SOME MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF THE UNIVERSITY Thomas Jefferson: The Freedom to Learn I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. --Jefferson John Locke's most ardent champion in the early years of American democracy was Thomas Jefferson (1743- 1826), lawyer, architect, educator, ambassador, President. This Virginia-born planter-aristocrat derived his vigorous humanitarian sympathies from Locke, Milton, Montesquieu and Voltaire; his science from Bacon, Newton and Franklin. He reshaped their ideas to fit a virgin continent of seem ingly endless potential where humanity was being given a fresh start toward liberty, selfhood, and the achievement of excellence. Jefferson retired from active political life in 1809 and turned his tireless energies to 110 Ill architecture and education. He founded the University of Virginia in 1819, designed its notable buildings, super vised their construction, and became the first Rector. The University opened its doors in 1825. Jefferson was among the first of America's states men and educators to realize that a free society must encompass both the vision of equality and the vision of excellence; lacking excellence, equality degenerates into mediocrity; lacking equality, excellence becomes the privilege of a special few.* He expressed this philosophy most cogently in a letter to his famous friend and antagon ist John Adams. "I agree with you," Jefferson wrote, . • • that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talent. . . . it would have been inconsistent in creation to have formed men for the social state, and not to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of the society. May we not even say, that that form of government is the best, which provides the most effectually for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of govern ment ?* ^Robert Ulich (ed.), Three Thousand Years of Educa tional Wisdom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950), p. 463. 2Jefferson's letter to John Adams dated October 28, 1813, reprinted in Crusade Aaainst Ignorance, edited by Gordon C. Lee (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), p. 162. 112 The most effective means for selecting and educating the "natural arlstol" became Jefferson's major concern In the closing years of his life. He believed education to be the most necessary Ingredient In the preservation and welfare of a democratic society, and higher education the means for providing lead ers for that democracy. The curriculum of higher educa tion, therefore, must be broad and must allow the student every opportunity to exercise his freedom, to develop his Individuality, and to Increase his usefulness to society. To the English clergyman and chemist, Joseph Priestley, Jefferson wrote as early as 1800: We wish to establish in the upper and healthier country, and more centrally for the state an Uni versity on a plan so broad and liberal and modern. as to be worth patronizing with the public support, and be a temptation to the youth of other states to come, and drink of the cup of knowledge and frater nize with us.3 Just how "broad and liberal and modern" Jefferson intended the university to be was the substance of a later letter to George Tlcknor, the Harvard language professor and educa tional reformer. After criticizing the common practice in 3Jefferson's letter to Joseph Priestley dated January 18, 1800, reprinted in American Higher Education, edited by R. Hofstadter and W. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), Vol. I, p. 175. 113 American colleges of holding all students to the same pre scribed courses of study, Jefferson added: We shall on the contrary allow them uncontrolled choice in the lectures they shall choose to attend, and require elementary qualification only, and suf ficient age. Our institution will proceed on the principle of doing all the good it can without con sulting its own pride or ambition; of letting every one come and listen to whatever he thinks may improve the condition of his mind.4 Jefferson designed a curriculum for the University of Virginia which combined popular and practical new sub jects, framed in an intellectual orientation of broad dimension. Eight separate schools were included, each independent of the others, in ancient languages, modem languages, mathematics, natural philosophy, natural his tory, medicine, moral philosophy, and law. There were no provisions for instruction in divinity. Every student was free to select his own course of study; there were to be no recognized classes of freshmen, sophomores, juniors or seniors, and no degrees. The student was free to study in whatever direction his interests took him and at whatever level his abilities allowed.5 ^Jefferson's letter to George Ticknor dated July 16, 1823, reprinted in American Higher Education, p. 267. ^Ulich, op. cit.. p. 463. 114 Jefferson's vision of a university was clearly the most wide-ranging and liberal of his time. Unfortunately, the United States in the early decades of the nineteenth century was not ready for such a vision and the institution which embodied it could not, therefore, long survive the death of its proponent. By 1831 the University of Virginia was awarding the conventional college degrees and requiring of every student the standard classical course of study. The extent of Jefferson's contribution to the shap ing of the University idea in America is debatable. Had the University of Virginia continued to develop as its founder had imagined, it would certainly have served as a model and inspiration for other Institutions of higher learning across the land. But it did not, and today Jefferson's plan for the University of Virginia is consid ered something of an historical curiosity. In the mind of a notable American humanist and educational visionary, the idea for a great free university took hold, flamed brightly for a brief period in a living institution and was then extinguished by the forces of educational conservatism and tradition. The idea was not to be realized again on Ameri can soil for fifty years. 115 John Henry Newman: An Enlargement of Mind You s«e, then, gentlemen, here ere two methods of education; the one esplres to be philosophical, the other to be mechanical; the one rises towards ideas, the other is exhausted upon what is particular and external. --Newman One of the most clear and cogent formulations of the university idea during the nineteenth century came not from an American (although Jefferson had caught its spirit), but from an English theologian and Rector of the Catholic University in Dublin, John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), In a series of brilliant lectures given dur ing his residence in Dublin, from 1852 to 1858, Newman defined the university as a place where students coming from every quarter would form habits of cultivated and accurate thought under the tutelage of scholars represent ing every academic discipline. He envisioned the univer sity as a . • . place of concourse . . . for great preachers, great orators, great nobles, great statesmen . . . the place to which a thousand schools make contribu tions; in which the intellect may safely range and speculate, sure to find its equal in some antagonist activity, and its judge in the tribunal of truth. It is a place where inquiry is pushed forward, and discoveries verified and perfected, and rashness 116 rendered Innocuous, and error exposed, by the collision of mind with mind, and knowledge with knowledge.& Repeatedly in his lectures Newman insisted on complete freedom for investigation in both theology and science. He could see no conflict between the two so long as theology kept to the spiritual world and science to the material. The lectures provided, finally, an incisive analysis and defense of liberal education as separate from vocational and professional training. Beginning with the assumption that all branches of knowledge are ultimately interrelated, since all were the handiwork of the "great Creator," Newman conceived the university as . . . an assemblage of learned men, zealous for their own sciences, and rivals of each other . . . (who) learn to respect, to consult, to aid each other. Thus is created a pure and clear atmosphere of thought, which the student also breathes, though in his own case he only pursues a few sciences out of the multitude.7 For the student, the effect of living amidst such 6"What is a University?" by John Henry Newman, reprinted in The Victorian Age, edited by J. W. Bawyer and J. L. Brooks (New York: F. S. Crofts and Co., 1947), p. 225. 7John Henry Cardinal Newman, The Scope and Nature of University Education (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1958), p. M. 117 surroundings and breathing so heady an atmosphere of Intellectual speculation was that he would learn to appre hend . . . the great outlines of knowledge, the princi ples on which It rests, the scale of Its parts, Its lights and Its shades, Its great points and Its little, as he otherwise cannot apprehend them. Hence It Is that his education Is called liberal. A habit of mind Is formed which lasts through life, of which the attributes are freedom, equltableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom; . • . This Is the main purpose of a university In Its treatment of students.8 Newman then raised the pragmatic question of the usefulness of such knowledge as the university affords. A liberal education Is not like a commercial or profes sional education, since no practical observable conse quences follow. Wherein then lies Its value? For his answer Newman barkened back to Aristotle's Politics and to the ancient philosopher's distinction between training which yields revenue and education which yields enjoyment. Let me not be thought to deny the necessity, or to decry the benefit, of such attention to what Is particular and practical, the useful or mechanical arts; life could not go on without them; we owe our dally welfare to them; their exercise Is the duty of the many, and we owe to the many a debt of grati tude for fulfilling It. 1 only say that knowledge, 8Ibid. in proportion as it tends more and more to be particular, ceases to be knowledge.? He then concluded with one of those remarkably striking comparisons for which his lectures are notable: [The] university [is] a place of education [not] of instruction, though, when knowledge is concerned, instruction would at first sight have seemed the more appropriate word. We are instructed, for Instance, in manual exercises, in the fine and use ful arts, in trades, and in ways of business; for these are methods which have little or no effect upon the mind itself, are contained in rules commit ted to memory, to tradition, or to use, and bear upon an end external to themselves. But education is a higher word; it implies an action upon our mental nature, and the formation of a character; it is something Individual and permanent, and is commonly spoken of in connection with religion and virtue. When, then, we speak of the communication of knowledge as being education, we thereby really imply that that knowledge is a state or condition of mind; and since cultivation of mind is surely worth seeking for its own sake, we are thus brought once more to the conclusion, which the word liberal and the word philosophy have already suggested, that there is a knowledge which is desirable though nothing come of it, as being of itself a treasure, and a sufficient remuneration of years of labour.10 Newman could find no word in the English language to designate the kind of knowledge which he had in mind. He did not mean the mere accumulation and retention of knowledge, the passive acquisition of knowledge which the 119 public at large considers to be the purpose and result of a university education. He meant, rather, that kind of learning which expands and enlarges the mind; the kind of learning which not only receives knowledge into the mind but which results from the simultaneous and energetic action of the reason and imagination upon the knowledge received, thus reducing it to order and meaning. There is no enlargement unless there be a compari son of ideas one with another, as they come before the mind, and a systematizing of them. We feel our minds to be growing and expanding then, when we not only learn, but refer what we learn to what we know already. • . . Therefore a truly great intellect . . . is one which takes a connected view of old and new, past and present, far and near, and which has an insight into the influence of all these one on another; without which there is no whole, and no centre. It possesses the knowledge, not only of things, but also of their mutual and true relations; knowledge not merely considered as acquirement, but as philosophy.^ Such, then, was the beau ideal of liberal education and subsequently of the university. The great practical error of the university, Newman contended, was its tendency to laden the memory of the student with a mass of undigested knowledge and teach so many different things that little or nothing is properly learned at all. The unnecessary profusion of subjects does not educate; it u Ibid.. p. 112. distorts and enfeebles the mind. The mere acquaintance with learned names and places, the mere attendance on lectures and demonstrations, the mere viewing of specimens in a museum does not enlarge the mind but rather tends to dissipate its energies. If forced to choose, Newman con tinued, . . • between a so-called university which dispensed with residence and tutorial superintendence, and gave its degree to any person who passed an examina tion in a wide range of subjects, and a university which had no professors or examinations at all, but merely brought a number of young men together for three or four years, and then sent them away, . . . I [would] have no hesitation in giving the prefer ence to that university which did nothing, over that which exacted of its members an acquaintance with every science under the s u n .12 Newman considered the relation of liberal knowledge to professional training and argued that, just as a healthy body is a prerequisite for the many tasks requiring phys ical energy, agility and endurance, so is a liberal educa tion the mark of a healthy mind, a prerequisite to profes sional training. The man who has learned to reason, to compare, to discriminate and analyze will not at once be a lawyer, a physician or statesman but he will be "in that state of intellect in which he can take up any one of the 121 sciences or callings . • . with an ease, a grace, and a success to which another Is a stranger. In this sense then, . . . mental culture Is emphatically useful."13 It Is a mistake, however, to think of liberal edu- cation as being merely preparatory to professional train ing; It may well be the best preparation, but Its purpose Is not preparation for anything at all. The point Newman Iterated again and again was that liberal knowledge brings Its own rewards In terms of personal happiness, enjoyment, and good citizenship. If any practical end must be assigned to a university course, It Is the training of good members of society. The university Is not to be content with training only the scientist or engineer, the dramatist or economist; Its purpose goes far beyond the training of specialists or preparing for entry Into a professional career. . . . It aims at raising the Intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purify ing the national taste, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed alms to popular aspiration, at giving enlargement and sobriety to the Ideas of the age, at facilitating the exercise of political power, and refining the intercourse of private life. It is the education which gives a man a clear conscious view of his own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence 13Ibld., p. 141. 122 in expressing them, and a force in urging them. It teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is sophistical, and to discard what is irrelevant. It prepares him to fill any post with credit, and to master any subject with facility. It shows him how to accommodate himself to others, how to throw himself into their state of mind, how to bring before them his own, how to influence them, how to come to an understanding with them, how to bear with them. He is at home in any society, he has common ground with every class; he knows when to speak and when to be silent; he is able to converse, he is able to listen; he can ask a question perti nently, and gain a lesson seasonably, when he has nothing to impart himself; he is ever ready, yet never in the way; he is a pleasant companion, and a comrade you can depend upon; he knows when to be serious and when to trifle, and he has a sure tact which enables him to trifle with gracefulness and to be serious with effect. He has the repose of a mind which lives in itself, while it lives in the world, and which has resources for its happiness at home when it cannot go abroad. He has a gift which serves him in public, and supports him in retire ment, without which good fortune is but vulgar, and with which failure and disappointment have a charm. The art which tends to make a man all this is in the object which it pursues as useful as the art of wealth or the art of health, though it is less susceptible of method, and less tangible, less cer tain, less complete in its result. Ortega v Gasset: A Cultural Synthesis To exert influence upon a mass, you must be something other than a mass yourselves: a live force, or in other words, a group in form. — Ortega I4Ibid., pp. 152-153. 123 Three quarters of a century after Newman had deliv ered his famous lectures on the scope and' function of the university, the Spanish philosopher, teacher and statesman, Josd Ortega y Gasset (1883-1950?), speaking before the Federation of University Students in Madrid, asserted that everywhere in Europe the university had assumed its major function to be the teaching of the learned professions. Instead of endeavoring to raise "the intellectual tone of society . . . cultivating the public mind . . . giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age . . . and refining tne intercourse of private life"^ (the functions that Newman had so persuasively assigned to it), the European university was teaching people "to be doctors, pharmacists, lawyers, judges, economists, public servants, teachers of the sciences and the humanities in secondary schools. . • Combined with professional training, Ortega found two other functions that were served by the twentieth-century European university: one, training in the methods of scientific research; the other, a barely 15Ibid. ^Josd Ortega y Gasset, Mission of the University, translated by Howard Lee Nostrand (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1946), p. 41. 124 perceptible residue "of that ancient precept of higher education, . . . 'general culture. "'17 Men cannot live without Ideas, Ortega argued. The Ideas which men need are the vital Ideas of the time, the system of Ideas, the repertory of convictions which will serve as an effective guide out of the "tangled and con fused jungle" In which Infra-man, Irrational man, Is Inevitably lost. Such an ensemble of the vital Ideas of the age constitute . . . culture In the true sense of the term; It la precisely the opposite of external ornament. Cul ture Is what saves human life from being a mere disaster; it Is what enables man to live a life which Is something above meaningless tragedy or Inward disgrace. . . . A man belongs to a genera tion; he Is of one substance with It. And each generation takes Its place not In some chance location, but directly and squarely upon the pre ceding one. This comes to mean that man lives, perforce, at the level of his time, and, more particularly, at the level of the Ideas of his time. 18 In this sense, Ortega declared, the average European Is Ignorant and "uncultured," he Is a barbarian, • • • a laggard behind the contemporary civiliza tion, archaic and primitive In contrast with his problems, which are grimly, relentlessly modem 17Ibld.. pp. 42-43. l®Jbld., p. 44. 125 . . • more learned than ever before, but at the , same time more uncultured.19 The blame for this condition Ortega laid on the doorstep of the nineteenth century university in all countries which exalted professional training and research above the other functions. Society needs professional men and the univer sity must prepare them, but the transcendent function of the university is that of preparing men for the "profession of governing." In every society someone governs, whether a group or a class, few people or many. By "governing" I mean not so much the legal exercise of authority as a diffuse pressure, or influence, exerted upon the body politic. Today, the societies In Europe are governed by the bourgeois classes, the majority of whom are composed of professional men. It is of the first importance to these societies, therefore, that these professional people, aside from their several professions, possess the power to make their lives a vital influence in harmony with the height of their times. Hence it is imperative to set up once more, in the university, the teaching of the culture, the system of vital ideas, which the age has attained. This is the basic function of the university. This is what the university must be, above all else.20 To achieve this, Ortega would stand the conventional uni versity curriculum on its head, making the "transmission of culture" its first and foremost objective, above 19Ibld.. p. 45. Ibid.. pp. 45-46 126 professional training and research. But, in still another way be would reverse the direction of the twentieth-century university, since the more basic problem, the problem of authenticity, has yet to be broached. The current profusion of studies, making it impossible for the student to master what the university teaches, stems from the pretension of the university to be something other than what it is or ever can be. The uni versity of today, Ortega argues, "is a tropical underbrush of subject matters.If to this underbrush we were to add the teaching of the culture, the university would most certainly swamp. He proposes, therefore, a solution based on a simple principle of economy, that the university center neither on the professor nor upon knowledge, but upon the student. Two dimensions are ascribed to the stu dent: first, he is a "being of limited learning capacity" second, he is in need of knowing certain fundamental things, the vital ideas of his time, in order to live his life well. University reform must begin with the ordinary student and we must establish "as a nucleus of the institu tion, as its central and basic portion, exclusively the 127 subject matters which can be required with absolute strin gency} i.e., those a good ordinary student can really learn."22 To locate this nucleus, we must subject the present conglomeration of courses to two tests, and only those that survive both tests will comprise the new university curric ulum. The first test consists of asking whether the subject is "strictly necessary for the life of the man who is now a student. Life, with its inexorable requirements, is the criterion that should guide this first stroke of the pruning knife."23 The second test requires that the sub jects judged strictly necessary in this way "be further reduced to what the student can really learn with thorough ness and understanding."^ Only by teaching the subjects which survive these two tests can we expect to make the university genuine. The university must neither feign to teach what is impossible for the student to learn nor teach subject matter which is irrelevant in the life of the student. 22Ibid., p. 56. 23Ibid., p. 57. 24Ibid. 128 The maxim of Leonardo's must guide from the begin ning any real reform of the university. Only a firm resolution to be genuine will bear fruit. And not only the life of the university, but the whole new life must be fashioned by artisans whose first thought is authenticity.25 Like Jefferson and Newman before him, Ortega cites as the cardinal function of the university that of "enlightenment," "of imparting the full culture of the time and revealing to mankind, with clarity and truthfulness, that gigantic world of today in which the life of the indi vidual must be articulated, if it is to be authentic."26 This can only be done by first rigorously synthesizing and organizing our present knowledge of man and of the cosmos. Ortega offers the caveat: If we fail to cultivate this sort of intellectual effort--effort addressed not to descriptive analy sis, after the usual manner of research, but to the task of simplifying and synthesizing the quintes sence of science, without sacrifice of its quality or substantialness--then the future of science itself will be disastrous. . . . We need to develop a special type of talent, for the specific function of synthesizing. The destiny of science is at stake.27 Thus, Ortega concludes that a university in its 23Ibid., p. 50. 26Ibid.. p. 68. 27Ibid.. pp. 69-70 129 most genuine sense is an institution which teaches first an organic synthesis of the vital ideas of the time and then offers professional training, the two together transforming the ordinary student into "a cultured person and a good member of a profession.''28 Around this central core of university function and responsibility, "the sciences must pitch their camps--their laboratories and seminars and dis cussion centres. The sciences are the soil out of which the higher learning grows and from which it draws its sus tenance."^ Finally, the university is not only in per petual contact with science and charged with the enthusiasm of science--the stimulating climate of discovery--but it is in contact too with the public life of the time, with the historical reality of the present. "The university must be open to the whole reality of its time. It must be in the midst of real life, and saturated with it."30 28Ibid., p. 73. 29Ibid.. p. 75. 30Ibid.. p. 76. 130 Alfred North Whitehead; The Gift of Imagination We may conceive humanity ae engaged In an Internecine conflict between youth and age. Youth la not defined by years but by the creative Impulse to make sooMthlng. The aged are those who, before all things, desire not to make a mistake. — Whitehead Ortega concludes his stimulating lectures on the mission of the university with the observation that "An atmosphere charged with enthusiasm . . . is the presupposi tion at the base of the university's existence." This spirit of imaginative Inquiry, which he calls "the spirit of science," animates the life of the institution; Indeed, "is the soul of the Institution, the principle which gives it the breath of life and saves it from being an automa- ton."31 The English mathematician and philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), in a collection of essays published under the title The Aims of Education, sees this enthusiasm that emanates from Interested and imaginative inquiry to be the very essence of the university. "The universities are schools of education and schools of 131 research," Whitehead writes. But the primary reason for their existence is not to be found either in the mere knowledge conveyed to the students or in the mere opportunities for re search afforded to the members of the faculty. • . • The justification for a university is that it pre serves the connection between knowledge and the zest of life, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of l e a r n i n g .32 Every great university has been founded by adventurous and imaginative people who love culture and learning and cannot think of them without emotion. The University of Oxford, for example, though it has sinned in many ways and still suffers many deficiencies, "has throughout the ages pre served one supreme merit, beside which all failures in detail are as dust in the balance: for century after cen tury, throughout the long course of her existence, she has produced bands of scholars who treated learning imagina tively."^ Another example is the University of Virginia, one of the great achievements of Mr. Jefferson who "devoted one side of his complex genius to placing that university amid every circumstance which could stimulate the imagina tion— beauty of buildings, of situation, and every other ^Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education (New York: The New American Library, 1949), p. 130. 33Ibid., p. 137. 132 stimulation of equipment and organization. "34 Still another is New England's oldest and most honored univer sity, Harvard, on whose faculty Whitehead served with such great distinction. It was founded by the Puritans of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who were "the most intensely imaginative people . . . racked with the inten sity of spiritual truths intellectually imagined."35 Imagination is a gift passed from one generation to the next, albeit a potentially dangerous one "which has started many a conflagration" but just as often the stimulus for great commercial enterprise as at Florence and Venice, or great philosophy and literature as in Greece and England, or great scholarship and learning as in Holland and Germany. A fact garnered from observation and invested by the imagination with all its possibilities of meaning "is no longer a bare fact . . . no longer a burden on the memory:"36 it becomes, rather, an energizing force, a stimulus for thought and activity. Imagination should never be divorced from facts, Whitehead remarks, but 34Ibid.. p. 138. 33Ibid. 36Ibid., p. 131. 133 employed to Illuminate facts. "Youth is imaginative, and if the imagination be strengthened by discipline this energy of imagination can in great measure be preserved through life."37 But youth must be left "free to think rightly and wrongly, and free to appreciate the variousness of the universe," since the "habit of unbiased thought • . . cannot be acquired when there is the daily task of preserving a concrete organization."38 One of the greatest difficulties in modern education is that of preserving the enthusiasm of youth, the imaginative play of youth, thrpugh a long period of technical training. A general principle not well understood by professional and vocational schools across the land is "that necessary technical excellence can only be acquired by a training which is apt to damage those energies of mind which should direct the technical skill." The way in which a university should function in the preparation for an intellectual career, such as modern business, or one of the older professions, is by promoting the imaginative consideration of the vafious general principles underlying that career. Its students thus pass into their period of technical apprenticeship with their imaginations already prac tised in connecting details with general principles. 37Ibid. 38Ibid. 134 The routine then receives its meaning, and also illuminates the principles which give it that mean- ing. Hence, instead of drudgery issuing in a blind rule of thumb, the properly trained man has some hope of obtaining an imagination disciplined by detailed facts and by necessary habits. Thus the proper function of a university is the imaginative acquisition of knowledge.39 Regarding the university faculty, Whitehead insists that it be "a band of scholars, stimulating each other, and freely determining their various activities."4® Since its members are individuals possessing the diverse talents and abilities to be found across the whole range of mankind, no single criterion can serve to evaluate the contribution of each to the institution as a whole. Whitehead condemns the present-day tendency to evaluate a faculty member solely on the basis of printed work signed with his name. The management of a university faculty has no analogy to that of a business organization. The public opinion of the faculty, and a common zeal for the purposes of the university, form the only effective safeguards for the high level of univer sity work. . . . You can secure certain formal requirements, that lectures are given at stated times and that instructors and students are in attendance. But the heart of the matter lies be yond all regulation.41 39Ibid. 40Ibid.. p. 137. 41Ibid., pp. 136-137. 135 It is this very problem, the efficient selection and utilization of a faculty, Whitehead concludes, that provides common ground for the two major university func tions of education and.research. Do you want your teachers to be imaginative? Then encourage them to research. Do you want your researchers to be imaginative? Then bring them into intellectual sympathy with the young at the most eager, imaginative period of life, when intellects are just entering upon their mature discipline. Make your researchers explain themselves to active minds, plastic and with the world before them; make your young students crown their period of intellec tual acquisition by some contact with minds gifted with experience of intellectual adventure. Educa tion is discipline for the adventure of life; research is intellectual adventure; and the univer sities should be homes of adventure shared in common by young and old.42 Karl Jaspers: The Search for Truth Because truth is accessible to systematic search, research is the foremost concern of the university. Because the scope of truth is far greater than that of science, the scientist must dedicate himself to truth as a human being, not just as a specialist. Hence, the pursuit of truth at the university demands the serious commitment of the whole man. — ft As we observed in Chapter II, the basic functions of the university during the middle ages were to transmit 42Ibid.. p. 135. the culture and train for the clergy. Until the seven teenth century the subjects of most importance were theology, medicine, jurisprudence and philosophy. Since then, however, the growing place of technology in present- day life has tended to place more and more emphasis on specialized training and on a proliferation of occupational and professional curricula. This tendency, combined with sizable increases in university attendance during the twentieth century, has brought about perceptible changes in the attitudes of university faculty members and in the relations between teachers and students. Steady growth in enrollment has imperceptibly changed the nature and func tions of the university. The ceaseless multiplying of courses, daily or weekly quizzes and frequent examinations, a disproportionate number of faculty who are not themselves doing research, and the widespread belief that a university should somehow assume the disciplinary responsibilities of parents tend to destroy the timeless ideal of intellectual search which the university is supposed to represent. Wherever the university accedes to outside pressure for mass education, the ideal of intellectual insight, power and discipline is in danger of being lost. In his brief but brilliant analysis of the idea of 137 the university, the German existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers argues that "university education addresses itself not to the few geniuses or to the mediocre average, but to that minority who, while capable of independent growth and of initiative, nevertheless stand in need of instruc tion."43 The life of the mind is never more than a chance achievement amid a sea of failure and frustration. It is always something over and above average per formance. Both student and teacher are unhappy when chained to curricula, and syllabi, to tests and mediocre standards. An atmosphere of uninspired and uninspiring common sense may well produce satisfac tory mastery of technical "know how" and testable factual information. Such an atmosphere, however, stifles genuine understanding and the spirit of adventure in research.^4 Like Whitehead and Ortega, Jaspers disdains spe cialization, arguing for a kind of scholarship that integrates knowledge. "The essence of the university is concerted yet unregimented activity, a life of diversity yet inspired by the ideal of wholeness, the cooperation yet independence of many disciplines."43 But to achieve this 43Karl Jaspers, The Idea of the University, trans lated by H. A. T. Reiche and H. F. Vanderschmidt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959), p. 60. 44Ibid.. p. 61. 45Ibid., p. 84. 138 unification of knowledge and establish once again this central function of the university, we cannot simply restore the ideals and aims of the medieval university; rather, the "whole content of modern knowledge and research must be integrated: broadening the scope of the university must initiate a genuine unification of all kinds of learn ing. "^6 Jaspers notes the modern trend for research institutes, schools of technology, and professional schools to develop outside of the university orbit but concludes that they must always remain fundamentally as offshoots of the university and dependent upon it for their supply of new talent. Research depends finally on access to the whole of knowledge and the opportunity for exchange among all sorts of specialists. Where research institutes are not tied to special places by the nature of their research, they do well to locate in university towns. . . . The individual scientist or scholar may profit from spending a certain length of time, or even the remainder of his life, at a research institute, relieved from the other duties of a university. Yet what he has achieved was accomplished in living exchange with the scholarly community to which he might someday return. Moreover, teaching itself is often--even most of the time— stimulating to research.4? 46Ibid.. p. 88. 4?Ibid.. p. 44. 139 Like Jefferson, Jaspers defends the idea of an intellectual hierarchy. Intellectual equality cannot be decreed, he argues, nor can all people appreciate and profit from the ideals of free inquiry, research, and imaginative learning that the university represents. To protect its aristocratic principles in an age of mass edu cation, Jaspers suggests, the university should establish affiliated schools for the training of specialists and technicians. Such schools would of necessity organize and prescribe their curricula but the university itself must ever remain free of prescription and dogma. The very nature of the university demands that the individual exercise his own choices throughout his entire course of study at the acknowledged risk of ending up with nothing. Our most serious and ultimately insoluble problem is how to create an intellectual and institutional climate favorable to such Independence. This is a far cry from the ideal of mass education in which the schools are expected to assume a paternalistic responsibility for its students, and Jaspers is aware of the danger: To live freely in the world of ideas is on first inspection fraught with danger for the student. He is thrown back upon his own resources since such a mode of life thrives only on one's own responsibility. 48Ibid.. pp. 118-119. 140 From the freedom of teaching springs the freedom of learning. Mo authority, no rules and regulations, no supervision of studies such as are found in high schools must be allowed to hamper the university student. He is free to "go to the dogs." It has often been said that you have to risk your young men if you want to get a generation of men. There is a place certainly for scholastic instruction, for learning in its narrower sense, and for prac tice in methods. But the student is free to choose how extensively he wants to participate in this instruction, and when he can get on with books alone, without benefit of teachers.49 The student must be free to learn as his own con science dictates for the same reason that the scholar must be free to study and the scientist free to explore since the idea of the university, the very lifeblood of higher education, flows from the free and uninhibited search for truth. The direction which this search takes for any given individual cannot be prescribed or dictated from without, it must come from within the individual himself. For the truly open and inquiring mind this quest is never satis fied; tirelessly, the individual goes on from one discovery to the next "hoping to embrace the very universe through knowledge"-*0 but realizing simultaneously the impossibility of such a dream. Three conditions, Jaspers concludes, are 49Ibid.. p. 54. 50Ibid.. p. 21. 141 basic to the scholar's quest for truth: the first is a genuine will to know; the second, a readiness to accept any criticism of one's assertions; the third, direct and frequent discussion and exchange with fellow scholars and students. The university demands a ruthless will to know. Since learning and personal initiative go hand in hand, the university aims for the broadest possible development of independence and personal responsi bility. Within its sphere, it respects no author ity other than truth in its infinite variety, the truth which all are seeking and yet no one can claim to possess in final and complete form.51 Summary and Synthesis For more than twenty-five hundred years the spirit of Socratic inquiry, the indomitable will of men to better understand themselves and the world about them, has sur vived in western civilization. Over that period of time men have learned to employ with increasing success the capabilities of the human mind to reason, to organize and to systematize ideas. This freedom of inquiry, the irrevocable right of individual men to explore their world and communicate their findings to all who will listen, is the very essence of the university. The idea of the 51Ibid., p. 53 university originates in the minds of free and imaginative men--Socrates, Plato, Augustine, Erasmus, Locke, Jefferson and Whitehead--and it acquires substance in the stone and steel of university buildings, in classrooms, dormitories, libraries and laboratories. As physical entities, univer sities have existed in the civilizations of the western world for more than nine hundred years, surviving the ravages of war and famine, the rise and fall of govern ments, the natural erosions of time, failures in human imagination and human will; not only have they survived but they have grown and flourished with an unparalleled record of vitality. In the United States alone there were in 1963, one hundred and forty-six universities and nearly eight hundred liberal arts colleges, together with some six hundred other institutions of higher learning.^2 "There are few earthly things more splendid than a Univer sity," writes the English poet John Masefield, "wherever a University stands, it stands and shines; wherever it exists, the free minds of men, urged on to full and free 52u. S. Office of Education, Opening Enrollment in Higher Education, 1963. Circular No. 728 (Washington, D.C. Government Printing Office, 1963). 143 enquiry, may still bring wisdom Into human affairs. To define the Idea of the university one must first delineate the contours of Intellectual life which sustain It. For that reason, In the opening chapters of this dissertation, the writer attempted to chart the development of those ideas id western civilization which have ulti mately shaped the content of the university curriculum. Furthermore, he attempted to identify some of the dictates of human intelligence and some fundamental assumptions which have governed the course of intellectual history in the west. These basic dictates, the reader will recall, are (1) man is driven by an insatiable curiosity--he wants to learn, (2) human knowledge must always be partial and incomplete but there are apparently no final limits to how much the mind can know--human intelligence is plastic, and (3) men have no choice but to employ reason as they seek to understand the structure, content and processes of the physical universe; their reasoning may prove woefully inadequate, the conclusions grossly mistaken, but the process itself is an ineradicable one in the human mind. The reader will recall, also, the summary of basic 53 Quoted in Jaspers, op. cit., p. 4. 144 assumptions underlying western thought. These assumptions are that (1) the physical universe Is an Intelligible and coherent whole, (2) scholarship, learning and the result ant discipline of mind and emotion provide the principal avenues to human happiness, and (3) the only reliable sources of knowledge are those provided by the method of science which begins with sensory data, and the method of reflection which begins with the Internal operations of the mind--comparing, relating, juxtaposing Ideas. These dictates, assumptions and methods of Inquiry provide the base on which the university stands. In Chapter IV, the writer surveyed the views of five men who, In their published works, have evidenced a deep concern for the university as a viable Institution. Each of the five In his own way has tried to suggest the Ideal, the real meaning of the university, and each has been painfully aware of how Impossible It Is to reduce that Ideal to a few simple statements. With Polonlus one must seek "By directions (to) find directions out." Though the outward forms of the university are ever- changing, the glimnerlng Ideal, which Is Greek In origin, In part conceptual, In part emotional, persists largely unchanged throughout the western tradition. As a physical 145 entity any specific university is closely Identified with a given time, a given cultural context, a given nation, but the goals of the university as an ideal transcend both time and nation. As an entity any specific university serves as a concourse for many different individuals (faculty, administrators, students); but as an ideal the intellectual tone, the climate of learning within the uni versity, transcends the philosophy, the values, the system of beliefs adopted by any individual or group. The insti tution which is faithful to the university idea admits that there are many different definitions of truth and many avenues for learning. It guarantees the absolute freedom to teach, do research, and learn. Wherever a single individual or group is allowed to dominate the quality of intellectual life within the university, wher ever a community or nation forces faculty and student allegiance to a single religious view or political aim, the idea of the university will inevitably suffer. No single statement of the university idea will ever stand as definitive. At this point of our study, however, the writer hazards a definition; the reader may accept it or not as he chooses, but it will serve as a working definition throughout Part III of this dissertation 146 The idea of the university is defined here as the disci plined search for truth in a climate of intellectual freedom. Both students and faculty engage in the search for truth, the students by encountering and testing ideas new to them, the faculty by extending the boundaries of human knowledge through scholarship and research. The search for truth is disciplined in that logical and sy&- * tematic methods are employed both by faculty in their research and by students in their mastery of subject matter. A climate of intellectual freedom means that teachers feel free to question, to doubt, to seek the truth in their disciplines and to teach their subject matter in the ways they find most effective; at the same time, students feel free to learn without fear of reprisal, without fear of error (much effective learning stems from the admission of mistakes), and with a tolerance for ambiguity and incompleteness. The chart displayed in Figure 2 summarizes the aims and functions of the university as they have been presented in this chapter. These seem to the writer to be the essential ingredients of the university idea. In Part III, "American Realization of the 147 University Idea," we shall examine how these aims and functions gradually came to be adopted by American univer sity presidents and articulated in their published addresses, essays and reports. 14H FIGURE 2 A 8 T N T H E S 1 S O F U N I V E R S 1 T T A D I S A N D F U N C T I O N S A l a i e n d F u n c t i o n : A t T h e y A f f i c t S t u d e n t i A t T h e y A f f i c t F a c u l t y A t T h a y A f f a c t Courua o f S t u d y E i i a n t i a l t o t h a Clluta o f l e a r n i n g P R I M A R Y T o c o a p t r * ud l y i t e a i t i t e 1dm i n d t h u s i x p i r i i n c t i g e n u i n e enlargaunt o f a l n d . T O p r e p a r e f o r l i f e ii u e n l i g h t e n e d t d u l t c i p i b l i o f i n t e l l l * ( i n t ud l n f o r a t d p a r t l c l * p i t l o o I n t b t i f f i l r i o f fully, c o uunity, ud utlon. T o u | a s a I n t h i fru a n d u n i n h i b i t e d mrch f o r t r u t h . T o d i v i l o p a luulna w i l l t o k n o w , a n d b e aunabli t o crltldn. T o c ouunlcati fruly ud w i t h f a l l o w acholan a n d i t u d c n t i . T o p r o v i d e a n o r g a n i c lynthadi o f t h a v i t a l i d a a i o f t h a t i a a . A n a t a o i p h a r a w h i c h a l l o w i e a c h i t u d a n t t o l a l a c t h l i o w n count o f i t u d y ud w o r k i t h l i l i v e l o f i b i l l t y , ud uch f a c u l t y anber t o r a i a a r c h a n d t e a c h I n f r e e d o a , S E C O N D A R T T o pnpin f o r i i p i c l f l c profmlon o r o c c u p a t i o n . T o c o u u n l c a t i , t h r o u g h t a a c h l n g , t h a lut f o r loaning ud t h a a x p a r - l a n c a o f l n t a l l a c t u a l a d v a n t u r a , T o p r o v i d e ipeda ll i e d a n d t e c h n i c a l t r a i n i n g f o r t h a p r o f e u l o n i . l u i l d l n g i , fadlltlu, a n d i l t e dulgnad t o e n c o u r a g e l a a r n l n g a n d itiulate i u gi n a tl v a i n q u i r y . T E R T I A R Y T o l t i r n t o “ utbodi o f idntlflc l n v e i t l g a t i o n I n l o l v l n g problm, T o bicou l a b u i d w i t h t h i i p t r i t o f iclnci. T o k a a p t h a a l n d v i t a l a n d a l l v * b y t h a lugl- n a t l v a acquldtlon o f k n o w l a d g a . T o a x t i n d t h a b o u n d a r l a i o f huun k n o w l a d g a b y t a a o i o f i cholanhlp a n d r a i a a r c h . T o p r o v i d e t r a i n i n g I n r a i a a r c h a e t h o d o l o g y andJ ' , uani f o r l e l a c t l n g ud t r a i n i n g i d antliti a n d i c h o l a r i . A dynulc l o c l a l l i l l i u : a urrounding couunity w h i c h u n d a r i t a n d i a n d l u p p o r t i t h a aiu a n d f u n c t l o n i o f t h a u n lv e n lt y , 07 ^ ^ PART III AMERICAN REALIZATION OF THE UNIVERSITY IDEA CHAPTER V HISTORICAL BEGINNINGS, 1636-1860 Scholastic Heritage In the Colonial Collage The university ideal delineated in the last chapter came to fruition on the American continent only very slowly and in piecemeal fashion. We find almost no evidence of it in the charters and statutes of the earliest colonial colleges--Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, and Princeton. The Harvard statutes adopted about the year 1646 required that every scholar "exercise himself in reading the Scrip tures twice a day [and] be ready to give an account of his proficiency thereinFurthermore, during his residence in the college, the student "shall studiously . . . attend the lectures without any disturbance by word or gesture."2 ^"Statutes of Harvard, ca. 1646" in American Higher Education. A Documentary History, edited by Richard Hofstadter and Wilson Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 8. 2Ibid.. p. 9. 150 151 Restrictions like these hardly afforded opportunity for the free and open exchange of ideas. The Harvard statutes devoted more attention to the disciplining of student appe tites than to the training of intellect or the genuine enlargement of mind. It was prescribed that no scholar . . . shall frequent the company and society of such men as lead an ungirt and dissolute life, . . . exchange anything to the value of six-pence without the allowance of his parents, . . . use their Mother tongue in public exercises of oratory, . . . be absent from prayer or Lectures.3 Wherever attention was given to the subjects and methods for study, the weight of scholastic tradition became oppressively evident. Every Scholar that on proof is found able to read the original of the Old and Hew Testament into the Latin tongue, and to resolve them logically withal being of honest life and conversation and at any public act hath the approbation of the Over seers, and Master of the College may be invested with his first degree. Every Scholar that gives up in writing a Synop sis or summa of Logic, Natural and Moral Philosophy, Arithmetic, Geometry, and Astronomy, and is ready to defend his theses or positions, withal skilled in the originals as aforesaid and still continues honest and studious, at any public act after trial he shall be capable of the second degree of Master of Arts.^ 3Ibid. 4Ibid.. p. 10. 152 In like manner, the charter and statufes of William and Mary College some fifty years later (1693) specified the classical curriculum of the medieval college and further required that "both masters and scholars be excited to greater diligence in their studies"^ by means of fre quent examinations. Moreover, as it was the duty of master and professor to discipline the behavior of students so was it the duty of the college president to "have a watchful eye over the other masters and professors, that they be not absent from their employments."^ The three objectives foremost in the minds of the founders of William and Mary were, first, that . • . the youth of Virginia should be well educated to learning and good morals. The second is that the churches of America, especially Virginia, should be supplied with good ministers after the doctrine and government of the Church of England; and that the college should be a constant seminary for this purpose. The third is that the Indians of America should be instructed in the Christian religion, and that seme of the Indian youth that are well-behaved and well-inclined, being first well prepared in the divinity school, may be sent out to preach the gospel to their countrymen in their own tongue, after they have been duly put in orders of deacons and priests.7 ^"Statutes of William and Mary, 1727" in American Higher Education, p. 45. 6Ibld. ?Ibid.. p. 43. 153 The emphasis, as In all of the colonial colleges throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was on moral and religious Instruction and training for the ministry. But In these early statutes of William and Mary, Interestingly enough, there appeared one slight deviation from the scho lastic tradition. When specifying the curriculum for the philosophy school, the founders wrote: For as much as we see now dally a further progress In philosophy, than could be made by Aristotle's Loglck and Physicks, which reigned so long alone In the schools, and shut out all other; therefore we leave It to the president and masters, by the advice of the chancellor, to teach what systems of loglck, physlcks, ethlcks, and mathamatlcks, they think fit In their schools. Further we judge It requisite, that besides disputations, the studious youth be exercised In declamations and themes on various subjects, but not any taken out of the Bible. Those we leave to the divinity school.8 This slight liberalizing and freeing of the curriculum, however, apparently had little Influence on other academi cians during the first half of the eighteenth century. The Yale laws drawn up In 1745 again Insisted on rigid adher ence to a fixed curriculum. In the first Year They (the students) Shall princi pally Study the Tongues & Logic (Aristotle's), and Shall in Some measure pursue the Study of the Tongues the Two next Years. In the Second Year They Shall Recite Rhetoric (again Aristotle's), 154 Gepmetry and Geography. In the Third Year Natural Philosophy, Astronomy and Other Parts of the Mathe- matlcks. In the Fourth Year Metaphysics and Ethics (both of Aristotle). And the respective Classes Shall Recite Such Books, and In Such a manner as has been accustomed.9 Like their parent institutions at Cambridge and Oxford, the American colleges of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen turies were uniformly dialectical, Aristotelian, and highly systematized. By the mid-eighteenth century the first signs of an emerging Interdenominational sponsorship had appeared, as had somewhat more liberal curricula. The charter for the founding of the College of New Jersey (Princeton) in 1746, for example, allowed "Persons" the right to "freely and truly have and enjoy their Judgments and Consciences in Matters of Religion throughout the said Province," and granted to young scholars "of every Religious Denomination . . . free and Equal Liberty and Advantage of Education in the Said College."^ Control of the college, however, remained firmly in the hands of the Presbyterian Church. Kings College (Columbia) founded in 1754 in the ^"Yale Laws of 1745" in American Higher Education, pp. 55-56. ^"Charter of the College of New Jersey (Prince ton), 1746, 1748" in American Higher Education, p. 110. 155 more Interdenominational city of New York, however, had an original board of trustees representing five different religious groups. An Anglican institution, it required only that its president be a member of the Church of Eng land. Its first president, Samuel Johnson, made perfectly clear in advertising the opening of the college "that as to religion, there is no intention to impose on the scholars, the peculiar tenets of any particular sect of Christians."^ However, he made it equally clear that the principal object of the college was to Inculcate the "great principles of Christianity and morality in which true Christians of each denomination are generally agreed."*2 The course of study to be pursued by every scholar in residence closely paral leled that of the other colonial colleges. First. The business of the first year shall be to go on and perfect their studies in the Latin and Greek classics and go over a system of rhetoric, geography and chronology and such as are designed for the pulpit shall also study the Hebrew. 2ndly. The business of the second and third years shall be after a small system of logic to study the mathematics and the mathematical and experimental philosophy in all the several branches ^"Samuel Johnson Advertises the Opening of King's College (Columbia), 1754" in American Higher Education. p. 110. 12Ibid. 156 of It, with agriculture and merchandise, together with something of the classics and criticism all the while. 3rdly. The fourth year is to be devoted to the studies of metaphysics, logic and moral philosophy, with something of criticism and the chief princi ples of law and government, together with history, sacred and profane. 4thly. The pupils in each of their terms shall be obliged, at such times as the president shall appoint , to make exercises In the several branches of learning suitable to their standing both In Latin and English, such as declination and dissertations on various questions pro and con, and frequently theses and syllogistical reasonings.13 The first real break In the rigid colonial college curriculum came with the chartering of Rhode Island College (Brown University) in 1764. The charter for this gener ously Interdenominational college reflected many principles of the Enlightenment then gaining ground in America and a surprising degree of tolerance for religious differences. . • • Youth of all religious denominations shall and may be freely admitted to the equal advantages, emoluments, and honors of the College or University; and shall receive a like fair, generous, and equal treatment during their residence therein, • . • accordingly the public teaching shall in general respect the sciences, and that the sectarian differ ences of opinion, and controversies on the peculiar ities of principle, shall not make any part of the public and classical instruction: Although all religious controversies may be studied freely, examined, and explained by the President, Professors, 13*'Laws and Orders of King's College, 1755" in American Higher Education, p. 120. 157 and Tutors, In a personal, separate, and distinct manner to the youth of any and each denomination, . . . the President, Professors, and Tutors shall treat the religion of each denomination with pecu liar tenderness, charity, and respect; so that neither denomination shall be alarmed with jealous ies or apprehensions of any illiberal and disingen uous attempts upon one another, but on the contrary an open, free, undeslgnlng, and generous harmony.1^ But the most radical collegiate establishment in colonial America was the College of Philadelphia chartered in 1755. Six years earlier, Benjamin Franklin had pub lished a pamphlet titled "Proposals Relating to the Educa tion of Youth in Pennsylvania" in which he pointed out the need for a college in Philadelphia that would be free from sectarian control and denominational bias. The purpose of the college, as Franklin foresaw it, was to promote useful and practical knowledge throughout the colony. In his Autoblography he described with charm and humor some of the difficulties encountered. Since financial support for the college came from a number of different sources and from varied religious groups, it was necessary to appoint a governing board which would be dominated by no single denomination. The founders hit upon the happy idea of appointing one representative from each of the religious ^"Charter of Rhode Island College (Brown Univer sity), 1764" in American Higher Education, pp. 135-136. 158 groups In Philadelphia: "viz., one Church-of-England man, one Presbyterian, one Baptist, one Moravian, etc.; those, In case of vacancy by death, were to fill It by election from among the contributors."*-* But the arrangement was not to work out quite so harmoniously. "The Moravian happened not to please his colleagues, and on his death they resolved to have no other of that sect. The diffi culty then was, how to avoid having two of some other sect, by means of the new choice. At length the difficulty was resolved, Franklin modestly continues, when "one men tioned me, with the observation that I was merely an honest man, and of no sect at all, which prevailed with them to choose me."17 . • . thus was established the present University of Philadelphia.18 I have been continued one of Its trustees from the beginning, now over forty years, ^"The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin" In The American Tradition In Literature (revised), edited by S. Bradley, R. Beatty and E. Long (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1961), Vol. I, p. 216. 16Ibid. 17Ibld.. p. 217. ^®Now the University of Pennsylvania. The Univer sity dates from 1765, when the medical school was added to the College of Philadelphia. 159 and have had the very great pleasure of seeing a number of the youth who have received their education In It distinguished by their Improved abilities, serviceable In public stations, and ornaments to their country.19 In that last sentence Franklin gives valuable insight into his own educational ideal— to improve the abilities of students, and to make them "serviceable in public stations, and ornaments to the country." What a world of difference lies between this wholly practical view and that of the Yale president, Thomas Clap, who was urging contemporane ously (1754) that "The great Design, of Founding this School (Yale), was to Educate Ministers in our own Way."20 Both views of what the higher learning should be, Frank lin's and Clap's, had their articulate defenders in colonial America, but it was the older college that led the way. Neither Franklin nor Clap nor any other American, apparently, during these early years was able to conceive the idea of the university as an extension of man's imagi native and rational faculties, a place for the disciplined search for truth in a climate of intellectual freedom. With the waning of the eighteenth century, the *-9"The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin P. 217. 20»'Thomas Clap Defends the Ideal of the Sectarian College, 1754" in American Higher Education, p. 115. 160 small parochial colleges were confronted with problems of growing complexity. Were colleges to remain In the control of sectarian groups? If so, would they not eventually so proliferate as to create an educational chaos? How were the Increasing needs for professionally trained people outside the ministry to be met? Would it ever be possible to establish In America a true university for general advanced study, and free and imaginative teaching and research? These were problems that would not and could not be solved by violent means, or political and military revolt, but the American Revolution did help to transform the thinking of college presidents and faculty about these problems. Early Proposals for a Public University The exhausting battles of the Revolutionary War at an end and political independence achieved, Americans could once more turn their attention to the problems of sustain ing and educating a growing populace. One of the first legislative proposals introduced in the new American Congress advocated the establishing of a federal university "into which the youth of the United States shall be received after they have finished their studies, and taken 161 their degrees in the colleges of their respective states."2* The proposal was drafted and submitted by a prominent Philadelphia physician and signer of the Declara tion of Independence, Benjamin Rush, who argued that the Congressional legislators could not reasonably expect to restore credit in the new nation, pay the public debt, or extend commerce until after a national university had been established which would inspire "our citizens . • . with federal principles" and dispel public ignorance, apathy and prejudice. His proposal Incorporated the views of Benjamin Franklin for a practical and useful education: "let those branches of literature only be taught, which are calculated to prepare our youth for civil and public life."22 other studies were to Include modem history, agriculture, prin ciples of commerce, modern languages, and the laws and Constitution of the United States. But the proposal was not acted upon by Congress, nor were any of the numerous proposals of similar design which were made during the first quarter century following the Revolution. All of the early Presidents, from Washington to the 21"BenjasdLn Rush on a Federal University" in American Higher Education. p. 153. 22Ibid. 162 second John Adams, were agreed as to the desirability of a national university but none succeeded in getting the necessary legislation through Congress. In his message to Congress in 1796 President Washington called for the found ing of a national institution whose primary object would be "the education of our youth in the science of govern ment."^ He was deeply sensitive to "how much a flourish ing state of the Arts and Sciences contributes to National prosperity and reputation."24 Indeed, so firmly convinced was he of the need for a national university that he left a bequest to Congress in his will to be used for the founding of one. How Congress eventually disposed of that bequest is one of the minor mysteries in American h i s t o r y .25 Again in 1810, President Madison proposed to the Congress a national "seminary of learning" to be supported by public funds "that the additional instruction emanating from it would contribute not less to strengthen the foundations than to adorn the structure of our free and happy system ^"Iteshlngton to Congress on a National University, 1790, 1796" in American Higher Education, p. 158. 24Ibid. 25John S. Brubacher and Willis Rudy, Higher Educa- tion in Transition (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958), p. 217. 163 of government."26 But the House of Representatives, believing that to establish such a "seminary" would require passage of a constitutional amendment, defeated the pro posal. In the years which followed, many like attempts to win the necessary legislative favor proved equally unsuc cessful. Just why this proposal repeatedly failed in the national legislature is difficult to determine; some reasons which have been advanced are the apathy or "down right hostility" of the American public to the national university idea, the prevalence throughout the nineteenth century of states-rights philosophy, and the continuous opposition of "powerful religious denominations that con- ' trolled American colleges at the time" in the belief that a national university would become "a center of secularism and irreligion."27 Other interesting attempts to found public institu tions of higher education are to be seen in the early charters for the University of Georgia (1785), the Univer sity of North Carolina (1789), Georgetown University (1789), the University of Vermont (1791), and the 26Jam e s d. Richardson (ed,), Messages and Papers of the Presidents (Washington, D.C.: 1896), Vol. I, p. 485. 2?Brubacher and Rudy, op. clt.. p. 218. 164 University of Maryland (1807).28 In the minds of many liberal Americans the old-time college had become obsolete, narrow In scope, and an embodiment of aristocratic social concepts that were anathema to the Ideals of the new democ racy. Furthermore, the winds of French Enlightenment thought were sweeping the nation, insisting that higher education had to be free from religious control If the mind of man were to reason boldly and create a new society based on rational thought and considered individual behavior. In the language of the preamble to the University of Georgia charter: Where the minds of the people in general are viciously disposed and unprincipled, and their con duct disorderly, a free government will be attended with greater confusions, and with evils more horrid than the wild uncultivated state of nature. . . . It should therefore be among the first objects of those who wish well to the national prosperity, to encourage and support the principles of religion and morality, and early to place the youth under the forming hand of society, that by instruction they may be moulded to the love of virtue and good order. Unfortunately, none of these early state institutions was able to realize in their early years the high aims and 28 See Volume I of American Higher Education for charters of these early universities. 29"Charter of the University of Georgia, 1785" in American Higher Education, p. 151. ideals of their charters, and none offered instruction sufficiently advanced to be characterized as university work. The English tradition of a college founded by gov ernment charter, managed by a separate corporate group, and supported largely by private funds was yet too strong. Not until the middle of the nineteenth century were state legislatures to have a hand in the appointing of college trustees and to make direct appropriations of funds for the support of colleges and universities. Although the idea for a great publie-supported institution of higher learning had been envisioned by many of the republic's founding fathers, it would not be realized until after the passage of many decades had served to erase from the minds of the American people their parochial faith in the sanctity of the small sectarian college. Philip Lindsley: Enemy of Sectarianism One of the most articulate opponents to the rapid multiplication of sectarian colleges in the early nine teenth century was the president of the University of Nashville, Philip Lindsley (1786-1855). Why, Lindsley asked, should colleges be any more sectarian than banks, penitentiaries, or railroads? "Colleges are designed for the Instruction of youth in the learned languages--in polite literature--in the liberal arts and sciences--and not in the dogmatical theology of any sect or party.”30 Lindsley1s idea of a college was ”a literary and scientific college” open to the general public and 'independent of all religious sectarian bias, or tendency, or Influence."31 He would have his college located in a large urban center because the city . . . has comparatively, more literary and scien tific men--more Individuals skilled in various languages--more eminent professional characters— larger libraries--more ample cabinets and collec tions of natural curiosities and specimens of the arts— a more enlightened and refined society to polish and restrain youth from vulgar practices and indulgences— a greater variety of churches and other religious institutions to enlarge the mind and prevent the growth of bigotry.32 A disciple of Jefferson, Lindsley sought to create at Nashville a public institution of collegiate and post- collegiate training patterned after Jefferson's plan for the University of Virginia. He divided the institution into six separate colleges of humanistic and vocational 30”philip Lindsley on the Problems of the College in a Sectarian Age, 1829” in American Higher Education, p. 233. 167 studies, and, although he did not eliminate the study of ancient languages from the curriculum, neither did he permit it to dominate. Call it what you will, Lindsley exclaimed--a college, a university, an academy, a lyceum-- it is not the name but "the substance— the knowledge--the mental enlargement and energy and power--that I would give to the people in as ample measure as possible. That they may be sovereign in fact as well as in name."'*3 He was suspicious of any form of aristocracy and looked forward to a time when colleges and universities across the land would liberally educate the whole populace and when it would not be unseemly for a college graduate to "follow the plow" or for a laborer "to be Intellectual and to comprehend the Constitution of his country."34 Lindsley encountered much public resistance to his educational idealism. There were those who denounced the University because of its liberal hiring policies and because it employed "incompetent" professors. To this charge, Lindsley rejoined, the incapacity of an individual 33"Philip Lindsley on the Failure of the American College, 1832 and 1848" in American Higher Education, p. 376. 34Ibid.. p. 377. 168 faculty member, whether great or small, "ought to be paraded before an Intelligent public, as jeopardizing the existence or permanent prosperity of the University itself," Any faculty member . . , is but an accident, a circumstance— while the University lives forever, . . . Stand by the University, whatever may be the character of its temporary governors and teachers. If the University be in itself a good thing, or capable of being made good: do not desert or renounce it, merely because some of it* non-essential appendages may not be particularly acceptable to your critical judgment or keener sagacity.33 Then, in a spirited defense of the principle of academic freedom, Lindsley continued: Of the precise political creed or bias of the Faculty, the speaker (President Lindsley) is entirely ignorant. He knows not the politics of any of his colleagues. He has never conversed with them on the subject: and he has never heard an avowal of principles or predilections from one of them. He cares not what their politics are, or for whom they vote. Thus it is also in regard to religious expression. Both trustees and faculty belohg to different sects and denominations. And the students are left to their own free choice, or to parental guidance, in both religion and politics. Their liberty has never been Infringed or interfered with in either respect.36 But public resistance to Lindsley's efforts to 35"Phlllp Lindsley on the Condition of the Col leges, 1837" in American Higher Education, p. 244. 36Ibid.. pp. 244-245. 169 turn the University of Nashville into a strong center of public higher education continued unabated, much of it stemming from the colleges themselves. At the time the University was first established in 1824 there were no other colleges within 200 miles of it, but by 1848 there were "some thirty or more within that distance; and nine within fifty miles."3^ These colleges, Lindsley com plained, . . • all claim to be our superiors; and to be equal at least to old Harvard and Yale. . . . [They are] eager to welcome pupils of all ages, and of every and no degree of literary qualifica tion . . • [and they promise] to finish off and' graduate, in double quick time, and in the most approved style, all who may come to t h e m .38 His avowed and lifelong enemies were public ignorance, academic pretentiousness, and college denominatlonallsm. Lindsley's vision of what a university could and should be was one of the most vital and exciting of the time. In an age when the small sectarian college was, in the public mind, the sine qua non of American higher education, Lindsley envisioned and argued for an institu tion of learning that would liberally educate "the fanner, 37"Phlllp Lindsley on the Failure of the American College" in American Higher Education, p. 378. 38Ibid. 170 the mechanic, the manufacturer, the sailor, the soldier.”39 The university he envisioned would be, like the intelli gence of man, ever incomplete; it would literally breathe growth, change, diversity, and learning. We may commence the enterprise, and leave posterity to carry it onward toward completion. For complete, in the nature of things, it never can be. It must be growing, advancing, enlarging, accumulating, till the end of time. No university in Europe is com plete- -not even in one department#*0 Ironically, the very forces of public ignorance and aggres sive sectarianism which he sought to combat with the uni versity as his weapon brought about the eventual defeat of his ambitious undertaking. Today, Philip Lindsley is remembered not for his achievements (for his university was never realized in his lifetime), but for his dreams, for the ''visions which he transferred to graduates of the college at Nashville who carried on in the Lindsley tradi tion throughout the Southwest."41 _ . _ _ ___ ) 3^Leroy J. Halsey (ed.), The Works of Philip Lindsley, P.P. (Philadelphia: 1866), Vol. I, p. 81. 40Ibid.. p. 406. 4*Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1962), p. 117. 171 Jeremiah Day; Bulwark of Conservatism Both Jefferson and Lindsley In proposals for their respective universities gave evidence of being men of liberal mind and vigorous imagination. Both were strong proponents of Intellectual freedom and of the right and obligation of each citizen to develop the full potential of his own God-given abilities. Along with George Tlcknor at Harvard, Ellphalet Nott at Union, and James Mersh at the University of Vermont, Jefferson and Lindsley were the men who In the early decades of the republic saw most clearly and expressed most eloquently the Idea of the university as a place for free Inquiry, teaching, and scholarship. Each sought In his own Institution to develop a climate of freedom, to quicken dissatisfaction with the status quo, to stimulate faculty research, to extend and encourage the precious quality of Imaginative teaching. Unfortunately, however, the universities of Virginia, Nashville and Vermont did not stand as the respected lead ers in American higher education during the first half of the nineteenth century; the mantle of leadership rested firmly on two other much older, much more traditional institutions, the "mothers of colleges," Yale and Princeton.42 Under the long, stable and successful presidency of Jeremiah Day (1773-1867), Yale college continued to be a stronghold of orthodox Congregationalism and developed an educational philosophy that eventually Influenced almost every new college established In the west and south before the Civil War. Where Lindsley urged experiment and change, Day sought stability and conservatism; where Jefferson would Institute the principle of free electives for the student, Day demanded a rigidly prescribed sequence of studies; where Tlcknor would Introduce the study of modem languages and grant students an option In meeting their foreign language requirements, Day Insisted on rigorous dally exercise In the classical tongues; and, where many educators were advocating the broad extension of free public education, both horizontally and vertically, Day supported the Yale classical' curriculum designed to discipline and educate sons of the rich and politically influential.43 The single document that expressed the conservative 42Ibld.. p. 135. 43Ibld., pp. 130-133 173 point of view most forcefully and lucidly and set the pat tern for American colleges prior to the Civil War was the Yale Report of 1828, written by President Day and a Yale faculty member, Professor James Kingsley. Designed as a rebuttal to growing criticism of the classical curriculum, the Report made such a powerful plea for humanism and the liberal arts, as then conceived, that It not only subdued the critics but solidly entrenched the classics and fixed the Yale curriculum for the remainder of the century. But, contrary to the opinions of many who have written on the subject, the Yale Report provided a vigor ous and logical defense of some of the central alms and functions of the university. "What Is the appropriate object of a college?" President Day asked In the preamble to the Report, and answered: "Its object Is to lav the foundation of a superior education."^ "And what are the Ingredients of this foundation?" They are those . . • branches of study best calculated to teach the art of fixing the attention, directing the train of thought, analysing a subject proposed for Investigation; following, with accurate discrimina tion, the course of argument; balancing nicely the evidence presented to the judgment; awakening, ^"The Yale Report of 1828" In American Higher Education, p. 278. 174 elevating, and controlling the imagination; arrang ing, with skill, the treasures which memory gathers; rousing and guiding the powers of genius.4- * It would be a rare and unenlightened college educator today who would argue that these are not desirable objectives for institutions of higher learning. Furthermore, Day was acutely aware of the need for a climate of learning which would allow the student to develop independence of thought and judgment. No one feature in a system of Intellectual education, Is of greater moment than such an arrangement of duties and motives, as will most effectually throw the student upon the resources of his own mind. Without this, the whole appara tus of libraries, and Instruments, and speclittns, and lectures, and teachers, will be insufficient to secure distinguished excellence. The scholar must form himself, by his own exertions.4® Like John Locke before him and Newman after, Day sought to find the sequence of studies and method of instruction which would most effectively produce in his t students "a proper symmetry and balance of character" and develop "the powers of the mind . . . in their fairest proportions."47 Finally, like Newman, Ortega and Jaspers, 46Ibid.. p. 279. 47Ibld. 175 Day argued for an education designed to prepare the student for his life as an informed adult and effective citizen in his family, community and nation. The great object of a collegiate education, prepar atory to the study of a profession, is to give that expansion and balance of the mental powers, those liberal and comprehensive views, and those fine proportions of character, which are not to be found In him whose ideas are always confined to one particular channel. When a man has entered upon the practice of his profession, the energies of his mind must be given, principally, to its appropriate duties. But if his thoughts never range on other subjects, If he never looks abroad on the ample domains of literature and science, there will be a narrowness in his habits of thinking, a peculiarity of character, which will be sure to mark him as a man of limited views and attainments. Should he be distinguished in his profession, his Ignorance on other subjects, and the defects of his education, will be the more exposed to public observation. On the other hand, he who is not only eminent in pro fessional life, but has also a mind richly stored with general knowledge, has an elevation and dignity of character, which gives him a commanding influence in society, and a widely extended sphere of useful ness.^® Thus it was not with respect to the end and aims of higher education that the Yale Report was so manifestly conservative; it was with respect to the means by which these aims were to be realized. The ends clearly formu lated, the authors proceeded in the second part of the document to examine the most desirable means for achieving 48Ibid.. p. 282. 176 them, and here they reverted to the traditional and firmly entrenched classical curriculum of the English college. Classical learning, they held, . . . may be defended not only as a necessary branch of education, in the present state of the world, but on the ground of its distinct and independent merits. Familiarity with the Greek and Roman writers is especially adapted to form the taste, and to discipline the mind, both in thought and diction, to the relish of what is elevated, chaste, and simple.49 It must be obvious to the most cursory ob server, that the classics afford materials to exercise talent of every degree, from the first opening of the youthful Intellect to the period of its highest maturity. The range of classical study extends from the elements of language, to the most difficult questions arising from literary research and criticism. Every faculty of the mind is employed; not only the memory, judgment, and reasoning powers, but the taste and fancy are occupied and improved.50 The natural corollaries to this line of argument were, first, the entire course of classical studies must be taken, no exceptions allowed, and no electives per mitted. Second, modern languages and literature, if stud ied at all, were to be approached only after a thorough grounding in the classics, for to study Voltaire before Tacitus, Shakespeare before Plutarch, would "reverse the 49Ibid., p. 289 50ibid. order of nature•“ Finally, class recitations were all to follow from readings in a single text, since multiple texts or wide reading in many different books would only increase the likelihood of controversy and confuse the immature mind .51- In this way, starting from an inspired and liberal conception of what a college education should be, Presi dent Day together with his Yale colleagues proceeded to deduce the most rigid and inflexible curriculum imaginable as the means to its attainment. As already indicated, the influence of the Yale Report extended far and wide throughout the nation. In 1836, Lyman Beecher, a leading exponent of New England life, eloquently defended the study of philosophy, logic, Greek, Latin, and the Bible, in the colleges, as the best guarantee to the future of the nation. Several years later when the University of Alabama was courting Jeffer son's elective system, the faculty voted against adopting "a fabric of so loose a construction and so deceitful a 178 character"3^ on the advice of a young mathematics professor and Yale graduate, F. A. P. Barnard. At the same time, another Yale graduate, Alonso Church, was winning his battle to preserve the classical curriculum at the Univer sity of Georgia, and President James Thomwell of the College of South Carolina was leaving no doubt in the minds of his faculty as to where his sympathies lay: "While others are veering to the popular pressure and introducing changes . . . destructive of the very nature of liberal education--let it be our glory to abide by the old land marks."53 Thus, by virtue of his presidency at the largest and one of the oldest and most honored of America's col leges, President Jeremiah Day not only formulated the ideal of intellectual discipline as the proper object of a college education, but firmly established the classical curriculum, in the nation's colleges, as the best means to achieving that end. ^Quoted in George P. Schmidt, The Liberal Arts College (Mew Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1957), p. 57. 53Ibid. 179 Francis Wayland: The Need for Reform Describing the quality of teaching at Yale during the 1820s, Julian Sturtevant, later President of Illinois College, observed in his autobiography that though it did acknirably accomplish "certain ends in the development of mind" and exerted "a great and salutary Influence over the student"; still "the Yale of that day was far from being all It might have been."54 The tutors were good drill-masters, but they often lacked culture and the true literary spirit. They did not bring their students as they might have done into sympathy with classic authors as models of literary excellence. The professor of the Latin and the Greek languages, Prof. James L. Kingsley, seldom lectured, but often Instructed his classes in certain favorite authors. He once taught our class, and at the end of the lesson as he closed his book, he said, "Young gentlemen, you read Latin horribly and translate It worse." In another instance he astonished us while closing a series of readings of Tacitus Agricola, by saying, "Young gentlemen, you have been reading one of the noblest productions of the human mind without knowing it." We might justly have retorted to these severe and perhaps deserved rebukes, "Whose fault Is it?"** A quarter of a century later, Andrew Dickson White, later President of Cornell, was to level a similar charge. ^Julian Sturtevant, Julian Sturtevant. an Auto* biography (New York: 1896), p. 8^. 55Ibld., p. 90. 179 Francis Wayland: The Need for Reform Describing the quality o£ teaching at Yale during the 1820s, Julian Sturtevant, later President of Illinois College, observed in his autobiography that though it did admirably accomplish "certain ends in the development of mind" and exerted "a great and salutary Influence over the student"; still "the Yale of that day was far from being ' all it might have been."54 The tutors were good drill-masters, but they often lacked culture and the true literary spirit. They did not bring their students as they might have done into sympathy with classic authors as models of literary excellence. The professor of the Latin and the Greek languages, Prof. James L. Kingsley, seldom lectured, but often Instructed his classes in certain favorite authors. He once taught our class, and at the end of the lesson as he closed his book, he said, "Young gentlemen, you read Latin horribly and translate it worse.** In another instance he astonished us while closing a series of readings of Tacitus Agricola, by saying, "Young gentlemen, you have been reading one of the noblest productions of the human mind without knowing it." We might justly have retorted to these severe and perhaps deserved rebukes, "Whose fault is it?"** A quarter of a century later, Andrew Dickson White, later President of Cornell, was to level a similar charge. ^Julian Sturtevant, Julian Sturtevant. an Auto biography (New York: 1896), p. 84. 55Ibid., p. 90 180 Comparing Yale with another college he had attended, White noted in his autobiography: This [Yale] was nearer my ideal; for its professors were more distinguished, its equipment more adequate, its students more numerous, its general scope more.extended. But it was still far below my dreams. Its single course in classics and mathe matics, through which all students were forced alike, regardless of their tastes, powers, or aims; its substitution of gerund-grinding for ancient literature; its want of all instruction In modern literature; its substitution of recitals from text books for instruction in history--all this was far short of my ideal. Moreover, Yale was then far more under denominational control than at present— its president, of necessity, as was then supposed, a Congregational minister; its professors, as a rule, members of the same sect; and its tutors, to whom our instruction during the first two years was almost entirely confined, students in the Congrega tional Divinity School.56 These were not Isolated complaints; they grew in frequency and animosity well into the third quarter of the century. Obviously, the classical curriculum was not getting the results its proponents and defenders claimed for it. Precisely, this was because, in the hands of inexperienced and average instructors, so much class time was given to mastering the syntax and grammar of ancient languages as to provide little or no opportunity for com paring, discussing, and systematizing ideas. The drudgery - ^ A n d r e w d. White, Autobiography (New York: The Century Co., 1907), Vol. I, pp. 28o-£o9. 181 and teaming Irrelevance of much of the college course of study created two problems of serious consequence. The first was that in a nation of rising population, college enrollment remained almost stationary. Between 1830 and 1860, for example, enrollment at Harvard increased from 254 to 409, at Yale from 324 to 502, at Union from 223 to 326, increases of one-third or less in a period of thirty years.^7 The second serious consequence was that in a nation of great resources and rapidly increasing private wealth the colleges were losing money. From the time of his inauguration as President of Brown in 1827, Francis Wayland was determined to alleviate these complex but interrelated problems, and he would do it by modifying and Invigorating the college curriculum. Wayland was only 31 years of age when he assumed the presi dency of Brown but he very quickly demonstrated to both faculty and members of the college corporation that he was to be a strong, firm and progressive administrator. His first reforms involved such minor matters as increasing library expenditures, erecting a new science hall, provid ing for scientific study, and insisting that faculty ^"College Attendance Statistics for 1828-29 and I860*' in Schsiidt, op. cit., p. 274. 182 members devote their whole time to instruction (he had dis covered that some members of the faculty were holding other jobs off campus)• But by 1830 he had thought out a much deeper and more revolutionary program of reform which he was to spend the next twenty-five years of his life trying to implement. The philosophy of this reform he stated clearly in 1827: I was clearly impressed with the importance of two things: first, of carrying into practice every science which was taught in theory; and, secondly, of adapting the whole course of instruction, as far as possible, to the wants of the whole cosaninity. The first seemed to me all-important as a means of intellectual discipline. The abstract principles of a science, if learned merely as disconnected truths, are soon forgotten. If combined with application to matters of actual existence, they will be remembered. Nor is this all. By uniting practice with theory, the mind acquires the habit of acting in obedience to law, and thus brought into harmony with a universe which is governed by law. In the second place, if education is good for one class of the community, it is good for all classes. Not that the same studies are to be pur sued by all, but that each one should have the same opportunity of pursuing such studies as will be of the jpreatest advantage to him in the course of life which he has c h o s e n.58 At least two points are of interest here. One is his clear distrust of theoretical speculation divorced from ^Quoted in James 0. Murray, Francis Wayland (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1891), pp. 164-165. 183 fact, his insistence that theory must always be "combined with application to matters of actual existence," and the other his desire to broaden the scope of collegiate educa tion so as to benefit all groups and classes of people in the community. One of his favorite ideas, as was true with Philip Lindsley, was to make higher education in some direct way serviceable to the working man, mechanic, farmer, and factory worker. Indeed, he admired the artisan no less than the scholar. In an address at the dedication of the Free Academy in Norwich, Connecticut, in 18S6, he said: I regard with special interest the announcement that young men are here to be fitted for the prac tical employments of life. . . . I look upon the practical arts as a great triumph of human intel lect. Our admiration for this sort of talent is legitimate. We do well to revere the genius of Milton and Dante and Goethe. But there is talent in a cotton-mi11 as well as Inin epic.59 In 1842 Wayland authored one of the most forceful and Influential pamphlets on the need for college reform to appear during the nineteenth century. In this document he argued persuasively that the existing impoverished con dition of the American college was due neither to the 59Ibid.. p. 178. poverty of the American people nor their indifference to education, but to the fact that the colleges were not properly answering public demand in the matter of higher education.6® He then proposed three plans by which col leges might better serve their conmunitiies and the nation. The first and simplest was to limit the number of studies offered "in such manner that whatever is taught may be taught thoroughly."61 The two things that always excited Wayland's abhorrence were religious intolerance and super ficiality in education. The second plan was to lengthen the college term from the conventional four years to six or seven so as to allow for thorough study of the new sub jects crowding into the curriculum. And the third plan, which Wayland recommended for Brown, was to make the col lege "more nearly to resemble a real University": . . . that is, to make it a place of education in all the most important branches of human learning. This might properly include instruction in all professional, as well as ante-professional science. It should comprise teaching in Latin, Greek, French, German, and Hebrew languages, Mathematics, Mechan ics, and all the branches of Natural Philosophy, Moral Philosophy, Intellectual Philosophy, Physical 60Mprancis wayland's Thoughts on the Present Collegiate System, 1842" in American Higher Education, pp. 335-375 et passim. 6IIbld.. p. 357. 185 Science In all Ice departments, Rhetoric and Its kindred literature, History, as well as Instruc tion In Law and Medicine.62 In 1850 Wayland came forth with a second report which was later to Influence such reformers as Henry Tappan and Charles W. Eliot. This time he vigorously criticized the colleges for diluting education and making It Increasingly superficial by accommodating new subjects within the old framework.^ The colleges, he charged, were turning out men who were not expert at anything at all. "The single academy at West Point," he added, "has done more toward the construction of railroads than all our . • . colleges united."**4 He appealed again for a course of study that would benefit all classes, and espe cially the rising middle class. He urged an end to the fixed four-year course and freedom for the student to carry, within limits, whatever load he wished. Finally, he proposed adding new courses in applied science, agri culture, law, and teaching. The Brown Corporation 62Ibid., p. 358. ^Francis Wayland, Report to the Corporation of Brown University on Changes in the System of Coiiegia'te Education (read March 287 1850) (Providence: 1850)7 64Ibid.. p. 18. 186 accepted the proposals and raised $125,000 to Implement them.^ But almost immediately the college ran into trouble. Enrollment increased, but not enough to support Wayland's expectations. The university was unable to offer enough courses to permit any real special ization. The faculty had difficulty adjusting the old rigid system of discipline to the new flexible curriculum. The new order attracted to Brown essentially a group of students of lower academic quality. By 1856 the faculty and corporation were in revolt, and Wayland was replaced that year by President Barnas Sears who made clear that he was prepared to return Brown to the safe ways of the past.66 Clearly the educational climate in America was not ready for the visionary Idealism of Francis Wayland nor would it be ready until well after the Civil War. Perhaps better than any man of his time, Francis Wayland epitomized the spirit of university teaching and the search for truth. In all of his teaching he sought to imbue his students with a fearless Independence of mind. He revered no system of philosophy or divinity, and though he disparaged none of the great religious dnd philosoph ical systests of the past, he held himself aloof from them and taught his students, in the spirit of Locke, to ^Rudolph, op. cit.. p. 239. 66Ibid. 187 "cherish your own conceptions," to look with "your own eyes."®^ It wee characteristic of Dr. Waylend ee en educa tor that he believed it essential to the highest and most enduring efficiency of a college presi dency that the president should be himself a teacher, and thus come into direct contact with the intellectual life of the college. . . • that the office of president could not be sunk in merely executive administration; that all the dignity and sacred responsibility of the official robe should Invest the higher office and functions of the teacher: that so only could the academic spirit be fully developed and maintained.68 Henry Tappan: Visionary Prophet Freedom--this is the grand characteristic of University Education, as it is the essential attribute of mankind. • . . --H. P. Tappan By 1850 the perennial cry, "What is wrong with our colleges?" was resounding throughout America. Francis Wayland had offered the diagnosis that education was advancing on the wrong track. The practical, active voca tions and professions, he had argued in his Thoughts on the Present Collegiate System, which had developed In response to the Industrial revolution and to increased ^Murray, op. cit., pp. 193-194. Ibid. 188 commercial activity were creating a whole new aocial class of merchants, manufacturers, mechanics, and skilled workers who were desirous and in need of education beyond the public school. Positions in city and county government, seats in state and national legislative chambers, and diplomatic posts were, at mid-century, as available to the successful merchant or manufacturer as to the learned pro fessor, doctor, or lawyer. To meet the new conditions in society, Wayland proposed drastic reform in the colleges. He attempted in the last years of his presidency at Brown to abolish the fixed four-year curriculum, adapt the length of a given course to fit the complexity of subject matter taught within it, allow every student to elect his own sequence of studies, and add new courses in chemistry, optics, geology, agriculture, political economy, history, and the science of teaching. Furthermore, he sought to make faculty members more dependent upon and responsive to the public they served. "Like any other man," he wrote, "the instructor will be brought directly in contact with the public, and his remuneration will be made to depend distinctly upon his industry and skill in his 189 profession.'*^ Wayland's solution to the problem was that of a shrewd businessman seeking to create a product which the public would want and would buy. He tried to conduct higher education on the broadest democratic principles and to open wide the college doors, but, from the very begin ning, the New England elite opposed him. Brown University was accused of cheapening educational standards and, In less than four years, a degree from Brown without the required work In Greek and Latin came to be considered second rate. Had Wayland, In the 1850s, been given the opportunity to try out his program at the University of Michigan things might have gone very differently for him. At Michigan a quite opposite solution was being attempted by Henry Philip Tappan (1805-1881), philosopher, educator, one-time professor of mental and moral philosophy at the University of the City of New York, and president of the University of Michigan. Like Wayland, Tappan found the American college grossly deficient, but deficient primarily because of its inability to measure up to the great univer sities of Europe, and more specifically to the German 69 Francis Wayland, Thoughts on the Present Colle giate System In the United States (Boston: Could and Lincoln, 16^2), pp. 62-63. 190 universities In which Tappan had just studied. In a slender volume titled University Education published in 1851, just a year after Wayland's influential second Report to the Brown Corporation, Tappan wrote: In our country we have no Universities. Whatever may be the names by which we choose to call our institutions of learning, still they are not Univer sities. They have neither libraries and material of learning, generally, nor the number of professors and courses of lectures, nor the large and free organization which go to make up Universities.7^ By "Universities" he meant, very simply: Cyclopedias of education: where, in libraries, cabinets, apparatus, and professors, provision is made for studying every branch of knowledge in full, for carrying forward all scientific investi gation; where study may be extended without limit, where the mind may be cultivated according to its wants, and where, in the lofty enthusiasm of grow ing knowledge and ripening scholarship, the bauble of an academical diploma is forgotten.71 Tappan saw clearly, as did Wayland, that the Asmrl- can college was not siinlstering to the vocational, prac tical, and political needs of the people. Far more significant to him was the fact that neither was the col lege ministering to the philosophical, scholarly, and literary needs of the nation. The university, Tappan 70Henry P. Tappan, University Education (New York: 1851), p. 50. 71Ibld.. p. 46. 191 argued, does not exist for the purpose of training "unpol ished men" to become "quick in calculation, and nice and skillful in mechanical works" nor solely to prepare young Inductees for the professions, rather, it serves that noble purpose of "quickening and informing souls with truths and knowledges, and giving them the power of using all their faculties aright in whatever direction they choose to exert them."72 Here the capacities of the mind are considered, and the system of education is shaped simply for educating— leading forth--unfolding these capacities. We now leave out of view the mere utilities of life, the demands of particular arts, the preparations for a particular profession. . . . The philosophical or ideal education does not abstract itself from the pursuits and ends of our human life, or lose sight of any of the great interests of the social state; on the contrary, it embraces them all, and that, too, under the highest points of view. It contem plates every man as having some proper work to perform for the common weal; but that, in order to perform it well, he requires the .cultivation of all his faculties, while in the doing of his work, he shall ripen more and m o r e .73 Tappan was not antipathetic to Wayland* s proposals for collegiate reform. He wrote: There are some features of this new organization [at Brown] which have very much the air of a 72Ibid.. p. 3. 192 University* The number of courses of instruction, the freedom of choice allowed to the student, end the abolition of the fixed term of four years, and the graduation of the time allotted to each partic ular course by the nature of the course itself-- all these seem to point to a U n i v e r s i t y ,^4 But some of the others of Wayland's proposals he found much less desirable and not at all part of the "legitimate idea of a University."7^ The very conception of adapting the Institution to the wants of "young men who are devoting them selves to the productive professions," Intimates that pupils will be received who have made very little scholastic preparation, and that, therefore, the courses intended for the "productive profes sions" will be quite elementary. The courses here proposed will undoubtedly be very useful to young men engaged in commerce and manufactures, and who propose to cultivate farms on scientific principles. The increase of students anticipated is likely to be chiefly from this class of youth; and thus, instead of the old college with Its Greek and Latin, and Mathematics, shall we not have a large commer cial institution, which, Instead of gathering around itself classical associations, and impressing us with the worth and dignity of scholarship, shall only give us the hum of preparation for the business of life in the Industrial and productive direction? The Letln and Greek scholars--the old-fashioned plodding students seeking after science and philos ophy for their own sake, and dreaming of high mental cultivation and profound learning, will be rarely seen, we fear, when candidates for the "productive professions" form the overwhelming majority and create the esprit de corps.7<* 74Ibid.. p. 68 75Ibid. 76Ibid.. p. 69. 193 Clearly, Wayland's plan for transforming the col lege, despite its many attractive features, would never bring forth the University that Tappan envisioned where philosophical education could be carried to its ultimate outcome. Like Jeremiah Day in the Yale Report, Tappan hoped to train the intellect but he did not propose to limit the curriculum to prescribed courses in classics and mathematics, and he was a vigorous opponent to the idea implicit in the Yale Report that the student was a passive receptacle waiting to be filled with learning. Unlike the typical college student accustomed to close supervision and "spoon feeding," the university student, in Tappan's view, was one who at the time of entry to the university had already acquired the necessary general knowledge and formed the desirable habits of study. He was one who knew how to hear the lecture of a professor to advantage, to use the library with profit, to carry on independent research in literature and science. Tappan distinguished sharply between the function of the university and the function of the college. He thought of education as being of two kinds: one, an educa tion imposed by tutors and governors, the other, self- imposed. The first was the education of one's childhood 194 and youth when the Intellectual faculties were still Immature and the knowledge to be acquired elementary in form and content. The second was the education begun in one's early manhood and carried on through life. The first period requires of necessity authori tative direction, and plastic superintendence. The second period is competent, unless the first has been neglected and suffered to run to waste, to form plans, make decisions, exercise choice, and to apply itself, as from Itself, to self-culture, the formation of character, and the duties of life. All men do, in some sort, attain to both kinds of Education; for all men are disciplined in some degree, well or ill, by a controlling power in early life; and all men have some sense of independence and new responsibilities, when they reach the age of manhood. Education, of both kinds, is a law of our being more or less perfectly developed.77 The purpose of the elementary school, the Gymnasia, and the college, Tappan continued, is to conduct the young citizen through the first period. But for the second, there is only one institution--the University. The University thus stands just where the first period of education closes, and where the other begins. The second period, indeed, never closes. But as education, during the first period, requires for its orderly development institutions of learn ing; so education during the second, requires for its proper determination and successful prosecution, the formation of habits of Independent thought and study, an acquaintance with method, and a general survey of the field of knowledge, such as can be 77Ibld.. p. 91. 195 gained only in an institution especially founded and furnished for these high ends. The University receives the alumnus of the Alma Mater, and ripens him into the man prepared for the offices of the Church and the State, and for the service of Science and Letters.78 In the year 1852, Tappan accepted the presidency of the University of Michigan, and for ten years struggled vainly to create there a great university molded to his vision. The struggle was to end in temporary failure. Michigan at mid-century was a frontier state torn by local jealousies and sectarian strife. Few of its prominent citizens whe could rise above the frontier rivalries, the pressures for social conformity, the patriotic fervor, to view with equanimity the idea of a tax-supported university modeled after Germanic originals. From the beginning, the new president's motives were misinterpreted and misunder stood. His ideals were ridiculed by press and clergy, his efforts to raise academic standards were castigated, and he was accused of being aristocratic and un-American.79 Typical of the journalistic abuse showered upon him during 78Ibid. 79Charles M. Perry, Henry Philip Tappan (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1933), p. 202. 196 his term of office was this newspaper account of one of his speeches: Of all the imitations of English aristocracy, German mysticism, Prussian lmpericj^ness, and Parisian nonsensities, he is altogether the most un-Americanized— the most completely foreignlzed specimen of an abnormal Yankee, we have ever seen. His thoughts, his oratory, his conversation, his social manners, his walk, and even his very prayers, are senseless mimicries of the follies of a rotten aristocracy over the sea. 80 The newspapers were not alone in attacking the university president. Numerous small sectarian colleges contributed their share of suspicion, opposition, and out right venom toward Tappan1s work. As Andrew D. White, for several years a history professor at Michigan during Tappan's administration, observed later in his Autobiog raphy : The worst difficulty by far which he had to meet was the steady opposition of the small sectarian colleges scattered throughout the State. Each, in its own petty interest, dreaded the growth of any institution better than itself; each stirred the members of the legislature from its locality to oppose all aid to the State university; each, in its religious assemblages, its synods, conferences, and the like, sought to stir prejudice against the State institution as "godless.** The result was that the doctor, in spite of his eloquent speeches, became the butt of various wretched demagogues in the 80Ibld. legislature, and he very rarely secured anything in the way of effective appropriations.81 In the spring of 1863, at the request of the Uni versity Regents, Tappan resigned from the presidency. He was fifty-eight years old and his career as an active participant in the shaping of an American university was at an end. In the fall of that year he returned to Europe where he sought "forgetfulness of the past, solace and repose, among the familiar friends and amidst the familiar scenes of the old world,"®^ Although Tappan1s efforts to launch a major univer sity at Michigan had foundered, a victim of sectarian bigotry and anti-intellectualism, it was but a temporary failure. Tappan had had the vision; he had already articulated the conditions, the purposes, the functions requisite to a great university; and now the task of actu ally establishing one fell to his heirs--Andrew Dickson White, professor of history at Michigan and first president of Cornell University, and Charles Kendall Adams, another Michigan faculty member and later president of the ®*Andrew D. White, Autobiography (New York: The Century Co., 1907), Vol. I, p. 279. 198 University of Wisconsin. These men would not fail. In the opinion of Andrew White: Dr. Tappan's work was great, indeed. He stood not only at the beginning of the Institution at Ann Arbor, but really at the beginning of the other universities of the Western States, from which the country is gaining so much at present, and is sure to gain vastly more in the future. The day will come when his statue will commemorate his services.83 So, today, we mention with respect the name of Henry Tappan who laid the foundation on which are built the great state universities of the West. These universities of the midwest, Rocky Mountain, and Pacific coast states have been shaped by two seemingly irreconcilable forces brought into a rough but working union: the one, the demo cratic and practical needs of the nineteenth century, and the other, Tappan*s vision of a university on the German plan embodying the ideals of intellectual freedom and scholarship. 83White, op. cit., p. 280 CHAPTER VI THE FOUNDING OF AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES, 1860-1900: PART I Andrew Dickson White: The "Cornell Idea*1 There I saw my ideal of a university not only realized, but extended and glorified--with renowned professors, with ample lecture-halls, with everything possible in the way of illus trative materials, with laboratories, museums, and a concourse of youth from all parts of the world. --A. D. White TWo events of the early 1860s were to have a pro found effect on the developing course of American higher education; one was the Civil War, and the other passage of the Morrill Act in 1862. The war was wasteful and destruc tive, impoverishing the South, robbing it of its youth and its wealth, leaving bitterness and hatred in its wake. For generations after the closing battle, a large proportion of the southern white population clung desperately to a romantic dream of an Old South that never was. In this environment colleges grew stagnant. The Morrill Act, on 199 200 the other hand, proved to be one of the most constructive and forward-looking measures ever adopted by the national legislature. For a number of years before its adoption, members of state legislative bodies and private individuals had struggled to establish colleges or technical institutes for the training of young men in agriculture and mechanics. Columbia (Kings College) had promised work in agricultural chemistry before 1800, and occasionally throughout the first half of the nineteenth century other colleges strove to develop courses more in keeping with the needs of an agrarian society, but generally without success.^ By mid-century the industrial potential of the country had developed to such an extent as to require better educated and more highly skilled workers than either the classical college or rural township could provide. Lindsley at Nashville, Wayland at Brown, Eliphalet Nott at Union, Benjamin Silliman at Yale, Louis Agassiz at Harvard, all recognized the need and attempted to do something about It, but their efforts were not popular. In 1857 Congress man Justin Morrill of Vermont introduced a bill in the House of Representatives that incorporated many of the ^-Edward Danforth Eddy, Jr., Colleges for Our Lend and Time (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957), pp. 1-22. 201 leading reform notions on technical education and proposed explicitly "to promote the liberal and practical education of the Industrial classes." But southern legislators opposed It and President Buchanan vetoed It. In 1862, after the South had withdrawn from the Union, Morrill Introduced his bill again, at which time It was passed and signed by President Lincoln. Among other provisions the bill put at the disposal of each state an amount of land equal to 30,000 acres for each senator and representative In Congress; the monies derived from the sale and use of this land were to be used . . . for the endowment, support, and maintenance of at least one college where 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 such manner as the Legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, In order to promote the liberal and practical education of the Industrial classes In the several pursuits and professions of life.3 One historian of the land-grant college movement, Earle D. Ross, characterized the Morrill legislation and 2Ibid.. p. 27. ^Walter P. Rogers, Andrew D. White and the Modem University (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1942), p. 58. 202 Its many beneficial results as . . . the outstanding, permanent achievement of the industrial movement in education which, starting in Europe, found greatest opportunity in a new land of exploitable resources and equalitarian traditions. The movement marked essentially an effort to bring instruction more in harmony with the rapidly chang ing economic and social order and to democratize technical education in consonance with the free school system of elementary education and the high school and state university at their levels. In practice it sought a direct application of the devel oping sciences to the new industries, with the main emphasis, in the days of the agricultural nation, upon the basic occupation.^ To be sure, not all of the results which followed immediately on passage of this act were equally auspicious. Some states like Oklahoma, Kansas, Washington, and Oregon used the funds derived from the sale of land to set up new and separate institutions in competition with existing state universities, accompanied by the "attendant log roll ing and wire pulling at the state legislature.And at least one state by 1900, Ohio, was supporting three differ ent state institutions all competing for public appropria tions. Four states, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and ^Earle D. Ross, "The 'Father* of the Land-Grant Colleges," Agricultural History. 12:159, April 1938. See also Rogers, op. cit.. p. 59. 5John Brubacher and Willis Rudy, Higher Education in Transition (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958), p. 156. 203 Iowa, used the land-grant funds to create A and M colleges out of previously chartered private colleges. In Connecti cut, the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale became the land-grant college; in Rhode Island, Brown; in New Hamp shire, Dartmouth; and in New Jersey, Rutgers.** But the states which probably used the land-grant funds to best advantage were those like Wisconsin, Minnesota, Georgia, and North Carolina, which added the support to existing state university endowments, and Indiana and New York, where the funds were combined with sizable independent benefactions to create strong new universities. In Indiana the land-grant fund was combined with the $100,000 gift from John Purdue, and in New York with the $500,000 gift from Ezra Cornell. Cornell University was located, at the request of its benefactor, at Ithaca, New York, where in the fall of the year "over the hills, the city, and the extended lake, lay the tinted blue of Indian summer." It grew out of the vision, energy and genius of two men, the Western Union magnate Ezra Cornell, and the University's first president Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918). At the opening day ^Frederick Rudolph, The American College and Uni versity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1962), p. 253. 204 ceremonies in October of 1868, President White set the tone for the new University and expressed the spirit of innova tion which would animate it. At Cornell, he said in his inaugural address, the liberal and practical studies would be united; control of the University would be nonsectarian; there would be no hierarchy of courses and no second-class students, all departments and courses would stand on equal footing and receive the same encouragement to develop and expand; and finally, the University would conduct itself as part of the whole system of public instruction within the State: it would not isolate itself from the school system, as so many existing colleges did, but would maintain a *'living connection with the system, [and] push its roots down into it and through it, drawing life from it and send ing life back into it."? White's concept of a successful and viable univer sity was an institution which welded together the voca- m tional schools approach required under the terms of the land-grant act and the German university idea of scholar ship and graduate study championed, among others, by Tappan at Michigan. As a younger man, White had been considerably ?Andrew D. White, Autobioaraphy (New York: The Century Co., 1907), Vol. I, p. 331. 205 Influenced by Tappan's educational Idealism and devotion to scholarship, so much so that he could record In his Auto biography: Dr. Tappan's work was great, Indeed. He stood not only at the beginning of the institution at Ann Arbor, but really at the beginning of the other universities of the Western States, from which the country is gaining so much at present, and is sure to gain vastly more in the future. . . . To no man is any success I may have afterward had in the administration of Cornell University so greatly due to him.& In concluding his appraisal of Henry Tappan and the extent of his contribution to the shaping of the university idea in America, White wrote: . • . the real beginning of a university in the United States, in the modern sense, was made by Dr. Tappan and his colleagues at Ann Arbor. Its only defects seemed to me that it included no technical side, and did not yet admit women. As to the first of these defects, the State had separated the agricultural college from the university, placing it in what, at that period, was a remote swamp near the State Capitol, and had as yet done nothing toward providing for other technical branches. As to the second, though a few of us favored the admis sion of women, President Tappan opposed it; and, probably, in view of the condition of the university and of public opinion at that time, his opposition was wise.9 As president of Cornell University Andrew White was to 8Ibid.. pp. 280-281. 9Ibid.. p. 292. 4 206 remedy both of these defects in the structure and adminis tration of American higher education. The success of White's plan for Cornell was evi dent from the beginning. On opening day he had a faculty of sixteen resident and six nonresident professors and an enrolled student body of 400. Moreover, "he had experi enced that incredible luxury for an American institution of higher learning of actually rejecting fifty applicants for admission."^ Each student was given his choice of field of study from among those offered in the classics, modem literature, science, and vocational studies. The student then built a program of courses within the field of his choice. To keep scholastic and scholarship stand ards at a high level, White employed a number of different devices. He invited distinguished scholars to come to Cornell as nonresident professors for varying lengths of time. In this way he brought to the campus such men as Louis Agassiz, James Russell Lowell, Bayard Taylor, Theodore Dwight, and others. There is little doubt but that the presence of these distinguished scholars had a stimulating effect on the rural youth who made up the ^Rudolph, oj>. cit.. p. 267. 207 greater part of Cornell's enrollment. Also, White was careful, In selecting his faculty, not to employ teachers solely on the recommendation of their friends. He wanted no pedants on his faculty, no "gerund-grinders" who mistook syntax for literature, substituted dates for history or formulas for science. His method was to seek out recog nized authorities, such as Agassiz, and obtain personal Information from them as to the young scholars and teachers most likely to make a success of their work at Cornell. He sought young men "who have a name to make and can make lt."^ Describing the method In retrospect, White wrote: This Idea was carried out to the letter. The most eminent men In various universities gave us confi dential advice; and thus It was that I was enabled to secure a number of bright, active, energetic young men as our resident professors, mingling with them two or three older men, whose experience and developed judgment seemed necessary In the ordinary conduct of our affairs .*2 One of White's most Important contributions to the development of American higher education was his strong advocacy of graduate study and Instruction. Prior to the Civil War organized graduate study In America had been practically nonexistent. Once the student had completed ^Whlte, op. clt.. p. 337. 12Ibld. the traditional four-year classical course in the college of his choice he found his formal education at an end. If he wished a Master's degree he could have one conferred upon him "in course," for a nominal fee, three years after his graduation as a Bachelor of Arts. If, then, he wanted a Ph.D., he went to Europe. In 1861 Yale granted the first earned Ph.D. in America,^ but not for another ten years did that college succeed in organizing a distinct graduate division of studies. In his Plan for the Organization of Cornell Univer sity. White made provision for a Department of Medicine and Surgery and a Department of L a w . Unfortunately, univer sity finances precluded the organization of these graduate schools until some years after White's presidency had ended. He did, however, succeed in inaugurating a strong program of nonprofessional graduate Instruction before leaving the presidency in 1885. Time and again during the early years of the University he recommended to the govern ing board that "Fellowships for Post-Graduate Study" be ^Rudolph, op. cit.. p. 269. established.15 Finally, in the last years of his presi dency, the financial condition of the University was so Improved as to make possible seven fellowships bearing an annual value of four hundred dollars. Slight though this may seem to us today, it was enough at the time to estab lish graduate studies at Cornell on a firm and lasting foundation. Andrew White's educational vision extended far beyond the range of a single university. Like Jefferson and John Stuart Mill he put his faith in an Intellectual elite and saw public education as a winnowing process from which would emerge the literate and articulate leaders needed to direct the destinies of the nation. Hence he opposed every element in education which might deny oppor tunity to superior minds. He worked vigorously and unceasingly to destroy the influence exerted by sectarian colleges, to break down the rigidities of the classical curriculum and introduce studies more relevant to a dynamic and rapidly changing society, and to attract to Cornell the most brilliant researchers and lecturers and the best qualified students, regardless of wealth or social 15Ibid. 210 position.I** Throughout his long and distinguished career as faculty member, university president, and United States diplomat, Andrew White was in the forefront of the post- Civil War national effort to secularize higher education and to prepare young men and women for the rapidly increas ing variety of specialized and technical occupations. Speaking to the alumni of Cornell in 1908, the former University president asserted once again the basic conviction of his educational philosophy that "the aim of a university should be the upbuilding of civilization in its highest sense," and that in this development of civil ization "the two great factors are the development of society and the development of the individual." Of these two factors he was convinced that the development of the individual was the more important, and that the high devel opment of the individual was a real condition precedent to the development of society. "I believe," White concluded, "that whatever else we do, we must steadily plan and labor, not only to make men and women skillful in the various professions and avocations of life, but to cultivate and ^Rogers, op. cit.. pp. 120 ff. 211 bring out the best In them as men and women. White's genius and energy led to a whole new career as diplomat, statesman, and presidential advisor following his retirement from the Cornell presidency. That the University was never far from his thoughts Is attested to by this paragraph from the chapter In his Autobiography titled "Concluding Years." During my life, which Is now extending beyond the allotted span of threescore and ten, I have been engaged, after the manner of my countrymen, In many sorts of work, have become Interested In many conditions of men, have joined In many efforts which I hope have been of use; but most of all, I have been Interested In the founding and maintain ing of Cornell University, and by the part I have taken In that, more than by any other work of my life, I hope to be judged.18 Charles W. Eliot; Growth and Progress at Harvard A university must.be Indlgenuous; It must be rich; but, above all, It must be free. The winnowing breese of freedom must blow through all Its chambers. — C. W. Eliot When Charles W. Eliot, aged fifteen, entered Her vard College In September of 1849, he was one of eighty- seven entering freshmen, seventy-two of whom hailed from ^From the Cornell Alumni News. June 24, 1908, quoted In Rogers, op. clt.. p. 215. ^Hfhite, o£. clt.. p. 443. 212 Massachusetts. The studies which he pursued during the next four years were all prescribed and limited in scope* The Harvard teaching staff of thirteen, including President Sparks, drilled the boys in Latin, Greek and mathematics, taught them some history and a little natural science. When the boys became seniors they were allowed a glimpse of European literature by means of Professor Longfellow's weekly lectures. Instruction throughout consisted of drill, memorization, and daily recitation; frequently, the class period was given over to declamations and rhetorical exercises. Undergraduate conduct was governed by an elabo rate code of disciplinary ordinances, and a boy's academic standing depended as much upon the purity of his deport ment as upon the quality of his academic work, "so that a docile but stupid lamb might outrank a superior scholar who was caught in a good many pranks."^ Thirty-six years later, on the eve of Harvard's two hundred fiftieth anniversary, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences numbered sixty-one; it was complemented by a graduate medical faculty of twenty-two and a law faculty of six. The undergraduate enrollment numbered 1,077 students 19Henry James, Charles W. Eliot (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1930), Vol. I, p. 38. 213 from forty-two different states and foreign countries.20 But faculty and student growth were not the only indices of change at Harvard during these three short decades. By 1886 the only required courses in the college were fresh man English, French (or German), and forensics (dropped in 1897). The student could earn his Bachelor's degree by passing eighteen courses, all elective but for the excep tions noted above. Indeed, not even two of the courses had to be related. The student, at the time of admission, was presented a menu of 153 full and 61 half-courses, 21 exclusive of seminars, from which to make his selection. * Parallel with the enrichment, broadening, and freeing of the curriculum was a gradual change in teaching method. Daily recitations were eliminated in all but the elementary languages and mathematics courses, and replaced by lecture, discussion, and Socratic colloquies between teacher and student. So dramatic was the change in method that at the Commencement dinner in 1886, James Freeman Clarke announced, with appropriate irony: 20Ihese figures are from "Statistics of Growth, 1869-1936," in Samuel Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1937), p. 490. 21Ibid., p. 346. 214 Formerly, the only business of a teacher was to hear recitations, and make marks for merit. Now, he has the opportunity of teaching. This is one of the greatest educational discoveries of modern times*-that the business of a teacher is to teach.22 The man largely responsible for this amasing prog ress in a nineteenth century American college was Charles William Eliot (1834-1926) who was named President of Harvard at the age of 35, and held that position with dis tinction for 40 years, from 1869 to 1909. The year Eliot assumed the presidency, the United States was busily caught up in the most spectacular indus trial and technological revolution that a society had ever known. A railroad spanned the continent, an army of home steaders was wiping out the western frontier, steel mills in Ohio and woolen mills in New England were running full blast, the potential for individual and national wealth seemed without limit, and numbers of young, energetic col lege presidents and faculty were vowing not to be left behind.^ Yale bad inaugurated a graduate school; Cornell was flourishing unhampered by dusty tradition; Princeton had just named an energetic Scottish philosopher to its presidential chair; in New York, F. A. P. Barnard was grooming Columbia for university status, and the state universities of Michigan, Wisconsin, and California were building rapidly. In this atmosphere the Harvard Corpora- tion was faced with a difficult decision: it could elect Andrew Peabody, then acting president, to the president's chair and continue the respectable calm of the previous administration; or it could elect Charles Eliot, feared by the classicists and despised by the scientists,but, nevertheless, a youthful, vigorous and articulate spokes man for change and progress in the American college. After much debate, first the Corporation and then the Overseers voted, and on May 19 sent Ralph Waldo Emerson, who at 66 was "the youngest and least imposing member"^ of the selections counittee, to inform Mr. Eliot that he was President of Harvard College. That the Harvard Corporation and Overseers had made a wise choice became publicly evident on a chilly October day when Eliot delivered his inaugural address. In the words of a biographer, Eliot appeared before his 24Ibid.. p. 327. ^Eliot's own characterization of Emerson, quoted in James, op. cit.. p. 200. 216 distinguished audience . . . tall, serious, standing on the threshold of his new career, with the calm look of a man whose patience and strength would be inexhaustible, stating plain views about hot questions in a voice whose beauty filled the church to the farthest recesses of the balconies. That mysterious sense of a presence, more certain to command attention than the physical touch of a hand, was already his to convey and communicated itself to the audience with his first simple sentence. It was palpable that the heart of the matter was behind the words, was the man who would turn out to be a doer . . . a man In whose nature there was Iron and whose iron was already magnetixed.26 The address that Eliot delivered "with a precise diction and in a deep mellow voice"2? was one of the most momentous and prophetic in the entire history of American higher education. It was prophetic because Eliot survived long enough as president, and was imaginative and vigorous enough to realize most of his reform proposals. The open ing sentences cut clearly through the fifty-yeat-old controversy between classical and scientific education and left no doubt in -the hearer's mind as to the new presi dent's Intention to make of Harvard College a great univer sity. 26Ibid.. pp. 234-235. 2?Morison, op. cit.. p. 329. 217 The endless controversies whether language, philosophy, mathematics, or science supplies the best mental training, whether general education should be chiefly literary or chiefly scientific, have no practical lesson for us today. This Uni versity recognises no real antagonism between literature and science, and consents to no such narrow alternatives as mathematics or classics, science or metaphysics. We would have them all, and at their best. To observe keenly, to reason soundly, and to Imagine vividly are operations as essential as that of clear and forcible expres sion; and to develop one of these faculties, It Is not necessary to repress and dwarf the others. A university Is not closely concerned with the applications of knowledge, until Its general education branches Into professional. Poetry and philosophy and science do Indeed conspire to promote the material welfare.of mankind; but science no more than poetry finds Its best war rant In Its utility. Truth and right are above utility In all realms of thought and action.28 The delivery lasted an hour and three quarters, during which time one "might have heard a pin drop, save when the old arches rang with thunders of applause."29 as one witness noted In his diary: I had looked for a very good, sound discourse, but this went far beyond all I had expected! It was In style clear, elegant, and terse; In matter com prehensive and critical. His views of what a University should be were beyond prose. Such a volley never was fired before In these old walls; 2®"Inaugural Address of Dr. Eliot" in Charles W. Eliot, the Man and His Beliefs. W. A. Neilson,~ed. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1926), Vol. I, p. 1. p. 228. 2^John Fiske to his wife, quoted in James, op. clt., 218 and yet there was nothing "radical11 about it. They were one and all content with this address--most even were enthusiastic!30 Eliot's principal criticism of the American college was directed not at the content, inadequate though he thought it was, but at the method of instruction--a note he sti^uck very early in the inaugural: Not nature, but an unintelligent system of Instruc tion from the primary school through the college, is responsible for the fact that many college graduates have so inadequate a conception of what is meant by scientific observation, reasoning, and proof. It is possible for the young to get actual experience of all the principal methods of thought. There is a method of thought in language, and a method in mathe matics, and another of natural and physical science, and another of faith. With wise direction, even a child would drink at all these springs. The actual problem to be solved is not what to teach, but how to teach.31 To improve the quality of instruction he made some very specific proposals. Of the teaching of language, he said: The University believes in the thorough study of language. It contends for all languages--Oriental, Greek, Latin, Romance, German, and especially for the mother-tongue; seeing in them all one institu tion, one history, one means of discipline, one department of learning. In teaching languages, it is for this American generation to invent, or to accept from abroad, better tools than the old; to ^From Theodore Lyman's Diary for Wednesday, October 19, 1863, quoted in James, op. cit., pp. 227-228. ^"Inaugural Address of Dr. Eliot," p. 3. 219 devise, or to transplant from Europe, prompter and more comprehensive methods than the prevailing; and to command more Intelligent labor, In order to gather rapidly and surely the best fruit of that culture and have time for other harvests.3^ And of the teaching of science: The University recognises the natural and phys ical sciences as Indispensable branches of educa tion, and has long acted upon this opinion; but It would have science taught In a rational way, objects and Instruments In hand— not from books merely, not through the memory chiefly, but by the seeing eye and the Informing fingers.*3 Of Instruction in history: [It] cannot be taught from books alone, but must be vivified and illustrated by teachers of active, comprehensive, and judicial mind. To learn by rote a list of dates is not to study history. Mr. finer- son says that history Is biography. In a deep sense this Is true. Certainly, the best way to Impart the facts of history to the young is through the quick interest they take in the lives of the men and women who fill great historical scenes or epitomise epochs. From the centers so established, their intereet may be spread over great areas. For the young especially, it is better to enter with intense sympathy into the great moments of history, than to stretch a thin attention through its weary centuries.34 And of philosophy: ^Ibid.. p. 5. 33Ibid.. p. 6. 34Ibid.. p. 7. 220 Philosophical subjects should never be taught with authority. They are not established sciences; they are full of disputed matters, open questions, and bottomless speculations. It is not the func tion of the teacher to settle philosophical and political controversies for the pupil, or even to recommend to him any one set of opinions as better than another. Exposition, not imposition, of opinions is the professor's part. The student should be made acquainted with all sides of these controversies, with the salient points of each sys tem; he should be shown what is still in force of institutions or philosophies mainly outgrown, and what is new in those now in vogue. The very word "education" is a standing protest against dogmatic teaching. The notion that education consists in the authoritative inculcation of what the teacher deems true may be logical and appropriate in a convent, or a seminary for priests, but it is intolerable in universities and public schools, from primary to professional. The worthy fruit of academic culture is an open mind, trained to care ful thinking, instructed in the methods of philo sophic investigation, acquainted in a general way with the accumulated thought of past generations, and penetrated with humility.35 Eliot then touched upon what was to become the most controversial issue during the first two decades of his administration, the idea of the elective system. "Only a few years ago," he said, "all students who graduated at this College passed through one uniform curriculum. . . . The individual student had no choice of either subjects or teachers."36 Such an education, he argued, does not 35jbid., pp. 7-8. 36Ibid.. p. 10. sufficiently attend to the individual traits of different minds. The young man of nineteen or twenty is the best judge of what he likes and is most fit for. "If his previ ous training has been sufficiently wide, he will know by that time whether he is most apt at language or philosophy or natural science or mathematics. If he feels no loves, he will at least have hates."37 Once the young man knows what "his own peculiar faculty" is, let him concentrate and develop it. Hence, the University must be ready to offer instruction in a wide range of subjects. But Eliot was careful not to convey the idea that the University was to be a training ground for the vocations and professions. The range of elective studies is large, though there are some striking deficiencies. The liberty of choice of subject is wide, but yet has very rigid limits. There is a certain framework which must be filled; and about half the material of the filling is prescribed. The choice offered to the student does not lie between liberal studies and professional or utilitarian studies. All the studies which are open to him are liberal and dis ciplinary, not narrow or s p e c i a l .38 Finally, he concluded his argument for the elective system with a debater's tour de force: 37Ibid., p. 12. 38Ibid.. p. 13. 222 The elective system fosters scholarship, because it gives free play to natural preferences and inborn aptitudes, makes possible enthusiasm for a chosen work, relieves the professor and the ardent disciple of the presence of a body of students who are com pelled to an unwelcome task, and enlarges instruc tion by substituting many and various lessons given to small, lively classes, for a few lessons many times repeated to different sections of a numerous class.39 Eliot's obvious strong commitment to self-reliance and self-expression must have gained a sympathetic response from that inaugural day audience which included Francis Parkman, Louis Agassiz, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. His proposal for an elective system gave clear evidence that he had rejected the old faculty psy chology in favor of a psychology of individual differences. Thus he found support from many Americans already imbued with democratic ideals of individual rights and responsi bilities, of the uniqueness of human personality, and of the need for equal opportunity, ideals which had been expressed by men like Emerson and Thoreau, Jefferson and Lincoln. Eliot's elective system was an obvious but seldom-practiced outgrowth of those ideals. Moreover, it was only with such a device as the elective system that Eliot could hope to move Harvard away from its provincial 223 New England orientation and to inspire it to become national in its interests and contributions. Finally, it was only by the elective principle that Harvard could be made to grow so as to Include departments for the new physical and natural sciences, and to encourage new re* search and new methods of learning. Gradually, under Eliot's masterful leadership, prescription was abandoned and the principle of election adopted. In 1872 all subject requirements for seniors were abolished. In 1879 all subject requirements for juniors were abolished. In 1884 the sophomores were liberated, and in 1883 subject requirements were materially reduced for freshmen. By 1894 a Harvard freshman's only required courses were rhetoric and a modern language. By 1897 the pre scribed course of study at Harvard had been reduced to a year of freshman rhetoric. During the forty years in which the elective principle was insinuat ing its way into every aspect of Harvard life, the faculty was growing from sixty to six hundred and the endowment from two to twenty million dollars.^0 In 1891 Eliot lectured on "The Aims of the Higher f Education," offering perhaps his best and most mature statement of the functions and purposes of the American university. He identified "three principal, direct func tions" of universities. First, ^°Rudolph, og. cit.. p. 294 224 they teach; secondly, they accumulate great stores of organized and systematized knowledge In the form of books and collections; thirdly, they Investigate, or, in other words, they seek to push out a little beyond the present limits of knowledge, and learn, year after year, day after day, some new truth. They are teachers, storehouses, and searchers for truth.41 Regarding the first function, that of teaching, Eliot said the university teaches all the languages which have preserved great literatures, modern history, the institutions of government, all that man has learned about the structure of the human mind and body, all that he has learned about "the broad realm of nature," and, finally, the university "must set before its pupils the literatures of the world--the precious fruit of the human imagination in its farthest reaches--and it must interpret those great ideals of our race, virtue, duty, piety, and righteous n e s s . " ^ These are all included within the liberal arts and sciences. Beyond this lie the professional studies; the university undertakes to prepare young men for all the learned or scientific professions. The divisions between the various professional schools, Eliot continued, are deep and wide; nevertheless, in a true university the same 41"The Aims of Higher Education" by C. W. Eliot, in Neilson, op. cit.. pp. 72-73. 42Ibid.» p. 73. 225 spirit pervades all alike, "the spirit of modern science-- candid, fearless, truth-seeking, searching for the fact regardless of the consequences,"^*3 Elaborating on the second function, the university as a storehouse, Eliot said that great collections in libraries and museums are a costly but essential necessity to the intellectual progress of the nation. And of the last, the truth-seeking function, Eliot held that a univer sity is "a society of learned men • . . each prepared to push forward a little the present limits of knowledge." Hence universities are places of research, of dili gent inquiry for new or forgotten truth. This function is quite as Indispensable as either of the two former. It is indispensable for two reasons: first, because a university which is not a place of research will not long continue to be a good place of teaching; and, secondly, because this incessant, quiet, single-minded search after new truth is the condition of both material and Intellectual prog ress for the nation and for the ra c e,44 This last function--ttie search for truth— Eliot believed to be the essential informing spirit of the university, that which forever animates the institution and impels it forward to new achievement and new heights of discovery and insight. Speaking to the Harvard alumni 43Ibid.. p. 74. 44Ibid.. p. 79. 226 toward the close of his long and successful presidency, Eliot stated the essence of the university In this way: When you occasionally come to Cambridge, per haps on the tenth, the fifteenth, the twentieth, the fiftieth anniversary of your graduation, you will find a large mechanical or external change in the University. The old buildings and old trees are carefully preserved; but we plant new ones. You will see new fences, new gates, new buildings, and a better care of the grounds . . . indeed, a great external change at Harvard, and many internal changes by growth; but the informing spirit is the same. Our motto remains the same— "Truth." There never was a better, and there never will be.45 James McCosh: Prescription and Election I think every educated man will allow that in all this we have a studium generale which is the essence of a university. — J. McCosh President Eliot was asked to defend the virtues of his elective system in a three-cornered debate with Yale's president Noah Porter and Princeton's president James McCosh in New York in 1885. Before a small but distin guished audience assembled in a private residence under the auspices of the Nineteenth Century Club, Eliot pleaded for a wide extension of the elective system and again expressed his confidence in the ability of young men to assess their ^Charles W. Eliot, The Training for an Effective Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1915), pp. 86-87. 227 own talents and make wise course selections. Porter could not be present but McCosh rose to criticize the wide liberty granted at Harvard and to defend his own plan of studies In practice at Princeton. "We In Princeton believe In a trinity of studies:" McCosh said, "In Language and Literature, In Science, and In Philosophy. Every educated man should know so much of each of these. Without this, man's varied faculties are not trained, his nature is not fully developed and may become malformed." Resting his case on the old faculty psychology, McCosh argued: Education is essentially the training of the mind— as the word educare denotes— the drawing forth of the faculties which God has given us. This it should especially be in a University, in a Studium Generale, as it used to be called. The powers of mind are numerous and varied, the senses, the memory, the fancy, judgment, reasoning, conscience, the feelings, the will; the mathematical, the meta physical, the mechanical, the poetical, the prosaic . . . all these should be cultivated, the studies necessary to do so should be provided, and the student required so far to attend to them, that the young man by exepcise may know what powers he has and the mental frame be fully developed.47 ^James McCosh, "The New Departure in College Edu cation, Being a Reply to President Eliot's Defense of It in New York," in American Higher Education, edited by R. Hofstadter and W. ^mlth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), Vol. II, p. 721. 47Ibid., p. 719. 228 Thus, two divergent paths for American higher edu cation were marked out. Eliot's touchstones were a strong commitment to science, acceptance of nineteenth century liberalism, and adherence to a doctrine of intellectual freedom for the professor and investigator and free elec tives for the student. McCosh, on the other hand, would achieve the objectives of higher education through mental discipline, limited electives for advanced students, and a carefully cultivated religious atmosphere. The debate achieved national prominence, was discussed throughout the nation, and loosed a flood of letters to the newspapers. The consensus supported McCosh.But if McCosh won the day, Eliot won the argument; for by the end of the century most of the large colleges and universities had adopted the elective principle, and even Princeton and Yale were moving toward its adoption. Not until after two world wars and a depression in the twentieth century would educators be jolted out of their complacent acceptance of human nation ality and social progress and undertake a second more critical examination of the elective principle— but that is a story for a later chapter. ^®Thomas J. Wertenbaker, Princeton 1746-1896 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946), p. 307. 229 Before coming to Princeton James McCosh had been a Scotch Presbyterian minister, author, and professor of logic and metaphysics in Belfast. When he came to Prince ton in 1868 he brought a wide acquaintance with the uni versities of the Old World. A graduate of two Scottish universities, he had often visited Oxford and Cambridge and investigated many leading universities in Germany, Switzerland, and Holland. Thus was he splendidly equipped to bring to Princeton the best from European systems of higher learning. In his inaugural address he outlined his theories of education and the policies he intended to pursue. The highest aim of the college, he believed, was to draw out and improve innate faculties. Next in importance was the imparting of such knowledge as would be useful in future life, not "dull and crabbed work" merely for the sake of mental discipline and not professional and vocational instruction, but rather the accepted university scheme of studies that included classics, mathematics, mental and moral science, political economy, literature, aesthetics, modern languages, and what was in that time high novelty-- physical training. A third aim of the college was to foster scholarship among the faculty. 230 Those who are placed in the offices of a university should aim at something more than being merely teachers of a restricted body of young men. The youths who are under them and who look to them will be greatly stimulated to study by the very circum stance that their professor is a man of wide sympa thies and connections with the literature or science of the country. And finally, as the glory of every alma mater is her chil dren, it was the aim of McCosh and of Princeton "to send forth a host of able ministers, lawyers, physicians, businessmen. In his inaugural address, he proceeded to discuss modes of teaching, the need for fellowships and graduate course work, standards of scholarship, and the superlative importance of professorial teaching as opposed to the tutorial system. He was ever careful not to convey the idea that he meant to impose the European system of col lege education on the American; I have no design, avowed or secret, to revolutionize your American colleges, or reconstruct them after a European model. I have seen enough of the American colleges to become convinced that they are not rashly to be meddled with. They are the spontaneous growth of your position and intelligence; they are associated with your history, and have become 49Quoted in ibid., pp. 292-293. 50Ibid.. p. 293. Adjusted to your wants, and whatever improvements they admit of must be built on the old foundation.51 During the first year of his administration McCosh set about to modify the old inflexible curriculum to which Princeton had adhered for so many decades. He instituted, with faculty approval, a curriculum consisting of a core of required courses and a superstructure of electives for training in special fields. Thus, after completing the core requirements in Latin and Greek, mathematics and logic, mental and moral science, theological students would properly concentrate on Greek and philosophy, medical stu dents on chemistry and physiology, law students on polit ical science, and so forth. But, he warned, the liberal studies must always precede specialization. Let the student first be taken, as it were, to an eminence, whence he may behold the whole country, with its connected hills, vales and streams lying below him, and then be encouraged to dive down into some special place, seen and selected from the height, that he may linger in it, and explore it minutely and t h o r o u g h l y .52 Among the required studies, the classical languages were of special importance. McCosh considered Greek the ^The Life of James McCosh. an autobiographical account, edited by W. M. Sloane (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1896), p. 191. ^Quoted in Wertenbaker, op. cit., p. 293. 232 noblest language of antiquity, valuable not only for training the mind but for opening the door to a literature of unsurpassed beauty. "If our colleges discard Latin and Greek," McCosh declared, "the whole ancient world with its thoughts and deeds will remain very much unknown even to 53 our educated men." Furthermore, he argued that, inas much as Greek is the language of the New Testament, . . . a college which does not require Greek will not prepare many to go forth as ministers or missionaries. This would be a great evil, not only to the churches, but also to the community gener ally. The devout young men who are studying for the ministry have a restraining and elevating influence in a c o l l e g e .54 As a widely recognized leader in the Presbyterian Church, McCosh*s theological views were well known. It came as a great surprise to conservative Presbyterians, therefore, when he announced in 1873 that he had accepted the theory of evolution. The time had come, he believed, to give up the old literal interpretation of Genesis and to reread what it taught in the light of scientific dis coveries. But he saw in Darwin no contradiction of Chris tianity and no reason for admitting infidelity in the ^"Report to Board of Trustees, November 13, 1884," inWertenbaker, op. clt.. p. 305. ^The Life of James McCosh. p. 203. 233 colleges of Europe and America. "I am happy to report," he could say to the Board of Trustees in 1874, that there Is little disposition in this college towards scepticism or scoffing. 1 do my best to guard against these. But 1 do this not by keeping the young men ignorant of prevailing errors, or by an empty denunciation of them--from a large obser vation I am able to say that this is the most effective of all means to produce infidelity. I encourage freedom of thought and expression among the students and seek to guide it aright. I state the errors of the day and then show the students how to meet t h e m .55 Perhaps no statement more clearly manifests the internal conflict in American higher education during the second half of the nineteenth century than this. Here is the urge to intellectual freedom, the encouragement of free thought and expression, but bounded and limited by tutorial guidance and religious prescription. When McCosh came to Princeton, it was a small sectarian college with an enrollment of 264, a faculty of ten, a library of 14,000 volumes, a rigidly prescribed curriculum, and no opportunities for graduate study. When he retired in 1888 Princeton was well on the way to becom ing a university with an undergraduate enrollment of 604, a faculty of thirty-five, a library approaching 100,000 55"Report to Board of Trustees, 1874," in Wertenbaker, op. cit.. p. 311. 234 volumes making it the second largest college library In the country, a curriculum of required core studies but numerous electives for upper division students, graduate fellowships and graduate course work. Throughout the years he had labored to establish a Studturn Generale which in the Middle Ages had constituted a university. His greatest disappointment arose from the fact that many of Princeton's benefactors, desiring to retain the old time college, would not support his efforts to build at Prince ton a great university. "1 was so vain as to think," he wrote after his retirement, "that out of our available materials 1 could have constructed a university of a high order." I would have embraced in it all that is good in our college; in particular, I would have seen that it was pervaded with religion, as the college is. . . . But this privilege has been denied me. I have always been prepared to contend with the enemies of the college, but I am not ready to fight with its greatest benefactors; so I retire. The college has been brought to the very borders [of a university], and I leave it to another to carry it over into the land of promise.56 56Life of James McCosh. p. 214. CHAPTER VII THE FOUNDING OF AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES, 1860-1900: PART II Daniel Colt Gilman: A Policy of Intellectual Freedom If we would maintain a university, great freedom must be allowed to both teachers and scholars. This involves freedom of methods to be employed by the instructors on the one hand, and, on the other, freedom of courses to be selected by the students. --Daniel C. Gilman In the decades following the Civil War, American institutions of higher learning, stimulated by fresh con ceptions of teaching and scholarship, imported largely from Germany, began to expand rapidly in two directions. Horizontally, the colleges expanded to include varying kinds of professional and vocational schools. To the faculties of law, theology, and medicine, Inherited from medieval times, the emerging American universities added schools of engineering and agriculture and, after the turn of the century, schools of education, journalism, business 235 236 administration, dentistry, and others. Coupled with the expansions by addition of schools and academic departments came a bewildering array of offices, services, institutes and bureaus. Vertically, the colleges expanded by estab lishing fellowships and opportunities for graduate study and by granting earned master's and doctoral degrees. Older Institutions like Harvard, Yale, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania expanded by simply grafting professional faculties to the classical college and by more or less breaking free of the religious affili ations which characterized their founding. State univer sities like Georgia, North Carolina and Michigan, which had existed in name only or struggled along on irregular legislative subsidies and private contributions, suddenly found it possible with land grant funds and increasing public support to realize many of the aims of Jefferson and Lindsley and to educate not only the classical student for the ministry or law but also the farmer and the mechanic, the merchant, and the civil servant.1' The state universities also opened their doors to both men and women ^Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1962), pp. 270 ff. 237 and in many states came to serve as capstones to integrated statewide educational systems. Still a third type of uni versity included those like Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Leland Stanford, and the University of Chicago which owed their existence to some great benefactor who provided the endow ment and who indicated more or less stringently how the institution was to be governed. Ecclesiastical endowments created a fourth type of university in the post-Civil War era and marked the founding of the Catholic University, the Methodist University in Washington, D.C., and the Church University of the South at Sewanee.2 In spite of differences in origin, size of endow ment, or heritage of tradition, these Institutions had much in common. In all of them the idea of liberal education was preserved and the traditional notion of a college training antecedent to professional study was retained. In all of them one could find professors who were dedicated not only to the perpetuation of an inherited store of knowledge through teaching but also to the increase of knowledge through research. And all of them honored in name, if not always in practice, the German university 2Ibid. 238 traditions of lehrfrslhelt and lernfralhcit. As practiced in the German universities during the nineteenth century, lernfreiheit denoted the freedom of the student to wander from one place to another choosing his courses of study at will, responsible for no regular attendance, and exempt from all tests save the final examinations* The term lehrfreihelt encompassed two con cepts. The first was the freedom of the professor to teach his subject as he saw fit and the second, his freedom to enquire and publish his findings.3 in the words of Friedrich Paulsen, philosopher and historian of the German university: The content of instruction is not prescribed for the academic teacher; he is, as searcher as well as teacher, attached to no authority; he himself answers for his own instruction and is responsible to no one else* Opposite him is his student with complete freedom to accept or reject; he is not a pupil but has the privilege of the critic or the Improver. There is only one aim' for both: the truth; only one yardstick: the agreement of thought with reality and with no other outside authority.^ With the grafting of German Ideals of academic freedom and ^Walter P. Metzger, Academic Freedom in the Age of the University (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), pp. lli-113. ^Friedrlck Paulsen, "Die akademische Freiheit," quoted in ibid., p. 115. 239 research to existing American conceptions of higher educa tion after the Civil War, the American university came of age. Probably no man did more to imbue the American educational tradition with German academic ideals than Daniel Coit Gilman (1831-1908), first president of Johns Hopkins University. As a young man just out of Yale, Gilman had traveled through Europe with his friend, Andrew White, and had studied closely the organization and func tioning of German universities. Returning to America, he was appointed professor of physical geography and director of the Yale College library, positions he held for the next seventeen years. In 1872 Gilman accepted the presidency of the University of California and there for three years struggled to make of that university something more than an agricultural and vocational college.^ In 1875 he was elected to the presidency of the newly-endowed Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and, in his letter of acceptance, penned one of the most eloquent statements ever to be made on the subject of academic freedom: The Institution we are about to organize would not be worthy the name of a University, if it were to ^Rudolph, op. cit.. pp. 269-270. 240 be devoted to any other purpose than the discovery and promulgation of the truth; and It would be Ignoble In the extreme If the resources would have been given by the Founder without restrictions, were limited to the maintenance of ecclesiastical differences or perverted to the promotion of political strife. As the spirit of the University should be that of intellectual freedom in the pursuit of truth and of the broadest charity toward those from whom we differ in opinion it is certain that sectarian and partisan preferences should have no control in the selection of teachers, and should not be appar ent in their official work. . . . We should hope that the Faculty soon to be chosen will be so catholic in spirit; so learned as to what has been discovered and so keen to ex plore new fields of research; so skillful as teach ers; so cooperative as builders; and so comprehen sive in the specialties to which they are devoted,-- that pupils will flock to their instruction, first from Maryland and the states near to it,— but soon also from the remotest parts of the land.** From the very beginning at Hopkins, Gilman was in tent on establishing a university in the German tradition, a university which would attract the ablest minds to Baltimore, as teachers and students, and which would return to the nation learned scholars and scientists. The ample funds provided in the Hopkins bequest would be spent not on magnificent buildings or landscaping but on scholars, ^Francesco Cordasco, Daniel Coit Gilman and the Protean Ph.D. (Leiden, The Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1960), pp. 64-65. 241 books, and laboratory equipment. As one visitor appropri- ately remarked, "They have millions for genuine research but not one cent for show."7 Johns Hopkins developed rapidly as a faculty-centered institution. In his First Annual Report (January 1, 1876) Gilman took note of the crucial importance of faculty selection: 1. the greatness of the University would depend on its able scholars. 2. the professors appointed must be men of "distin guished reputations." 3. the University must hire specialists since "the day has passed for a professor of sciences or a professor of languages or a professor of his tory • . . those gentlemen willing to teach anything or take any chair are not those we most require."® Gilman insisted also that only those students suf ficiently well prepared to challenge and stimulate the faculty be admitted to graduate study. This was almost an exact reversal of the spirit of the old-time college where teachers were selected for their supposed capacity to stimulate and challenge the students. "The University," said Gilman in his Inaugural address, 7Ibid. 8Ibid.. p. 73 242 is a place for the advanced and special education of youth who have been prepared for its freedom by the discipline of a lower school. . . • The free dom to investigate, the obligation to teach, and the careful bestowal of academic honors are always understood to be among the university functions. The pupils are supposed to be wise enough to select, and mature enough to follow, the courses they pur sue. 9 The Scylla and Charybdis of university building during the nineteenth century were the twin evils of pre scription and vocationalism. A university president who managed to avoid the smooth, sheer rock of narrow sectari anism and course prescription was likely to be swallowed up in the swirling vortex of vocational and practical studies. To avoid the first evil, Gilman proposed to admit to the university only those students who "have been matured by the long preparatory discipline of superior teachers, and by the systematic, laborious, and persistent pursuit of fundamental knowledge."*^ Professors, in turn, would be governed by "unselfish devotion to the discovery and advancement of truth and righteousness."^ To avoid the second evil, Gilman cautioned ^Daniel C. Gilman, University Problems in the United States (New York: The Century Co., 1898), pp. 13-14. 10lbid.. p. 33. 11Ibid. 243 . . . We must beware lest we are led away from our foundations; lest we make our schools technical instead of liberal, and impart a knowledge of meth ods rather than of principles. If we make this mistake, we may have an excellent polytechnic school, but not a university.12 The true university, he maintained, has four func tions: "the acquisition, conservation, refinement, and distribution of knowledge." These carefully chosen words he proceeded to explain: 1. It is the business of a university to advance knowledge; every professor must be a stu dent. No history is so remote that it may be neglected; no law of mathematics is so hidden that it may not be sought out; no problem in respect to physics is so difficult that it must be shunned. No love of ease, no dread of labor, no fear of con sequences, no desire for wealth, will divert a band of well-chosen professors from uniting their forces in the prosecution of study. . . . This is what laboratories, museums, and libra ries signify. Nothing is foreign to their purpose, and those who work in them are animated by the firm belief that the advancement of knowledge in any direction contributes to the welfare of man. . . . 2. Universities are conservative. They encour age the study of the history, the philosophy, the poetry, the drama, the politics, the religion— in fine, the experience of antecedent ages. Successors of the ancient monasteries, they keep alive in our day the knowledge of ancient languages and art, enrich the literature of our mother-tongue, hold up to us the highest standards of excellence in writing, 12Ibid. 244 and enable us to share in the thoughts of the noblest of our race. . . , 3. Universities are refining. They are con* stantly, by laborious processes, by intricate sys tems of cooperation, and by ingenious methods, engaged in eliminating human errors and in submit ting all Inherited possessions to those processes which remove the dross and bring out the gold. No truth which has once been discovered is allowed to perish, but the incrustations which cover it are removed. It is the universities which edit, interpret, translate, and reiterate the acquisi tions of former generations in both literature and science. . . . 4. Universities distribute knowledge. The scholar does but half his duty who simply acquires knowledge. He must share his possessions with others. This is done, in the first place, by the instruction of pupils. Experience has certainly demonstrated that, with rare exceptions, those men are most learned who produce most. The process of acquiring seems to be promoted by that of imparting. The investigator who is surrounded by a bright circle of friendly inquisitors and critics finds his best powers developed by this influence. Next to its visible circle of pupils, the university should impart its acquisitions to the world of scholars. Learned publications are therefore to be encouraged. But beyond these formal and well- recognized means of cosmunleating knowledge, univer sities have innumerable less obvious, but not less useful, opportunities of conveying their benefits to the outside world.13 Time and again Gilman iterated in his lectures, public addresses, and reports that the essence of the university is its search for truth, and that a university 13Ibid.. pp. 55-58. 245 can properly exist only when teachers and scholars are free. "If our universities are suffering from excessive spontaneity," Gilman said in 1893, they are free from every form of intellectual des potism. Separate institutions may indeed he governed by the enactments of a legislature or the regulations of a religious denomination, but, as a whole, the higher education of this country is absolutely free from political and ecclesiastical control. By granting full intellectual freedom to both teachers and scholars Gilman sought to elevate the rational powers of the human mind to a position never before attained in any society, and to combine the energies of scholarship with the American impulse for human betterment and material progress. To this end he set the course for Johns Hopkins University, and a great segment of American higher educa tion followed its example. Brubacher has noted that Johns Hopkins came to exert an influence on American higher education "out of all proportion to its size, wealth, or a g e ."15 A survey of 1,000 distinguished American scientists in 1926 14ttid., p. 292. 15John s. Brubacher and Willis Rudy, Higher Educa- tion in Transition (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958), p. 17£. 246 revealed that one-fourth of them were Hopkins graduates. Cordasco lists16 among the Hopkins Ph.D. recipients between 1878 and 1886 the names John Dewey, Josiah Royce, and Woodrow Wilson. Among the many distinguished members of Gilman'8 faculty were Henry Rowland in physics, Ira Remson in chemistry, G. Stanley Hall in psychology, and William Osier in medicine. Even today, despite the financial setbacks and loss of prestige which the University suffered in the first decade of the twentieth century, throughout America and the world Johns Hopkins continues to hold a fine reputation for advanced scholarship and teaching excellence. Noah Porter: Defender of the Classical College The discipline which is required for the higher education is not a simple gymnastic to the intellect, it is not the training of the curious philologist, or the sharp logician, but it is a liberalizing discipline which prepares for culture and thought, and which gradually lifts the mind from the hard and dry paradigms of the pedagogue, and the enforced syntax of the classroom, to the comparative judgaent and the aesthetic culture of the philosopher and critic. --N. Porter 16Cordasco, op. cit., pp. 147-149. 247 When the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale Uni versity celebrated its semi-centennial anniversary in October of 1897, the main address was delivered by Daniel Colt Gilman. Gilman's earlier connection with the Shef field Scientific School had been as Professor of Physical Geography (1856-1863) where he had served as apologist and educational theorist for the new science education and had worked for the establishment of the Ph.D. degree. In his 1897 commemorative address Gilman acknowledged his own deep indebtedness to Yale: For one such institution, now celebrating its majority, permit me to acknowledge with filial gratitude the impulses, lessons, warnings, and encouragements derived from the Sheffield Scien tific School, and publicly admit that much of the health and strength of the Johns Hopkins University is due to early and repeated drafts upon the life-giving springs of New Haven.17 Gilman's work at Yale, first as student and later as library director and science professor, was accomplished under Theodore Dwight Woolsey whose presidency extended from 1846 to 1871. The Yale College that Woolsey and Gilman knew was a far cry from the simple college of pre- Revo lutionary days or even of the time of Jeremiah Day. As early as 1790 a Yale president, Ezra Stiles, had dreamed ^Gilman, o£. cit., pp. 146-147* of professorships which would elevate Yale to the status of a University. Stiles' successor, Timothy Dwight, laid the foundation for the Medical Institution, the Law School, and the Department of Theology, thereby creating the basis for a traditional Continental university on American shores. In 1832 the completion of the Trumbull Gallery gave Yale the first college-connected art museum in the country. By the early forties graduate work outside of the three professions was being offered. To these early but solid foundations, President Woolsey made numerous additions. In 1847 a Department of Philosophy and the Arts was established for the purpose of providing graduate instruction in the arts and sciences and undergraduate instruction in the applied sciences. A School of Applied Chemistry was added in 1847 and in 1852 a School of Engin eering; both of these quickly proved successful and, when endowed by Joseph Earl Sheffield in 1861, became the Sheffield Scientific School.^ In that same year, respond ing to an appeal from the Scientific School professors, the Yale Corporation took the pioneering step of authorizing *®George W. Pierson, Yale College, an Educational History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), p. 50. 249 the degree of Doctor of Philosophy so as "to retain in this country many young men, and especially students of Science who now resort to German Universities."*9 Meanwhile, under Woolsey, Yale College continued to expand with new professorships in modern languages and history, an endowment for the Peabody Museum of Natural History, and, with Gilman's aid, establishment of the first college Art School in the nation. By 1870 the pressures toward reshaping the institution in the direction of a modem university were considerable. In 1871 a strong committee of professors, acting on behalf of all the facul ties, submitted to the Corporation a statement of the needs of the University emphasizing that, even though the Corpor ation had the power to grant University degrees, the corresponding departments of instruction were inadequately developed. The cotmittee defined the aim of the College as liberal culture by mental discipline but Insisted that the College must advance with the progress of science and letters. They urged that the library be expanded and that new professorships be added in English, modern languages, physics, and history. The essential requirement for a 19Ibid.. p. 50. 250 University, argued the committee, was advanced instruction in all the great branches of learning.2® In the forefront of all these efforts to transform Yale from a small college in the classical and clerical tradition into a comprehen sive and expanding university was Daniel Coit Gilman. But to many Influential Yale alumni and members of the Corporation, the financial requirements for such a transformation were too staggering. To realize the faculty committee's reconmendations would require, according to one 21 conservative estimate,at least three million dollars. Hence, it was to Noah Porter, author of a widely read defense of the traditional concept of education, The Ameri can Colleges and the American Public, that the Corporation turned in 1871 for a new president and successor to Woolsey. A year later, Gilman, who had become disenchanted with the course taken at the Scientific School, resigned his New Haven office and accepted the presidency of the University of California. Just prior to his resignation Gilman wrote to Andrew White: 20Ibid., p. 55 21Ibid.. p. 56 251 As to Yale matters, the tendency, right or wrong, is to diversity or duality in the undergraduate instruction-course rather than unity; that is to say, the Sheffield Scientific School is bound to work out its notions in one way and the old College in another will carry out its plans, . • . Gradually all our Instructions have become distinct from theirs and now not one of our classes goes to the old College for instruction. This is contrary to our original expectations and desires; we have rather been forced into these circumstances.^^ At the time of his election to the Yale Presidency Noah Porter was Clark Professor of Moral Philosophy and Metaphysics in the College, and Instructor in Didactic or Natural Theology in the Divinity School. He had won an international reputation as a philosopher, scholarly writer, editor of dictionaries, and respected authority in the field of education. But to Porter, the mission of the American college, and more particularly of Yale, was the immemorial one of educating young men to be effective and useful citizens. In essence he argued that the traditional curriculum of the college, with its heavy emphasis on classical languages and mathematics, offered the best training "for those young men who are destined for an active and business life, and that these [young men] least of all should seek for what is called a more practical 22 Quoted in Cordasco, op. cit.. p. 33. 252 23 course of study." Continuing in this vein, he urged: The disciplinary studies of the college quicken the intellect and form it to habits of method, of analysis, and of comprehension. All of these habits are brought into constant requisition, when prac tical take the place of speculative questions, and men and their relations occupy the chief attention, instead of books and literature. The liberal studies of the college are if possible most necessary to those who by the necessities of their future calling are to be debarred to a great extent from the ameni ties of literature, and the delights of r e a d i n g .24 Porter's logic seems specious and antiquated today, partic ularly when he contends that the function of the school of science or technology is to train those "who are to become men of business or gentlemen of leisure."25 gut it was a logic that enjoyed wide support in America long after the Civil War. Porter, together with many sympathetic defend ers of the classical college, believed that the American public was just not ready for "real graduate education." . His faith lay in the concept of the traditional college, its young men, its social life, its class system, its moral purpose, its discipline, and its methods of learning by 23floah Porter, The American Colleges and the American Public (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1878), p. 7l. 24ibid.. pp. 71-72. 25ibid. 253 rote memory end recitetion. The new sciences could not be given e lerger piece in the curriculum without usurping essentiel elements end, as for the elective system--thet threetened the whole colleglete structure. Mindful of the chenges then teking piece et Harvard under Eliot, Porter could only predict . . . that if the new system is persevered in, Harvard College will contain three or four sets of students among its undergraduates • • . [including] a large, inferior, and heterogeneous class, who will select their "electives" with the keenest appreciation of what will yield a living standing at the expense of labor— camp-followers and strag glers, who will require a vigorous Provost Marshall to look after and to connect them in reputable relations with the principal battalions.26 Like the majority of nineteenty-century college presidents, Porter held that College meant something solid and shared— an organised and balanced communal experience consisting of several parts. The first of these parts was parental supervision and communal living. What the members t of a class learned from each other was fully as important as what they learned from books and professors. Second, the order of studies was inviolable beginning with exact studies and memory training in the languages and ^Noah Porter, "Greek and Liberal Education," Princeton Review. 60:2:213, September 1884. See also Pierson, op. cit.. p. 58. 254 mathematics, and culminating in philosophy and a broad and generous introduction to culture consisting of work in the sciences, social studies, and history. And, since these studies provided a foundation of equal value to the future / of businessman, professional man, or leader in practical affairs, they should be pursued by every student in the same manner and sequence. Third, the discipline of having to do hard and unpleasant work was Indispensable. "The student often most needs the discipline to which he is least inclined,"2^ President Porter would say, believing that it taught self-sacrifice and gave a man readiness and power. The discipline concept was central to the study of Latin and Greek, Porter thought: "... The study of language is the most efficient Instrument of discipline . . . and should continue to be made prominent and neces sary in the American colleges."28 xo the argument that modern languages could be substituted for the classical, Inasmuch as most men do not become scholars and hence have ^ P o r t e r , The American Colleges and the American Public, p. 42. 28Ibid., p. 45. 255 little need for the languages of scholarship, Porter replied: The majority of such persons have even the greater need, and will be likely to make a more efficient use of the power, discipline and scholarship which classical study will give them, than of the more or less of German and French which they may study in its place. The manifold relations by which a knowl edge of the ancient languages and of ancient life is connected with the history which they read, the literature which they enjoy, and the institutions under which they live, make even a scanty knowl edge of both to be of constant use and applica tion. 29 Furthermore, he argued, among ail languages and litera ture, Greek and Latin were superior in both structure and content, for they had given birth to the modern language, to literature, to Christianity, and to science. The ancients, he believed, looked out upon a world more com prehensive, more rich, and more humane than did Americans, and communicated their vision through the media of drama and poetry, philosophy,and history. Finally, Porter maintained, since modern knowledge was readily accessible through modern living, it need not occupy precious time in the college curriculum. Education should have a higher aim than professional preparation. 29 Ibid. 256 A hard and positive narrowness of mind is the beset ting danger of the science and literature of the present day. Only those men can rise above it who look beyond the boundaries of their own special fields of study and labor. . . . The absorbing and limiting demands of professional and practical life, and the inexorable requirements of a division of labor, are decisive arguments for general education wherever it is attainable.30 A medieval schoolman would have found himself quite at home in the Yale of Porter* s day, for the studies of the first two years were the old liberal arts whose Trivium had been Latin grammar, rhetoric, and logic, and whose Quadrivium had been arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. These were followed in the latter two years by the Aristotelian philosophies: natural philosophy or physics, mental philosophy or logic, metaphysics, moral philosophy or ethics, and political economy. The main object of study throughout was to provide training in accurate observation, accurate memory, and logical reasoning together with a modicum of classical culture. The intellectual powers that such method and content provided were believed to be time less in value and an Indispensable foundation for compe tence in any walk of life. Under the rubric of mental discipline these studies had been singled out for centuries 30Ibid., pp. 333-334 257 by the medieval schoolmen, pedants, and dons in the English universities, and by college presidents like Jeremiah Day in the 1820s and Noah Porter in the 1870s. Indeed, they had formed the core of Yale studies since the time of the founding of that college. "As far as we can understand, in our studies," remarked members of the Senior Class of 1876, "discipline stands in an inverse ratio to the inter* est. The more disagreeable and abstruse studies are, the more they conduce to that grand aim of our curriculum** discipline."31 . Nevertheless, as George Pierson, Yale's historian, has noted, the "cohesion of the college was impressive. In its curriculum the authorities had a formula which had weathered the centuries" and they had "managed to force into it the beginnings of an impressive number of modern studies."32 Noah Porter was the last of the articulate and persuasive old*time college presidents to appear on the American scene. He represented a philosophy of higher education that contained within it many admirable and ~ valuable strains. Unfortunately, as so often happens in 31 Quoted in Pierson, op. cit.. pp. 72-73. 32Ibid. American life, practitioners and supporters of the new ' education being proclaimed by men like White, Eliot, and Gilman tended to discard the whole concept of the tradi tional college in favor of the new. Many wished not only to add new studies to the college curriculum but at the same time to abolish most of the older disciplinary studies; others wished for a complete transformation of the liberal arts college into technical, professional, and vocational institutes; while not a few urged abandonment of the college concept in favor of universities on the German model. But the strengths and virtues of the classical college were not to be denied. The college provided a climate for the effective realization of the first and basic aim of the university (as we identified it in an earlier chapter)--to offer a forum for the comparing and systematizing of ideas; to enable students to experience a genuine enlargement of mind; and to prepare students for life as enlightened adults capable of intelligent and informed participation in the affairs of family, comnunity and nation. Jefferson and Day, Eliot and McCosh, Gilman and Porter would disagree as to the best means of realizing that aim, but they would all agree that it is a central aim 259 of American higher education. William Rainey Harper: Monumental Energy and Vision The university touches life, every phase of life, at every point. It enters into every field of thought to which the human mind addresses itself. It has no fixed abode far away from man; for it goes to those who cannot come to it. It is shut in behind no lofty battlements; for it has no enemy which it would ward off. Strangely enough, it vanquishes its enemies by inviting them into close association with itself. The university is of the people, and for the people, whether considered individ ually or collectively. --W. R. Harper It was to Noah Porter's Yale that a young Ohio lad came In 1873 for graduate study in the Department of Phi lo a op hy and Arts. William Harper was but seventeen years of age when he entered the Yale graduate school and "seemed to his classmates, who were eight or ten years his senior, a somewhat unsophisticated lad, as of course he was, coming from a small country c o l l e g e . " 3 3 Harper elected to take his Ph.D. degree under William Dwight Whitney, professor of Sanskrit and comparative philology, and two years later presented his thesis on "A Comparative Study of the ^Thomas W. Goodspeed, William Rainev Harper (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928), p. 25. 260 Prepositions in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Gothic." He then entered upon the first of what Professor Finley has called his three careers, that of teacher exemplary and professor of Hebrew. Now it was teaching to which he gave himself with the strength of three men; another hour or another day it was to study, to the seeking of a scholar; and then the next hour or the next day it was the complex and tangled task of the executive to which this man of three men's brains set his hand.34 After eleven years of teaching, the thirty-year*old Harper returned to Yale as Professor of Semitic languages in the Graduate Faculty and Instructor in the Divinity School. Under President Timothy Dwight, Yale College was being transformed into Yale University and the educational vision and progressive spirit of Dwight were peculiarly congenial to the new professor. Harper entered upon his work with great enthusiasm. He remained at Yale for five years and earned wide fame as a teacher and scholar not only among his colleagues and students but throughout the country. He possessed rare gifts as a teacher and lec turer; so popular was he among the Yale students that "hundreds" would gather about the entrance of the hall ^John H. Finley, then president of the College of the City of New York; quoted in ibid., pp. 1-2. 261 where he wee to lecture, welting for e smell class to be dismissed end then rush in to find seets until the room wes crowded.With the spreed of his feme he soon came to be in greet demend for Bible lectures in cities end on other college cempuses. And he beceme Involved in other activities, too. He wes elected president of the American Publication Society of Hebrew; he wes named principal of the Chautauqua College of Liberal Arts; he served as editor of two journals, the Old and New Testament Student and Hebraica: and he conducted lecture courses outside of Yale--in Brooklyn, Vassar, Boston, and New Haven. Harper was truly a man of driving ambition and monumental energy. When John D. Rockefeller proffered the gift of two million dollars to found a university at Chicago and asked William Rainey Harper to serve as its first president, he unhesitatingly accepted. Perhaps to a greater extent than any other university in the land, the University of Chicago was the creation of a single man— a product of the compre hensive vision and untiring energy of President Harper. From the beginning he envisioned a "great University for Goodspeed, op. cit., p. 78. 262 36 Chicago and tha West" and drew up a plan that was to revolutionize university organization in America. His plan called for five divisions: the University Proper; the Uni versity Extension; the University Press; the University Libraries, Laboratories and Museums; the University Affili ations. Three of these— Extension, Press and Affiliations-- were new to the university idea and obvious inventions of Harper's fertile imagination. Through the agency of these new divisions, Harper sought to make the University useful to other institutions and to disseminate its research find ings and scholarship as widely as possible by means of its own press. The keynote of the University envisioned by Harper was service; service restricted not just to students in the classrooms, but extended to all associated with the college, to the surrounding community, and to the nation at large. By dividing the academic year into four equal quarters— Sumner, Fall, Winter, Spring— Harper enabled students to take their vacations in any one quarter and yet retain their place in class, and made it possible for graduate students and teachers to take advanced courses during the summer months. But Harper's most startling 36Ibid.. p. 109. 263 innovation, and the one most roundly praised and damned in the literature, was the division of the undergraduate college into junior and senior colleges. Though such an arrangement had been proposed earlier by educators like Tappan and Folwell, Harper was the first to seriously and successfully put it into operation.^7 In gathering his faculty Harper sought out the best men he could find. He wanted teachers, but most of all he wanted scholars, men in love with learning, with a passion for research who could produce and would publish. And, because he could offer the best academic salaries and excellent facilities and opportunities for study and research, he did succeed in attracting some of the most able men from other institutions: J. Laurence Laughlin came from Cornell to head the Department of Political Economy; A. W. Small, president of Colby University, came to head the Department of Sociology; Alonzo Stagg, the best-known college athlete of the day, came as Director of . Athletics; and E. Von Holst came from the University of Freiburg in Germany to head the Department of History. The story of Harper's raid on the Clark University faculty 37 J'Rudolph, op. cit.. p. 350. 264 is well-known and need not be recounted here, but from Clark came such notable scholars as A. A. Michelson to head the Department of Physics, C. 0. Whitman In Biology, and J. U. Nef In Chemistry. Later appointments Included Paul Shorey In Greek, James H. Breasted In Egyptology, and John Dewey In Philosophy. Within the first University of Chicago faculty, Harper remarked in his 1903 Decennial Report, an unusual spirit of cooperation was evident from the beginning. A spirit of co-operation has grown up which has shown itself in many ways, and from the more devel oped growth of which much good may be expected. The staff has been singularly free from cliques. A caucus Is something practically unknown. Debate is always free and outspoken. The division of the Faculties varies with almost every question which comes forward. Men who oppose each other vigorously on one subject work together most harmoniously when another subject comes forward for consideration. . . . It seems evident that a closer bond of union will exist between the Professional Faculties and the staff of the Faculties of Arts, Literature, and Science than is ordinarily found in institutions of learning. No sharp line has yet been drawn between the members of the Professional Faculties and those of the other Faculties. It is my most earnest hope that the tendency which has already shown itself in this matter may continue, and that as other Professional Faculties shall be organized they shall not be isolated from the University at large or from any portion of it, but rather that they shall take their full share in the discussion and disposition of all questions which concern the University life and policy. The future of 265 professional work in this country is largely depend ent, in my opinion, upon the closeness of its rela tionship to the University;38 The most succinct statement of Harper's concept of the aims and functions of the university is to be found in a collection of articles and addresses published in 1905 under the title The Trend in Higher Education. Here he identified and analyzed many of the crucial conflicts and problems confronting American educators at the turn of the century: "The University and Religious Education," "Latin vs. Science," "Coeducation," "The Length of the College Course," "Waste in Higher Education," problems of "The Urban University."39 Through the smoke of these many battles he perceived a significant central trend, namely, the growing democratization of American higher education. Comparing "the situation today with that of one or two centuries ago," he found that a complete revolution had taken place and that out of the small sectarian colleges of the past had emerged the modem university whose chief function must be to oo J The President's Report. The Decennial Publica tions of the University of Chicago, First Series, Vol. I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1903), p. xx. ^William R. Harper, The Trend in Higher Education in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1905). 266 . . . guide democracy into the new fields of arts and literature and science [and to lead] those who will follow her to consecrate themselves to the course of liberty and truth and righteousness, in home, in country, and throughout the world.^0 It is democracy, Harper exclaimed, that gave birth to the idea of the university. In the schools of the church during the middle ages, there was never an opportu nity to argue or to discuss differences of opinion. The method of instruction was simple and monotonous. The instructor passed on to the pupil that which he had been given and the pupil received it just as it had come down through the centuries.41 The method is still in vogue in some institutions. But with the revival of the study of logic and the rise of a new spirit of inquiry the univer sity came into being. In more recent times the most distinctive mark of a real university has come to be "free dom of expression." The three birth-marks of a university are, therefore, self-government, freedom from ecclesias tical control, and the right of free utterance. And these certainly give it the right to proclaim itself an institution of the people, an Institution bom of the democratic spirit .42 40Ibid.. p. 24 4IIbid. 42Ibid.. p. 4. 267 Harper* 8 ministerial training and exhaustive knowl edge of the Hebrew tradition and of the Hebrew language is readily evidenced in almost every one of his pronouncements on the aims and problems of the university. The university is the prophet who is to hold high the great ideal of democracy. . . . [It] is the prophetic interpreter of democracy; the prophet of her past, in all its vicissitudes; the prophet of her present, in all its complexity; the prophet of her future, in all its possibilities«4^ And, again: The university is a priest established to act as mediator in the religion of democracy, wherever mediation may be possible; established to lead the souls of men and nations into close cosnunication with the common soul of all humanity; established to stand apart from other institutions, and at the same time to mingle closely with the constituent elements of the people; established to introduce whosoever will into all the mysteries of the past and present, whether solved or still unsolved.44 But he was always careful to separate the claims of organ ized religion from the domain of the university. The university is the priest of democracy and a priest is found only in association with religion. What, then, is the religion that the university serves? The religion that the university serves is humanity and its god is mankind. Some 43Ibid., p. 20. 44Ibid.. p. 27. 268 universities, he believed, were deaf to the cry of suffer ing humanity, while others were too exclusive and shut up within themselves. But the university of the future, Harper argued with all the persuasive power at his command, is one the motto of which will be: "Service for mankind wherever mankind is, whether within scholastic walls or without those walls and in the world at large."4^ Summary and Synthesis The nineteenth century American idea of a univer sity obviously did not originate in America. Its earliest roots go back to the men of the middle ages who established in the mind of the western world the principle of preserv ing and perpetuating theoretical knowledge in a special institution— a university or Studium Generale as they called it--an institution consisting of scholars and students associated together for mutual benefit and protection and enjoying a large measure of self-government. From the middle ages also came the ideas that the university ought to embrace the whole of human knowledge, excluding manual skills, and that esoteric learning is essential to the 45Ibid.. pp. 27-28. 269 highest development of man.4* * But the American university was not a simple importation of continental models, nor was it a simple transplant of the English college modified to fit the New World environment. Indeed, Oxford and Cambridge by the nineteenth century had become little more than finishing schools grooming candidates for the English governing class.47 Though influenced by both continental and English precedents, by the close of the last century the American university had become much more than either; it was a product of complex forces and tensions. Chief among these were the uncertainties, doubts and virtues of the adoles cent nation itself--the brash optimism and boastfulness of the American frontier, the enthusiasm for self-improvement, the naive belief that any individual could accomplish any thing he set his hand or mind to, and the uncritical faith in education as an elevator which could lift a whole society to a higher plane of social, economic and intellec tual well-being. 4^Paul Farmer, "Nineteenth-Century Ideas of the University: Continental Europe," in The Modern University, edited by Margaret Clapp (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1950), p. 3. 47Ibid.. p. 44. 270 The university mirrored the unformed American society in many ways; its growing scientism and need for specialists: its willingness to experiment--to 'try any thing once"; its importation of ideas from Europe; its conflicting values, confusion of standards and broadening of opportunities. Experiment was the keynote. The Johns Hopkins bequest made possible the founding of a strong graduate institution patterned after the German university with only a small undergraduate college underneath. But this very absence of a strong college to supply the univer sity with young scholars proved a formidable handicap. At Yale the new theoretical and applied sciences were allowed to grow up beside and around the strong central College while graduate studies were loosely organized into a Department of Philosophy and the Arts. The idea was that of a federation of self-governing schools. But the College faculty and members of the Yale Corporation were reluctant to grant equal status to the newer, more secular depart ments. Hence, Yale College, under the administration of Noah Porter, continued to enjoy most of the support and prestige and to get most of the money, leaving the Grad uate Department and the Sheffield Scientific School to survive as best they could. 271 Harvard took still a different route. Eliot, con vinced from the beginning that the parallel department idea could not work, championed the elective system, promising freedom for students to choose their own studies and free dom for teachers to teach in new and untried ways. The system made it possible to add many new subjects to the curriculum without necessarily eliminating the old, but it did destroy the sense of unity and cohesion which charac terized the traditional college; it denied the value of a single general education for all but enabled each student to discover his own abilities and prepare for his own career. The system inevitably offended those who believed in the value of a single integrated humanistic training for all. Education is more than course-taking or book learn ing, argued Eliot's critics from places like Princeton and Yale; it is an experience to be shared in common. Boys coming from many different backgrounds must learn to live together, play together, work together; they must test themselves against each other in common competition.^® But Eliot, convinced that the paramount need of the country ^®G. W. Pierson, "American Universities in the Nineteenth Century; The Formative Period," in The Modern University, p. 88. 272 was for individualists and specialists, persevered in his transformation of the college. In the western states other experiments were taking place. There the idealism of Wayland, Tappan, White, and Harper held sway. Higher education was viewed as a vital function of society, best exercised by the state through the establishment of state institutions. The state univer- sity was the crown of a statewide system of public educa tion beginning in the kindergarten and continuing through graduate school; it offered professional and practical as well as scholarly instruction to all who could benefit from it. Western educators were less afraid of state control than were their eastern colleagues and they set up publicly-controlled institutions entirely divorced from church interests and subservient to no Intellectual aris tocracy. The state university was clearly a product of the midwestern American belief that educational opportunity should be general, that everyone should be able to train his own individual talents, and that every person should have the same chance to rise as far as his capacities permitted. "Higher education safeguarded the social 273 mobility of the nation, and that was the heart of democ racy."^ Nowhere else was the observation made by Lord Bryce so applicable: "While the universities of Germany were popular but not free, and the universities of England were free but not popular, those of America were both popular and free."^® But if the advantages of the state universities were their broad base, their wide popular appeal and demo cratic orientation, their disadvantage was that they had to compete with numerous denominational colleges. Students and faculty of large universities lacked the alumni sup port, the traditions, and the close-knit dormitory life characteristic of the eastern and smaller denominational colleges. Also, far too frequently the state university boards of regents were politically unstable and the people far too generous in their expectations of what the univer sity could do for them. Too many people expected to be able to enter without academic preparation; and too many expected the universities not only to educate them but to help them find jobs, make money, and elevate their social aq * Allan Nevins, The State Universities and Democ racy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962), p. 71. 50Ibid.. p. 70. 274 standing In the community. "To many a voter his state university was a rainbow--with a pot of gold at the end of it."^* By 1900 most of the aims and functions of the uni* versity had been ably stated, but in no single institution had they all been fully realized. Wayland and Mott had led the battle for professional and occupational training. Tappan had urged the free and uninhibited search for truth and the idea of the university as a community of scholars. Porter and McCosh had sought to build an intellectual climate that would stimulate intellectual discipline and growth. Eliot had created an environment where each student was free to select his own course of study and work at his own level of ability, and where each faculty member was free to teach according to his own special talents and inclinations. Gilman and Harper had emphasized the imaginative acquisition of knowledge and the extension of knowledge through scholarship and scientific research; their institutions had become imbued with the spirit of science. White, Gilman and Harper had sought to create institutions that would serve the larger community and ^Pierson, "American Universities in the Nineteenth Century," in The Modern University, p. 83. 275 would communicate through teaching and publication a zest for learning and an appreciation for theoretical study. And, finally, the growing western state universities, in addition to providing a broad general education, sought to train the technologists and specialists required by an increasingly technical-minded society. But in no single institution were all of these functions yet combined and energized by the single pervasive ideal of the disciplined search for truth in a climate of intellectual freedom. The broad multipurpose university was to be the exclusive product of the twentieth century. CHAPTER VIII THE CONSOLIDATION OF RESOURCES, 1900-1925 Woodrow Wilson: In the Nation's Service My own ideals for the University are those of genuine democracy and serious scholarship. The two, indeed, seem to me to go together. --W. Wilson In 1900 Princeton University (the name had been changed from College of New Jersey in 1896) consisted of the undergraduate college and a graduate school modeled in plan and standard after the German university. A graduate student entering at that time found no formal regulations or tests to comply with, and was free to take whatever courses in whatever fields he chose.* There was a wide variety to choose from: Greek and Sanskrit, political science and European history, philosophy, Indo-Germanic philology, German, French, Anglo-Saxon and Gothic, English ^See Hardin Craig's fascinating account of his own experience as a Princeton graduate student in chapter two of his Woodrow Wilson at Princeton (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960), p. 33 ff. 276 277 literature, poetics, rhetoric, prose fiction, and many others. Among the fine scholars and excellent teachers were Woodrow Wilson, vigorous and convincing, one of the most popular lecturers in Princeton history; Bliss Perry, distinguished for his lectures on poetry and prose fiction; the philosopher Alexander Ormund; the Sanskrit scholar Samuel Winans; and the philologists 0. H. Hoskins and Jesse o Benedict Carter. Most of these men had been attracted to Princeton by the vigorous leadership and scholarly attain ments of James McCosh. As noted earlier, McCosh, during his presidency, had clearly and emphatically recognized the vital importance of research as a university function and had instituted the first scholarships and fellowships to be provided at Princeton. And McCosh had known, as all great university and college presidents must know, that the strength of any institution of higher learning lies ulti mately in the quality of its faculty. But, despite the beginnings of a fine graduate school, Princeton student life at the turn of the century was still almost exclusively undergraduate. 2Ibid.. p. 39. 278 Costumes in which orange and black cried aloud, parades and inarching songs, with or without excuse, mild hazing, much informal participation in sports, . . . and Innocent and rather polite gaiety were in order. There were still some riotous classrooms in which peculiar and helpless, rather than unpopu lar, college teachers were hazed.3 The course of study in the freshman and sophomore years contained few electives, and the student's entire program was carefully supervised. The junior and senior years, on the other hand, were relatively free of specific course requirements, and, though the serious student could choose among a number of "admirable advanced courses," there were numerous electives of little substance, and some "feeble standards" which the less serious students tended to exploit.4 Course prescription and daily class recita tion characterized lower-division work and tended to discourage student loafing and laxity. But in upper- division and graduate courses the lecture system had been imported from Germany and Scotland, and the practice of infrequent tests and multiple free electives made it possi ble for many students to establish a fashion according to which hard study was bad form. "But all in all," Hardin 3Ibid.. p. 34. 4Ibid.. p. 37. 279 Craig, the distinguished Princeton professor of English literature, has written, it would take a great deal to convince me, in the light of my subsequent experience, that the Princeton of the period . . . was not an excellent institution. Princeton had a conscience, and the tenderness of that conscience testified to the high quality of the men then responsible for the institution.5 Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated president of the university in 1902 amidst the acclaim and approval of the entire Princeton community. He had been a powerful and persuasive teacher and member of the political science faculty since 1890. As president of Princeton from 1902 to 1910 Wilson came to believe that the American universi ties of the time, with their emphasis on specialisation and the new scientific method, were not producing the dedicated leaders necessary to the preservation of the nation's democracy. Consequently, he utilized his great leadership, wisdom, and ability for the purpose of recast ing university education at Princeton, his principal goals being breadth in each individual field of study and intimate relations between teachers and pupils in the preceptorial system. 3Ibid.. pp. 41-42 280 Of the first goal, breadth in fields of study, Wilson remarked in his inaugural address: There are two ways of preparing a young man for his life work. One is to give him the skill and special knowledge which shall make a good tool, an excellent bread-winning tool, of him; and for thousands of young men that way must be followed. It is a good way. It is honorable. It is indis pensable. But it is not for the college, and it never can be. The college should seek to make the men whom it receives something more than excellent servants of a trade or skilled practitioners of a profession. It should give them elasticity of faculty and breadth of vision, so that they shall have a surplus of mind to expend, not upon their profession only, for its liberalization and enlarge ment, but also upon the broader interests which lie about them, in the spheres in which they are to be, not bread-winners merely, but citizens as well, and in their own hearts, where they are to the stature of real nobility. It is this free capital of mind the world most stands in need of,--this free capital that awaits investment in undertakings, spiritual as well as material, which advance the race and help all men to a better life.6 This paragraph is remarkably close to the language of the Yale Report of 1828 and to the educational philosophies of Jeremiah Day, James McCosh, and Noah Porter, but Wilson goes on to ask whether the end is best realized "by the old disciplines of Greek, Latin, mathematics, and English" and concludes that it is not. 6Woodrow Wilson's Inaugural Address, reprinted in Builders of American Universities, edited by David A. Weaver (Alton, Illinois: Shurtleff College Press, 1950), Vol. I, p. 71. 281 The day has gone by when that Is possible. The circle of liberal studies is too much enlarged, the area of general learning is too much extended, to make it any longer possible to make these few things stand for all. Science has opened a new world of learning, as great as the old. . . • The mind of the modern student must be carried through a wide range of studies in which science shall have a place not less distinguished than that accorded literature, philosophy, or politics.? But he would not deny the disciplinary value of studies in Greek and Latin texts and the necessity for drill in mathematics. "They are Indeed disciplinary. The mind takes fibre, facility, strength, adaptability, certainty of touch from handling them, when the teacher knows his art and their power."8 Wilson held a curiously naive and romantic view of the simple purity and beauty of classical literature. "The classical literatures," he said, give us, in tones and with an authentic accent we can nowhere else hear, the thoughts of an age we cannot visit. They contain airs of a time not our own, unlike our own, and yet its foster parent. To these things was the modem thinking world first ' bred. In them speaks a time naive, pagan, an early morning day when men looked upon the earth while it was fresh, untrodden by crowding thought, an age when the mind moved, as it were, without preposses sions and with an unsophisticated, childlike curiosity, a season apart during which those seats upon the Mediterranean seem the first seats of 7Ibid.. pp. 71-72. 8Ibid.. p. 73. 282 thoughtful men. We shell not enywhere else get a substitute for it. The modern mind has been built upon that culture and there is no authentic equiv alent.^ But breadth for each student in his field of study could ultimately be obtained only at the expense of the classical disciplinary studies, and Wilson well knew that the boundaries of education must be extended to include the modern sciences--physlcs, chemistry, biology, geology, and astronomy. These great bodies of knowledge claim their place at the foundation of liberal training not merely for our information, but because they afford us direct introduction into the most essential analytical and rational processes of scientific study, impart penetration, precision, candor, openness of mind, and afford the close contacts of concrete thinking.10 Unlike Eliot, Wilson was not ready to throw the burden of choice among these numerous courses of study wholly upon the student. Since he [the student] cannot in the time at his disposal go the grand tour of accepted modem knowledge, we who have studied the geography of learning and who have observed several generation [sic] of men attempt the journey, must instruct him how in a brief space he may see most of the world, and he must choose only which one of several tours that we may map he will take. Else there is 9Ibid.. p. 74. 10Ibid.. pp. 75-76 283 no difference between young men and old, between the novice and the man of experience, in funda mental matters of choice. We must supply the synthesis and must see to it that, whatever group of studies the student selects, it shall at least represent the round whole, contain all the ele ments of modern knowledge, and be itself a complete circle of general subjects. Princeton can never have any uncertainty of view on that point.^ The first of Wilson's goals made necessary a reorganization of the University's curriculum and depart mental structure. This he launched immediately so that by 1904 the University* s administrative structure was refash ioned and the program of courses considerably expanded. Professors in related subjects were grouped in four divi sions: the division of philosophy, the division of art and archeology, the division of language and literature, and the division of mathematics and science. The latter division, including all of the mathematical and scientific studies, was designated the new "School of Science. The second of Wilson's great reforms was the pre ceptorial system which for many years had seemed to him the only means of making university instruction effective. ^JLbid., p. 76. ^Arthur S. Link, Wilson, the Road to the White House (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), p. 41. 284 The idea was borrowed from the tutorial system then in use at Oxford and Cambridge which Wilson had studied and admired during visits to England in 1896 and 1899. A basic tenet in Wilson's philosophy was the Augustinian idea that men could not be educated by others; they could only educate themselves. His rationale for the precep torial system was that it was the only means by which students could be stimulated to read deeply and learn to think independently. He reasoned that a body of tutors at Princeton would transform the university • . . from a place where there are youngsters doing tasks to a place where there are men doing thinking, men who are conversing about the things of thought. . . . Wherever you have a small class and they can be intimately associated with their chief in the study of an interesting subject they catch the infection of the subject; but where they are in big classes and simply hear a man lecture two or three times a week, they cannot catch the infection of anything, except it may be the voice and enthusiasm of the lecturer himself.13 He was careful to acquire the virtues of the English tutorial system without duplicating its vices. The English appointed their tutors for life, but Wilson knew that no one can tutor young men for long without 13gay Stannard Baker, Woodrow Wilson. Life and Letters. Vol. II (New York: Charles Scribner^s Sons, 1946), p. 162. 285 losing enthusiasm for it. So he appointed his tutors for no more than five-year terms. In selecting the preceptors he chose from an enormous number of applicants from all over the country, and in the fall of 1905 launched the system with fifty academically promising young men. It proved so successful that within a decade both Harvard and Yale were experimenting with the preceptorial system. Wilson advised his preceptors to avoid the question-and- answer method in their dealings with students, and to keep conferences free in spirit and broad in method. It was not the purpose of the preceptorial conference to find out what the student did know but rather to discover what he did not know and then to put him in the way of getting the knowledge. In his 1905 report to the Board of Trustees, Wilson explained the essentials of his preceptorial plan in these words: We are trying to get away from the idea, born of the old system of lectures and quizzes, that a course in any subject consists of a particular teacher's lectures or the conning of a particular textbook, and to act upon the very different idea that a course is a subject of study to be got up by as thorough and extensive reading as possible outside the class-room; that the class-room is merely a place of test and review, and that lectures, no matter how authoritative the lecturer, are no . 286 more than a means of directing, broadening, illumi nating, or supplementing the student's reading.14 Behind all of Wilson's efforts and successes at reorganizing the structure of the University, to attract first rate teachers and scholars, to broaden the curricu lum, to revitalize the learning process, lay always his deep sense that it was the nation that was being inspired and served. Not mere learning, but the spirit of service is what ultimately gives an institution of higher learning a place in the public annals of the nation, Wilson insisted. The "air of the world's transactions, the con sciousness of the solidarity of the race, the sense of the duty of man toward man, of the presence of men in every problem"15 should pervade the campus, the classrooms and the laboratories. The ideal academic community, he knew, could never exist on land or sea, but in the Princeton experiment he sought an approximation of that educational ideal which sensitive and cultivated people might conceiv ably accomplish if they would. 14Ibid.. p. 165. ^"Woodrow Wilson on 'Princeton in the Nation's Service,' 1896," in American Higher Education. Vol. II, edited by R. Hofstadter and W. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 694. 287 I have had sight of the perfect place of learn ing in my thought: a free place, and a various, where no man could be and not know with how great a destiny knowledge had come into the world*-itself a little world; but not perplexed, living with a singleness of aim not known without; the home of sagacious men, hard-headed and with a will to know, debaters of the world* s questions every day and used to the rough ways of democracy; and yet a place removed--calm Science seated there, recluse, ascetic, like a nun, not knowing that the world passes, not caring, if the truth but come in answer to her prayer; and Literature, walking within her open doors, in quiet chambers, with men of olden time, storied walls about her, and calm voices infinitely sweet; here "magic casements, opening on the foam of perilous seas, in fairy lands for lorn, " to which you may withdraw and use your youth for pleasure; there windows open straight upon the street, where many stand and talk, intent upon the world of men and business. A place where ideals are kept in heart in an air they can breathe; but no fool's paradise. A place where to hear the truth about the past and hold debate about the affairs of the present, with knowledge and without passion; like the world in having all men's life at heart, a place for men and all that concerns them; but unlike the world in its self-possession, its thorough way of talk, its care to know more than the moment brings a light; slow to take excitement, its air pure and wholesome with a breath of faith; every eye within it bright in the clear day and quick to look toward heaven for the confirmation of its hope. Who shall show us the way to this place?'-” 16Ibid., pp. 694-695. 288 Charles Van Hise: The Wisconsin Idea*1 A state university can only permanently succeed where Its doors are open to all of both sexes who possess sufficient intellectual endowment, where the financial terms are so easy that the industrious poor may find the way, and where the student sentiment is such that each stands upon an equal footing with all. This is the states university ideal, and this is a new thing in the world. — C. Van Hise Unlike English universities of the Oxford type where teachers exercise direct authority over their own work and privileges, Americans have, historically, concen trated university leadership functions in the hands of a single man--the president. And in the well-endowed and ably administered private universities, the influence of the president has often spread far beyond the borders of the campus or the boundaries of the university community. This was certainly true of William Rainey Harper whose educational leadership at Chicago was felt throughout the midwest; it was true also of Stanford's David Starr Jordan whose potency was felt in all of the states of the far West, and of Woodrow Wilson, Charles Eliot, and Columbia's Nicholas Murray Butler, all of whom exercised national and even international leadership. State university presidents, by and large, have not enjoyed the national prestige and power of their more illustrious colleagues in private institutions; neverthe less, many state university presidents in the twentieth century did come to exert a profound educational influence within the borders of their respective states. James B. Angel1, for example, president of the University of Michigan for forty years, did much to weld the Michigan public schools into a single united system so that "the youngest pupil in the most secluded schoolhouse should be encouraged to see that the path was open from his home up to and through the universityRichard Henry Jesse came to the presidency of the University of Missouri with an invigorating set of twentieth-century reforms, and Benjamin Ide Wheeler brought the German educational ideals of lernfreiheit and lehrfreiheit to the University of California. Others could be named for their strong and imaginative leadership of state Institutions: Cyrus Northrup at Minnesota, E. Benjamin Andrews at Nebraska, Edmund James at Illinois, and Charles Kendall Adams at Wisconsin, but perhaps the ideas which came to exert the ^Quoted in Allan Nevins, The State Universities and Democracy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962), p. 91. 290 greatest influence on the development of the twentieth- century public university were those of Charles R. Van Hise, successor to Adams at the University of Wisconsin. Van Hise was reared and trained in Wisconsin; a graduate of the University, he became professor of geology in 1892 and was appointed president in 1903. His inaugural address was a clarion call for state university growth and expansion, principally by the building of dormitories, by expansion of the curriculum to include applied sciences, and by providing opportunities for off-campus study. He sought to identify the university with the state in a wide range of activities. He urged university faculty men to . * serve as public commissioners or to serve as specialists and advisors to state offices and on public committees, and he rejoiced whenever they were appointed. Van Hise became the most enthusiastic of state university presidents over the value of extension teaching, and during his admin istration correspondence courses, lecture programs, study and debating groups, and a general information service were all organized. His critics argued that such instruc tion was not of true university calibre, but he replied that the university was "the one agency of the state which 291 could so embody the combined Intellectual life of the com munity that It could apply that life on any level for the 18 betterment of the community." Defending the university extension program in an address delivered in 1913, Van Hise said, . . If we expect new knowledge to be applied at any time to the then existing stage of advancement, it must be carried out to the people. Adults must continue their education throughout life."^ And, again: We do not see how it demeans us to do work for the advancement of the people simply because it has not been traditional for a university to undertake such work. We laid down the fundamental principle that the State University of Wisconsin is willing to undertake any line of educational work for which it is the best fitted Instrument, without regard to the preconceived notions of anybody, anywhere, con cerning the scope of a university. One other idea is fundamental in our extension work, and that is to find a way for the boy or girl of parts whatever the conditions of birth. . . . We, in the State of Wisconsin, wish to create a situation in which mute, inglorious Miltons shall become an impossi bility, The greatest waste of this nation is its waste of talent.20 Van Hise envisioned three main tasks for the 18Ibid., p. 98. 19An address to the Philadelphia City Club's Expe ditioh, Madison, May 23, 1913, reprinted in Merle Curtl and Vernon Carstensen, The University of Wisconsin. 1848- 1925, Vol. II (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1949), p. 616. 2QIbid.. pp. 616-617. 292 University. The first was to help prepare the undergrade ate for his life work and for informed and intelligent citizenship; the second was to advance the limits of human knowledge; and the third was to disseminate knowledge, take it to the people and apply it to the solution of economic, social, and political problems. But it was the second and third of these tasks, research and extension, that Van Hise championed with particular vigor. To the many critics of his program who argued that opportunities for research could never be as great in a state-supported institution as in a private one, Van Hise declared boldly: I am not willing to admit that a state university under a democracy shall be of lower grade than a state university under a monarchy, [and] if the University of Wisconsin is to do for the state what it has a right to expect, it must develop, expand, strengthen creative work at whatever cost.21 Therefore, it was the responsibility of the state through the agency of the state university to support research and creative scholarship in every field; research should not be confined to traditional arts and sciences, nor to just those subjects deemed practical and useful. One can never predict, Van Hise declared, *'at what distant nook of ^Van Hise's Inaugural Address, June 7, 1904, reprinted in Builders of American Universities. Vol. II, p. 184. 293 knowledge, apparently remote from any practical service, a brilliantly useful stream may spring. It is certain that every fundamental discovery yet made by the delving stu dent has been of service to man before a decade has passed."22 The state university, therefore, must see to it that scholarship and research of all kinds is ever encouraged to proceed unfettered. A privately endowed institution may select some part of knowledge and confine itself to that, but not so a state university. A university supported by the state for all its people, for all its sons and daughters, with their tastes and aptitudes as varied as mankind, can place no bounds upon the lines of its endeavors, else the state is the irreparable loser. 23 Such convictions were not easily or readily accepted by the people of Wisconsin in the first decade of the century, and Van Hise found it no easy task to convince the Wiscon sin taxpayers that a basic responsibility of the University was to further research in every field, from rural electri fication to dramaturgy. Opposition to the idea was wide spread and persistent throughout the fifteen years of his administration. 22Ibid.. p. 182. 23Ibid.. p. 183. 294 To the second task of the university, the applica tion of knowledge for the direct improvement of the life of the people in every sphere, Van Hise devoted much of his time and energy along two main avenues of activity. The first, as previously suggested, involved the contribution to public service by the expert drawn from the faculty. Professors were men of affairs serving as nonpartisan experts in all sorts of ways from the improvement of agri culture, to the building of railways and bridges, to the solving of complicated economic and social questions. By 1908 almost one-fifth of Wisconsin's University faculty were serving the state on one or more commissions; Van Hise himself was a member of five.2^ A second avenue for University "service to the state" involved developing and expanding extension and correspondence course offerings. "1 shall never be content until the beneficent influence of the University reaches every family in the state," Van Hise declared. "This is my ideal of a state university."^** And the Influence was extended by turning the whole state into a university 2^Curti and Garstensen, op. cit.. p. 88. 25Ibid.. pp. 88-89. 295 i campus where two-week short courses were conducted for farmers and housewives, informative pamphlets and brochures on vital issues were dispensed to every community, and traveling professors held classes in rural townships and urban centers up and down the state. The large part of the work of the University, the president proclaimed, was not for the students on the Madison campus but for the two and a half million people throughout the state.2* > Universities are chief centers of progress and therefore of disturbance, Van Hise declared. They have been described as the nurseries of revolu tion, of social democracy, of anarchy. But on the contrary, universities because of their leadership are the safety-valves of the nation. It is only when the just aspirations of the people have been repressed; it is only when the call to remedy injus tice has been unheard, that revolution and anarchy have come.27 Van Hise was well aware that the American physical frontier had passed and that quite new conditions confronted the nation. The consequence was that universities, while being centers of social, political, and economic unrest neverthe less had to provide at the same time a training ground for the preparing of teachers, professional men, and the 26Ibid. 27Ibid., p. 622. 296 diplomatic leaders so desperately needed by a viable and growing democratic society. Arthur Hadley: Education for Citizenship Instruction is and always will be an important element in education; knowledge is and always will be of exceptional value to the citizens of a free commonwealth. But the acquisition of knowledge is not the end of education as we are now using the term; it is simply an incident in tne larger and more important process of training for citizenship. --A. T. Hadley By the opening of the twentieth century the old independent college with its simple formula for turning out scholars and gentlemen had clearly yielded precedence to the university.The idea that a single man could master, 28 "In America, the name of university has sometimes been claimed by institutions whose advanced program of instruction and research has remained little more than a noble aspiration. To be sure, the precise meaning of the word 'university1 has undergone profound changes in modern times. Nevertheless, it has generally come to connote an ' intellectual institution of large size which affords instruction of an advanced nature in all of the main branches of learning. As a matter of fact, if one were to hold strictly to the definition which Continental Europe since the nineteenth century has tended to recognize as the only proper one— namely, a graduate institution giving various forms of advanced training--no American university would qualify, not even Johns Hopkins or Clark. Actually, the American university, though modeled on the European, has evolved Its own unique framework. And, in so doing, it has assimilated, rather than destroyed, the pre-existing 297 or even survey, all knowledge was an inheritance of eight* eenth century enlightenment, which by 1900 had become palpably absurd. Few scholars and fewer college presidents had the temerity to try to encompass the whole of knowl- edge. The expansion of knowledge and diversification of intellectual interests were accompanied, inevitably, by expansion and diversification of the college curriculum, rapid growth in college and university enrollments, increase in faculty size, and multiplication of administra tive duties. Colleges and universities alike were caught up in the rising tide of diversification, specialization, and the infatuation with numbers--numbers of students, numbers of courses, numbers of departments, of faculty, of administrative personnel, numbers of books in the library, of buildings on the campus, and of degrees annually awarded. With increased enrollments and greatly Increased endowments, the boards of college and university control, which during the nineteenth century had been dominated by clergymen, in the twentieth became dominated by college." (John Brubacher and Willis Rudy, in Higher Education in Transition [New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958J, pp. 139-14o .) 298 businessmen. Symptomatic of this transition from the sectarian to the secular college was the election in 1899 of a layman, Arthur TWining Hadley, to the presidency of Yale. Hadley had been a Yale student during Noah Porter’s term of office and a Yale faculty member during Timothy Dwight's term, and he had observed firsthand the transfor mation of Yale from college to university. When visiting President Porter, Hadley would like as not find him reading Kant, but when he called on President Dwight he was more likely to find him examining a balance sheet. On Porter's desk he found manuscripts, on Dwight's he found the cata logues of competing institutions. He called on Porter in his study but on Dwight in his office.29 Of his own duties as university president, Hadley wrote: The work of the president of Yale, or of any other large university, is a good deal like that of the president of a business corporation. . . . The modern president has no longer a study, but an office. In the place of bookshelves we find letter files. Instead of tables covered with laborious and beautifully written manuscript, we find type writing machines and efficient stenographers. . . . 29Ibid.. p. 351 299 The position of honor is no longer occupied by a Greek dictionary, but by a t e l e p h o n e .^0 But Hadley proved to be more than a conventional business executive. He touched and Inspired his university with the warmth and spirit of his own engaging personality and he shaped its destiny with wise and judicious policies. His theories of administration and his vision of what a university ideally should be set a course for twentieth century Yale from which it has not significantly devi ated.'*1 The "University Idea"--the discovery of what a university could and should be--was, to Hadley, a fascinat ing challenge.32 Existing universities, he believed, were hopeful but complicated affairs of unsettled organization and conflicting purposes, and in no part of the world were they accommodated perfectly to meet the needs of men. The ideal university, for Hadley, was one possessed of a single energizing spirit but reaching out in many directions to 30Morris Hadley, Arthur Twining Hadley (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), pp. 124-125. 31 George W. Pierson, Yale College, an Educational History. 1871-1921 (New Haven* Yale University Press, 1952), p. 123. 32Ibid.. p. 123. 300 fulfill many diverse obligations. The university should first be an institution for hard work and general culture, and secondarily a place where young men from various back grounds and with differing expectations "come together for the competitions of youth, the cementing of friendships, 33 and the apprenticeship to learning." Above all, the university should foster the discovery, preservation, and teaching of truth, and maintain the highest intellectual standards. A university has two distinct objects in view. Its primary object is to establish and maintain high standards of scientific investigation, general culture, and professional training. Its secondary object is to teach as many students as possible in the different lines with which it concerns itself. The two things cannot well be separated. Unless the matter of standards is held in the foreground, a place does not deserve the name of a university. . • . But no university can let its zeal for stand ards interfere with its efficiency as a teaching force. The presence of a great body of pupils, engaged in common tasks and Imbued with common aspirations, is by far the most important means which an institution has at its command of making its standards effective throughout the community.34 But high standards, clusters of professional schools, numbers of students, and an enlightened faculty 33Ibid., p. 124. 34Ibid. 301 did not by themselves satisfy all the conditions for a great university. Beyond these necessary requirements, the twentieth-century university had broad obligations to the public and to the nation as a whole. Misconceptions of the university purpose, Hadley felt, were rife. Three of the more common misconceptions he diagnosed as these: first, the university viewed as a popularizer of knowledge; second, as a training place for professional experts; and third, as a home for scientific specialists. None of these, he felt, were adequate statements of university spirit and purpose. Rather, the most profoundly important task of the university was the training of American youth for the successful performance of their adult responsibil ities in guiding and shaping the destinies of the nation. To play an active role in shaping the destiny of his coun try is at once the greatest privilege and heaviest duty of the American citizen. "If we train the members of the rising generation to do this well, all other things can be trusted to take care of themselves. If we do not train them to do this well, no amount of education in other lines will make up for the deficiency."35 The colleges and 35Arthur T. Hadley, The Education of the American Citizen (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1902), p. 168. 302 universities, Hadley believed, were the only effective agencies through which this "sense of trusteeship" could be kindled and transmitted. . . . there is no one part of our national life where there are so many opportunities for its devel opment as in our colleges and universities. Their members are still at an impressionable age. They are living in communities, each of which has its traditions, its collective sentiment, and its loy alty which carries the individual outside of him self. Here, if anywhere, we have freedom from that excessive commercialism which dominates most other departments of American life. Here, if anywhere, we have the opportunity for the study of those things which are broad instead of those which are narrow, of things which are permanent instead of those which are transitory. Here we have, as it exists nowhere else, the opportunity to make men acquire the habit of thinking and living in an atmosphere purer than that of their own selfish interests.36 And what specifically are the habits and powers most needed by the citizens of a free country? Hadley identified and grouped them under three heads. First is the habit of self-government. If we are to become good American citizens, we must accustom ourselves to do inconvenient things, not because some policeman, uniformed or otherwise, tells us to, but because we believe them to be right-- right by the dictates of public opinion and of our own consciences.37 36Ibid.. p. 169. 3^Arthur T. Hadley, Education and Government (New Haven: Yale University f^ress, 19&), p. 94. “ 303 The second necessary qualification for intelligent citizen ship is the habit of public spirit. We must accustom ourselves to work hard for things which the community needs, and to find the need of the community a sufficient motive for enlisting our full powers in the work, independently of the ques tion whether there is anything in it for us.38 The third and most difficult habit to acquire, yet the most basic, is the habit of constructive thought. The habit and the power of independent judgment, Hadley felt, . . . is one of the rarest things that there is in the world . . • when we take the hundred million people that there are in the country, the number who have any idea what it means to do their own thinking is a very small portion of the whole. Yet it is essential to the safety of the country that the self-governing citizen should have formed this habit. If the community consists of people who let others do their thinking for them, it will pretty soon con sist of people who let others do their governing for them. That is the way things worked in Athens and in Rome. That is the way they worked in Florence and in Venice. That is the way they have worked in Russia in the signal instance which recent years have furnished.39 The successful conduct of the business of citizen ship, Hadley concluded, depends on the development in the enlightened leaders of the nation of the following three powers: self-government, public spirit, and constructive 38Ibid. 39Ibid.. p. 95. • , 304 thought. And the primary aim of the university, as of the college, Is to Instill and develop these habits In the youth of the nation. A. Lawrence Lowell: Developing the Whole Man • The University touches the community at many points, and as time goes on It ought to serve the public through ever Increasing channels. But all Its activities are more or less connected with, and most of them are based upon, the college. It is there that character ought to be shaped, that aspira tions ought to be formed, that citizens ought to be trained, and scholarly tastes Implanted. --A. Lawrence Lowell In May of 1909 Charles W. Eliot, after forty years in the office, retired from the presidency of Harvard University. His successor was another "Boston Brahmin" and Unitarian, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, who had been a Harvard professor of government since 1900 and author of a forceful and incisive analysis of the English parliamentary system titled The Government of England. Lowell was a distin guished member of a distinguished family. Since 1806 five Lowells had served as Overseers of Harvard College, and since 1721 thirteen had been granted Harvard degrees,^0 ^See the "Lowell Dynasty" in Samuel E. Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1$37), p. 159. 305 Abbott Lawrence Lowell was a distant cousin of John Lowell, founder of the Lowell Institute, and of the poet Janes Russell Lowell. His brother was Percival Lowell, the astronomer, and his sister, Any Lowell the poet. Abbott Lawrence Lowell was an intellectual aristo crat who detested the "gentleman C" and all other forms of Intellectual mediocrity. His main attention, while in office, was directed to the College, not because he under valued the work of the graduate school but because it was the College that most needed reform.^ He proposed not to undo the work of his predecessor but to consolidate the educational advances of the Eliot administration and to build upon them. Like that of Eliot, Lowell's Inaugural address was a challenge to the academic world. He began with Aristotle's remark that man is by nature a social animal and that American colleges exist to develop his powers as a social being. Nevertheless, he continued, American college life "has shown a marked tendency to dis integrate, both intellectually and socially."^ Colleges ^Ibid.. p. 441. ^A. Lawrence Lowell, At War with Academic Tradi tions in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934), p. 33. 306 of the old type possessed a solidarity and unity of aim which has disappeared; if one result has given us a free dom of movement necessary for progress, another more ominous result has been the low estimation accorded intel lectual ability and proficiency in college study by both undergraduates and the public at large. Lowell believed that the college was in danger of being pinched out, as in Germany, between secondary education and the professional schools. Nicholas Murray Butler at Columbia and others were urging that the college course be shortened by one or two years, but to this Lowell replied, "The most vital measure for saving the college is not to shorten its dura tion, but to ensure that it shall be worth saving. To ensure the saving of the college, a new solidar ity and unity of aim must be established in place of that which had been lost. The new college, which Lowell pro posed and endeavored to establish in the twenty-five years of his administration, was to function as an integral part and center of the entire University complex. The ideal college 43Ibid., p. 35. 307 • • • would contemplate the highest development of the individual student— which involves the best equipment of the graduate. It would contemplate also the proper connection of the college with the professional schools; and it would adjust the relation of the students to one a n o t h e r .44 These three aims of the college in its relation to the University he then developed in detail. First, . . . the college ought to produce, not defective specialists, but men intellectually well rounded, of wide sympathies and unfettered judgment. At the aame time they ought to be trained to hard and accurate thought, and this will not come merely by surveying the elementary principles of many sub jects. It requires a mastery of something, acquired by continuous application. Every student ought to know in some subject what the ultimate sources of opinion are, and how they are handled by those who profess it. Only in this way is he likely to gain the solidity of thought that begets sound thinking. In short, he ought, so far as in him lies, to be both broad and p r o f o u n d .45 Lowell was fond of quoting a statement of Yale's President Hadley: The ideal college education seems to me to be one where a student learns things that he is not going to use in after life, by methods that he is going to use. The former element gives the breadth, the latter element gives the training.46 To both presidents, the essence of liberal education ^Ibid., p. 36. 45ibid. 46Ibid.. pp. 36-37 308 consisted of an attitude of mind, a familiarity with methods of thought, and an ability to locate and use information. It did not consist of storing the memory with facts and information, regardless of how valuable such a storehouse might be. Lowell's second point had to do with the relation of the college to the professional schools. Every college graduate, he argued, ought to be equipped to enter any pro fessional school; consequently, the professional schools ought to be so ordered as to serve him. Although he recog nized that some professional schools--medicine and engin eering, for example--might legitimately require some minimum undergraduate specialization, he was nevertheless adamant in his belief that "for a man who is destined to reach the top of his profession a broad education, and a firm grasp of some subject lying outside of his vocation, is a vast advantage .'*47 Lowell18 third and last major concern was with the interrelations of undergraduates to one another, intellec tually and socially. He had studied the system then in vogue in the English universities and he was impressed with 47Ibid.. p. 38. (Italics added.) the success of Wilson's preceptorial plan at Princeton. Oxford and Cambridge had no elective system, except for the "pass men"; but they had succeeded in stimulating the intellectual curiosity and enthusiasm of youth. Their success, Lowell felt, lay in the "Honour schools" or "Tripos" in a number of broad subjects, prepared for under the direction of a tutor, and tested by a stiff general examination before graduation— a plan that had won the respect of students and educators alike. Harvard had already begun to grant degrees with distinction, especially in history and literature, and Lowell was intent on strengthening this concern with honors by Insisting that every student in Harvard College Integrate his curriculum, once he had chosen a general subject. The schools were to do this by providing each student with a tutor to help him in the process, and by setting up a comprehensive examina tion as a goal.On the social side, too, Lowell observed the practices at Oxford and Cambridge and resolved to destroy the social divisions based on wealth, preparatory schooling, and social position. In their stead he would guarantee free and equal treatment of every student in the ^®Morison, op. cit., pp. 442-443. 310 College, regardless of wealth or family connection. He sought to combine the hard work of learning with the fine art of living and to make sure that even the poorest stu dent was within reach of the best that the College had to offer. But Lowell's whole proposed system of tutors and general examinations, of honors and subject matter concen tration, of new dormitories, eating halls, and Improved social life had but one final aim--to involve the student completely and wholeheartedly in the arduous intellectual and self-disciplinary act of learning. . . . If I may parody the motto of the University, what we desire here is not truth, but the search for truth. A truth that is held at any one time by any body of men is always more or less defective. What we want is an interest in the pursuit of truth, in caring for truth. We want our men to realise that there is no delight so great in life as the exercise of the intellectual faculties in the pur suit of something which is hard to find; in other words, that the attempt to think and think purposely towards the solving of a problem is the most delightful thing there is in life* That is what we want of the college man from the day he enters as a freshman until as a professor he is the author of a book. That is what I understand the University has always stood for.^9 Consequently, therefore, the University as an Institution must always be changing. ^9Lowell, op. cit.. p. 354. 311 Zt must change from one generation to the next, and change radically, change deeply, Its Ideas. But that does not prevent Its holding on to the eternal thread that runs through all changes that occur.50 It Is of no slight Interest that during a period when the Interest of other universities was concentrated on professional and graduate work and when the smaller separate colleges were largely committed to physical expan* slon and fund raising, Lowell stood as one for whom the intellectual life of the undergraduate was of absorbing interest, and as one who pressed for the Improvement of that life with unremitting tenacity of purpose.Nothing disturbed him more than the simple and obvious fact that everywhere in universities and colleges, which stood for the eternal worth of thought and pre-eminence of the sage, classes of young scholars sat listlessly on the bench. They sat so, not because the subject was dull or the lec turer incompetent, but because they did not see clearly enough how exciting was the pursuit of learning and how valuable was the goal. The most pressing task of the day, Lowell believed, was to make the young men sitting in 50Ibid.. p. 355. ^ F r e d e r i c k paui Keppel, Philanthropy and Learning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), p. 127. 312 classrooms and lecture halls feel the greatness of learning and understand how fully learning deserves the price that must be paid for it. To do this, he counseled his faculty, "We must learn— and herein lies the secret--we must learn the precious art of touching their i m a g i n a t i o n . " ^ The professor who will most likely touch and inspire the imaginations of his students is one who has come, through his own research, to a deep understanding of his own sub ject and who senses no arbitrarily imposed limits on his teaching and research activities. Provisions for research and the guarantee of academic freedom,^ then, were, for Lowell, the final necessary constituents in the successful conduct of the university. ^Lowell, og. cit.. p. 64. ^Lowell's able defense of academic freedom during World War I is so well-known as to need no summarization here. His statement on academic freedom, from the Annual Report of 1916-17, is reprinted in his At War with Academic Traditions.in America, pp. 267-272, and again in What a University President Has Learned (New York: The Macmillan Co., 19385, pp. H7-nj:-------- CHAPTER IX NEW GROWTH AND DIVERSIFICATION Robert M. Hutchins: Experiment and Controversy A university is a community of scholars. It is not a kindergarten; it is not a club; it is not a reform school; it is not a polit ical party; it is not an agency of propaganda. A university is a community of scholars. The scholars who compose that community have been chosen by their predecessors because they are especially competent to study and to teach some branch of knowledge. The greatest university is that in which the largest pro portion of these scholars are most competent in their chosen fields. --Robert M. Hutchins In 1918 a commission of the American National Edu cation Association prepared and published a document titled Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education. The document carried a statement of goals for American schools andt endorsed and distributed by the United States Byreau of Education, it rapidly stimulated a nation-wide discussion of educational policy.* In their Cardinal Principles, the *A remark attributed to Professor Edgar B. Wesley 313 314 National Education Association commission argued that. Inasmuch as two-thirds of all those entering the four-year high school did not stay to graduate and an even larger proportion did not go on to college, the time had come to re-examine the old concept of general intellectual disci pline as the principal goal of education. The commission proposed that Individual differences In capacities and attitudes receive more attention In the schools, that the child be conceived of not as a mind to be developed but as a citizen to be trained, that citizenship and democracy be taught directly, and that high school courses be better adapted to meet the needs of both those who continue and those who drop out of school.2 Furthermore, the commission argued, colleges and universities should follow the example of the secondary schools by considering themselves mass Institutions and by arranging their offerings accordingly. The Idea that higher education should be restricted only to the Intellec tual elite Is destined to disappear, the authors prophesied. In the years to come, they held, high school graduates with by Richard Hofstadter in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1963), p. 334. 2Ibid.. pp. 334-335. 315 vocational interests, as well as those with liberal inter ests, should be allowed to go on to college and to take any form of education which would afford "profit to them selves and to society."3 During the decades between the two world wars, the most articulate opponent to this view of higher education was the young president of the University of Chicago, Robert Maynard Hutchins. Born into an academic family in 1899 in Brooklyn, Hutchins was educated at Oberlln and Yale where he received an LL.B. in 1923. He joined the faculty of the Yale Law School as a lecturer in 1925 and rapidly rose to become its dean in 1928-1929. In 1929, at the age of thirty, he assumed the presidency of the University of Chicago, where he served under that title until 1945, then, for another six years as chancellor. His presidency at Chicago was notable for its vigor, experimentation, and controversy and for his stout defense of academic freedom. During the years of his presidency, Hutchins became famous as one of the outstanding proponents of intellectualism in education.^ 3Ibid., p. 336. ^J. Brubacher and W. Rudy, Higher Education in Tran sition (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1^*>8), pp. 266-290. 316 In the first full-dress statement of his educa tional philosophy, The Higher Learning in America published in 1936, Hutchins argued that the most striking fact about American education, both secondary and higher, "is the confusion that besets it."^ This confusion begins in the high school and continues to the loftiest levels of the university. The high school cannot make up its mind whether it is preparing students for life or for college. Its student population is miscellaneous and variegated. The course of study is substantially uniform for all groups, • . • The junior college is in most places an exten sion of the high-school curriculum, . • • Here also the question whether the students are completing their education or are preparing to go on to the university has not been settled, and the aims of the institution are not clear. The college of liberal arts is partly high school, partly university, partly general, partly special. Frequently it looks like a teacher-training institution. Frequently it looks like nothing at all. The degree it offers seems to certify that the student has passed an uneventful period without violating any local, state, or federal law, and that he has a fair, if temporary, recollection of what his teachers have said to him. • . • Little pre tense is made that many of the things said to him are of much importance. The university is distinguished from the college by two things: professional schools and the Ph.D. degree. At present we do not know why the university ^Robert M. Hutchins, The Higher Learning in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1936), p. 1. 317 should have professional schools or what they should be like. We do not even know what the professions are. Professional education consists either of going through motions that we have inherited or of making gestures of varying degrees of wildness that we hope may be more effectual. The Ph.D. degree, because it has become a necessary part of the insignia of the college or university teacher, has lost any other meaning. But universities also do research and hope to train research men. The same degree is awarded in recognition of research. The students who are going to be teachers are put through a procedure which was designed to produce investiga- tors. The classes, the courses, the content, and the aims of graduate work are as confused as those of the high school.& What were the causes of this pervasive "disunity, discord, and disorder" at all educational levels? Hutchins identified three which he believed responsible for the disease in higher education. In his view, the ailment proceeded fundamentally from a too-ready response of uni versities to satisfy the many demands made upon them by the American public. This public, he argued, is moved by love of money; thus motivated, the university responds to anything that promises to bring money, whether donors, student fees, or state legislatures. The result is that institutions of higher learning become public servlce- stations; and, because there is no single tide in public opinion— only a criss-cross of currents— the kind of 6Ibid.. pp. 1-3. 318 service rendered shifts with every change In public whim. Love of money requires the admission of large numbers of students and a consequent lowering of standards. A second major cause of American educational dis order, Hutchins felt, stemmed from the effect upon higher education of our popular notion of democracy. This notion, confused as it is, encourages the belief that everyone should have the same chance of getting higher education, and everyone should have just that kind of education he happens to want. Hutchins maintained that the responsi bility of the public for providing education ends properly at the sophomore year of college; after that, education should be given only to those who have demonstrated special intellectual capacity. A third major cause of our educational disorder steamed from an erroneous notion of progress, the idea that the future is always an improvement on the past. Why not, then, break with the past? Hutchins asked. Since in fact the "progress" that has taken place is mainly in material things and techniques, the higher learning has become swamped in an empiricism that drowns the intellect.? ^Ibid.. Chapter I, passim. 319 Hutchins' diagnosis of the ills besetting American higher education was undeniably shrewd and to the mark. Many of his readers, however, were not willing to accept his remedy because it was based on little more than a strong personal belief in the existence of fixed and eternal truths. "Real unity can be achieved only by a hierarchy of truths which shows us which are fundamental and which are subsidiary."^ Hutchins seemed to argue that since the evils besetting American higher education have come from surrender to the shifting currents of public sentiment, the only remedy was to be found in the greatest possible separation of higher learning from contemporary k social life, in an aloof and continual contemplation of absolute truths. The solution could only be realized, so far as universities were concerned, in a deep divorcement of the life of the mind from the requirements of daily life. In Hutchins' view, the university must be a time less institution dedicated to but one noble cause, "the pursuit of truth for its own sake." Could the twentieth- century university be divested of its professional schools 8Ibid.. p. 95. 320 and technical institutes, shorn of its obligations to serve all interests in the community, freed from its existing welter of extra-curricular and nonacademic activities, it would emerge as an institution of but three faculties: metaphysics, social science, and natural science. By "metaphysics" Hutchins meant to embrace the study of "first principles" and all that follows logically from them— the principles of change in the physical world, studies of man and of his productions in literature and fine arts.9 Social sciences would embrace the fields of ethics, politics, and economics, "together with such historical and empirical materials as may be needed to supplement them for the guidance of human action."1° The natural sciences encompassed the study of nature. "The natural sciences derive their principles from the philosophy of nature, which in turn depends on metaphysics. In the study of them such recent observations as serve to illustrate, exemplify, or confirm these principles must be Included."H 9Ibid., p. 107. 10Ibid. 11Ibid.. p. 108. 321 In summary, then, the university would consist of the three faculties, metaphysics, social science, and natural science. The professors would be those who were thinking about the fundamental problems in these fields. The teaching would be directed to understanding the ideas in these fields, and would have no vocational aim. The student would study all three subject matters, with emphasis upon one. He would enter upon this program at the beginning of the junior year and continue in it for about three years. Since it is desirable that the collection of historical and current data should proceed in the vicinity of the university, research institutes in the social and natural sciences may be established in connection with it, though not as part of it. Technical Institutes in the same relation to the university may also be created if needed to give practical training for occupations which require a background of special knowledge and facility in special techniques. Students should in no case be admitted to technical or research institutes until they have completed their general and higher educa tion. We see, then, that we may get order in the higher learning by removing from it the elements which disorder it today, and these are vocational- lsm and unqualified empiricism. If when these elements are removed we pursue the truth for its own sake in the light of some principle of order, such as metaphysics, we shall have a rational plan for a university. We shall be able to make a university a true center of learning; we shall be able to make it the home of creative thought.12 President Hutchins looked at American higher educa tion and found it sorely wanting: characterized by disorder, subject to the material values of an acquisitive 12Ibid., pp. 116-117. 322 society, permeated with vocationaliam. So, he declared war on empiricism, on anti-intellectualism, and on voca- tionalism wherever he founo them in the fabric of univer sity life. He proposed to incorporate in their stead a return to the old scholastic curriculum, an education in classics, gramnar, rhetoric, logic, mathematics, and Aristotelian metaphysics; and he rested his argument on the private belief that the "heart of any course of study designed for the whole people will be . . . the same at any time, in any place, under any political, social, or economic conditions. James B. Conant: A Long-Range Human Enterprise We can describe a university, it seems to me, as a community of scholars with a considerable degree of independence and self-government, concerned with professional education, the advancement of knowledge, and the general education of the leading citizens. — J. B. Conant If the philosophy of higher education propounded by Robert Hutchins is at all susceptible to brief and concise statement, it may perhaps be stated as follows: the principal aim of education is understanding, knowledge ^Ibid.. pp. 32, 66. 323 of events and their causes, knowledge of the reasons for things. The principal distinction between training and education is an intellectual one. Where the trained person performs certain operations habitually and unthinkingly, the educated person performs those operations with an understanding of their causes and consequences. Harking back to Aristotle, Hutchins contends that education is "the process of learning to lead the good life."^ But goodness and wisdom go hand-in-hand, and thus it is the primary responsibility of the educational system to supply the individual with the understanding and the knowledge necessary to sustain him in the performance of good acts. The task of the educational system is "to provide the opportunity for the maximum development of the intellectual powers of those who enter it; for no other institution can perform this service to society."^ But Hutchins does not mean by this that the univer sities should open their doors to the public at large or that everyone in a democratic society should seek ^Robert M. Hutchins, Some Observations on American Education (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), p. 103. 15Ibid. 324 university degrees. A democracy must first make the effort to see that every citizen becomes as good and as wise as it is possible for him to become and that he achieves the fullest development of his intellectual powers. The citi- zen should go as far in the educational system as he is interested in going and as far as he is qualified by intel ligence and motivation to go. The only obstacles that should stand in his way to the uppermost reaches of higher education "should be such as arise from a deficiency of interest or ability."1^ Though in disagreement with Hutchins on many points, James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard Univer sity from 1933 to 1933, appears to be in agreement with him on this basic philosophy. In his Preface to the Harvard Committee Report General Education in a Free Society (1943), Conant argued that: Unless the educational process includes at each level of maturity some continuing contact with those fields in which value judgments are of prime importance (history, art, literature, and philos ophy), it must fall far short of the ideal. The student in high school, in college [sic] and in graduate school must be concerned, in part at least, with the words "right" and "wrong" in both the ethical and the mathematical sense. Unless he feels 16Ibid.. p. 106 325 the import of those general ideas and aspirations which have been a deep moving force in the lives of men, he runs the risk of partial blindness.^ Conant uses the term "general education" to repre sent this particular objective— education for citizenship and education for the good life. Thus defined, general education may be contrasted with specialized and profes sional education; the latter is directed toward the acquir ing of certain skills and information and the formation of certain attitudes useful in a vocation. This separation of general education from professional education has led the former to be designated "liberal education"; however, Conant prefers the term "general education." In his view, general education is but one of four functions, or elements of strength, which characterize the university as a dis tinct institution in western society and which must be kept in proper balance if universities are to survive and flourish. As the university tradition came to America, it was based on four ultimate sources of strength: the cultivation of learning for its own sake, the educational stream that makes possible the profes sions, the general educational stream of the liberal ^General Education in a Free Society: Report of the Harvard Committee (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1945)* p. vlli. 326 arts, and, lastly, the never-falling river of stu dent life carrying all the power that comes from the gregarious impulses of human beings. According to my view, universities have flourished when these four elements have been properly in balance; on the other hand, when one or more of these same elements has diminished or dried up, the academies of advanced instruction have failed signally in per forming a relevant social f u n c t i o n .*8 Let us examine each of these four elements in turn. The cultivation of learning for its own sake, Conant main- * tains, first took hold in American universities late in the nineteenth century as an attempt to offset the emphasis on professional and vocational studies in the A and M col leges. Conant quotes with approval the judgment of an eminent Oxford scholar who declared that the university tradition had never taken root in the United States. The judgment is harsh but true, Conant maintains, because it was not until the Johns Hopkins University was opened in Baltimore that the idea of a university as a center of advanced learning came to prominence in the public mind. It was not until Gilman had boldly proclaimed that "all departments of learning should be promoted" and that "the glory of the university should rest upon the character of the teachers and scholars • • • and not upon their number 1& James B. Conant, Education in a Divided World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), p. 159. 327 nor upon the buildings constructed for their use" that scholarship came into its own as part of the university tradition of the United States.19 Of the second element or source of strength in the university tradition, namely, training for the professions, Conant holds that this came to prominence in American uni versities only in the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth centuries. As American society became more highly industrialized the demands for people with special.and technical education increased. The universities felt new pressures to educate young men and women for specific vocations and responded by develop ing graduate programs in business administration, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, and the like. But soon the voices of able and distinguished citizens rose in alarm. When you abandon the concept of a university as a home of learning, they declared, as a place where the life of the mind is to be cultivated at all costs, you destroy our centers of higher education. Nevertheless, despite these outcries and lamentations, the trend toward increased vocational and professional training continued apace. 328 One of our oldest universities strengthened its school of business administration, another con tinued to give degrees in forestry and nursing, while privately controlled universities in urban areas were as catholic in their offerings as any financed by the state. One element of the ancient four— professional education— had received nour ishment from the combination of democracy and Industrialization. It was forced to proliferate in a way to shock the admirers of the ancient stem. All manner of new vocations were assimi lated within the sacred walls of a university, and graduates armed with special training in a variety of skills stood on the commencement platform as proudly.as the future members of the clergy or the bar.20 In short, Conant concluded, the forces of democracy, in a brief period of seventy-five years, had taken the European idea of a university and transformed it. But the trans formation was sound, he maintains, since it resulted from a philosophy hostile to the idea of an occupational hier archy, a philosophy which accepted instead the social equality of all useful labor. The third source of strength in the modern American university, the general educational stream of the liberal arts, is one of the traditional elements in the university pattern to remain relatively constant through the centu ries. Conant refers here, primarily, to education in the humanities, in art and in literatures of the past. In 20Ibid.. p. 162. 329 origin, Humanism had a dual nature. It was compounded of the fruits of intellectual adventure on the one hand, and aesthetic and philosophic insight on the other--the zest of digging and the joy of contemplation of the treasure found. This twofold aspect of the humanities persists to the present and is a source both of strength and of weak ness. The dual nature must be kept in balance. If the zeal for digging or its equivalent in philo logical terms becomes overriding, a type of dessi- cated scholarship results which has been the subject of attack now for many years. If the joy of con templation of the beautiful becomes dominant, a sentimental attachment to some one period of literary or artistic taste is almost certain to result. The dynamic quality of true humanism disappears as the collector merely rearranges and admires those objects on which he has set his heart.21 He continues: The teacher of the humanities today has the special task of rediscovering and transmitting a knowledge of man's activity as a poet and artist. The humanist today, as he was five centuries ago, is not only a discoverer but an Interpreter and above all a teacher, whether his pupils be children, young men and women, or adults. In this task he will need as a constant ally the creative artist. . . . I may only note that unless society encour ages and generously supports contemporary artists, composers, and writers, there will be little sustained enthusiasm for studying the heritage of the past.22 21Ibid., p. 78. 22Ibid. 330 Conant's fin^l source of strength in the university tradition is "the never-failing river of student life carrying all the power that comes from the gregarious impulses of human beings."^ It is this emphasis which has manifested itself in ways as different as the Oxford / colleges, the German dueling clubs, and the American zest for intercollegiate athletics. When any one of these four elements is eliminated from the university, or when any one of them acquires dominance over the others, the university withers. The cultivation of learning alone produces not a community but a research institute; sole concern with student life pro duces either an academic country club or a football team maneuvering under a collegiate banner; professional educa tion by itself results in nothing but a trade school; an institution concerned with general education, even in the best liberal arts tradition, divorced from research and training for the professions is admittedly not a university but a college. Therefore, to Conant, the future of the American university depends primarily on keeping a balance between these four traditional elements of strength. 331 Concluding his analysis of the origins and func tions of the American university, Conant writes: Like all other democratic institutions based on the principles of toleration, individual freedom, and the efficacy of rational methods, the universi ties are certain to meet with many difficulties as they seek to preserve their Integrity during this period of warring ideologies. . . . Today, . • . the friends of learning must recognize the dangers which might threaten the universities if tempers rise as the armed truce lengthens. They must seek to increase the number of citizens who understand the true nature of universities, the vital impor tance of the tradition of free inquiry, the signifi cance of life tenure for the older members of each faculty, the fact that violent differences of opinion are essential for education. . . . In short, our citadels of learning must be guarded by devoted laymen in all walks of life who realize the relation between education and American democ racy. So protected, the universities need not worry unduly about infiltration of Marxist subversive elements or intimidation from without. They will remain secure fortresses of our liberties.24 Whitney Griswold: In the University Tradition Liberal learning is both a safeguard against false ideas of freedom and a source of true ones. Due process of law provides an orderly framework within which the definition of freedom may be carried on without fear of subversion by one man's will, by enemy agents, or by popular hue and cry. Liberal learning and due process of law are root and branch of the university tradition. — A. W. Griswold 24Ibid., pp. 179-180 332 The American university is an institution created since the Civil War to provide within a single framework the multiple functions of professional training, advance- ment of scholarship, scientific research, classroom instruction of high quality, and education in the liberal arts. During the first half of the twentieth century the university came to be the most powerful and influential institution in the whole fabric of American higher educa tion; by 1950 universities were granting one-half of all degrees in liberal arts, two-thirds of those in profes sional studies, and nine-tenths of those in graduate studies,^ American universities today carry the major burden of the nation's research efforts, provide numerous direct services to the public by operating experiment stations, institutes, and adult training centers, and stimulate the continual flow of organized information, analyses, criticism, and expert opinion necessary to the successful operation of a prosperous democratic society. American universities in recent decades have come to provide the intellectual leadership for the nation. They ^Richard Hofstadter and C. DeWitt Hardy, The Development and Scope of Higher Education in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), p. 140. 333 speak with an authority and prestige far beyond the reach of liberal arts colleges, technical institutes, and pro* fessional schools. Moreover, in graduate and professional schools, universities train those who later carry on the teaching and research duties in other institutions; thus, the temper of university education permeates the whole system of higher education. But the heart of the university in mid-twentieth century America, as was true in twelfth-century Paris and thirteenth-century Oxford, is liberal education--that edu cation which expands to the limit the student's capacity for self-government, for seeking and finding enjoyment and meaning in everything he does.^ There has perhaps been no more articulate champion on the American scene for this kind of liberal education than A. Whitney Griswold, the sixteenth president of Yale University. It is unfortunate, Griswold writes, that we are so } confused over the meaning of the phrase "liberal arts," let alone the subjects of study for which it stands. The phrase ^^A. Whitney Griswold, Liberal Education and the Democratic Ideal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), p. vi. 334 . ... has acquired connotations of special privi lege and preciosity. At the risk of laboring the obvious, therefore, let us recall that, as it is used here, the word "liberal" comes from the Latin liber, meaning "free"; and that from earliest times these have included the sciences. (In the Middle Ages the liberal arts were arithmetic, geometry and astronomy, in addition to grdmmar, rhetoric, logic and music.) In other words, the liberal arts are rooted in freedom, not privilege, and they are broad, not narrow, in educational scope.27 Many critics of the liberal arts tradition, Griswold continues, have attacked the content without being aware, apparently, that the value of a liberal edu cation lies not in its content but in its quality or spirit. The elective system itself, as fostered under Eliot at Harvard, was an attack on the quantitative aspects of the liberal arts curriculum but not on its quality or spirit. When the scientist forgets that both science and the humanities are parts of the liberal arts tradition, or when the professional man asks what classical literature or poetry have to do with preparation for the law, medicine or engineering, he has lost sight of the purpose and spirit of the liberal arts. The purpose of the liberal arts is not to teach business men business, or grammarians grammar, or college students Greek and Latin (which have 27Ibid., p. 11. 335 disappeared from their required curricula). It is to awaken and develop the intellectual and spiritual powers in the individual before he enters upon his chosen career, so that he may bring to that career the greatest possible assets of intelligence, resourcefulness, judgment, and character.28 Or, in the words of John Stuart Mill, the liberal arts transform young men and women into "capable and cultivated human beings. . . . Men are men before they are lawyers or physicians or manufacturers; and if you make them capa ble and sensible men they will make themselves capable and sensible lawyers or physicians."29 One can find, Griswold believes, no better statement of the purpose of liberal education than this nor any that so well establishes its place in a national educational system, dedicated, as ours is, "to the preparation of men and women not just for intellectual pursuits but for life."30 The conclusion to be drawn is that liberal studies and other studies long thought to be in competition ,are not competitors at all, but allies. The age-old conflicts which have raged between classical and modem studies, between humanistic and scien tific studies, between theoretical and practical studies 28Ibid., p. 13. 29Ibid. 30Ibid. 336 have no foundation in principle. Any study that is taught so as to stir the imaginations of students, any study which serves to free the individual from the chains of blind im pulse and unreasoned habitual behavior, is a liberal study. The particular character of modern learning and scholarship that distinguishes it from learning in the ancient world, Griswold notes, is its institutional sanc tion. The higher learning is innate in western civiliza tion, but in the ancient world it was largely unorganized and carried on only by the zeal and competence of individ ual Greek, Hebrew, and Roman scholars. Beginning in the twelfth century with the revival of learning that ended the Dark Ages, however, the university became the scholar's home. Toward the end of the twelfth century, groups of masters and students banded themselves together to exploit this newly rediscovered wealth of learn ing, first at Bologna, then at Paris, then at Oxford and Cambridge, calling their organizations studia generalia. universitates, and finally univer sities. These institutions succeeded in bringing together the study of the liberal arts (grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, 3^A. W. Griswold18 "Inaugural Address" made on formally taking office as Yale's sixteenth president, New Haven, October 6, 1950. Reprinted in Essays on Education (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), p. 5. 337 geometry, astronomy, and music) with the pursuit of higher education in special fields (medicine, theology, law, philosophy). Thus the university not only institutional- ized scholarship but also deepened and broadened the whole range of the higher learning. They [universities] deepened it by bringing this combination within the experience of a single individual, and they broadened it by making the experience available to much greater numbers of individuals. They did not attempt to cover every field of learning. That is neither the proper meaning of the word university nor, I submit, the proper policy for it to suggest to us. A group of men devoted to learning on the highest plane of intellectual and moral integrity would be an even more accurate historical definition of a university than an institution combining higher education with the liberal arts. But it is in their institutional design that we most clearly perceive the interlock ing of the higher learning and university tradi tions. 32 Historically, the university's graduate and profes sional schools have functioned to extend man's knowledge to the furthest frontiers of learning, and the college of liberal arts has functioned to prepare students for service on these frontiers. Both of these functions are still being served today and both are becoming more important as knowledge accumulates. The liberal arts, far from dimin ishing in Importance, are becoming more and more vital as 32Ibid.. p. 6. 338 "stepping stones to the professions" and as the best preparation for the ordinary work of the world. In a democracy, which rests upon the freedom and responsibility of the individual, they give that individual vision. They enlarge his capacity for self-knowledge and expand his opportunities for self-improvement. . . , They are the wellsprings of a free society.33 Griswold sees in this unification of intellectual pursuit and purposive self-development the ideal preparation for vigorous participation in a truly democratic society. It is in this way that the American democratic tradition forms the tripos with the traditions of higher learning and the university. Europeans and Englishmen have used their universities to train their intellectual and political leaders. We have conceived a broader purpose for higher education. This purpose regards all education as a preparation for life, and higher education but the culminating phase of a process that should be available to all who have the capacity to partake of it. By capac ity we do not mean merely Intellectual competence. We mean Intellectual competence tempered by charac ter, judgment, and moral responsibility. Our purpose does not assume equal capacity or equal attainment among men. It holds, rather, that if men are to be thrown upon their own individual resources in society, society should prepare them for that responsibility and should not allow that preparation to be limited by anything other than the individual*s innate ability to benefit by it. This was Jefferson's corollary to popular sovereignty, his key to equal opportunity and a truly mobile, democratic society. This was the means whereby the people could not only instruct themselves in the use 33Ibid.. p. 7. 339 of the franchise but also produce their leaders and teachers in every sphere of life. It was education in this sense that Jefferson called "the most legi timate engine of government" and of which he said, in words that stand out vividly against the Iron Curtain, "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."34 Summary and Synthesis If any single trend distinguishes the twentieth- century American university from its predecessors, it is the trend toward democratization. The multiplication of scholarship programs, rapidly increasing enrollments, and large-scale adult education programs, all viewed with disdain in traditional circles, are, nevertheless, the distinguishing features of American universities in this century. Wherever the democratized institution has retained the traditional values of.the university, those values marked out so well by men like Hutchins, Conant and Griswold, the university is sure to be strong and alive. But where the institution suffers for want of financial support or responsible faculty leadership, the trend toward democratization results Inevitably in adult play schools, low academic standards, and excessive 34Ibid.. pp. 7-8. vocationalism. The modern university is a complex, multipurposed institution which, in addition to its traditional func tions, seeks to transmit cultural and technical knowledge in terms understandable to the laymen, and to improve the educational level of the whole society. In adopting such an aim, it has departed wholly from the earlier aristo cratic concept of educating only the gentleman, and it has departed to some degree from the narrow intellectual concept of educating only the ablest minds. Thus, the university has tended to become, in our time, not only a community of scholars but also a community of citizens, some seeking to add to their general understanding and knowledge, others seeking intellectual challenge and stimulation, and still others seeking new skills and voca tional or professional upgrading. The fundamental respon sibility of the university today, then, has become that of responding sensitively and intelligently to the various public demands made upon it, while retaining simultaneously the traditional values which have characterized it from the beginning--the zest for learning, inspired teaching, the spirit of scholarly inquiry, and professional training. 341 It is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that only by maintaining a nice balance between the values of the past and the demands of the present can the university continue to play a vital role in the life of our times. Today's university needs to provide a forum for the continuing discussion of searching questions; it needs to provide an atmosphere where truth, not power, is the goal in view; it needs to retain its tradition of objective inquiry, its intellectual honesty, its comprehension of all knowledge, its mission of civilizing and bringing under control the Irrational forces in men; and it needs to persevere in its pursuit of that ideal inherited from the Middle Ages of bringing harmony and understanding into the affairs of men. PART IV THE ENDLESS QUEST CHAPTER X THE UNIVERSITY IDEA: PAST AND PRESENT The Historical Past The love of truth Is not the same as the need of certitude and it is rather Imprudent to confuse the one with the other. . , . One can love the truth all the more for not believing it possible ever to attain an absolute. --Andr^ Glde A basic question to which this dissertation is addressed is: Does the university have, in any distinctive sense, a continuity? The answer at this point should be a resounding yes; for more than two millenia the university has had and continues to have a profound and apparently ineradicable continuity in the civilized societies of western Europe and America. Whatever may be the shortcom ings of the contemporary university, it does at least appear to have a clear central focus, rooted in a long and rich cultural heritage that is guiding it through the temporal conflicts and problems of the present. In the 343 344 present, as in the past, the university directs its efforts toward the search for truth, the discovery and conservation of knowledge, and the educating of students that they may become more alert, more aware, more observant, more ra tional, and more desirous of elevating their lives through conscious endeavor. The university is that unique institu tion wherein one finds and learns to participate in the disciplined search for truth in an atmosphere of intellec tual freedom. This has been its purpose from the beginning. Plato's Academy, opened in 387 B.C., functioned continu ously for more than 900 years. Here were taught music, poetry and song, physical education and dialectics. The moral values of loyalty, valor, and the appreciation and enjoyment of leisure were stressed. The guiding ideal was "a man both beautiful and good"; physical body and moral character were of equal importance and equally in need of nourishment and discipline. Although designed as a school for the education of political leaders rather than of ordinary people, the Academy emphasized the Socratic belief in the value of truth and wisdom and gave new emphasis to intellectual inquiry and right reasoning as the means for coming to know the truth. The Socratic-Platonic view was 345 that virtue cannot be implanted in the student; it is there already and oniy awaits the teacher who can bring it to full flower. The Socratic method required that the teacher act as an agent and not as a source of knowledge, and that a premium be placed on getting the pupil to discover answers for himself. In this sense the Academy came to function both as a unique place for higher learning and as a center for the advancement of knowledge. One historic function of higher education in Rome was to continue the work begun by the Athenians and to establish the values of Hellenic civilization so firmly in Western Europe as to enable those values to survive the overthrow of the Roman Empire itself. The substance of Roman higher education in the first four centuries of the Christian era was rhetoric, law, and philosophy. As the Empire deteriorated during the fourth and fifth centuries, the Hellenic educational tradition was moved from Rome to Constantinople, where it survived, despite vicissitudes, for the next thousand years. Like its Roman and Greek predecessors, the Byzantine curriculum was composed of music, physical education, mathematics, rhetoric, philos ophy, law, and medicine. Its immediate purpose, again like its predecessors, was to train an elite from which the 346 state*8 officials could be drawn; but its more far-reaching and fundamental achievement was to keep alive the spirit of learning during the long centuries of the European Dark Ages. The content and purposes of classical education were sustained in Constantinople despite frequent threats of conquest and destruction. But in the eleventh century Moslem Turks did succeed in invading Constantinople, the capitol of Byzantiumj and the long and confusing history of the Holy Wars began. The Holy Wars were ostensibly fought for the purpose of recovering and protecting the Holy Places in Asia Minor; but there was yet another and more far-reaching result obtained. During the two centu ries of Crusades the entire body of Byzantine cultural achievement, including the writings of Greek authors, was gradually made available in new translations to the West. This discovery of the writings of long-forgotten Greek mathematicians, philosophers, poets and dramatists resulted in a thirteenth-century renaissance of learning throughout Western Europe. The progenitors of universities in the Western world were the twelfth and thirteenth century studla ■ ■ * organized at Paris, Bologna, and Oxford. These emerged from the earlier cathedral schools and gained eminence 347 from the brilliant reputations of teachers like Abelard, Irnerius, and John of Salisbury. Known first as Studia Generalia and later as Universitas. these centers of learning attracted scholars from all parts of Europe. A typical Studium would possess a faculty of arts and one or more of the higher faculties of medicine, law, or theology. A student would enter first the faculty of arts and study the septivium or seven liberal arts: grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music. Upon graduation as a bachelor he was granted a license to teach and became eligible to enter one of the graduate faculties in law, medicine, or theology. If he remained on the university roll he was, in time, admitted to the guild of masters. This practice, Campbell Stewart has noted, is the origin of one of the most significant factors of the university*-its unique freedom. "Although the Church offered the license to teach, the masters examined and graduated the student and they elected him to their own number. This is the beginning of academic free dom, for no further formal examination was needed."! The ^Campbell Stewart, "The Place of Higher Education in a Changing Society," in The American College, edited by Hevitt Sanford (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1962), p. 911. 348 highest academic honor, the degree of Doctor, was offered in each of the three graduate faculties and awarded only after the successful presentation and defense of a thesis. The European universities grew so rapidly during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that they came to rival in power and influence both the established Roman Catholic Church and the prevailing monarchies. Through the intellectual achievement of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle became the final authority in logic and dialectics for master and cleric, student and townsman. A revealing glimpse of the medieval university man at his best is afforded us in the prologue to Chaucer's Canter- bury Tales. Here the scholar is described as devout and humble, a man completely dedicated to the complementary tasks of learning and teaching. For him was lever have at his beddes heed Twenty bokes, clad in black or reed, Of Aristotle and his philosophye, Then robes riche, or fifthele, or gay sautrye. But al that he mighte of his freendes hente, On bokes and on leminge he it spente, Of studie took he most cure and most hede Nought a word spok he more than was nede, And that was sayd in forme and reverence, And short and quik, and ful of hy sentence. 349 Souninge in moral vertu was his speche, And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly t e c h e . 2 Between 1400 and 1600 the European universities underwent several important changes. Oxford and Cambridge broke their religious affiliations with the Church of Rome and established themselves as clusters of Protestant col leges Intent on training ministers to serve the Anglican cause and spread its message. The growth of mercantilism, the breakdown of the medieval guild system, and the conse quent rise of a large middle class brought young men in considerable numbers to the universities to be trained for the professions. The scholarship of men like Erasmus and Thomas More introduced a fresh spirit of humanism into European learning and emancipated academic man from the rigors of Aristotelian logic and dialectics. The publica tion of new and revolutionary works in the sciences (anatomy and astronomy in particular) overthrew many exist ing theories of the nature of man and the universe and stimulated the imaginations of poets and scientists alike. Thus, by the time Bacon and Descartes appeared, a considerable change had been effected in the temper and 2 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, edited by W. W. Skeat and Louis Untexmeyer (New York: The Modern Library, 1929), p. 8. 350 concent of Western thought. Descartes felt much pressure to bend his thought so as to fit with the established dogma of the Church, but Bacon struck out at the gross superstitions of medieval tradition and sought to clear the intellectual atmosphere of much of the pseudo-science, astrology, and magic, which had accumulated over the centuries. Then in the seventeenth century Newton and Harvey, Comenius and.Gilbert made their great contributions in the surging trend toward empiricism and the growing scientific concern with objects and processes, forces and measurements. Many different worlds or countries of the mind then lay close together--the world of scholastic learning, the world of scientific experiment, the worlds of classical mythology and of biblical his tory, of fable and of fact, of theology and demon- ology, of sacred and profane love, of pagan and Christian morals, of activity and contemplation; and a cultivated man had freedom of them all.3 With the founding of nine American colonial col leges during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the spark of learning Ignited by the liberal arts curriculum in the medieval university crossed the Atlantic. In Massachusetts, Virginia, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New ^Basll Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background (London: Chatto and Windus, 1933), p. 42. 351 Hampshire, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York, colleges were founded for the express purpose of guaranteeing that the youth of the colony should "be well educated to learn ing and good morals." Modeled after the English college system, the colonial colleges inherited from Oxford and Cambridge a curriculum, methods of administration and instruction, and a system of honors and degrees. But, most important, they inherited a tradition which was recog nized and sought after for two thousand years as the rich est educational opportunity of the ideal citizen. This is the tradition of the liberal arts, a tradition which has in some times and in some places been distorted to mean the education of an aristocratic citi zenry, or the education of propertied and leisured gentle men, or the education of statesmen and diplomats. In essence it is none of these. The liberal arts is an edu cation designed to stimulate and discipline the human mind and to make whole and agile the human body. It provides the student with a general foundation upon which to build the specific competence required in any profession or vocation. It is an education intended to prepare free and responsible men and women to live in a free society. The true spirit of the liberal arts tradition places the man 352 ahead of his calling and seeks to expand to the utmost the only true source of virtue the conscience and mind of is the tradition that was and intelligence in society-- the individual citizen. This ignited in the colonial colleges, a tradition as old as the kocratic dialogues. For twenty- five hundred years it has wound its way through the learn ing, scholarship, and science of Western societies; it is the tradition of learning for the sake of learning, of man seeking to know the truth, and of one generation communi cating to the next this zeal for learning and the spirit of disinterested research. The colonial colleges prepared clergymen and trained for the professions, but the uniform prerequisite to professional study was a four-year curric ulum in the liberal arts. The liberal arts were not abandoned when the col leges stopped teaching the trivium and quadrivium. The medieval curriculum has, in fact, not been abandoned but broadened to include modern languages, literature, philos ophy, fine arts, the sciences and social studies. The enduring bases of the liberal arts are not any single set of subjects, ideas or techniques. The liberal arts provide, first, an education founded on the study of language, both classical and modern, and including the 353 study of one's own native language. Second, the instruc tion is not intended to be vocationally useful; its intent is to cultivate a quality of mind, to discipline the intellectual faculties. Third, the liberal arts are those studies most appropriate to free and independent men; they do not teach servility or unthinking dependence on author ity, but prepare free, responsible and self-governing citizens for life in a free society. Finally, liberal education provides the student with that kind of personal enrichment and imaginative stimulus which can come only from the study of literature, the arts, religion, history, philosophy and theoretical science. This, then, is the tradition that was established in America with the founding of the classical colleges; this is the tradition that lies at the heart of university and collegiate establishments in America today; this is the tradition which, when not properly tended, stands always in danger of dying, taking with it perhaps the creative and imaginative powers of the human race. Hence, a university or a society which refuses to honor the tradition and spirit of the liberal arts tends to turn toward vocationslism, narrow specialization, and the ultimate de-humanization of man. 354 The Historical Present It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. It is time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure--if they are, indeed, so well off— to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives. --H. D. Thoreau The dominant institution of higher learning in antebellum America was the liberal arts college--sectarian, privately-supported, and patterned after the English col lege. Donald Tewksbury reported the founding of more than five hundred separate colleges before 1860, of which only slightly more than one hundred have survived.^ These colleges, democratic though they were in comparison to their more aristocratic English cousins, came under increasing criticism after the Civil War. The criticism was directed at some very real faults, since the colleges did tend to teach by rote, overemphasize linguistic skills, and rely too heavily on the well-stocked memory. Further more, scholarship lacked depth and authority, and college ^Donald G. Tewksbury, The Founding of American Colleges and Universities Before theCivil War (New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1932). 355 professors were not providing the kind of intellectual leadership required by a vigorous and dynamic society. But the most severe criticism was directed not at these largely internal faults; it was directed at the failure of the colleges to train vocationally. The liberal arts colleges were not providing the public with an education closely and directly related to the pressing problems of taming a frontier and cultivating the soil for a new culture. The classical curriculum seemed remote indeed from the practical needs of a people wholly engrossed with the exciting problems of exploiting a virgin continent. Consequently, there grew up around many of the liberal arts colleges, galaxies of professional schools which trained students in those skills required to operate the increasingly complicated and technical machinery of modern society. Another stimulus for change at work in American higher education was provided by men like Jefferson, Tichnor, Tappan, and finally Gilman, who sought to bring the nineteenth century European university system to root in American soil. The European university, perhaps best exemplified by the University of Berlin, had carefully nurtured a tradition of freedom for professor and student which was largely unknown In the English and American liberal arts college. This freedom was of two kinds: first, a freedom for the professor to teach those subjects In which he was most competent and to employ whatever methods he found effective, lehrfreiheit; second, a free dom for the student to pick and choose among the univer sity offerings and to study whatever he wished, lernfrei- heit. As early as 1825 the Harvard faculty attempted to introduce a free elective system in that college but aroused such a storm of opposition from the Overseers, administration, alumni and others that it was not until 1882, sixty years later, that an elective system was adopted. The idea of free electives was opposed in American colleges primarily because it ran countier to the prevailing rigidity and fixity of the liberal arts curric ulum which was thought to produce a single coherent back ground of knowledge, attitudes, and skills shared by all students alike. Not until after the Civil War and the passage in 1862 of the Morrill Land Grant Act did the American univer sity begin to show an indigenous quality. The Land Grant Act effected a powerful change in American higher educa tion. Historically, the university had developed a 357 tradition of inculcating the virtues of independent thought, aesthetic appreciation, and critical reasoning; the Land Grant legislation was designed to counterbalance these by providing, in addition, the training needed for specific vocations, particularly in agriculture and the mechanic arts. As the nineteenth century waned, both research and teaching in American colleges and universities came more and more to be valued in terms of their applicability to the solution of immediate practical problems. Along with increased emphasis on vocational training came still another modification, another function added to the clas sical idea of the university; that was the general promulgation of knowledge--the making available of knowl edge on every conceivable subject not just to an intellec tual few but to the largest possible number of citizens. An increasingly technical-minded society demanded that universities modify their traditional functions and objec tives to correspond more closely to the needs of the society. Even the older, more conservative and classical- minded colleges (Yale and Princeton, for example, in the last decades of the century) found it necessary to enlarge their curricula, Introduce an elective system, make 358 provision for technical and scientific training, and add graduate programs leading to professional degrees. But perhaps the most amazing changes in the whole pattern and direction of American higher education came with the appearance first of specialized institutes like Rensselaer and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and second with the rapid growth of large, multipurpose universities, both public and private. The reluctance of established colleges to provide training in technology and the sciences resulted in the establishing of separate schools for this purpose. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute was founded in 1824, the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn and Cooper Union were both founded in the 1850s, and in 1861 the Massachusetts legislature chartered the Massachusetts Institute of Tech nology in Boston. The state university movement, which could trace its foundation to the closing decade of the eighteenth century, also began to quicken in the years just before and after the Civil War. That vision of a bright new world which had led the pioneers to develop the American West had come by mid-century to mean that every person is free to think, speak, write, and learn without restraint; free to shift from poverty to wealth, from 359 ignorance to learning, from subordination to command. And, in the years following the Civil War, American society, excited by this vision, flung itself into one of the most ambitious tasks ever undertaken--the founding of colleges and universities on a grand scale.. In the dynamic American society of the late nine teenth and early twentieth centuries, both public and private universities rapidly came to accept the idea that it was their function not only to cultivate learning, encourage research, and prepare young men for the profes sions, but to provide students with technical knowledge and skills, prepare young men and women for effective citizenship, offer instruction in a wide range of socially useful activities, and disseminate knowledge to the widest possible public. To accommodate this enlargement of pur pose, the universities opened their doors to new courses, new activities, and to great numbers of new students varying widely in age, ability, seriousness of purpose, and academic preparation. Yet, underlying the multiplication of aims and the staggering number of courses, activities and degrees, we may still perceive the single vital current, the basic impulse which throughout history has animated and guided university development. That basic impulse is the ancient zeal for learning, the scholar's unquenchable curiosity, man's endless search to know the truth about the universe in which he finds himself. Again and again the university presidents whose philosophies of higher education provide the subject matter for this dissertation have iterated, each in his own way, this fundamental ideal. To Philip Lindsley, arch opponent to rigidity in education, the university is forever incomplete; like the intelligence of man it "must be growing, advancing, enlarging, accumulat ing till the end of time." To Lindsley*s more conservative contemporary, Jeremiah Day, the college provides "such an arrangement of duties and motives, as will most effectually throw the student upon the resources of his own mind." The able, tough-minded president of Brown, Francis Wayland, systematically taught his students to cherish their own conceptions and to look with their own eyes. For him the I university is that institution which provides each person "the same opportunity of pursuing such studies as will be of the greatest advantage to him in the course of life which he has chosen." And in the words of Michigan's visionary Henry Tappan, the university is "Freedom--this is the general characteristic of University education, as it is the essential attribute of mankind." After the Civil War, testimonials as to the strength and vitality of the university idea in American life grew in number and in persuasive power. Cornell's first president, Andrew White, asserted the aim of a uni versity to be "the upbuilding of civilization in its highest sense"; and, in order to do this, "we must steadily plan and labor, not only to make men and women skillful in the various professions and avocations of life, but to cultivate and bring out the best in them as men and women." Harvard's youthful innovator, President Eliot, found the "worthy fruit" of the academic community to be "an open mind, trained to careful thinking, instructed in the meth ods of philosophic investigation, acquainted in a general way with the accumulated thought of past generations, and penetrated with humility." Eliot's able university neighbor and antagonist, James McCosh at Princeton, con ceived as the highest aims of the college (and of the university), first, the drawing out and improving of innate faculties; next, the imparting of such knowledge as would be useful in future life; third, the fostering of scholar ship among faculty; and finally, the sending forth of able ministers, lawyers, physicians, and businessmen to serve the community and the nation. Daniel Coit Gilman's con tribution was not that he brought the university idea to this country— it was already here— but that he was able most nearly to realize it at Johns Hopkins, the institution which he headed. "The Institution we are about to organize would not be worthy the name of a University, if it were to be directed to any other purpose than the discovery and promulgation of the truth." Even the most conservative of prominent nineteenth-century presidents, Noah Porter, gave expression to this ideal as the end and aim of higher edu cation : "The discipline . • . required . . . is not a simple gymnastic to the intellect, it is not the training of the curious philologist, or the sharp logician, but it is a liberalizing discipline which prepares for culture and thought, and which gradually lifts the mind . . . to the comparative judgment and the aesthetic culture of the philosopher and critic." Many diverse forces worked to bring about the twentieth-century democratization of the American univer sity. There perhaps has been no more able spokesman for this broadening of purpose and aim than Chicago's William Rainey Harper. For him the university's chief function must be to "guide democracy into the new fields of arts and 363 literature and science." For him the birthmarks of a university are "self-government, freedom from ecclesias tical control, and the right of free utterance." For him, the university is "the prophetic interpreter of democracy." Harper's contemporary, Woodrow Wilson, gave voice to a very similar educational idealism from the office of the Prince ton presidency. Like Harper, Wilson would combine the ideals of genuine democracy and serious scholarship and create an institution of learning where one could "hear the truth about the past and hold debate about the affairs of the present, with knowledge and without passion"; an insti tution "like the world in having all men's life at heart . • • but unlike the world in its self-possession." The opening of university doors to all men and women possessing the necessary intellectual endowment, and the equating of all studies, whether academic, professional or vocational--in a word, the democratization of the uni versity— was seen by Wisconsin's president, Charles Van Hise, as a "new thing in the world." Van Hise saw the main tasks of the university as educating for informed and intelligent citizenship, advancing the limits of human knowledge, and disseminating knowledge so widely that people everywhere might use it in solving their economic, 364 social, and political problems. To this third task, the wide dissemination of knowledge, Van Hise chose to devote most of his energies. His contemporary, Yale's president Arthur Hadley, on the other hand, envisioned the university as a place devoted, above all, to the discovery, preserve** tion, and teaching of truth. Where Van Hise emphasized the dissemination of knowledge, Hadley stressed training for intelligent citizenship. The task of the university, as of the college, Hadley asserted, is to teach young men the habit of constructive thought, the habit and the power of independent judgment. A nation composed of self- governing citizens, he believed, cannot fail to be strong, progressive and energetic. "Universities are places of research, of diligent inquiry for new or forgotten truth," said Charles W. Eliot; the basic function and essential informing spirit of the university is the search for truth. And Eliot's successor, A. Lawrence Lowell, stated this ideal no less fervently: "What we desire here is not truth, but the search for truth. A truth that Is held at any one time by any body of men is always more or less defective. What we want is an interest in the pursuit of truth, in caring for truth." Because its concern is with the pursuit of truth and with 365 Che developing of intellectual faculties to think hard and to think purposefully toward the solving of problems, the university as an institution must always be changing. "It must change from one generation to the next, and change radically, change deeply, its ideas. But that does not prevent its holding on to the eternal thread that runs through all changes that occur." Thus, we come full circle from Lindsley's statement that the university is forever incomplete, like the intelligence of man, to Lowell's conception of the university as the embodiment of man's never-ending search for truth. University presidents of the middle decades of the twentieth century have not found occasion to dispute or to disagree with this as the essence, the ancient origin, and the still-governing impulse of the university. To Robert Hutchins the one noble course to which the university is dedicated is the pursuit of truth; to James Conant the most ancient and most pervasive source of strength in the modern university is the liberal arts tradition compounded of the fruits of intellectual adventure, the zest of digging and the joy of contemplation; to Whitney Griswold the most accurate definition of a university is "a group of men devoted to learning on the highest plane of intellectual and moral Integrity." Thus we conclude that the university In western civilization, despite its many outward forms, its diversity of aims and purposes, its variety of curricular and extra curricular activities, does have a distinctive continuity and central purpose guiding and animating it today, as it did in the past, with all of the force of its ancient heritage. The university is man on the eternal quest for 4 knowledge and truth; the university is man seeking, man learning, man changing, growing, and maturing. MThe university is the intellect, it is science, erected into an institution.* ' BI BL IO G R AP H Y / BIBLIOGRAPHY General Historical Background Adamson, J. N. (ed.). The Educational Writings of John Locke. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1922. Armytage, W. H. G. Civic Universities. Aspects of the British Tradition. London: Ernest Benn, Ltd., 1955. Becker, Carl L. Freedom and Responsibility in the American Way of Life. New York: Vintage Books, 1955. Bizzell, William B. The Relations of Learning. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1934. Bowra, C. M. The Greek Experience. New York: The New American Library, n.d. Bowyer, J. W., and J. L. Brooks (eds.). The Victorian Age. New York: F. S. Crofts and Co., 1947. Brinton, Crane. Ideas and Hen. New York: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1950. Bryson, Lyman. The Drive Toward Reason. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954. Carmichael, Oliver C. Universities: Commonwealth and American. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959. Cassirer, Ernst (ed.). The Renaissance Philosophy of Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948. Clapp, Margaret A. The Modern University. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1950. 368 369 Costello, W. T. The Scholastic Curriculum at Early Seventeenth-Century Cambridge. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958, Descartes, Rene. A Discourse on Method and Selected Writings. Edited by A. D. Lindsay. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1951. Dewey, John. Experience and Education. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1938. Flexner, Abraham. Universities. American. English. German. New York: Oxford University Press, 1930. Freemantie, Anne (ed.). The Age of Belief. New York: Mentor Books, 1955. Glass, Bentley. Science and Liberal Education. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959. Hamilton, Edith. The Echo of Greece. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., Inc., 1957. . and Huntington Cairns (eds.). The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Bollengen Series LXXI. New York: Random House, 1961. 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Creator Hodgman, Robert Stanley (author)

Core Title Shaping The Idea Of The University: An Historical Analysis Of The Originsand Development Of The University Idea In European And American Thought

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Education

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Advisor Pullias, Earl Vivon (committee chair), Christensen, Francis (committee member), Martin, David W. (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c18-332878

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