Abstract
Michigan president James B. Angell, speaking on the occasion of his 1871 inaugural address, was moved to observe, “The public mind is now in a plastic, impressionable state, and every vigorous college, nay, every capable worker, may help to shape its decisions upon education.” Surveying the collegiate scene of his time, Angell concluded, “In this day of unparalleled activity in college life, the institution which is not steadily advancing is certainly falling behind.”1 A more quintessential encapsulation of the situation in American higher education in the post-Civil War period is difficult to imagine. The “unparalleled activity” he spoke of was both real and palpable. It was an era in which, as never before, institutions of higher learning were scrutinizing themselves and reexamining their basic purposes and goals. Although prognostications of the future of higher education differed greatly, the prospect of major change ahead was widely commented upon. Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others, was keenly aware that institutions of higher learning in the latter half of the nineteenth century would likely bear little resemblance to their antebellum predecessors. “The treatises that are written on University reform may be acute or not,” he recorded in his journal in 1867, “but their chief value to the observer is the showing that a cleavage is occurring in the hitherto granite of the past, and a new era is nearly arrived.”2
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Notes
James B. Angell, Selected Addresses (New York: Longmans, Green, 1912), pp. 7, 27.
Quoted in Walter P. Rogers, Andrew D.White and the Modern University (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press. 1942), p. 4.
See Jurgen Herbst, “Diversification in American Higher Education,” in Conrad H. Jarausch, ed., The Transformation of Higher Learning 1860–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 196–206
Richard Storr, The Beginnings of Graduate Education in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 1–66.
A graphic overview is given in Joseph M. Stetar, “ln Search of a Direction: Southern Higher Education After the Civil War,” History of Education Quarterly 25 (Fall 1985): 341–368.
James B. Sellers, History of the University of Alabama, 2 vols. (University: University of Alabama Press, 1953), l, pp. 292ff.
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Daniel Read, “Historical Sketch of the University of Missouri,” Historical Sketches of the Universities and Colleges of the United States (Washington, D.C.: United States Bureau of Education, 1883), pp. 40ff.
Christopher J. Lucas, School of the Schoolmasters (Columbia, Missouri: College of Education, University of Missouri, 1989), p. 9.
See John A. Garraty, The American Nation Since 1865 (New York: Harper and Row, 1966). pp. 11–32.
Refer to William H. Cowley, “European Influence Upon American Higher Education,” Educational Record 20 (April 1939): 165–190.
A cogent description of the new leadership coming to power in the early state universities is offered in Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A History (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1990). pp. 348–350.
For illustrative declarations, consult Andrew Dickson White, Autobiography (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1905), I, p. 291
James A. Angell, Reminiscences (New York: David McKay, 1912), p. 102
Solon J. Buck, ed., William Watts Folwell, The Autobiography and Letters of a Pioneer of Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1933), p. 88
Nicholas Murray Butler, Across the Busy Years (New York: Scribner, 1935), I, p. 126.
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The founding of Johns Hopkins University is described in John Calvin French, A History of the University Founded by Johns Hopkins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1946)
Hugh Hawkins, Pioneer: A History of the Johns Hopkins University, 1874–1889 (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1960).
F.W Keisey, “The Study of Latin in Collegiate Education,” Education 3 (January 1883): 270.
Quoted in Allan Nevins, The State Universities and Democracy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962), p. 35.
Quoted in Norman Foerster, The American State University (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1937), pp. 24–25.
Cited in Daniel W Hollis, University of South Carolina, 2 vols. (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1951), II, p. 91.
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Note the discussions in Wellford Addis, “Technological Instruction in the Land Grant Colleges,” Annual Report of the U.S. Commissioner of Education for 1895 (Washington, D.C.: United States Bureau of Education, 1896), pp. 1189–1210
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© 2006 Christopher J. Lucas
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Lucas, C.J. (2006). The Evolving American University. In: American Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10841-8_5
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