American Higher Learning:
Meeting #5 -- February 17^th

The Ante-Bellum College and Its Public

Review of Last Week -- Students/Discipline/The Curriculum

Students:
-- Few of them -- Many 19thC colleges with < 100 students
-- Fewer still stay on to graduate -- drop-outs often exceed the hangers-in
-- Fewer as proportion of American society??

1800 -- 6 of 1000 white males between 15-20
1860 -- 12 of 1000 ??

Not representative of American society
-- no women (50%); no Blacks (15%); practically no Indians (5%)
-- more urban in origins (with country >60% rural at C/War)
-- more likely from professional families (ministers/lawyers)
-- more likely Presbyterian/Episcopalian/Unitarian/ Less so Methodist/Baptist -- Few Catholic/Jewish)
-- more likely to have disposable wealth -- rich -- "an economic elite"

Small numbers not primarily attributable to exclusiveness//selectivity//discrimination

Small numbers not attributable to the rigor//demands of the curriculum

How attributable to expense??
Actual expenses -- deferred income
Harvard and Columbia expensive
Harvard -- 1845 -- $75
Columbia -- 1851 -- annual fees reduced to $50.00
Harvard -- 1860 -- $104 in fees -- $300 overall
-- but Williams/Union/Hobart/Colby??

How much in the way of scholarships -- Institutionally awarded// individually backed students
-- pre-ministry scholarships (American Education Society)

How much tuition discounting?? Student jobs

Like now, the expenses of college going more apparent than real -- though in last two decades got very real

My generation -- early 1960s -- little in way of loan-debt (and your parents in late 1960s)

Discipline:

Colleges are pretty rowdy places
-- disciplinary hold on kids pretty weak;
-- students rose up as classes more than as individual troublemakers (covered for each other, like the cops do);
-- fear of expulsion not great;
-- rustication for the most serious offenses;
-- lots of serious drinking and street walking

Faculty
-- as disciplinary officers;
-- operating at a disadvantage;
-- subject to nocturnal retaliation

Grounds for expulsion
-- Assaulting a faculty member;
-- really agressive and repeated neglect of studies

Pass/Fail grading system -- if that -- Deportment and Scholarship intermixed
Pre-organized sports -- which redirected some of this youthful energy outward into intermural and intercollegiate competition

Curriculum:

Little variation across time or institution --

Classics
-- Latin/Greek/Hebrew (occasionally)
-- dead languages
-- Rhetoric/Grammar/Writing English prose

Mathematics (sub-Calculus)

Natural Philosophy/Science
-- geology/astronomy/navigation
-- closest to "practical' stuff
-- botany/chemistry

Moral Philosophy -- typically taught by President to seniors

No history/art history/English literature/social sciences/economics/psychology/not much in way of modern languages, either

Yale Report (1828) rationale -- "discipline of the mind' vs. "furniture of the mind"

Curriculum generally fixed/required/taken in prescribed sequence by class
Faculty sometimes stayed with class for four years; more often taught all subjects to a given year:
No faculty specializations (FAP Barnard as Yale tutor in 1830s)

Practical rationale -- No instructors to teach otherwise/other subjects
Faculty drawn from ranks of immediate graduates -- little additional training
Faculty resist changes in curriculum -- would jeopardize job security...

Notion of electives -- I take this rather than that... seldom available (aside from outside curriculum instruction in Italian or German)
Idea introduced at Harvard in late 1830s -- to give math prof some interested and self-selected students...

Chemistry available at Columbia...

Failed to produce serious classical scholars -- though some lifelong readers of the Classics
"to lay the foundation of a superior education.."

Failed to produce serious scientists -- though the faculties sometimes contained serious scientists who learned their science by other means

This week:
So what was college worth?? What its value-added character??
-- Provided graduates with a social reference group
-- Memories/ lifelong friendships
-- a leg up in the professions?

The ministry?? -- Charles Grandison Finney -- on the dangers of an an overeducated clergy

The law/public life?? -- Andrew Jackson/George Bancroft/

"The spirit and wants of the age" -- to which the Yale faculty responded

Colleges seen as producing many of the nation's first leaders --
31 of 55 at Constitutional Convention went to college -- 10 to Princeton

Columbia -- John Jay/Gouverneur Morris/Alexander Hamilton/DeWitt Clinton
Harvard -- John Adams/ JQ Adams
Princeton -- James Madison
Wm & Mary -- TJefferson and James Monroe

JA/TJ/JM/JM/JQA -- 5 of first 6 presidents were college graduates

AJ/MVB/ZT/MF/JB/AL/AJ -- 6 of next 11 did not

WHH -- Hampden-Sidney
John Tyler - Wm & Mary
James Polk -- UNC
Franklin Pierce -- Bowdoin
James Buchanan -- Dickinson College

US Senate in 1860s --

Return to Seminar Notes Page