American Higher Learning:
Meeting #7 -- March 3^rd

Academe Transformed: Johns Hopkins University and Its Progeny

The Ante-Bellum College

Of only modest local cultural import

• did not secure/deny much in the way of occupational access; -- The ministry as exception; business leaders seldom college graduates; politicians better off without college degree...
• did little but confirm social status (not a vehicle for achieving same)
• only beginning to be a place for philanthropic activity -- churches far more so
• attracted little federal attention until Civil War; foreign observers dismissive of American colleges (Tocqueville)
• taught little that gave its graduates an operational advantage over self-taught/apprenticed young men

Too many institutions, too few students

• by 1860 -- >200+ colleges // 1,000 faculty //10,000 students
• 14 colleges in NY State -- 6 in NYC -- CC/NYU/CCNY/Fordham/St. John's
• Columbia College in 1860 -- <200 students // 8 faculty [1870 -- 120 CC students]

Too undercapitalized -- most dependent upon this year's tuition income; few with any other dependable income (no federal contracts; most gifts for specific purposes; state support largely over by 1830s)

Columbia an exception -- land around first campus -- lots for rent
Land given by state mid-Island -- 47th-50th/Madison/Fifth -- starting to be rented in 1850s...

Two Ante-Bellum Developments that are harbingers of change:

1. Emergence of an American scientific community in 1840s-- men of science, with appropriate training at European universities -- geologists/botanists/chemists/physicists/mathematicians
-- AAAS (1848)
-- NAS (1863)

Not obvious/foregone that these men would institutionally connect with colleges
-- with state and fed'l gov't
-- Gentlemen of science (Franklin/Jefferson --> Charles Darwin)
-- Colleges not places for research or even advanced teaching -- for teaching the basics to kids...
-- Columbia College in 1854 -- Wolcott Gibbs, a chemist -- rejected by Trustees on religious grounds

Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard
Sheffield Scientific School at Yale
School of Mines at Columbia

2. Upsurge in American college graduates going to Europe (esp. Germany) for advanced training, for which they increasingly received doctorates (PhDs) for their efforts;
Studies in the humanities as well as sciences -- biblical studies/ancient languages/philology/Sanskrit...
Returnees look to colleges to employ them....

Yale responded to tuition drain by instituting its own PhD in 1861 --stay in New Haven!!!
Cornell and Harvard soon followed... by 1875 -- 25 US Phds??

Then the War --

Three post-war developments --

1. War-generated fortunes in hands of those who wish to make a philanthropic difference

-- Ezra Cornell -- Western Union Telegraph
-- Johns Hopkins -- B & ) Railroad/ d. 1870 -- $7,000,000 for a univ/hospital
-- Leland Stanford -- Union Pacific RR -- 1885 gift of $24,000,000
-- Jonas Clark -- merchant Clark University (1887)
-- John D. Rockefeller -- UChicago (1892) -- $34,000,000
-- Andrew Carnegie

2. Change in the composition of the faculties of the leading colleges
-- away from local credentials as teachers
-- toward requiring nationally/internationally acknowledged credentials as scholars
-- PhD; endorsement from the leaders of the "discipline"
-- Faculty prepared to seize operational control over aspects of the institution: -- Setting the curriculum and hiring faculty;
-- Faculty now align themselves/loyalties with those in their discipline as much as with their institutional colleagues

3. College presidents prepared to create new institutions or transform the mission of old institutions to increase their prestige, status, usefulness, financial wellbeing
-- The first instance -- Cornell/JHU/Stanford/Clark/UChicago...
-- The second -- Harvard/Yale/Michigan/UPenn...

Not all old colleges go with the new -- Amherst/Williams/Wesleyan/Swarthmore

Princeton -- wavering well into early 20th C...

The important prsidents
-- Daniel Coit Gilman at JHU
-- Charles William Eliot at Harvard
-- William Rainey Harper at Chicago

-- at Columbia -- #10 FAP Barnard (1664-1889) and #11 Seth Low (1890-1901)

Two faculty prime movers -- John W. Burgess and Nicholas Murray Butler

Some sense of where Burgess was coming from -- Came to Columbia in 1876 from Amherst when he couldn't persuade Amherst trustees to move toward transforming Amherst into a university;

Why Columbia -- hated city life
CU running a $100,000 annual surplus... the richest college with the fewest students...

1880 -- Created the School/Faculty of Poltical Science -- The beginnings of grdauate instruction at Columbia
1883 -- First Phd
1900 -- 174 PhDs (21 a year/5th -- by 1920 #1 or 2)

1900 -- CU as one of 14 charter membersof AAU (1

Burgess on Columbia College --

on students -- "rich loafers" -- I do as little as I can for these dunderheads and save my time for research"

On colleges (1880s) -- "I must confess that I am unable to divine what is to be ultimately the position of Colleges which cannot become Universities and will not become high schools. I can not see what reason they will have to exist. It will largely be a waste of capital to maintain them, and a waste of time to attend them."

GSantayana on his Harvard colleagues (1892) -- "are no longer the sort of persons that might as well have been clergymen or schoolmasters; they have rather the type of mind of a doctor, an engineer, or a social reformer; the wide awake young man who can do most things better than old people, and who knows it."

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