American Higher Learning:
Seminar Readings

January 27th

Readings:
Anonymous, "New Englands First Fruits" [1643] (xeroxed handout)

Samuel Johnson, "Announcement of the Beginning of Tuition in [King's] College." [1754] (xeroxed handout)

Frederick Rudolph, The American College & University: A History [1962] (Univ. Georgia Press, 1990), chs. 1 - 3.

Field Trips (Local & Digital):
Locate, visit and be prepared to report briefly -- in a newsgroup posting -- on the relevance for our purposes of one of the following:

-- The Columbiana Room of Columbia University

-- The Barnard College Archives

-- The Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University

-- The Oral History Collection of Columbia University

-- The "university's history" site on the electronic home page of one of the following:

Harvard University

William & Mary

Yale University

Princeton University

Columbia University

February 3rd -- Governance/Finance

February 10th -- Students/Curriculum/ Discipline/Extra-Curriculum

February 17th -- The Colleges and Their Public

Check:  The Preliminary Bibliography for American Higher Learning to 1860s

Required of All:
Frederick Rudolph, American College, chs. 4-11.

Individual Assignments (each member should read two of the following):
Edmund S. Morgan, "The American Revolution Considered as an Intellectual Movement," in Arthur Schlesinger and Morton White, eds, Paths of American Thought

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, "A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge," (1779)

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson correspondence on education and "natural aristocracy," (1813)

Richard Hofstadter and Walter Metzger, "The Old Time College/ The Great Retrogression," in The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States (1955)

Recommended (useful for developing 3rd assignment):
On Columbia:
David C. Humphrey, From King's College to Columbia, 1746-1800 (Columbia UP, 1976)

Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, eds., The Diary of George Templeton Strong, 1835-1875. 4 Volumes (Macmillan, 1952)

On Governance and Finance (and Columbia, specifically):
Jergen Herbst, From Crisis to Crisis: American College Government, 1636-1819 (Harvard, 1982)

John S. Whitehead, The Separation of College and State: Columbia, Dartmouth, Harvard and Yale, 1776-1876
(Yale, 1973)

On Students, Discipline and the Extracurriculum:
Colin B. Burke, American Collegiate Populations: A Test of the Traditional View (NYU, 1982 )

Jeremiah Day, "The Yale Faculty Report of 1828," excerpts in R. Hofstadter and Wilson Smith, eds., American Higher Education: A Documentary History. Volume 1 (UChicago, 1961), pp. 275-291

Francis Wayland, "Thoughts on the Present Collegiate System (1842)," excerpts in Hofstadter and Smith, Documentary History, pp. 334-375.

Five Newsgroup Postings Sought for February 3rd to 17th:

                        --Thomas Jefferson's views on higher education

                        -- Richard Hofstadter's "The Great Retrogression Thesis"

                        -- Colin Burke on RH's "GRT"

                        -- The Yale Faculty Report of 1828 in an electronic nutshell...

                         -- Francis Wayland's "Thoughts on the Present Colegiate System" in an electronic nutshell...

March 3rd --The Age of Academic Enterprise

Readings Required of all:
Rudolph. American College and University, chs. 12, 13, 14 and 16

Richard Hofstadter, "The Revolution in Higher Education," in Schlesinger and White, Paths of American Thought (1963), pp. 269-300

Edward Shils, "The Order of Learning in the United States," in Alexandra Oleson and John Voss, eds., The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America (JHU Press, 1979), pp. 19-47

Individual assignments for posting:
Edward Chase Kirkland, "The Higher Learning," in Dream and Thought in the Business Community, 1860-1900
(Cornell, 1956), pp. 83-113.

Robert A. McCaughey, "The Transformation of American Academic Life: Harvard University, 1821-1892," Perspectives in American History, VIII (1974), pp. 239-332.

March 10th -- Women on Campus

Readings Required of all:
Rudolph, "The Education of Women," American College and University , pp. 307-328

Rosalind Rosenberg, "The Limits of Access: The History of Coeductaion in America," in Faragher and Howe, eds., Women and Higher Education in American History (Norton, 1986), pp. 107-129

Rosalind Rosenberg, "Who Was Virginia Gildersleeve?" in Barnard (Summer 1995), pp. 16-21.

Patricia A. Graham, "Expansion and Exclusion: A History of Women in American Higher Education," Signs (Summer 1978), pp. 759-773.

Individual assignments for posting:
Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas (Knopf, 1994)

March 24th -- Early Second Thoughts on the University

Readings:
Rudolph, "The Rise of Football," American College and University, pp. 373-393

George Santayana, "A Glimpse of Yale" (1892) and "The Spirit and Ideals of Harvard University" (1894) [xeroxed handouts]

William James, "The PhD Octopus" (1903), 'The True Harvard" (1903) and "The Social value of the College-Bred" (1907) [xeroxed handouts]

Individual Assignment (for posting):
Owen Johnson, Stover at Yale (1912)

April 1st -- When Grades Weren't Enough: Anti-Semitism in the Interwar Years

Readings Required of all:
Diane Trilling, "Lionel Trilling: Jew at Columbia," Commentary (1979)

Norman Podhoretz, Excerpts from Making It

Individual Assignment:
Harold Wechsler, The Qualified Student

Dan Oren, Joining the Club: A History of Jews at Yale (Yale. 1985)

Steinberg, Stephen, The American Melting Pot: Catholics and Jews in American Higher Education (McGraw Hill, 1974)

 

April 7th -- The University in the "American Century," 1945-1965

For Individual Assignment:
William F. Buckley, Jr., God and Man at Yale (Regnery, 1954)

Daniel Bell, The Reform of General Education: The Columbia College Experience (1966)

Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University (Harvard, 1964)

Robert A. McCaughey, "The Years That Were Fat,"in International Studies and Academic Enterprise: A Chapter in the Enclosure of American Learning (Columbia UP, 1984)

Lionel Trilling, The Middle of the Journey (1947) or The Liberal Imagination (1951)

Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (1955) or Anti-Intellectualism in America (1964)

April 14th and April 21st -- Columbia in the 1960s

Columbia-Focused Readings:
Columbia '68 Timeline and Images

Kunen, James, The Strawberry Statement

Avorn, Jerry, ed., Up Against the Ivy Wall. Columbia Spectator, 1969.

Cox, Archibald, The Cox Commission Report [Crisis at Columbia] . Vintage, 1969.

Trilling, Diana, "On the Steps of Low Library," in We Must March My Darlings. Harcourt Brace, 1975, 75-154.

Dickstein, Morris, "Remembering the Sixties, Surviving the Seventies," in Gates of Eden. Penguin,1977.

Elsewhere:
Rorabaugh, W.J., Berkeley at War: The 1960s. Oxford UP, 1989.

Kelman, Steven, Push Comes to Shove: The Escalation of Student Protest. Houghton-Mifflin, 1970.

Eichel, Lawrence E., et al, eds., The Harvard Strike. Houghton-Mifflin, 1970.

Rosenblatt, Roger

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