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A young man, not quite 18, entered Williams College in the fall of 1869. His study plans for the next four years were made for him. As Edward A. Birge wrote in The Atlantic 40 years later, in 1909, “The college offered a simple, homogeneous course of study,” which each student was bound to follow. It began with classical languages and extended to history, mathematics, and lectures in the basic sciences. Along the way, there was a great deal of composition and rhetoric, writing essays by hand and delivering “orations” before the college. As Birge recalled, he and his classmates had not come to Williams for jobs training; rather, they had come for “somewhat vague and intangible intellectual gains,” in search of “that still less tangible thing, culture.”
About 110 miles to the east, Charles W. Eliot was also in his first semester in the fall of 1869. Recently installed as the youngest president of Harvard, Eliot was at the start of a 40-year tenure dedicated to making higher education’s training more practical, its gains more tangible. Students, he believed, needed more than culture; they needed the foundations for a career. As he’d written in The Atlantic earlier in 1869, it was the institution’s job to “convert the boy of fair abilities and intentions into an observant, judicious man,” ready to “rise rapidly through the grades of employment.” Eliot would help transform the American college into the American university in service of that vision.
Ever since Birge went to college and Eliot set out to make a university, American higher education has been pulled toward three different functions at once: cultural formation, preparation for work, and the pursuit of academic research. The modern university took shape in the push and pull among them, a hybrid that has never quite resolved its own contradictions.
Those contradictions have taken on fresh urgency in recent decades, as undergraduates continue to lose trust in the practical benefits of a humanities degree—and the “return on investment” of college more broadly. The debate that raged in the last third of the 19th century, over who and what college is for, has never really been resolved.
Before the Civil War, American colleges were small, hidebound places. A few were very old; none were very grand. True to their original purpose of training ministers, most were associated with some Christian denomination or another. Often strapped for cash, they offered spartan accommodations, bad food, and strict discipline. Intellectually, they were repositories of the old, rather than incubators of the new. The “culture” that Birge referenced began with ancient Greece and Rome. Studying their languages provided the foundations of thought; reading their literature, history, and philosophy provided an approach to life.
Once the Civil War ended and the nation marched into its next industrial-capitalist phase, Eliot took to the pages of The Atlantic with a new vision for higher education in America. The university—no longer just a college—would embrace all subjects of “human inquiry,” and explore them “on a higher plane than elsewhere.” The scientific and technical fields, presently relegated to inferior parallel schools and courses, could be profitably integrated into a single institution in which there would be “no real antagonism between literature and science,” as Eliot argued in his inaugural address months later. If this did not make an educated man in a traditional sense, the time had come to enlarge the definition. A man could have culture, but he could also be prepared for a world of commerce.
There had been earlier reform efforts along similar lines—at Brown in the 1840s, at Union in the 1850s—but Eliot’s young age, social prominence, and timing allowed him to seize the moment. Described in one report as “a young man of prodigious muscle, a leading oarsman in a boat club, with ability to laugh loud enough to disturb all the proprieties of Boston Common,” Eliot cut a notable figure. His Atlantic essays, with their “radical” proposals, became news in their own right, garnering attention in Boston and well beyond. It was not long after the second was published, in March of 1869, that Eliot was selected to be Harvard’s next president.
Not everyone was happy. At Harvard College’s alumni-association dinner that June, no less a personage than Charles Francis Adams (son of John Quincy, grandson of John) expressed the vivid wish—according to a newspaper report—that “the classics which had hitherto been the bright and shining girdle of their Alma Mater, beneath whose protection she had nurtured and brought to light so many generations of her children,” would be preserved. The president of Franklin and Marshall separately worried that “the professional interest” would “prove a Jonah’s whale to the liberal. The humanities will be in the end swallowed up by the utilities.”
James McCosh, one of Princeton’s presidents in the late 19th century, emerged as Eliot’s most vocal critic by the 1880s. It was nothing short of a scandal, McCosh said, that the “once most illustrious university in America no longer requires its graduates to know the most perfect language, the grandest literature, the most elevated thinking of all antiquity.” Eliot had begun his first Atlantic essay by imagining a parent seeking a practical education for his son and asking, “What can I do with my boy?” McCosh apostrophized that parent’s buyer’s remorse: “I sent my son to you believing that man is made in the image of God, you taught him that he is an upper brute, and he has certainly become so; I sent him to you pure, and last night he was carried to my door drunk. Curse ye this college; ‘curse ye bitterly.’”
While McCosh defended the classical curriculum and mocked the “dilettanti courses” of soft, slacker subjects such as modern European history (“just a let-off to easy-going students from the studies which require thought”), Eliot continued to press for a middle way. The ancients had their place, but true learning would encompass “new fields of discovery” and invite students “to walk in new-made as well as in long-trodden paths.”
By 1885, though, Eliot had more than traditionalists to contend with. Johns Hopkins, founded in 1876 on what was then the largest ever philanthropic bequest in the history of American higher ed, brought an entirely different model to the United States. Dedicated to research and advanced scholarship above all, the institution’s leaders initially planned to forego undergraduate education altogether. In his inaugural address, Eliot had envisioned a university built around a faculty whose chief obligation was to teaching, noting that, with one exception, Harvard did not “hold a single fund primarily intended to secure to men of learning the leisure and means to prosecute original researches.” By the time Hopkins began competing with Harvard for faculty, Eliot had to revise that notion.
For traditionalists, the research model marked a further turn away from the commitment to classical teaching. The university would serve the many interests of students, yes, but it would also become oriented primarily around the scholarly pursuits of the faculty. By the mid–20th century, the University of California chancellor Clark Kerr could flatly confess that “acceptable” rather than “outstanding” undergraduate teaching was the cost of doing business in the research university.
When Birge looked back on his college years in 1909—the same year that Eliot stepped down at Harvard—he was in the middle of a career as a zoologist and had spent time as acting president of the University of Wisconsin. He seemed almost to lament the loss of the classical institution that had formed him, and of the emergence of the modern one he’d helped build. Yes, the research university had given students more choice and allowed scholars to advance new knowledge and discoveries. And, yes, his career at Williams had its “narrowness, its absurdities”—its lack of serious scientific study, for instance. Yet, he couldn’t fully quit the model that he’d spent years helping to reform. If his education had been devoid of all professionalism and practical considerations, it had also been delightfully free of them. “We took four years of our youth,” he wrote, “and devoted them, quite unconsciously, to the intellectual life and to the ethical spirit.”
He concluded that perhaps it was time to restore something of that spirit to the university. Perhaps people would see that “there is something practical in preparing for living, as well as in preparing for work.” Perhaps a balance could be struck between the life of the mind and the business of the world. If so, America’s colleges and universities are still trying to find it.
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