Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

A large mission of the colleges was to spread Protestant Christianity to the untamed wilds of the west and in 1835, in his Plea for the West

, Lyman Beecher urged that education beyond the seaboard could not be achieved simply by sending teachers out from the east – the west must have colleges and seminaries of its own. There was then a fear that Catholics would take over the west, a fear fortified by the growing immigration into America from the Catholic countries of southern Europe. The warning was heeded and, by 1847, Presbyterians had built a system of about a hundred schools in twenty-six states.⁸⁷

The University of Illinois was founded in 1868 and California in 1869. It was about now that the attractions of the German system began to be appreciated, with several professors and university administrators travelling to Prussia, in particular, to study the way things were done there. In this way, religion began to occupy less of a role in American university education. The fact that the Germans led the way in history, for example, increasingly implied that theology was itself an historical development, and this encouraged biblical criticism. Germany was also responsible for the idea that education should be the responsibility of the state, not just a private matter. Finally, it was a German idea that the university should be the home of scholars (researchers, writers) and not just of teachers.

This was nowhere more evident than at Harvard. It had begun as a Puritan college in 1636. More than thirty partners of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were graduates of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and so the college they established near Boston naturally followed the Emmanuel pattern. Equally influential was the Scottish model, in particular Aberdeen. Scottish universities were nonresidential, democratic rather than religious, and governed by local dignitaries – a forerunner of boards of trustees.

The man who first conceived the modern university as we know it was Charles Eliot, a chemistry professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who, in 1869, at the age of only thirty-five, was appointed President of Harvard, where he had been an undergraduate. When Eliot arrived, Harvard had 1,050 students and fifty-nine members of the faculty. In 1909, when he retired, there were four times as many students and the faculty had grown ten-fold. But Eliot was concerned with more than size. ‘He killed and buried the limited arts college curriculum which he had inherited. He built up the professional schools and made them an integral part of the university. Finally, he promoted graduate education and thus established a model which practically all other American universities with graduate ambitions have followed.’ Above all, Eliot followed the German system of higher education, the system that gave the world Planck, Weber, Strauss, Freud and Einstein. Intellectually, Johann Fichte, Christian Wolff and Immanuel Kant were the significant figures in German thinking about education, freeing German scholarship from its stultifying reliance on theology. As a result, and as we have seen, German scholars acquired a clear advantage over their European counterparts in philosophy, philology and the physical sciences. It was in Germany, for example, that physics, chemistry and geology were first regarded in universities as equal to the humanities.⁸⁸

The graduate seminar, the PhD, and student freedom were all German ideas.

From Eliot’s time onwards, the American universities set out to emulate the German system, particularly in the area of research. However, this German example, though impressive in advancing knowledge and in producing new technological processes for industry, nevertheless sabotaged the ‘collegiate way of living’ and the close personal relations between undergraduates and faculty which had been a major feature of American higher education until the adoption of the German approach. The German system was chiefly responsible for what William James called ‘the PhD octopus’. Yale awarded the first PhD west of the Atlantic in 1861; by 1900 well over three hundred were being granted every year.⁸⁹

The price for following Germany’s lead was a total break with the British collegiate system. At many universities, housing for students disappeared entirely, as did communal eating. At Harvard in the 1880s the German system was followed so slavishly that attendance at classes was no longer required – all that counted was performance in the examinations. Then a reaction set in. Chicago was first, building seven dormitories by 1900 ‘in spite of the prejudice against them at the time in the [mid-] West on the ground that they were medieval, British and autocratic’. Yale and Princeton soon adopted a similar approach. Harvard reorganised after the English housing model in the 1920s.⁹⁰