Colleges and Universities

Colleges and universities in the new American nation were established slowly and deliberately until the American Revolution, at which point establishments ceased for a decade and then resumed in increasing numbers through the 1820s. During this period, these institutions were substantially devoted to imparting "liberal education," with the purpose of forming leaders and citizens for colonial and then republican society. The functions of advancing knowledge and providing graduate or professional education, commonly associated with higher education from the late nineteenth century onward, were not adopted by colleges in the new American nation, apart from informal or ancillary modes, the medical school at the College of Philadelphia being one possible exception. Even taking that into account, there were no "universities" in the new nation as that term would later be understood.

Until the middle of the eighteenth century, just three colleges had been founded in the colonies, and their religious character reflected the fierce sectarian divisions that had arisen in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and engulfed its universities and colleges. In Massachusetts, the Puritans—who became Congregationalists—founded Harvard College (1636); in Virginia, the Anglicans established the College of William and Mary (1693); in Connecticut, Congregationalists who leaned toward Presbyterianism founded Yale College (1701). Thus, the significant role of higher education in defining religious orthodoxy—and the concomitant battles among the Christian sects for control—was extended to the earliest colonial colleges and continued in the colleges established before the American Revolution.

At the same time, another significant and related characteristic of institutional governance was extended from Europe to the colonial colleges. These colleges combined the degree-granting authority of the European universities with the governance model of the European colleges and halls, which had originated as safe domiciles for young students living far from home. The latter, being governed by nonresident trustees who were usually clergymen or men of affairs, became more responsive to the public (and religious) purposes represented by the nonresident trustees than were the universities, being governed by the teaching masters.

In the American colonies, this collegiate form of governance was coupled with the power to grant degrees and became the normative model of organization in American higher education. As a result, the colonial colleges were profoundly shaped by not only religious but also public purposes. In fact, the colonial colleges commonly regarded today as exemplary private institutions were, in this early period, regarded as virtually public institutions, being sponsored and, to some extent, funded by the colonial governments. Hence, the general pattern resulted that the nine colleges established before the American Revolution were, with the exception of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, founded one to a colony in conjunction with the established or predominant Protestant sect in the colony. This general correlation among colony, sect, and college reduced competition for public funds and, to some extent, sectarian bickering, at least within the college itself.

In New York the Anglicans fought off the Presbyterians to establish tenuous control over King's College, later Columbia, in the early years after its founding in 1754. In pluralistic Pennsylvania an alliance of Presbyterians and Anglicans dominated the future University of Pennsylvania from its chartering in 1755. New Jersey was a partial exception to the pattern in as much as the dominant Presbyterians split their efforts between the College of New Jersey (1746), later Princeton, founded by English and Scottish Presbyterians, and Queen's College (1766), later Rutgers, founded by Dutch Reformed Presbyterians. Yet both groups shared virtually the same doctrine, and the colleges nearly merged in 1793. In anomalous Rhode Island the Baptists founded the future Brown University (1765), and in the northern colony of New Hampshire the Congregationalists established Dartmouth (1769). Notwithstanding this cooperative pattern among colony, sect, and college, these foundings were rarely harmonious and were often fraught with disputes among religious parties and between the colonial government and clerical leaders.

Collèges and Universities Chartered to Grant Degrees before 1820

DEBATE OVER LIBERAL EDUCATION

Stemming from these conflicts, the nature of liberal education at the colonial colleges became a matter of dispute as well. Until the middle of the eighteenth century, the content and nature of liberal arts at Harvard, Yale, and William and Mary largely conformed to the accommodation, inherited directly from Europe, between the scholastic "liberal arts" (artes liberales) at the universities and the "humanistic studies" (studia humanitatis) that had emerged over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This early colonial program comprised studies in grammar, rhetoric, logic, history, ethics, and metaphysics, with a smattering of mathematics, astronomy, and geography. Most of the subject matter was drawn from Greek or Latin texts and taught by recitations—oral, catechetical quizzing conducted in class.

While this accommodation constituted the bulk of liberal education throughout this period, modifications of this formal program began to appear in the third quarter of the eighteenth century and then to grow in the 1790s and subsequent decades. On the one hand, the modifications concerned whether and how far "modern" authors could be incorporated into the formal curriculum. Such authors included Isaac Newton (1642-1727) in natural science, William Shakespeare (1564-1616) and John Milton (1608-1674) in literature, and Joseph Addison (1672-1719) in rhetoric. Princeton led the efforts to make these modifications during the third quarter of the eighteenth century, but even there the changes were largely marginalized and did not yet breach the dikes built by traditional practice around the formal curriculum.

On the other hand, the modifications were devoted to building what was reflected in the title of a pamphlet written in 1765 by Joseph Priestley, A Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life. Over the subsequent decades, as the essay was republished and eventually appeared in an American edition in 1803, there were increasing calls to incorporate the useful study of sciences, modern languages, and social and political subjects appropriate for citizens of a republic. Priestley emigrated to the United States in 1794 and settled near Philadelphia, where he was offered, but declined, a chair in chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, the other early institution associated with efforts to broaden the traditional liberal education. Even there, however, these reforming efforts were blunted by the established faculty, and associations outside of the colleges and universities led the effort for reform. Thus, in Philadelphia in 1796, the American Philosophical Society held an essay contest for writings describing "the best system of liberal education and literary instruction, adapted to the genius of the government of the United States" (Essays on Education in the Early Republic, p. xv).

Despite the perceived impracticality of the formal curriculum, students graduated from the colleges and entered a variety of vocational fields, particularly those of the "learned professions" of theology, law, and medicine, as well as teaching. Until 1700 more than half of the liberal arts graduates, all of whom attended Harvard, entered the ministry. At that point, the fraction dropped to a norm of about 40 percent, which held steady through 1750, and reflected graduates of only Harvard and Yale, since William and Mary had become moribund. During the 1750s, as more colleges opened for instruction, this percentage remained consistent and then slid to 30 percent by 1776. Meanwhile, the percentage entering medicine grew from about 5 percent at the beginning of the eighteenth century to about 15 percent by 1776. Law and commerce also saw their respective fraction of college graduates increase to that of medicine, about 15 percent, by 1776. Teaching at all levels consistently attracted about 5 percent of college graduates. These percentages did not vary significantly among the different colleges. After the American Revolution, the fraction of college graduates entering the ministry dropped steadily, while that entering law grew steadily, passing the clergy in about 1820. The fraction entering other fields generally remained consistent over the same period.

Meanwhile, the calls to modify the traditional substance and form of liberal education increased in volume and number in the early decades of the nineteenth century. But the changes made were minimal and largely confined to extracurricular literary and debating clubs and societies formed by the students. In 1828 the Yale president Jeremiah Day (17731867) and faculty issued a famous report in which they rebutted a proposal (made, predictably, by a member of the external board of trustees) "to leave out of said course the study of the dead languages, substituting other studies therefore" (Reports, p. 3). Even as it quoted the Roman writer Cicero (106-43 b.c.) in rebuttal, however, the Yale Reports also employed the language of Francis Bacon (1561-1626), the philosophical champion of the new empirical sciences. This rhetorical shift indicated that the prospect for substantial change in the formal curriculum was clearly on the horizon.

COLLEGE FOUNDINGS

Part of the reason for the intransigence and uniformity of the colleges was that the leaders of newly founded colleges had graduated from the eastern colleges and adopted the curriculum of their alma maters, if for no other reason than to legitimate their new foundations. For the early nineteenth century, the precise number of colleges is indeterminate because some were founded in name only, others were merely chartered, and still others began to offer instruction but closed soon thereafter. The table presented here, drawn largely from the research of historian Jurgen Herbst, includes virtually all colleges chartered by 1820 to grant degrees. The institutions are listed by the year in which they opened for collegiate instruction, which is a more salient, if elusive, criterion than the date of chartering. The institutions that never opened for instruction, as noted in the table, are listed by the date of their charter, and their charter date is included in parentheses. Some of the institutions opened earlier as academies that did not grant bachelor's degrees.

In surveying these colleges, the instruction they offered, and the vocations entered by their students, it is important to remember that they were all closed to women during this period. Even progressive observers such as Samuel Harrison Smith, winning essayist in the 1796 contest on liberal education sponsored by the American Philosophical Society, observed "that the great object of a liberal plan of education should be the almost universal diffusion of knowledge" (Smith, p. 189). By this qualification he referred to "female instruction," though hoping that it would be "marked by a rapid progress and that a prospect opens equal to their most ambitious desires" (Smith, p. 217). Tutored or self-taught women, who looked on from the outside, were not satisfied with this hope. Yet though they might call for the equivalent of a college education—as did Emma Willard in her Plan of Female Education (1818)—even these proposals did not through the 1820s entail the granting of a college degree.