Acknowledgments -
Special thanks are owed to Normand Bernier, Michael Schwartz, Robert Young, and Kim Sebaly, who kindly consented to review preliminary manuscript drafts; Frederick Chambers, James White, Clifton Goine, Carol Flynne, Karen Stauffacher and Averil McClelland for assistance with source materials; to Diane Damicone, Leanne Hoopnagle, Georgia Childers, Debra Huey, Amanda Allen, and Sonj a Bennett for clerical support; to Kathleen Thompson, Laura Heymann and Jennifer Farthing of St. Martin's Press; and to Amanda Johnson and Emily Leithauser of Pal grave Macmillan Press, Global Publishing at St. Martin's Press, who handled preparations for the revised edition of this work.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to quote briefly from the following:
An Aristocracy of Everyone, by Benjamin Barber, by permission of Ballantine Debating PC: The Controversy Over Political Correctness On College Campuses, Paul Berman, ed., by permission of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group
Education Without Impact, by George H. Douglas, copyright © 1992 by George H. Douglas. Published by arrangement with Carol Publishing Group. A Birch Lane Press Book
Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, by Robert N. Bellah, et a!., copyright © 1985 The Regents of the University of California
Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus by Dinesh D'Souza, copyright © 1991 by Dinesh D'Souza. Reprinted with the permission of The Free Press, a division of Macmillan, Inc.
Killing the Spirit: Higher Education In America, by Page Smith, by permission of Viking Penguin
Official Knowledge, by Michael Apple, by permission of Routledge Teacher Education In America, by Christopher J. Lucas, by permission of St. Martin's Press
The Good Society, by Robert N. Bellah, et aI., by permission of Random HouseNintage
The University: An Owner's Manual, by Henry Rosovsky, by permission ofW. W. Norton and Company
Turmoil on the Campus, Edward J. Bander, ed., by permission of H. W. Wilson Company
was treated at too primitive a level to be of much interest to professional historians. Unquestionably, that harsh judgment is no longer warranted. There exists an abundance of first-rate material from which to draw, much of which informs the present narrative.
A conscientious attempt has been made to deploy a frame of reference generous enough to accommodate several different discussions of institutional structure and organization, curricula and instruction, governance questions, sometimes the particulars of faculty and student life, and issues of basic social purpose and function. However, no single architectonic theme, no grand interpretive synthesis, is advanced in an effort to comprehend the whole. Any such project extends far beyond the ambition of this work.
At a point in time when cultural incIusivity has become increasing de rigueur in historical writing, it may be worth emphasizing the point that no attempt has been made to construct a true "global" history of higher education. Thus, the great imperial libraries and teaching institutions traditionally associated with China's successive dynasties from the Sui- T'ang era onward are not cited. Nor is any account provided of oral teaching and devotional centers nurtured by the Vedantist and so-called heterodox philosophic schools of ancient and pre-modern India. Only cursory attention is given to Nestorian and, later Muslin scriptoria that stretched across the Near and Middle East from the Persian court to Samarkand and Baghdad between the tenth and thirteenth centuries. Immense centers of higher learning that once t10urished in the principal West African cities of Jenne, Gao, and Timbuktu under the Songhay imperium from the thirteenth to late sixteenth century are similarly left unmentioned.
These omissions are in no way intended to denigrate or deny the fact that great centers of advanced learning have existed at various historical points, in many different cultures around the world. The unabashedly "Eurocentric" focus of the present work derives, rather, from a felt need to confine the narrative to a discussion of the historical antecedents of American higher education and its subsequent development down to the present time. The historical fact of the matter is, American colleges and universities are mainly an outgrowth of, and elaborations upon, European and English traditions, and behind them, those of Greco-Roman civilization-not African, Indian, or Chinese. Moreover, understanding and appreciation for how the past has shaped the texture of American academic life today in the twenty-first century are-and should be seen to be-logically independent of any given individual's racial or ethnic background, ideological predilections, or gender.
Standard histories of American higher education typically begin with the colonial period-which, one supposes, is a bit like coming in for the end of the
third act of a play. The very earliest colleges in North American in fact were very much a product of European social forces and cultural movements underway well before the early 1600s; and those in turn were outgrowths of trends at work since the time of the late Renaissance, and so on. Consequently, Part I of the present work opens with a necessarily cursory look to beginnings in remote antiquity, then traces the evolution of institutions of higher learning throughout the classical and Hellenistic periods, and on into the high Middle Ages. The origins of the first European universities are treated as well as subsequent evolution and permutations from the thirteenth to the early eighteenth centuries. Discussion of the development of modern European higher education is broken off at the point where the focus of the narrative turns to colonial North America. It would require separate volumes to examine European institutions of higher learning over the past two centuries in any meaningful way.
Part II offers an overview of American colonial and antebellum colleges from the early 1600s through to the midpoint of the nineteenth century. For the post-Civil War period, the subsequent narrative analyzes formative events and circumstances surrounding the emergence of comprehensive land-grant institutions, sectarian or denominational colleges, and the beginnings of the prototypical American university.
Part III is given over to the main outlines of the history of American academe in the twentieth century, from the opening years of the 1900s and the appearance of large corporate research institutions of higher learning through to the century's closing decade. Finally, in Part IV, contemporary criticisms of colleges and universities in the United States are briefly examined and assessed in a concluding historical retrospective.
Lastly, it needs to be said, there is no tacit assumption behind this brief work that American institutions of higher learning somehow represent a "culmination" of what has gone before. For its intended readership, the central question that drives the narrative to follow is simply: What preceded American higher education within the Western cultural tradition and how did the modern American college and university subsequently come to what it is today? Every effort has been made to make the account accessible to anyone minimally conversant with the social and intellectual history of Western civilization. More important still, as a social and intellectual history, rather than an institutional chronicle, the effort throughout-in this revised edition as in the original-has been to keep the narrative reasonably compact. The extent to which all of these aspirations have been achieved satisfactorily, of course, must be left ultimately to the judgment of readers.
PART I I HISTORICAL ORIGINS AND ANTECEDENTS
crop payments, transfers of staples and materials, and similar transactions. At the center of this complex economic circulation system stood the temple, which served also as the pivot of the broader social and political order. These autarchic "landed sanctuaries" or cuItic preserves would have been supported by extensive land holdings, the management of which required a literate class of administrators.
Writing fragments unearthed from the archaic temple ofE-Anna in Uruk, to cite a case in point, reveal the presence of such a literate class well established by the midpoint of the third millennium, and further open up the possibility of organized instruction conducted under temple auspices. Overall, it can be assumed that the invention of cuneiform was at once the necessary and sufficient condition for the emergence of a literate bureaucracy. The scribal class, in turn, represented a functional response to the need for efficient record-keeping within an ever-increasing system of administrative control. 4
Likewise supportive of the growth of a scribal caste was the ascendancy of the royal court as a major center of power. Mesopotamian courts, no less than temples, required the service of literate bureaucrats for conducting affairs of state (correspondence, tax collections, conscriptions, and so on), and correlatively, schools in which to prepare scribes for their multiple tasks. The many economic, political, administrative, and literary tablets recovered so far suggest that the number of scribes, of varying ranks and titles, who practiced their craft in the service of temple and court from Sumerian times onward must have run into the many thousands. Included among their numbers were "junior" and "high" scribes, both public and private copyists, liturgical specialists, assorted cultic functionaries, administrative factotums, commercial letter-writers, notaries, seal inscribers, stele engravers, registrars, land surveyors, court advisors, royal secretaries, diplomatic envoys, and many other classes of court retainers. 5
"Tablet writers," it is plain, considered themselves members of an intellectual elite (dumu gir), and perhaps justifiably so. Undoubtedly the high scarcity value of literacy translated into special standing, as suggested both by the range of important occupations open to them exclusively, and by a common scribal boast that they alone were fit to dispense counsel, or nag ida (Akkadian: masartu), to kings and other members of the reigning aristocracy. Generally speaking, if the literati were not themselves members of the ruling class, at least they enjoyed the patronage and respect of the rich and powerful.
The school in which scribes received their training was called the "tablet house" (Sumerian: edubba; Akkadian: bft-tuppi).6 By the middle of the third millennium B.C. such preparatory institutions were scattered across the entire wadi arifidan or "twin rivers basin" of the Tigris and Euphrates. There were
thriving enterprises in Uruk, Ur, Shuruppak, Isin, Larsa, Nippur, Babylon, Saduppum, Kish, Sippar, Mari-in virtually every major metropolitan center throughout the whole region. Model lessons and compositions recounting aspects of school life supply surprisingly detailed if not always coherent indications of how the edubba was staffed, the nature of the instruction offered, and the content of the curriculum. Assisting the tablet-house "father" (adda edubba) or "master" (ummia; ummianu) was a sesgal or "elder brother," a clerk (ugula) and a "proctor" (lu gisshurra), not to mention several teachers of the various specialized subjects comprising the curriculum. Apparently the edubba course of instruction was as far-ranging and comprehensive as it was difficult. Scattered references throughout the corpus of Sumerian schoolhouse literature make mention of a diverse array of subjects: accounting, geometry, musical notation, law and legal phraseology, grammar, poetry, history, courtly and priestly etiquette, and much else besides. 7
Thus, it is apparent that the comprehensive and far-reaching nature of the course of studies mandated for graduation required many years to complete. School instruction began at a relatively early age and could continue in many cases on through adolescence and well into adulthood. 8 The latter portion of instruction and study, resting as it did on a preparatory foundation consisting of years of training within a formal institution of learning, may justifiably be considered "higher education," of a type roughly comparable with that developed elsewhere at later dates in antiquity. Whether conducted in a temple with its adjacent library or within the precincts of a royal place, specialized or advanced training in mathematics, literature, possibly law, medicine, and theology was in fact both characteristic of, and ultimately indispensable to, the shaping and maintenance of the earliest literate civilization to emerge at the dawn of recorded history.
ADVANCED LEARNING IN EGYPT
The historical priority of Sumer over Egypt in the development of high civilization is generally acknowledged by most scholars. 9 By what period of time the former preceded the emergence of an indigenous Nile River culture remains largely speculative, however. As in Sumer, both temple and palace as economic and social institutions were to play important roles in the emergence of a maturing Egyptian civilization. Systems for reckoning and writing made their appearance early on, sometime in the third millennium. Unfortunately, direct evidence for some form of organized instruction is largely lacking for the period of the Old and Middle Kingdoms (c. 2700-1800 B.C.). So-called wisdom literature, most notably three pieces, the Hymn to the Nile, the Instruction of Amenemhet, and Instruction of Duauf, imply that at least some
as a burgeoning commercial and maritime metropolis. Advances in shipbuilding, navigation, agricultural technology and commerce were bringing unprecedented prosperity. The coming to power of a middle class encouraged a more fluid, egalitarian order; and the city's citizenry already was experimenting with democratic self-government. Increased contacts with foreign peoples and cultures had conferred a new urban sophistication or worldliness as well. In short, the age of Pericles and the building of the Parthenon marked a new era of social transformation and cultural creativity.
Accompanying these changes was a nascent spirit of questioning and skepticism. The shift in speculative thought was away from the mythic worldview ofthe past and toward critical analysis and reflection upon the world of human affairs. The old Homeric sense of a moral order governing the cosmos, an impersonal fate that preserved the natural equilibrium of things amidst change, was giving way before an awakened interest in observation and analysis. Belief in the Olympian pantheon likewise was being seriously undermined; and a more secular spirit was clearly abroad in the land. "Concerning the gods," as one of the early sophists declared, "I have no means of knowing whether they exist or not, nor of what form they are; for there are many obstacles to such knowledge, including the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of human life."14
To the sophists, arid disputations over the ultimate nature of reality as advanced by Thales, Anaxamander, Leucippus, Democritus, Anaxagoras, Heraclitus, Zeno-indeed, of' all the speculative philosophers of' the pastseemed increasingly irrelevant. In the sophists' view, the intellectual chaos generated by the old cosmologies, each particular theory contradicting or negating its competitors, was neither plausible to common sense nor applicable to practical human needs. As the Roman writer Cicero put it much later, speaking of' the sophists, they "brought philosophy down from heaven to the dwellings of'men." Possibly there were no transcendent truths, these teachers of' wisdom conjectured, no ultimate norms or ethical standards. If religious belief's, political institutions, and rules of' moral conduct are all humanly created conventions, if' social conventions are merely local and not universal, then conceivably all standards of' good and bad, right and wrong, of'morality and immorality should be considered equally unsubstantial and ephemeral.
Further, given the now-apparent unreliability of sensory experience, perhaps all understanding is only a matter of subjective opinion. Everyone creates his own reality. Genuine objectivity is impossible. And if everything is relative, then the only knowledge worth possessing is that which serves the individual. The effort that had gone previously into understanding the cosmos, it was argued increasingly, might now more productively be applied to human
affairs, to ethics and politics. Correlatively, the aim of human thought should be to serve human needs; and only personal or individual experience was thought to afford a basis for achieving that aim. Each person therefore should be advised to rely upon his own powers and abilities to make his way through the world.
What the sophists urged upon their listeners were the practical arts of oratory and rhetorical persuasion, as well as an array of studies in history, music, and mathematics. In a culture that had always valued fluency and style in forensic debate, speech-making, and the like, here was precisely the sort of training by means of which a young man could improve his life chances. No longer bound by social class or the circumstances of birth, provided he applied himself, any ambitious student might aspire to better himself and ultimately achieve high position within the social order. Students signed up in droves to sit at the feet of these new teachers.
"Human excellence," proclaimed Protagoras (481-411 B.C.), a recent arrival from Abdera on the Thracian coast, "is the proper care of one's personal affairs, so as best to manage one's own household, and also ofthe state's affairs, so as to become a real power in the city, both as a speaker and man of action."15 Despite its novelty, so bold a declaration must have exercised a powerful appeal in a society where the spoken word potently molded public opinion. Because any aspirant to power had to be an effective speaker if he was to be heard in the courts and halls of government, Protagoras advised the importance of the study of language-grammar, etymology, syntax-and its uses in rhetoric. Such studies would assist each student to clarify and shape his thoughts and enable him to express them eloquently.
Briefly, Protagoras' dictum, "Man is the measure of all things," presaged the message of all the later sophists to follow. Truth, goodness, justice, or beauty are relative to particular human interests and needs. Hence there can be only particular truths valid for a given time and place. Morality varies from one society to another. There are no absolute canons of right and wrong decreed in the heavens to fit all cases; private judgment alone must determine what is fitting and appropriate in any given instance or situation. It is incumbent upon each individual accordingly to erect a personal standard of authority through his own careful reflection and judgment. The means to establish the measure of all things follow from the study of logic and oratory.
Those who followed after Protagoras extended much the same message. Among the more celebrated teachers of wisdom were Gorgias of Leontini, the Sicilian ambassador to Athens (c. 427 B.C.) who possibly had been influenced by the rhetoricians Tisias and Corax of Syracuse; Prodicus of Ceos, who stressed the importance of literary studies; Euenos of Paros; such lesser
subjective preference. What it sought, in the final analysis, was a knowledge of how life should best be lived without primary regard for personal advantage. Furthermore, unlike the sophists, Socrates offered his instruction free of charge.
The form of argument he developed and with which his name is most closely associated, the so-called Socratic method, usually took the shape of a conversation or "dialectic." His characteristic strategy was to engage a listener on a topic and then request that some critical term be defined more carefully. When a provisional definition was proposed by one of his students, Socrates would then relentlessly analyze one by one the implications inherent in the definition or argument under scrutiny. Successive attempts to define the essence of that something-the meaning, for instance, of "courage" or "virtue" or "beauty"-were rejected as too vague, or too broad, or too narrow, or as inherently self-contradictory. The objective throughout was never merely destructive. Rather, Socrates' aim was to produce a consistent idea of universal validity, one capable of withstanding all further criticism. The truth of anything, Socrates taught, resides not in individual perceptions, as Hippias and others had claimed, but in the element common to all perceptions, the concept or definition. Thus, ethical relativism holds that virtue varies according to place, time, or circumstances. There can be no universal morality. But if one could attain a definition of, say, virtue holding true under all conditions, he claimed, then one could judge each individual's actions insofar as they accorded with or contradicted the universal concept of virtue. The generalized principle of "virtue" in and of itself could then be shown to be binding upon all who aspire to be virtuous. The final measure would not be private opinion, but objective truth.
Socrates' life, as is well known, ended in martyrdom. Never popular in his role as gadt1y, incessantly puncturing the pretensions of the rich and powerful, forever sowing doubt and confounding those who claimed to be wise, it was not long before Socrates began to attract powerful enemies. Particularly insofar as he insisted that knowledge could not be purchased secondhand like a prepackaged commodity (as the sophists seemed to promise) and that true wisdom was won from within only by critical self-ret1ection and intellectual struggle, his was bound to be a minority voice. Socrates' injunction to "know thyself" and his declaration that the unexamined life is not worth living were hardly likely to endear him to the masses either. In the end, caught up in a political backlash of intrigue, he was forced to drink the hemlock. Recounting the final death scene, Plato's Phaedo has a character observe, "This ... was the end of our friend, a man, we should say, who was the best of all his time that we have known, and moreover, the most wise and just."
PHILOSOPHIC SCHOOLS
Neither Socrates' instruction nor that of his sophist opponents required the benefit of an actual physical facility. A small space in the open marketplace of the city, or perhaps within the colonnades of a nearby temple where one might find shelter from the sun, usually sufficed for a teaching master, surrounded by his band of students. With Plato (c. 428-348 B.C.), however, who was Socrates' most famous pupil, may be found one of the first instances of a literal "school" devoted expressly to higher learning among the ancient Greeks.
Following an eventful career as a world traveler and would-be advisor to several successive rulers in Sicily, Plato had returned to his native Athens in midlife to devote himself to teaching. Around 388 and for the next four decades until his death, he offered instruction in or near a school (gymnasian) located some two miles northwest of the city. Situated in a grove dedicated to the early folk hero Academus, the school had long been known popularly as the Academy. Plato's institution apparently inherited the same name, an appellation it was to bear thereafter throughout the many centuries of its existence.
In his early writings, according to one interpretation at least, Plato's teachings differed little from those of Socrates. Considered as a whole, however, the corpus Platonicum evolved into a much more ambitious and comprehensive philosophic program than anything contemplated by "the wisest man in Athens." In common with his mentor, he rejected the sophists' claim that man is the measure of all things. But in rejecting relativism, Plato went on to construct a grand metaphysical and ethical system guided by a vision of ajust and harmonious social order. 17 Within an ideal state, he taught, education would become a tool for sorting and screening people according to their respective abilities, inclinations, and natures. The bulk of the state's citizenry would be simple artisans, shopkeepers, and the like. A separate class of warriors would be assigned the task of serving as guardians, protecting the state from its enemies and ensuring internal order. A third class of philosophers, guided by perfect knowledge of the arts of governing, would be set to rule.
Unlike Socrates, Plato came to believe that only a select few were capable of casting off the chains of myth and superstition in order to achieve true wisdom. The culmination of years of arduous study and analysis, Plato argued, was a kind of supra-rational, intuitive apprehension of a transcendent reality wholly unlike that disclosed by ordinary sensory experience. Only the "philosopher-king" (or queen), he concluded, was competent to discern the true archetypal Forms or Ideas from which sensory particulars within the empirical world ultimately derive. Thus guided and inspired by knowledge of
the Good in and of itself, those entrusted to govern in an ideal state would rule with perfect justice for all.
The Academy in which Plato conversed with his disciples evolved over an extended period into a major classical center of learning. IS Little is known about the formal curriculum in Plato's own time. Presumably it included dialectic (the study of discussion, discourse, forensic debate, and formal argumentation), mathematics, and metaphysics. Nor are there reliable indications of precisely how instruction was managed within the Academy. Plato himself apparently gave few formal lectures. Note-taking, he once insisted, is simply a mnemonic device to preserve pseudoknowledge; whereas truth, once grasped, requires no aids to memory and will forever be remembered. 19 Most likely, such teaching as was done was conducted through oral questioning and responding, or some other form of dialectic. If there were formal presentations at all, judging from the evidence left by former students, they would have dealt primarily with geometry, advanced mathematics, and number theory.2o
Upon Plato's death, the estate was bequeathed to Plato's nephew, Speusippos (348-270 B.C.), under whose tenure the school seems to have lapsed into relative obscurity.21 The Academy regained some of its old vigor and fame when it passed into the hands of Arcesilaus (315-240 B.C.) who assumed control around the year 270. A third revival ensued a half century or so later with the accession of Carneades of Cyrene (c. 214-129 B.C.). He was followed in turn by Clitomachus, of whom little is known, and he subsequently by a certain Philo of Larissa. In 88 B.C. the Academy came under the directorship of another illustrious figure, Antiochus, and entered upon yet another period of prosperity and influence. All told, the Academy was to remain in operation for a full nine centuries, until its final closing in A.D. 529. 22
The second major school of philosophy in Athens (in the dual sense of a systematic body of thought and a literal institution in which its teaching was housed) was that of Aristotle (384/3-322 B.C.).23 He was born in the Greek city of Stagira in Chalcidice, not far from the Macedonian court at Pella. In the year 366 B.C., when he was eighteen, Aristotle arrived at the Platonic Academy where he remained for almost two decades. After Speusippos assumed the directorship of the school upon Plato's death, Aristotle reportedly took leave for the island ofLesbos where he pursued his interests in medicine and marine biology. Thereafter, according to traditional accounts, he sojourned at the court of Hermias and subsequently served for several years as tutor to Alexander, son of the Macedonian monarch Philip. Around 335-334 B.C. Aristotle returned to Athens, which by now was firmly under Macedonian control. There in a rented building adjacent to the gymnasion known as the
theme was the quest for human happiness. True (hedone) in life-hence the term "hedonism" to characterize Epicureanism-was considered to come not from attempting to satisfy bodily pleasures, but, rather, from the more austere pursuit of emotional tranquility and the inexhaustible mental pleasures of the soup! Self-discipline, avoidance of the distractions of earthly pleasures, and spiritual concentration-these were the means by which the highest and most satisfying forms of happiness could be secured. Although the original Garden of Epicurus closed temporarily in the year 79 B.C., after having been guided under some fourteen different directorships, the influence of its founder was to outlast the institution itself by many centuries. 32
THE HELLENISTIC PERIOD
Even before Plato's death, growing disunity among the Greek city-states had increased their vulnerability to external threats, most notably that posed by the expansion-minded Macedonians. By the middle of the fourth century when the threat could no longer be ignored, it was too late. The major military debacle suffered by the Greeks at Chaeronea in 338 B.C., for example, for all intents and purposes spelled the end of Greek independence and the establishment of Macedonian hegemony throughout Hellas. Yet even after the ancient citystates lost their sovereignty, the classical culture they had nurtured was being dispersed or exported throughout the eastern Mediterranean world by Alexander the Great. Nor did his premature death halt the process. The emergence of Hellenistic culture, very much rooted in that of classical antiquity but enriched and extended by contacts with the peoples of the Near East, proceeded largely unimpeded by the disintegration and division of the short-lived Alexandrian imperium. 33 Scores of major municipal centers, for example, rather quickly evolved from sleepy provincial outposts into bustling cultural centers in their own right: Antioch in Syria; Seleucia on the Tigris; Pergamon; Jerusalem; and Pelusium, Oxyrhynchus, Ptolemais, and Alexandria in Egypt, the last-named founded by Alexander himself in 332 B.C. Nevertheless, all of the important elements of Greek "civilization" (oikoumene) continued to hold sway, regardless of who actually held the reigns of political power, whether it was the Seleucids in the east, the Ptolemies in Egypt, or the Macedonian diadochi, or generals, in Greece itself. Ultimately, of course, even the mighty Romans who alone eventually achieved the goal of unified control over the entire Mediterranean basin, were to succumb to the allure of Greek culture, or paideia, even as they impressed upon it the flavor of their own history and institutions.
Details on the precise shape of institutionalized higher learning from the third and second centuries B.C. onward into the period of Roman domination
