Higher Learning in America

In the 2015–16 World University Rankings published by the Times Higher Education, 70 percent of the top twenty universities were located in the United States. Why? The rankings rely on thousands of data points crunched by algorithms, but historians might prefer a longer, more extended explanation. That is precisely what they get from the four books under review. In fact, James Axtell’s explanation begins 800 years ago with the founding of Europe’s great universities. His ambitious and welcome synthesis of this vast history culminates in a focus on the 108 elite U.S. research universities, which he uncharitably distinguishes from the “profuse rest.” The other books offer case studies of three of these institutions: Harvard (ranked 6th), Chicago (ranked 10th), and Rutgers (ranked 141st). Their varied and overlapping histories satisfy in a way no numerical ranking can.

Axtell’s Wisdom’s Workshop is broadest in scope, and his history brings to the surface five essential themes that organize the history of the university: governance, finance, the student body, curriculum, and—for want of a better term—external relations. In one way or another, these books address these themes within their own institutional contexts.

Axtell’s command of the immense secondary literature is impressive and enables him to sprint across centuries of European and early American history to identify the modern university’s varied origins. Continental universities originated the basic contours of the institution we know today and established its structure and rituals, but Axtell traces the American college to English cousins. Harvard’s founders, for example, had Cambridge in mind when they put its namesake benefactor’s legacy to work in the 1630s. In time, other colleges joined Harvard: William and Mary in 1693 and Yale in 1701. The pace picked up after mid-century, although Axtell downplays the role of the Great Awakening in establishing the College of New Jersey (Princeton, 1746), Dartmouth (1769), Rhode Island College (Brown, 1764) and Queen’s (Columbia, 1766). None of these colleges, he argues, was, or could afford to be, “overtly sectarian.” Instead, the colonies’ pluralism forced a more ecumenical approach (p. 126).

During the early republic, Americans’ attachment to education increased, but, as Axtell points out, no system of education emerged such as those we see in Europe and England. The number of colleges increased, but academies remained popular institutions for higher learning. The colleges that did exist were often small and poor affairs struggling along with a president and perhaps a few tutors. More successful colleges erected buildings and employed faculty whose mission was to transmit knowledge and police the behavior of students, those adolescent “inheritors of Adamic sin” (p. 184). Still, Axtell joins other scholars, including Roger L. Geiger, in seeing the nineteenth-century college as dynamic and responsive. Faculty eagerly supplemented the classical curriculum diet with “applied, practical, and modern” courses. Faculty specialization comes into view and professional schools emerge, such as Harvard’s Law School (discussed below) but also schools of medicine and theology. The college, however, was not a university, though many institutions claimed the name. The rise of the American university occurred following the Civil War as students returned from Germany, having sought there the higher learning not available at home.

Axtell takes up the “German Question” in chapter five and largely agrees with the emerging consensus that Germany’s influence was selective, not wholesale. Boyer arrives at a similar conclusion. Nineteenth-century college...