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Conclusion
- University of Virginia Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
187 When the Civil War began, higher education in America comprised chiefly small colleges that taught students an abstract curriculum rooted in the classical languages and mathematics. In the North they attracted students from a broad range of social classes who wished to become ministers, doctors, lawyers, or teachers. In the South they enrolled primarily the children of the plantation elite. Men and women in the South attended di≠erent colleges; blacks attended none. Students often traveled across state borders to reach college. The federal government did not play a major role in education. State governments had founded some colleges but usually had left them to operate and raise funds on their own. The war both engaged and challenged these colleges. Male students left to enlist in the Union and Confederate armies. Women replaced brothers who had left farms to enlist or remained on campus knitting socks for the soldiers. Monetary inflation and the presence of armies forced additional students to withdraw. Some Southern colleges su≠ered physical destruction, while others endured military takeover as bases or hospitals. Meanwhile, Congress made the federal government a patron of higher education by passing the Morrill Land-Grant College Act. When the war ended, Northern colleges quickly regained their students. Southern colleges , many of which had closed, faced a much greater struggle. As Southern colleges prepared to rebuild and reopen after the war, they thought about what curricula and institutional structures would best help them to survive in the postbellum economy and society. Some decided on multicollegiate universities o≠ering classical, professional, and practical degree programs, along with outreach programs such as public lectures. These universities, they believed, would attract the most Conclusion 188 RECONSTRUCTING THE CAMPUS students and, through modular tuition policies, extract the most income from those students. Classical colleges such as South Carolina College and the University of Missouri thus reinvented themselves as comprehensive universities. Pointing to wartime damage, the University of Missouri persuaded the state government to fund its transition from college to university. It and other colleges became modern state universities, with funding and direction from their state governments, for the first time. Both to maximize income and to address the social changes that accompanied the Civil War and Reconstruction, Southern colleges diversi- fied their student populations. In the late 1860s and 1870s they began to admit more students of limited financial means, including both elites who now had less wealth and nontraditional students attracted by the new practical courses. Previously male colleges became coeducational, pushed in that direction by the need to train teachers for the new public school systems. The University of South Carolina, controlled by a Reconstruction legislature, even admitted African Americans for the first time. That change did not last, but access for poor whites did. Blacks’ education survived primarily in separate institutions. The di∞culty of traveling in wartime began a trend in both Southern and Northern colleges toward enrolling primarily local students. Southern universities, in both their curricula and their student populations, came more closely to resemble Northern ones. Meanwhile, as the federal government expanded during and after the Civil War, it began to play a larger role in higher education. The Morrill Act of 1862 provided indirect federal funding for colleges teaching agriculture and mechanics. Because of the wartime context, Congress required that funded colleges also teach military tactics. After the war, Congress voted to assign army o∞cers to civilian colleges to drill and teach their students. Colleges readily accepted the o≠er, partnering with the government to add a new component to the college curriculum. Some colleges and state governments also o≠ered a free education to war veterans , especially injured ones, and to the orphans of men who had died in the war. Federal involvement in education culminated in the creation of the Department (later Bureau) of Education in 1867. The government began to collect information from colleges, schools, and other educational institutions to prepare and disseminate an ongoing statistical portrait of education in the United States. In 1876 the federal government and individual colleges worked together to display the condition of, and recent developments in, higher education to a national audience at the Centen- [23.20.220.59] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 14:52 GMT) 189 CONCLUSION nial Exposition in Philadelphia. There Americans outside college communities learned about many of the reforms in curricula, admissions, and government involvement that had transpired over the past fifteen years. They learned how di≠erent higher education was...