American College and University: A History

9. Financing the Colleges

9 Financing the Colleges During the War of 1812 military forces of the United States commandeered the only building of the University of Vermont for use as a barracks. The university necessarily called off classes and waited for peace. For its troubles it received a government check in the amount of $5,600.* Few American colleges would not have benefited from a similar misfortune . The American college, when open, was often on the verge of bankruptcy. Vermont had discovered, when closed, how to experience prosperity. But the War of 1812 did not solve the financial problems of the American college. War and misfortune and Uncle Sam did not pay the bills. Who did? The students did not. From the beginning the American college was cloaked with a public purpose, with a responsibility to the past and the present and the future. The college was expected to give more than it received—not more than it received from the society which it served, but more than it necessarily received from the particular young men 1 An earlier version of this chapter appeared as "Who Paid the Bills? An Inquiry into the Nature of Nineteenth-Century College Finance" in Harvard Educational Review,XXXI (1961), 144-57. Julian Ira Lindsay : Tradition Looks Forward: The University of Vermont: A History 1191-1904 (Burlington, 1954), p. 109. THE AMERICAN COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 178 who were being prepared to do society's work. The college was not to be an institution of narrow privilege. Society required the use of all its best talents, and while it would, of course, always be easier for a rich boy than a poor boy to go to college, persistence and ambition and talent were not to be denied. The American college, therefore, was an expression of Christian charity, both in the assistance that it gave to needy young men and in the assistance that it received from affluent old men. While the colonial economy could not support philanthropy of the dimension that founded the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, individual benevolence was nonetheless in the English tradition, and the colonial colleges therefore naturally looked to it for sustenance. At first England itself was the only reliable source of significant philanthropy . The Englishmen John Harvard and Elihu Yale, while not the founders of the colleges that took their names, were the first substantial private benefactors of collegiate education in New England. The first scholarship fund given to an American college was an act of Christian benevolence on the part of Lady Anne Mowlson, whose maiden name had been Radcliffe. But, although colonial life was poor, the tradition which supported the English colleges in England was not abandoned in the New World. It was necessarily supplemented by other means, but it was also encouraged by the vital sense of stewardship nurtured by the Christian denominations . From this concept of stewardship would flow many of the benefactions that sustained the American college, until in combination with the great fortunes which opportunity in America underwrote, there would emerge in the second half of the nineteenth century full-blown institutions, each (as had often been the case at Oxford and Cambridge) the creation of a single originating donor: Vassar, Smith, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, Chicago, and Wellesley.2 'Samuel Eliot Morison: The Founding of Harvard College(Cambridge , 1935), pp. 89, 210 ff., and Three Centuries of Harvard 1636-1936 179 Financing the Colleges Samuel Johnson, the eighteenth-century English lexicographer , defined a patron as "Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery." The world surely has had its share of such wretches, but they did not predominate in the era of the colleges. The early patrons were of the sort who established a model for Eliam E. Barney , a post-Civil War benefactor at Denison who enforced upon himself and his family "the strictest kind of personal economy" in order to multiply hisgood works.8 A model ante bellum benefactor was Amos Lawrence, a Boston merchant, who carried around in his wallet a piece of paper on which he had scribbled, "What shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and lose his own Soul?" Into his account book Lawrence wrote in January 1828: "My property imposes upon me many duties, which can only be known to my Maker. May a sense of these duties be constantly impressed upon my mind." A sense of these duties made...