American College and University: A History

11. Crisis of the 1850's

II Crisis of the iS^o's The American college did not find the answers to the questions raised by the rising tide of democracy until after the Civil War. Nor did it, until then, begin effectively to grapple with the question of quality, of standards, of excellence. Whether higher education in the United States was going to serve the people was one question; whether it was going to serve learning was another. The old-time college had been willing to serve both, but on its terms, which meant that the people must take from the colleges what the colleges had decided was good for the people and that learning must not interfere with the colleges' commitment to character. Both the people and learning would find new allies in postwar America. As an expanding dynamic industrial society set about making itself into a colossus of power, new institutions would be developed that would better meet the requirements of such a society. The college of the first half of the nineteenth century was the creature of a relatively simple, agrarian community, a community of settled ways and of ancient certainties. It would survive, partly as an instrument of class or religious purposes. In the next hundred years, however, the old-time college would change significantly and it would find itself THE AMERICAN COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 222 increasingly surrounded by new institutions that were addressing themselves effectively to the questions of intellectual and popular purpose to which the first two hundred and twenty-five years of American higher education had given but faltering, uncertain answers. The likelihood that such questions would soon be answered became apparent in the 1850*5 when the voices of complaint were more insistent, when the always expanding domain of science registered new and significant victories, and when under the leadership of Francis Wayland, Brown took steps that provided a new rallying point for critics of the Yale Report of 1828. The maturing of the natural and physical sciences profoundly influenced the colleges; and while the role of science as the great disrupter of the classical course of study would have to wait until after the war, the first half of the nineteenth century suggested that if anything were going to shake the colleges loose from many of their old convictions, it would be science. The very first inroads on the classical curriculum had been made in 1727 with the appointment of a professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at Harvard. By 1792 botany had entered the course of study at Columbia, and three years later John MacLean, at Princeton, became the first professor of chemistry in an American college. By midnineteenth century the so-called new subjects—mathematics, natural philosophy, botany, and chemistry, to which were added zoology, geology, and mineralogy—had insinuated themselves into the course of study in most colleges. Accompanied as they were by French, German, history, and English literature, they were not given more than passing attention. Sometimes they were packaged in such a way as to offer a degree of election. At Dartmouth they were placed in the winter term when most students were absent, teaching in New England district schools.1 1 Palmer Chamberlain Ricketts: History of Rensselaer Polytechnic 223 Crisis of the 1850*5 The new scientific subjects had not yet achieved anything like ultimate respectability, but thanks to a band of curious, inquiring pioneers, science was popularized in the United States and before long was recognized as offering that broadly utilitarian orientation which the ancient studies lacked. The work of the pioneers, both in advancing science and in popularizing it, combined with the richness of the American continent in making science an instrument for exploiting the great natural wealth of inland America. Not even the most hidebound of the college conservatives were able to deny to the sciences limited entry. Instrumental in developing American interest in science was Benjamin Silliman, a Yale graduate of the Class of 1796 who was appointed professor of chemistry and natural history at Yale in 1802, even before he had ever seen a chemical experiment performed, let alone performed one himself. Preparatory to taking up his professorship, Silliman studied for two years at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia , among other places, and at the laboratory of John MacLean at Princeton, where he saw his first chemical experiment . Silliman gave his first course of lectures at Yale in 1804 and followed it...