American College and University: A History

16. Flowering of the University Movement

i6 Flowering of the University Movement In a spirit of optimism appropriate to the age President James B. Angell of the University of Michigan looked out upon the collegiate world in 1871 and concluded, "In this day of unparalleled activity in college life, the institution which is not steadily advancing is certainly falling behind."1 The little sleepy colleges, the reluctant universities, the friends of the status quo—if they did not hear this call to action from one of the important new spokesmen for American higher education, they could not avoid the growing evidence that indeed there had never before been an age of such stirrings, such changes, perhaps, as President Angell said, such advance. James McCosh was prodding a reluctant board at Princeton , Charles William Eliot was conquering a reluctant board at Cambridge. At Ithaca and Baltimore new departures in American higher education were being plotted. The landgrant colleges were sprouting, and the state universities were assuming new roles. So dynamic were the changes, so remarkably accelerated the influence of the new institutions and the 1 James Burrill Angell: Selected Addresses (New York, 1912), p. 27. THE AMERICAN COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 330 new movements, so rapid the tendency of one institution to emulate the advances of a rival that a short thirteen years later John W. Burgess, an astute and perceptive professor at Columbia College in New York, was led to the observation: "I confess that I am unable to divine what is to be ultimately the position of Colleges which cannot become Universities and which will not be Gymnasia. I cannot see what reason they will have to exist. It will be largely a waste of capital to maintain them, and largely a waste of time to attend them. It is so now." * It was well enough for the Columbia professor to dispose of two hundred and fifty years of American collegiate history and now to proclaim that the colleges had either to become universities or to remain advancedhigh schools. Every institution knew that it had to do something, even, if necessary, defend its right to stand still. What no institution could be certain of, however, was exactly what was meant by a university. President Eliot might proclaim that "a university cannot be built upon a sect"—which was unquestionably true in Germany and Cambridge, but was it not worth trying in the United States, where all things were possible?3 What was one to say to the warnings of Professor Henry Vethake of the college in Philadelphia that called itself the University of Pennsylvania? Professor Vethake had pointed out that the German universities were largely supported by students preparing for three professional careers that did not even exist in the United States—teaching, the civil service, and diplomacy . The answer to the professor unquestionably was that the day had come when the United States needed professional teachers, professional public servants, and professional diplomats , and that the needs could not be served by the colleges. Very well, then, a university was a place that turned out pro3 John W. Burgess: The American University: When Shall it Be? Where Shall it Be? What Shall it Be? (Boston, 1884), p. 5. *Quoted in George Wilson Pierson: Yale: College and University 1871-1937 (New Haven, 1952-5), I, 61. 33l Flowering of the University Movement fessional career men for opportunities that did not exist but ought to. Was that a way to commandpublic support? * As the years passed, confusion was piled on confusion, not only because colleges changed their letterheads to read "university ," but because the road to university purpose, function, or status was in no sense clearly defined. At Virginia the university concept rested on a broad base of courses and departments in which a student could study in depth and with a freedom unknown in the traditional institutions. At Johns Hopkins, on the other hand, the position was developed that a true university was postcollegiate in its orientation, that its essence was located in the graduate faculty of arts and sciences whose life revolved around the advancement of learning . In Cambridge President Eliot was moving Harvard toward university status by purposefully obliterating or at least diffusing the lines between undergraduate and graduate, between collegiate and scholarly. For Eliot the idea of a university was essentially a matter of spirit, and if an institution had that spirit, there was no place within it where the university spirit...