American College and University: A History

21. Counterrevolution

II Counterrevolution Organization, with all of its characteristic paraphernalia— committees, departments, hierarchies, codes, standards— often manages to choke the last bit of life out of an enterprise , frustrate almost every tendency toward originality and imagination, and militate against decision and responsibility . But it is a narrow and self-blinding look which only sees the organization, its structure, its fascinating capacity for process and technique. For any accounting of organization must get beyond process and consider some of the concrete results. While it was true, therefore, that by the First World War the American college and university had become an organized institution, some attention must be paid to the annual report, to the record that organization itself helped to achieve. The history of American higher education between the Civil War and the First World War, while the history of organization, is also the history of a tremendous number of changes, even improvements. By 1900 a backward-glancing university president might not think that every change was for the best, but who was going to prefer the days of the common curriculum and all the monotony, sterility, and superficiality which it meant over the great variety, the libraries, the laboratories, the 441 Counterrevolution museums which organization now accommodated? Was it really a loss that in place of the old in loco parentis discipline there now was an aura of laissez faire, which was unquestionably quite as friendly and considerably more respectful of student freedom? If there were no longer any Hopkinses or Waylands or Notts, no great moral guiding teachers, in their stead was a body of trained professionals, with all the self-consciousness and self-respect which that suggested, and with an abiding devotion to the life of the mind.1 Colleges which had once, in a general way, prepared and sent young men on to professional training were now great universities providing that training themselves, for the old professions and for dozens of new ones as well. Colleges that had almost starved to death, in their dependence upon a neighborhood of reluctant boys, had found new purpose and new growth in the discovery that the American woman was willing and able to learn. State legislatures, once hesitant even to charter a college, were now pouring great sums of money into giant systems of public higher education. Even the great complex of intercollegiate athletics—was it not a certain advantage to have worldly values so well established in an environment quite capable of taking leave of reality? To such minor blessings could be added, of course, the new vitality of the relationship between the universities and the public, the closing of that great yawning gap, so characteristic of the old era, between the college and all but a small segment of society, and the increasing articulation between the schools and the colleges and universities. All this, after all, was made possible by organization. Among the great consequences of university growth and aspiration were the development of coherent systems of public education, the legitimizing of new areas of subject matter, and the mutual search of universities, colleges, and schools for standards of excellence. Too often these fundamental achievements were overlooked in the welter of sta1 James Burrill Angell: Selected Addresses (New York, 1912), pp. 129-53. THE AMERICAN COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 442 tistics that attested to sheer growth or in the certainly abundant absurdities and exaggerations which the university movement inspired. The physical growth was in itself impressive , with half of the total benefactions to higher education in the year 1910 given over to buildings and grounds. The spirit of this commitment to growth was caught by the slogan-makers at Pomona who in 1919 came up with the rallying call: "Every Goal a New Beginning," and by the trustees of Johns Hopkins who at the same time, despite a ten-million-dollar endowment, were busy accumulating an impressive indebtedness, at the rate of $65,000 a year.2 It reached the epitome of curricular expression at the University of Nebraska where, by 1931, a student could take courses in early Irish, creative thinking, American English, first aid, advanced clothing, ice cream and ices, third-year Czechoslovakian , football, sewerage, and a man's problems in the modern home.8 Yet, hidden in the absurdity of such an offering and in all of the impulse to growth was the fact that between 1890 and 1925 enrollment in institutions of higher education...