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22. An American Consensus
- University of Georgia Press
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An American Consensus The continuous search for purpose and definition on the American campus led to a revival of collegiate values in the 1920*5, but university ideals were not in any serious way rejected because Harvard and Yale made dramatic efforts to deal with some of the problems of growth or because various new curricular proposals rested on English models. The innovations were expensive, so expensive that not even Harvard and Yale were able to afford the faculty, the tutors, in other words the intellectual equipment, which their new residential patterns encouraged. The Harvard and Yale residences never achieved the intellectual record of which they were capable, and although there were exceptions, the Harvard houses and Yale colleges were more successful in reviving the social and moral climate of the collegiate way than in sustaining any markedintellectual improvement. In the meantime, naturally, the service ideal of the American university enjoyed continued support, and while the 1920*8 was not a period of agitation and reform such as evoked the Wisconsin Idea, schools of finance and business administration often addressed themselves to the needs of a 11 463 An American Consensus society enjoying on the whole a remarkable period of growth and expansion. All of the tendencies with which the collegiate revival was intended to cope retained their vigor, for they were inherent in size and organization; those evils that were an outgrowth of the scholarly temper and the scientific spirit could, at best, be only neutralized. At the state universities and at the land-grant colleges there could be no significant rejection of the assumptions that made the American university something very much more than an agency for democratizing aristocratic values. Yet for a time at any rate the university idea had hit its high-water mark, and while the passage of time would mean more and bigger universities, higher and higher enrollments, the university idea, firmly planted, was now required to live with many of the ideasagainst which it had fought so long. Growth would, indeed, feed on growth. Modern technology required a more highly educated population: the colleges and universities were called upon to provide the trained intelligence that would create, master, and find the terms on which man could live with that technology. American society itself was committed to education as an instrument of mobility, and since mobility was proof that the society worked, the demands placed upon formal agencies of higher education grew apace. Teachers colleges, outgrowth of onetime normal schools of high-school level, now moved toward full collegiate status. In local communities everywhere, but especially in the Midwest and Far West, junior colleges responded to the desire for education beyond the high school, less expensive and more convenient than that provided by the great universities.1 The junior college became the agency for meeting the needs of "the nonacademically minded high-school graduate."2 The state universities began to grow toward such gigantic size that in 1 See Leonard Vincent Koos: The Junior College (2 vols., Minneapolis , 1924); Walter Crosby Eells: The Junior College (New York, 1931). 2 William H. Snyder: "The Real Function of the Junior College," The Junior College Journal, I (1930),76. [3.236.81.4] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 15:06 GMT) THE AMERICAN COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 464 a state like California only decentralization and emulation of the chain department store would in the end offer a way out of the problems created by an almost insatiable popular appetite for higher education. But henceforth growth would be tempered by a university rationale that would be philosophically characterized by consolidation, accommodation, by a certain regard for the whole man that an era of university-building had not permitted. Henceforth the long English tradition would stand beside the apparatus of growth and of German scholarship and would keep alive, even in the most hostile of territory, some respect for the idea of the liberally educatedman. During all the years of university growth, the extracurriculum played a major role in sustaining collegiate values. The athletic teams, fraternities and social clubs, theater groups, newspapers, and magazines, all of these various enterprises not only allowed young undergraduates to emulate and prepare for life, but also provided them with experiences that they knew to be profoundly human. Just as the extracurriculum in the collegiate era was a response to the sterility of the curriculum, in the university era it became a compensation for the one-sided intellectuality and the overwhelming impersonality of the official...