5. Thwarted Reform

William Barton Rogers and the Idea of MIT

CHAPTER FIVE

Thwarted Reform

ROGERS’S IDEAS ABOUT higher learning followed the pattern of his scientific and professional thought. A combination of theory and practice stood at the forefront of what he believed a college or university should promote. The useful arts, in other words, appeared once again as an organizing principle in his worldview. During the antebellum period the United States underwent a scientific-industrial revolution that stimulated Rogers and others to translate their worldviews into college-level reforms. Rogers believed that one of the greatest challenges reformers of his era faced was the anemic role of science in academia. Charles W. Eliot, best known for his presidency at Harvard University from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, agreed with Rogers. In an article of 1869 Eliot evaluated the three most common ways science had entered the college curriculum: courses, separate schools, and technological institutes. At the start of the century colleges rarely offered more than a classical curriculum that required students to take Latin, Greek, and moral philosophy. As topics in chemistry or geology or astronomy generated interest, faculty began to provide occasional lectures or formal classes to students as electives. In addition to scattered offerings, the founding of separate schools provided another avenue for science in traditional higher education. Harvard and Yale established a popular model, continued at several other institutions, that separated classical from scientific studies. For students disenchanted with scattered courses or separate (or, as Eliot would say, “marginalized”) schools, technological institutes provided a structured alternative. By the 1860s Rogers, Eliot, and other reformers believed that independent institutes held the most promise for scientific studies.¹

In the decades before the Civil War, Rogers immersed himself in each of the three developments. All the while, however, he became increasingly known for advancing the idea of a comprehensive institute, one that aimed for scientific breadth and depth as well as laboratory instruction. His experiences in traditional higher education and scientific research had much to do with his vision for an alternative. Established colleges and universities, he came to believe, suffered from traditions that placed restrictions on science studies and favored a classical curriculum, which had long dominated American higher learning. After attempting to follow the path of reform, Rogers turned to institution building. His experiences conducting scientific research supported his contention that an independent institute was necessary. The lack of experienced assistants for the survey of Virginia illustrated to him the need for a new form of higher learning along with new modes of instruction. Few traditional institutions offered students regular or direct contact with the laboratory, and Rogers made this lack of laboratory practice the focus of his efforts for an institute. He based his useful arts worldview on the need for it.

In the early nineteenth century, if college students wanted science instruction, they looked not to the college but to medical schools. Rogers’s father, among hundreds of others, graduated from the medical school at the University of Pennsylvania in the first decade of the century. Many of these students, in turn, either entered the medical profession or sought the rare college professorship in science. Benjamin Silliman followed this career pattern and became an influential science professor at Yale in 1802. For many of Rogers’s generation, Silliman’s chair represented a substantial fissure in the classical curriculum. It offered a model for the promotion of science in established classical colleges. Well-known scientists, such as geologist Amos Eaton, joined the swelling ranks of students who had studied with Silliman. Moreover, the highly regarded American Journal of Science, founded by the Yale professor, was known as “Silliman’s journal.” The journal provided a resource for scientists to keep informed of developments in the United States and abroad. Like other antebellum scientists, Rogers benefited from Silliman’s efforts. By the time Rogers was beginning his career in science, Silliman had made professorships in such disciplines more attractive to college leaders. The prominence that Yale had achieved for hiring and keeping Silliman, America’s science educator, drew other colleges into a race to stay current.²

The start of Rogers’s career coincided with the first groundswell of experimentation in college science that occurred during the 1820s. At the time course catalogues began to appear regularly, and college presidents frequently compared their curricular offerings and admissions requirements. Advances made at one institution would follow shortly at others. For many reasons, including the common introduction of science into parlors, primers, and public schooling, college officials began to see the need to overcome obstacles to science instruction at the undergraduate level: the poor materials and textbooks, the lack of qualified faculty, the tenuous part-time positions for scientists, and the lack of apparatus for experiments and lecture demonstrations. Overcoming some of these obstacles, Harvard instituted its first regular chemistry courses for undergraduate students in 1825. A year later the faculty at Amherst called attention to the “inadequacy of the prevailing systems of classical education” for ignoring science. Shortly thereafter, Amherst established courses on “Chemistry and other kindred branches of Physical sciences by showing their application to the more useful arts and trades.” Throughout the 1820s additional calls for changes to the curriculum came from across the nation, from the University of Vermont, the University of Virginia, Columbia, Williams, Middlebury, Dartmouth, Dickinson, and others.³

At William and Mary, before decade’s end, Rogers found little difficulty in making popular his lectures on natural philosophy and chemistry. By the time he replaced his father on the faculty, the college was rethinking its classical curriculum, particularly in light of the founding of the science-friendly University of Virginia in 1825. “The establishment of the University of Virginia,” warned a faculty statement outlining the threat, “did not accord with the views of William and Mary, and it was foreseen that it would reduce its standing, unless some expedient was adopted, which might give a great impulse to the College.” Science courses provided one “expedient” with which the institution could respond to change.⁴

Rogers brought to the lecture halls a generalist approach to science and presented the material in a manner that conformed to the useful arts ideal. In his natural philosophy courses he carried his young listeners through the topics of “Dynamics, Mechanics, Hydrodynamics, Pneumatics, Acoustics, Optics, Magnetism, Electricity, Meteorology, Physical Geography, [and] Physical and Descriptive Astronomy.” But he also commanded student attention by illustrating the practical application of natural philosophy to “the strengths of materials, the construction of . . . Roofs, Arches, Bridges, Roads, the Steam Engine, and Elementary Principles of Architecture.” Reflecting his useful arts approach, he relied on two basic texts. Students were required to read Rogers’s Introduction to the field. His later publications, such as An Elementary Treatise on the Strength of Materials and Elements of Mechanical Philosophy, likely evolved from the text. Students also studied Elements of Natural Philosophy as selected from the Library of Useful Knowledge. Published in London, the Library provided a series of works that shared Rogers’s useful arts worldview.⁵

In his chemistry courses Rogers applied a similar pattern. One section dealt with the theories of “Inorganic and Organic Chemistry,” while another included demonstrations on the chemical relationships in “the arts of Bleaching, Dyeing, Tanning, Metallurgy, Brewing, Distillation, [and] the manufacture of glass and porcelain.” The basic principles and practices that Rogers taught came from John White Webster’s Chemistry, a work based on William Thomas Brande’s text on the subject. Webster, an itinerant lecturer at Harvard, West Point, Brown, Amherst, and other colleges, had compiled his lectures and those of English chemist Brande for the volume, which “endeavoured not to limit the student to any particular theories, but to sketch the outlines of those of the most eminent writers, leaving to the teacher the discussion of their various merits.” The review of theories came in large measure from Brande’s own surveys of the field. A lecturer at England’s Royal Institution, Brande received recognition for his theoretical research in the field, earning the prestigious Copley Medal in 1813. At the same time, Webster’s coupling of theory with practice must have pleased Rogers: “Many valuable practical directions have been introduced from Mr. [Michael] Faraday’s late work on Chemical Manipulation, and the section on the analysis of Minerals from Dr. [Edward] Turner’s Elements.” To a large degree the text satisfied Rogers’s useful arts emphasis for his classes on chemistry.⁶

His course offerings and selection of texts played a role in a heightened interest in science at William and Mary. One of Rogers’s pupils, his youngest brother, Robert Empie Rogers, commented that “his classes are advancing very well indeed, and they are all very much pleased.” Even for his evening study “clubs,” sessions that William assigned to his classes and visited almost every night of the week, “students attend with the greatest alacrity possible; there is not the least disorder among them.”⁷

The lack of disorder stemmed in part from Rogers’s approach to instruction, which included laboratory demonstrations. This offering made his science offerings potentially more inviting, especially to students accustomed to the drone of recitations in ancient languages. He drew listeners in with his emphasis on technologies for instruction. Rogers took pride in using new approaches to college science “in a manner agreeable to the class.” At the same time, he noted problems experienced with attaining and maintaining scientific apparatus. In his words, he found grave “difficulties arising from want of instruments, or from imperfection in those we possess, or any other trivial circumstances connected with my duties.” Although the technical problems caused him “uneasiness or perplexity,” he felt compelled as a scientist to “employ every accessible means of illustrating my subject in an intelligible manner.” As a last resort, he could always rely on lectures, or “explanations,” as he put it. Yet “the want of apparatus,” Rogers concluded, “is certainly a serious difficulty in the way of a lecturer.”⁸

Ironically, his efforts at the college led the University of Virginia to offer Rogers a position in 1835, an offer he felt he couldn’t refuse. The faculty at the university supported an elective system that allowed Rogers more freedom to expand science offerings in the curriculum. From the moment he began teaching in Charlottesville, his practical and theoretical interests appeared in the institution’s catalogue. At first the offerings were presented in scattered, unorganized themes. The first of four themes, Mechanics, included “Statics, Dynamics, Laws of Impulse and Pressure, Corpuscular Forces, Strength of Materials, Friction and Machinery.” Many of the topics lent themselves to practical uses of physics for engineering purposes. The second section covered “Hydrodynamics” and the third “Heat.” The remainder were combined into a theme with assorted topics, such as “Electricity and Galvanism; Magnetism; Electro-Magnetism; Optics; Astronomy.” Within a few years, however, Rogers reworked the offerings into an organized system that followed the scheme adopted in his Elements of Mechanical Philosophy. Until he published the work, students worked through the variety of texts and “treatises” of the Library of Useful Knowledge. The selections included works by Lardner, Kater, Potter, and Young (Mechanics, Hydrodynamics, Pneumatics, Steam Engine), Brewster and Jackson (Optics), Herschel, Gummere, and Norton (Astronomy), Lyell, Trimmer, De la Beche, Bakewell, Allen, Philip, Dana, and Ansted (Geology and Mineralogy); Golding Bird, Muller, and Peschel (Physics); and Agassiz and Gould (Zoology). Whatever the themes or texts, Rogers distinguished himself from his predecessor at Virginia by incorporating the useful arts approach. Students, for example, received more instruction in the useful, or “mechanic,” arts and expanded sections on theories about “dynamics” and “heat” after he arrived there. By the same approach Rogers expanded the options available to students in geology and mineralogy as part of his course in natural philosophy. He taught classes on the concepts of stratigraphy as well as “practical and descriptive portions of the Science.” For mineralogy he went a step further, including “an economic view.”⁹

Making further use of the elective system at Virginia, Rogers pressed for the establishment of a new school to emphasize his useful arts ideal. A year after joining the faculty, he led the founding of the first “School of Engineering” at the university. Upon receiving approval from the Board of Visitors, Rogers and a colleague, mathematics professor Charles Bonnycastle, created the school with practice and theory in mind. They divided six themes between them. Rogers taught three options: Geology, Heat and Steam, and Theoretical Mechanics. Bonnycastle took on the other three: Graphical Mathematics, Surveying, and “Theory of Roads, Railroads, Canals, Bridges.” Rounding out the schools offerings, the two professors co-taught an additional surveying section as well as a section on “drawing and sketching.” As for laboratory experiences, Rogers provided students with exercises “taught practically in the field” for practice in surveying.¹⁰

Toward the end of his career at Virginia, the institution allowed Rogers to reorganize the school of natural philosophy. He divided the area into two parts, junior and senior classes. The division closely matched his belief that students should first learn the principles and theories of science before attempting to apply such knowledge for practical purposes. Juniors received lectures on the theories of equilibrium, resistance, acoustics, and electricity, among other themes. Senior students, having a background in theory, explored “practical statics” and “practical dynamics” as related to architecture, steam engines, and additional practical topics. Rogers’s emphasis on having students learn theory before proceeding to practice would become a hallmark of his educational reform efforts.¹¹

Although Rogers enjoyed some success in advancing curricular changes, during his tenure at William and Mary and the University of Virginia, he gained virtually no ground toward his most prized ideal: laboratory instruction. Colleges of the era rarely strayed from such traditional methods of instruction as the recitation, a practice that required students to memorize texts for classroom recitals. Indeed, when the University of Virginia adopted lectures and written examinations, many viewed the methods as progressive or radical when compared to recitations. But even at Virginia, at best Rogers could only include laboratory demonstrations as part of a lecture. Otherwise known as “lecture demonstrations,” the practice called for a faculty member to perform an experiment for students to observe. Rogers believed, however, that recitations, lectures, written exams, and demonstrations paled in comparison to work done in the laboratory, which allowed students to experiment with connections between theory and practice that no other form of instruction could provide. The University of Virginia nevertheless resisted this part of his reform efforts.¹²

The resistance that Rogers and science promoters at other colleges faced was due, in large measure, to a landmark publication in 1828. That year Yale College, one of the most influential institutions of the period, dampened enthusiasm for practical and scientific education by issuing a position statement, “Original Papers in Relation to a Course of Liberal Education.” The expansion of natural science offerings had raised questions about the meaning of a classical education, questions that the article sought to put to rest. In effect, the report advanced an ideal of higher learning that placed the classics and mental discipline at the center of the American college curriculum.¹³

The policy-shaping document, known as the Yale Report of 1828, had two principal authors. Yale president Jeremiah Day drafted the first of two sections, which defined the aims of a liberal education: “Its object is to lay the foundation of a superior education.” Day distinguished the universal applicability of the collegiate education from the particularistic training of practical studies. James Kingsley, who served as professor at Yale for a half-century, wrote the second section to explain the continued use of the so-called dead languages, primarily Greek and Latin. He described a need for the ancient languages in cultivating students for the literary world, gaining taste, strengthening the mental faculties, and preparing for the professions. Bringing together the perspectives of a president and a faculty member at Yale in 1828, the report outlined a tradition and philosophy of American higher education that had at one time been assumed. Both sections supported the notion of faculty psychology that depicted the mind as having “discipline” and “furniture” to acquire. Discipline consisted of exercising the mind, conceived of as a muscle, through recitation and rote memorization. The best furniture, argued Day and Kingsley, came from reciting the classical languages. Faculty psychology, pervasive throughout the Yale Report, influenced the standard conception of a proper collegiate education. All other forms of discipline and furniture, such as experimentation and scientific knowledge, asserted the article, had complementary, if lesser, roles to play in the undergraduate course of study.¹⁴

For Rogers and other science advocates within traditional colleges, the report left many educational questions unanswered. Why did the classics provide the best furnishings for the mind? Why should science faculty teach by way of recitations, the methods of language instructors, when the laboratory offered more for scientific studies? Why should professional and practical education be marginalized and not taught with the same rigor and given the same value as the classical curriculum? Ultimately, Rogers kept questions of this sort in mind as he plotted his college reforms.¹⁵

Rogers first expressed his vision of a technological institute in print during his tenure at the University of Virginia. After notice of his reform interests reached several members of Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute, in 1837, the managers of the institute requested his assistance in developing a memorial for a “School of Arts” with which to petition the Pennsylvania legislature. For this concept of “school” Rogers drafted a proposal aimed at “professional education” for the mechanic arts. He modeled the program after medical and legal training. Young mechanics, he contended, worked in the nation’s newly expanding fields of engineering and mining and manufacturing, almost always without formal preparation. The memorial offered an opportunity to establish a program to meet the needs of mechanics; central to his proposal was the notion of offering a greater number of theoretical studies than what was available at vocational institutions and more practical experiences than traditional institutions of higher education.¹⁶

The memorial recommended starting a school divided into six departments, each led by a head professor who was assisted by “sub-professors,” or “practical instructors.” Faculty had the option of using the recitation method and giving lectures, but the laboratory, Rogers emphasized, would provide the primary mode of instruction. In three departments—Mechanical Engineering, Chemistry, and Mathematics—the laboratory consisted of facilities with apparatus for instruction. The mechanic arts students would apply the principles learned in lectures to “model-making” through experimentation with “machinery” and “structures.” Chemistry students would perform analyses of soils, minerals, and other substances under the guidance of specialized instructors. Those in the mathematics department would apply “principles of perspective and descriptive geometry” to architectural, topographical, and machine drawing. In the three remaining departments—Geology, Civil Engineering, and Agriculture—the outdoor environment itself provided the laboratory. Lessons in the field, Rogers argued, taught observational and operational skills required for enlightened mining, surveying, and farming.¹⁷

The proposal attributed several advantages to laboratory work. For one thing it exposed students to equipment commonly used in practice. Most colleges of the period avoided what Rogers’s plan set out to do, given the high costs of the apparatuses of the day. Those institutions that did purchase such equipment considered them too valuable for student use. Instead, faculty limited apparatus use to lecture demonstrations or displays for campus visitors. Rogers’s proposal challenged conventional wisdom by seeking to place the tools of science in student hands. For Rogers the laboratory also offered students an opportunity to translate theory into practice. Whether in geology, chemistry, or physics, he firmly believed, few means outside of laboratory instruction afforded such a connection. By experimenting with apparatus or in the field, students could observe phenomena and then describe their observations “to an exact form on paper.” By controlling and describing their own experiments, students could thus become directly part of the process for learning new principles and theories. At the same time, laboratories had the potential to demystify occupations traditionally shrouded in folk myths or superstitions. Mining, for instance, “would be directed by sure principles and not by blind chance, or by a routine more often inapplicable than appropriate.” “To be an enlightened mechanic,” he continued, “it is also necessary, to a certain extent, to be acquainted with science; nor is it less true, that a knowledge of some of the arts is requisite to the cultivation of science itself.” Rogers’s plan offered a “more intimate union” of mind and hand.¹⁸

In justifying the new model of higher learning, Rogers reasoned that such a union between theory and practice had not always been necessary. In the “early stage” of the arts, before the industrial revolution, artisans gained sufficient skills from informal settings. Rogers referred to an elaborate system of apprenticeship in which trade workers began as journeymen under the direction of masters. Apprentices often aspired to reach the status of master, achieving proficiency enough to employ and teach other journeymen. With the onset of the industrial revolution, however, factories and other systematized forms of labor organization brought the apprenticeship system to an end. Trade workers of the day no longer acquired skills that would directly advance them in their field and within their community. Instead, they performed routine tasks, resulting in fewer opportunities for social mobility. Rogers’s proposal for a School of Arts responded to a growing desire in the United States for a “professional” mechanic. By the same token, he reasoned that the school would not only benefit the mechanical, manufacturing, and agricultural communities but also the state more broadly. Writing in an era of internal improvements, he remarked that the “succession of experiments, often blindly undertaken” in areas such as surveying and geological studies had resulted in “disaster” and great cost. By providing a new education for a new class of mechanics, the state would profit through “the widest possible diffusion of that accurate and enlarged practical knowledge; for the want of which, labor and money are so often fruitlessly and perniciously expended.” Rogers thus aspired beyond curricular and pedagogical reform, envisaging a form of higher learning that had consequences for social reform as well as for the advancement of science.¹⁹

In the end the school, with its six departments, laboratory method, and ambitions for social and scientific advance, never opened. Financial panic, similar to that of 1819, returned in 1837. The Pennsylvania legislature looked for ways to reduce or reject additional expenditures, and Rogers’s proposal had little chance of surviving the retrenchment. Although the plan received support from the Franklin Institute and other quarters, the economic turmoil and reluctant legislature withheld the funds necessary for establishing the new school. Within a year the idea had all but disappeared.²⁰

Throughout the 1840s Rogers kept abreast of efforts to advance practical and scientific studies as they continued to emerge in the Northeast and elsewhere. Most colleges by 1840 had a professor of mathematics who, unlike their predecessors, taught the subject without also teaching the sciences or the classics. Joining their ranks, natural philosophers enjoyed somewhat better facilities; their courses also appeared more regularly as diverse offerings in optics, electricity, meteorology, and astronomy. Although student laboratories remained rare, new scientific equipment made the lecture demonstration more common. Recitation, however, continued as the dominant practice, even among science instructors who occasionally used alternative teaching methods. Chemistry joined mathematics and natural philosophy in making inroads into the curriculum. The popularity of chemistry courses stemmed from the medical, industrial, and agricultural applications of the field. Chemists often taught mineralogy, geology, and agricultural topics as a single course. Yet as research in each of the areas became more specialized, chemists began to expand their course offerings to match the trend.²¹

The college curriculum grew significantly during the 1830s and 1840s, the period in which Rogers labored over his ideal for higher learning. The expansion of the curriculum and only slight changes to graduation requirements created obvious challenges that antebellum scholars had to face. Collegiate leaders, many of whom continued to look to the Yale Report of 1828 for guidance, attempted to address the “crowding of the curriculum.” Some considered lengthening their undergraduate programs from four to five or six years. Others experimented with certificates or science diplomas. Still others looked to nondegree or partial studies programs to meet demands for science offerings. Each of these schemes were attempts at the same thing: to preserve the integrity of the classical curriculum (and the bachelor of arts degree) and offer science on the side. While at the University of Virginia, Rogers benefited from a system of electives that allowed students to take his science courses as part of their program of study. The university had promoted this student freedom for decades, and over time other institutions began to take notice. But observers found the structure of Virginia’s independent schools and system of electives difficult to adapt to traditional programs. Although an endless accretion of courses, parallel and partial programs, and electives failed to satisfy reformers, a popular solution soon arose from Harvard and Yale.²²

By 1847, a decade after Rogers wrote the School of Arts proposal, both Harvard and Yale had established plans that led to separate schools of science and practical studies. At Harvard the school focused on “engineering, mining, mechanical drawing, and methods of constructing machinery” but later, under Agassiz, shied away from applied science. The Yale plan, meanwhile, kept a more applied tone, but received no financial support from the college. Faculty there relied exclusively on student fees. For some Harvard and Yale provided a model that was attractive; it kept practical and scientific education outside of the traditional curriculum, thereby reducing interference with an institution’s established mission. But this reform, like others of the period, left many others disappointed. Charles W. Eliot pointed to the absence of entrance requirements as one source of the problem. “Anybody, no matter how ignorant,” could find a seat at science schools such as those of Harvard or Yale. At Harvard another problem arose from the lack of adequate facilities and laboratory experiences for students. Eliot later recalled his experiences at the Lawrence Scientific School and its “humble” beginnings. The faculty had had no means of “offering laboratory practice to the students, except as a favor which could be granted to very few.”²³

For Rogers the reforms of the era seemed ineffective, whether in the form of increased requirements or alternative courses of study or separate schools. The continued lack of laboratory experiences for undergraduate students at Harvard, at Yale, and at most every other program in the country, he argued, continued to pose an obstacle to scientific progress. He saw a need to break new educational ground. “The Lawrence School,” observed Rogers at the time of its founding, “never can succeed on its present plan in accomplishment of what was intended. It can only, as now organized, draw a small number of the body of students aside from the usual college routine.” The heart of the matter for Rogers rested, as it often did, in the imbalance between theory and practice. Harvard’s science program “should be in reality a school of applied science, embracing at least four professorships, and it ought to be in great measure independent of the other departments of Harvard.” He believed that only a truly independent program would have enough freedom to develop studies along the lines of the useful arts, to make science more than an “aside” in the curriculum, and to offer alternative modes of instruction. Such a program, Rogers continued, would “embrace experimental physics,” for example, to expose students to “applied mechanics” and the “principles” underlying such applications.²⁴

Not surprisingly, Rogers took a special interest in the organization of Harvard’s Scientific School, for in 1846, the year before its founding, he had sent an elaborate proposal for an institute to reformers in the Boston area. In a letter sent through his brother Henry, who had moved to Boston, William described to John A. Lowell Jr., director of the Lowell Institute, the potential for starting a useful arts—based school of science. William’s proposal to Lowell argued for scientific studies that incorporated advanced laboratory instruction.²⁵

The preface to Rogers’s proposal defined the main objects of a polytechnic school. He contended that, foremost, an institute should promote “the inculcation of all the scientific principles which form the basis and explanation of them, and along with this a full and methodical review of all their leading processes and operation in connection with physical laws.” The basic principles, as he envisioned them, placed the student “in the workshop” for clarity of comprehension of “the agencies of the materials and instruments with which [the student] works.” As in his previous plans for reform, he wrote that by such practical and applied instruction through laboratory work, the student “is saved from the disasters of blind experiment.” The document argued that experimentation in the laboratory would prepare a student for practice in the field. From Rogers’s own experience managing field assistants for the Virginia survey, “blind experiment” produced fruitless results. He dismissed the increasingly common use in the United States of the lecture demonstration as inadequate for his alternative model of higher learning. According to the proposal, an institute should provide an advanced education for the mind and thorough training of the hand.²⁶

Rogers continued his description of the ideal science institution by outlining its organizational structure. His plan divided the model program into two areas, one for theory and the other for practice. The first department of the school, guided by two instructors, would focus on the “groundwork of . . . general physical laws.” Matriculants in this department would receive a broad introduction to general principles of physics. Students, he warned, could not benefit from the second division until they had successfully mastered the elements of instruction provided in the first department. The second division would have an “entirely practical” emphasis, in which students would learn “chemical manipulation and the analysis of chemical products . . . elementary mathematics . . . [and] full instruction in drawing and modeling.” The laboratory, meanwhile, stood at the center of student experiences, with “two or three tutors, or sub-professors, to give personal instruction in the laboratory.” Rogers’s plan had far-reaching ambitions; he expected that soon the school would “overtop the universities of the land in the accuracy and the extent of its teachings in all branches of positive knowledge.”²⁷

Rogers followed with a series of examples describing how practitioners such as machinists, engineers, and architects could benefit from theoretical and practical instruction as offered by his proposal. These practitioners, he insisted, needed more than a passing acquaintance with physical laws such as the dynamics of equilibrium, friction, resistance, chemical and thermal changes, and mechanical principles. Rogers predicted that refineries and manufacturing would soon require the service of those well versed in theory and scientific laws. “The processes they [refining and manufacturing] involve,” he suggested, “are but the vast practical enlargement of the common experiments of the laboratory and lecture-room.” He emphasized the point, one grounded in the useful arts ideal, by asserting that “there is no branch of practical industry . . . which is not capable of being better practised, and even being improved in its processes, through the knowledge of its connections with physical truths and laws, and therefore we would add that there is no class of operatives to whom the teaching of science may not become of direct and substantial utility and material usefulness.” The proposal made clear that the “operatives” he had in mind were composed of a diverse audience of science enthusiasts. He wanted to draw “lovers of knowledge of both sexes to the halls of the Institute.” His support of coeducation distinguished him from many of his colleagues. At the University of Virginia, from which Rogers wrote to Lowell, similar coeducational ideals would not appear in practice for more than one hundred years.²⁸

Although Rogers offered an elaborate argument for an institute based on his years of research and administrative experience, Lowell resolved to do nothing with the proposal. The funding source that supported the Lowell Institute—Lowell Sr.’s will—and the ideals of the governing body directing the institute likely prohibited the use of funds for such a project. Yet Rogers’s 1846 plan had indirect as well as direct influences on selected educational reforms of the 1840s.

The proposal likely had an indirect influence on the founding of Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School. Abbot Lawrence, the Boston industrialist who donated fifty thousand dollars for the science school, was no stranger to John A. Lowell. They worked together on several projects between March 1846, when Lowell received Rogers’s plan, and June 1847, when Lawrence notified Harvard of his donation and the accompanying stipulations. Lawrence and Lowell shared executive duties in a textile manufacturing plant and were on a local committee for the 1847 meeting of the Association of American Geologists and Naturalists. Lowell, moreover, held a seat as a fellow of Harvard College at the time Lawrence was proposing his bequest. The two industrialists thus had ample opportunities across the fifteen-month period to discuss proposals for a science institute. Still more revealing, however, was the similarity between the Rogers and Lawrence plans. Rogers had called for two professorships to cover the fields of physics, chemistry, and geology. A similar structure appeared in Lawrence’s plan, in which he sought to create professorships for the fields of engineering, chemistry, and geology. That Lawrence emphasized a geology chair with specialization in the “industrial arts” further supports the view that Rogers’s ideas may have been incorporated into the Harvard program. While many other proposals could have influenced Lawrence’s scientific school, there were significant, if indirect, elements shared with Rogers’s plan.²⁹

The practical, or applied, mission tied to the Lawrence donation came undone, however, at the hands of Louis Agassiz, who diverted the school toward basic, abstract ends against the founder’s intent. The ensuing tension may have led Agassiz to press for adding Rogers, who promoted the useful arts ideal, to the Harvard faculty. “He [Agassiz] told me in confidence,” confessed a colleague to Rogers, “of his wish and purpose to make room for you in the scientific school or new museum as professor of Geology, he wishing to relinquish it and retain the Zoology, as soon as the museum affairs are organized. If this should suit you, I do sincerely trust it will be done.” By the time President Cornelius C. Felton and members of the faculty at Harvard began to consider Rogers for an appointment, who was then unaffiliated with an institution, he’d decided that it would be better to remain independent. Felton, noted Rogers, “expresses the strong wish of himself and others to have me in Cambridge. They are proposing to establish a Professorship of Geology and Mining in connection with the Lawrence School, at least for the present. . . . If I enter Cambridge I can do so without in the slightest degree relinquishing the individuality I have heretofore maintained. So, at least, I think, and on no other terms would I be willing to connect myself with the college.” Freedom to actually practice the useful arts he had been preaching, Rogers concluded, wouldn’t come easy at the tradition-laden institution. In the end an appointment at Harvard never materialized for Rogers, but it was hardly his last interaction with the institution.³⁰

Rogers’s 1846 plan also had a direct influence on fellow reformer Francis Wayland, president of Brown University. Wayland became well-known as a staunch critic of the classical college, the most vocal and popular critic to emerge after the publication of the Yale Report of 1828. In the 1840s and 1850s he advocated radical changes to the traditional undergraduate course of study in light of an emerging middle class. As a political economist, Wayland analyzed the condition of American colleges and concluded that because they offered superficial, rigid, and antiquated courses, they stood on the brink of bankruptcy. Protesting the university’s resistance to change, Wayland went so far as to resign the presidency of Brown, but after negotiating with the administration, he retracted his resignation on the condition that the Brown corporation willingly undertake a wholesale revision of its program. The trustees agreed, raised $125,000 for the new curriculum at Brown, and welcomed Wayland back to campus. Having gained popular support for his ideas and a vote of confidence from the institution’s governing board, he looked to his contemporaries for model reform plans.³¹

One of the first educational leaders that Wayland went to for inspiration was Rogers. After William’s brother Henry met with Wayland in December 1849 about a proposed restructuring of Brown’s curriculum, Wayland appealed to William for specific ideas concerning changes to science instruction in American higher learning. Henry assured William that “Wayland is intent upon some valuable and important collegiate reforms, and his views are shared by [Zachariah] Allen [a manufacturer and trustee of Brown] and a majority of trustees.” “They contemplate an entire reorganization of their college,” he continued, “introducing much more science and practical instruction, less Greek, etc., and adapting some of your system. Wayland is tired of the old monastic system . . . [and] wishes a copy of your exposition of the system, etc., at the University, Memorial to the Legislature, and any documents or notes of your own having a bearing on the subject. He has had a copy and lent it to some of his trustees, and it may not suffice for his wants just now, therefore send him another.”³² Wayland based his well-known Report of 1850 in part on Rogers’s ideas about reform. Among the most controversial of its elements were an end to the fixed curriculum, the beginning of a free elective system, and the establishment of a robust program of applied science, in addition to courses in agriculture, law, and education. At the center of the Report stood many of the useful arts principles that Rogers had advocated for almost a quarter-century, principles that called for the union of theory and practice and for opening up the curriculum to applied instruction.

In support of his Report, Wayland traveled to Virginia in April 1850 to discuss reform with Rogers in person and to review the system of electives on the Charlottesville campus. William hosted Wayland’s stay, as they conversed about reform, toured lectures on the campus, and met with other faculty. In his memoirs the Rhode Island visitor recorded that he traveled to the institution “wishing to gain all possible aid from the light of experience.” Following the visit Rogers wrote to his brother Henry that he “appear [s] quite determined to adopt our more liberal features in their [Brown’s] new scheme.” Although William’s useful arts emphasis appeared in Wayland’s reforms, Brown’s approach to the new course of study and supply of funds proved inadequate for any long-standing reform. Five years after the publication of the Report, Brown trustees ousted Wayland and returned the institution to the original design.³³

While many factors contributed to the decline of this reform effort, Wayland’s lack of scientific research and engagement with the profession stands out among them. As Rogers would soon discover, credibility in the sciences when advocating scientific and practical studies came to play an increasingly important role in American higher educational reform movements of the mid-nineteenth century.