The Victorian University and Our Own

The Victorian period, in both England and America, saw the establishment of many new colleges and universities. In 1836, the King ended the monopoly that Cambridge and Oxford had over the awarding of university degrees by granting a royal charter to the University of London, which had begun offering university-level instruction in 1826. Owens College, Manchester (later to become the centre of the federal Victoria University in combination with university colleges in Liverpool, Leeds, and Sheffield), admitted its first class in 1851; in 1851, John Henry Newman went to Ireland to establish a Roman Catholic university in Dublin. The University of Bristol opened in 1876; Mason College of Science, which became the University of Birmingham, in 1880. University colleges were also founded in Hull, Southampton, Reading, Nottingham, Exeter, and Leicester. Between 1848 and 1871, the first women’s colleges were founded at Oxford and at Cambridge. During those same decades in the United States, many new colleges and universities were established, most notably the state land grant universities authorised by the Morrill Act of 1862 and many of the major women’s colleges, including Smith College, of which I serve as president, which opened its doors in 1875.

This great expansion in higher education brought significant intellectual questions to the forefront of writing and debate. Who should be educated? What was the value of higher education? What should students study? What were the relative claims of the classics, of modern literature, of theology, of science? Much Victorian writing on these questions has for its context the founding of these new colleges and universities. John Henry Newman wrote The Idea of a University as a series of discourses and lectures, defining the values and aspirations of the new Catholic college that the Pope had asked him to establish in Dublin. Thomas Henry Huxley delivered ‘A Liberal Education; And Where to Find It’ to the South London Working Men’s College in 1868; he delivered ‘Science and Culture’ at the opening in 1880 of Sir Josiah Mason’s Science College in Birmingham. Matthew Arnold composed ‘Literature and Science’ in response to Huxley; it was the principal lecture that he delivered on his lecture tour of America, from October of 1883 to March of 1884. Many of the stops on that tour were colleges and universities, a significant number in the early years of their history.

On his tour of the United States, Arnold stopped to lecture at several of the new women’s colleges that had just opened their doors –Wellesley, Vassar, and Smith. He was impressed by the students, and when he came to revise ‘Literature and Science,’ he inserted a sentence about women’s study of Greek: ‘Women will again study Greek, as Lady Jane Grey did; I believe that in that chain of forts, with which the fair host of the Amazons are now engirdling our English universities, I find that here in America, in colleges like Smith College in Massachusetts, and Vassar College in the State of New York, and in the happy families of the mixed universities out West, they are studying it already’.¹ In his biography of Arnold, Park Honan observes that in this lecture tour, concentrating so heavily on colleges and universities, Arnold influenced American higher education at an important moment in its development.² Indeed, the way had been paved, in some cases, by careful attention to Arnold’s ideas as the curricula of America’s new colleges were being developed. When Smith’s President Seelye introduced Arnold, he said that the occasion was particularly gratifying to him because he had consulted Arnold’s essays on education when he was planning the curriculum for the new college, which had opened its doors only eight years earlier.

In reading Newman, Huxley, and Arnold in the early years of the twenty-first century, it is striking how many of the questions that concerned them still occupy us as leaders of colleges and universities: the claims of the humanities, the place of science and scientific education, the relation of science and religion, the definition of a liberal education and its relationship to...