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42 The countries in which historic preservation first began in a self-conscious way, France and the United Kingdom, very quickly formalized the processes of preservation and brought them under the purview of the central government. Even though the actual agents of the process—the practitioners—remained at first outside direct government employment, as materials and construction techniques began to change radically at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, and as the techniques of physical preservation became more technical and precise , it became necessary for the governmental ministries to initiate training courses and schools for the men and women who were carrying out conservation work. With the increasing bureaucratization of preservation activities within governmental agencies, the preservation planners, in order to be successful in the competitive world of bureaucracy, perforce increasingly had to become bureaucrats and administer agencies and programs that were part of larger governmental activities. As other European countries recognized the need to conserve their historic patrimonies , the models provided by these two pioneering countries became the ones to follow. As historic preservation (heritage conservation) became more widespread throughout the entire world in the twentieth century other countries, particularly those with strong centralized governments, followed this same path. Except in the United States. To almost anyone who is not an American, the early—and even recent—history of the training of historic preservationists in the United States makes little sense in that it has no direct Robert Russell 3 First Pete and then Repeat? Fundamental Differences in Intention between Undergraduate and Graduate Preservation Programs in the United States “First Pete and then Repeat” is an old folk phrase, more common a hundred years ago than it is now. It refers to situations where two different people, unknown to one another , arrive at a situation at different times and pose precisely the same question, or respond in exactly the same way. U N D E R G R A D U A T E A N D G R A D U A T E P R O G R A M S 43 connection with governmental agencies, funds, or institutions. Virtually everywhere else in the world this training is a function of central government . Even in the United Kingdom, where heritage training is more widely diffused, government money flows to private and quasi-public organizations like English Heritage and the English National Trust, which support and encourage preservation education, but do not directly offer it. In Canada, the national advocacy organization Heritage Canada Foundation (Heritage Canada) is a registered charity, but the actual money for conservation and preservation is public. In the United States, organized preservation education has largely relied on the tried and true American method of the ad hoc: an amalgam of floundering amateurs, private enterprise, and higher education. A thorough history of preservation education in America has yet to be written. My aim here is much more modest in that I want to examine only one particular aspect of it: the singular way that higher education has moved to fill the void in preservation training and practice caused by the historically minor role that the U.S. government has played in the identification and preservation of the built environment. I want to look at the relationship (more accurately, the lack of relationship) between the study of preservation at the undergraduate and graduate levels of university education. More specifically, I want to look at the teaching of historic preservation in a liberal arts environment. First Pete: Undergraduate Preservation Studies as Liberal Education According to the National Council of Preservation Education’s (ncpe) Great Chart, there are currently ten American institutions offering undergraduate degrees in historic preservation. Of these ten, the American College of the Building Arts (acba) in Charleston, South Carolina, is sui generis: its own thing, admirable and necessary, but unlikely to be replicated. Two others, the Boston Architectural College and the Savannah College of Art and Design, are unabashedly about training for professional careers, and while they grant undergraduate degrees, they make few if any claims about the place of the liberal arts in their institutions. Belmont College—which until recently was called Belmont Technical College—represents the presence of preservation training in American community colleges. The remaining six colleges and universities make explicit claims to offer preservation education more or less within the liberal arts tradition. These range from Roger Williams University’s description of itself as a place...

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