Legacy and Conflict: Willa Cather and the Spirit of the Western University

In reflecting on her representations of immigrants living in the Great Plains, Willa Cather asserted that "most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen."¹ Despite this proclamation, Cather drew continually on her experiences as a college student at the University of Nebraska in her fiction and other works. As Catherine Chaput suggests in her article "Democracy, Capitalism, and the Ambivalence of Willa Cather’s Frontier Rhetorics," Cather’s exploration of education and academic themes is intricately intertwined with her sense of place. Chaput argues that Cather—and many others in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—employed the discourse of the frontier’s expanding democratic opportunities and capitalistic growth as a metaphor for the expanding "frontiers" in education, spurred especially through a growing public university system.² Beyond Chaput’s article, though, Cather’s depictions of higher education and the West remain underexplored territory. In this essay, I seek to acknowledge the importance of frontier rhetorics—those celebrations of the "western spirit"—and also examine the specific pedagogical approaches and competing theories of education in Willa Cather’s work. Additionally, I examine how these representations of education reflected education in the West more broadly, as educators attempted to balance innovation with tradition in dynamic environments that were shaped by institutional politics, individual mentorships, and ultimately, the pressing impulse for both students and teachers to move "beyond" the West.

The 1890s through the 1920s—three decades that encompass Cather’s time as a student at the University of Nebraska in the late 1890s to the publication of The Professor’s House in 1925—represent a dynamic period for higher education in the United States, particularly in the West. The Morrill Act of 1862 provided many western states with the opportunity to create institutions of higher education, and increasingly, students and their families came to believe in the benefits of education beyond high school. These social changes are reflected in—and were encouraged by—an increased exposure to ideas about higher education through American periodicals and newspapers, which were increasingly published in the 1890s.³ Moreover, universities themselves began to create stronger institutional identities, particularly through athletics, which allowed regional citizens to form associations with institutions, even if they did not attend as students themselves. With increased exposure, however, several questions emerged in debates surrounding higher education at this time. What made these western universities distinct from their eastern counterparts? Should institutions of higher education be public or private? Should institutions be governed by religious principles or adopt secular codes of ethics? What courses of study should be offered, and what are the aims of this education?

Part of these debates concerning the aims of higher education can be located in the wording of the Morrill Act itself. As Mark Nemac explains in Ivory Towers and Nationalist Minds, his study of antebellum land-grant universities and their relationship to the state, the Morrill Act did not so much set strict trajectory for higher education, but rather, brought the goals and aims of higher education to the surface of public debate among educators, government officials, and citizens. The Morrill Act’s broad phrasing—promising for

the endowment, support, and maintenance of at least one college where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies, and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture, and the mechanic arts, in such a manner as the legislatures of the State may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life—

clearly afforded room for vastly different visions of higher education programs.⁴ Although the Morrill Act clearly stressed a utilitarian approach—providing students with agricultural skills in order to benefit society as a whole through improved farming practice—the act’s wording did not exclude other approaches.

Many westerners believed that students should emerge from their educational experience with a deeper...