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INTRODUCTION
History as Inquiry
Part of thinking historically is to understand how we think historically, what historians call “historiography.” For a long time, Microsoft Word did not recognize the words “historiographical” or “historiography.” Each time I had a Windows upgrade, I had to add those two words to the dictionary. It is indeed telling that the dominant form of creating a manuscript in today’s world, Microsoft Word, did not know that we have different ways of thinking historically. It is all too easy to see history as a simple recounting of facts, of names, dates, and places (what I none too fondly refer to as name-date-place crap). While such an approach may earn you a winner’s spot in a trivia game, it is not historical inquiry. If you or I want to think historically, we have to think about who did what when and where in terms of how and why. And, thanks to the post-World War II movements toward challenging glorious renditions of the past, the hows and whys of history are now far more complicated than they were even a generation ago, much less two or three generations ago. We create our historical narratives, and the purpose of this introduction is to be explicit about how I have attempted to create this history.
One way of thinking historically is to consider how the writer raises issues or addresses concerns that are not primary to the argument but are important; there are plenty of details and arguments in history and measuring which are more important than others is an important way of choosing how to present the historical narrative, as I noted in the Preface. The Turabian style manual, with the use of footnotes or endnotes as the primary form of citation in historical writing, allows the writer to offer secondary content, in comment on the primary content of the text, in addition to specific citations to tell readers where the information comes from. There are some of those notes in this book, and readers need to consider taking the time to read the content endnotes, rather than taking them as a way to reduce the amount of text that you have to read. Other endnotes will be simply reference notes, offering you, the reader, the opportunity to pursue the issues raised in the text by going to the original source and developing an informed way of thinking historically.
Writing a history of U.S. higher education is a daunting task of thinking historically for a number of reasons. First, the sweep of the centuries requires attention across multiple meanings of higher education, across multiple groups involved with higher education, across the rise and fall of multiple types of higher education institutions. Second, there are several strong histories of U.S. higher education, both in terms of sweeping interpretations as well as well-focused works on important aspects of meanings, people, or institutions. For the moment, I want to highlight six books that offer important and sweeping portraits of the history of U.S. higher education, starting with Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A History. Rudolph completed the massive task of reading dozens upon dozens of institutional histories (having read some, I am not going to recommend that effort unless you are very dedicated to sifting through presidencies, celebrations, and some glossing over of uncomfortable events), and his work starts with the beginning, Harvard’s foundation in 1636, and ends in the 1950s. Notable given its first publication in 1962, Rudolph addresses women (mostly white women) and African Americans, groups all too often ignored well into the 1970s. Rudolph reminds readers that academic drift is highly characteristic of higher education in this country. There is also John S. Brubacher and Willis Rudy, Higher Education in Transition; A History of American Colleges And Universities, 1636–1968, an analysis of changes in U.S. higher education, with careful attention to such matters as the curriculum, professional education, and student life. Laurence Veysey wrote a very long dissertation (over 1,200 pages according to the legend), and his book, The Emergence of the American University, is the result. It addresses four meanings of higher education—discipline and piety, utility, research, and liberal culture—arguing that in the end, although discipline and piety had almost dissipated by the early 1900s, the other three meanings entered into an uneasy but oddly effective blend that established the American university. A fourth book, by John Thelin, A History of American Higher Education, in one sense furthers Rudolph’s interpretations but in other important ways offers nuances about the complexity of the history and provides a direct challenge to practitioners to understand history in order to improve their practice, a long-standing interest of his. Fifth, Roger Geiger’s book, The History of American Higher Education: Learning and Culture from the Founding to World War II, reflects his long-standing and successful inquiries into research universities and the colleges that support them, highlighting culture (of the intellectual sort) and reason. Finally, Barbara Solomon wrote In the Company of Educated Women, the first overview of women in higher education and a reminder that we are seriously remiss if we do not attend to all who attend higher education and experience its effects. Because of these books for the most part I have written this book built on articles even though historians of higher education know that a good book is the goal of a good historian, for the easy reason that broad interpretations of books find little hold in a brief article, so I do not wrestle directly with the well-informed and highly informative book-length efforts of these and other scholars that offer broad interpretations, although I rely on their work on more than one occasion.
The third reason why this effort is a daunting task is because there has been remarkable growth of the field in two associations, the Association for the Study of Higher Education and the History of Education Society, a growth from the late 1980s of a few (if any) presentations at the organizations’ annual meetings to, at times in the case of the History of Education Society, a majority of the articles in its History of Education Quarterly addressing higher education. Long ago I arranged for a breakfast of historians of higher education at ASHE, the beginning of HASHE—historians at ASHE—and the increasing range of interests as more scholars enter the field over the years has been invigorating. Many talented scholars are now in the field, and any book attempting to address all the centuries, all the meanings, all the participants, all the institutional types will receive careful scrutiny.
THREE WAYS OF THINKING HISTORICALLY
Hence, I write this book as I teach the history of higher education, explaining my historical approach and then focusing on a broad range of people and institutions (with occasionally smart-aleck remarks, or as one of my African American students once said to me, “Philo, you are a piece of work”). At the beginning of each semester when teaching the history of higher education, I begin with a brief and perhaps unmerciful discussion of three types of history. The first is name-date-place crap. We inflict this understanding of history on ourselves and, most unfortunately, on generations of students. It is important to know when the first Morrill Land Grant Act passed (1862), but unless we also know its immediate context (the Civil War, hence the often-overlooked inclusion of military instruction) and the social power of its successor, the 1890 Morrill Land Grant Act (it authorized government monies for segregated white and black colleges and universities), it is merely a number. As another example, we know that Oberlin College was the first institution to admit white women and African American men and women. Yet the story of how that admission policy came about, and its consequences over the next several decades, is much more complex than the simple declaration that Oberlin College began admitting white women in 1833 and African Americans in 1835.1 Understanding the ways that white female students and African American students experienced their higher education begins to shape a deeper understanding of the college experience.
Simple recounting of apparent facts can also drive a highly traditional, if not hidebound, approach to history. After all, given that white males were those who had the social, political, economic, and legal power to start organizations, not surprisingly, they usually founded colleges that reflected white male values and norms, and in fact, were typically reserved for white males. There are important differences, however, as the chapters highlight. It is inescapable that writing a history of higher education from the beginning nearly requires the writer to argue about white men. For now, suffice it to say that while I have to name in order to write a history, how I name, whom I will name, will be a central condition of this text. For example, I pay careful attention to how we name institutions of higher education. It is most curious that a careful reading of the quite famous Yale Report of 1828 reveals that such a venerable institution of higher education admitted boys by policy at the age of 14 at that time, and there were even exceptions to that age. Yale was a college, proud in its 1828 Report to point out that it was a college. Academies flourished at the same time, and these were institutions that often had many women students; shortly thereafter, in the 1820s and 1830s, normal schools began, and their enrollments were initially dominated by women. In both cases women in their teens were admitted. How is it that Yale is a college but academies and normal schools are not? Is it the curriculum—as if the classical curriculum of Yale, precursor to the modern liberal arts curriculum of today, is the only curriculum requiring higher thought? What, then, is an institution of higher education in the Early Republic? And what does that mean for today? Whom or what we name, and how and why, are deeply important problems, and by reflecting on those acts of naming, we can revisit how we think about those names and how we exercise power in the act of naming. The problem of naming is more than what name a community might prefer, as it includes even the opportunity to name a community. This book admittedly has a focus on white women and African Americans because there is a preponderance of scholarship on those groups, and I offer discussion of other groups as possible with the hope that such scholarship will continue to advance. There is sparse but growing scholarship in terms of many communities (such as Latinx, gender and sex identity, Asian), and I have made a decided effort to include rather than exclude even where the literature is at a nascent stage (here follows an endnote with both reference and content information, as an example of my arguments at the beginning of this chapter).2
The second is more complicated, what I call amateur history (with none of the connotation that “amateur” is not as good as “professional,” as I mean by amateur that it is volunteer-supported). Amateur history tends to find its representation in such locations as local historical societies directed by volunteers, where displays of Marquis de Lafayette’s gloves from the Revolutionary War inform viewers. These places are amateur in the sense that the gloves are interesting but even with a placard describing the time when the Marquis wore the gloves, there is no interpretive meaning—who wore such gloves and why? What social forces resulted in gloves for some and not for others? Who made the gloves and with what, if any, profit? What is very interesting about amateur history is that it has been a noticeable gendered participation in contrast to professional history (the third category). For a very long time, women rather than men were more likely to oversee these museums, as if it were acceptable for them to inform us historically in volunteer settings rather than in the classroom or at conferences, where monetarily rewarded (professional) historians did their work.3 Creating a history that recognizes how protest develops among marginalized and oppressed groups tells us a great deal about how society and the polity change and don’t change, and a gendered view of history is one way of addressing such recognition, a perspective that began among some paid historians in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which leads discussion of the third form of history, professional (i.e., paid) history, the world of academics, where three forms of evidence create history: the footnote or endnote, the archive, the oral history. Professional historians want readers to know where the evidence came from, so that information occurs in the footnote or the endnote. And the evidence lies either in archives or in oral histories, or in both. Archives have traditionally preserved written documents, and it is amazing what people have written and left behind. Oral histories are fairly recent forms of Western evidence, an indication of how we in the European world, especially the formally educated European world, awkwardly value the written word as truth while the spoken word is deemed ephemeral, as if no college president has ever written a memorandum or report that presents only part of the information about the institution in an effort to get more money. In the early 1970s scholars such as Jan Vansina argued that memory in either written or spoken form is a form of evidence, and slowly such arguments have met less resistance and received more acceptance, perhaps in part because the face of professional history has literally changed into a reflection of more diversity.4
So, this book embarks on professional history, and if I am going to teach history through this effort, I have to engage readers in thinking historically. What are appropriate sources of historical evidence, and why—who creates the distinction of appropriate and who created the sources? While drawing upon the same body of literature, or rather, the same body extended into the present from the early 1960s as other historians of higher education who have attempted to discuss, writ large, these meanings of events, people, and institutions, I argue for different emphases, which means arguing for a different interpretation. I would not presume to have the remarkable sense of activism and academic mind that Howard Zinn showed. Nevertheless, I must admit that I have long been deeply concerned about the ease with which we interpret higher education from the perspective of the elite, whether that is in terms of institutions (for example, research universities) or their participants (highly selective admissions for undergraduates and intense expectations of faculty members in regard to their research and scholarship). As best as I can determine, all groups with some sort of engagement in higher education too quickly turn to what they deem as the best—the best institutions, the most qualified students, the most productive faculty members—even in their sector of higher education. There are wonderful exceptions, as in the case of Willie and Edmonds’ strong response to Jencks and Riesman’s claim that black colleges were academic backwaters.5 As the authors in Willie and Edmonds’ edited volume note, black colleges face myriad challenges and address varied needs; one might well wonder why Jencks and Riesman, faculty members at an elite university at the time, did not recognize that white elite research universities faced a breadth of challenges and needs resting on the foundation of exclusion (at the time of their claim, their university did not admit women), albeit within an arena of huge amounts of money and social power.
In setting out to write a history of higher education from the ground up, this book does not start with the foundation of Harvard in 1636 by a group of admittedly hardy white men at the edge of what they knew and valued as civilization but with their use of Native Americans not only through genocide in acquiring land and wealth but also enrollment in their college. Nor does the book end with the wonder of highly selective colleges and universities leading the way for a stunning range of institutions and participants. In fact, throughout the book I cast a very critical eye upon selectivity and prestige and their outcomes.
COLLEGES AND THEIR COMMUNITIES IN HISTORICAL MEANING
As is often the case with scholarship, it took a long time to realize what I was writing here. (Students new to their graduate experience need to understand that rigorous research and scholarship results from reflection upon reflection, not simply finding evidence and writing about it.) One place kept coming back to haunt me, the dead college. It has been subjected to bad research with claims past and present that large numbers of colleges have died or are about to die, and then has had important revisions, and in the latter case, the clear conclusion that it is quite hard for a college to die.6 Pundits have warned us for a very long time about these deaths, and report after report has warned us about t...
