In colonial days, there was little debate. Long before the creation of modern political parties, the modern banking system, and our modern system of trade and commerce, the nation’s oldest colleges had established a curriculum of classical history, classical languages, ancient literature, and theology. Over time, these institutions gradually added courses in ‘practical’ subjects, but at its core American higher education remained committed to the European model of classical learning.

Harvard was the nation’s first college, created in 1636 and offering a curriculum in philosophy, history, mathematics, physics, and literature. The liberal arts curriculum at the nation’s first colleges reflected the visions of colonial theologians, merchants, and planters to develop a sound and prosperous society of educated tradesmen, ministers, teachers, and public servants. The College of William and Mary (1693) educated Virginia’s planter class in logic and rhetoric. Yale College (1701) offered courses in languages and civil policy, and graduates bound for careers in medicine, law, and commerce were equally required to master Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. At the College of New Jersey (1746), later Princeton, the sons of the colonial mercantile class read Homer, Cicero, Shakespeare, and Milton.

Primary among the goals of colonial colleges was to educate students in the classical tradition as well as in theology, and to train students to develop the critical faculties essential to a liberalism of spirit. Many of the founding fathers who led the revolutionary generation were first-generation college graduates who had received their training in rhetoric and oratory at colonial colleges. Despite regional differences in the economic, political, and religious life of the colonies, the curriculum at William and Mary (Jefferson’s alma mater), King’s College (where Alexander Hamilton was educated), and Harvard (the college John Adams attended) provided the revolutionary generation with a common intellectual vocabulary and a dedication to the liberal spirit.

In the decades after the Revolutionary war, colleges became more liberal in both curriculum and more demographically inclusive, offering courses in modern languages, political science, and practical sciences, and educating an increasing number of students from middle class families.

The question of whether, or how, to integrate a liberal arts curriculum and professional degree programs first arose significantly in 1819, when former president Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia. Long before the creation of modern political parties, the modern banking system, and our modern system of trade and commerce, the nation’s oldest colleges had established a curriculum of classical history, classical languages, ancient literature, and theology, and then gradually added courses in ‘practical’ subjects. Jefferson designed the curriculum of his beloved university to include courses in law, medicine, and science, believing that institutions of higher learning should provide highly specialized professional training. Students were able to choose from elective courses rather than follow the prerequisites of a set curriculum, in the belief that the spirit of liberty was integral to the intellectual development of an engaged citizenry. In his 1818 ‘Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Fix the Site of the University of Virginia,’ Jefferson argued that one of the purposes of higher education was ‘to harmonize and promote the interests of agriculture, manufactures and commerce ... and give a free scope to the public industry’ as well as ‘to develop the reasoning faculties of our youth ... and to form them to the habits of reflection and correct action.’ Jefferson knew that his commitment to training students for ‘the various vocations of life’ was unorthodox: ‘Some good men, and even of respectable information, consider the learned sciences as useless acquirements,’ he noted, lamenting the reactionary view that ‘what has ever been must ever be, and that to secure ourselves where we are, we must tread with awful reverence in the footsteps of our fathers.’ Yet the country was full of ‘real and living examples’ of Americans who had made ‘wonderful advances’ in science and technology, Jefferson said, because they had the opportunity to focus on the acquisition and application of useful, practical knowledge (Jefferson, 1856, pp. 435–436).

By the time of Eliot’s reforms of the Harvard curriculum, then, colleges had been expanding their offerings, first incrementally and then in a wave of reform, to include courses intended to provide professional training to young Americans who wished to become engineers, scientists, and educators. Some critics worried that the study of agriculture or military science might compromise the traditional liberal arts mission of American colleges, but in an age of rapid technological innovation and economic development, the focus on scientific and practical education was of national consequence.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the federal government funded the building of roads, canals, and railroads, and crafted tax and legal policies designed to encourage private commerce. The Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890, which granted federal land to state governments for the founding of colleges, created new institutions that taught from a broad, practical curriculum and trained the engineers and technicians who would oversee the country’s dramatic expansion.

Faculty at traditional liberal arts colleges often criticized the move towards a practical curriculum and the loss of the classics as the foundation of higher education. A faculty committee at Yale College produced The Yale Report of 1828, an institutional memorandum that became an influential treatise arguing for the retention of the classical curriculum. The report, referring to the university’s recent addition of courses in the sciences and political economy, was written in response to suggestions that American colleges, in order to thrive, needed to adapt to ‘the spirit and wants of the age’ by being better accommodated to the business character of the nation. The report’s authors argued that a college’s mission is to provide a solid education in the liberal arts and sciences, not to teach particular professional skills, because the study of ancient literature, classical languages, English language, and rhetoric and philosophy is the basis for the learning of professional skills.

The liberal and comprehensive study of arts and sciences, the authors said, makes a contribution to the learner’s acquisition of professional skills because ‘Every thing throws light upon every thing.’ An understanding of literature and science will not ‘grow up spontaneously, amid the bustle of business’ later in life, the faculty argued, and self-educated men who can train themselves to think rigorously across disciplines – the Benjamin Franklins – are the rarest exceptions. The time for professional training was after a thorough liberal arts education:

Curricular reform that emphasized the need to include vocational training gradually became the rule over the course of the nineteenth century, transforming higher education. The industrial revolution made it necessary for colleges to train students in the professions, and this focus on practical education and marketable skills inspired the founding of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1861), a ‘polytechnic’ institute of industrial sciences which would train students in the habits of observation, reflection and analysis and produce a generation of inventors and industrialists devoted to national progress. Founder William Barton Rogers believed that an exclusive focus on classical learning could not help the nation advance in an age of rapid technological change and industrialization, that science and technology were ‘legitimate foundations of higher education,’ and that professional education should be introduced at the undergraduate level ‘combined with the basic elements of a liberal education.’ This new form of university education, combining the traditional elements of classical liberal arts learning with practical training, represented a form of higher education ‘indigenous to American soil and American culture,’ and colleges had the imperative to offer the kinds of courses that would prepare students to work in a more economically and socially complex society, Rogers said (MIT, 1949, pp. 8–10).

In the great age of nineteenth-century American industrialization and economic development, university-educated executives and managers were needed to run complex business organizations, including railroads and manufact...