Science as Service: Establishing and Reformulating American Land-Grant Universities, 1865–1930

By Alan I Marcus, Roger L. Geiger, Mark R. Finlay and 8 more

Science as Service: Establishing and Reformulating American Land-Grant Universities, 1865–1930 is the first of a two-volume study that traces the foundation and evolution of America’s land-grant institutions. In this expertly curated collection of essays, Alan I Marcus has assembled a tough-minded account of the successes and set-backs of these institutions during the first sixty-five years of their existence. In myriad scenes, vignettes, and episodes from the history of land-grant colleges, these essays demonstrate the defining characteristic of these institutions: their willingness to proclaim and pursue science in the service of the publics and students they serve.
 
The Morrill Land-Grant College Act of 1862 created a series of institutions—at least one in every state and territory—with now familiar names: Michigan State University, Ohio State University, Purdue University, Rutgers University, the University of Arizona, and the University of California, to name a few. These schools opened educational opportunities and pathways to a significant segment of the American public and gave the United States a global edge in science, technical innovation, and agriculture.
 
Science as Service provides an essential body of literature for understanding the transformations of the land-grant colleges established by the Morrill Act in 1862 as well as the considerable impact they had on the history of the United States. Historians of science, technology, and agriculture, along with rural sociologists, public decision and policy makers, educators, and higher education administrators will find this an essential addition to their book collections.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Aug 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9780817388188

Book preview

SCIENCE AS SERVICE

NEW HISTORIES OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, THE ENVIRONMENT, AGRICULTURE & MEDICINE

NEXUS is a book series devoted to the publication of high-quality scholarship in the history of the sciences and allied fields. Its broad reach encompasses science, technology, the environment, agriculture, and medicine, but also includes intersections with other types of knowledge, such as music, urban planning, or educational policy. Its essential concern is with the interface of nature and culture, broadly conceived, and it embraces an emerging intellectual constellation of new syntheses, methods, and approaches in the study of people and nature through time.

SERIES EDITORS

Alan I Marcus

Mark D. Hersey

Alexandra E. Hui

ADVISORY BOARD

Amy Sue Bix

Frederick R. Davis

Jim Downs

Richard A. Richards

Suman Seth

Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis

Jessica Wang

SCIENCE AS SERVICE

Establishing and Reformulating Land-Grant Universities 1865–1930

EDITED BY ALAN I MARCUS

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

TUSCALOOSA

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2015 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Scala Pro

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cover photograph: Laboratory chemists preparing solutions at a land-grant institution; courtesy of the Special Collections Department/Printed Special Collections at Iowa State University Library

Design: Michele Myatt Quinn

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

   Science as service : establishing and reformulating American land-grant universities, 1865–1930 / edited by Alan I Marcus.

   pages    cm.

   — (Nexus) Includes bibliographical references and index.

   ISBN 978-0-8173-1868-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8173-8818-8 (ebook)

   1. State universities and colleges—United States—History—19th century. 2. State universities and colleges—United States—History—20th century. 3. Science—Study and teaching (Higher)—United States—History—19th century. 4. Science—Study and teaching (Higher)—United States—History—20th century. 5. Technology—Study and teaching (Higher)—United States—History—19th century. 6. Technology—Study and teaching (Higher)—United States—History—20th century. 7. United States. Land Grant Act of 1862. I. Marcus, Alan I, 1949–

LB2329.5.S35 2015  378'.053—dc23

2015000664

In Memory of Mark R. Finlay,

Scholar and Friend to All Who Knew Him

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction / Alan I Marcus

1

Land-Grant Colleges and the Pre-Modern Era of American Higher Education, 1850–1890 / Roger L. Geiger

PART ONE

Science Assumes Center Stage

2

Transnational Exchanges of Agricultural Scientific Thought from the Morrill Act through the Hatch Act / Mark R. Finlay

3

The Rise and Fall of the Grange’s Yankee Land-Grant Colleges, 1873–1901 / Nathan M. Sorber

4

Is Milk the Measure of All Things? Babcock Tests, Breed Associations, and Land-Grant Scientists, 1890–1920 / Micah Rueber

5

Engineering National Character: Early Land-Grant College Science and the Quest for an American Identity / Paul K. Nienkamp

6

People’s Colleges for Other Citizens: Black Land-Grant Institutions and the Politics of Educational Expansion in the Post–Civil War Era / Debra A. Reid

PART TWO

Extending the Scientific/Technical Toolbox

7

The Morrill Land-Grant Act and American Cities: The Neglected Story / Robert B. Fairbanks

8

Generating Knowledge and Power: The Role of Land-Grant Colleges in Electrifying America / Richard F. Hirsh

9

Spreading Their Butter Too Thin: Land-Grant Libraries, 1900–1940 / Sara E. Morris

10

Engineering and the Land-Grant Tradition at the University of Illinois, 1868–1950 / Bruce E. Seely

Conclusion / Alan I Marcus

Appendix: US Congressional Acts Pertaining to the Land-Grant Institutions

Selected Bibliography

Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

This volume is the consequence of a national conference, Thinking Land-Grants: A ‘Cerebration’ of the 150th Anniversary of the Morrill Land-Grant Act. Held October 3–6, 2012, at Mississippi State University, the ‘Cerebration’ brought some forty scholars to campus from across America. The essays here are revisions and expansions of some of the papers presented at that event.

Pulling off such a significant meeting required considerable support. Mark E. Keenum, Mississippi State University President; Jerome A. Gilbert, Provost and Executive Vice President; Gregory A. Bohach, Vice President for Agriculture, Forestry and Veterinary Medicine; David Shaw, Vice President for Research and Economic Development; Don Zant, Vice President for Budget and Planning; George Hopper, Dean of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Director of the Mississippi Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station; and Gary L. Myers, Dean of Arts & Sciences, jumped at the opportunity to back the effort. They gladly provided the funding necessary to bring in speakers and to conduct conference affairs as well as the moral support to see it through. Of special note was the magnificent trip to the Mississippi Delta where we visited cotton fields, watched a working cotton gin, ate at a commissary and hung out at a blues joint. I thank Reuben Moore and Joe Street for helping to arrange that epic event. The graduate students of the department of history helped with local arrangements—driving shuttles, making airport runs, guiding visitors. In turn, they got to meet scholars in a way that few neophyte historians do. Ms. Karrie Barfield spearheaded the transportation effort and in the process learned vital life lessons. Pam Wasson, History’s Administrative Assistant, was her usual indispensible self and coordinated everything. Patsy Humphrey ran the department office while Pam was otherwise engaged.

Jean Marcus graciously hosted a catfish fry at our house for nearly 100 people, and our son, Gregory, provided logistical support, collecting garbage, emptying and restocking containers, and dragging coolers of soft drinks and ice wherever they were needed. Haley Jade entertained as necessary and removed food that had fallen on the floor. Without each of their help, the entire conference would have lacked je ne sais quoi.

Following the event a handful of graduate students participated in a colloquium on historical editing. There they took the various conference essays and grappled with thorny issues of organization and editing, creating themes and introductions, and writing head and section notes. In a sense, the colloquium enabled them to see a historical product constructed in a fashion quite different than a single authored piece. It was my hope that by starting with completed pieces and then establishing a framework in which to house them would permit the students to recognize the steps they would naturally encounter when they undertook their own studies. Time will tell how successful I was.

Two of my MSU colleagues, Jim Giesen and Mark Hersey, read a version of the introduction for this volume and provided wise counsel.

I would be remiss if I did not thank the University of Alabama Press for its support. Curtis L. Clark, Director, Daniel Waterman, Editor-in-Chief, and Elizabeth Motherwell, Environmental Editor, as well as the entire Alabama Press staff were helpful every step of the way. Two anonymous readers kindly shared their insights and made this a better book.

Finally, it gives me great pleasure to thank the contributors to the volume for their hard work, perception, and historical vision. It is very much their production.

Introduction

ALAN I MARCUS

Few federal initiatives have been as successful as the Morrill Land-Grant College Act. The 1862 act fostered a series of institutions—at least one in every state and territory—with now familiar names: Michigan State University, Ohio State University, Rutgers University, University of California, University of Arizona, and Purdue University just to name a few. These schools opened educational opportunities to a significant segment of the American public. Over the years, they came to produce the country’s scientific, technical, and agricultural leaders; spawned innovations that changed the face of the nation; and helped create the modern world. Tens of millions of students have passed through their doors. These men and women became entrepreneurs or scholars, got well-paying jobs, raised families, and sent their sons and daughters to college and graduate school. Industries and businesses rose because of research done at these places, which helped fuel the postwar boom that made America the leader of the free world.

Champions of these institutions tout a land-grant ethos, a fundamental sense and purpose that has always characterized these schools. In 1890 and again in 1994, their successes appeared so abundant that Congress reopened the Morrill Act to incorporate those who had been ineligible to reap the initial measure’s myriad benefits. The manifest achievements of the land grants ought not be construed to suggest that they have not been without significant foibles and far greater flaws. Nor have these colleges remained unchanged as their foremost proponents loudly assert. In their century and a half of existence, the institutions have been redefined and reconceptualized any number of times. They bear only a cursory resemblance to their original incarnations.

The 150th anniversary of the Morrill Act in 2012 gave its modern day partisans the opportunity to do some stocktaking. So proud were they of the institutions’ virtues that they held an epic celebration. The Smithsonian Institution hosted a two-week-long exhibit at the National Mall recounting the many splendors that the act had produced in the past century and a half. Virtually all the nation’s land-grant institutions participated in what was a display of past, present, and future science and technology. Nor was that all. The American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific organization, held at its annual meeting no less than three sessions that considered the implications of the Morrill Act on chemistry. One session was a special Presidential session, which was followed by an hour-and-a-half-long news conference. Penn State, University of Illinois, University of Florida, and Mississippi State University each held a large national or international conference to discuss the act’s past and in some cases its future.

This process of inquiry and the outpouring of scholarship gratified the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities. The single entity joining all state and land-grant universities, the association partnered with Mississippi State to create the Virtual Archives of Land-Grant History. Still in its nascent stage, the archives will become the portal through which to enter and search the archives of the various land-grant universities and the central clearinghouse for the history of the land-grant experience.

This recent flurry of scholarly activity has helped elucidate just how the land grants became educational juggernauts. It also reminded us that that was not always so. The initial act was a compromise among a variety of positions and it passed only because the southern states were in rebellion. Few in that region wanted to use the public lands for educational purposes.

This volume is the first of a two-volume effort that traces the changes among America’s land grants over the past century and a half. It stems from the papers presented at the Mississippi State conference, which in tone was different than the others. Its organizers titled it Thinking Land-Grants and called it a cerebration, not a celebration. The event was explicitly about the history of those institutions, warts and all. Apparent dead ends were to be followed and unexplored areas uncovered. It was to be a historical investigation, not a self-congratulation.

This volume—volume 1—covers aspects of the period from the years right after the act’s passage to about 1930, although a few essays carry the analysis closer to the present. It hopes to explain how and why the land-grant institutions developed as they did and how they came to put considerable faith and effort in science and technology. It does not seek to be all encompassing. It is not to be a de facto history of the land-grant movement. It is a series of scenes, vignettes, episodes in the history of land grants, which, when weaved together, demonstrate the fundamental thrusts and tenets of how Morrill land-grant universities came to assume the forms and purposes that they have exhibited. What characterized these institutions almost without exception was their willingness to proclaim that they would employ science in service to their constituencies. It was the promise of the application of a particular kind of expertise—science—to the concerns of their client groups that enabled them first to carve out and then establish the important place that their rhetoric demanded for themselves.

The act’s original terms hardly inspired confidence that a competent, coherent set of institutions would emerge. Quite the opposite was the case. Descriptions of the act’s goals seemed almost at cross-purposes, even though the law’s initial declaration seemed unambiguous. Congress offered grants of land to each state and territory to support at least one college that would promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life. That passage suggested that these institutions would cater to children not usually able to seek higher education—those of the industrial classes—and that they would be wide-ranging and teach students those skills that marked mid-century success, cultivation, and civility. But the act also refined that mandate. These new entities could not exclude scientific and classical studies from their curricula and had to include military tactics. Each prepared the mind to embrace the virtues necessary to achieve well-being and standing in a democratic republic. Congress then identified the new schools’ leading object as teaching such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts. That deliberative body did not dictate what those branches of learning were or how they needed to be taught. Instead, they granted prerogative to the sovereign states. Colleges were to prosecute the preceding tasks in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe.

That final stipulation placed power expressly in each state’s legislature. Congress provided guidance but state legislatures rendered decisions. State control guaranteed that each school would develop independently. The educational milieu in which each legislature shaped its Morrill mandate was murky. A plethora of other institutional forms existed—high schools, professional schools, women’s academies, universities, schools of science, elite liberal arts colleges, institutes, farmers’ colleges, and normal schools. Each of these schools articulated a vision for itself—or had one articulated for it—and staked out territory in this unprecedented and highly competitive, yet uncharted, educational sea. Several schools had overlapping functions and constituencies. Most, however, tried to identify a niche for themselves and set about to fill it.

The various different institutions in the years before about 1870 each had similar entrance criteria—the equivalent of a common school education; differentiation among the types of schools was not hierarchal. It was achieved primarily through to whom each educational form catered and what outcome each sought to produce, little more. Curricula deviated significantly as purposes varied. Attendance at any of these schools marked students as exceptional, perhaps successful, as even a scintilla of schooling beyond the common school was extraordinary.

States characteristically determined where in this mid-century educational smorgasbord land-grant colleges belonged. They also dictated where they were situated and in conjunction with what. Two models predominated. Legislatures either erected new institutions or affixed them to established state universities. The latter plan sometimes failed of its own weight. Professors at state schools protested being joined to schools where practical mandates were part of the curriculum and where students were of a middling sort. In some instances, such as the cases of North Carolina and Mississippi, legislatures heeded those complaints and moved the land grants to new places.

From the start, liberal arts college faculties rapidly distanced themselves from the coarseness and practicality of land-grant colleges. The upshot was that any sort of liberal arts presence or classical influence was greatly reduced at these new schools, even if they were tethered to state universities. Attempts to neatly weave the humanities as a fundamental thread in the land-grant college tapestry proved far more problematic than the act’s initial framers had inferred.

State legislative intervention riddled land grants from the beginning. Simply making the decision where to locate a school was momentous. If joined to an established entity, the federal support promised in the law would guarantee that the combined school had funding enough to thrive. Planning to establish a new school set localities in competition to be that site. Land and commercial values would explode once a locality received the legislature’s designation.

Legislative interest did not end once schools were situated. Emergence of the National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry (the Grange) and other farmers’ organizations in the later 1860s and early 1870s as potent political forces pressured legislatures in most states. The vast majority of Americans lived in rural environs and earned their livelihood in agriculture. These men and women lobbied their legislatures to use land grants to assist farmers in virtually every capacity. Land-grant institutions were made responsible for the children of the industrial classes at their creation—mostly farm children as their numbers dwarfed other industries—and now for the industrial classes themselves. Legislatures reinterpreted the Morrill Act to help farmers farm.

These lobbying efforts dramatically skewed the character of these schools. Rather than even pay lip service to the several pursuits and professions of life clause, land-grant colleges and the land-grant section of state universities became predominantly agricultural entities. Students learned agricultural practice and theory and farmers hoped that land-grant personnel would provide them with new information about how to farm more efficiently and effectively.

Chemists were the first group to claim that farmers needed to turn to them to make agriculture bloom. That assertion became the lever they used to pry themselves into the new schools. Their technical competence promised to uncover optimum farming practices and techniques. Botanists, dairy scientists, and others employing the same tack quickly followed chemists. They too claimed a technical expertise essential for modifying farming practice. Farmers were initially suspicious of the various claims, and science groups repeatedly struggled to demonstrate to legislatures that their claims bore fruit. Yet they proved relentless. They preached at farmers’ meetings, went to farms, and engaged in enterprises that would draw considerable notice. They even formed themselves into a lobbying organization, the Society for the Promotion of Agricultural Science, to press their case. Increasingly, they made inroads.

The Society for the Promotion of Agricultural Science was noteworthy because it attacked the issue nationally. It rarely directed efforts at any one school or any single state and chose to take the quest to place scientists at the apex of land-grant schools nationwide. In that sense, the society operated in stark contrast to the Morrill Act’s state specification as it worked to develop a single national agenda. It sought to ascertain what experiments in agriculture are most needed, and indicate the methods of conducting them.

Land-grant colleges also opted to go national. These scientist-dominated institutions crusaded to free themselves from state politics. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), established by Congress the same year as the land grants, served as the potential vehicle for liberation. The colleges and their scientists labored for the agency to coordinate agricultural science and the newest knowledge of farming. The USDA would harmonize colleges through science and become the entity to standardize agricultural science as it related to farmers.

State legislatures and many farm organizations objected to efforts to nationalize agricultural science and by extension American agriculture itself. They especially feared the USDA would usurp state privilege and direct technical efforts to a single end. Power would be transferred from the states and farmers, and, as a consequence, both groups railed against the federal government, assuming an agenda-setting position.

These fundamental tensions between farmers and scientists and between state and federal governments tipped in favor of the scientists and the USDA with passage of the Hatch Agricultural Experiment Station Act. The 1887 act provided each state $15,000 yearly to fund an experiment station—usually in conjunction with the state’s land-grant college—to engage in agricultural research. Regular federal funding provided the colleges increased stability, while the act’s designation that it be spent on agricultural investigation reaffirmed their agricultural bent. The colleges met soon after to discuss how to incorporate the new legislation and perpetuate its changes. At that gathering, they formed themselves into a collective, the Association of American Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations. They would go forward as a single nationwide entity. Scientists also recognized the Hatch Act. It provided regular funding for agricultural investigation and therefore granted agricultural scientists a certain legitimacy, a fact they institutionalized by establishing a journal, Agricultural Science, through which to report the most recent agricultural experiments. In 1888, the USDA asserted itself within this new milieu. It published a bulletin, the Experiment Station Record, that surveyed monthly each of these new investigative facilities and reported on recent research. This attempt to place the USDA at the apex of the newly national agricultural nexus gained credence the next year when the agency’s secretary was made a member of the president’s cabinet. Shortly thereafter, USDA bureaus used their budgets to fund specific experiments at the stations and universities. A nationwide hierarchal system of agricultural science and agricultural education had been established.

A caveat needs to be noted here. The nationwide agricultural system existed in sufferance as much as in fact. Control under the auspices of the federal government was an emergent concept. Many questioned whether Washington possessed the power to corral or even coordinate the sovereign states in matters outside commerce and the national defense. States generally rebuked attempts from the federal government to enact policy. Such attempts often fell on deaf ears.

Such was the case with the second Morrill Act in 1890. It granted states two options: to add to extant land grants but to open them to persons of color or create separate institutions to serve blacks. In practice, the act significantly fortified the land grants in most of the north but had a very different outcome in the south. Rather than enhance programs at extant colleges, southern legislatures chose to use the funds to create separate African American land grants. These 1890 land grants were prohibited from sharing in the Hatch funding; they were less scientific than vocational institutes where the techniques of farming and industry were taught by African Americans to African Americans.

The 1890 land grants remained separate but hardly equal well into the 1970s. To be sure, they broadened their mandate beyond faming to encompass several other applied majors but under extremely unfortunate terms. In an era of segregation, southern legislatures provided little funding beyond that required by law to maintain these schools. The region’s 1862 land grants gained virtually nothing from the 1890 Morrill Act. As a consequence, these institutions increasingly lagged behind their northern compatriots, especially when later federal legislation often mandated that funding be granted to those places that did not discriminate by color.

Both in the south and north, agriculture dominated land-grant colleges at the expense of other interests. Champions of the mechanic arts lacked the inherent political base in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that agriculture enjoyed. Despite their comparatively frail backing, engineering interests worked to become a full land-grant partner. In 1903, they convinced Congress to consider a measure to create engineering experiment stations, similar in function to those established by the Hatch Act. Congress ultimately rejected that gambit. In 1893, land-grant engineers formed the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education, an analogue to the Society for the Promotion of Agricultural Science, and in 1912 the Land-Grant College Engineering Association, a complement to the Association of American Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations. In that way they hoped to become on par with their agricultural colleagues. Those two initiatives failed to bear the desired fruit. Rural and farm interests continue to dominate state legislatures, which set congressional districts and chose senators until 1913. It remained until about 1920 for as much as 50 percent of the American population to reside in places of 2,500 or more, places which by virtue of their size and activity might find considerable use for engineering skills.

Demographics blocked their ascent but engineers continued to press their case. What inroads they made were sporadic and opportunistic. In the years immediately after 1862, ways of teaching the principles surrounding machine repair and maintenance, especially of steam engines as prime movers, dominated the land-grant mechanic arts. In that instance, the pervasive use of steam power—especially in agriculture—provided a practical constituency in the absence of a political one. For the mechanic arts and later engineering, development was piecemeal as necessity generated the markets for land-grant institutionalization. Demand for newer forms of transportation—such as railroads, then automobiles, and then airplanes—and for a dynamic infrastructure for a burgeoning America—bridges, municipal sewer and water works, and the advent of skyscrapers—emphasized production of persons savvy enough in technical matters to design and maintain them. Constancy, reliability, and standardization became key features of both the class of persons in charge of constructing these new structures and machines and the teaching of the principles behind the structures and machines themselves. Similarly, the rise of electric traction and the electric light as potential consumer goods placed a premium on those skilled in electric motors and electric power generation and regulation, while the abrogation of the German chemical patents created a demand for those who in America could design batch chemical processes and the chemical plants in which to run them. In each instance, the principles that undergird the design, construction, and maintenance of these technical and technological products became the fodder for land-grant engineering courses, land-grant college majors, and later land-grant engineering departments. Indeed, this need-based insinuation was so pronounced that by the 1920s many land-grant institutions offered a full complement of engineering specialties.

1

Land-Grant Colleges and the Pre-Modern Era of American Higher Education, 1850–1890

ROGER L. GEIGER

State legislatures pursued their individualized Morrill mandates in a murky educational atmosphere. Roger Geiger’s essay reminds us that a plethora of other institutional forms already existed before creation of the land-grant institutions, each of which sought viability.

Geiger notes that the land-grant institutions possessed no more right to survival than any of the other new forms. Each competed in the marketplace for students and ideas. What enabled the land-grant institutions to survive and ultimately flourish was their willingness to bend to the political will and then successfully to reshape that will in a way that would privilege themselves. Buffeted by the political pressure of the Grange and other agricultural organizations, state legislatures by the 1880s required land-grant institutions to assume an additional duty, one that initially had little to do with students. Land-grant institutions were to assist agriculturalists—farmers—in becoming more productive and profitable. The new schools quickly enlisted the authority of science to the cause. Science was the expertise—the means—to reform agriculture. It would ultimately serve as the basis for much of the education provided at the new land-grant universities. Scientists as the ultimate arbiters of that expertise would become entrenched as the face and fact of land-grant colleges in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Traditional historiography divides the evolution of American higher education at the Civil War. Education before 1861 is portrayed as the era of the old-time classical college, which is mistakenly described as having changed little since the founding of Harvard. After 1865, modern institutions appear in rapid succession: land-grant colleges after 1862; Vassar for ladies and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for engineers in 1865; Cornell opened in 1868; Charles W. Eliot took charge of Harvard the next year; and Johns Hopkins introduced research and PhDs in 1876. This view ignores a lengthy period that straddled the Civil War, in which the characteristic institutions resembled neither classical colleges nor modern universities. I call this period the premodern era for lack of a better term, and it is characterized by its own distinctive set of institutions. All of these institutions emerged before the Civil War, and all became obsolete after the real modernizing revolution that occurred circa 1885 to 1895, probably the most sweeping period of change in American higher education. Premodern institutions persisted or adapted, as might be expected, and their premodern forms lingered far longer than is acknowledged before fading away after World War I.

What were these institutions?

• Early high schools

• Normal schools

• Female colleges and seminaries

• Schools of science

• Multipurpose colleges

• Proprietary medical and law schools

• Polytechnic institutes

And, what did they have in common?

• These institutions operated wholly or partially in the educational space between the common schools and degree-granting colleges—what we now call secondary education, but overlapping with higher education.

• Admissions were exceedingly fluid, reflecting the diverse and problematic preparation of students.

• Students were consequently heterogeneous.

• The institutions provided career-oriented educational upgrading, for the most part, although the credentials, with the partial exception of the MD, had little tangible value.

• Hence, completing a full course and graduation was more the exception than the rule.

PREMODERN INSTITUTION

High Schools, or the People’s Colleges

The Boston English High School was the first to be established in the United States (1821). The school taught an academic curriculum that extended beyond academy subjects (English, geography, history) to mathematics, science, and modern languages—branches of great practical importance which have usually been taught only at the Colleges. The high school thus offered a terminal course—a people’s college. Boys’ High was an immediate success, attracting sons of white-collar and artisan families for the most part, who were then readily hired by the city’s commercial establishments. Because these vocations did not pertain to girls, the city governors saw no reason to expend tax money for their advanced education. In 1854, the need for teachers justified founding the Boston Girls’ High and Normal School.¹

Philadelphia opened Central High School in 1838 to provide a liberal education for those intended for business life. Its first principal, Alexander Dallas Bache (1838–1842), left his University of Pennsylvania professorship to take this position. The school realized the vision of his great grandfather, Benjamin Franklin. Central taught a practical curriculum that was particularly strong in science, supplemented with philosophical apparatus and an observatory. A rigorous entrance examination kept enrollments fairly stable at five hundred to six hundred from the 1840s to the 1890s. In 1849, the Pennsylvania General Assembly granted Central the right to award college degrees, although this had little effect on the school or its clientele. The school consistently prepared sons of the commercial middle class to enter the world of Philadelphia business. In the 1880s, it enlarged its offerings with vocational and college preparatory tracks.²

The College of the City of New York opened in 1849 as a Free Academy to provide liberal and practical education for students from the city’s public schools. The proposal anticipated the language of the Morrill Act, envisioning a College . . . in no way inferior to any of our colleges to educate children of the laboring class in chemistry, mechanics, architecture, agriculture, navigation, physical as well as moral or mental science, &, &. The college was open to male school graduates—a free female normal school opened in 1870 (later Hunter College). It offered a unique five-year college course in which the first, sub-freshman year compensated for the absence of public high schools in the city. However, few completed the four-year classical course that followed. This model produced a closed system where students from public schools were not qualified to attend other colleges, nor were outsiders likely to attend the College of the City of New York.³

Elsewhere, urban high schools largely followed the people’s college model of providing a terminal academic course that prepared students for the business of life—actually, a life in the city’s business community. These schools were created following the formal organization of the common school system. They thus developed from below and reflected the desires of middle-class tax payers for immediately useful education.⁴

An alternative role for public high schools was to serve as the connecting link between the common schools and colleges. The several states that attempted to organize education from the top down, most notably Michigan, sought to institutionalize this approach, which required teaching classical languages. However, states proved unable to fund local high schools, and city tax payers usually balked at the cost of preparing students for college. High schools tended to offer Latin, at least, and patterns of enrollment varied across cities; but in most high schools, a large majority of students sought only preparation for immediate employment in local businesses. Even Michigan had difficulty forging the connecting link. In the 1870s, the Kalamazoo decision by the Michigan Supreme Court validated the authority of public school districts to fund high schools with tax revenues, and the University of Michigan pioneered a system of certifying high schools to admit their graduates without examination. Still, before 1881, only 4 percent of the state’s high school graduates planned to attend college. However, the decade of the 1880s saw the transformation of American high schools. The number of public high schools grew tenfold as they became the advanced level of common schooling. Still, in 1890, high school graduates represented roughly one-third of students prepared for college, with the rest coming from private academies or college preparatory departments.⁵

Normal Schools

The model for separate schools for the training of elementary teachers was created by Prussia, and the term normal was copied from the French adaptation of that pattern (écoles normales). The model was first used by Massachusetts in 1839. The three normal schools the state established were humble affairs, offering a course of up to three years (which few completed) of professional training for teachers of rural primary schools. Their accomplishments were modest too. Rural boys and girls attended them as the only available education beyond common schools. Most became teachers, as promised, in order to receive free tuition; but not for long, given the miserable pay and working conditions in rural school districts. The movement to establish normal schools was led by educational reformers, who advocated systems of public education to advance and unify the nation, while deploring the hodgepodge of private schools. They addressed, on one hand, a crying need for trained teachers for the nation’s mushrooming schoolrooms. On the other hand, potential students like those in Massachusetts sought any form of further education and were scarcely content to remain elementary school teachers. Normal schools developed slowly before the Civil War, as only a few states yielded to the entreaties of educational reformers. Those states established single, central normal schools, unlike Massachusetts’s rural strategy. The New York State Normal School at Albany was founded in 1844, followed in 1849 by charters in Connecticut and Michigan. In Illinois, agitation for an agricultural college resulted instead in the Illinois State Normal School (1857). That same year, a Pennsylvania law created twelve normal school districts, but left it to private stockholders to actually establish the schools. After the war, normal schools grew in numbers and in scope.⁶

At the end of the 1860s, thirty-five state normal schools were operating, and in the next decade that figure doubled. Large numbers of fairly ephemeral private normal schools operated in these decades. The largest number of public normal schools was opened in the 1890s (42 schools, ten new states), producing a total of 139 in 1900. The overriding issue during the early stages of this development was the tension created by a narrow focus on instilling professional teaching skills versus providing teachers with a broader academic culture. Over time, most normal schools experienced academic drift, offering a two-year elementary course and a four-year advanced course. The former represented secondary studies, while the final two years of the advanced course contained college-level material. The late-nineteenth-century normal school thus straddled secondary and higher education.⁷

In 1899, the Michigan State Normal School in Ypsilanti became a four-year, degree-granting college—Michigan State Normal College (later Eastern Michigan University). This change in status marked the beginning of an inexorable transformation of normal schools into teacher’s colleges. Most of these conversions took place in the 1920s. Eventually, two hundred normal schools became teacher’s colleges. However, even these institutions retained a premodern flavor, being confined in most states strictly to teacher education. Ultimately, these institutions became full colleges and universities after World War II.⁸

Female Colleges

The women’s colleges of the South and Midwest represent a single type. Although often named institutes or seminaries as well as colleges, almost all included female in their titles. They taught an English course that was weighted toward science and English composition and offered ornamental electives. Most schools began with a three-year course but added an optional four-year course by the 1860s that included a smattering of Latin. Their students tended to be relatively young, needed work in preparatory departments, and seldom persisted through to graduation. This approach to women’s education was paralleled in early coeducational colleges by a ladies’ course, omitting Latin and Greek and usually occupying three years. At Oberlin, for example, most women took the ladies’ course, even though they were allowed in the classical course. At female colleges, too, the ladies’ course was more popular than the four-year course. In 1880, 155 female colleges granted college degrees; 59 of them had been founded in the 1850s, and 58 in the following two decades; 107 were located in southern and south-central states.⁹

Contemporaries regarded the female colleges as inferior to men’s colleges, comparing them with the stronger rather than the weaker examples of the latter. Consequently, efforts began in the 1850s to provide young women with a true collegiate—that is, classical—course. Mary Sharp College for Young Ladies in Tennessee and Elmira Female College in New York were the first to offer such courses and conferred their first AB degrees in 1855 and 1859, respectively. Matthew Vassar, Sophia Smith, and William Durant soon aimed even higher, founding Vassar, Smith, and Wellesley colleges to be analogues of Harvard and Yale. Initially hampered by the lack of women with preparation in the classical languages, they soon rose in size and stature.

In 1887, the Bureau of Education classified this group as division A colleges and the female colleges as division B. In effect, it labeled these premodern schools as anachronisms. Given their attempt to offer preparatory, ornamental, basic education, and mental discipline and culture, the Bureau of Education opined, it is obvious that some part of the scheme must fail of satisfactory results. From 1880 to 1900, division A colleges grew from eight hundred to five thousand; women in coeducational colleges increased from four thousand to twenty-two thousand; but division B stagnated at eleven thousand students.¹⁰ Still, as late as 1890, division B colleges were educating roughly one-half of collegiate women.

This class of colleges proved incapable of adapting to the modern era. Lacking endowments, patrons, or effective leaders, even long-established female colleges succumbed. Mary Sharp (1853–1895), Wesleyan Female College in Delaware (1841–1885), and Pittsburgh Female College (1854–1896) all closed after forty-plus years of operations. Ingham University (1857–1892) had its property foreclosed by one of its trustees. The educational space that the female colleges had occupied from the 1840s to the 1890s was gradually claimed by high schools, normal schools, and modern women’s and coeducational colleges.¹¹

Multipurpose Colleges

These institutions were the modal institution of American higher education from the 1840s to the 1890s. Ninety-two such colleges were opened in the 1860s, and sixty-one and sixty-nine in the following two decades. These numbers dwarf the new land-grant colleges, institutes of technology, or endowed universities. Multipurpose colleges all had religious sponsorship or links. At their core was the classical AB course, organized into four separate classes, each performing fifteen recitations a week. In addition, nearly all included a preparatory department. From this base, they offered additional courses according to local demand: almost all had a less demanding English course leading to a bachelor of science degree; teacher’s courses and a ladies’ course were common; and additional ornamental and commercial subjects were also offered according to demand. Such curricula could be offered by a small, unspecialized faculty and adjunct instructors. The average number of college students was seventy-eight in 1840 and eighty-eight in 1880, but most institutions enrolled a larger number in preparatory and special classes. They thus served the eclectic educational needs of the island communities of rural America, untouched by high schools or normal schools. They were also entirely unsuited for the educational system of modern America that emerged at the end of the century.¹²

By then this fact was apparent to contemporaries. University of Chicago President William Rainey Harper offered a dour assessment in The Prospects of