The social and political liberalism of the United States certainly fostered “the vast expansion and diversification of liberal arts college course offerings” that Willis Rudy identified in 1960. But whether the social and political ideology of the time—and liberalism, in particular—should determine the “curricular blueprint” of the liberal arts has been disputed. In 1958 Harold Taylor argued strongly in favor of the shaping influence of liberalism in a lecture at Swarthmore College.
Born in Toronto, Harold Taylor (1914–1993) earned a B.A. at the University of Toronto in 1935 and a then a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of London in 1938. After teaching philosophy at the University of Wisconsin from 1939 to 1945 and working in the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development during the second half of World War II, he became the youngest college president in the country when he was chosen in 1945 to lead Sarah Lawrence College.54
Founded among the experimental colleges for women during the Progressive college movement between the World Wars,55 Sarah Lawrence gave no grades and required each student to develop an independent course of study and to contribute labor to maintain the college. Taylor extended these progressive policies by pressing for racial integration at the predominantly white college and by championing academic freedom against McCarthyism at a time when “opposition to [McCarthy’s] version of academic freedom was limited. . . . A few academic leaders spoke out. Harold Taylor . . . insisted that a professor should be judged by his actions, not his affiliations. He offered the standard civil libertarian objection to firing Communists: ‘If we begin excluding Communists, we will end by excluding anyone who says anything provocative, unorthodox, or interesting.’ ”56 Near the end of his presidency, Taylor gave the following lecture, advocating “the progressive idea” or “pragmatic thesis” of liberal education.57 Taylor’s civil libertarianism and pragmatic view, hardened by McCarthyism, naturally influenced his presentation of the history of liberal education.
Upon retiring from Sarah Lawrence in 1959, Taylor taught at the New School for Social Research and City University of New York.58 He also lectured for the U.S. Department of State both in the United States and abroad and served as chairman of the Peace Strategy Committee of the National Research Council from 1959 to 1968. During the 1970s he chaired the United States Committee for the United Nations University. Taylor died in 1993 in New York City.
The idea of liberalism and of liberal education is a fairly recent one and a local one. It has its origin in the Western world, in political and social changes which began in the seventeenth century with the discovery of a new universe and a new world, with a new mercantile class and the growth of common law. Liberalism as a social philosophy grew in the eighteenth century through the organization of new political forms and social classes. It exploded the nineteenth century with a series of revolutions against the regimes of church, royalty, aristocracy, and state. It emerged into the twentieth century to face its greatest test in two world wars, a world depression, and any number of minor wars and current conflicts and revolutions. There are those who look at this short history and say that liberalism is now bankrupt, that individualism is dead, and that a liberal democracy cannot stand up against authoritarian systems, either in international affairs or in the development of internal strength. What is needed is said to be a stronger and more ordered political doctrine and stronger social controls, including the control of education.
Liberal education is the intellectual and cultural instrument through which the basic ideas of liberalism are transmitted and developed. This kind of education began with the clusters of scholars and students who joined together to study, examine, and revise the known ideas of Greek society, religion, and classical thought. Throughout the history of Western society, liberal education has been both the institutional expression of liberalism as a philosophy and the intellectual force which helped to create the political and social changes of liberalized societies.60
The central idea of liberal education is therefore the idea of individualism and individual freedom.61 Its tradition is that of the liberal revolt against state authority, religious dogma, and all the elements of the old regime. It is allied to the Protestant movement in its assertion of the individual conscience and the individual reason against church doctrines and church control.62 It is part of the tradition of the enlightenment and the age of reason. It is centrally concerned with the struggle of reason against ignorance, moral values against brute force, freedom against tyranny.
The tradition of liberalism and of liberal education does not lie solely within the arts and the humanities; it has to do with the doctrines of social progress and the disciplines of science. For it was the combination of liberal social theory and scientific thinking which infused Western society with a spirit of discovery and the idea of change. The universe itself had been considered a static entity; space was a local affair; society was fixed and unchangeable. The scientific spirit, with its insistence on rational proof and objective evidence, was the driving force in the seventeenth century which released intellectual and social energies into new dimensions of thought and action.
The characteristic of the modern movements in philosophy, the movements which began in the nineteenth century and set the framework for the twentieth, is the scientific basis on which they stand. In the nineteenth century, the scientific disciplines, when applied to the study of nature, society, and man, produced discoveries in all fields from physics to psychology. The idea of evolutionary change affected the concept of religion, of society, of art, of human nature; the philosophies of Bergson, Russell, Whitehead, Dewey, and Santayana, for example, are based on the facts of science and their interpretation by scientists and philosophers.63 The new emphasis on psychology as a science came from the application of philosophical theory and the scientific method to individual case studies of human nature, culminating in the work of Freud, Jung, and Adler, among others.64 New attitudes to the individual found their way into twentieth-century literature, poetry, painting, sculpture, and the arts. From Martha Graham to Dylan Thomas, from the surrealist poets to the experimental novelists, from Bauhaus design to Frank Lloyd Wright, new forms, new traditions, new philosophies emerged in the first half of this century.65 The central core of the new aesthetic was a philosophy of individualism.
On the other hand, the central idea of modern philosophy came to be that of a profusion of unfolding possibilities emerging from the development of the universe and everything in it through billions of years. If the world is a huge organism, alive, changing, moving toward an expanding goal whose ultimate point is unknown, then everything in it is in a state of change. Everything in it is in the process of becoming something else. The teeming birth of cells, the constant unfolding of new forms of life were all considered to be demonstrations of the creative energy which lies within nature.
William James, to come closer to our present world, accepted a philosophy of creative evolution and accepted the idea of creativity as a basic concept in his system of thought. The human mind, for William James, was continually creating its own knowledge out of the day-to-day run of human experience. “All the while,” said James in his Principles of Psychology, “the world we feel and live in will be that which our ancestors and we, by slow cumulative strokes of choice, have extricated out of this, like sculptors, by simply rejecting certain portions of the given stuff. Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone. Other minds, other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressive chaos.”66
The essence of the modern movement in education is the idea of creative experience and its liberating effects on the individual. The modern movement is in fact a fundamental shift in attitude toward life itself. It refuses to accept the conventional forms in which life is presented to us and looks for fresh ways of interpreting facts, for new forms of art, of architecture, of scientific discovery, of literature, of society. It refuses to accept the fatalism of the classical philosophy, or the classical tone of reconciliation to things as they exist, or the warning to mankind that everything which is done has already been done before and that everything will pass away and return to nothingness. The modern movement believes in the reality of novelty and discovery; it believes in progress toward goals which man has made and which he can remake as he goes along. . . .
First, then, the content of the curriculum, particularly in the freshman year, should be drawn from original materials in the fields of politics, social science, philosophy, psychology, the arts, literature, and science, dealing with issues and questions which can evoke genuine concern in the students. Courses should be planned which are not summaries and outlines of fields of subject matter but which deal with fresh and interesting ideas about man and nature, society and the individual.67 The purpose of the course is not to cover ground but to plunge the student into a world of ideas with which he can become truly concerned. He will cover ground once he becomes involved with the ideas. Give the freshman or the sophomore some room to move among fields of his choice; do not restrict him only to required courses; give him the largest chance he can have to work at the things he wants to know.
Secondly, the lecture system, the academic credit system, the conventional examination system must be replaced by a combination of discussion methods, independent study, tests of achievement, and a greater freedom and responsibility for the individual student.
Thirdly, programs of study should be planned to individual needs, allowing those with the ability to go as far and as fast as their capacities can take them in those areas to which their aims, motives, and interests drive them. This need not involve the complete rearrangement of present college structures but only a change in the attitude of educators toward their students by which their individual differences are respected in the development of educational programs.
Fourthly, the value of immediate experience must be recognized as a prime educational force. Such recognition would mean that students could paint, sculpt, compose, act; write plays, poetry, novels, short stories; carry out research projects and experiments as a regular part of their academic program. The whole life of the college campus is thereby enriched, and the spirit of the creative arts infuses the community with ideas and values which are simply not available from other academic sources.
These are the dimensions of an approach to learning which seeks to maintain the central tradition of liberal education—the tradition of individualism and humanism. It is an approach which gives promise of developing in the generations of the young an open and active mind, a capacity for further growth, and a concern for those ideals of liberalism which can transform a mass of human beings into a community of interesting citizens.
Two decades after Harold Taylor spoke, Paul O. Kristeller expressed a contrary view at a symposium on “Liberalism and Liberal Education” held at Columbia University. In fact, he maintained more generally “that education and culture are autonomous . . . and are not merely the by-products of social and political forces that happen to prevail at a given time.”
Kristeller (1905–1999) was born in Berlin and earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Heidelberg in 1928. After postdoctoral study at the universities of Berlin and Freiburg, he lectured at universities in Italy between 1935 and 1938. In 1939 he came to Yale University as an instructor, then moved to Columbia University where he was made professor of philosophy in 1956 and retired in 1973. During his academic career, Kristeller spent several years at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, studying Renaissance philosophy, his academic specialty. In fact, Kristeller “is responsible for establishing Renaissance philosophy as a particular field of enquiry, at least among English-speaking scholars.” Kristeller wrote more than 800 books and articles, including his seven-volume Iter Italicum, begun in the 1930s and published between 1963 and 1996. This “Italian Journey” is a catalog and guide to Italian Renaissance documents and manuscripts held in libraries around the world.68 Kristeller died in his Manhattan home in 1999.
I should like to begin with a few remarks about liberalism, which is mentioned in the title of our series though not in the title of my paper. Liberalism is a political concept, and its meaning has been rather fluid, as all political concepts are—especially in times of trouble, according to a famous passage in Thucydides.70 I gladly leave the thankless task of defining liberalism to the political theorists. The title of our series might suggest that liberalism and liberal education are related or interdependent. In my opinion, this is not the case. Liberal education in a broad sense existed for many centuries before political liberalism was even heard of.71 Liberal education did not produce liberalism, but flourished under many different political systems that were not at all liberal. Conversely, liberal education is not a necessary product of liberalism, and it may actually decline and disappear in a politically liberal society. For those of us who favor both liberalism and liberal education, as I think I do at least in some sense, the question must be put differently: How can liberal education be adapted to liberalism and be made to promote liberalism, and how can liberal education be defended and maintained in a liberal society? My assumption is that education and culture are autonomous, have their own traditions, and are not merely the by-products of political and social forces that happen to prevail at a given time.72
The topic I am supposed to treat, as I understand it, is different and more specific: What is the history of liberal education in the western world, and what is the place of humanism, and especially of Renaissance humanism, in this history? In using the terms humanism and humanistic education, I do not refer to the vaguely moral connotation that these terms have assumed in recent years, but to the very specific meaning that the terms humanist and humanities, if not humanism, received in the Renaissance and retained up to the early decades of our century. In other words, I am referring to the learned humanism of the fifteenth, and not to the unlearned humanism of the twentieth century. The humanities in documents of the fifteenth century are listed as grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy,73 and the way to teach and study them is to read and interpret the Greek and Latin classics in their original text. The humanistic school was, and until recently has been, based on a classical curriculum. I am myself the product of a Humanistisches Gymnasium which involved, among other things, nine years of Latin and six years of Greek, six hours or more per week. In order to understand this phenomenon, let us go back to classical Antiquity.
The Greeks developed a system of general, as distinct from professional, education that emphasized grammar and the reading of Homer and the other great poets, and later added rhetoric and the study of the great prose writers, the orators, the historians, and the philosophers. In late ancient and Byzantine times, this also involved the careful study of the classical literary language from which the spoken language had moved further and further away. The Romans also studied the grammar and literature of their own language, but as pupils and later as rulers of the Greeks they also studied the language, grammar, and literature of the Greeks. The main Latin writers, including Cicero and Vergil, came comparatively late. They belonged to the first century B.C.—after the time the Romans had adopted many features of Greek civilization—and obtained their place as school authors only during the imperial period.
In the early Middle Ages, Greek disappeared from the schools of Western Europe and Latin grammar assumed a crucial role, since Latin had ceased to be the spoken language of the population while remaining the language of the Church, of law, of administration and diplomacy, of learning and instruction. The core of the curriculum were the so-called seven liberal arts: grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. They were all taught on a very elementary level, and grammar was by far the most important of them. During the twelfth century, learning expanded through the translation of many philosophical and scientific texts from the Greek and Arabic, through the rise of the cathedral schools and universities, and through an increased curiosity for knowledge and logical skill. The reading of the classical Latin authors flourished, and there was for a while a rivalry between the arts and the authors (the liberal arts and the great authors).74 In the thirteenth century, the arts prevailed—that is, the disciplines of philosophy, theology, law, and medicine that had by then been firmly established at the universities. The secondary schools which were supposed to prepare their students for the universities were left with the task of teaching the old liberal arts, and especially grammar, including the Latin language.75
With the fourteenth and even more with the fifteenth century, especially in Italy, the study of the Latin classics expanded, both in the secondary schools and at the universities, and a number of long-neglected authors, including Lucretius and Tacitus, were discovered and more widely studied. Moreover, the study of Greek language and Greek classical literature was introduced from the East and favored by the influx of many Byzantine scholars both before and after the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453. This reform of education, and especially of secondary education, is what constitutes an important facet of the humanistic movement in the Italian Renaissance, and it was sustained by the firm and widespread belief that a classical education, the study of Greek and Latin literature, was the best way to train future rulers and citizens, professionals and scholars. While there was some resistance on the part of theologians, classical education was on the whole victorious, and it functioned not as a substitute for but as an important supplement to religious, Christian education.
The formal aspect of learning how to write well and elegantly in prose and in verse was given great emphasis, and it seemed obvious that the study and imitation of the classical models was the best way to attain this goal. As to content, the classical historians provided instruction in ancient history and institutions, and supplied models of imitation and warning examples for future rulers, statesman, and generals. . . . The reading of classical poets and orators, as well as of other prose writers, was not only enjoyable, as it undoubtedly is, but also useful as an exercise to imitate and master their language and their style, thus enabling the student to learn how to write well in prose and verse. The reading of the ancient philosophers also provided moral education and some instruction in philosophy.76
Once the products of the humanist grammar school became university students, scholars, and professionals, the newly gained classical learning bore its fruits in their own specialized disciplines. The scholars of the late fifteenth and sixteenth century spoke and wrote a better Latin, to be sure, but above all, the jurists acquired a better knowledge of the meaning and historical context of Roman law which was still the basis of much continental law, and even made new advances during this period. The physicians, mathematicians, astronomers, and geographers still enhanced their knowledge by a study of the more advanced Greek treatises on their subjects—particularly Hippocrates and Galen, Archimedes and Diophantus, Ptolemy and Strabo, of whom this period produced either new or first translations.77 The philosophers improved their understanding of Aristotle and acquired for the first time a comprehensive knowledge of the Aristotelian commentators, of Plato and the Neoplationists, of Stoic, Epicurean, and Skeptic philosophy, and of the large body of Greek popular thought represented by such writers as Lucian or Plutarch—all sources not accessible in the Middle Ages in the West. Finally, the theologians applied classical knowledge to a textual study of the Greek New Testament, of the Greek and Latin Church Fathers, and occasionally of the Hebrew Old Testament.
When the humanist movement and the humanist school spread from Italy to the rest of Europe, mainly during the sixteenth century, the same beliefs and interests were at work and the theological aspect was especially important. In Catholic Europe (and Latin America), humanist education was adopted by the Jesuits and other religious orders. In Protestant Europe, especially Germany, the Low Countries, and England, new humanist schools were founded that served in part the purpose of training future ministers who would be able to interpret the Word of God from the original text of the Bible and of the Church Fathers. This was also true of early America, and in Protestant Germany some of the best humanist schools even in my time traced their origin to the period of the Reformation.
Yet through the sixteenth century, the study of Latin served very important practical purposes which gradually disappeared afterwards and which we are likely to forget. Latin was and remained to our time the language of the Catholic Church, of its liturgy and administration, and to some extent of its theological literature and instruction. Latin was the language of much international law and diplomacy; it yielded but slowly and partly to Italian in the late sixteenth, to French in the mid-seventeenth, and to English in the twentieth century. Latin was the language of much law and medicine. Latin was the language of practically all university instruction until the late eighteenth century, and of all scholarly and learned literature for students and professionals, as against the popular literature for laymen. When Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz wrote for their colleagues, they wrote in Latin; and when they wrote in Italian, French, or English, they wrote for the general public. It was only in the seventeenth century that Italian, French, and English began to be used as scholarly languages, and German followed only in the eighteenth century. Finally, there was a great output of Latin poetry and prose literature, some of it excellent and influential, during the sixteenth and down to the eighteenth century.
The result of all this is easily forgotten: European culture down to the seventeenth and even eighteenth century is a bilingual culture that found its expression in two languages, Latin and the respective national language. It was only in the nineteenth century that the literature in Latin became negligible, except in classical philology, and perhaps with the exception of Hungary and the Slavic countries where the natural languages were slower in asserting themselves. In other words, up to the eighteenth century, a classical education, and especially the knowledge of Latin, was not only a cultural asset or a status symbol, but a useful training indispensable for a number of professional activities. It was indispensable for the future university student, diplomat and administrator, let alone for the university-trained jurist, theologian, physician, scientist, or scholar. . . .78
The classical school persisted to the eighteenth century very much as it had been since the fifteenth and sixteenth, while it gradually lost some, though by no means all, of its practical usefulness, and certainly none of its educational and literary appeal. By 1800, the school was ready for reforms and changes which were bound to come. . . . New subjects were added, such as the sciences, medieval and early modern history, and the national and other modern languages and literatures. Also, the classical core subjects of Greek were modified under the impact of their diminishing practical use and the new developments in classical philology, history, and archaeology. The classical authors were now read with the help of modern classical scholarship in which the teachers had been trained and to which they themselves made important contributions. There was less and less emphasis on the ability to write—let alone to speak—Latin, since the practical use for these skills had rapidly declined and disappeared.
The classical school of the nineteenth and early twentieth century—at least the type of school in which I was brought up—thus conveyed many other skills, such as some modern mathematics and physics, German literature and composition, French (and some English) language and literature; but it also gave us a good reading knowledge of classical Greek and Latin, and an acquaintance with some of the best ancient poets and prose writers, presented in the light of the best classical scholarship then available. Other subjects were missing or poorly represented. Religious instruction was optional. There was some calisthenics but no sports. Instruction in music was poor and elementary, and there was no art history or philosophy, no social or political studies, no contemporary history or literature—not to speak of home economics or family living, typing, or driving. Yet the idea was that the tough subjects, such as languages and composition and mathematics, required study and instruction, whereas other subjects could be more easily pursued outside of school.
My teachers did not think that I was unfamiliar with contemporary German literature because I didn’t have such courses in school. They thought I could do that without guidance, and I did. I also pursued a lot of music and art history, modern history, and literature on my own in the time free from class hours and homework. These studies and pursuits were encouraged and respected by my parents and teachers. It just did not occur to them that every conceivable field of interest should be pursued as a part of the school curriculum or that a young person should not learn anything except what was taught to him in school.79 School instruction was limited to the subjects that were considered essential and required hard work.80 I must admit with some embarrassment that I thoroughly enjoyed my work in school, as well as many other things besides, and that it never occurred to me to question its value or to rebel against its discipline.81
During the present century, criticism of the classical school became increasingly vocal, and especially in this country, but also in Europe, humanistic education has lost more and more ground and is now rapidly disappearing. . . . The liberal arts college, of which so much has been said and written, and especially the programs in the humanities and western civilization at Columbia College and elsewhere, have obviously been designed as a substitute for the classical school that has vanished.82 The program does teach classical literature and civilization and this is a great merit. Yet it teaches them in a hurry, and in English translations rather than in the original languages, and this is by no means the same thing. (I do not believe in translations, or in their ability to replace the original texts, although many people nowadays comfortably assume this as a dogma.83) I consider this program valuable, and am glad that it is continuing at Columbia. It is better than nothing, for it is better for a young person to read Homer and Plato quickly and in a translation than not at all. Yet even this substitute, known as the humanities or the liberal arts, is now under attack and has disappeared from most colleges, though fortunately not from Columbia.
By 1970 not only was the remnant of classical or humanistic education “under attack” even in the liberal arts college, as Paul Kristeller lamented, but the liberal arts curriculum had been thoroughly “reorganized on the basis of specialized departmental areas of scholarly and professional interest,” as Willis Rudy described. These developments resulted because “the research universities were producing the faculties for collegiate institutions and . . . competition among the colleges led them to imitate the major university model,” as stated in selection #64 drawn from The Perpetual Dream: Reform and Experiment in the American College. Authored by Gerald Grant and David Riesman, this book examines the counter-reaction in undergraduate curriculum, which occurred amid the liberalizing social and political movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Born in Philadelphia, David Riesman (1909–2002) graduated from Harvard College in 1931 and from Harvard Law School in 1934. After clerking for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, he practiced law in Boston and then was appointed professor of law at the University of Buffalo in 1937. During the Second World War he worked in industry, and in 1946 became a professor of social sciences at the University of Chicago and engaged in field work leading to his acclaimed analysis of the urban upper class: The Lonely Crowd (with Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer) in 1951. In 1958 Riesman was appointed Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University, where he remained until his retirement in 1980. Gerald P. Grant (1938–) was born in Syracuse, New York, and received his bachelor’s degree from John Carroll University in 1959. After earning a master’s degree from Columbia University and serving in the U.S. Marine Corps, he joined the staff of the Washington Post in 1961. He became a Nieman fellow at Harvard University in 1967 and earned his Ph.D. in sociology in 1972. Grant then accepted a faculty appointment at Syracuse University, and was named Hannah Hammond Professor in 1993 and Distinguished University Professor in 1998.
Grant and Riesman chose The Perpetual Dream for their title because “the campus has been a kind of dreamscape for utopian as well as practical reformers, some projecting their notions of an ideal community on the curriculum and extracurriculum, and others seeing the diversity of undergraduate experience as an epitome of the American dream that education can change one’s life, at whatever age. These yearnings, so ingrained in a nation that believes deeply in a second (and often a third) chance for everyone, are never fulfilled but endlessly renewed.” (p. 1) The Perpetual Dream was awarded the Borden Prize as the Outstanding Book in Higher Education for 1978 by the American Council on Education.
[W]e restricted the scope of our inquiry to “merely” 3,000 formally constituted institutions of higher education and focused most of our efforts on what the experimenters themselves claimed to be reforms. Through a variety of methods, we began to investigate these claims and to attempt to understand the intentions of the reformers. Some of the reforms have a large resonance, representing attempts not only to change the university but to set forth new ideals. We call these telic reforms, reforms pointing toward a different conception of the ends of undergraduate education, to distinguish them from the more popular reforms of the last decade which have brought about a general loosening of the curriculum. The telic reforms approach the status of social movements or generic protests against contemporary American life. . . . [but] we have not constructed anything grand enough to be called either a sociological or an educational theory. Rather, in the more usual way of inductively oriented social scientists, we have looked at some cases, compared them, and arranged them in [a] typology of reform movements. . . . In this chapter, we explain that typology and attempt to place the telic reform movements in historical perspective.
In Chapter 6, we discuss the popular reforms as partially a response to the meritocratic discontents that came to characterize student life in the most selective colleges and universities. By the early 1960s, the expansion of the American system of higher education had led to fierce competition for admission to elite colleges and greatly intensified academic pressures for undergraduates who, once admitted, continued to compete for choice graduate-school opportunities. Students sought relief in a wide range of popular reforms that gave them a considerably greater degree of autonomy and resulted in dramatic changes in their relationships with teachers. Students were freer than before to pick and choose their way through the curriculum and to move at their own pace without penalty. The most popular of these reforms—student-designed majors, free-choice curricula, the abolition of fixed requirements—sought not to establish new institutional aims, but to slow the pace and expand the avenues of approach. While these reforms began in the elite academic institutions, they spread to other colleges and universities. They were adopted in part out of misconceived notions that they would serve to quench campus revolts as well as out of genuinely educational motives on the part of a new generation of faculty who wished to change the processes of education in significant ways. The popular reforms modified the means of education within the constraints of the existing goals of the research-oriented university.85
The telic reforms, on the other hand, embody a significantly different conception of the goals of undergraduate education. To some degree, they represent an attack on the hegemony of the giant research oriented multiversities and their satellite university colleges. In one sense, these telic reforms could be thought of as counterrevolutionary, that is, as counter to the rise of the research-oriented universities that Christopher Jencks and David Riesman described in The Academic Revolution. By “revolution,” Jencks and Riesman meant the crescent hegemony of the academic professions over previously influential parties: trustees and legislators, students, administrators, religious denominations.86 That book, like others of its genre, noted that the research universities were producing the faculties for collegiate institutions and took for granted the way in which competition among the colleges led them to imitate the major university model. But because of their resentment and later disaffection with the aims of the academic vanguard, many faculty members trained under its auspices have shown resistance to the model; and their ambivalence, as well as lack of resources, limited the momentum with which it could be imitated. Until the 1920s, the university college model . . . was neither strong enough at the center nor extensive enough at the periphery of American higher education to incite rebellions that might establish contrasting models of higher education other than those affiliated with denominational groups.87
But in the 1930s, two of the telic movements—in our typology the neo-classical and the aesthetic-expressive—arose in opposition to the university college model, and they were followed later by what we have called the communal-expressive and activist-radical. By telic reforms, then, we mean to signify those reforms that emphasize ends and purposes that are different from, if not hostile to, the goals of the regnant research universities. . . . Essentially, the typology contrasts different models of undergraduate education, which can be translated into ideas about the purposes of such an experience, the values it should embody, and the forms of authority on which it ultimately rests, Each offers a distinctive vision of an educating community. . . .88
St. John’s College is the ideal-typical example of what we call the neo-classical college since it has sought to restore the classical curriculum with new intensity and purity.89 Like the other anti-university experiments, it was basically dominated by a moral imperative: a vision of human unity, of the good life in a Platonic mode. And like Plato’s Socratic dialogues, the mode of discourse at St. John’s is aporetic:90 “The argument either leads nowhere or it goes around in circles.”91 Beginning with the Socratic dialogues in the first year, and progressing through the 100-odd Great Books which have come to characterize the program, St. John’s teaches that “one dogma and doctrine is not to be compromised: the assertion that learning is first and last for its own sake.”92 The idea of “dogma” in its Greek sense of “a formulated belief” is not foreign at St. John’s, a community that believes education should not be instrumental to some other end, but should itself be an end. Thus the college should model the forms of life of liberally educated men, enabling students to join in this process and to experience it as its own reward. The object is to create a great conversation about the great questions. At root, these are connected with intellectual and moral virtue, and with all the Socratic paradoxes about whether and in what ways virtue is “teachable.” . . .
The neo-classicals regarded and still regard the universities and the conventionally departmentalized colleges as vulgar and technocratic. They envisage the universities as sterile, exploiting knowledge for merely technical ends and preparing students not for the “calling” of life, but for superficial, though profitable, vocationalism. They underestimated the diversity of what later came to be called the multiversity, and also its incremental inventiveness.
Students were invited to come to St. John’s College not for certification or entry into a meritocratic elite, but in order to become more civilized, in order to join an aristocratic great chain of being, stretching back through the medieval university to Plato’s Academy. The graduates of St. John’s College, an institution which in Scott Buchanan’s words was designed to produce cultural misfits, are not rendered unemployable but have, in fact, done well in law, teaching, business, and other fields. . . .
In the 1920s to learn the performing arts, one’s best bet was probably at a conservatory or an art institute. A few liberal-arts colleges had, so to speak, musical appendages, such as Oberlin with its Conservatory. Some of the great state universities, such as Indiana, Illinois, Michigan in music, and Iowa in creative writing, were diverse enough and flexible enough to get away from traditional scholarly canons as to what is appropriate in a university setting.93 In a way, they followed the land-grant model. Just as they had prepared people who wanted to teach home economics, they prepared people who wanted to teach music or to enter “commercial” callings in the graphic arts as well as those who aspired to the fine arts.
But the creation of colleges whose main emphasis lay in the aesthetic dimension was mirrored by the founding of a kind of second generation of institutions devoted to the education of women. Vassar, Bryn Mawr, Smith, and Mount Holyoke had established that women could equal men in cognitive facility. Now Scripps and, later, to a lesser degree, Mills on the West Coast and Bennington and Sarah Lawrence on the East Coast, took advantage of the somewhat sheltered status of upper-class women to give freer rein to acknowledged creativity in the arts. . . . Along with Black Mountain College, [they] embodied what we have here termed the aesthetic-expressive ideal. . . . [C]reative expression lay at the core of the enterprise. . . .
Although the arts did not flourish on American campuses before World War II, major gains were made in the 1960s. More than 80 campuses, three-fourths of them public institutions (UCLA is the largest, awarding 232 fine-arts degrees in a recent year), now award degrees in art. Among the private institutions which have sizable programs are Brigham Young University, Wellesley College, Boston University, and Northwestern University; but no private institutions are among the first twenty in numbers graduated; and, with the exception of Stanford, no elite private university awards more than twenty-five art degrees annually. And as more students are trained in the arts, pressure is created for such programs to move downward as graduates seek jobs in the lower schools. . . .
Viewed from the perspective of the discipleship that characterized both Black Mountain and the early Bennington, the new palaces of the arts rising in some of the public universities would be seen as corrupting in their giantism. Those early pioneers in education in the arts might also view the Carnegie Commission’s recent anointing of the arts as somewhat of a curse.94 One consequence of the imitation by the broader academic culture is that the colleges founded to give form to the aesthetic impulse have had perhaps an even harder time surviving than the other offbeat enterprises we are discussing here. For one thing, the polarization in terms of sex which relegated creative expression to the female domain has greatly moderated; with men encouraged to develop what would once have been thought “feminine” aspects of themselves, colleges specializing in aesthetic expressivity for women have had to reconsider their mandate. . . .95
As higher education spread and as the specifically religious impulse waned [in the twentieth century], it is understandable that a few institutions of higher education began to see themselves as the principal expression of the values of community, even though they also operated as peripheral members of a system valuing competition and cognitive rationality. Community was one theme at Black Mountain College, along with the emphasis on the arts; and like other utopian communities, Black Mountain suffered a series of schisms in its search for wholeness. Schisms, in fact, seem to be part of the “natural history” of communal-expressive ventures. Such institutions generally begin with a charismatic leader who is often not good at balancing either books or interests and is subsequently expelled.
The full flowering of the communal-expressive movement in the several colleges that have been dominated by it occurred only with the growing influence of humanistic psychology. Much of the literature of humanistic psychology, including the journal of that name, focuses less on expressing its own particular ethos, than on differentiating itself from such major currents in psychology as behaviorism and traditional Freudian psychoanalysis. Its view of man tends to be Rousseauistic. Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, and a more distant and more intellectual mentor, Norman O. Brown, provided the movement with an ideology about the importance of the affective life. . . .96
Some of the spirit that animated Johnston College at its founding was also present at the birth of Evergreen State College several years later, but it is considerably attenuated now. However, the communal-expressive impulse was widespread, even though it was often short-lived and seldom established as the dominant metaphor of an entire institution. Seeds of the so-called human potential movement found life at the College Within at Tufts University, the Inner College of the University of Connecticut, at an Esalen-like Center at the University of Oregon, Bensalem College at Fordham University, and a variety of “living-learning” experiments from Old Westbury to Fresno State. Rochdale College, though not actually a degree-granting institution, was set up in an apartment house near Toronto University where resident members were required to contribute labor and hire their own teachers and administrators. The College of the Person in Washington, DC, advertised itself as a center for encounter, bodily awareness exercises, and Gestalt therapy “that will provide for emotional involvement and support, an opportunity to share feelings, perceptions, insights, love and concern.” . . .
In the late 1960s, the seminar table began to resemble the family dinner table.97 Affective relations came to outweigh intellectual competition, although students as well as their teachers were often ambivalent about awarding academic credit for such explorations. The purest realization of the Communal-Expressive style that we have encountered is . . . Kresge College at the University of California at Santa Cruz, which opened in 1970. Kresge appealed to students as “a living learning community which concerns itself with the human as well as the intellectual needs of its members.” . . .
Kresge strikes us as an experiment of integrity that deserves the careful attention of those who would hope that a better balance can be struck between feeling and intellect, and who believe that we have a great deal to learn about how to be more cooperative without sacrificing essential human diversity.
If the communal-expressive colleges have identified principally with the counterculture, the colleges dominated by political activism in the 1960s have been at odds with the counterculture’s softness, its emphasis on consensus. They sought change in the society, less consciously in themselves. In the early days of Students for a Democratic Society, the two currents were fused, and often confused; members sought expressive comradeship as well as specific political mobilization and change.
Even now, with the receding wave of protest, departments at many universities, eminent and non-elite alike, are dominated by faculty who were “radicalized” in the 1960s, often, of course, with leadership from the few charismatic elders.98 As Carnegie Commission surveys of faculty attitudes show, there are dramatic differences among fields, with sociology at one extreme and engineering or veterinary medicine at another. But if one asks not about enclaves within major institutions, but rather about colleges founded by or dominated by activist-radicals, then the list is short indeed. . . .
The 1920s saw the founding of the college which was to become in the 1960s the most visible and highly charged base for political activism of any college in America. Antioch College (as it was later reconstituted by Arthur Morgan) represents an ideal-typical instance of the activist-radical college. Its commitment to extramural action began in the 1920s with its focus on the co-op program by which Antioch students spent alternate terms on and off campus in work programs. These programs were not, as were those designed for non-affluent students at Northeastern University or University of Cincinnati, designed to help them finance their education; in fact, their education at parental expense was in effect prolonged in order to help immerse them more fully in the dilemmas and contradictions of American life. Although the work program even to this day has not been fully integrated into the Antioch curriculum, the ideology of the program under the aegis of Arthur Morgan reflected an attempt to get away from bookishness, to provide mentors for students other than scholarly faculty, for whom, in fact, Arthur Morgan had an almost philistine lack of respect.99
Antioch was neither founded by radicals originally, nor was it in fact refounded by them during the era of Arthur Morgan. But it has been committed to social, political, and curricular change since that refounding, and in the 1960s it experienced with particular intensity the commitment of a large part of its faculty and student body to using the college for the political ends of the far left. Antioch expanded early, as a few other colleges did, to serve minority groups and had a small cadre committed to expressive-communitarian ideals that were now avowedly political. The college was never wholly “radicalized,” but the largest single unit on the campus, although not formally a department, came to be the Marxist-oriented Institute for the Solution of Social Problems. . . .100
Antioch’s complex metamorphoses have outrun our own ability to keep pace. Although we had prepared a chapter on Antioch for this volume, we later decided that the College for Human Services would be in some ways a better illustration of the activist-radical model. CHS, as nearly everyone refers to it, was founded on the lower West Side of New York in 1965 by an extraordinary woman, Audrey Cohen. . . . As at Antioch, students sometimes find it more tempting to try to change the college than the world outside, and the College for Human Services suffered a series of strikes in the early 1970s. But, perhaps because neither student nor faculty rebels had any tenure at CHS, and because Audrey Cohen did not hesitate to show some the door, the experiment not only survived but grew stronger. The curriculum, under development for more than a decade, demands a dedication approaching sainthood from its students. But it is also one of the most ingenious we have seen in terms of engaging students in a carefully articulated series of practical challenges.101
Antioch and the College for Human Services illustrate different strains of the activist radical movement. Antioch, in its Marxist Institute for the Solution of Social Problems, was more grandly revolutionary for a brief time, but was not grounded in any stern tradition of radicalism. There has never been any very powerful endemic Socialist movement in America. . . . The College for Human Services is closer to the impulses of Jane Addams and the early settlement-house leaders than it is to Marxist or more specifically radical political movements. . . .
Our typology emphasizes the differences among the telic reforms. But the commonalties are also striking. Each of these experiments has a sense of mission. We suspect that many faculty who are attracted to them are not only dissatisfied with competitive life in the multiversity but yearn for a sense of identity and esprit. They want to join an institution that is capable of evoking the deep loyalties of the whole self and of engendering all-out efforts. They want to believe. A visitor is immediately aware of the basic choices participants have exercised. Bridges have been cut; commitments have been made, and ideals are continually tested, including those of the visitor.
A spirit of vocation and intensity about teaching permeates these communities, partly as a result of the jettisoning of research and publication norms, but also from the growth of a new sense of mission. Of course, new ideals may fade for individuals if not institutions, and faculty who have sacrificed much in their own conversion often hide even from themselves the hurt they feel when their offerings are rejected by the intended acolytes. Yet there is some protection against such wounds since the expertise of the teacher is de-emphasized. In all these radical experiments, teachers and students are seen as co-learners: at St. John’s students and tutors puzzle out the great texts together and at Black Mountain they joined others in creating paintings and poems. The egalitarian spirit does not deny to teachers all authority, although the grounds of that authority do not lie in disciplinary expertise in the way that they do in the university colleges. . . .
What does mark these colleges off from most modern universities is the devotion to community. Bonds of community are nourished by reinforcing participation in the full round of life, whether at the Friday night lecture at St. John’s or the kin-group meeting at Kresge. At three of these institutions, there are no departments to compete for students. The important judgments have to do with whether students measure up to the ideals of the college, not whether they perform well according to the traditional standards developed by a departmentally organized faculty.102
Like the popular reforms, the telic experiments are bound together in their aversions to the multiversity model, but their arena is wider than that of the enemy—their hope is to create some notion of the good life whether in the Platonic or the Rogerian mode.
It is in this deepest sense that these institutions are “trans-disciplinary,” i.e., there is some notion of an end or a good to which academic disciplines are subordinate. Their sense of mission is reflected in the forms of teaching, too. At St. John’s there is the belief that disciplines serve as falsifying lenses through which students preconceive and are likely to misconceive the “natural articulations of the intellectual world. . . . This college chooses to overcome these institutionalized prejudgments by substituting fundamental books for departments and elementary skills for disciplines.”103 The mixed-media event was born at Black Mountain, where poets, musicians, dancers, actors—and on occasion stray dogs—joined together to create productions. At Kresge, the disciplines were viewed as subordinate to the task of building community, and at CHS, subordinate to the aim of discovering the generic competencies of the “humane professional.” . . .
In the telic reforms, disciplines in the narrow sense are subordinate to—and usually exist in uneasy tension with—the broad authority that establishes “the moving spirit of the whole group.”104 That authority defines the relation between the student and the community into which he is being inducted. In what we have called the neo-classical model, the authority rests in the wisdom of the Socratic elders as interpreters of the texts of the liberal tradition. The young tutor who questions the selection of any particular reading or its relations to other aspects of the St. John’s program is told to be patient: in time he will come to see the wisdom of the choice in the larger scheme of things. For the aesthetic-expressive model, the authority lies in submission to the sensibilities of the master artists. They determine what counts as art and what kind of community discipline will best sustain the tradition of artistic innovation. In the communal-expressive case, the authority derives from the charisma of the founding prophet or guru, the one who can win the devotion of followers to a particular notion of a nurturing community. . . .
The activist-radical model is grounded in an agenda of social or political reform, and the discipline lies in the experience of learning to effect change. The student at the College for Human Services must perform “constructive actions” that result in benefits to clients. The authority attaches to the one who creates a vision of a better society and who acts to bring about change in the desired direction. In the extreme case it is the author of the revolution; in democratic situations it is the one whose program of reform wins the most adherents or votes. Challenges to the authority of the activist-radical inevitably turn on the question of whether one is trying to understand the world or to change it, and at the College for Human Services the curriculum is based on the idea that one will understand it best by trying to change it.
We speak of the transcendent, and even this brief overview hints at the utopian strains that run through these reform movements. The utopian impulses are strong, representing a search for a more perfect union that, as we have noted, often leads to disunion and schism. Because the founders have made radical choices, not leaving many options open in the way that the contemporary university does, the alternative to opposition is withdrawal. . . .
In contrast to our discussion of the telic reforms, our effort here is to suggest the major lines of the popular reforms that have brought widespread changes in curriculum and extracurriculum during the last dozen years. These do not involve a radical reorientation of institutional goals but affect the relations between students and faculty, the processes of education, and the context in which it takes place. . . .105 Only a very few institutions have stood unequivocally unaltered during the period of change that overtook both American society and its educational institutions in the 1960s and thereafter. While both individual students and institutions have been unevenly affected by these changes, there is no doubt that almost everywhere requirements have been relaxed, the paths toward a degree have been made more multiple and open, and the gold standard of academic currency (in some cases more nominal than real) has been diluted by grade inflation. . . .
Only a very small proportion of faculty and students ever spent their time in protest meetings, rallies, and demonstrations, even on the more agitated campuses. Yet a small proportion of a very large base can still be a sizable—and threatening—number, and since many activist students were also among the more talented and dramaturgical, their activities had a stunning impact. . . . Students got onto boards of trustees (or invaded their meetings), drafted reports proposing educational reforms, and campaigned ceaselessly in fiery columns in the student papers for alterations in the established ways of conducting academic business.
The changes brought about in this manner are those we are terming “popular reforms.” They included changes in curriculum, which not only introduced black and other ethnic studies and later women’s studies, but also provided opportunities for credit for off-campus work. . . . Among the new institutions founded during the sixties, some had no traditional departments and emphasized interdisciplinary programs or contract-based individuated learning. Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington; New Jersey’s Stockton State and Ramapo Colleges; the College of Old Westbury in the State University of New York system; Hampshire College; the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, were all non-departmental in original structure. Johnston College of the University of Redlands, Sterling University in Ottawa, Kansas, and many others emphasized nontraditional learning for what Patricia Cross has termed the “new students.”106 Adults and especially older women returning to or finishing college were given the opportunity to participate in individuated programs at places like Empire State College of the State University of New York or Minnesota Metropolitan University.
Yet these new colleges and new programs did not drive out the old. . . . What has happened in fact is that the college curriculum has been expanded. At some colleges, for example, black and other ethnic studies have been added as the result of student and often faculty and administration pressures; often these are organized in new departments, though they may draw on the knowledge base and faculty of existing departments. Women’s studies, both within established departments such as history, sociology, psychology, economics, and as separate departments and majors, have spread with extraordinary speed, and are served by a whole new outpouring of texts and scholarly journals. Environmental studies (around which the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay and the College of the Atlantic initially organized their entire curricula) have been seen as a way to respond to interest in the environment; and law schools have added courses in environmental law, medical schools in environment-related subjects, and schools of education, adopting a different focus, have added departments of “learning environments.” The interest in the environment has been seen by natural scientists as a way of attracting students with “relevant” subject matter.
It is clear that to an uneven extent the major or field of concentration has lost, however, a good deal of its earlier rigidity. In fields like mathematics and chemistry, sequences remain. But in less technical departments, students can fulfill academic requirements in a greater variety of ways than before: with courses in related departments; with so-called experiential off-campus learning; or with self-paced courses, in which, according to the Carnegie Council survey, 30 percent of the nation’s students have participated. The pass/no credit option, favored by a majority of the students in 1969, is now favored by only a third, but the surveys report that nearly half have made use of it. Still the major stands as the focus of the average student’s academic experience, in part because of the increasing vocational pressures felt by undergraduates in recent years. What has dramatically changed is the place of any kind of general education or core curriculum; in all but a few institutions, the hold of the curriculum as a set of more or less systematic pathways toward a baccalaureate degree has become attenuated. Grade inflation and the loosening of requirements have weakened the role of faculty members and departments as gatekeepers of the degree (and whatever honors may be bestowed along with it). In the language of the student movement, students have “gained control over the decisions which affect their own lives”; in the language of the market, the student consumer has become king . . .
We state at the outset our tentative conclusion: that the most widespread and significant impact of the educational upheaval of the sixties was to bring about a considerably greater degree of autonomy for students.107 They were free to plan their courses of study in a way they had never done before. The most important change was the virtual or complete abolition of fixed requirements in many departments and of mandatory distribution requirements, whether of breadth or depth, including class attendance and the time, mode, and kinds of credits needed to secure a baccalaureate degree. . . .108 With the end of the draft, the “stop-out” again became a possibility for male students, and upper middle-class women liberated enough to be on their own often followed suit. Even in the selective residential institutions, the notion of a curriculum built around four consecutive years began to seem almost archaic. . . .
It should be noted in this connection that central to these reforms is what we might term the sanitized transcript, which erases all incompletes, tentatives, and failing grades, and records only successes. However, the pass/no credit option has in the last few years become increasingly less satisfying, or is used by diligent students to provide leeway for even harder work, for example, on essential pre-med courses.109 The Buckley Amendment, which permits students to see their own files and what has been written about them, only carried further the institutionalization of the sanitized transcript. . . .
As with many empirically based typologies, it is far from easy to draw a line between the telic reforms and the nationwide sweep of what we have termed the [popular] movement toward an over-optioned life. One way of looking at the latter group of changes is to see them as bringing to the smaller institutions, such as regional state or local private colleges, some of the benefits as well as some of the drawbacks of the multiversity. In educational units within the multiversity, as in the deregulated liberal-arts colleges, the options sought and retained by students vary greatly, as does the holding power of institutions against the inevitable lessening of loyalty on the part of both students and faculty. . . .
Political protests—particularly on those leading campuses that were for a time under siege—no doubt also affected faculty dispositions. . . . Thus the pedagogical left, like the political left, was not just a student movement. A sizable percentage of the faculty were convinced of the need for relaxations in the curriculum that would permit more experiment and innovation. And many believed that student-directed education was the best kind of education. . . .
[A]dded to the curriculum were not only new subjects based on scientific developments and on student pressures, but also new opportunities for work in the performing arts (a necessity in the men’s colleges which went coed) as well as credit in liberal arts colleges for activities once considered vocational, such as preparation for schoolteaching, or, within sociology departments, for field work in social agencies or probation departments. Still, if one compares catalogs of today with those of a dozen years ago, in general one sees the same departments along with the new additions, and, notably and advantageously, some movement away from a too exclusive emphasis on the Western World. . . . It should be clear that these changes, though offensive to traditionalist faculty, are not invariably changes for the worse. . . .
[W]e conclude that the popular reforms of the sixties are here to stay, even though enthusiasm for them has greatly ebbed. . . . What remains is the patternless multiversity where such coherence as exists is intradepartmental and where, as a result of the popular reforms, the minority of students who want to create their own individuated program find neither help nor hindrance in doing so.
1. Robert E. Spiller, “Higher Education and the War,” The Journal of Higher Education 13 (1942): 287.
2. Donald J. Cowling, “The Preservation of Liberal Education in Time of War,” Association of American Colleges Bulletin 29 (1943): 187–91.
3. Meta Glass, “How Shall the College Curriculum be Adjusted to Wartime Conditions and Needs?” Association of American Colleges Bulletin 28 (1942): 554. Glass was speaking at the National Institute on Education and the War, held in Washington, DC in August, 1942, under the auspices of the United States Office of Education.
4. James P. Baxter III, “Commission on Liberal Education Report,” Association of American Colleges Bulletin 29 (1943): 269–74.
5. “The Post-War Responsibilities of Liberal Education: Report of the Committee on the Re-Statement of the Nature and Aims of Liberal Education,” Association of American Colleges Bulletin 29 (1943): 275–99.
6. General Education in a Free Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1945), pp. 27–35, 42–53, 66, 76–8, 92ff.
7. Gordon K. Chalmers, “Report on a Work in Progress: Education, the Redefinition of Liberal Education,” Association of American Colleges Bulletin 32 (1946): 60.
8. See George E. Ganss, Saint Ignatius’s Idea of a Jesuit University (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1954), p. 269; George N. Shuster, “Introduction,” in The Idea of a University, by John Henry Newman (New York: Doubleday, 1959), p. 39; Paul Hirst, “Liberal Education and the Nature of Knowledge,” in Philosophical Analysis and Education, ed. Reginald A. Archambault (New York: Humanities Press, 1965), pp. 116–21; John S. Brubacher and Willis Rudy, Higher Education in Transition: A History of American Colleges and Universities, 1636–1976, 3d ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), p. 303.
9. Gerald Grant and David Riesman, The Perpetual Dream: Reform and Experiment in the American College (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 183.
10. Sarah V. Barnes, “The ‘Experimental’ Liberal Education for Women at Purdue University, 1939–1947” (unpublished typescript, 2000). Printed by permission of the author.
11. Purdue’s first class of students in 1874 included no women. The following year the institution became coeducational, although it was not until 1920 that women represented more than 10 percent of the student body. Beginning in the early 1920s, land-grant institutions (in this case including state universities) were relatively hospitable toward women, both as students and faculty. Susan B. Carter, “Academic Women Revisited: An Empirical Study of Changing Patterns of Women’s Employment as College and University Faculty, 1890–1963,” Journal of Social History 14 (1981): 675–97.
12. By the late 1930s a handful of women were enrolled in Agriculture and Engineering. One woman earned a B.S. in Agriculture in 1939, and by 1943 two women had earned engineering degrees.
13. Born in Chicago, Elliott (1874–1960) earned a B.S. and an M.A. in chemistry at the University of Nebraska. After serving as a teacher and administrator in Colorado public schools from 1897 to 1903, he pursued graduate work at Teachers College, Columbia University, for two years. He then became professor of education at the University of Wisconsin (1905–1916); chancellor of the University of Montana system (1916–1922); and president of Purdue University (1922–1945).
14. Born in Kansas, Amelia Earhart (1897–1937), the famed aviator, disappeared over the Pacific Ocean, attempting to fly solo around the world in 1937.
15. Lillian Moller Gilbreth (1878–1972), born in Oakland, California, earned a B.A. at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1900 and a Ph.D. in psychology from Brown University in 1915. In 1939 Purdue had twenty-four female faculty members at the rank of assistant professor or above and twenty-four female instructors. Including both categories, women represented 8 percent of the total faculty.
16. Raised in Missouri, Dorothy C. Stratton (1907–2006) earned a B.A. at Ottawa University, Kansas, an M.A. in education from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. at Teachers College, Columbia University. In 1933 President Elliott brought her from teaching high school in California to become the second Dean of Women at Purdue.
17. After graduating with the B.A. from Mount Holyoke College, Helen Hazelton received professional training in the Department of Hygiene at Wellesley College and taught for four years at Northwestern University. In 1929 Hazelton completed an M.A. at Teachers College, Columbia University, and was appointed Professor and Director of Physical Education at Purdue.
18. On the contemporaneous situation of women seeking a B.A. course but being forced to choose among vocational programs, see selection #57 from John Dewey, et al., The Curriculum for the Liberal Arts College (1931), pt. II.
19. The fundamental objectives of the experimental curriculum were stated as follows: “The program is designed to train select groups of young women for intelligent leadership in whatever communities, large or small, urban or rural, they may be placed after college. Since science plays so predominant a part in molding the modern world, a keen interest in scientific problems and a sensitive appreciation of the part which the contributions of scientists play in our daily lives are deemed essential for such leadership. . . . Moreover, if these young women are to be influential members of their respective communities, they must be trained in the science and art of human relations. That implies possession of sympathetic understanding of their fellow human beings, with an ability to present their own ideas in an effective fashion. College should prepare students for a life of personal satisfaction as well as for effectiveness as members of society. The cultured person turns to literature and the arts as a sure source of pleasure. Every normal individual derives satisfaction from a vocation for which he feels himself well fitted. Included among the chief objectives of this program are the development of esthetic [sic] appreciation and the intelligent choice of a vocation.”
20. In the words of its report, “The Committee found that it was practically impossible to consider separately the needs of women as different from men when it came to general education, but proceeded to limit the study to women at Purdue, since that was the original assignment.”
21. Dorothy A. Bovée received her B.S. (1921), M.S. (1930), and Ph.D. (1943) from the University of Minnesota. During her tenure at Purdue, she married a younger man, shocking the conservative communities of Purdue and West Lafayette. In about 1948 Dr. Bovée left with her husband for California, and by the early 1950s was serving as an associate professor and chairperson of the department of education at Mills, a women’s college near San Francisco, where she retired in 1964.
22. Compare this 1945 committee report to the 1943 report “The Nature and Purpose of Liberal Education” from the Association of American Colleges and the 1945 committee report of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, General Education in a Free Society, both of which are discussed in the introduction to Section IX.
23. Barnes observes, “Although no record exists of the reasons for her departure, one can speculate that Dr. Bovée, who had not participated in the original planning stages of the program, did not agree with the decision to admit men.”
24. C. S. Boucher, “Current Changes and Experiments in Liberal-Arts Colleges,” in McHale, et al., Changes and Experiments in Liberal-Arts Education (Bloomington, IL: Public School Publishing, 1932), pp. 10–1.
25. Aydelotte, Breaking the Academic Lock Step, pp. 36–7.
26. Frank Aydelotte, Breaking the Academic Lock Step: The Development of Honors Work in American Colleges and Universities (New York: Harper, 1944), pp. 1–19, 32–4, 42–4. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
27. The neglect of liberal education during war-time is caused by necessity. What are the motives, implied by Aydelotte, for neglecting liberal education after the war?
28. Aydelotte does not provide citations to his quotations or references, many of which are drawn from Elizabethan literature, his scholarly specialty. This quotation is from Shakespeare, MacBeth, act 3, sc. 5, 1. 35.
29. This phrase comes from the description of life in a state of war by English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) in Leviathan, ch. 13, pt. 9.
30. Stephen Leacock (1869–1944), a Canadian economist and political scientist who received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1903 and taught at McGill University (1903–1936), became famous for writing humor, which began to appear in Literary Lapses (1910).
31. Compare Plato’s and Aristotle’s analyses of means and ends in education to that of Aydelotte.
32. Many advocates of liberal education do not associate it with “freedom and individualism.” Does Aydelotte’s defense for liberal education require this association?
33. Or, has the theory been that all people share a common nature?
34. Is “the theory that each person is unique” the same as “the theory . . . that each deserves to have his own powers developed to the fullest possible extent?”
35. What is Aydelotte definition of “technical” education?
36. According to Aydelotte, what is excessively regimented and what is excessively free in liberal education? And what should be regimented and what free, instead?
37. Is Aydelotte persuasive in attempting to reconcile democracy and honors education?
38. This standardization emerged at the end of the nineteenth century to provide students access to a wide variety of colleges and universities across the country and allowed students to move between institutions, once enrolled. Are these benefits outweighed by the problems that Aydelotte attributes to standardization?
39. What is the proper role of extracurricular activities in liberal education? Do these activities, in fact, cultivate “independence and initiative” more than academics?
40. Should the “standards” of liberal education be constant or change to fit the nature of the student population?
41. How is this “most serious problem confronting American higher education today” related to the overarching problem of the “academic lock-step”?
42. Similarly, Columbia University “was committed to a parallel organization in the Sciences,” but “institutional and staffing difficulties confounded the various efforts to create such general education science courses,” as reported in Daniel Bell’s selection #54.
43. See An Adventure in Education, by the Swarthmore College Faculty (New York: Macmillan, 1941), chs. 10, 12.
44. Willis Rudy, The Evolving Liberal Arts Curriculum: A Historical Review of Basic Themes (New York: Teachers College Press, 1960), pp. 39–47, 85–114. Reprinted by permission of Teachers College Press. The wording in this selection has been adapted at points.
45. Charles W. Eliot, “The Case against Compulsory Latin,” Atlantic Monthly (Mar. 1917): 360–1. Eliot’s views reflect the development that the various fields of engineering began to require a bachelor’s degree at this time.
46. See C. Wright Mills, White Collar, The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), pp. 131.
47. This theme became central in Christopher Jencks and David Riesman, The Academic Revolution (New York: Doubleday, 1968), which provides the background for selection #64 by Gerald Grant and David Riesman.
48. William L. Bryan, “The Liberal Arts College in the State University,” Association of American Colleges Bulletin 17(1931): 128–9.
49. A study of 105 liberal arts colleges from across the country found that only one had established some form of independent study in 1910. By 1940, however, more than one-third of the total had provided such options. [Orrin T. Richardson, “Requirements for Bachelor’s Degrees, 1890–1940” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1946), pp. 34–5.] Rudy observed that “a similar trend may be noted in the colleges which we have surveyed for the period 1905–1955.”
50. The vocationalism that Rudy regards here and below as the predominant motive for the flourishing of honors work is distinguished from honors work by Frank Aydelotte in selection #60.
51. Richardson, “Requirements for Bachelor’s Degrees, 1890–1940,” p. 16.
52. George W. Pierson, Yale College: An Educational History, 1871–1921 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), pp. 44–5.
53. Harry E. Edwards, “Trends in the Development of the College Curriculum within the Area of the North Central Association, 1830–1930” (Ph.D. diss., University of Indiana, 1933), pp. 514–5.
54. Bruce Lambert, “Harold Taylor, Novel Educator and College President, Dies at 78,” New York Times (10 February 1993).
55. See the introduction to the selection by John Dewey et al. in selection #57, as well as Taylor’s account in “The Philosophical Foundations of General Education,” pp. 21–45, in General Education, Part I, The Fifty-First Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, ed. Nelson B. Henry (Chicago: NSSE, 1952).
56. Ellen W. Schecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 109.
57. Willis D. Weatherford, Jr., “Introduction,” in The Goals of Higher Education, pp. 3–5.
58. The New School for Social Research was founded in 1919; its first director was historian James Harvey Robinson (1863–1936), who participated in the 1931 conference on progressive liberal education at Rollins College described in selection #57.
59. Harold Taylor, “Individualism and the Liberal Tradition” (1958), pp. 9–12, 24–5, in The Goals of Higher Education, ed. Willis D. Weatherford, Jr. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960). Reprinted by permission of the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
60. John Dewey, the Pragmatist philosopher whose ideas informed both Sarah Lawrence College and Harold Taylor, dated the association between liberalism and liberal education to the 1920s, observing, “Today the word liberal is applied to an educational institution to denote opposition to the reactionary and ultraconservative, not to denote just preoccupation with intellectual and ideal matters. The word has taken on economic and political significance in connection with the human struggle for economic independence and political emancipation.” John Dewey, “The Prospects of the Liberal College” (1924), reprinted in Joann Boydston, John Dewey, The Middle Works, 1899–1924, vol. 15 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983): 200. A similar view is expressed by President Hamilton Holt (1872–1951) of Rollins College, another progressive liberal arts college, in “Liberalizing a Liberal Education,” in Kathryn McHale, et al., Changes and Experiments in Liberal-Arts Education (Bloomington, IL: Public School Publishing, 1932), pp. 221–8.
61. Or is it the case that “education is not a practice which concerns the individual alone: it is essentially a function of the community.” Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture (1933), tr. Gilbert Highet, 2nd English ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1945), v. 1, pp. xiii–xiv.
62. Hence, in their battle against the electivism of Harvard President Charles W. Eliot, leaders of Catholic colleges maintained that “electivism was Protestantism applied to education.” Rev. J. J. Howard of the College of the Holy Cross, in “Alumni Pleased,” Boston Globe (29 June 1900): 1.
63. Henri Bergson (1859–1941), French philosopher; Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), English philosopher; Alfred North Whitehead (1867–1947), English philosopher; George Santayana (1863–1952), United States philosopher.
64. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Austrian founder of psychoanalysis; Carl G. Jung (1875–1961), Swiss psychiatrist; Alfred Adler (1870–1937), Austrian psychiatrist.
65. Martha Graham (1895–1991), leader and performer of modern dance in the United States; Dylan Thomas (1914–1953), Welsh poet; Frank Lloyd Wright (1869–1959), United States architect.
66. Taylor does not provide a reference, but the point, if not the quotation, comes from the concluding chapter addressing the nature of “experience” in William James, Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), v. 2, ch. 28.
67. Survey and orientation courses had been introduced some three decades earlier, as described in the introduction to Edgar Robinson’s selection #55.
68. Material in this biography is drawn “Paul Oskar Kristeller,” Boston Globe (11 June 1999): E15. The quotation is from C. B. Schmitt, “The Philosophical Mode,” Times Literary Supplement (25 July 1980): 856.
69. Paul O. Kristeller, “Liberal Education and Western Humanism,” Liberalism and Liberal Education, vol.5, no.1, Seminar Reports, Program of General Education in the Humanities, Columbia University (Fall 1976), pp. 15–22. Reprinted by permission of Columbia University.
70. Thucydides (c. 460–c. 400 B.C.), Greek historian of Athens, wrote about the Peloponnesian War.
71. A contrasting view addressing liberalism in general, various kinds of liberalism in particular, and liberal education, as well as their inter-relationships, may be found in the companion essay: Charles Frankel, “Intellectual Foundations of Liberalism,” Liberalism and Liberal Education, pp. 3–11.
72. Compare the views expressed by Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich and Jane Roland Martin in the Introduction and by Mary Louise Pratt in selection #66.
73. See the introduction to Section IV and selection #25 by Pier Paolo Vergerio and selection #26 by Ignatius Loyola.
74. This rivalry is the subject of the thirteenth-century poetical ballad: Henri d’Andeli, The Battle of the Seven Arts: A French Poem by Henri d’Andeli, tr. Louis J. Paetow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1914).
75. See “Rules for Men and Women Teaching in Grammar Schools” (c. 1357) in selection #22.
76. Kristeller’s account is demonstrated by On the Method of Instruction (1511), composed by Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536), Dutch scholar and humanist.
77. Diophantus (c. A.D. 250) Greek algebrist; Strabo (c. 63 B.C.–c. A.D. 20) Greek geographer.
78. Bathsua Reginald Makin in selection #30 and Emma Willard in selection #35 note the import of this indispensability for women.
79. This point is echoed by Robert Hutchins in selection #58 and Jeremiah Day in selection #37. What should be the relationship between liberal education and contemporary culture?
80. Compare Plato’s rationale in his selection (526c) in Section I for putting mathematics at the core of the liberal arts.
81. Compare Kristeller’s personal experience with Harold Taylor’s view of liberal education above.
82. Lionel Trilling in selection #53 and Daniel Bell in selection #54 recount the inception of general education at Columbia University.
83. Compare the views of Robert Hutchins in selection #58 and of Charles Eliot, addressing the study of German philosophy, in selection #40.
84. Gerald Grant and David Riesman, The Perpetual Dream: Reform and Experiment in the American College (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 15–37, 179–91, 204–13, 216. Reprinted by permission of the University of Chicago Press.
85. Why do Grant and Riesman call these “popular reforms” given that they arose “in the most selective colleges and universities?”
86. Christopher Jencks and David Riesman, The Academic Revolution (New York: Doubleday, 1968).
87. Jencks and Riesman introduced the term “university college” in The Academic Revolution to denote colleges whose faculties had adopted the values and mores of the faculty at the research universities.
88. What is the conceptual distinction between the “popular” and “telic” reforms?
89. On the founding of St. Johns, see the introduction to selection #58.
90. Aporia is the state of doubt, or perplexity, that one enters upon encountering a problem or puzzle that cannot be resolved. Socrates was said to reduce his interlocutors to aporia through his relentlessly probing questions.
91. Quotation is from Hannah Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture,” Social Research, 38, no. 3 (Autumn 1971), who makes a point in this essay that would find great favor at St. John’s: “Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining and reflecting upon whatever happens to come to pass, . . . be of such a nature that it ‘conditions’ men against evil doing?” p. 148.
92. Eva Brann, “What are the Beliefs and Teachings of St. John’s College?” The Collegian, St. John’s College (May 1975): 10. See selection #65 from the 2007–2008 catalog of St. John’s, introduced by Eva Brann.
93. Syracuse University, which in 1873 established the first degree-granting professional school of art, was an early exception to this pattern.
94. See Clark Kerr, “The Carnegie Commission Looks at the Arts,” Arts in Society 11 (1974): 190–97.
95. On this point, see the discussion of Jane Roland Martin in the Introduction.
96. Carl Rogers (1902–1987), humanistic psychologist who developed client-centered counseling; Abraham Maslow (1908–1970), founder of humanistic psychology; Norman O. Brown (1913–2002), classicist and philosopher who wrote on psychoanalytic themes.
97. This analogy is drawn from Craig Eisendrath’s and Thomas J. Cottle’s discussion in Out of Discontent: Visions of the Contemporary University (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1972), pp. 56–8.
98. For accounts by various hands of the impact of student protest on an array of more or less prominent colleges and universities, see David Riesman and Verne Stadtman, eds., Academic Transformation: Seventeen Institutions under Pressure (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972); Seymour M. Lipset, Rebellion in the University (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971).
99. Arthur E. Morgan (1878–1975), a civil engineer, became a trustee of Antioch in 1919, when it was on the brink of bankruptcy. Appointed to lead the reorganization committee to find a new president, he assumed the position himself in 1920 and became president of the Progressive Education Association in the following year. Disappointed in the faculty’s reluctance to follow his vision for thoroughgoing experiential and vocational education, Morgan stepped down in 1933, and worked in a number of domestic and international public service and advocacy roles until his death.
100. Given that Antioch College went bankrupt and closed in 2008, it may be asked whether any of these telic reforms are financially viable.
101. See Audrey Cohen, “The Founding of a New Profession: The Human Service Professional” (New York: unpublished paper, 19 June 1974), Educational Resources Information Center doc. #ED136171.
102. Yet, to the extent that such a judgment of the “whole” student reflects an “ideal,” it can be deeply wounding, especially if the idealistic judgment leads to exclusion from the group. Departmental verdicts based on “traditional” academic standards can be discounted to some extent.
103. Eva Brann, “What are the Beliefs and Teachings of St. John’s College?” p. 9.
104. Grant and Riesman draw these words of John Dewey from Kenneth D. Denne, “Authority in Education,” Harvard Educational Review 40 (1970): 385–410—“whose analysis of the authority of rule and authority of the expert helped us to clarify these distinctions.” A fundamental source for the analysis of authority in charismatic, sect-like, or other such “transcendent” communities is: Ernest Troelstch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, tr. Olive Wyon, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1931).
105. Is the distinction between the “telic” and “popular” reforms consistent?
106. See K. Patricia Cross, Beyond the Open Door (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1976).
107. Is this greater degree of autonomy beneficial or not? Has the autonomy diminished subsequently?
108. There remain a few traditional, usually small, liberal-arts colleges run by Protestant denominations (although virtually none that are Catholic) where class attendance is still required, where the very small size of the faculty can be used to limit options, and where curricular coherence has remained relatively “unliberated.”
109. The Carnegie Council studies show that, in 1969, 50 percent of undergraduates agreed strongly or with reservations that undergraduate education would be improved if grades were abolished; in 1975, 32 percent did. (Faculty percentages over the same period dropped from 34 percent to 19 percent.) See Martin Trow, Aspects of American Higher Education, 1969–1975: A Report for the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education (1977), table 3, p. 14.