Chapter 2
Puritan College
The earliest settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who arrived from England in 1630, spent six years putting roofs over their heads, planting crops, building churches, and establishing a civil government before they could address the cause of higher education. But in the spirit of creating the “city on a hill” described by their leader, John Winthrop, as they crossed the Atlantic on the Arbella, in 1636 the Massachusetts General Court passed an act providing for a “schoale or colledge.” Governor Winthrop and eleven other appointed overseers identified a spot up the Charles River from Boston, in Newetowne, at Cow-yard.1
Newetowne was renamed Cambridge, and it was to England's University of Cambridge that the new college looked for its institutional DNA. The initial masters and benefactors of the school were Cambridge graduates. They included John Harvard, for whom the college was named after he died in 1638 and left it half of his estate of about £800 and his library of 329 books.
The vision of Harvard's founder's was grand: “the advancement of all good literature, arts, and sciences.”2 In the English tradition, Harvard was an all-male school (that would remain the case for more than three hundred years). Most of the students were young, the youngest in their middle teens. They studied classical subjects such as logic and rhetoric, via learning methods experienced by their Cambridge-trained instructors: readings, recitations, and, as the final hurdle to graduation, oral examinations.
Though Harvard modeled its curriculum and instruction on that of Cambridge and its sister institution Oxford, there were fundamental differences. The most significant was an overt sacred purpose and focus. The school was, to its core, a religious enterprise, intended to train future ministers. The Veritas motto now enshrined on its official seal replaced an earlier one, Christo et Ecclesiae: “For Christ and the Church.”3 In addition to other classical subjects, Harvard students studied the Greek and Hebrew necessary to read the early versions of the Bible, regardless of whether they intended to join the clergy.4 In the Puritan tradition, the instruction was dogmatic.
Harvard instilled moral character not only through classroom recitation of scriptural texts but also through devotionals such as morning and evening prayer as well as daily attendance at chapel, where the college president expounded on a chapter of scripture.5 Sunday, of course, was given over wholly to worship.
Harvard also differed from Cambridge and Oxford in its lack of what is generally considered scholarship, the discovery of new knowledge. Though it soon won recognition of its degrees by the established English universities—an early manifestation of the bigger-and-better tendency—Harvard operated at a much more modest level. For many years, it accepted tuition in the form of farm produce, including livestock.6 The faculty was small, a president plus two or three tutors, usually recent graduates awaiting ministerial appointments.7 No faculty member was qualified to give the kind of lectures offered at Cambridge and Oxford. The college did not grant Ph.D. degrees, and its master's degrees required little effort and were widely considered to be of low quality.8
To its credit, Harvard College was entirely student focused. Each tutor lived with his students; the instruction, formal and informal, ran from dawn to dusk. But no tutor was a subject matter expert. In fact, the tutors had studied no subject in more detail than their students would. Their value as instructors was that they had walked the same path already and were willing to tread it again, stride for stride with their charges. None could be called scholars in the modern sense of the term.9 Moreover, the instruction was inherently expensive, given that all learning occurred under direct supervision. The cost was affordable only because instructors were paid so little.
Though Harvard was destined to be one of the biggest and best universities in the world, in its earliest years its educational offering was modest. In the late seventeenth century, its key genetic traits could be characterized as shown in Table 2.1.
Table 2.1 Harvard's Initial DNA, 1636–1707
| Initial Traits | Implications |
| Small, face-to-face classes | High faculty-student intimacy |
| Low instructional efficiency | |
| Classical, religious instruction | High moral content in the curriculum |
| Narrow curriculum with low practicality for non-pastors | |
| Dogmatic instruction | |
| Nonspecialized faculty | High faculty empathy for learners |
| Low faculty expertise |
The Advent of Secularization and Specialization
In 1708 John Leverett became the first non-clergyman to preside over Harvard. Leverett knew the school well, having earned both B.A. and M.A. degrees and taught there for a dozen years. But he was a man of the world in the best sense, an accomplished jurist, politician, and military commander.
Leverett's appointment ended decades of weak and even absentee leadership at Harvard. His immediate predecessor had resigned due to illness, and the preceding president, Increase Mather, had spent little time in Cambridge during his nine years at the helm. Leverett brought welcome attention and energy to the job. In addition to promoting financial stability and student enrollment growth, he gently steered Harvard in a more secular and liberal direction than his sectarian predecessors would have countenanced.10 While striving to preserve the moral character of the school, Leverett established the first student club and the first student publication, The Telltale. He began a tradition of endowed faculty chairs, several of which were soon occupied by scholars who had been trained in England.
Leverett's decision to take Harvard down a more secular path was understandable. In addition to being all-too-often absent from his post, Increase Mather had played an indirect role in the Salem witch trials, in which his son Cotton was a central figure. Leverett recognized that a less Puritan Harvard would have broader appeal, particularly to students with no intention of becoming clergy, and that graduates educated in a more secular tradition might make greater contributions to civic leadership.
The move away from Puritan orthodoxy and dogma, and from the focus on clergy education, was a modification of Harvard's original DNA that brought both benefits and costs; the same was true of the introduction of endowed chairs, clearly a bigger-and-better move. That can be seen in the person of Isaac Greenwood, the first professor to occupy Harvard's chair of mathematics and natural philosophy. Greenwood had graduated from Harvard and gone on to study science in London before returning to Harvard. Fresh with knowledge of the latest scientific discoveries, Greenwood lectured of things not yet in print.11 His stories of Isaac Newton's experiments and observations represented a substantial improvement over the reading of Aristotelian texts. Greenwood's approach was the beginning in the United States of the college lecture, with students taking notes at the feet of an expert professor. Pedagogically, it represented a great advance over reading and rote recitation. Better still, Greenwood brought laboratory equipment into the classroom, for the first time in the history of American higher education demonstrating the principles he taught.12 He was Harvard's first modern scholar.
Greenwood's innovative approach was also the beginning, though, of divided faculty attention, with professors splitting their time between teaching students and exploring new discoveries in their specialized fields of knowledge. In some respects, the greater scholarly expertise was better for students, allowing them greater depth and practicality in their studies. However, it came at the expense of breadth of knowledge and student–teacher intimacy. Specialists such as Greenwood brought more relevant ideas to the classroom, but as mentors they were both narrower in their interests and more distant from the daily student experience. We can see that change to Harvard's DNA on many university campuses today.
The more immediate problem, in Greenwood's case, was his private life. After just ten years on the job, during which he published the country's first modern science textbook, he was fired for “various acts of gross intemperance, by excessive drinking.”13 Greenwood's moral weakness was unique among the faculty but indicative of a broader trend among students. The records of that time are, according to noted Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, “full of ‘drinking frolicks,’ poultry-stealing, profane cursing and swearing, card-playing, live snakes in tutors' chambers, bringing ‘Rhum’ into college rooms, and ‘shamefull and scandalous Routs and Noises for sundry nights in the College Yard.’”14
Harvard's classrooms continued to secularize under scholars such as Greenwood's successor, John Winthrop. Winthrop, second great-grandson and namesake of the founding governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was a first-rate scientist even by European standards. He was also unbound by religious orthodoxy, daring to speculate that disasters such as the great Lisbon earthquake on All Saints Day 1755 had natural rather than divine origins.15 For this he is recognized today as an early contributor to the science of seismology. At the time, “he attracted the opprobrium of the clergy, the admiration of Harvard students, and the curiosity of the laity.”16
The pursuit of discovery, which required a more secular view of the world, also required more academic specialization. That trend was evident among not only Harvard's professors but also its tutors. Beginning in 1767, tutors specialized by subject rather than spanning the entire curriculum.17 From the standpoint of subject matter expertise, the change represented a clear improvement. But the tendency toward curricular narrowing and pedagogical distancing, begun forty years earlier with Isaac Greenwood, was becoming genetically entrenched.
On the eve of the American Revolution, Harvard entered a nearly hundred-year period of relative drift and discontent. The first two presidents of this period were forced to resign, one for personal impropriety and the other for unpopularity with students.18 Their eleven successors did little better, presiding over terms marked by brevity, student dissatisfaction, and occasional tumult.
The end of Puritan domination of Harvard was signaled just after the turn of the nineteenth century, when Unitarians captured both the presidency and the school's divinity professorship. Though this pivotal event in the shift away from Calvinist orthodoxy embittered some supporters, it did not necessarily mean the end of religious reverence at Harvard, as pointed out by Morison:
Unitarianism of the Boston stamp was not a fixed dogma but a point of view that was receptive, searching, inquiring, and yet devout; a halfway house to the rationalistic and scientific point of view, yet a house built so reverently that the academic wayfarer could seldom forget that he had sojourned in a House of God.19
The rationalism of Unitarianism made for a more open, inquiring learning environment for both scholars and students, a cherished trait of today's universities. However, the classroom experience changed little. In the early 1800s, the college remained inbred, with nearly all of its instructors schooled exclusively at Harvard.20 The subjects of study and teaching methods stayed largely the same, as these former students replicated their classroom experiences for current ones.
There were exceptions to this rule, mainly in the form of a few brilliant instructors trained in Germany, then the scholarship capital of the world. There was, for example, Edward Everett, a professor of Greek who had studied at the University of Göttingen. One of his students, Ralph Waldo Emerson, lauded Everett's “great talent for collecting facts, and for bringing those he had to bear with ingenious felicity on the topic of the moment.”21 That “ingenious felicity,” though, apparently didn't embrace the gift of getting quickly to the point, nor of audience sensitivity. This was the same Everett who, having spoken for two hours before Lincoln's Gettysburg address, later confessed to President Lincoln, “I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”22
With the curriculum and pedagogy in relative limbo, Harvard failed to challenge or satisfy its best students. Charles Sumner, a Massachusetts senator and famed abolitionist, declared of his experience, “I am not aware that any one single thing is well taught to the Undergraduates of Harvard College.”23 Another alumnus, Andrew Peabody, who went on to become a Harvard professor and acting president, recalled, “A youth who was regular in his habits, and who made some sort of an answer, however wide of the mark, at half of his recitations, commonly obtained his degree.”24
In 1823 the discontent spilled over. That was the year of a “Great Rebellion” that resulted in the expulsion of thirty-seven students (more than half of the unruly graduating class) as they were on the verge of receiving their diplomas.25 The immediate cause of the rebellion, factional brawling over the chosen commencement speaker, was only the tip of an iceberg of dissatisfaction that had manifested itself for years in large-scale food fights and destructive pranks.
In 1825 Harvard president John Kirkland, a gentle pastor beloved by the students notwithstanding their dissatisfaction with the institution, responded to the discontent with seminal changes to the undergraduate curriculum. For the first time in nearly two hundred years, students were allowed to choose a subject; in place of part of the Latin and Greek requirements, they could opt for French, Italian, German, or Spanish.26 At the same time, control of the curriculum, which had resided with collegewide boards, was given over to newly created faculty departments. Putting responsibility for curriculum development with the specialists who knew the subject matter best, it was thought, would result in greater curricular innovation and thus better student learning experiences.
Departmentalization of the curriculum did in fact make for better individual courses. It also facilitated better scholarship, as academic specialists gathered into departments could more easily share ideas. But the introduction of departments also modified Harvard's DNA and was a de facto driver of the school's choices about its subject matter and scholarship. In the decades to come, the departmental structure would lead not only to broader study options and better scholarly research, but also to course offerings that both narrowed and proliferated. In addition, it would distance the academic disciplines from one another. Over time, the net effect would be to increase the cost and complexity of providing undergraduate education, particularly cross-disciplinary elements of the curriculum such as general or liberal education.27
The educational reforms of this era also included the introduction of grades, a tool for challenging indolent students and rewarding conscientious ones.28 In a related attempt to improve student behavior, a long summer vacation was introduced. Ironically, the traditional academic calendar was instituted at Harvard not for pedagogical reasons or even out of agricultural necessity but to accommodate student preferences.29 The theory was that disruptions such as the Great Rebellion occurred most often in hot weather; without modern air conditioning systems, it seemed safer to send students home during the summer months.30 In those days, when faculty salaries and building costs were relatively low, the cost of a long summer break was modest. Before long, though, the truncated academic calendar would become much more expensive.
Notwithstanding these significant innovations, the Harvard curriculum remained relatively rigid and stale. In many cases, faculty preference for the established order thwarted proposed curriculum changes. Professors at Harvard found support in an influential report issued in 1828 by Yale University that reasserted the primacy of the classical curricular model that allowed students little or no choice of subject matter.31 In New Haven, Connecticut, as well as Cambridge, Massachusetts, recitation, the rote restatement of reading and lecture material, continued as the dominant pedagogy. Greek remained the language of distinction, a requirement not only for graduation but also for admission.32
Though the Industrial Revolution transformed the greater Boston area to a degree seen in few other places, Harvard College changed little more in the nineteenth century than it had in the eighteenth. One reason for Harvard's reluctance to innovate may have been the relative failure of experiments by Benjamin Franklin at what would become the University of Pennsylvania and by Thomas Jefferson at the University of Virginia. Both men were ahead of their time with innovations such as an elective, science-heavy curriculum and division of the university into separate colleges. These innovations were prescient, as we'll see, but premature for the faculty of these institutions.
Harvard's commitment to its traditional model of higher education was also a reaction to developments in the world beyond the academy. The more things changed around them, the more academic scholars found a sense of stability and safety in the classical tradition. The supposed virtue of the ancients was seen as an antidote to the venality of the new commerce. Thus, the most respected institutions were the slowest to innovate. Higher education advanced during this period, but not at Harvard or its sister schools. For example, the forerunner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world's largest scientific society and the publisher of the prestigious journal Science, was founded not by scholars at Harvard or Yale but at the fledgling U.S. Military Academy at West Point by two dozen cadets.33
Even during this period of relative drift, Harvard made notable changes that helped lay the foundation for the university to come. Professional schools were established in medicine (1782), divinity (1816), law (1817), science (1847), and dentistry (1867). National searches led to the hiring of more-qualified faculty not only for these professional schools but for the college as well. Both professional schools outside of the college and recruitment of the best professors became important elements of Harvard's DNA, though their full effects weren't immediately apparent. For example, the specialized professional schools, which did not then require completion of a college degree, became competitive alternatives to a liberal college education, increasing pressure on the college to introduce more specialized curriculum. Similarly, national searches for faculty heightened the emphasis on scholarship as a selection criterion, in part because research publication and scholarly distinction were more easily measured than teaching effectiveness.
Harvard also established itself during this time as a premier fund-raising organization. The robust New England economy produced new fortunes, and Harvard received large donations not only from its alumni but also from more-distant admirers. From the beginning, the school's presidents established the expectation that they would retain discretion in the use of these donations, though that would prove more and more difficult over time.34 By the turn of the twentieth century, Harvard's endowment comprised thousands of separate gift funds, many controlled by its deans rather than the president. Some donors with preferred personal causes placed narrow, legally binding restrictions on their gifts. Among present-day Harvard's restricted endowments is one limited to the acquisition of meteorite specimens. Another rewards the best essay on “the true spirit of book collecting.”35 Such narrowly restricted gifts, common in higher education today, are not only inaccessible for general university purposes but may require expenditures not provided for by the donor. Meteorites, for example, must be housed and cared for by curators.
Notwithstanding these seeds of future difficulty, Harvard's relatively unrestricted philanthropic support proved a boon when, in 1865, it severed financial ties with the government of Massachusetts, which had been agitating for curriculum and financial reform (some of which it achieved in the newly established Massachusetts Institute of Technology). The preference for donor rather than state-appropriated funds would become a dominant trait not only of Harvard but of other universities. As shown in Table 2.2, it was one of seven major genetic alterations during Harvard's first two hundred years that together made the institution more secular and specialized. In many respects, these alterations raised the quality of its academic activities, including the education of students. Harvard was getting bigger and better. However, it was also gradually becoming less focused on student instruction and more organizationally complex and resource hungry.
Table 2.2 Harvard's Evolving DNA, 1708–1868
| New Trait | Implications |
| Secularization | Freedom from dogma in academic inquiry |
| Increased practicality in the curriculum | |
| Tendency toward skepticism | |
| Subject matter specialization | Greater subject matter expertise and depth |
| Better scholarship | |
| Enhanced faculty credentials | |
| Diminished faculty focus on students | |
| Increased emphasis on curricular content and lecturing | |
| Increased instructional cost | |
| Departmentalization | Broader study options |
| Enhanced disciplinary collaboration | |
| Increased narrowing of scholarship and fragmentation of the curriculum | |
| Increased fragmentation of the faculty | |
| Long summer recess | Greater faculty research opportunities |
| Lower utilization of physical facilities | |
| Professional schools | Increased contribution to economic and social welfare |
| Specialized alternatives to liberal education | |
| Private fundraising | Greater discretion in spending |
| Diminished dependence on student tuition and state support | |
| Donor limitations and incidental expenses |
Harvard weathered the Civil War better than many of its peers. The war's economic impact on New England was relatively positive. The school prospered under a modest but capable minister, Thomas Hill, who raised admission standards and expanded elective offerings, particularly in the sciences.36 But during Harvard's years of drift, competing institutions had sprung up by the dozens. Some, notably Yale, temporarily eclipsed it in prestige and number of graduates.37 Innovative newcomers seemed ready to do the same in terms of curriculum and scholarship. By comparison, Harvard seemed adrift. Samuel Eliot Morison summarized the woeful contrast this way:
Yet Harvard College was hidebound, the Harvard Law School senescent, the Medical School ineffective, and the Lawrence Scientific “the resort of shirks and stragglers.”… It was a saying that all a Harvard man had to do for his Master's degree was to pay five dollars and stay out of jail.38
Fortunately, by the end of the 1860s Harvard was poised for a remarkable renaissance.