CHARLES WATCHED IN HORROR AS ONE FINANCIAL INSTITUTION after another collapsed, first in the United States, then in Europe, then in emerging markets worldwide. A recent Harvard graduate, with honors in theoretical chemistry, he was fortunate to be able to live off his family inheritance and pursue research in pure science, the kind of occupation that may not be remunerative or even practical but that had the potential to lead to a breakthrough that might one day change the world.
Not anymore. With his father’s portfolio in shambles, Charles faced the same challenge to make a living as his classmates. Time to recalibrate. In addition to pure science, his training was mostly in the traditional liberal arts. What kind of job was this elite education suited for? More and more experts were insisting that a traditional college education was useless in the modern high-tech, globally connected world. Would his be the first generation in America to be less prosperous than the one that came before? Had his Harvard education trained him for his future or for the past?
My students call this a “quarter-life crisis.” Instead of celebrations of youthful optimism at the beginning of bright careers, they throw twenty-fifth birthday parties to commemorate their collective indecision and existential sense of uselessness: degrees in hand, perfect grades, excellent credentials, top honors, few job prospects. Even the ones who graduate in fields that supposedly make them “workforce ready”—computer scientists, mathematicians, engineers—wonder whether they need further education to be a better match for jobs that compensate them well enough to pay off student loans and survive outside their parents’ basements, to be productive members of society, to compete with the robots that everyone says are coming.
Like Charles, my students express real fears with their sardonic celebrations of quarter-life crises. There is one crucial difference though. Charles was no anxious Millennial but was, of course, Charles William Eliot, the person most decisively responsible for designing the modern American research university. Born in 1834 and graduating from Harvard in 1853, Eliot wasn’t concerned about whether his job prospects would vanish as a result of the gig economy driven by artificial intelligence, but he was just as worried as students today about the role of technology in his future. He agonized over changes brought about by the second phase of the Industrial Revolution, the era of the telegraph, electricity, railroads, mass printing methods, steel manufacturing, commercial oil drilling, urbanization, and the assembly line. Scion of one of America’s most illustrious families, Charles Eliot was inspired to become a reformer of higher education because he believed the outdated Puritan college in which he had been trained and in which he taught was inadequate to the task of preparing future managers and leaders of America’s new technology-driven industrial age.
The Panic of 1857 rocked Eliot’s world, as it rocked the entire world. The first worldwide financial crisis was exacerbated by the new technology of telegraphy. Morse code communicated financial disasters faster than they could be contained, spreading the panic. The failure of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company created a domino effect of collapsing credit and creditors in securities markets and banks, first in the United States and then abroad. When the S.S. Central America, carrying a shipload of gold to stabilize the New York markets, sank unexpectedly in September 1857, so did hopes for mitigating economic disaster. The entire world economy was damaged. The United States did not fully recover from the collapse until the Civil War.
Eliot understood the causes of the financial meltdown and shared the widespread opinion that the single biggest contributor to the financial panic was American grandiosity and naiveté. If only there had been greater oversight and regulation of the banks; if only greedy creditors weren’t so overextended on risky loans without sufficient collateral to back them; if only Congress had been paying attention to the worrisome signs of mounting debt instead of being gridlocked by partisanship, this disaster might have been prevented.
The Panic of 1857 dimmed the reputation of the United States as a bright, emerging superpower. Other nations—especially those in Europe—pointed to America’s lack of a sophisticated, fully realized higher education system that could prepare its elites to handle the nation’s increasing prominence in world affairs. They blamed the bursting of the economic bubble on American provincialism. Americans were inventors and innovators, but Europeans believed that Americans placed blind faith in technology, that Americans had not fully grasped the social or economic implications, for example, of rapid communication.
In 1857, Eliot was a tutor in chemical mathematics at Harvard. He could see that the university had changed little from the Puritan school founded in 1636 to train ministers. When he had entered Harvard at age fifteen in 1849, directly from Boston Public Latin School, the college had had no real admissions requirements, although he did sit for an entrance exam. Here is a typical exam question from that time: “Translate into Latin: ‘Who more illustrious in Greece than Themistocles? Who when he had been driven into exile did not do harm to his thankless country, but did the same that Coriolanus had done twenty years before?’”
This kind of exam may have been useful in 1636 for assessing ministers trained in the classics, but it was hard to see what Themistocles had to say to the 90 percent of Harvard students who, in Eliot’s day, had no interest in a career at the pulpit and who, like many people around the world, were facing a world full of the greatest technological and social changes yet in human history. What good was the Latin dative case in the age of the telegraph?
In any event, how well Eliot did on the exam mattered little given that his real entrée to Harvard was the fact that his father had attended Harvard. His grandfather Samuel Eliot had been the president of the Massachusetts Bank and had endowed the Eliot Chair of Greek Literature at Harvard. On his mother’s side, his ancestry ran directly back to Edmund Rice, one of the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. His lineage was the price of admission into America’s oldest university.
The curriculum Eliot encountered at Harvard was no more relevant than its entrance exam. It too had been in place since Harvard’s beginning. Students were to master a restrictive sequence of required courses primarily in three subject areas: Latin, Greek, and mathematics. There was a smattering of natural science, and not much else.
Typically, after these general studies, graduates went into an apprenticeship in a profession: divinity, medicine, law, dentistry, or veterinary science. The professional course of study was ad hoc. It was tied only loosely to the main Harvard curriculum. A student could enter directly into vocational studies without passing first through Harvard College—or any college. Students then could go into professional training without much more than a high school diploma.
This educational system would not have been a dire problem if the world had been meandering along as usual in the two hundred years that separated Harvard’s founding in 1636 from the Panic of 1857. But by that latter year, although Harvard hadn’t changed much, just about everything else had.
ABOVE ALL, INDUSTRIALIZATION ALTERED THE HUMAN RELATIONSHIP with the planet: how long we lived, where we lived, whether we lived in single-family dwellings on the land where we raised animals and crops for our own needs, whether we moved en masse into cities and lived in apartments or tenements and worked for salaries in order to have funds to purchase goods from those who specialized in their production.
To reduce a dynamic and complex process to but one example, consider people’s changing eating habits. Starting at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it would become more common for people to buy their family’s meat at the market than to raise and butcher their own animals. That may sound like a simple, even trivial, change. Yet as the great environmental and labor historian William Cronon has shown in detail, in consumer practice it was emblematic of shifting family, social, community, national, economic, political, labor, immigration, health, lifestyle, and demographic relations. It also reveals why a different kind of professional education was desperately needed by Eliot’s day.
Take the case of a rural New England farm family in 1820, raising a small herd of cattle, plus tending chickens, a garden, and a hog or two. The entire family performed chores to run the farm and household. Everyone learned a little bit about everything—from household management and horticulture to animal husbandry—usually by doing it, with only some labor differentiated, typically by gender. Knowledge and practices were passed on from one generation to the next and from older children to younger.
That familiar single-family farm arrangement began to change when the first slabs of meat from western cattle were sold in New England markets at lower prices than locally raised beef. Suddenly, the small farm was not sustainable. In its place grew the complex, specialized forerunner of today’s agribusinesses, requiring railroads, shipping infrastructure, meatpacking facilities, and so on. No longer could a single family live off the land, raising the produce and animals they needed to survive and selling or bartering a few additional cows or pigs to pay for goods they could not supply for themselves. Many farm families moved from the country to the city to find work to provide income to buy the food that, a generation earlier, they would have produced for themselves.
While reducing the need for the cottage industry and the rural single-family farm, this new economic dynamic increased the need for specialists who could manage and regulate every stage in the new, mechanized, large-scale agricultural operations. Specialists were needed, for example, in the sanitary slaughter, packing, and distribution of processed meat. Professional associations were created to establish the standards for credentialing different kinds of regulatory experts. Vocational schools and universities began to train inspectors as well as those who independently certified the inspectors. The workers were supervised by managers who themselves had specialized training in highly differentiated processes, from transporting livestock to feedlots to maintaining the railroads that delivered the cattle.
A new range of professionals was required to design the human, mechanical, legal, and fiduciary apparatus of meat production and to manage every part of the meat production process. Professionals had to certify the safety of these operations, calculate profits, adjudicate conflicts, unionize to protect workers from exploitation, provide social services for those who could not work, and on and on. These are not skills people learn in traditional ways by putting into practice knowledge gleaned from a parent or an older sibling.
Nor are they occupations that supply workers with the personal satisfaction that might have come from owning a small shop or a farm, where pride in the work is deeply integrated into all aspects of everyday life and community. In the agribusiness model, employees labored for a salary from the employer. Any rewards or recognition were conferred by a representative of that employer, typically the supervisor. Workers were rewarded not for their personal or individual characteristics—autonomy, intelligence, knowledge, creativity, and so forth—but for achieving the goals (or production quotas) determined by a supervisor who, in turn, was required to meet goals set by his or her supervisor. Employees did not work specifically to produce goods necessary for their own and their family’s survival, although their survival probably depended on their ability to work. With the arrival of industrialization, workers were separated from their work, and the work was separated from their existence and community. This is what Karl Marx called “alienated” or “estranged” labor: people’s labor became an object that existed outside themselves and that was controlled by others.
The raising of animals, for example, was separated from their slaughter. People were not consuming meat from animals they had raised themselves. The meatpacking industry was divorced from the consumers of the meat. Earning an hourly wage standing in one spot all day creating uniform-sized pieces of sirloin, flank, and rump steaks from carcasses that arrived via assembly line removed individual responsibility from the entire process, responsibility to the once-living animal and to the humans who would eat it. When the bottom line was all that mattered to the company and its shareholders, the divide between labor and safety was likely to be large, if not vast. This created the need for new worker protections. The federal government hired a phalanx of safety and health officials to regulate and safeguard labor, safety, and sanitation. Previous generations didn’t need regulators and bureaucrats because safety and hygiene were tied directly to their survival and that of their family and community.
What happened in the cattle industry, as Cronon observes, had parallels in virtually every other industry of the time, with similar movement from family- and community-based activities to specialized, hierarchical operations, all of which required trained workers, overseers, and bureaucrats.
This is where formal education entered the picture. The great education project of the nineteenth century, in the United States and in industrializing Europe, was to train farmers to be factory workers and shopkeepers to be managers, supervisors, regulators, bureaucrats, and policymakers for the new industries. Enacting compulsory public education was one response to the need to train factory workers. In England, where industrialization had been under way for decades, the Factory Act of 1833 was a good example of the relationship between the factory and the school. The act raised the age at which children could work in factories to nine years and reduced the number of hours a day that children could work (nine to twelve hours, depending on the child’s age). It also mandated that two hours of each day be set aside for schooling. As Marx and others noted, this schooling was structured less for students’ self-realization than to shape compliant factory workers. Classrooms were regulated as carefully as was the shop floor, with nailed-down desks, standardized curriculums, and division of knowledge into discrete subjects to be studied for a specific amount of time each day.
There is nothing “natural” about this way of learning, but it was a good match for that new world of mass production. As people moved away from farms and cottage industries into cities and factory work, many were concerned about the fate of children amid these enormous social shifts. Compulsory public schooling was embraced as a way of stabilizing, regularizing, and preparing youth for their future in a changing world. In the United States, between 1852 (Massachusetts) and 1918 (Mississippi), every state eventually enacted laws mandating students be educated at the state’s expense. Each state set the ages at which kids had to begin school and when they could leave school. Each state regulated the number of days children had to attend school, the number of hours of school they had to attend each day, the extent of school holidays, and, in some cases, they set curricular requirements, too.
Along with these changes, led by capitalist education reformers, politicians, ministers, and business leaders, there was a push to expand higher education in the famous colleges and universities of New England that dated back to colonial times. From the time of the Constitution until 1820, a new college opened, on average, every two years; by the end of this period, the average rate was three or four a year. By the time of the Civil War, the United States boasted nearly a thousand independent, decentralized institutions of higher education that enrolled close to 150,000 students.
For most of the nineteenth century, these tended to be small, denominational colleges, averaging fewer than ninety students each. Some colleges, established by white settlers less as educational ventures than as a means of advertising the potential of the frontier, existed before there was compulsory K–12 education in their region. They were poorly staffed and financially dysfunctional, and they often lacked textbooks and facilities of any kind. Professors were paid in chickens, eggs, pigs, or not at all. Often a “college” existed in name only on promotional materials.
The need for specialized training across the spectrum of society—from farms to factories—is perhaps best exemplified in the push to create a system of publicly funded universities that could address the needs of those living in rural areas of the country while participating in the larger processes of industrialization, agribusiness, and mass production. In 1862, near the start of the Civil War, Congressman Justin Morrill proposed what came to be known as the Morrill Acts, which allowed the money from the sale of federal lands to homesteaders to be repurposed as endowments given back to each state to fund “land-grant” universities. Each eligible state was allotted thirty thousand acres of federal land, either within the state’s borders or in the homestead lands beyond. Proceeds from the sale of this land could be used to establish educational institutions. During the Civil War, Southern states were prohibited from participating in this program; yet, in 1890, under the second Morrill Act, the same benefits were extended to the former Confederate states. The point was, in the words of Justin Morrill, to make higher education “accessible to all, but especially to the sons of toil.”
Land-grant colleges transformed American society by extending the reach and mission of higher education far beyond those of the Ivy League schools that embodied the Puritan college model. The rationale for many of these land-grant universities was to bring the new science of agriculture and its concomitant social and economic developments to rural America: the schools would educate and professionalize farmers. Scientific crop rotation, animal husbandry, and soil enhancement were all part of modern farming, a subject to be studied at university, not simply learned from elder generations.
Yet these land-grant universities were not vocational in a narrow sense. Consider this lofty statement of purpose from the Morrill Acts: “Without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.”
Almost all of the universities established were public (MIT and Cornell are two exceptions). At the end of the Civil War, when the second Morrill Act extended the land-grant universities into the former Confederate states, a new provision was added that resulted in the creation of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs).
Because the Morrill Act funding disallowed racial segregation in the new schools even as many Southern states legally segregated blacks and whites, HBCUs were established proximate to Southern (white) land-grant institutions to technically fulfill the terms of the Morrill Act. This is one way in which higher education participated in the racist and racialized “separate but equal” laws of Jim Crow accepted as a “compromise” during Reconstruction.
In 1869, when Charles Eliot addressed the shortcomings of existing institutions of higher learning in his manifesto “The New Education,” he purposely excluded the land-grant universities from his critique. Because they were only “four or five years” in conception and only a few months old in terms of “actual work,” it was too early to judge how innovative they might be. Like others of his time, however, he was aware that these regional public universities offered a different model for higher education, one far more connected to the needs of their communities than anything the Puritan colleges had to offer. Indeed, a majority of the founding presidents of land-grant universities had graduated from the elite colleges of New England (including Harvard) and were unprepared to reconcile the discrepancy between their education in Greek, Latin, and mathematics and the mission of the new universities rising from the soil of East Lansing, Michigan, or Ames, Iowa.
Against a growing national recognition that citizens of an industrialized America needed a relevant higher education, Charles Eliot led revolutionary transformation at the nation’s oldest and most prestigious universities. If change was happening everywhere in America, Eliot argued, institutions of higher education certainly needed to reflect it in their curriculums. In their antiquated state, Harvard and the other Ivy Leagues could not be trusted to train competent leaders of the new universities, corporations, professions, government offices, and other rapidly changing institutions.
AT THE TIME OF THE PANIC OF 1857, IT WAS ASSUMED THAT A HARVARD professor would be independently wealthy and would not need to earn an income, certainly not by teaching. For Eliot, his Harvard salary was symbolic, more honorarium than living wage. After the financial panic, his tutor’s income was all he had. He worried that he would have to “abandon chemistry, and instead go into business in order to earn a livelihood.”
Caught up in the excitement over new forms of higher learning and how they could contribute to the burgeoning new industries of the nation, Eliot decided to postpone his entry into the business world and, instead, pursue the business of higher education reform. Europe had already gone through extensive educational transformation, so, in 1863, Eliot used an inheritance from his grandfather, supplemented by a loan, and set out on an extended trip to Europe to study the new research universities flourishing in Germany and France. With his wife, Emily, and their two sons—one a toddler, the other still an infant—Eliot set himself a rigorous course of study of the superior European system of higher education, including the vocational schools, which were older and more developed than the new American land-grant universities, and the distinguished universities dedicated to training Europe’s elites.
As were many of his American contemporaries, Eliot was drawn to the University of Berlin (later renamed the Humboldt University of Berlin), which had been established in 1810 by the liberal educational reformer Wilhelm von Humboldt. Like Harvard, the University of Berlin was designed for elites, not for the general population, and was dedicated to cultivating the talent of future political and intellectual leaders. The rationalist foundation of the university meant that it concentrated on the idea of bildung (building) the whole man (women were not admitted).
Disciplinary in structure, the curriculum at the University of Berlin was far more expansive than that of its American counterparts. Humboldt himself had passionately championed the humanities—literature, history, modern languages, aesthetics, and linguistics (his own field)—which he saw as continuous with, rather than separate from, the crucial study of natural science, engineering, and technology. He believed every field of study required foundational principles based on logic, reasoning, and the connectedness of knowledge.
The Humboldtian university was cosmopolitan, with the goal of making its students citizens of the world. It combined research and teaching, science and the arts, all considered necessary schooling for the socially responsible individual. Inspired by its founder’s Enlightenment belief in rationalism as a social good, a hallmark of this new research university was what we now call “academic freedom”—freedom to pursue research without regard to the religious, political, economic, or intellectual leanings of university administrators or ruling political parties. The university promoted the development and interchange of free, independent ideas that could lead to the betterment of society. Humboldt had emphasized that universities should be subsidized by the state, not driven by capitalistic market demands and pressures.
Eliot also studied the French system, which was based on a different model of higher education. Whereas the German university emphasized selection, diversity, and choice, the French system was rooted in the “universal,” meaning standardization and regularization of the curriculum, requirements, and admissions procedures. Eliot studied carefully the advantages and drawbacks of each system, comparing the more prescriptive French system with the German emphasis on choice, the ability of students to choose their elective courses and the professors who would direct their research.
Because his broad aim was to consider the impact of an advanced system of higher education on society, Eliot augmented his study of the universities with interviews of people from all walks of life, from shop floor workers and milliners in France to corporate leaders and even princes and princesses in Germany. He interviewed people who attended university and people who did not, people in professional occupations and those in poverty, students as well as professors, professional educators and college dropouts. He wanted to assess the societal effects of the university, as perceived by the widest segments of society.
He noted that in Europe, especially in Germany, all of the universities had been founded by the aristocracy, including the so-called polytechnics designed for skilled tradespeople. This resulted in a system of education that was virtually free for students undertaking advanced training and in a workforce far more skilled and knowledgeable than that in the United States.
Eliot applauded many of the reforms he saw during his tour of Europe and had significant reservations about what might or might not work in the United States. He knew Americans would not accept a federally funded, top-down, uniform, national university system. From the beginning, education in America had been a local responsibility. Mandatory or homogeneous reforms would not be possible, so he concentrated instead on making Harvard and other elite universities models of change for other institutions to follow.
One area where Eliot’s thinking deviated strongly from that of European educators was the idea that young people should be funneled into a vocation early. In Europe, children aged ten to thirteen were sorted into educational tracks that directed them either to the university or to the vocation-oriented polytechnic. They were also assigned to study a specific subject or discipline. Students didn’t specialize in theoretical chemistry and then swerve into education as a college sophomore, for example. Eliot, by contrast, upheld the American idea of higher education as a formalized opportunity to rethink one’s vocation and retool toward a different future.
A combination of shrewd choices and fortuitous timing enabled Charles Eliot to transform Harvard and create the American research university. While on his information-gathering trip in Europe, Eliot was offered a lucrative and impressive opportunity: a major textile mill, Merrimack Company of Lowell, Massachusetts, wanted him to be, essentially, its CEO. He would be paid the exorbitant salary of $5,000 a year and given a house to live in for free.
Because one of the main reasons he had toured Europe was to figure out how American higher education could produce more corporate leaders, especially in the manufacturing sector, the offer to run a company was tempting. He could have employed his training in chemistry in the factory, combining his intellectual and his business interests.
He had another job offer, too. The new Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the few private land-grant institutions, was just opening its doors to its first class. Eliot decided not to go into business. He accepted a position at MIT, becoming its first professor of chemistry, at a salary of $3,500, significantly more than he would have earned at Harvard.
Harvard was then going through a challenging period. In quick succession within a decade, three presidents—all trained as ministers—had resigned or died in office. At the same time, more and more leaders in the business community started to agree with Eliot that the college was doing a poor job preparing its students for the modern world.
While he was a professor at MIT, Eliot published the long, scathing two-part essay, “The New Education.” The essay caused a stir and put Eliot at the center of a national debate on the scope and purpose of higher education and what was needed to radically reform the university for industrial society.
To the surprise of most observers, when the Harvard Corporation found itself locked in a dispute over who might best lead the college in its time of internal turmoil and external disapproval, Eliot’s name was proposed. Not everyone found the idea acceptable. Some members of the Harvard Corporation balked, whereas others saw Eliot as the practical visionary the institution needed. Eliot was not a clergyman or a classicist, the two vocations most central to Harvard’s identity. Nonetheless, on October 19, 1869, at the age of thirty-five, he was elected and then inaugurated as president of Harvard University.
He began his term with a bang. Most inaugural addresses, then and now, are drenched in platitudes, but Eliot opened with a clear articulation of changes he would pursue during his tenure. He insisted that Americans were not ignorant by nature. He blamed—as did many Europeans—poor schooling as the problem: “Not nature, but an unintelligent system of instruction from the primary school to the college.” In his view, the real question was not “what to teach, but how.” He put his colleagues on notice that, in his role as president, he intended to enact far-reaching modifications of the university.
And from the start, he led decisively, restructuring the most basic elements of the academy into new courses, fields, disciplines, and requirements. He changed working conditions for professors and preferences and admission standards for students. He extended the offerings of the university to formal medical and professional schools, for which he raised funds. He joined with the most important capitalists of the era to finance enormous institutional growth and rehabilitated everything from the admissions procedures to the graduation requirements, from athletic offerings to race relations.
He was in constant contact with other education leaders, including Andrew D. White at Cornell and James Angell at the University of Michigan, as well as the founders of three private regional research universities, Daniel Coit Gilman (Johns Hopkins University), William Rainey Harper (University of Chicago), and David Starr Jordan (Stanford University). Together they formed networks and associations that included virtually every other college president in America and began to redefine the university as a place and a means for training professional managers who could thrive amid the economic, technological, and social dislocations of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century.
For all his concern with a relevant education, Eliot was opposed to the idea of a strictly technical, vocational education such as that offered by Germany’s polytechnic universities. He believed vocationalism did not produce the intended result: “To make a good engineer, chemist, or architect, the only sure way is to make first, or at least simultaneously, an observant, reflecting, and sensible man, whose mind is not only well stored, but well trained also to see, compare, reason, and decide. The vigorous training of the mental powers is therefore the primary object of every well-organized technical school. At the same time a well-arranged course of study… will include a vast deal of information and many practical exercises appropriate to the professions which the students have in view.”
In 1909, forty years after he took the job, in a letter to his friend Edward Everett Hale, Eliot listed what he considered to be his greatest achievements:
I. The re-organization and ample endowment of the Medical School.
II. The re-making of the Law School under Langdell.
III. The re-building of the Divinity School on a scientific basis with a Faculty containing members of several denominations.
IV. The establishment of religious services on a voluntary basis under a board of preachers representing several denominations.
V. The requiring of a previous degree for admission to all the professional schools except the Dental School, which is moving in the same direction.
VI. The administration of the University as a unified group of departments—one undergraduate department and many graduate schools.
VII. The perfecting of the elective system as a system.
VIII. The increase of the endowments and of the number of students.
IX. The remarkable rise in the scholarly quality of the men appointed to teach in the University.
It’s an expansive list. Of special note is how much Eliot concentrated on professionalization and admissions requirements for the new professional schools. This meant, for all of Harvard faculty as well as students, a new emphasis on research, specialization, and credentialing, changes that would have a necessary impact on Harvard College, too. Each of Eliot’s nine top achievements necessitated extensive transformations of other aspects of the university as well. In order to change instruction to allow for a wider range of interests and talents (electives), Eliot had to reconsider the university’s admissions standards and allow in students with a wider educational background than one in Greek, Latin, and mathematics. In order to expand the size of the student body and improve its quality, he looked for applicants who were not descendants of elite Harvard alumni. Perhaps even more remarkably, in the name of excellence, he championed what we would now call “diversity” as crucial to improving and modernizing the intellectual life of Harvard, making it less insular and less provincial. Unlike several of his predecessors, he did not oppose admission of either Jews or Roman Catholics. He also admitted African Americans, including a young man who would go on to become one of the most famous sociologists of the twentieth century, W. E. B. Du Bois, the first African American to earn a PhD at Harvard. Because the most brilliant students were frequently not the wealthiest, Eliot also raised an endowment and offered students financial aid.
Although Eliot could not imagine women on the same campus as men, he very much supported women’s education, a progressive stance in Victorian America, when many scientists and medical professionals argued that learning could tax and even destroy women’s reproductive capabilities and diminish their maternal instincts. In his 1869 inaugural address, Eliot noted: “The world knows next to nothing about the natural mental capacities of the female sex. Only after generations of civil freedom and social equality will it be possible to obtain the data necessary for an adequate discussion of woman’s natural tendencies, tastes, and capabilities.” He quickly reassured his audience that he had no intention of subjecting Harvard to an experiment in gender equality: “It is not the business of the University to decide this mooted point.”
Yet in 1879 he was receptive when a Cambridge businessman, Arthur Gilman, came to him with a request. Gilman had started the Private Collegiate Instruction for Women, known then as the “Harvard Annex,” and later renamed Radcliffe College. Gilman offered Harvard faculty bonus salaries to teach there so that his brilliant daughter and other young women could experience a first-class education. Gilman asked Eliot whether the relationship with Harvard might be formalized. Eliot agreed, and he and Gilman enticed a number of prominent local women to take leadership roles, including Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, the wife of the famous naturalist Louis Agassiz. She would become the first president of Radcliffe College. Other Harvard faculty members were persuaded (and paid well) to teach the young women of Radcliffe a more comprehensive array of subjects than they would have encountered at many of the women’s colleges of the time: modern languages, philosophy, music, history, political economy, natural history, mathematics, and physics.
Perhaps Eliot’s most important and lasting contribution, inspired by the Humboldtian university, was his emphasis on student choice. He believed students should be allowed to choose both courses and professors. Allowing students to choose their course of study meant that the university would need to adapt to the trends that emerged. The rush of students into certain fields and courses taught by particular professors showed which academic areas were in demand and others that were in decline. New, advanced courses in the most desired areas had to be added and new faculty hired. This necessitated new graduate programs to train the next generation of professors in those fields and that room be made in the existing faculty. Eliot designed handsome retirement and pension packages to incentivize strategic retirements, a previously unheard of practice. Again, each change was connected to others, and the whole system was reengineered at once.
To promote new fields of research and to reward faculty excellence, new criteria for advancement had to be developed. New faculty, like new students, were not accepted solely because they were descendants of Harvard alumni, and it was no longer assumed that instructors had trust funds to supplement their income. Eliot raised the typical Harvard professor’s annual salary from $3,000 to $4,000, making it possible for them to support a family. He developed a system for advancement and tenure inspired by the German research university’s emphasis on the primacy of research and intellectual freedom.
Writing in 1909, on the occasion of Eliot’s retirement as president of Harvard, Eugen Kuehnemann, a visiting professor from Germany, considered his accomplishments. Whereas Eliot had provided his friend Edward Everett Hale with an unannotated list, Kuehnemann was more expansive. He noted:
A new spirit had to be infused into this new organism. There had to be a complete change of methods as well as of aims, and, what was still more, a raising of the standards of work was imperatively needed in all the departments. The easy-going pursuit of prescribed courses was to give way to real study, determined by the student’s own resolution and on his own responsibility. The drill system with its merely practical aims was to be replaced by a thoroughly scholarly training befitting the dignity and importance of the learned professions. But the most urgent task was to determine the proper relation between general education and professional training. Only those possessed of a general education, acquired by independently chosen study in the college, were to be admitted to the professional schools. That was the final aim. Truly, the very conception of American education was involved in the momentous decision of these questions.
The features of the modern American university that Eliot invented, experimented with, implemented, or institutionalized during his long presidency make an impressive list: majors, minors, divisions (humanities, social sciences, natural and biological sciences), credit hours, degree requirements, grades, the bell curve, deviation from the mean, class rankings, certification, general education, upper-division electives, ability to choose professors, optional attendance policies, professionalization (credentials, accreditation), graduate schools, collegiate law schools, nursing schools, graduate schools of education, collegiate business schools, Harvard Annex for women (later Radcliffe College), competitive scholarships, financial aid, college entrance exams, capital fund-raising campaigns, living wages for professors, tenure, sabbaticals, faculty pensions, school rankings, new courses and subjects (including natural history, algebra, laboratory physics, geometry, modern languages, American archaeology, and anthropology), secularization, and optional prayer (the first American college to end compulsory prayer).
Many of these were profoundly new, even radical features for American higher education. Most were in place by 1909 and fully institutionalized across numerous institutions by 1925. Not a single item needs explanation for anyone reading today because they remain the basics of the university we have inherited. As Eliot’s accomplishment, that’s remarkable. As the continuing infrastructure for higher education in the twenty-first century, it’s the problem.
THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE PURITAN COLLEGE INTO THE MODERN American university—our university—happened at a specific historical moment in response to extensive societal changes wrought by industrialization. In leading that revolution in higher education, Eliot and his colleagues were part of the zeitgeist of industrialization, data-driven scientific methods, quantifiable outcomes, professionalization, specialization, new modes of manufacturing, and new ideas about labor and management. The presidents at the nation’s most elite institutions of higher education financed their ambitions for higher education reforms by working with the wealthiest industrialists of the day. University of Chicago president William Rainey Harper joined forces with oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, and President David Starr Jordan with railroad magnate Leland Stanford. Eliot worked closely with these and many of the other industrialists of the day.
The philanthropists involved in the transformation of higher education—Carnegie, Rockefeller, Cornell, James Buchanan Duke, Marshall Field, Cornelius Vanderbilt—were known by another name to the general public: robber barons. They differed from one another greatly in political persuasion and personality and yet shared many assumptions about the importance of professionalism and productivity. Like Eliot and other educators, they also believed in the prevailing business and management theory in the United States in the 1880s and 1890s. They were in step with (and sometimes directly influenced by) the work of the architect of “scientific labor management,” Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose principal objective was to apply quantifiable or “scientific” measurement to labor to increase economic efficiency and productivity.
Although Taylor began his studies in factories, he believed his practices for measuring inputs and outputs pertained to all labor, including that in corporate boardrooms, professional associations, and universities. He presided over the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and worked to institute and regulate top-down standards for that field. He would go on to become the first professor hired by one of America’s first collegiate business schools, the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, and worked to translate scientific labor management into academic practice. Standardization of labor practices, of measurements, of productivity quotas became key to the management of factories and assembly lines—and came to influence a new approach to higher education that increasingly relied on quantitative metrics as the means for certifying quality and expertise. Eliot knew Taylor’s work, and Taylor knew Eliot’s.
Taylor’s time-and-motion studies were designed to maximize the efficiency of specialized labor. The distinctive feature of an assembly line is that no longer is one person skilled at all or many aspects of making a product. Instead, production is divided into separate tasks, and each person is trained to complete one operation, on time, on the assembly line, over and over and over, with maximum expertise and efficiency. Taylor argued that each task could be accomplished at greater and greater efficiency if certain principles were followed. Those principles included the specialized training of every employee, evaluation of those employees, and addition of managers trained to supervise and measure worker efficiency. Taylor favored a hierarchical system by which supervisors in factories instructed those who worked for them to be as regular, repetitive, and machine-like as possible. Workflow was designed to be consistent; a worker was expected to work at the same pace at the end of a long day as at the day’s beginning. Human working life, in short, was fitted to the rhythms and necessities of the machine, and human outputs and efficiency were judged by standardized measurements, all of which we know as “Taylorism” today.
Taylor developed his ideas while working as a manager in a pig iron factory. The son of a wealthy family, Taylor attended Phillips Exeter Academy and passed the entrance examination for Harvard with honors. He planned to go to Harvard Law School to follow in his father’s profession. Instead, like a forerunner of Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, he decided that industry, not law, was the future. At the pig iron factory, he invented his theories of scientific labor management. His new science measured how much pig iron a laborer could be incentivized to carry in a ten-hour workday and set quotas for how much workers should be able to carry and how fast. He called those who met the quotas “soldiers” and those who did not “malingerers.” He rewarded the former and had no problem penalizing and even firing the latter.
In designing college education to prepare students for a world increasingly shaped by industrialization and, later, by Taylorism, Eliot and his colleagues embraced specialization, standardized analytics, and constant evaluation by peers and supervisors. Led by Harvard, nearly every elite university moved to a system driven by selective admissions testing and measurable outcomes, the higher education equivalents of Taylor’s worker productivity calculations. Universities divided knowledge into distinct and specialized departments (disciplines, majors, minors, and combinations of required courses and electives), at least partly inspired by Taylorist theories of the division of labor and the efficiencies of each worker mastering one specific part of a job using a particular method. Professionalism in higher education became almost synonymous with specialization, in sharp contrast to earlier historical ideals of what it meant to be learned, such as the “Renaissance man,” a multitalented, versatile, visionary, cross-disciplinary thinker. Specialized academic training and reputation were consonant with Taylorist and other forms of industrial age management philosophy that emphasized the efficiency of job descriptions that defined specific prerequisites, functions, duties, and responsibilities. The new field of “human resources,” which gained currency in the 1890s, fed off of and into Taylorism as well as into the founding mission of new graduate schools, professional schools, and research universities, which organized knowledge around production of relevant, peer-reviewed research within a specific discipline or professional association.
Even the nation’s liberal arts colleges followed suit, reorganizing their curriculums in ways that resembled Harvard’s: two years of general education before students chose a major and possibly a minor, too. The New England Association of Colleges and Preparatory Schools, which Eliot helped to found, designed rankings and accreditation systems by which the nation’s diverse institutions of higher education could be compared, judged, and ranked. Each and every aspect of an institution was judged by an implicit or explicit system of values, often measured quantitatively by such inputs as “selectivity” or “admission rate” and by outputs such as attainment of high grade point averages (a new concept and method for reducing knowledge to a letter or a number). Harvard and the other Ivy League research universities became the implicit standard against which the merit of every other college and university was judged. Expanding educational opportunities beyond the descendants of alumni, in other words, lent new weight to admissions exams and importance to selectivity (and rejection rates) and contributed to the elite institutions gaining top rankings that other institutions aspired to.
In keeping with this new emphasis on rankings and metrics, educators at the top institutions created the College Entrance Examination Board (CEEB) on December 22, 1899. Based at Columbia University, the CEEB was charged with designing more uniform entrance exams. The CEEB created written exams that anyone could take in the fields of botany, chemistry, English, French, German, Greek, history, Latin, mathematics, physics, and zoology. The exams also allowed for comparisons of the student bodies across the different colleges and universities that administered them. The higher the aggregated exam scores of a university’s students, the higher the ranking of the university.
Students, faculty, and whole institutions increasingly were graded by predetermined and measurable sets of values at the same time that Taylorism replaced experiential, quality judgments with supposedly scientific time-and-motion studies that quantified the productivity of shop floor workers. He also devised new accountancy methods and scheduling charts for middle managers and executives. Eliot’s university, like Taylor’s management theories, emphasized the relationship between time and knowledge. The invention of the “credit hour,” for example, necessitated standardizing the requirements and regulations for how long students had to be in school and in a classroom (“contact hours”). The prescribed numbers of hours per class session per course per year and per degree were concurrent features in the realms of management and academe.
The distance from measuring worker productivity carrying pig iron in wheelbarrows to determining college admission to elite universities by standardized test scores is closer than we would like to imagine. Influenced by Taylor’s ideas that every worker should be held to production quotas and that specialized labor is more productive than general competency, Eliot and other educators of the day designed the modern university to train the nation’s elite to assume their role as leaders of the industrial age. They would be trained to become the professional-managerial class in a time of rapid technological, scientific, social, and economic change.
ELIOT’S INNOVATIONS—NOW MANDATORY, STANDARDIZED, AND regulated for well over a hundred years—may have been useful to the creation of the professional-managerial class required by a newly industrialized and urbanized country. The features of the modern university designed to train and to measure specialized knowledge production were desirable because they enabled people to be pigeonholed into hierarchical corporate structures. Eliot’s university was designed for stability on the basis of an apprenticeship model where students were tested on the knowledge they have coming into the university and tested in each course on the way to a degree in a specific field where specialists had defined the degree requirements. What constitutes “excellence” and a “field” in the first place is still based on standards established by the elite universities.
Eliot’s system did not make innovation easy on a structural level, even if one of his goals was to train fully rounded and independent-thinking graduates. Nor was it flexible, adaptive, geared to the circumstances (economic or regional) of the institution or to the varying abilities of students. In fact, it narrowed what counts as aptitude and intelligence, as creativity and ingenuity, to that which can be tested according to standardized metrics—intellectual production quotas—established in advance. It is no wonder that the same era that produced all of these interrelated institutional features of higher education also invented “giftedness” and “learning disabilities,” new terms to account for human differences, to address the fact that some otherwise exceptional and admirable students had shortcomings that simply did not, quite literally, “measure up.”
In the modern university, what Fredrick Winslow Taylor called “scientific labor management” was translated into what could well be called “scientific learning management.” The worldwide preeminence of standardized testing today can be traced back to these roots, when a streamlined, standardized answer was considered “scientific” and a good index for intelligence, aptitude, or achievement. This must have been baffling to earlier educators, for whom recitation, oratory, debate, and other forms of performance ranked high. Because we have so thoroughly accepted these machine age ways of thinking about education, it is hard to peel back all the assumptions to see how historically specific they are. When we do, it is surprising to notice that many of the notions that shape formal education today really are archaic, even odd.
Many progressive educators, at that time and in the intervening decades, have protested the reduction of all the different ways we learn, think, and know the world to machine-gradable test scores and all the pedagogical and curricular corollaries to standardized testing. John Dewey, Maria Montessori, and progressive thinkers at the turn of the twentieth century objected to reducing humans to test-taking trainees checking off boxes on the way to a degree. A hundred years of sophisticated, thorough learning research and theory—Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy, Howard Gardner’s emotional intelligence, bell hooks’s activist learning, and Carol Dweck’s growth mind-set—separate us from the prevailing thinking at the time of the creation of the research university. A century of studies has revealed what learning is, how people learn differently and in different circumstances and in different fields, how people perform in groups, and how being invested in one’s own projects and following them through from initial idea to completion and implementation teach incomparably more than any standardized test can measure.
Yet we have not incorporated these findings about active learning into the institutional practices of most of our elite universities. Quite the opposite. Graduate students who plan to become college professors undergo rigorous training in their field of specialization but almost never take even a single course in pedagogy. They rarely know much at all about the research on new (or even old) ways of teaching and learning. If apprenticeship (learning the way your adviser learned) is the institutional ideal, then faculty have no reason to understand how to teach their students more effectively. Faculty operate under the assumption that their graduate students learn by imitating faculty advisers the way these advisers learned to imitate their own mentors. Pedagogy is irrelevant. So is change.
We rely now more than ever on tools and ideas championed by Taylor and incorporated into the infrastructure of the modern university by Taylor and his colleagues. Consider the SATs, the gatekeeper for college. The first multiple-choice exams that could be graded by a grid or grade sheet (later, by machine) were developed in the early twentieth century. They met a need: new laws requiring students to stay in school until age sixteen had been passed, effectively transforming secondary education from precollege training for the elite into mass education for everyone, including the millions of immigrants arriving in America at the time. There were not enough teachers to give every student individual attention and elaborate written feedback. The tests automated the complex process of learning assessment, reducing knowledge to one best answer among four or five distractors, and were easily marked by an untrained grader using an answer grid. The inventor of the single-best-answer timed test was a doctoral student at Emporia State University (previously Kansas State Teachers’ College), Frederick J. Kelly. Inspired by the new methods for determining IQ (intelligence quotient, ca. 1904), he developed the Kansas Silent Reading Test in 1914. These ideas were entirely of their moment. If Model Ts could be produced cheaply and effectively by standardization and automation (“any color you want so long as it’s black”), then so could learning.
Here’s a sample test question designed by Kelly and included in his 1914 dissertation: “Below are given the names of four animals. Draw a line around the name of each animal that is useful on the farm: cow tiger rat wolf.” The dissertation continues: “The exercise tells us to draw a line around the word ‘cow.’ No other answer is right. Even if a line is drawn under the word ‘cow,’ the answer is wrong, and nothing counts.… Stop at once when time is called. Do not open the papers until told, so that all may begin at the same time.”
Drawing a line under rather than a circle around means I don’t get into Harvard? By 1925, this timed multiple-choice test, in a form anyone today would recognize, became the Scholastic Aptitude Test. Ninety years later, a good score on the SATs continues to guarantee admission to college, even though many of the assumptions behind multiple-choice testing have been discredited. Is a perfect score a testament to intelligence or passivity? Is it a sign of aptitude or affluence and access to teachers trained to “teach to the test”? Does it yield insight into someone’s creative potential and ability to change and learn and relearn, or is it a good indicator of exactly the opposite? The United States tests earlier and more often than any other nation on the planet. And our overreliance on tests is only the tip of the iceberg. We’ve been honing and perfecting, regulating and expanding Eliot’s system of higher education for a century.
ELIOT’S UNIVERSITY HAS HAD A GOOD, LONG RUN. YET IT NO longer prepares young people for the conceptual, epistemological, economic, intellectual, and social demands of the complex and often disturbing world we live in today. Even the most basic categories in Eliot’s time simply do not hold in our post-Internet world. What is the division of “work” and “leisure” in a world where everything I do—my work life, personal life, social life, political life—and all the information and requirements of who I am and what I do comes to me on a smartphone that fits in the palm of my hand?
More and more, I will have an AI-driven device set up in my home that tells me what I want to do based on data it silently, watchfully gathers as I go about my days. I can enter my nineteenth-century office building, walk down the corridor that splits each department and discipline at my university into physically separate spaces, go into my private office, and then, with my door closed and myself cordoned off from the world, turn on my desktop computer and the entire world—personal, social, and professional—comes tumbling in all at once. Conversely, when I finally escape on vacation as far away from the office as I can manage, I cannot make a call on my smartphone without seeing an email from my department chair that requires an immediate response. Very little in the higher education process of today prepares us for managing the integrated, merged, and chaotic work and home lives most of us are now experiencing.
Ours is not the world for which Eliot and his colleagues created majors, minors, graduate schools, and professional schools. Indeed, many of the professions for which individuals now train in the most rigorous ways no longer exist in a way that makes sense. For example, many medical students end up earning a second degree in another field because medical school doesn’t prepare them for the way medicine is practiced. Occupations for which an advanced degree—including graduate degrees and professional school degrees—was required are rapidly being outsourced, offshored, or reduced to low-pay, insecure, “ambient” work (contingent, with no labor protections, no job security, and no benefits). That’s true for accounting, journalism, computer programming, and college teaching.
As you will see, colleges and universities have not simply stood still since Eliot handed down credit hours, tenure, the nursing school, and so on. Most institutions are constantly adding new programs relevant to the world today. Whether creating programs on genome ethics, data science and society, or race and law enforcement, universities work hard to address the most pressing issues of the times.
In fact, nearly every college and university today hosts parallel systems. On the one hand, they offer traditional majors, minors, departments, and disciplines that bear remarkable resemblance to those created for the industrial age university. Traditional departments hire new faculty members and are responsible for their promotion and tenure. College rankings, too, tend to be based on productivity in these core disciplines that look like the Harvard and Radcliffe curricular core of 1900 (modern languages, philosophy, music, history, political economy, natural history, mathematics, and physics). Job listings for new professors are advertised in the bulletins of the same professional associations that award grants and fellowships to graduate students and new professors, making it hard to stray too far beyond the boundaries of traditional disciplines.
Yet the real action at most universities and colleges is happening outside these traditional areas, in institutes, initiatives, and interdisciplinary groups that typically span the inherited structures, that are often inspired by the most innovative research of the faculty, and that usually offer students opportunities to engage in original research, real-world projects, internships, or experiential learning outside the various requirements and assumptions of the traditional majors. Interdisciplinary programs tend to exist in a somewhat uneasy or even antagonistic relationship with the core departments. They are also most vulnerable to cutbacks. Because the movement to make college more “economical” by cutting “frills” is so closely tied to ideological goals, often the most relevant programs with the most flexible career opportunities are the first to be eliminated.
The traditional infrastructure of the contemporary university remains remarkably similar to what Eliot and his colleagues designed. Yet it is no longer serving our students well. Charles Eliot and his colleagues redesigned American higher education in response to the changes in the nineteenth century that had altered the conditions of life and work and that required, as they saw it, a new kind of specialized, measured, quantifiable approach to educating the nation’s youth.
It was a brilliant answer to massive transformation that occurred a hundred years ago.
It’s what we’re saddled with today—and what many of us are working very hard to change.