The American College in the Nineteenth Century / Edition 1

by Roger L. Geiger

Overview

At the end of the eighteenth century, just eighteen colleges existed in the United States, with an average enrollment of fewer than seventy. One hundred years later, over 450 American colleges and universities boasted enrollments up more than one hundredfold. The role of educational institutions in the life of the nation had been utterly transformed.

As the bridge between the two eras, the nineteenth-century college has been among the most controversial subjects in the history of American higher education. While earlier historians portrayed the "old-time" college as an impediment to modernization, later scholars affirmed the broad role of the colleges in the education of the American people.

The American College in the Nineteenth Century combines the best recent scholarship with an interpretive introduction to provide a fresh view of the development of American colleges. The contributors consider these institutions within four new contexts: first, the dramatic transformation in the college students' experience from oppressive discipline to relative freedom; second, the regional variations among the developing American colleges (for example, a South dominated by state colleges, a Midwest by denominational schools); third, the revolution in the century's third quarter as colleges became multipurpose institutions; and fourth, universities that became dominant by the end of the century, incorporating rather than displacing the colleges.

Innovative in its examination of the nature and function of these uniquely American institutions, The American College in the Nineteenth Century is a vital addition to the scholarship of the period.

Contributors: David B. Potts, Leon Jackson, Julie Ann Bubolz, Michael Sugrue, James Findlay, Margaret A. Nash, Peter Dobkin Hall, James Turner, Paul Bernard, and Willard J. Pugh.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826513649
Publisher:	Vanderbilt University Press
Publication date:	05/11/2000
Series:	Vanderbilt Issues in Higher Education
Edition description:	REV
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.84(d)

About the Author

Roger L. Geiger is professor and head of the Higher Education Program at Pennsylvania State University and editor of the History of Higher Education Annual. He has written widely on the academic research system, the history of higher education, and comparative higher education. His most recent book is Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research Universities since World War II (1993).

Table of Contents

	Preface	vii
	Introduction: New Themes in the History of Nineteenth-Century Colleges	1
	Curriculum and Enrollment: Assessing the Popularity of Antebellum Colleges	37
	The Rights of Man and the Rites of Youth: Fraternity and Riot at Eighteenth-Century Harvard	46
	College As It Was in the Mid-Nineteenth Century	80
	"We Desired Our Future Rulers to Be Educated Men" South Carolina College, the Defense of Slavery, and the Development of Secessionist Politics	91
	Agency, Denominations, and the Western Colleges, 1830-1860: Some Connections between Evangelicalism and American Higher Education	115
	The Era of Multipurpose Colleges in American Higher Education, 1850-1890	127
	The Rise and Fall of Useful Knowledge: Higher Education for Science, Agriculture, and the Mechanic Arts, 1850-1875	153
	"A Salutary Rivalry" The Growth of Higher Education for Women in Oxford, Ohio, 1855-1867	169
	The "Superior Instruction of Women," 1836-1890	183
	Noah Porter Writ Large? Reflections on the Modernization of American Higher Education and Its Critics, 1866-1916	196
	The German Model and the Graduate School: The University of Michigan and the Origin Myth of the American University	221
	A "Curious Working of Cross Purposes" in the Founding of the University of Chicago	242
	The Crisis of the Old Order: The Colleges in the 1890s	264
	Notes	277
	Select Bibliography	353
	Index	359

What People are Saying About This

Patrick T. Terenzini

Braxton set out 'to reinvigorate research on college student departure,' and this collection of essays by leading scholars should do precisely that. The book both broadens and deepens our current knowledge and thinking, offering new conceptions and configurations of the forces shaping student persistence and educational attainment. It provides a far more comprehensive set of considerations than previously available for those who would explain the daunting complexity of student attendance or who seek policies and programs to help all students succeed.
—(Patrick T. Terenzini, Center for the Study of Higher Education, The Pennsylvania University)

Linda Serra Hagedorn

By choosing to rework and examine college student retention, the authors have chosen to bravely confront, revise, and augment the venerated Tinto Interactionist Theory. Unafraid to challenge an icon of higher education that has been well-respected for over twenty-five years, the authors provide new theories and directions more appropriate to the diverse college students found on the campuses of the twenty-first century.
—(Linda Serra Hagedorn, Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis, University of Southern California)

Editorial Reviews

Far more than a 'reader,' this book is a landmark in efforts to write truly about the past of American higher education. By signaling the maturation of the revisionist approach, this volume lays the groundwork for new approaches.
--Hugh Hawkins, Amherst College


A generation of scholarship dismantling the conventional wisdom on nineteenth-century American higher education has been a well-kept secret. Thanks to Roger Geiger, some of the best is finally under one cover. This collection forces us to reach new understandings of periodization, regional variations, and student life, and to place universities in a realistic social context.
--Bruce Leslie, State University of New York-Brockport


Roger Geiger's happy thought, to collect the leading essays of the last decade on the 'old-time college,' is a centennial gift to students, teachers, and scholars. Routinely underplayed in the historiography of American higher education, the college has always had a fascinating story to tell.
Sheldon Rothblatt, University of California and Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm

From the Publisher