The Marketplace of Ideas (4 page)

Conant was not entirely satisfied with his committee’s recommendations. He worried that general education could not be entrusted to specialists, and thought that a separate general education faculty should have been called for. It was not, and that failure proved to be the worm in Conant’s apple. The program underwent what one of its historians calls “an almost satiric distortion of its objectives.” It was gradually diluted by the inclusion of specialized courses; eventually, students were able to fulfill the requirements with courses such as Scandinavian Cinema, and by 1966, the program was effectively abandoned.
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It took more than a decade for Harvard to design and implement another general education curriculum. Reviving general education was difficult in part because academic life in the sixties was not friendly to concepts like consensus and the canon. But it was also difficult because general education programs tend to trigger the liberal arts college’s autoimmune system. To understand why this is so, we need to go back to another educational crusader, Charles William Eliot.

4.

Eliot became president of Harvard in 1869. His academic field was chemistry, but (unlike his successor Conant) he was not a particularly accomplished chemist. In fact, he had resigned from the Harvard faculty, in 1863, after being passed over for a new chair. He left for Europe, where he spent two years inspecting educational systems in various countries. In 1865, he returned to the United States to take a position as professor of chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which had just been founded in Boston as a school to prepare students for the scientific professions. When the Harvard Overseers chose Eliot, who was working at what many would have regarded as a vocational school, they were taking a radical step. His appointment constituted recognition that American higher education was changing, and that Harvard was in danger of losing its prestige. Harvard picked Eliot because it wanted to be reformed. Eliot did not disappoint. He was inaugurated in the fall of 1869 and he served for forty years.
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By the time he retired, Eliot had become identified with almost everything that distinguishes the modern research university from the antebellum college: the abandonment of the role of
in loco parentis
; the abolition of required coursework; the introduction of the elective system for undergraduates; the establishment of graduate schools with doctoral programs in the arts and sciences; and the emergence of pure and applied research as principal components of the university’s mission. Eliot played a prominent part in all these developments. He was, after all, a prominent figure at a prominent school. But he was not their originator. Other colleges instituted many of these reforms well before Harvard did. Yale had been awarding doctorates since 1861, for example, and the trend toward applied research was kicked off by the Morrill Land-Grant College Act, passed by the wartime Congress in 1862. The reform Eliot was most closely associated with was the elective system: by 1899 he had got rid of all required courses for Harvard undergraduates except first-year English and a foreign language requirement. Cornell and Brown, though, had tried free elective curricula well before Eliot. (Until his appointment, Eliot had actually been somewhat dubious of electives; he seems to have changed his mind, partly because of his own reflections on the advantages of an elective system, but possibly because a committee of the Harvard Overseers had drawn up a report recommending more of them before he was hired.)
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So Eliot’s role was to some extent reactive. He was a quick student of trends and an aggressive implementer of change. He adopted a “new sheriff in town” manner toward his faculty (a manner that has not always proved effective at Harvard). But he did bring one original and revolutionary idea with him when he came into office. This was to make the bachelor’s degree a prerequisite for admission to professional school. It may seem a minor reform, but it was possibly the key element in the transformation of American higher education in the decades after the Civil War.

Before Eliot, students entering higher education could choose between college and professional school—law, medicine, or science, which in the nineteenth century was taught at a school separate from the college. In 1869, Eliot’s first year as president, half of the students at Harvard Law School and nearly three quarters of the students at Harvard Medical School had not attended college and did not hold undergraduate degrees. These were, comparatively, respectable numbers. Only 19 of the 411 medical students at the University of Michigan, and none of the 387 law students there, had prior degrees of any kind. There were no admissions requirements at Harvard Law School, beyond evidence of “good character” and the ability to pay the hundred dollars tuition, which went into the pockets of the law professors. There were no grades or exams, and students often left before the end of the two-year curriculum to go to work. They received their degrees on schedule anyway. Standards at medical schools were only a little less amorphous. To get an MD at Harvard, students were obliged to take a ninety-minute oral examination, during which nine students rotated among nine professors, all sitting in one large room, spending ten minutes with each. When the ninety minutes were up, a bell was sounded, and the professors, without consulting one another, marked pass or fail for their fields on a chalkboard. Any student who passed five of the nine fields became a doctor.

Eliot considered the situation scandalous. He published an article about it in
The Atlantic Monthly
in 1869, just a few months before being offered the presidency, and that article was almost certainly a factor in the decision to appoint him. Harvard wanted a reformer because there was alarming evidence in the 1860s that college enrollments were in decline in the United States, and the existence of an easy professional school option was one of the reasons why. Once installed, Eliot immediately set about instituting admission and graduation requirements at Harvard’s schools of medicine, law, divinity, and science, and forcing those schools to develop meaningful curricula. It took some time: a bachelor’s degree was not required for admission to the Harvard Medical School until 1900.

Eliot’s reform had several long-term effects on American education and American society. First, it professionalized the professions. It erected a hurdle on what had been a fairly smooth path, compelling future doctors and lawyers to commit to four years of liberal arts education before entering what are, essentially, professional certification programs. This made the professions more selective and thereby raised the social status of law, medicine, and science and engineering. Law students were no longer teenagers looking for a shortcut to a comfortable career; they were college graduates, required to demonstrate that they had acquired specific kinds of knowledge. People who couldn’t clear the hurdles couldn’t advance to practice. Eliot’s reform helped put universities in the exclusive business of credentialing professionals.

The emergence of pure research as part of the university’s mission—the notion that professors should be paid to produce work that might have no practical application—was the nineteenth-century development that Eliot had least enthusiasm for. He believed in the importance of undergraduate teaching—as a champion of electives, he always insisted that the subject was less important than the teacher—and he believed in the social value of professional schools. But he was too committed to the doctrine of laissez-faire to believe in research whose worth could not be measured in the marketplace, and Harvard did not formally establish a graduate school in arts and sciences until 1890, rather late in the history of graduate education. The push toward doctoral-level education came from elsewhere.

Still, as Eliot quickly realized, graduate schools perform the same function as professional schools. Doctoral programs, and the requirement that college teachers hold a PhD, professionalized the professoriate. The standards for scholarship, like the standards for law and medicine, became systematized: everyone had to clear the same hurdles and to demonstrate competence in a scholarly specialty. People who could not clear the hurdles, or who had never joined the race, were pushed to the margins of their fields. The late nineteenth-century university was really (to adopt a mid-twentieth-century term) a multiversity—it had far less coherence than the antebellum college, since it was essentially a conglomeration of non-overlapping specialties. It altered the intellectual environment, and not every organism proved able to adapt.

Eliot’s reform saved the liberal arts college from drowning in an increasingly mass, mobile, and materialistic society. In 1870, one out of every sixty men between eighteen and twenty-one years old was a college student; by 1900, one out of every twenty-five was in college.
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Eliot was a Brahmin of the Brahmins. His father, Samuel A. Eliot, was a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School, a mayor of Boston, a one-term congressman, and one of the richest men in Massachusetts before he lost everything in the financial panic of 1857. But Eliot did not see the function of institutions such as Harvard to be that of perpetuating existing hierarchies of wealth and class. He understood that in an expanding nation, social and economic power would pass to people who, regardless of birth and inheritance, possessed specialized expertise. If a liberal arts education remained an optional luxury for these people, then the college would wither away.

By making college the gateway to the professions, Eliot linked the college to the rising fortunes of this new professional class. But he also enabled the college to preserve its anti-utilitarian ethos in an increasingly secular and utilitarian age. For Eliot insisted on keeping liberal education separate from professional and vocational education. He thought that utility should be stressed everywhere in the professional schools but nowhere in the colleges. The collegiate ideal, he explained in his
Atlantic Monthly
article, is “the enthusiastic study of subjects for the love of them without any ulterior objects.”
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College is about knowledge for its own sake—hence the free elective system, which let students roam across the curriculum without being shackled to the requirements of a major. And this is the system we have inherited: liberalization first, then professionalization. The two types of education are kept separate.

Eliot’s reform left a question mark in the undergraduate experience. What, if nothing they were learning was intended to have real-world utility, were undergraduates supposed to learn? The free election system basically said, It doesn’t matter; you will learn what you really need to know in graduate school. And abuses of the system, a problem that was much debated in higher education circles in the late nineteenth century, led to a reaction against it after the turn of the century.
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But the idea that liberal arts education is by its nature divorced from professional education persisted. This separation is one of the chief characteristics of elite institutions of higher learning, and it is the buried assumption in the resistance to general education programs that undertake to connect what undergraduates learn with the world outside the academy. In a system that associates college with the ideals of the love of learning and knowledge for its own sake, a curriculum designed with real-world goals in mind can seem utilitarian, instrumentalist, vocational, presentist, anti-intellectual—illiberal.

5.

Professors still tend to feel that there are things that every educated person should know, and one means of accommodating this mission without arousing the autoimmune system is to define general education as an introduction to scholarly methods. This is what Harvard did in the 1970s, under its president, Derek Bok, and his dean, Henry Rosofsky, when the faculty created and adopted the Core. The Core is a program with eleven course categories, from literature and moral reasoning to historical study and physical science. The courses are almost all extradepartmental; they stand in a separate place in the catalogue. Students need to take seven (from which categories depends on their major field) to graduate. This is a system that no longer draws a bright line between what goes on in the academic disciplines and what goes on in general education classes. It allows professors to teach their specialties, since the takeaway is a method of inquiry rather than wide knowledge of a subject. Courses can, in other words, be quite narrowly focused (Scandinavian Cinema) and still accomplish the assigned mission.

The Core program, like most of its predecessors in American higher education, was designed with a view to preparing students for life after college. Though the courses were on the usual subject matters of the disciplines, the Core was not about learning for its own sake. It was about learning how to learn. When the program was being designed, Rosofsky is supposed to have decreed that the Harvard faculty would not shed blood over books—meaning that there would be no attempt to impose a canon.
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The emphasis on the traditional disciplines avoided the danger of political warfare that loomed over any curricular reform in the aftermath of the sixties. The very idea of requirements was inconsistent with the spirit of the age. At Stanford in 1968, a committee appointed to look into curricular reform by the university’s president, J. E. Wallace Sterling, and chaired by its vice-provost, Herbert L. Packer, concluded that “the faculty member should be free to pursue his intellectual interests wherever they lead him. The student, other things being equal, should be equally free.” The committee found that “the general educational ideal is totally impracticable as a dominant curricular pattern in the modern university.”
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