A young man, not quite 18, entered Williams College in the fall of 1869. His study plans for the next four years were made for him. As Edward A. Birge wrote in The Atlantic 40 years later, in 1909, “The college offered a simple, homogeneous course of study,” which each student was bound to follow. It began with classical languages and extended to history, mathematics, and lectures in the basic sciences. Along the way, there was a great deal of composition and rhetoric, writing essays by hand and delivering “orations” before the college. As Birge recalled, he and his classmates had not come to Williams for jobs training; rather, they had come for “somewhat vague and intangible intellectual gains,” in search of “that still less tangible thing, culture.”
About 110 miles to the east, Charles W. Eliot was also in his first semester in the fall of 1869. Recently installed as the youngest president of Harvard, Eliot was at the start of a 40-year tenure dedicated to making higher education’s training more practical, its gains more tangible. Students, he believed, needed more than culture; they needed the foundations for a career. As he’d written in The Atlantic earlier in 1869, it was the institution’s job to “convert the boy of fair abilities and intentions into an observant, judicious man,” ready to “rise rapidly through the grades of employment.” Eliot would help transform the American college into the American university in service of that vision.
Ever since Birge went to college and Eliot set out to make a university, American higher education has been pulled toward three different functions at once: cultural formation, preparation for work, and the pursuit of academic research. The modern university took shape in the push and pull among them, a hybrid that has never quite resolved its own contradictions.
Those contradictions have taken on fresh urgency in recent decades, as undergraduates continue to lose trust in the practical benefits of a humanities degree—and the “return on investment” of college more broadly. The debate that raged in the last third of the 19th century, over who and what college is for, has never really been resolved.
Before the Civil War, American colleges were small, hidebound places. A few were very old; none were very grand. True to their original purpose of training ministers, most were associated with some Christian denomination or another. Often strapped for cash, they offered spartan accommodations, bad food, and strict discipline. Intellectually, they were repositories of the old, rather than incubators of the new. The “culture” that Birge referenced began with ancient Greece and Rome. Studying their languages provided the foundations of thought; reading their literature, history, and philosophy provided an approach to life.