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In Search of a Direction: Southern Higher Education after the Civil War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Joseph M. Stetar
Joseph M. Stetar*
Affiliation:
Seton Hall University
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Extract

The south did not share in the enormous expansion of American higher education in the years following the Civil War. Nationally, higher education enrollments grew over five-fold in the decades following the War. In 1870 there were 62,000 students in colleges, universities, professional, normal and teacher colleges in the United States. By 1890 the total higher education enrollment was 157,000 and by 1910 had risen to 355,000. Multipurpose institutions with programs characteristic of the leading twentieth-century universities began to appear in the East, West and Midwest. No such development was evident in the nineteenth-century South where colleges struggled to remain alive. Left virtually destitute by the War and lacking students, buildings and assets, college leaders clung more to romantic dreams and were unable to share in the bold expansion experienced by other regions. The point is etched clearly when one realizes that about the time Charles W. Eliot began to chart the transition of Harvard College to Harvard University, Landon C. Garland, President of the University of Alabama, and later of Vanderbilt, wrote:

The University buildings are all burned. Nothing was saved but the private residence of the officers. The most valuable part of my library … was consumed. This is a great loss to me just now.

I do not know that the University of Alabama will be rebuilt—if at all, it will be several years hence. I cannot await the final results, but must look for some employment.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , Fall 1985 , pp. 341 - 367
Copyright
Copyright © 1985 by History of Education Society 

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References

Notes

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