Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 February 2017
Between 1860 and 1900 Americans witnessed a revolution that ushered in a new type of university and a new academic order. During those years, the increasingly nonsectarian, scientific, and utilitarian university supplanted the denominationally affiliated liberal arts college as America's preeminent institution of higher learning. Many of the architects of this new university, whose ranks included university presidents, faculty, and civic leaders, christened it a “modern” institution of higher education, wrapping their academic innovations in the rhetoric of progress. Conversely, they often depicted their opponents and those associated with older collegiate traditions as academic relics wedded to retrograde practices and enamored of past ages. The popularity of the idea of progress in the late nineteenth century and its formative role in the rise of the modern university are well known. Less clear is the fate of representatives and elements of the older academic order during this period. If indeed the universities of the late nineteenth century were “modern” and “progressive,” what was to be the fate of the past—and educators and scholars committed to the wisdom of the past—within those institutions and higher education more generally?
1 Recent works on the nature of the “modern” university and the ideal of progress within it include Ross, Dorothy The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Marsden, George M. The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Non-Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Reuben, Julie A. The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); and Roberts, Jon and Turner, James, The Sacred and the Secular University (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).Google Scholar
2 In general, comprehensive accounts of American colleges and universities neglect the history of Catholic higher education in America. These include Cremin, Lawrence American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607-1783 (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), American Education: The National Experience 1783-1876 (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), and American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876-1980 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), as well as Rudolph, Frederick Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study Since 1636 (New York: Jossey-Bass, 1977), and his The American College and University: A History (New York: Vintage Books, 1962). Similarly, the two most influential works of university history in the last half century ignore Catholics and relegate the classical, antebellum colleges to the sidelines: Hofstadter, Richard and Metzger, Walter The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955) and Veysey, Laurence R. The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965).Google Scholar
3 Grafton, Anthony and Jardine, Lisa From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), xii–xiv; Ganss, George E. Saint Ignatius’ Idea of a Jesuit University (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1956); O'Malley, John W., The First Jesuits (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
4 Egan, Maurice Francis “The Needs of Catholic Colleges,“ in Progress of the American Catholic Church in America and the Great Columbian Congress of 1893 (Chicago: J. S. Hyland 1897), 2:104.Google Scholar
5 Williams, Raymond Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Burr, George L. “How the Middle Ages Got Their Name,” American Historical Review 20 (1914-1915): 813-14.Google Scholar
6 Williams, Keywords; Kelley, Donald ed., Versions of History from Antiquity to the Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); Bury, J. B. The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Growth and Origin (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1932); Culler, A. Dwight The Victorian Mirror of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Pollard, Sidney The Idea of Progress: History and Society (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1968); Nisbet, Robert History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1980); Bowler, Peter J. The Invention of Progress: The Victorians and the Past (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).Google Scholar
7 Nichols, Thomas “Modern Skepticism,“ Princeton Review 3 (April 1874), 237; Humphreys, E. R. “Common Sense in Classics,” Education (January 1881), 295. Also see Howard, Francis W. “Catholicism, Protestantism, and Progress,” Catholic World 62 (November 1895): 145-53.Google Scholar
8 Trautmann, Thomas R. “The Revolution in Ethnological Time,“ Man 17 (1992), 380.Google Scholar
9 Lowe, Robert “Classical Education,“ American Journal of Education 27 (1877): 871.Google Scholar
10 Hawkins, Hugh “The University-Builders Observe the Colleges,“ History of Education Quarterly 11 (Winter 1971): 353–62.Google Scholar
11 Williams, Keywords, 207–8. See also Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “medieval.”Google Scholar
12 Gilman, D. C. “The Future of American Colleges and Universities,“ Atlantic Monthly 78 (1896), 179. On Gilman, see Hart, D. G. “Faith and Learning in the Age of the University: The Academic Ministry of Daniel Coit Gilman,“ in The Secularization of the Academy, Marsden, George M. and Longfield, Bradley J. eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992): 107–45. The modern university's debts to liberal Protestantism are traced in Marsden, The Soul of the American University, and Reuben, The Making of the Modern University. On liberal Protestantism and its relation to modernism, see Hutchison, William R. The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992).Google Scholar
13 Fisher, Irving quoted in Reuben, The Making of the Modern University, 70; Eliot, Charles W. quoted in Jordan, David Starr Days of a Man (Yonkers-on-Hudson, NY: World Book Company, 1922), 2:2; “The Southern University,” Debow's Review 28 (December 1860), 728; Greene, Charles S. “The Hearst Architectural Competition of the University of California,” Overland Monthly 34 (July 1899), 72.Google Scholar
14 Dawson, Principal “The Present Rights and Duties of Science,“ Princeton Review 2 (July-December 1878), 675.Google Scholar
15 Burich, Keith R. “Charles Eliot Norton, Henry Adams, and the Catholic Church as Symbol of Order and Authority,“ Catholic Historical Review 75 (July 1989): 423–38; Turner, James The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Jackson Lears, T. J. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).Google Scholar
16 Fleming, Robin “Picturesque History and the Medieval in Nineteenth-Century America,“ American Historical Review 100 (October 1995): 1061–94; Lears, No Place of Grace, ch. 4.Google Scholar
17 Walsh, James Joseph The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries (New York: Catholic Summer School Press, 1907).Google Scholar
18 Gleason, Philip “Neoscholasticism as Preconciliar Ideology,“ U. S. Catholic Historian 7 (Fall 1988): 401–11.Google Scholar
19 Appleby, R. Scott “Church and Age Unite!”: The Modernist Impulse in American Catholicism (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992); McAvoy, Thomas The Great Crisis in American Church History, 1895-1900 (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1957). Leo XIII's condemnation of Americanism, officially known as “Testern Benevolentiae,” is reprinted as an appendix to The Great Crisis, 379-91. Pius X, “Pascendi Dominici Gregis,” in The Papal Encyclicals, 1903-1939, Carlen, Claudia ed. (Wilmington, NC: McGrath Publishing Company, 1981), 89.Google Scholar
20 See for example the account in McGreevy, John T. Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, forthcoming).Google Scholar
21 Samson, G. W. “Jesuit Collegiate Instruction, As Affecting Present Questions of Education and Society,“ in Proceedings of the National Baptist Educational Convention (New York: Brooklyn Baptist Social Union, 1870), 130, 131.Google Scholar
22 Eliot's views on the Catholic Church and modern science can be found in Eliot to Thomas Dwight, 1 September 1908; Dwight to Eliot, 3 September 1908; Eliot to Dwight, 8 September 1908; and Dwight to Eliot, 11 September 1908. (The quotations are from Eliot's letter of 8 September.) Correspondence is located in the Harvard University Archives, UAI.5.150, box 210. Also see Eliot, Charles W. “Recent Changes in Secondary Education,“ Atlantic Monthly 84 (October 1899), 443. Mahoney, Kathleen “Fin-de-Siècle Catholics: Insiders and Outsiders at Harvard,” U.S. Catholic Historian 13 (Fall 1995): 19-48.Google Scholar
23 Richards, J. Havens to Brosnahan, Timothy 16 March 1898, Boston College Archives, Brosnahan papers; Schwickerath, Robert Jesuit Education: Its History and Principles Viewed in the Light of Modern Educational Problems (St. Louis, MO: B. Herder, 1903), 98–99.Google Scholar
24 Gleason, Philip Contending with Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).Google Scholar
25 Eliot, “Recent Changes in Secondary Education,“ 443; Timothy Brosnahan, “President Eliot and Jesuit Colleges” (Boston: The Sacred Heart Review, 1900), 11. Contosta, David R. Villanova University, 1842-1992: American—Catholic—Augustinian (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 69-74.Google Scholar
26 Geiger, Roger L. “The Era of Multipurpose Colleges in American Higher Education, 1850 to 1890,“ History of Higher Education Annual 15 (1995): 51–92; Leslie, W. Bruce Gentlemen and Scholars: College and Community in the “Age of the University,” 1865-1917 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992). Thebaud, A. J. complained of the “endeavor to annex a post-graduate course to every one of our [Catholic] colleges, which seemed for awhile to prevail, is evidently preposterous, and must always end in failure.” See “Superior Instruction in Our Colleges,” American Catholic Quarterly Review 7 (October 1882), 697.Google Scholar
27 “The New Woman at the University,” Herold des Glaubens (St. Louis), 11 August 1897, Trinity College Archives, clippings file, p. 47.Google Scholar
28 Spalding, John L. “Woman and the Higher Education,“ in Opportunity and Other Essays and Addresses (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1900), 65; Sister Mary Euphrasia to Sister McGroarty, Julia May 1897, in Mullaly, Columba Trinity College, Washington, D.C.: The First Eighty Years 1897-1977 (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, Inc. 1987), 29.Google Scholar
29 Spalding quoted in Nuesse, C. Joseph The Catholic University of America: A Centennial History (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1990), 18. Father Thomas Middleton quoted in Contosta, Villanova University, 77.Google Scholar
30 Egan, “The Needs of Catholic Colleges“ and Azarius, Brother “Our Catholic School System,“ in Progress of the Catholic Church, 2: 105 and 120 respectively. Also see Azarius, Brother “The Lessons of a Century of Catholic Education,“ Catholic World 50 (November 1889): 152.Google Scholar
31 Rea, Robert “Public Education Before the ‘Reformation,'“ Catholic World 32 (December 1880), 361; Everett, Ruth “Jesuit Educators and Modern Colleges,” Arena 23 (January-June 1900), 651.Google Scholar
32 Euphrasia, Sr. Mary quoted in Mullaly, Trinity College, 29; also see Gasson, Thomas “Women and the Intellectual Life,“ reprinted in Higher Education for Catholic Women: An Historical Anthology, Oates, Mary J. ed. (New York: Garland Publishers, 1987), 62–63.Google Scholar
33 Conaty, Thomas J. “Religion in Education,“ Catholic World 44 (November 1886), 154.Google Scholar
34 Shields, Thomas Edward “Catholic Teachers and Educational Progress,“ Catholic World 83 (April-September 1906), 100, 101.Google Scholar
35 Gleason, Contending with Modernity, 51–52.Google Scholar
36 Ross, Origins of American Social Science.Google Scholar
37 All Benjamin Rush quotes are taken from Richard, Carl The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 200–2.Google Scholar
38 Day, Jeremiah and Kingsley, James Luce “Original Papers in Relation to a Course of Liberal Education,“ American Journal of Science and Arts 15 (January 1829): 297–351. Quote from 300.Google Scholar
39 Adams, Henry The Education of Henry Adams (1918; reprint, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1961), 53.Google Scholar
40 Adams, Charles Francis A College Fetich (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1883), 5.Google Scholar
41 Youmans, E. L. The Culture Demanded by Modern Life (New York: D. Appleton, 1867), vi.Google Scholar
42 Youmans, E. L. “The College Fetich Once More,“ Popular Science Monthly 25 (May-October 1884), 704.Google Scholar
43 Eliot, Charles William “What is a Liberal Education?“ Century 28 (May-October 1884), 208.Google Scholar
44 Carl Barus quoted by Wiley, Harvey “The Value of the Study of Greek and Latin as a Preparation for the Study of Science,“ in Kelsey, Francis Willey ed., Latin and Greek in American Education (New York: Macmillan Co., 1927), 204.Google Scholar
45 Coulter, John M. The Work of a University: Inaugural Address at Lake Forest, Ill, June 15, 1893 (Madison, WI: Tracy, Gibbs, 1894), 4.Google Scholar
46 Veysey, Emergence of the American University, 13–14.Google Scholar
47 Lowe, Robert “Classical Education,“ 877.Google Scholar
48 Benson, Arthur C. “A Classical Education,“ Living Age 28 (23 September 1905), 809.Google Scholar
49 Noah Porter quoted in Veysey, Emergence of the American University, 44-45.Google Scholar
50 Tomlinson, Everett Titsworth “Progress in Means of Teaching the Classics,“ Education (March 1885), 400.Google Scholar
51 Humphreys, “Common Sense in Classics,“ 295.Google Scholar
52 Norton quoted in Turner, Liberal Education, 386.Google Scholar
53 Hollinger, David “The Knower and the Artificer, with Postscript 1993,“ in Ross, Dorothy ed., Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences 1870-1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 26–53.Google Scholar
54 Hale, William Gardner Aims and Methods of Classical Study (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1887), 42.Google Scholar
55 Kelsey, “Is There a Science of Classical Philology?“ Classical Philology 3 (October 1908), 384.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
56 Gildersleeve, Basil Lanneau “Classics and Colleges,“ in Gildersleeve, Essays and Studies Educational and Literary (1890; reprint, New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1960), 76.Google Scholar
57 This shift is described in more detail in Winterer, Caroline The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).Google Scholar
58 Felton, Cornelius Conway A Lecture on Classical Learning (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, Little, and Wilkins, 1831), 18.Google Scholar
59 Brown, Jerry Wayne The Rise of Biblical Criticism in America, 1800-1870: The New England Scholars (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1969).Google Scholar
60 Everett, Edward “The History of Grecian Art,“ North American Review 12 (January 1821), 184.Google Scholar
61 Felton, A Lecture on Classical Learning, 16–18.Google Scholar
62 Frieze, Henry Simmons “Extracts from a Paper on the Early Days of the University of Michigan,“ (n.d.), Boise, James R. Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.Google Scholar
63 Harris, W. T. “On the Function of the Study of Latin and Greek in Education,“ Journal of Social Science 20 (1885), 4.Google Scholar
64 Quoted in Gleason, Contenting with Modernity, 53.Google Scholar
65 [Timothy Brosnahan], “System of Education,” reprinted in Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Boston College, 1898-99 (Published for Boston College, 1899), 33. Brosnahan's essay was reprinted in the catalogues of a number of American Jesuit colleges well into the twentieth century.Google Scholar
66 Kuzniewski, Anthony Thy Honored Name: A History of the College of the Holy Cross, 1843-1994 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1999), 174.Google Scholar
67 Quoted in Whitehill, Walter M. Museum of Fine Arts Boston: A Centennial History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 1: 5, 9.Google Scholar
68 Wharton, Edith The Custom of the Country (1913; reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1987). For Victorian classicism in England, see Turner, Frank The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981).Google Scholar
69 Norton, Charles Eliot “The Work of the Archaeological Institute of America,“ American Journal of Archaeology 4 (1900), 15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
70 Harris, “On the Function of the Study of Latin and Greek in Education,“ 7.Google Scholar
71 “The Classics in Modern Higher Education,” American Catholic Quarterly Review 10 (January 1885): 160–62.Google Scholar
72 Eliot, “What is a Liberal Education?“ 205.Google Scholar
73 Lowe, “Classical Education,“ 872.Google Scholar
74 Norton quoted in Turner, The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton, 385.Google Scholar
75 Catalogue of the University of South Carolina, 1890-91 (Columbia, SC: Presbyterian Publishing House, 1891), 52, 56.Google Scholar
76 Turner, Roberts and The Sacred and the Secular University. in 1894 the General Superior of the Jesuits based in Rome complained that given the “whole plan of modern studies” students “come forth from college little encyclopedias, as the saying is, and having skimmed the surface of the whole field of all the sciences, they possess of all this nothing solid.” Martin, Luis “On Some Dangers of Our Times,“ in Select Letters of Our Very Reverend Fathers General (Woodstock, MD: Woodstock College, 1900), 509.Google Scholar
77 Nicholas Murray Butler quoted in Allardyce, Gilbert “The Rise and Fall of the Western Civilization Course,“ American Historical Review 87 (June 1982), 703.Google Scholar
78 Quoted in Gleason, Contending with Modernity, 255.Google Scholar