¹ The Report's full title and references are as follows: Committee of the Corporation and the Academical Faculty, Reports on the Course of Instruction in Yale College (New Haven, CT, 1828). It was subsequently published as, “Original Papers in Relation to a Course of Liberal Education.” The American Journal of Science and Arts 15 (January 1829): 297–351. In this article I refer to the page numbers from the original 1828 Report.Google Scholar

² Ticknor, George, Remarks on Changes Lately Proposed or Adopted, in Harvard University (Boston, 1825). The Yale authors quote and dispute Ticknor in Yale Report, 42–49. On the general background of the Report, see Urofsky, Melvin I., “Reform and Response: The Yale Report of 1828.” History of Education Quarterly 5 (March 1965): 53–67. For a general account of the University of Virginia's curricular experiment, see Frederick Rudolph, Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study since 1636 (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1977), 81–83. For Ticknor's reform efforts at Harvard, see Tyack, David D., George Ticknor and the Boston Brahmins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 85–128, and Storr, Richard, The Beginnings of Graduate Education in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 15–24.Google Scholar

³ Hofstadter, Richard and Wilson Smith, eds., American Higher Education: A Documentary History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1961), 275. Some of the earlier discussions of the Report were in R. Freeman Butts, The College Charts Its Course: Historical Conceptions and Current Proposals (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939), 118–125, and Schmidt, George P., The Liberal Arts College: A Chapter in American Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1957), 55–58.Google Scholar

⁴ Hofstadter, Richard and Metzger, Walter P., The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), 279. The precepts of the faculty psychology are invoked in the Yale Report, 7–15, 30–41, and passim. See also Urofsky, “Reform and Response,” 58–61.Google Scholar

⁵ Bloom, Allan, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987); Levine, Lawrence W., The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture, and History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), esp. 37–53. See also David, L. Kirp's more recent discussion of the Yale Report in Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 256–59.Google Scholar

⁶ Potts, David B., Baptist Colleges in the Development of American Society, 1812–1861 (PhD Dissertation: Harvard University, 1967; New York: Garland Publishing, 1988) was among the studies that inaugurated this revisionist movement. Other landmark studies within this movement have been Guralnick, Stanley M., Science and the Ante-bellum American College (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1975) and Burke, Colin B., American Collegiate Populations: A Test of the Traditional View (New York: New York University Press, 1982). A synthesis of the revisionist views of the antebellum college is attempted in Roger Geiger, ed., The American College in the Nineteenth Century (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000). The book includes articles from History of Higher Education Annual (recently re-titled Perspectives on the History of Higher Education), a periodical edited by Geiger, which has been a major vehicle for propagating the revisionist views. For a bibliographical overview of recent scholarship in the field, see also Hart, D.G., “Christianity and the University in America: A Bibliographical Essay,” in Marsden, George M. and Longfield, Bradley J., ed., The Secularization of the Academy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 303–309.Google Scholar

⁷ In 1977 Potts, David B. observed, “Anachronistic readings of the Report are now yielding to interpretations that find it a thoughtful, realistic, and effective approach to pre-Civil War collegiate education.” Potts, “‘College Enthusiasm!’ as Public Response, 1800–1860.” Harvard Educational Review 47 (February 1977): 39. As examples of the emerging new assessment of the Report, Potts cited his own, “American Colleges in the Nineteenth Century: From Localism to Denominationalism.” History of Education Quarterly 11 (Winter 1971): 353–366; Sloan, Douglas, “Harmony, Chaos, and Consensus: The American College Curriculum.” Teachers College Record 73 (UATDecember 1971): 242–247; Guralnick, Science and the Ante-bellum American College, 28–33; and Gabriel, Ralph Henry, Religion and Learning at Yale: The Church of Christ in the College and University, 1757–1957 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958), 98–108, which Potts characterized as an instance of “an earlier sympathetic reading.” In 1981, however, he remarked that many scholars, though sympathetic to the Report, still had not understood its true message and implications, citing Frederick Rudolph as a prime example. (Potts, “Curriculum and Enrollment: Some Thoughts on Assessing the Popularity of Antebellum Colleges.” History of Higher Education Annual 1 (UAT1981): 88–109, reprinted as “Curriculum and Enrollment: Assessing the Popularity of Antebellum Colleges,” in Geiger, ed., The American College in the Nineteenth Century, 37–45. Potts discusses both Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A History (New York: Knopf, 1962), chapters 3–11, and idem, Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study since 1636 (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1977), 66–72). Independent of the revisionist movement, there is also a reading that has attempted to treat the Report as a “neorepublican manifesto.” See Lane, Jack C., “The Yale Report of 1828 and Liberal Education: A Neorepublican Manifesto,” History of Education Quarterly 23 (Fall 1987): 325–338.Google Scholar

⁸ Geiger, , American College in the Nineteenth Century, 8.Google Scholar

⁹ Axtell, James, “The Death of the Liberal Arts College,” History of Education Quarterly 11 (UATWinter 1971): 339–352, itemized and discussed the failings of what the author called “bad Whig history.”CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁰ On the emergence of a unique system of higher education in the United States, seen in contrast to developments in major European countries, see Pak, Michael S., “Academia Americana: The Transformation of a Prestige System” (PhD Dissertation: Harvard University, 2000), 13–45.Google Scholar

¹¹ Yale Report, 20. See also 50–51.Google Scholar

¹² Pak, “Academia Americana,” 13–29.Google Scholar

¹³ Burke, American Collegiate Populations, 18.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Hofstadter, and Metzger, , Development of Academic Freedom, 209–274. The “mortality rate” of colleges is discussed on 211–12. See also Donald G. Tewksbury, The Founding of American Colleges and Universities before the Civil War (New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1932).Google Scholar

¹⁵ Burke discredits Tewksbury's research in American Collegiate Populations, 11–52. A tabulation of the total collegiate enrollment for the period is on page 54.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Ibid., 54.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Ibid., 53–54. On local boosterism, see Potts, “‘College Enthusiasm!’ as Public Response, 1800–1860,” 28–42. For a recent treatment of the relationship between antebellum colleges and Christianity, see Reuben, Julie A., The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 17–60, and Marsden and Longfield, eds., The Secularization of the Academy. On the nature of cooperation between the locals and the denominations, see Potts, “American Colleges in the 19th Century: From Localism to Denominationalism.” On the Baptists in particular, see Potts, Baptist Colleges. Still useful on the Presbyterians is Geiger, C. Harve, The Program of Higher Education of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America: An Historical Analysis of Its Growth in the United States (Cedar Rapids, IA: Laurance Press, 1940). On the Methodists, see Sylvanus Milne Duvall, The Methodist Episcopal Church and Education up to 1869 (New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1928). The figures on the percentage of denominationally affiliated colleges are tabulated in Burke, American Collegiate Population, 22.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Quincy quoted in McCaughey, Robert A., Josiah Quincy 1772–1864: The Last Federalist (Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press, 1974), 169–170.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Quincy, “Address of Josiah Quincy upon His Inauguration as President of Harvard University, June 2nd, 1829,” Josiah Quincy Papers, Harvard University Archives, 41.Google Scholar

²⁰ [Wayland, Francis], Report to the Corporation of Brown University on Changes in the System of Collegiate Education, Read March 28, 1850 (Providence, 1850), 43.Google Scholar

²¹ Philip Lindsley, “Speech about Colleges, at Nashville, Commencement Day, October 4, 1848,” The Works of Philip Lindsley, D.D., Later President of the University of Nashville (Philadelphia, 1859), I, 518.Google Scholar

²² Cogswell to William Hunting, 7 November 1838, American Education Society Letters, II, 73, Congregational Library, Boston. For a fuller discussion of the Society's activities and impact, see Natalie Naylor, “Raising a Learned Ministry: The American Education Society, 1815–1860” (PhD Dissertation: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1971).Google Scholar

²³ Wayland's quote is from Report to the Corporation of Brown University, 60. On academies, see Nancy Beadie and Kim Tolley, eds., Chartered Schools: Two Hundred Years of Independent Academies in the United States, 1727–1925 (New York: Routledge Palmer, 2002). On the competition academies faced in turn, see in the above collection Christine Ogren, “Betrothed to the State?: Nineteenth-Century Academies Confront the Rise of the State Normal Schools,” 284–303.Google Scholar

²⁴ Pierson, George W., the statistician and historian of Yale, observes: “Once the enrollment began to be printed under President Timothy Dwight, they recorded a rise-fall-rise to 305 by the year 1811, some decline in the War of 1812, recovery in the 1820s, and a total college enrollment of 413 in the year 1835–36. Yale was then (and for a long generation remained) the largest college in the country, yet it took almost twenty years for growth to resume, so that a figure of more than 500 students was not reached until the eve of the Civil War.” Pierson, A Yale Book of Numbers: Historical Statistics of the College and University, 1701–1976 (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1983), 5.Google Scholar

²⁵ Yale Report, 28, 21, 27, 42.Google Scholar

²⁶ This was true of the curriculum for the French lycée and the German Gymnasium, which for all purposes were the equivalents of the American undergraduate college in this period. University degree programs in France and Germany were likewise controlled by the government, which administered national exams for those seeking to graduate.Google Scholar

²⁷ Pak, “Academia Americana,” 13–29.Google Scholar

²⁸ Guralnick, , Science and the Ante-bellum American College, ix. Guralnick's conclusions are based on a study of the curriculum at Amherst, Bowdoin, Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, Dickinson, Harvard, Middlebury, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Princeton, Rochester, Transylvania, Union, University of Vermont, Virginia, Wesleyan, Williams, and Yale.Google Scholar

²⁹ Pierson, , A Yale Book of Numbers, 20.Google Scholar

³⁰ [Wayland, Francis], Report to the Corporation of Brown University, 14, 8.Google Scholar

³¹ A good feel for what the classroom instruction at antebellum colleges was like is conveyed by the recollection of Andrew Dickson White, who was a prize-winning student at Yale in the early 1850s. In the following passage he speaks of instruction in science: “The textbook was simply repeated by rote. Not one student in fifty took the least interest in it; and the man who could give the words of the text most glibly secured the best marks.” See Andrew White, Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White (New York: The Century Co., 1905), Vol. 1, 27; Yale Report, 10–11, defends the efficacy of recitations as an instructional method. See also Geiger and Julie Ann Bubolz, “College As It Was in the Mid-Nineteenth Century” in Geiger, ed., The American College in the Nineteenth Century, 81.Google Scholar

³² Guralnick, , Science and the Ante-bellum American College, xi.Google Scholar

³³ Quincy, Josiah, Remarks on the Nature and Probable Effects of Introducing the Voluntary System in the Studies of Latin and Greek (Cambridge, MA: J. Owen, 1841), 12.Google Scholar

³⁴ Yale Report, 5–6. On the curricular changes since the colonial period, see 42–49.Google Scholar

³⁵ Ibid., 42–43.Google Scholar

³⁶ Ibid., 42.Google Scholar

³⁷ Jencks, Christopher and Riesman, David, The Academic Revolution (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968), 61.Google Scholar

³⁸ Yale Report, 25.Google Scholar

³⁹ Quote from Yale Report, 54. More on the value of classical education as a preparation for the professions, see 36–41, 54–56, and passim.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Lindsley, Philip, “Baccalaureate Address, at Cumberland College, 1829,” The Works of Philip Lindsley, D.D., I, 162–63.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Burke, , American Collegiate Populations, 55, 137–211. The best general account of the “status revolution” in the Jacksonian era remains Edward Pessen, Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics, rev. ed. (Howewood, IL: The Dorsey Press, 1978). In addition, Bushman, Richard L., The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992) is a landmark study in cultural history, which documents the intensifying quest for “gentility” reflected in the lifestyles of Americans of virtually all social classes in this period.Google Scholar

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⁴³ Wayland, Francis, Thoughts on the Present Collegiate System in the United States (Boston, 1842), 80.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Wayland, Report, 14.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Yale Report, 6.Google Scholar

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⁴⁸ Yale Report, 7. The content of this paragraph is also drawn from Merle Curti, “Psychological Theories of American Thought” in Wiener, Philip P., ed., Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973), 16–30; [Thomas H. Leahey], “Faculty Psychology” in Robert Audi, ed., The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 261. The faculty psychology and its historical significance are discussed in Douglas Sloan, The Scottish Enlightenment and the American College Ideal (New York: Teachers College Press, 1971) and Kuklick, Bruce, A History of Philosophy in America 1720–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 58–74. Fuller explorations of the faculty psychology as a philosophical doctrine are found in Patricia Easton, A., ed., The Logic and the Workings of the Mind: The Logic of Ideas and Faculty Psychology in Early Modern Philosophy (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1997).Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Urofsky, , “Reform and Response,” 61.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ The elective system Wayland proposed is outlined in his Report to the Corporation of Brown University, 51–56. The earliest copies of Wayland's textbooks I have been able to locate are Elements of Moral Science (New York: Cooke and Co., 1835) and The Elements of Intellectual Philosophy (New York: J.C. Derby, 1854), though the latter is a second edition. Both of these went through numerous editions. On the popularity of Wayland's textbooks, see Curti, , “Psychological Theories of American Thought,” 22. The quote is from the 1854 edition of Elements of Intellectual Philosophy, 122.Google Scholar

⁵¹ Ibid., 265.Google Scholar

⁵² Davie, George Elder, The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and Her Universities in the Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1961), especially xi–xx, 3–102.Google Scholar

⁵³ [Jardine, George], “On the Systems of Education Established in Universities, and on the Means of Improving Them.” American Journal of Education 1 (1826): 585.Google Scholar

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⁵⁸ For Ticknor's failed reforms at Harvard, see Tyack, George Ticknor, 85–128, and Storr, The Beginnings of Graduate Education, 15–24. For a general discussion of the failed reform efforts of German-trained American scholars and scientists at American colleges, see Pak, “Academia Americana,” 78–127.Google Scholar

⁵⁹ On Beck, Charles and Felton, Cornelius and their ill-fated experiment at Harvard, see McCaughey, , Josiah Quincy, 173–74. With regard to the quality of teaching, it is interesting to note that in 1829 Quincy conducted a study on how much time instructors at Harvard spent with each student for recitations in Latin and Greek and found a “general want of thoroughness of instruction in those branches, which has, in a greater or less degree, characterized all the literary institutions of our country.” There was “indifference,” he concluded, even among instructors themselves. From Harvard University, Annual Report, 1828–29 (Cambridge, 1830), 11, 7. Quincy's low opinion regarding the quality of classical instruction at American colleges did not change near the time of his retirement in the 1840s. See Quincy, Remarks (Cambridge, MA, 1841).Google Scholar

⁶⁰ Geiger, , The American College in the Nineteenth Century, 8, 81.Google Scholar

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⁶³ This argument in turn derived from their more general view that evangelical religion has been hostile to the intellect throughout American history—a view which Hotstadter would further elaborate in his subsequent book, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York, Knopf, Alfred A., 1963).Google Scholar

⁶⁴ In a response to revisionists, Metzger wrote, “What would have happened if there had been no Richard Hofstadter? The revisionists would have had to invent him and to a certain extent they have.” Metzger, Walter P., “American Collegiate Population: A Test of the Traditional View.” The Journal of Higher Education 55, 3 (May-June 1984): 422. See also Laurence Veysey's skeptical treatment of revisionists in Veysey, “The History of Education.” Reviews in American History 10, 4 (December 1982): 289.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶⁵ Bok, Derek, Higher Learning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 185–86.Google Scholar