The year 1984 brought much reflection in the popular media on just how far we have become clasped in the totalitarian grip of “big brother.” That question quite aside, Orwell's dreaded date should also be a time to examine to what degree the two large dictatorships of his time—the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany—were really in the “total” control of an Orwellian “Party.” Though Orwell as a journalist had little to say about the schools and much to say about the press and television serving the totalitarian party, few of his readers, then or now, would fail to reflect on what role schooling from kindergarten to university would play in such a society as Orwell feared.

Colleges were founded in many of the cities of Victorian England. Some failed; others became the civic universities of twentieth-century Britain. Owens College, Manchester; Yorkshire College, Leeds; and University College, Liverpool, which formed the Victoria University; are examples both diverse and interconnected, as well as representative and influential, and therefore form the basis of this study. The new colleges quickly evolved efficient academic self-government. The successively evolved constitutions of Owens College and the Victoria University were widely influential, but the developing practice of academic governance was perhaps more significant. British academics were learning to use their constitutions and diverge from the apparent letter of statutes in ways which have been widely admired in the twentieth century.

The traditional image of nineteenth-century European students presents the liberal French revolutionary mounting the barricades or the romantic German drinking or dueling to protect his honor. Many of these images were deceptive, and historians in the last ten years have worked to find the true significance of the student subcultures in Europe, and the manner in which these students were socialized for their future roles in society. Robert J. Smith has argued that students at the Ecole Normale Supérieure drew progressive political lessons from their education, which contributed greatly to defining the characteristics not only of French education, but of the Third Republic itself. McLachlan and Rothblatt have demonstrated that when nineteenth-century students at Princeton or Oxford and Cambridge were dissatisfied with the official curriculum of those institutions they were quite capable of taking the initiative and establishing much of their own social and intellectual life. Konrad Jarausch has emphasized the role of voluntary student organizations in the neutralization of liberal impulses in German higher education, and has stressed the importance of student subculture for the shift from left-wing to right-wing nationalism in Germany. In general, Jarausch has pointed out the importance of traditional student organizations, which “socialize the future elite toward adult roles and form a safety valve for sporadic outbursts of violence, sexual license, etc.”

Adam Smith's famous lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres, first delivered in Edinburgh from 1748 to 1751, were the first formal lectures on the subject of “English” in Britain to give singular pedagogical prominence to the application of selections from English literature in the university classroom. Literary and educational historians over the years have acknowledged Smith's role particularly in the teaching of rhetoric; but they have hesitated to assign any significant historical value to the theory that his extensive use of selections from English literature in his lectures was less belletristically inspired, in spite of his refined literary interests, and more the result of his deeply felt, practical concern over the future of a laissez-faire economic system that by its very nature advocated a lessening of political, social, and religious control over the commonwealth. Smith's decision to use selections from English literature in his classroom, as this essay argues, was based largely on the belief that vernacular literature could provide a ready context for the teaching of ideological, social and moral lessons. As an economist, Smith was naturally interested in the insular “business” of higher education, but he was also interested in the broader role that he thought higher education should play in preparing students for the “real business” of the real world.

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:

In 1908 and 1909 the science journalist Edwin E. Slosson visited and described fourteen of what he called “The Great American Universities.” The volume of that title which he published still deserves a place among the most interesting books of this century on higher education. The members of his select group—California, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin among the state universities; Columbia, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale from the descendents of the colonial colleges; and Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and Chicago from the “new” endowed universities—these schools for the most part led other institutions of higher education in numbers of students, the size of their budgets, and the scholarly achievements of their faculties.