In the Fall of 1840, twenty-four-year-old Clarissa Pengra journeyed from a small town in western New York to the growing city of Syracuse to take up a new teaching position. She began by heading north by carriage on a plank road to Rochester, where she would catch a canal boat east. Arriving in Rochester in the evening, after what she described as “an unpleasant ride,” she decided to spend the night at a boarding establishment rather than at the home of a family friend, “in order to be convenient for the boat in the morning.” While in the city, she finished her “shopping,” a term she had never used in the context of her rural hometown. Already, Clarissa had traveled a social and psychological distance. In the hours, weeks, and months that followed, her sense of dislocation would continue. At 6 a.m. on the morning after she arrived in Rochester, she boarded the canal boat for a trip that would take 24 hours, ending in Syracuse the following day “before daylight.” On the boat, Clarissa encountered whist-players, whiskey drinkers, and a follower of the Calvinist evangelist, Charles Finney, each in his own way somewhat at odds with her own principles and ideas. With respect to the trip as a whole, she expressed a sense of adventure, tempered by a hint of anxiety. “I have left home and friend,” she wrote in her journal, “and for the present must learn to depend upon myself.”

Of the classic documents addressing issues in higher education, few have provoked as much commentary as the Yale Report of 1828—and perhaps fewer still have been subject to such undeserved infamy. Ostensibly, the Report originated as an institutional memorandum. It was produced in response to the suggestion made at the annual meeting of the Yale Corporation in 1827 that the College might consider dropping the study of “the dead languages” from its curriculum. But its authors—President Jeremiah Day, Professors Benjamin Silliman, Sr., and James L. Kingsley—were clearly participating as well in an ongoing public debate. The 1820s were a decade of lively campus discussions on the subject of curricular reform. The stakes were high. The study of Latin and Greek traditionally constituted the core and bulk of college education. Wasn't it time for change?

In the 1890s progressive educators like John Dewey proposed expansive ideas about integrating school and society. Working to make the boundaries between classroom learning and pupils' natural environment more permeable, for example, Dewey urged teachers to connect intellectual and practical elements within their curricula. Highly visible and widespread examples of this integrative goal were the school gardens that flourished from the 1890s well into the twentieth century. Evidence of their presence is recorded in newspapers, national magazines, and annual school reports whose illustrations typically portrayed well-dressed children cultivating large gardens next to impressive urban school buildings. Whether in large cities or country settings, school gardens were expressions of modern and progressive education of the sort encouraged by Dewey. Gardens were encouraged in theory and in practice not only at the laboratory school affiliated with the University of Chicago but also in normal schools across the country (Figure 1).

Were colleges obliged to address the dilemmas faced by the many firstand second-generation Americans who enrolled after World War I? No, replied many administrators who espoused exclusion or assimilation, or who expressed indifference. These attitudes meant that many students would never learn to navigate the turbulent waters of campus social life. Dropout rates were significant even before the Great Crash created insurmountable financial difficulties for numerous undergraduates. The testimony of peers who remained suggested that success often came despite institutional hostility.