In the state university, Henry Pritchett once claimed, we find, “a conception of education from the standpoint of a whole people.…” If, he continued, “our American democracy were today called to give proof of its constructive ability, the State University and the public school which it crowns would be the strongest evidence of its fitness which it could offer.”

The vast complexity of a modern American university and the manifold duties of the man who serves as its executive are well known. Administration has become a more demanding operation than it was when James Madison, an Episcopal bishop and late eighteenth-century president of the College of William and Mary, described the vicissitudes of the College's early days: “The first plan of our College was imperfect. It consisted of a President, whose only business was to superintend….” Obviously, superintending is not what it used to be.

In the eighteenth century, American education, like American culture, was not self-sufficient: its acropolis lay in Britain. Students interested in medicine took their training at London or Edinburgh; ministers were continually recruited in the mother country; a few years at one of the Inns of Court still provided the best training in law; significant numbers of Americans attended Oxford or Cambridge, seeking “a gentleman's education.”

In this quotation is recorded the beginnings of the first successful effort to establish higher education within what came to be the continental United States. There may be some disagreement concerning the role of Master Harvard, but that there was an immediate involvement of religion in this educational undertaking is very obvious. There has been, however, no single interpretation of the role of religion in this the first of our colleges. Some students of the subject find here the beginnings of a narrow ecclesiastical training from which American higher education was to suffer for many decades. Others, on the contrary, see this as the origin of liberal education available to all acceptable students, bent on careers in both state and church.

Perhaps one of the mostly highly complex developments in the history of American higher education has been that of majoring, or the ever-growing specialization in the undergraduate curriculum. Certainly much of this has stemmed from the modern industrial revolution, which has produced a need for trained experts in a vast number of specialized fields. Institutions of higher learning have become divisive and differentiated, and the principle of election and the requirements of graduate schools have served as entering wedges for undergraduate concentration of studies in one or a few closely related subjects.

The early American colleges were smaller and poorer counterparts of the universities of Great Britain, rather than indigenous institutions, and the mother country was the source of their curriculum. At Cambridge University, which became the intellectual center of the Puritan movement, the curriculum of studies had evolved from the medieval trivium (grammar, rhetoric, logic) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music) and from the three philosophies (natural, moral, mental). But interest in mathematics had dwindled by 1700, and the study of classical authors was revived. The universities were still governed by the Elizabethan statutes of 1561, which required that each student be proficient in rhetoric, logic, and philosophy, and that they be tested in these subjects by public disputations before being admitted to a degree. Beyond these requirements, the subjects to be studied were determined by a tutor, who was responsible for the four or five students assigned to him.