Educational Reform During the Age

Educational Reform During the Age of Colleges The first major transformation would thus begin as an emphasis on intellect and academic evolution, with religiosity coming increasingly to be understood as a poor foundation for scholastic improvement. Thomas Jefferson, a founding figure as fundamental in our educational tradition as in our tradition of democracy, would be motivated toward change by a recognition of the value in excellence in learning. This would produce the transition, deeply opposed by the religious authorities of the early 19th century, toward an educational tradition that could differentiate itself from America's Christianity. Given that so many groups viewed this as a counter-traditional attack on Christian and American values, it is a move that was taken with no small amount of hostility. Indeed, "when Thomas Jefferson in 1814 recruited a faculty, including four Englishmen and a German, on the basis of intellectual promise and learning rather than piety, he invited the hostility of the press, which was much more interested that a faculty be American than that it be learned." (158) However, Jefferson's intent to construct an educational facility with the skills and intelligence to improve the knowledge and wherewithal of future generations of Americans would have a substantial impact on a secular learning tradition. Today, whether achieved or not, the aims presented by Jefferson do appear to have forged a mold for the diversification and qualification of those who would be educators. Also, Jefferson's impulses would also drive schools toward the practical implications of a separation between church and such state- based institutions as school. This would be an important transition which, as indicated in the text's contention with such figures as Eliphalet Nott, would be prompted by a changing cultural tendency in the burgeoning nation. A sense of greater independence and a more aware perception of that which it meant to be an American were both increasingly provoking an examination of the disposition of such figures as Nott. A theological scholar and devout member of the clergy, the long-time president of Union College would be a catalyst to individuals such as Jefferson, who viewed Nott's type as the college professor of a waning day. Jefferson's position would be shared by a great many others, who viewed the preponderance of religious figures in practical education as failing to attend to the realistic needs of young men. Accordingly, the text denotes of the clergyman's approach to education, "this divorce from the world-which was nothing less than a rejection of the enterprising, exploiting, self-seeking qualities of American life-would not recommend the professors to their students or, increasingly, to their students' fathers and to the governing boards as well." (160) Indeed, change was becoming an inevitability as the piety or moral imposition of previous generations of educators was now an ill-fit for the identity of young America. Its ambition helped to drive the shift away from unimpeachable religious centrality and toward the world of textual examination and scrutiny instead. Religion, it would appear, was not the enemy of proper education. It was, however, the improper vantage from which many academic leaders had come, as opposed to backgrounds in actual scholarly instruction of specific fields of selected merit. To Wayland, who would serve almost thirty years to the presidency of Brown University, this was true to the highest levels of authority. From his perspective, a great disservice had been done to the institutions of higher education in the United States through the failure of their leaders to choose figures of more suitable backgrounds for improving instruction. In his own words, Wayland would ask, "How can colleges prosper directed by men, very good men to be sure, but who know about every other thing except about education. The man who first devised the present mode of governing colleges in this country has done us more injury than Benedict Arnold." (172) Wayside's view would begin to reorient Brown toward the prospect of staffing itself with professional educators rather than clergy and men of influence. The motive would be clear here, as the rising prominence in influence and impulse of young students themselves would drive Wayside and his contemporaries to scrutinize college governance and administration as processes separate from the priorities of education itself. The impact of Wayside's recognition would be the newfound scrutiny of decisions which placed those unqualified in the areas of education in positions of power and determination where education was concerned. Perhaps most troubling amongst the outcomes of this orientation at America's universities was its perpetuation of a class system. Those who had been elevated to places of administrative oversight were typically wealthy elites whose legacy in the institution or community would have a greater bearing on the position of power than on their qualifications therefore. By outcome, the goals of education would often be subverted to the proclivities of class exclusion, making most of America's higher educational contexts the province of those already wealthy and imbued with opportunity. A change in perspective demanding a transition from this period would, by the middle of the 19th century, actually begin to produce explicit policy change where some of America's more vaunted universities would be concerned. For Tappan at Michigan and Ticknor at Harvard, for instance, this period would be seen as an opportunity for reformation to the improvement of education and the social parameters shaping it. Accordingly, the first board of regents at the University of Michigan in 1837 included no clergymen, and for the first fifteen years no more than a quarter of the board were clergymen . . . At Harvard the charter provision requiring some clergymen on the corporation was repealed in 1851." (174) These changes were indicative of the increasing pressure on universities to function at least somewhat more secularly, and more importantly, with an emphasis on scholarly aims rather than those constructed of the moral and religious conditions that interested figures such as Nott. The result in the decades to follow would be a transition not just in the personnel but also in the academic orientation of the nation's first and most respected colleges. These would increasingly find the necessity to diversity content and discipline offerings in order to improve the educational scope provided to students. The result would be a liberalization of sorts in the otherwise historically strict and rigid universities such as Harvard, Yale and Princeton. This would not be an easily won change for those traditional universities whose interest in social and ideological control produced education under a strict set of discipline limitations. Indeed, "Yale agonized in the face of the movement," trying gradually and in the face of opposition to diversify course offerings. This would mark an important break, as would all of these changes, from the traditional dogma and imposition of the university, instead recognizing the student as a recipient of education rather than as a subject of an authoritative social institution. This corresponded with the evolving American identity. And accordingly, "within such a developing framework the American college in the nineteenth century was achieving a balance of power, an equation in which one other element, of course, should be included-the customers." (176) The customer being the student, this age of colleges would increasingly demonstrate that the student is to be seen not as an end product of the university experience but as the catalyst to the interests and priorities demonstrated there within.