Colleges and Universities
Industrialization altered the way Americans thought at
the same time that it transformed their ways of making
a living. Technological advances revolutionized the
communication of ideas more drastically than they did
the transportation of goods or the manufacture of
steel. The materialism that permeated American atti-
tudes toward business also affected contemporary
education and literature, while Charles Darwin’s the-
ory of evolution influenced American philosophers,
lawyers, and historians profoundly. This was especially
true of the nation’s institutions of higher education.
Between 1878 and 1898, the number of colleges
and universities increased from about 350 to 500, and
the student body roughly tripled. Despite this growth,
less than 2 percent of the college-age population
attended college, but the aspirations of the nation’s
youth were rising, and more and more parents had the
financial means necessary for fulfilling them.
More significant than the expansion of the colleges
were the alterations in their curricula and in the atmos-
phere permeating the average campus. In 1870 most
colleges remained what they had been in the 1830s:
small, limited in their offerings, and intellectually stag-
nant. The ill-paid professors were seldom scholars of
stature. Thereafter, change came like a flood tide: State
universities proliferated; the federal government’s land-
grant program in support of training in “agriculture
and the mechanic arts,” established under the Morrill
Act of 1862, came into its own; wealthy philan-
thropists poured fortunes into old institutions and
founded new ones; educators introduced new courses
and adopted new teaching methods; professional
schools of law, medicine, education, business, journal-
ism, and other specialties increased in number.
In the forefront of reform was Harvard, the oldest
and most prestigious college in the country. In the
1860s it possessed an excellent faculty, but teaching
methods were antiquated and the curriculum had
remained almost unchanged since the colonial period.
In 1869, however, a dynamic president, the chemist
Charles W. Eliot, undertook a transformation of the
college. Eliot introduced the elective system, gradually
eliminating required courses and expanding offerings
in such areas as modern languages, economics, and
the laboratory sciences. For the first time, students
were allowed to borrow books from the library! Eliot
also encouraged the faculty to experiment with new
teaching methods, and he brought in professors with
original minds and new ideas.
An even more important development in higher
education was the founding of Johns Hopkins in 1876.
This university was one of many established in the
period by wealthy industrialists; its benefactor, the
Baltimore merchant Johns Hopkins, had made his for-
tune in the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Its distinc-
tiveness, however, was due to the vision of Daniel Coit
Gilman, its first president.
Gilman modeled Johns Hopkins on the German
universities, where meticulous research and freedom of
inquiry were the guiding principles. In staffing the
institution, he sought scholars of the highest reputa-
tion, scouring Europe as well as America in his search
for talent and offering outstanding
men high salaries for that time—up
to $5,000 for a professor, roughly
ten times the income of a skilled
artisan. Johns Hopkins specialized
in graduate education. In the gener-
ation after its founding, it churned
out a remarkable percentage of the
most important scholars in the
nation, including Woodrow Wilson
in political science, John Dewey in
philosophy, Frederick Jackson
Turner in history, and John R.
Commons in economics.
The success of Johns Hopkins
did not stop the migration of
American scholars to Europe;
more than 2,000 matriculated at
German universities during the
1880s. But as Hopkins graduates
took up professorships at other
institutions and as scholars trained
elsewhere adopted the Hopkins
methods, true graduate education512 Chapter 19 Intellectual and Cultural Trends in the Late Nineteenth Century
W. A. Rogers’s engraving, “Out of the Game,” showed one injured boy tending to another. It
appeared in the October 31, 1891 issue of Harper’s Weekly, which included an essay by Walter
Camp. Camp claimed that football cultivated the man “of executive ability.” If all life was
“survival of the fittest,” then colleges were right to promote such aggressive pastimes.