Colleges and Universities 513became possible in most sections of
the country.
The example of Johns Hopkins
encouraged other wealthy individuals to
endow universities offering advanced
work. Clark University in Worcester,
Massachusetts, founded by Jonas Clark,
a merchant and real estate speculator,
opened its doors in 1889. Its president,
G. Stanley Hall, had been a professor of
psychology at Hopkins, and he built the
new university in that institution’s
image. More important was John D.
Rockefeller’s creation, the University of
Chicago (1892), whose first president,
William Rainey Harper, was a brilliant
biblical scholar—he received his PhD
from Yale at the age of eighteen—an
imaginative administrator, and a football
enthusiast, as noted at the outset of this
chapter. The new university, he told
Rockefeller, should be designed “with
the example of Johns Hopkins before
our eyes.”
Like Daniel Coit Gilman, Harper sought
topflight scholars for his faculty. He offered such high
salaries that he was besieged with over 1,000 applica-
tions. Armed with Rockefeller dollars, he “raided”
the best institutions in the nation. He decimated the
faculty of the new Clark University—“an act of
wreckage,” the indignant President Hall complained,
“comparable to anything that the worst trust ever
attempted against its competitors.” Chicago offered
first-class graduate and undergraduate education.
During its first year there were 120 instructors for
fewer than 600 students, and despite fears that the
mighty tycoon Rockefeller would enforce his social
and economic views on the institution, academic free-
dom was the rule.
State and federal aid to higher education
expanded rapidly. The Morrill Act, granting land to
each state at a rate of 30,000 acres for each senator
and representative, provided the endowments that
gave many important modern universities, such as
Illinois, Michigan State, and Ohio State, their start.
While the federal assistance was earmarked for specific
subjects, the land-grant colleges offered a full range
of courses, and all received additional state funds. The
land-grant universities adopted new ideas quickly.
They were coeducational from the start, and most
developed professional schools and experimented
with extension work and summer programs.
Typical of the better state institutions was the
University of Michigan, which reached the top rank
among the nation’s universities during the presidency
of James B. Angell (1871–1909). Like Eliot at
Harvard, Angell expanded the undergraduate cur-
riculum and strengthened the law and medical
schools. He encouraged graduate studies, seeking to
make Michigan “part of the great world of scholars,”
and sought ways in which the university could serve
the general community.
Important advances were made in women’s
higher education. Beginning with Vassar College,
which opened its doors to 300 women students in
1865, the opportunity for young women to pursue
serious academic work gradually expanded. Wellesley
and Smith, both founded in 1875, completed the
so-called Big Three women’s colleges. Together with
the already established Mount Holyoke (1837), and
with Bryn Mawr (1885), Barnard (1889), and Radcliffe
(1893), they became known as the Seven Sisters.
The only professional careers easily available to
women were nursing, teaching, and the new area called
social work. Nevertheless, the remarkable women that
these institutions trained were conscious of their
uniqueness and determined to demonstrate their capa-
bilities. They provided most of the leaders of the early-
twentieth-century drive for equal rights for women.
Not all the changes in higher education were
beneficial. The elective system led to superficiality;
students gained a smattering of knowledge of many
subjects and mastered none. For example, 55 percent
of the Harvard class of 1898 took elementary courses
and no others during their four years of study.
Intensive graduate work often produced narrowness
of outlook and research monographs on trivial sub-
jects. Attempts to apply the scientific method in fieldsA physics lecture, circa 1890, at the University of Michigan. Note that women are
segregated from men; but in the men’s section white and black men are sitting
together. Many of the Morrill Act universities admitted women.