The American college in the nineteenth century

The American College in the Nineteenth Century. Edited by Roger L. Geiger. (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000. Pp. ix, 363. $49.95.) Students of the history of higher education in the nineteenth century should have little difficulty recalling the names Frederick Rudolph, Richard Hofstadter, Walter P. Metzger, John S. Brubacher, and Willis Rudy. Their narrative histories, among others written in the 1950s and 1960s, have provided and continue to provide the foundation texts in courses devoted to the field. Yet, as Roger L. Geiger points out in his preface and introduction to this collection, beginning in the 1970s a new scholarship has challenged many of the assumptions and stereotypes contained in those works. What Geiger has found frustrating, however, is that despite some thirty years of revisionist scholarship employing the methods and tools of social history, there has been a failure to provide a new synthesis or to suggest new concepts to replace the old. In a most interesting thirty-six page introduction, the editor offers a series of four themes that constitute the framework for the new interpretation he espouses. He then provides thirteen articles, all but one previously published in the History of Higher Education Annual, that exemplify the scholarship supportive of those themes. The first theme focuses on student life in the nineteenth century. An article by David B. Potts offers enrollment figures that challenge the traditional view that the antebellum colleges were impractical, unpopular, and resistant to change. Potts presents a convincing argument that the Yale Report of 1828, usually depicted as an impediment to progress in higher education, was in fact a call for reform in the classical curriculum. He points out that Yale was among the most popular colleges, experiencing a 60 percent increase in enrollment between 1828 and 1860. Finally, Potts counters the oft-repeated claim that the antebellum colleges were narrow-minded defenders of the status quo. He demonstrates that enrollment growth and curriculum improvements did occur. Two additional essays devoted to the first theme focus on the actual conditions of student life on campuses in the Northeast. Again, the revisionist view of the antebellum collegiate scene is one of gradual, positive change, beginning around 1820, from riotous students protesting against authoritarian rule, a "lifeless and uninspiring curriculum" (52), and stifling teaching methods to a student life fashioned and directed by the students, one product of a far less repressive collegiate climate. The editor's second theme concerns regional differences among colleges between 1830 and 1860. The essays included depict the institutions of the Northeast as undergoing improvements in the quality of their faculty, the breadth of their curricula, and the standards of their admission. In an article focusing on developments in Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana, the West is shown to be the land of proliferating denominational colleges that fostered coeducation and practical courses of study as well as promoting religion. Michael Sugrue's piece, "We Desire Our Future Rulers to Be Educated Men," presents the history of South Carolina College during the first half of the nineteenth century. This essay is included as illustrative of the spread of state colleges in the South, but its contribution to this collection goes beyond that. It is unique in capturing the purpose and spirit of the school, its reflection of regional values, and its influence on regional politics. The reader clearly senses that here was a most influential college that was indeed different from those of the North and West in its interest in educating the sons of the social elite, its relative inattention to religion, and its defense of slavery and espousal of secession. …