III
In point of historical pedigree the American universities are
of another derivation than their European counterpart; although
the difference in this respect is not so sharp a matter of
contrast as might be assumed at first sight. The European
(Continental) universities appear to have been founded, originally, to meet the needs of professional training, more particularly theological (and philosophical) training in the earlier times. The American universities are, historically, an outgrowth of the American college; and the latter was installed, in its beginnings, largely as a means of professional training; chiefly training for Divinity, secondarily for the calling of the schoolmaster. But in neither case, neither in that of the European university nor in that of the American College, was this early vocational aim of the schools allowed to decide their character in the long run, nor to circumscribe the lines of their later growth. In both cases, somewhat alike, the two groups of schools came to their mature development, in the nineteenth century, as establishments occupied with disinterested learning, given over to the pursuit of intellectual enterprise, rather than as seminaries for training of a vocational kind. They still had a vocational value, no doubt, and the vocational needs of their students need not have been absent from the considerations that guided their directorates. It would particularly be found that the (clerical) directorates of the American colleges had more than half an eye to the needs of Divinity even at so late a date as when, in the third quarter of the century, the complexion of the American college situation began seriously to change. It is from this period -- from the era of the Civil War and the Reconstruction -- that the changes set in which have reshaped the academic situation in America.
At this era, some half a century ago, the American college
was, or was at least pressed to be, given over to disinterested
instruction, not specialized with a vocational, or even a
denominational, bias. It was coming to take its place as the
superior or crowning member, a sort of capstone, of the system of
public instruction. The life history of any one of the state
universities whose early period of growth runs across this era
will readily show the effectual guidance of such an ideal of a
college, as a superior and definitive member in a school system
designed to afford an extended course of instruction looking to
an unbiassed increase and diffusion of knowledge. Other
interests, of a professional or vocational kind, were also
entrusted to the keeping of these new-found schools; but with a
conclusive generality the rule holds that in these academic
creations a college establishment of a disinterested, non-vocational character is counted in as the indispensable nucleus, -- that much was at that time a matter of course.
The further development shows two marked features: The
American university has come into bearing; and the college has
become an intermediate rather than a terminal link in the
conventional scheme of education. Under the names "undergraduate" and "graduate," the college and the university are still commonly coupled together as subdivisions of a complex whole; but this holding together of the two disparate schools is at the best a freak of aimless survival. At the worst, and more commonly, it is the result of a gross ambition for magnitude on the part of the joint directorate. Whether the college lives by itself as an independent establishment on a foundation of its own, or is in point of legal formality a subdivision of the university establishment, it takes its place in the educational scheme as senior member of the secondary school system, and it bears no peculiarly close relation to the university as a seat of learning. At the closest it stands to the university in the relation of a fitting school; more commonly its relations are closer with the ordinary professional and vocational schools; and for the most part it stands in no relation, beyond that of juxtaposition, with the one or the other.