The establishment of state-supported and state-controlled universities in the commonwealths organized after the close of the eighteenth century by no means put an end to the establishment of colleges upon religious foundations. Denominational zeal was very strong in the decades preceding the Civil War, and the church was the center of community life in the newly settled regions. The need to provide an intelligent ministry and also a higher civilization led to the establishment of many small sectarian colleges in the new states. Despite the fact that practically all of them would today be considered only of secondary grade, they accomplished a splendid work and provided ideals and standards of intellectual life in a new country whose population was engaged chiefly in supplying the physical needs of life. The response made in the Civil War by the institutions of higher education throughout the United States, whether privately or publicly supported, was a magnificent return for the sacrifices endured in their establishment and maintenance. Everywhere throughout the North the colleges were depleted of instructors and students who had entered the ranks, and in the South nearly all the colleges were compelled to close their doors. Upon the shoulders of their graduates fell the burden of directing civil and military affairs in state and nation.
Were a visitor to Harvard or Columbia in 1860 to revisit it today, the changes he would observe would be startling. The elective system, graduate studies, professional and technical schools, an allied woman's college, and a summer session are a few of the most noticeable activities incorporated since 1860. It would be impossible to set any date for the beginning of this transformation, so gradual and subtle has it been, but the accession of Dr. Charles W. Eliot to the presidency of Harvard College in 1869 and the establishment of Johns Hopkins University in 1876 are definite landmarks.
This chapter is a history of the American college, and space will not permit of a detailed description of these activities but simply of a narration of the way they developed and of the forces which brought them into being.
It has already been mentioned that the curriculum of the average American college at the beginning of the nineteenth century differed but little from the curriculum followed in the middle of the seventeenth. The reason is simple. The curriculum is based upon the biological principle of adaptation to environment, and the environment of the average American of 1800 differed but slightly from his ancestor of a century and a half previous. The growth of the curriculum follows, slowly it is often true, upon the growth of knowledge. The growth of knowledge during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was slow and insignificant compared to its marvelous growth in the nineteenth century, particularly in the last half of it. The great discoveries in science, first in chemistry, then in physics and biology, resulted in their gradually displacing much of the logic and philosophy which had maintained the prime place in the old curriculum. The interest aroused in the French language and literature by our Revolution; in the Spanish by the South American wars of independence; and in the German by the distinguished scholars who studied in the German universities during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, caused a demand that those languages as well as English have a place in the curriculum. This could be secured only by making them partly alternatives to the classical languages. The Industrial Revolution, based as it was upon the application of science to industry, not only gave an impetus to the establishment of technical schools, but by revolutionizing the production and distribution of wealth pushed into the curriculum the science that deals with wealth, political economy. The growth of cities that followed in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, the conflicts between the interests of classes,--viz., landowners, capitalists, and laborers,--the rapid decay of feudalism and the spread of political democracy following the French Revolution, the expansion of commerce to all corners of the globe and the resulting development of colonialism, all these human interests gave a new meaning to the study of history and politics which caused them to secure a place of great prominence in the curriculum during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.