We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 February 2017
Of the classic documents addressing issues in higher education, few have provoked as much commentary as the Yale Report of 1828—and perhaps fewer still have been subject to such undeserved infamy. Ostensibly, the Report originated as an institutional memorandum. It was produced in response to the suggestion made at the annual meeting of the Yale Corporation in 1827 that the College might consider dropping the study of “the dead languages” from its curriculum. But its authors—President Jeremiah Day, Professors Benjamin Silliman, Sr., and James L. Kingsley—were clearly participating as well in an ongoing public debate. The 1820s were a decade of lively campus discussions on the subject of curricular reform. The stakes were high. The study of Latin and Greek traditionally constituted the core and bulk of college education. Wasn't it time for change?
1 The Report's full title and references are as follows: Committee of the Corporation and the Academical Faculty, Reports on the Course of Instruction in Yale College (New Haven, CT, 1828). It was subsequently published as, “Original Papers in Relation to a Course of Liberal Education.” The American Journal of Science and Arts 15 (January 1829): 297–351. In this article I refer to the page numbers from the original 1828 Report.Google Scholar
2 Ticknor, George, Remarks on Changes Lately Proposed or Adopted, in Harvard University (Boston, 1825). The Yale authors quote and dispute Ticknor in Yale Report, 42–49. On the general background of the Report, see Urofsky, Melvin I., “Reform and Response: The Yale Report of 1828.” History of Education Quarterly 5 (March 1965): 53–67. For a general account of the University of Virginia's curricular experiment, see Frederick Rudolph, Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study since 1636 (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1977), 81–83. For Ticknor's reform efforts at Harvard, see Tyack, David D., George Ticknor and the Boston Brahmins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 85–128, and Storr, Richard, The Beginnings of Graduate Education in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 15–24.Google Scholar
3 Hofstadter, Richard and Wilson Smith, eds., American Higher Education: A Documentary History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1961), 275. Some of the earlier discussions of the Report were in R. Freeman Butts, The College Charts Its Course: Historical Conceptions and Current Proposals (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939), 118–125, and Schmidt, George P., The Liberal Arts College: A Chapter in American Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1957), 55–58.Google Scholar
4 Hofstadter, Richard and Metzger, Walter P., The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), 279. The precepts of the faculty psychology are invoked in the Yale Report, 7–15, 30–41, and passim. See also Urofsky, “Reform and Response,” 58–61.Google Scholar
5 Bloom, Allan, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987); Levine, Lawrence W., The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture, and History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), esp. 37–53. See also David, L. Kirp's more recent discussion of the Yale Report in Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 256–59.Google Scholar
6 Potts, David B., Baptist Colleges in the Development of American Society, 1812–1861 (PhD Dissertation: Harvard University, 1967; New York: Garland Publishing, 1988) was among the studies that inaugurated this revisionist movement. Other landmark studies within this movement have been Guralnick, Stanley M., Science and the Ante-bellum American College (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1975) and Burke, Colin B., American Collegiate Populations: A Test of the Traditional View (New York: New York University Press, 1982). A synthesis of the revisionist views of the antebellum college is attempted in Roger Geiger, ed., The American College in the Nineteenth Century (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000). The book includes articles from History of Higher Education Annual (recently re-titled Perspectives on the History of Higher Education), a periodical edited by Geiger, which has been a major vehicle for propagating the revisionist views. For a bibliographical overview of recent scholarship in the field, see also Hart, D.G., “Christianity and the University in America: A Bibliographical Essay,” in Marsden, George M. and Longfield, Bradley J., ed., The Secularization of the Academy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 303–309.Google Scholar
7 In 1977 Potts, David B. observed, “Anachronistic readings of the Report are now yielding to interpretations that find it a thoughtful, realistic, and effective approach to pre-Civil War collegiate education.” Potts, “‘College Enthusiasm!’ as Public Response, 1800–1860.” Harvard Educational Review 47 (February 1977): 39. As examples of the emerging new assessment of the Report, Potts cited his own, “American Colleges in the Nineteenth Century: From Localism to Denominationalism.” History of Education Quarterly 11 (Winter 1971): 353–366; Sloan, Douglas, “Harmony, Chaos, and Consensus: The American College Curriculum.” Teachers College Record 73 (UATDecember 1971): 242–247; Guralnick, Science and the Ante-bellum American College, 28–33; and Gabriel, Ralph Henry, Religion and Learning at Yale: The Church of Christ in the College and University, 1757–1957 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958), 98–108, which Potts characterized as an instance of “an earlier sympathetic reading.” In 1981, however, he remarked that many scholars, though sympathetic to the Report, still had not understood its true message and implications, citing Frederick Rudolph as a prime example. (Potts, “Curriculum and Enrollment: Some Thoughts on Assessing the Popularity of Antebellum Colleges.” History of Higher Education Annual 1 (UAT1981): 88–109, reprinted as “Curriculum and Enrollment: Assessing the Popularity of Antebellum Colleges,” in Geiger, ed., The American College in the Nineteenth Century, 37–45. Potts discusses both Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A History (New York: Knopf, 1962), chapters 3–11, and idem, Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study since 1636 (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1977), 66–72). Independent of the revisionist movement, there is also a reading that has attempted to treat the Report as a “neorepublican manifesto.” See Lane, Jack C., “The Yale Report of 1828 and Liberal Education: A Neorepublican Manifesto,” History of Education Quarterly 23 (Fall 1987): 325–338.Google Scholar
8 Geiger, , American College in the Nineteenth Century, 8.Google Scholar
9 Axtell, James, “The Death of the Liberal Arts College,” History of Education Quarterly 11 (UATWinter 1971): 339–352, itemized and discussed the failings of what the author called “bad Whig history.”CrossRefGoogle Scholar
10 On the emergence of a unique system of higher education in the United States, seen in contrast to developments in major European countries, see Pak, Michael S., “Academia Americana: The Transformation of a Prestige System” (PhD Dissertation: Harvard University, 2000), 13–45.Google Scholar
11 Yale Report, 20. See also 50–51.Google Scholar
12 Pak, “Academia Americana,” 13–29.Google Scholar
13 Burke, American Collegiate Populations, 18.Google Scholar
14 Hofstadter, and Metzger, , Development of Academic Freedom, 209–274. The “mortality rate” of colleges is discussed on 211–12. See also Donald G. Tewksbury, The Founding of American Colleges and Universities before the Civil War (New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1932).Google Scholar
15 Burke discredits Tewksbury's research in American Collegiate Populations, 11–52. A tabulation of the total collegiate enrollment for the period is on page 54.Google Scholar
16 Ibid., 54.Google Scholar
17 Ibid., 53–54. On local boosterism, see Potts, “‘College Enthusiasm!’ as Public Response, 1800–1860,” 28–42. For a recent treatment of the relationship between antebellum colleges and Christianity, see Reuben, Julie A., The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 17–60, and Marsden and Longfield, eds., The Secularization of the Academy. On the nature of cooperation between the locals and the denominations, see Potts, “American Colleges in the 19th Century: From Localism to Denominationalism.” On the Baptists in particular, see Potts, Baptist Colleges. Still useful on the Presbyterians is Geiger, C. Harve, The Program of Higher Education of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America: An Historical Analysis of Its Growth in the United States (Cedar Rapids, IA: Laurance Press, 1940). On the Methodists, see Sylvanus Milne Duvall, The Methodist Episcopal Church and Education up to 1869 (New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1928). The figures on the percentage of denominationally affiliated colleges are tabulated in Burke, American Collegiate Population, 22.Google Scholar
18 Quincy quoted in McCaughey, Robert A., Josiah Quincy 1772–1864: The Last Federalist (Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press, 1974), 169–170.Google Scholar
19 Quincy, “Address of Josiah Quincy upon His Inauguration as President of Harvard University, June 2nd, 1829,” Josiah Quincy Papers, Harvard University Archives, 41.Google Scholar
20 [Wayland, Francis], Report to the Corporation of Brown University on Changes in the System of Collegiate Education, Read March 28, 1850 (Providence, 1850), 43.Google Scholar
21 Philip Lindsley, “Speech about Colleges, at Nashville, Commencement Day, October 4, 1848,” The Works of Philip Lindsley, D.D., Later President of the University of Nashville (Philadelphia, 1859), I, 518.Google Scholar
22 Cogswell to William Hunting, 7 November 1838, American Education Society Letters, II, 73, Congregational Library, Boston. For a fuller discussion of the Society's activities and impact, see Natalie Naylor, “Raising a Learned Ministry: The American Education Society, 1815–1860” (PhD Dissertation: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1971).Google Scholar
23 Wayland's quote is from Report to the Corporation of Brown University, 60. On academies, see Nancy Beadie and Kim Tolley, eds., Chartered Schools: Two Hundred Years of Independent Academies in the United States, 1727–1925 (New York: Routledge Palmer, 2002). On the competition academies faced in turn, see in the above collection Christine Ogren, “Betrothed to the State?: Nineteenth-Century Academies Confront the Rise of the State Normal Schools,” 284–303.Google Scholar
24 Pierson, George W., the statistician and historian of Yale, observes: “Once the enrollment began to be printed under President Timothy Dwight, they recorded a rise-fall-rise to 305 by the year 1811, some decline in the War of 1812, recovery in the 1820s, and a total college enrollment of 413 in the year 1835–36. Yale was then (and for a long generation remained) the largest college in the country, yet it took almost twenty years for growth to resume, so that a figure of more than 500 students was not reached until the eve of the Civil War.” Pierson, A Yale Book of Numbers: Historical Statistics of the College and University, 1701–1976 (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1983), 5.Google Scholar
25 Yale Report, 28, 21, 27, 42.Google Scholar
26 This was true of the curriculum for the French lycée and the German Gymnasium, which for all purposes were the equivalents of the American undergraduate college in this period. University degree programs in France and Germany were likewise controlled by the government, which administered national exams for those seeking to graduate.Google Scholar
27 Pak, “Academia Americana,” 13–29.Google Scholar
28 Guralnick, , Science and the Ante-bellum American College, ix. Guralnick's conclusions are based on a study of the curriculum at Amherst, Bowdoin, Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, Dickinson, Harvard, Middlebury, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Princeton, Rochester, Transylvania, Union, University of Vermont, Virginia, Wesleyan, Williams, and Yale.Google Scholar
29 Pierson, , A Yale Book of Numbers, 20.Google Scholar
30 [Wayland, Francis], Report to the Corporation of Brown University, 14, 8.Google Scholar
31 A good feel for what the classroom instruction at antebellum colleges was like is conveyed by the recollection of Andrew Dickson White, who was a prize-winning student at Yale in the early 1850s. In the following passage he speaks of instruction in science: “The textbook was simply repeated by rote. Not one student in fifty took the least interest in it; and the man who could give the words of the text most glibly secured the best marks.” See Andrew White, Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White (New York: The Century Co., 1905), Vol. 1, 27; Yale Report, 10–11, defends the efficacy of recitations as an instructional method. See also Geiger and Julie Ann Bubolz, “College As It Was in the Mid-Nineteenth Century” in Geiger, ed., The American College in the Nineteenth Century, 81.Google Scholar
32 Guralnick, , Science and the Ante-bellum American College, xi.Google Scholar
33 Quincy, Josiah, Remarks on the Nature and Probable Effects of Introducing the Voluntary System in the Studies of Latin and Greek (Cambridge, MA: J. Owen, 1841), 12.Google Scholar
34 Yale Report, 5–6. On the curricular changes since the colonial period, see 42–49.Google Scholar
35 Ibid., 42–43.Google Scholar
36 Ibid., 42.Google Scholar
37 Jencks, Christopher and Riesman, David, The Academic Revolution (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968), 61.Google Scholar
38 Yale Report, 25.Google Scholar
39 Quote from Yale Report, 54. More on the value of classical education as a preparation for the professions, see 36–41, 54–56, and passim.Google Scholar
40 Lindsley, Philip, “Baccalaureate Address, at Cumberland College, 1829,” The Works of Philip Lindsley, D.D., I, 162–63.Google Scholar
41 Burke, , American Collegiate Populations, 55, 137–211. The best general account of the “status revolution” in the Jacksonian era remains Edward Pessen, Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics, rev. ed. (Howewood, IL: The Dorsey Press, 1978). In addition, Bushman, Richard L., The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992) is a landmark study in cultural history, which documents the intensifying quest for “gentility” reflected in the lifestyles of Americans of virtually all social classes in this period.Google Scholar
42 Ticknor, , Remarks, 38.Google Scholar
43 Wayland, Francis, Thoughts on the Present Collegiate System in the United States (Boston, 1842), 80.Google Scholar
44 Wayland, Report, 14.Google Scholar
45 Yale Report, 6.Google Scholar
46 Quincy, Josiah, Remarks on the Nature and Probable Effects of Introducing the Voluntary System, 7.Google Scholar
46 Yale Report, 42.Google Scholar
48 Yale Report, 7. The content of this paragraph is also drawn from Merle Curti, “Psychological Theories of American Thought” in Wiener, Philip P., ed., Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973), 16–30; [Thomas H. Leahey], “Faculty Psychology” in Robert Audi, ed., The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 261. The faculty psychology and its historical significance are discussed in Douglas Sloan, The Scottish Enlightenment and the American College Ideal (New York: Teachers College Press, 1971) and Kuklick, Bruce, A History of Philosophy in America 1720–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 58–74. Fuller explorations of the faculty psychology as a philosophical doctrine are found in Patricia Easton, A., ed., The Logic and the Workings of the Mind: The Logic of Ideas and Faculty Psychology in Early Modern Philosophy (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1997).Google Scholar
49 Urofsky, , “Reform and Response,” 61.Google Scholar
50 The elective system Wayland proposed is outlined in his Report to the Corporation of Brown University, 51–56. The earliest copies of Wayland's textbooks I have been able to locate are Elements of Moral Science (New York: Cooke and Co., 1835) and The Elements of Intellectual Philosophy (New York: J.C. Derby, 1854), though the latter is a second edition. Both of these went through numerous editions. On the popularity of Wayland's textbooks, see Curti, , “Psychological Theories of American Thought,” 22. The quote is from the 1854 edition of Elements of Intellectual Philosophy, 122.Google Scholar
51 Ibid., 265.Google Scholar
52 Davie, George Elder, The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and Her Universities in the Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1961), especially xi–xx, 3–102.Google Scholar
53 [Jardine, George], “On the Systems of Education Established in Universities, and on the Means of Improving Them.” American Journal of Education 1 (1826): 585.Google Scholar
54 Ticknor, , Remarks, 7.Google Scholar
55 Yale Report, 46.Google Scholar
56 Geiger, , American College in the Nineteenth Century, 4.Google Scholar
57 Winterer, Caroline, “The Humanist Revolution in America, 1820–1860: Classical Antiquity in the Colleges.” History of Higher Education Annual 18 (1998): 111–130. One of the best discussions of “the Greek Revival” is found in Gary Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 41–62.Google Scholar
58 For Ticknor's failed reforms at Harvard, see Tyack, George Ticknor, 85–128, and Storr, The Beginnings of Graduate Education, 15–24. For a general discussion of the failed reform efforts of German-trained American scholars and scientists at American colleges, see Pak, “Academia Americana,” 78–127.Google Scholar
59 On Beck, Charles and Felton, Cornelius and their ill-fated experiment at Harvard, see McCaughey, , Josiah Quincy, 173–74. With regard to the quality of teaching, it is interesting to note that in 1829 Quincy conducted a study on how much time instructors at Harvard spent with each student for recitations in Latin and Greek and found a “general want of thoroughness of instruction in those branches, which has, in a greater or less degree, characterized all the literary institutions of our country.” There was “indifference,” he concluded, even among instructors themselves. From Harvard University, Annual Report, 1828–29 (Cambridge, 1830), 11, 7. Quincy's low opinion regarding the quality of classical instruction at American colleges did not change near the time of his retirement in the 1840s. See Quincy, Remarks (Cambridge, MA, 1841).Google Scholar
60 Geiger, , The American College in the Nineteenth Century, 8, 81.Google Scholar
61 Yale Report, 21.Google Scholar
62 On the failure of Virginia's reforms, see Rudolph, Curriculum, 81–83.Google Scholar
63 This argument in turn derived from their more general view that evangelical religion has been hostile to the intellect throughout American history—a view which Hotstadter would further elaborate in his subsequent book, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York, Knopf, Alfred A., 1963).Google Scholar
64 In a response to revisionists, Metzger wrote, “What would have happened if there had been no Richard Hofstadter? The revisionists would have had to invent him and to a certain extent they have.” Metzger, Walter P., “American Collegiate Population: A Test of the Traditional View.” The Journal of Higher Education 55, 3 (May-June 1984): 422. See also Laurence Veysey's skeptical treatment of revisionists in Veysey, “The History of Education.” Reviews in American History 10, 4 (December 1982): 289.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
65 Bok, Derek, Higher Learning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 185–86.Google Scholar
