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In the Wake of Laurence Veysey: Re-examining the Liberal Arts College

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz
Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz*
Affiliation:
Smith College
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Extract

In The Emergence of the American University, Laurence R. Veysey enriched our understanding of the American university at its creation in the second half of the nineteenth century. He demonstrated how this new institution drew on German approaches and valued experimental, empirical methods of knowledge. The university introduced the lecture and seminar. It valued graduate school training above all; the doctoral dissertation required that its students become creators of new knowledge, preferably by experimental methods. Veysey helped us understand the emerging American university by creating a useful ideal type.

Type
Retrospective: Laurence R. Veysey's The Emergence of the American University
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , Fall 2005 , pp. 420 - 426
Copyright
Copyright © 2005 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 Geiger, Roger L. ed., The American College in the Nineteenth Century, (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000). For the intellectual tradition of the college, see p. 276, fn. 3. Particularly valuable to this essay are Geiger's “The Era of Multipurpose Colleges in American Higher Education” and “The ‘Superior Instruction of Women” 1836–1890.” Geiger makes the point that the revisionist interpreters of the college have not presented a “synthesis of their monographic findings to displace the traditional narratives” (p. 8).Google Scholar

2 Stevenson, Louise L. Scholarly Means to Evangelical Ends: The New Haven Scholars and the Transformation of Higher Learning in America, 1830–1890 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). I am also grateful to Stevenson's excellent entry on “Colleges and Universities” in A Companion to American Thought, ed. Wightman Fox, Richard and Kloppenberg, James T. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 134–37.Google Scholar

3 Hawkins, Hugh “The Making of the Liberal Arts College Identity,“ Daedalus, 128: 1 (1999): 1–25. This work has influenced my way of thinking about the liberal arts college and shapes much of what follows in this essay.Google Scholar

4 Leslie, W. Bruce Gentlemen and Scholars: College and Community in the “Age of the University,” 1865–1917 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992); and Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1987).Google Scholar

5 Geiger makes clear that this was only possible in the larger colleges. By 1900, 25 faculty members were “deemed appropriate by one estimate in order to offer an elective curriculum. … Yet in 1900 the modal college enrolled only 83 students. Few colleges reached a faculty size of 25 before 1920,” The American College in the Nineteenth Century, p. 35.Google Scholar

6 Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women's Colleges from Their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1984).Google Scholar

7 In understanding it, I am particularly grateful for the 1994 research paper of Smith student Patricia Vidil and the 2002 research paper of Sunada., Erika Ms. Sunada was a graduate student in the American Studies Diploma Program at Smith. She has studied the career decision of the missionary Azalia Emma Peet in an excellent essay, “Dreaming of the Orient in Domestic America: Azalia Emma Peet and the Missionary Impulse,” that I hope will soon be published.Google Scholar

8 Letter of Sarah De Forest Pettus, “Letters from Missionary Alumnae,” The Smith College Monthly, vol. 15 (April 1908), 463. I am grateful to Erika Sunada, “Dreaming of the Orient in Domestic America,” for this quote and reference.Google Scholar

9 The courses offered in the 1894 catalogue were as follows: 1. General Economics 2. General Sociology 3. Social Institutions: The Family 4. Social Institutions: The State 5. The Laboring Class: The history of the laboring class and its evolution from slavery and serfdom; the modern labor movement, its aim and prospects. 6. Socialism: The history of socialistic theories and experiments; the present proposals and prospects of socialism, and its relation to labor movement. 7. Money 8. Commercial Legislation 9. Social Pathology: Paupers & Defectives 10. Social Pathology: Crime and CriminalsGoogle Scholar

10 In trying to understand why one area of student interest became a powerful area of study and another waited in the wings, I can only speculate at this point. Smith may have feared the missionary impulse, so strong at its sister institution Mount Holyoke College. For many decades it may have hesitated, awaiting a more “scientific” approach to consideration of Asia. The college, by contrast, had every reason to foster the civic work and aspirations of the new reformist sociology. The college's president was involved in many civic enterprises, including the People's Institute, rubbing shoulders with important reformers who lived in the town.Google Scholar

11 Veysey, Laurence R. The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 209–12, 240–41.Google Scholar

12 Ibid., 237–41, quote p. 237.Google Scholar

13 Ibid., 283.Google Scholar