Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

The Authors

Arthur M. Cohen is professor emeritus of higher education at??UCLA, editor-in-chief of New Directions for Community Colleges, and coauthor of The American Community College, Fifth Edition?? from Jossey-Bass.

Carrie B. Kisker??is an editor, researcher, and educational consultant in Los Angeles. She has taught courses on the history of higher education and on citizenship, leadership, and service, and is the

former managing editor of New Directions for Community Colleges.

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When the first edition of The Shaping of American Higher Education was published it was lauded for its historical perspective and in-depth coverage of current events that provided an authoritative, comprehensive account of the history of higher education in the United States. As in the first edition, this book tracks trends and important issues in eight key areas: student access, faculty professionalization, curricular expansion, institutional growth, governance, finance, research, and outcomes. Thoroughly revised and updated, the volume is filled with critical new data; recent information from specialized sources on faculty, student admissions, and management practices; and an entirely new section that explores privatization, corporatization, and accountability from the mid-1990s to the present. This second edition also includes end-of-chapter questions for guidance, reflection, and study.

"Cohen and Kisker do the nation's colleges and universities a much needed service by authoring this volume. The highly regarded histories of American higher education have become badly dated. They ignore the last quarter century when American higher education was transformed. This volume provides comprehensive information on that era."
? Art Levine, president, Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and author,

When Hope and Fear Collide: A Portrait of Today's College Student

"The second edition of The Shaping of American Higher Education is a treasure trove of information and insight. Cohen and Kisker provide us with astute and straightforward analysis and commentary on our past, present, and likely future. This book is invaluable to those seeking to go to the heart of the issues and challenges confronting higher education."
? Judith S. Eaton, president, Council for Higher Education Accreditation

"Arthur Cohen and his collaborator have now updated his superb history of American higher education. It remains masterful, authoritative, comprehensive, and incisive, and guarantees that this work will stand as the classic required resource for all who want to understand where higher education came from and where it is going. The new material gives a wise and nuanced perspective on the current crisis-driven transformations of the higher education industry."
? John Lombardi, president, Louisiana State University System

"The Shaping of American Higher Education is distinguished by its systematic approach, comprehensive coverage, and extensive treatment of the modern era, including the first years of the twenty-first century. In this second edition, Arthur Cohen and Carrie Kisker are especially adept at bringing historical perspective and a balanced viewpoint to controversial issues of the current era."
? Roger L. Geiger, distinguished professor, The Pennsylvania State University, and author, Knowledge and Money

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The Shaping of American Higher Education

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

Three characteristics of the English colonies in America most affected their development. First was the settlers' determination to form a way of life different from the governmental and familial rigidities they had left in Europe. Second was the land—the limitless horizons for which dissidents and new immigrants could reach whenever they tired of their previous stations. Third was the religious spirit of the time—Protestantism and Anglicanism newly separated from Catholicism and continually reforming, yielding variations in patterns of observance from deism (later Unitarianism) to fervent sects devoted to emotional worship.

Societal Context

Table 1.1. shows a statistical picture of the conditions surrounding American higher education in the Colonial Era.

The distance from Europe contributed to shaping the course of development, as the colonists built their own societies with varying degrees of oversight from the parent country. Although explorers and immigrants had been arriving in the Western hemisphere for more than one hundred years, no lasting English settlement occurred until the beginning of the seventeenth century. Under British sovereignty, Virginia, the first colony, was settled in 1607, and all but one of the colonies was formed by the end of the century. Georgia, the last of the original thirteen, was settled in 1732.

Each colony differed from the others as a consequence of its climate and the religion, mores, and the social patterns characteristic of its early settlers. Among these groups were Puritans bringing a high interest in literacy and a strong theological bent to Massachusetts. Next were distressed Royalists who saw Virginia as an extended export farm to be worked by indentured servants and African slaves. The Society of Friends (Quakers) who emigrated from the English Midlands to the Delaware Valley were the most willing to interact peaceably with the indigenous peoples and to base their communities on religious toleration. The last groups were from Scotland and the north of England and Ireland, who emigrated to escape poverty in the mid-seventeenth century and settled the Appalachian back country. Each group stamped its lifestyle so definitively on its environment that its speech patterns and accents, attitudes toward learning and ageing, child-rearing practices, and many other folkways (Fischer, 1989, names over two dozen) persist to this day.

Whereas the seventeenth century was characterized by an influx of English families, adventurers, and indentured servants, along with Africans who were brought unwillingly, in the eighteenth century sizeable numbers of Germans, Scots, and Irish arrived. From around 250,000 in 1700, the colonial population quadrupled by midcentury and increased by as much as 30 to 40 percent each decade thereafter. The settlements were widespread; Boston, the largest city, had 7,000 people in 1700, and by the end of the era it, Philadelphia, and New York each had as many as 10,000. The more Europeans, the greater the need for land, hence the onerous displacement of the native peoples as the immigrants conquered the wilderness. This expansionism was a continuation of the dynamism that had characterized the Spanish in the Caribbean and Central and South America, and that the English and other European powers subsequently pursued in Australia and parts of Africa. The colonists began importing slaves from Africa because they could not entice or coerce the natives to work in farms or industries. The policy of Indian removal persisted until the end of the nineteenth century, when the remnants of the indigenous populations had all been assimilated through intermarriage or sequestered in reservations.

For most of the settlers, the New World represented a chance for a new start. Some came as servants who had escaped prison and bought their passage by promising to work for the plantation owners for a number of years after arrival. Others were disinherited children who saw greater promise in a continent where land was cheap and a farm and family could be built anew. The desire for religious freedom brought groups from England and the Continent during an era of religious turmoil and conflict.

In their social and cultural context, the colonies were decidedly English. For a half-dozen generations after the founding of Jamestown and the landing at Plymouth Rock, they retained the characteristics of the motherland. The Germans brought their own language and customs, but the colonial laws, dress, culture, religion, professions, government, and child-rearing and educational practices were modeled on English forms. However, the years in America effected modifications in all areas of life. Some were necessitated by the challenge of living in a land where the wilderness and potentially hostile natives lurked just outside the settlements. Others were shifts in thinking, as a unique American consciousness took shape. Distance from the mother country, reckoned in terms of the several weeks that it took for messages to pass between England and the American seaboard, allowed for new ideas in religious observance and acculturation of the young to take shape.

Religion and the churches are worthy of a special note because they were so close to the daily life and thought of the colonists. Anglicanism and various Protestant sects dominated seventeenth-century England, hence the English colonies as well. The Bible was the major text, often the only book in the home. God and the devil were real to believers. As the witchcraft trials in Massachusetts and Connecticut demonstrated, people could be possessed, have occult powers. Good and evil, the forces of light and darkness, were tangible qualities. The New England Puritans had fled the dictates of the high church of the home country and its links with the crown. They abhorred the idea of a theocracy, but the secular states they established had strong ties to their churches and in some areas of social control were more rigid than those they had left.

The Puritans especially felt they had a mission to create "a city upon a hill," as John Winthrop exhorted even before his congregants reached shore. If they failed to establish God's Kingdom, he later preached, they would be turned out of the land. In other words, fail and you're damned. This thesis, modified toward secular pursuits, became so engrained that two hundred years later Alexis de Tocqueville commented on how ambition was the universal feeling in America.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, European concepts of the Enlightenment and deism modified thought. Many of the leaders born in the first half of the century—Washington, Jefferson, Franklin—adhered to rationalist ideas, read political philosophy that espoused the rights of man, had less attachment to organized religious observance. To them, the Bible was not revelation but a text. Reaction against the eighteenth-century Enlightenment came with a religious backlash known initially as the Great Awakening, dating from around 1750 and reappearing subsequently under different identifiers. This religious fervor led to the continual splintering of established churches into various sects.

The major peculiarity of the North American continent—its limitless land—influenced the way the colonies and eventually the nation developed. The country was large enough to allow for continual reformation in all aspects of colonial life. New forms of religious observance and fresh ideas in everything from the building of settlements to child rearing could emerge in the vast spaces available. The boundless horizons affected family life. The general outlook, especially in the New England colonies, was that everyone should live in family units. But the restless son, chafing under the domination of parents who might have little patience with a rebellious child, could always strike off on his own. The frontier, new opportunities, a different environment always beckoned. In a land where cash was scarce, a child had little reason to hope for an inheritance, but although nearby farm land was not free, the frontier was ever expanding and a young man could work his way into a homestead of his own. Accordingly, a sense of optimism grew. The sons could expect to have more wealth than their fathers; a young man could become a professional person even if his father was a farmer. There were few barriers to those who wanted to make the move. Roles for women were more limited; most opportunities other than domestic service as wife, maid, or older-generation assistant were still in the future.

The geographic openness of the land was reflected also in the way people could reinvent themselves. There were few restrictions on entering the professions. The lawyers, physicians, and theologians occasionally attempted to control entry into their professions, but in few communities was anyone eager to examine the credentials of a newly arrived practitioner; public licensing was seldom seen. Apprenticeships were the major form of access to the professions. A lawyer could take a young person to read with him, and that person could hang up a shingle and enter practice at any time. In medicine a few physicians tried to form groups to judge who was entitled to call himself a doctor, but apprenticeships and the subsequent opening of practice were not regulated. According to Handlin and Handlin (1971), "Only one colony, New Jersey, in 1772, actually limited by law the right of anyone to assume the title of Doctor" (p. 39). Clergymen were both preachers and teachers, and congregations tended to value those who were schooled. Numerous preachers ascended to the pulpit without formal schooling, but "university graduates who could hurl about quotations in the original Hebrew and Greek and loftily demonstrate their superior familiarity with Scripture enjoyed a strategic advantage" (Handlin and Handlin, 1971, p. 43). Teaching required no specific preparation; anyone who could read and write could show others how to do it.

The development of literacy did not depend on schooling. Today's children are exposed to language on television, billboards, magazines, newspapers, even the promotional material on cereal and toy boxes; regardless of the emphasis in their homes, they are surrounded by words. But although the colonists in the coastal cities saw books and newspapers, many who were living on the margins of civilization had little association with print other than in the family Bible. Their familiarity with ideas came through words delivered by a preacher or itinerant peddler. For the vast majority of young people, the family was the source of education in social mores, morality, and ways of behaving. Under the circumstances, the extent of literacy is remarkable. Their orthography was crude, but the colonists were more familiar with language than were their European social-class counterparts.

The American Revolution was born as the colonists gained a sense of uniqueness. Strung along the Eastern seaboard from Massachusetts to Georgia, oriented to the sea across which the immigrants had come, the colonists saw England as the mother country. All the main towns were on bodies of navigable water, and most of the commerce was waterborne trade among the colonies themselves, the English colonies in the West Indies, and Britain. The reasons for the American Revolution have been discussed countless times. Was it commercial interests? Blundering by the English rulers? A by-blow of the French-British rivalry? The revolution has gained particular status as a mythic quest for freedom from oppression by the crown. Taking a cynical view of the latter reason, the contemporary Samuel Johnson (Bate, 1975) said, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" (p. 193). Most of the colonists had no trouble holding compartmentalized notions of freedom—one for themselves, another for their slaves and servants. Views of parity were further stratified to account for what were perceived as natural differences among wealthy and poor and men and women. The "all men are created equal" phrase in the Declaration of Independence proved rather a qualified statement—one that was to be debated and reinterpreted countless times throughout the new nation's history.

Institutions

The nine colleges that were organized in the colonies were modeled on educational forms that had been developed in Europe over the prior five hundred years. This development has been traced well by Rashdall (1936), Herbst (1982), and more recently, Lucas (2006). One incipient university form was organized by groups of students who established their own organizations and assemblies, employing the faculty, deciding on how they would spend their funds, and setting rules governing the courses of study, examinations, and awarding of degrees. Such institutions were organized as early as the twelfth century in Italy and subsequently in Spain, Portugal, and central Europe. The curriculum included the classical writers along with studies in the liberal arts and natural science. They awarded bachelor's degrees and, if a graduate chose to stay on for another year or two, the master's. A teaching license would be awarded somewhere between receipt of the bachelor's and the master's. The student-led institutions also established rituals surrounding graduation, including academic robes and commencement exercises.

A second type of European institution developed within the church. Allied closely with the priesthood, these institutions were dedicated to training clergymen. Their curriculum was based in church doctrine with students learning the words of doctrinal authorities and principles of theology. They were professional schools operated by and for the purposes of the centralized church. The University of Paris exemplified the form.

In retrospect, the threads of the colonial colleges and of higher education subsequently were apparent in both groups. The institutions incorporated the conceptual precision that would later lead to empirical investigation, the use of ancient texts as enhancing intellectual curiosity, and humanistic thought that led toward secularized study. The elements of all the institutional types can be found in higher education today. However, at the time of the founding of the colonial colleges, the pattern of curriculum and faculty student relations stemming from church-related institutions was most prominent. The European universities were lagging in the development of science, and the colonial institutions had little to do with science until the end of the era. The students and the faculty had no say in governance matters; authority ran from the institution's board of governors to the college president. Curriculum centered on classical texts and the foundations of Christian doctrine. The humanities, as studied in classical writings as literature and the fine and performing arts, had to await a later day. Similarly, experimental science as an area of inductive inquiry could not emerge until scientists freed themselves from reliance on doctrine and prior authority and from the search for universal truths as revealed in classical writings.

The eighteenth-century Enlightenment did not have an immediate effect. The anticlerical ideas that were filtering into the thinking of Europeans from French and English philosophers to literate laypeople were slow to penetrate the universities. Gradually however, the idea of the university as the seat of all learning came to fruition in Oxford and Cambridge. And gradually across the continent, the university as an agent of the state was being born. Still, science as a path to understanding through experimentation and verification was developing outside the universities and remained there well into the nineteenth century. Except for theologians, few scientists, philosophers, or leading thinkers were working within the formal higher education structure in Europe or in the colonies.

The colleges in the American colonies were modeled on an amalgamation of ideas and forms coming from Europe, but they emerged in their own way. Boorstin (1991) comments that the colonists settled the continent before they had a system for dealing with it. Hence they had to reinvent governmental and educational forms as they went along. The idea of lay governing boards was transplanted from Scottish universities and the curriculum and residential pattern from Cambridge. None of the colleges followed the continental pattern of students in charge of the institution, and none was strictly controlled by a dominant church. They all developed around notions of acculturating the young, passing on the wisdom of the classics, and preparing people not only for service as clergymen but as public servants as well.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Shaping of American Higher Educationby Arthur M. Cohen Carrie B. Kisker Copyright © 2010 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Excerpted by permission of John Wiley & Sons. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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