The Origins of the University Idea at Trinity College

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When the trustees of Trinity College named John Franklin Crowell as president of the small, struggling institution in 1887, they undoubtedly did not realize what the long-range consequences of their action would be. Not only would the Pennsylvanian, who was only twenty-nine years old when he took the job, succeed in moving the institution some fifty miles eastward, from its rural isolation in Randolph County to the booming factory town of Durham, but he also had even more ambitious ideas about transforming the little college into a university.

After attending school in New Berlin, Pennsylvania, young Crowell went to Dartmouth for a year, transferred to Yale in 1880, and, after receiving his undergraduate degree there in 1883, spent a year in Yale's divinity school and another in its fledgling graduate school before serving as a school principal for two years.

Crowell's ambitious hopes for a "Greater Trinity," a university-type institution, were way ahead of their time and doomed to failure. Since Trinity was not yet, in fact, a strong liberal arts college, Crowell's talk of professional schools and other features of a university suggest a certain naiveté and lack of realism on his part. Yet the fact that he brought such ideas with him to Trinity points up an important truth about American higher education in the late nineteenth century.

Although the term "university" was, and is, used with notorious looseness in the United States, there is widespread agreement among historians that the nation's first authentic university—what would later on in the twentieth Century be known as a research university—opened its doors in 1876. The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, deliberately modeled itself on the German universities that were then widely hailed as the best in the world. The training of graduate students, through relatively small seminars where research was the principal concern and the new doctor of philosophy degree the goal, was the prime mission of Johns Hopkins, and its example quickly influenced the whole pattern of American higher education.

While other forces were also at work, the Johns Hopkins example inspired a select group of American institutions to transform themselves, gradually and in varying fashions, into research universities. In the Midwest and Far West, several state-supported universities—most prominently Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and California—emulated Johns Hopkins and added to their historic mission of teaching that of the advancement of human knowledge through research as one of their primary purposes. In the Northeast, several of the nation's oldest educational institutions—especially Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Pennsylvania, and Columbia—bestirred themselves to meet the new competition and by around 1900 were widely recognized as belonging in the top group of research universities. Joining the five state-supported universities and the five Ivy League institutions, five important new, voluntarily supported universities were launched after the Civil War: Cornell in 1868, Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1865, Johns Hopkins in 1876, Stanford in 1891, and Chicago in 1892. These fifteen institutions, according to a prominent historian of American research universities, "fully embody the emergence of research as a fundamental goal in American higher education."

Twelve of the fifteen institutions named above were among the fourteen founding members of the Association of American Universities. Its creation in 1900 was an important milestone in the emergence of the American research universities, for the leading Ph.D.-granting institutions of the era not only thereby declared their equality with the much older European universities but also set about strengthening the standards for the doctorate and guaranteeing the value of the best American degrees against "cheaper" domestic and foreign competition.

Although Johns Hopkins is in the border State of Maryland, the revolution that transformed the top echelon of American higher education in the late nineteenth century virtually bypassed the South. This happened primarily because deep, widespread poverty gripped the South for many decades after the Civil War. The large amounts of money that research universities required—from state governments, wealthy alumni, or philanthropists like John D. Rockefeller and Leland Stanford—simply did not exist in the vast area between the Potomac and the Rio Grande. Consequently, just as public schools in the South generally lagged pitifully behind those in most other parts of the country, the colleges and universities in the region remained distinctly weaker than the nation's best.

Yet individuals, such as John F. Crowell at Trinity, began the process of transmitting the ideas and aims of the educational revolution long before certain southern institutions themselves could be recognizably transformed. Individuals comparable to Crowell no doubt acted as key transmitters or conveyers at state-supported universities in Charlottesville, Virginia; Chapel Hill, North Carolina; and Austin, Texas, as well as at various other ambitious institutions in the South. Trinity College, when it moved to Durham in 1892, was a far cry indeed from a research university;...