University Education

Danger signs on the Horizon, 1869

In this latest post of things that will not make it into the book, I was catching up on the Grant Cabinet appointment debacle soon after his inauguration (you will have to purchase the book for that), and stumbled on something quite interesting in the New York Tribune. I noticed a little op-ed on the rising importance of public university education. It provides an early glimpse into the intentions of America’s elites and ruling class at the time.

There were decent universities teaching real knowledge at the time of the Founding. This changed not too soon after the Founding generation passed, and especially after the Civil War when a concerted effort was made to change the nature and character of collegiate education.

From their inception, modern universities had an element of German optimism about them. There were exceptions to the rule, of course, and the early private colleges of the republic were frankly quite well designed absent any idealism of the European kind. The Founders, and a generation or so soon thereafter, managed to escape a lot of what was to come. But America’s colleges were seen as inferior to the more austere and prestigious European version by the 1860s.

I wrote about this a little in my first book, All Honor to Jefferson, where, I noted that as early as the 1820s, rich southerners were sending their children to Europe to study with Hegel, his students, and the like. Though Historicism does not in all cases line up with progressivism, they are, we might say, kissing cousins. The seeds of higher education’s demise were sown quite early.

We might put it another way, what we see occurring in higher education in the present day, were foundationally planted well over a hundred years ago.

As Ronald J. Pestritto noted,

This recasting of the founding rested on coupling historical contingency with a faith in progress. Progressives generally believed that the human condition improves as history marches forward…The Progressive movement became the means by which German historicism was imported into the American political tradition.

He notes quite rightly that in 1876 Johns Hopkins University was founded with the explicit intent of bringing the German model to America.

This is where my stumbling upon a piece in the New York Tribune piqued my interest: the ideas of progress were quite evident in the language of the newspapers of the day before 1876.¹ In fact, though I would have to dig it up, Lincoln was in some way, talking a language alien to many of the intellectual elites of his day. In fact, many either did not understand him, or used his support for natural equality as a way to forward their idea of progressive equality.

The language of the country’s papers—how we understand ourselves whither we are tending—from time to time made reference to the Declaration of Independence when speaking of slaves/slavery and the rights of man. The political rights of voting were less so tied to the protection of things like natural rights—though to be fair, there were a few instances where the defense of the enfranchisement of the vote was defended on natural rights grounds. But these instances were few.

While there were references to the Declaration in some instances, increasingly the Declaration dropped out of consideration in the national discourse. Our shared humanity found in Nature, was more or less slowly…forgotten. Progress (or some other synonym) was promoted as the driving force behind political change.

We see this in the piece I read from the Tribune this week.

Progress has Arrived!

According to the Tribune, professors Goldwin Smith (a British trained instructor of History at Cornell) and Samuel Eliot (Harvard Grad in the 1830s, president of the Social Science Association, teacher of history at Trinity College), were praised for their desire to make higher education real—that is bring it up to the “higher standards” of their European counterparts.

American degrees have low value because they are behind the times. While the Tribune did not use that language, sit tight. It is apropos. This is clearly what they meant when they spoke of changing American Education to a more European model.

Eliot wished to create a system of public funding for elites to take classes, shutter half the already existing universities, and then put up the best students as professors in the remaining universities. In this way, the degree would “rise in value.” Professors should become “higher in value” in order to “raise the morale of the whole nation.”

According to the Tribune, this,

could not fail to improve our system of government; for under its influences we should have men among our national Senators and Representatives who, having made political science one of their University studies, would bring those studies, matured by the experience of riper years, to a practical and beneficial issue.

Governing now was meant to be for practical purposes. It was not meant to be a development of the soul, per se, but a development of plenty, pleasure, and, of course, leisure. But, not for everybody!

More notably, higher education would now be a power, an interest, informing our representatives what policies should be enacted, and why. Education institutions would become a part of the State in order to forward the interests of the State and the political men who were elected would be trained by the institution of the State par excellence—the public university.

Though mentioned, Smith’s piece was not spoken of directly in the Tribune. This led me to track down the first volume of the June proceedings mentioned in the paper—the Tribune no doubt drew its op-ed by acquiring the papers before the formal printing (after all Greeley was there and presented his own paper!). The proceedings leave no doubt that what the Union needed was a new education regarding the political:

Social Science, or the Science of Society, treats of man as a social being [ed. fair enough but this is not Aristotle’s idea of social being]. It fulfills its functions just as other sciences fulfill theirs, by collecting facts, applying principles, and reaching the general laws which govern the social relations. Its character as a Science needs not be questioned. The subjects it embraces, Education, Health, Economy and Jurisprudence, are confessedly susceptible of scientific treatment…²

The matter of politics, and social policy can be reduced to a science. This hard science training is far different from the training of political men about the Good, or the Nature of mankind. This is not about the philosophical as philosophy is not even mentioned as an aim of study. Subtle? Perhaps, but they were clear about their intent. The Journal makes it clear their aim is to take things as they are, not as they should be in order to improve the lot of mankind. Note, that this new political science is,

behind the effect to the cause, and tries to prevent, even more than to relieve, the errors existing among men.³

Their aim was to understand how humans tick (what they call immutable laws of social interaction) so they could reformulate social policy through “scientific inquiry.” This almost sounds like behavioralism. It is not to persuade men to live a life according to nature—that is developing their reason, to rule over their passions. It is not even about the necessary instruction about the forms of government and why, just maybe, the American Founding was the best regime. In fact, none of that is considered worthy of college study. The entire intent is to improve on government. Implicit in all this is somehow the Founders got it wrong, OR THAT the Founders set into motion an organic system of government.

Eliot’s paper/talk is on the topic of University Education. He states he is an “unbiased” academic. In his wide ranging and disconnected comments, he rails against the excessive teaching of Latin and Greek, has some iconoclastic disdain for medieval statues reflecting past history, and laments that students have no say in the governing of the University. No kidding. 100 years before the 1960s, this guy planted seeds for the SDS (ok, I overstate the case, but let’s not blame everything on 60s radicals when their great grandfathers in America were envisioning their influence in education).

This is not to say that he rejected the classics—he didn’t (he thinks Homer explains more about the personal nature of politics better than any, which is potentially problematic in and of itself)—and in many ways found them superior, but he also found them equally “simplistic.” They are not useful to the modern student; they do not speak competently to the times. He wants us to face the reality of things in the modern world. To that end, he recommends dropping classical education to a great degree for a more scientific endeavor.

He also wants the university professor to be relieved of the toil of work for private study insofar as the Germans and French had then instituted. More leisure means more opportunity for new discovery.

To consider the other author praised by the Tribune is where we turn next.

Smith spoke about civil service reform with these words:

We are yet to convince ourselves as a nation, that the purpose of public office is to serve the country, not the party, not the office-holder; and that, such being its purpose, its tenure should be independent of patronage, independent of all partisan tactics and personal influences. We are also to understand more fully than we have ever done, that those whom we place in office should be selected according to their fitness, both in character and in education, and that so long as they continue fit, they should be secured in the posts they occupy. A deeper sense of the importance of preparation for administrative duties must penetrate the popular mind.

In other words, in order for America to move forward, we must create a professional class of people who are not beholden to the political. This is the beginning of the effort to decouple the rule of the people with the rule of a professional elite.

He explicitly states later that our education system will train these adminsitrative interests in the ways of “social science.” Make no mistake, this is not a humane science per se—that is, it is not a science that trains new government employees the nature of man and our natural limits. In fact, the intent to to create a class of interested professionals who are armed with the new science of politics, and who will not be checked by the lowly concerns of the people. These “civil servants” will be best equipped at circumventing the protections of their natural rights because they are armed with immutable scientific knowledge. This is the beginning of a new education—a re-education of the American populace. He minces no words:

One sometimes wishes that as the country possesses a training-school for its Army, and another for its Navy, so it might establish a third for its Civil Service.

The aligning of the administrative with the military side of politics in Smith’s description represents the most blunt idea of the character of the administrative state and education’s role in it.

Among the participants at this meeting, were none other than Horace Greeley (the Liberal Republican d. 1872 before he could convert to the Democrat party) and Charles Francis Adams Jr. ( son of John Quincy Adams, John Adams’s Great Grandson, Liberal Republican and eventually, Democrat. Overseer of Harvard after turning down offer to be its president in 1869). Each of these men would become Grant’s political enemies. Another of those would be the German trained, Carl Schurz.

It should be no surprise that many figures who were enamored with progressive education would end up leaving the Republican Party and joining the Democrats. In some way this is no surprise. Lincoln and the Founders believed in an equality that came from nature. To them, it was everything that would not only be a source of securing rights, but limiting government. Despite the Lincolnian rhetoric which would not have assented to such a change in the nature of political education (or philosophical education), early progressives found the natural equality of the Founders too constraining.

Yes, you read that right.

Let’s put it this way—the same central idea—the Declaration—which bases government on the enlightened consent of the covered, was restrictive in the very nature of its recognition in the rights man possessed by nature. This restrictive foundation meant that while equality of RIGHTS was the governing thread of the nation, it could not, if it came from nature, be used to justify equality of conditions, nor, unlimited government. Natural rights were just a step in the overall progression of history, and history needed competent men trained in science to move civilization forward. In other words, the new form of education would correct Founding generation’s understanding of the political and advance civilization to a better form of government by extending and expanding the State/Nation with scientifically trained administrators disconnected from politics.

The early progressives of the Social Science Association that Greeley’s Tribune praised, sought to decouple the American people from their consent in the government for a professionalized coterie of professionals with exacting science on their side. This was needed to move the country forward—that is to keep up with the times. In the process, they changed the understanding of equality as one that all human beings share, to…something else quite different.

In order to increase the size of the government, and implement their new scientific understanding of human development, nature had to be redefined or be scuttled. Natural rights stood in the way of their project because it required persuasion and consent while also limiting what the government could do.

As early as 1869, the elites of our country set about the undermining of the Founding, and as a result, liberty. The only way to proceed as they wanted to was to liberate the people from the source of their rights—they had to create a new axiom to accomplish their goals. This goal would be a different kind of rule based on a different understanding of the political.

1. New York Tribune, March 11, 1869.

2. Introductory Note, Journal of Social Science 1, no. 1 (June 1869) : 1.

3. Ibid., 3.