Charles W. Eliot, a well-connected chemistry professor who failed to get tenure at Harvard but who went on to be the university’s longest serving president is the focus of today’s #stampoftheday. Here’s pictured on a 3-stamp stamps issued as part of the 1940 “Famous Americans” series.
Eliot, who was as president of Harvard University from 1869 until 1909, transformed that university into the country’s first major research university and, in doing so, provided a model for many other colleges and universities. Moreover, his initiatives highlight important questions about the nature of higher education that are as important today as they were in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
The grandson of Samuel Eliot, a successful Boston merchant and banker, Eliot graduated from Harvard and became an assistant professor of mathematics and chemistry at the university. But he left Harvard in 1863 after he was not appointed the Rumford Professor of Chemistry. Using his inheritance and loans, he went to Europe where he spent two years studying all aspects of higher education, particularly links between universities and the growing commercial economies in France and Germany.
“I have given special attention to the schools here provided for the education of young men for those arts and trades which require some knowledge of scientific principles and their applications,” he wrote, “the schools which turn out master workmen, superintendents, and designers for the numerous French industries which demand taste, skill, and special technical instruction….I can’t but think that a thorough knowledge of what France has found useful for the development of her resources, may someday enable me to be of use to my country” particularly to his home state of Massachusetts which, he thought, needed “to foster by every mean in her power the manufactures which are her main strength.”
Such an approach, he knew, would mark a major shift for American colleges which at the time were controlled by clergymen and embraced a classical curricula that had little relevance to an industrializing nation. Few offered courses in the sciences, modern languages, history, or political economy and only a handful had graduate or professional schools. This meant that many businessmen – including many in Boston who had gone to Harvard – were increasingly reluctant to send their sons to colleges or to donate money to support them.
When he returned to the US in 1865, Eliot took a job as a chemistry professor the newly opened Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which was pursuing a new approach to higher education. He kept thinking about how to improve other colleges, particularly Harvard. In 1859, he published a two-part article about the future of American higher education in the influential The Atlantic Monthly. “The American people are fighting a wilderness, physical and moral, on the one hand, and on the other are struggling to work out the awful problem of self-government,” he wrote. “For this fight they must be trained and armed.” The role of the university, he added, was to instruct that the managers, administrators, and specialists who would “work out the awful problem of self-government.”
Eliot went on to outline a vision of a nation of great public and private enterprises, guided by leaders in America’s growing metropolitan centers who would be recruited and trained by elite universities (like Harvard). Once in college, they would not study the ancient prescribed classical curriculum but instead would have an “elective system” in which they could discover and deepen their passions and skills and in doing so find their way to appropriate professions and vocations. This, in turn, would lead some to attend graduate and professional schools, which would train them to be both “commissioned officers in the army of industry” and also civic leaders who would “work out the awful problem of self-government.”
“We need engineers who thoroughly understand what is already known at home and abroad about mining, road and bridge building, railways, canals, water-powers, and steam machinery;” he wrote, “architects who have thoroughly studied their art; builders who can at least construct buildings which will not fall down; chemists and metallurgists who will know what the world has done and is doing in the chemical arts, and in the extraction and working of metals; manufacturers who appreciate what science and technical skill can do for the works which they superintend.”
The argument resonated with the businessmen who had gained control of Harvard a few years earlier when they were able to wrest control of the university’s Board of Overseers away from elected officials in to members chosen by Harvard graduates. In 1868, shortly after this shift occurred, then Harvard President Thomas Hill, a Unitarian minister, resigned and 1869, the new board made Eliot the university’s president.
In his inaugural address, he renewed his call for more specialized education, arguing “the vulgar conceit that a Yankee can turn his hand to anything we insensibly carry into high places, where it is preposterous and criminal. We are accustomed to seeing men leap from farm or shop to court-room or pulpit, and we half believe that common men can safely use the seven-league boots of genius. What amount of knowledge and experience do we habitually demand of our lawgivers? What special training do we ordinarily think necessary for our diplomatists? – although in great emergencies the nation has known where to turn. Only after years of the bitterest experience did we come to believe the professional training of a soldier to be of value in war. This lack of faith in the prophecy of a natural bent, and in the value of a discipline concentrated upon a single object, amounts to a national danger.”
Eliot put many of these ideas into action of the next four decades. Harvard hired well-known scholars from home and abroad and he organized the university’s faculty into schools and departments. Using standardized entrance examinations, it began recruiting and accepting students from all over America and abroad. In addition, the university vastly expanded its facilities, building new laboratories, libraries, classrooms, and athletic facilities. Funding for much of this work was provided by members of the nation’s growing plutocracy and with those gifts Harvard soon became the world’s wealthiest private university.
Although Radcliffe College was founded while he was Harvard’s president, Eliot did not support women’s education, arguing, 1869: “the world knows next to nothing about the capacities of the female sex. Only after generations of civil freedom and social equality will it be possible to obtain the data necessary for an adequate discussion of woman’s natural tendencies, tastes, and capabilities…It is not the business of the University to decide this mooted point.”
He had a somewhat better record in other areas. During his tenure, several Blacks studied at Harvard, including W. E. B. Du Bois. And unlike his successor, A. Lawrence Lowell, Eliot opposed efforts to limit the admission of Jews and Roman Catholics. Outside of Harvard, he was a vocal anti-imperialist and a strong supporter of President Theodore Roosevelt’s progressive policies. However, Eliot was adamantly opposed to labor unions, fostering a campus climate where many Harvard students served as strikebreakers.
Eliot was no fan of collegiate sports. He tried, unsuccessfully, to ban football at Harvard because it was “a fight whose strategy and ethics are those of war,” where “the weaker man is considered the legitimate prey of the stronger.” He added, football wasn’t “wholesome” because the game made it possible to engage in “ungenerous or mean acts which easily escape detection” that could “contribute to victory.” He also had little regard for baseball, once observing: “I’m told the team did well because one pitcher had a fine curve ball. I understand that a curve ball is thrown with a deliberate attempt to deceive. Surely this is not an ability we should want to foster at Harvard.”
Eliot’s impact was enormous and most colleges and universities followed his lead. What’s striking to me is that he grappled with fundamental questions about the purpose of higher education. And, of course, at this moment we have seen that it is both “preposterous and criminal” to rely on self-proclaimed experts to address the most challenging questions instead of trusting those with “knowledge and experience” to provide needed guidance. But perhaps that will change…
Be well, stay safe, fight for justice and work for peace.