One can see why. Until 1826 there were just the two universities in existence in England – Oxford and Cambridge – and offering a very restricted range of education.77 At Oxford the intake was barely two hundred a year and many of those did not persevere to graduation. The English universities were open only to Anglicans, based on a regulation which required acceptance of the Thirty-Nine Articles. Both seats of learning had deteriorated in the eighteenth century, with the only recognised course, at Oxford at least, being a narrow classics curriculum ‘with a smattering of Aristotelian philosophy’, whereas in Cambridge the formal examination was almost entirely mathematical. There was no entrance examination at either place and, moreover, peers could get a degree without examination. Examinations were expanded and refined in the first decades of the nineteenth century but more to the point, in view of what happened later, were the attacks mounted on Oxford and Cambridge by a trio of Scotsmen in Edinburgh – Francis Jeffrey, Henry Brougham and Sydney Smith. Two of these were Oxford graduates and in the journal they founded, the Edinburgh Review, they took Oxford and Cambridge to task for offering an education which, they argued, was far too grounded in the classics and, as a result, very largely useless. ‘The bias given to men’s minds is so strong that it is no uncommon thing to meet with Englishmen, whom, but for their grey hair and wrinkles, we might easily mistake for school-boys. Their talk is of Latin verses; and, it is quite clear, if men’s ages are to be dated from the state of their mental progress, that such men are eighteen years of age and not a day older . . .’78 Sydney Smith, the author of this attack, went on to criticise Oxbridge men for having no knowledge of the sciences, of economics or politics, of Britain’s geographical and commercial relations with Europe. The classics, he said, cultivated the imagination but not the intellect.
There were two responses we may mention. One was the creation of civic universities in Britain, particularly University College and King’s College, London, both of which were established deliberately to accept Nonconformists, and which were based partly on the Scottish universities and their excellent medical schools. One of the men involved in the creation of University College, London, Thomas Campbell, visited the Universities of Berlin (founded 1809) and Bonn (1816), as a result of which he opted for the professorial system of tuition, in use there and in Scotland, rather than Oxford’s tutorial system. Another source of inspiration came from the University of Virginia, founded in 1819 thanks largely to the efforts of Thomas Jefferson. The main ideals of this institution were set out in the report of a State Commission which met at Rockfish Gap in the Blue Ridge in 1818 and which became known as the Rockfish Gap Report. The specific aim of this university, according to the report, was ‘to form the statesmen, legislature and judges, on whom public prosperity and individual happiness are so much to depend . . .’ Politics, law, agriculture, commerce, mathematical and physical sciences, and the arts, were all included. University College, London, followed this more practical vision and the even more practical – and novel – idea was adopted of floating a public company to finance the building of the college. Non-denominational university education was begun in England.79
This became a bone of contention, which culminated in May 1852 in a series of five lectures given in Dublin by John Henry Newman, later Cardinal Newman, on ‘The Idea of the University’. The immediate spur to Newman’s lectures was the founding of the new universities, like the University of London, and the Queen’s Colleges in Ireland (Belfast, Cork and Galway), in which the study of theology was excluded on principle. Newman’s lectures, which became famous as the classic defence of what is still sometimes called ‘a liberal education’, argued two points. The first was that ‘Christianity, and nothing short of it, must be made the element and principle of all education’.80 Newman argued that all branches of knowledge were connected together and that to exclude theology was to distort wisdom. His second point was that knowledge is an end in itself, that the purpose of a university education was not to be immediately useful but to bear its fruits throughout life. ‘A habit of mind is formed which lasts throughout life, of which the attributes are, freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom; or what in a former Discourse I have ventured to call a philosophical habit . . . Knowledge is capable of being its own end.’81 Newman’s seminal idea, and the most controversial – a dispute that is still with us – was set out in his seventh lecture (five were given at Dublin, five others published but not delivered). In this, he says: ‘. . . the man who has learned to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyse, who has refined his taste, and formed his judgement, and sharpened his mental vision, will not indeed at once be a lawyer, or a pleader, or an orator, or a statesman, or a physician, or a good landlord, or a man of business, or a soldier, or an engineer, or a chemist, or a geologist, or an antiquarian, but he will be placed in that state of intellect in which he can take up any one of the sciences or callings I have referred to . . . with an ease, a grace, a versatility, and a success, to which another is a stranger. In this sense, then, . . . mental culture is emphatically useful.’82
Apart from Newman’s concern with ‘liberal’ education, his emphasis on religion was not as out of place as it may seem, especially in America. As George M. Marsden has shown, in his survey of early American colleges, some five hundred were founded in the pre-Civil War era, of which perhaps two hundred survived into the twentieth century. Two-fifths were either Presbyterian or Congregationalist colleges, down from over a half in Jefferson’s day, at the expense of Methodist, Baptist and Catholic establishments, which accelerated after 1830 and especially after 1850.83 In nineteenth-century America, in the educational sphere, there was a widely shared article of faith that science, common sense, morality and true religion ‘were firmly allied’.84
For many years, say the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century, Harvard and Yale were almost all there was to American higher education. Only towards the end of that period was an Anglican college established in the South, William and Mary (chartered in 1693, opened in 1707, and only gradually becoming a fully-fledged college). Beyond that, most of the colleges that became well-known universities were founded by New Light clergy – New Jersey (Princeton), 1746, Brown, 1764, Queen’s (Rutgers), 1766, and Dartmouth, 1769. ‘New Light’ was a religious response in America to the Enlightenment. Yale had been founded in 1701 as a response to a perceived decline in theological orthodoxy at Harvard. The new moral philosophy presupposed that ‘virtue’ could be discovered on a rational basis, that God would reveal to man the moral basis of life, based on reason, much as He had revealed to Newton the laws by which the universe operated. This was essentially the basis on which Yale was founded.85 In a short while the new approach developed into what became known as the Great Awakening, which, in the American context, described a shift from the predominantly pessimistic view of human nature to a far more optimistic – positive – outlook, as typified by Anglicanism. This was a far more humanistic cast of mind (unlike Harvard, which remained Calvinist) and led to a much greater appreciation of the achievements of the Enlightenment in those colleges, such as Princeton, which followed Yale.