The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Colleges and Their Patrons IN 1876 there were 311 colleges and universities in this country. In 1960 there were 2,026. In 1870 1.7 per cent of our population...
...But our author pulls the austere Dr...
...Rudolph reports that in 1873 Charles William Norton, President of Harvard, spoke against the appropriation of Federal tax money in support of schools, using the argument: "Our ancestors well understood the principle that to make a people free and self-reliant it is necessary to let them take care of themselves...
...It is said that Winchell's teaching had a great effect and was known over the entire State of Michigan...
...By 1970 it is estimated that 50 per cent of all Americans in this age-group will be involved in some kind of higher education...
...Rudolph does suitable honor to one of my personal academic heroes...
...Eliot up sharply: "Had this principle actually been well understood by Dr...
...education is that every religious denomination has had its own colleges...
...The bibliography alone covers 20 pages...
...Yet there are Congressmen who still solemnly assert that it is not true, and that if there were to be Federal appropriations for schools our entire educational structure would collapse...
...It is no wonder that to this day European visitors find our system no system at all but pretty much of an educational wilderness...
...One of the interesting aspects of U.S...
...These conditions practically forced us to develop institutions of bewildering variety...
...Professor Alexander Winchell...
...None of this proves that I have a marvelous mind for figures, but only that I have just gotten around to reading a fascinating book entitled The American College and University by Frederick Rudolph (Knopf, 516 pp., $6.75...
...For these men, a reading of The American College and University would be, to say the least, instructive...
...Others are still desperately hanging on...
...Among other things, this gave us the tremendous advantage of being able to pick and choose, reject or combine, and now and then devise something of our own...
...There must be hundreds of graves like his scattered across the country, the resting places of teachers who stood up for the truth, but who in most cases were less fortunate than Winchell...
...At the present time, scores of colleges and universities are largely supported by state and Federal funds...
...He was, I have been told, a devout Methodist and made it his business to explain to his students that they could hold Charles Darwin and John Wesley in a common respect...
...On over 100 occasions before 1789 the General Court of Massachusetts appropriated funds for Harvard College, which clearly was not capable of taking care of itself...
...What its author has attempted is a record of the human and institutional source of every new idea or effort of reform in the history of our academic life...
...neither one, he felt, invalidated the other...
...Eliot's ancestors, there would have been no Harvard and no presidential office there for him to use against the principle of government financed education...
...In 1878 Winchell was fired from the biology department of Vanderbilt University because he insisted on teaching the theory of evolution...
...Soon after, he was joyously welcomed at the University of Michigan...
...During my own days at Ann Arbor, it was not at all unusual for students and young instructors to stroll to a cemetery on the edge of town and stand for a moment of meditation at the grave of this brave and honest man...
...Some groups have had to relinquish their grip on these academic offspring for financial reasons...
...He has done all that any man could do to give a complete picture of our educational development over the past 326 years...
...Like everything else about us, our schools had their origins in Europe...
...Congressmen, in particular, would do well to read this book...
...I was delighted to note that Dr...
...In 1870 1.7 per cent of our population between 18 and 21 was in college...
...Yet back of all the complexity and confusion there has always been a unified push toward a better life...
...The book is an enormously comprehensive job...
...Our heritage from England, France and Germany came in different ways at different times and through the activities of different men...
Vol. 46 • November 1963 • No. 24
