First True American University?

I've been looking for the source of this quote.This course description in Cornell's History Department attributes it to Frederick Rudolf. In fact,the course title is "The First American University."

But I searched Rudolf's opus, American College and University: A History, not only for the phrase, but also for just "first," and came up with nothing.Rudolph is very complementary to Cornell and credits it with pioneering things like coeducation and dormitories. But I could not find the specific phrase. Perhaps he used it elswhere.

Do any of you know the exact source?

Swampy
I've been looking for the source of this quote.This course description in Cornell's History Department attributes it to Frederick Rudolf. In fact,the course title is "The First American University."

But I searched Rudolf's opus, American College and University: A History, not only for the phrase, but also for just "first," and came up with nothing.Rudolph is very complementary to Cornell and credits it with pioneering things like coeducation and dormitories. But I could not find the specific phrase. Perhaps he used it elswhere.

Do any of you know the exact source?

Curious, I Googled the phrase "First True American University". One reference attributes the designation to Morris Bishop. Other institutions claiming to be the first true American university include Johns Hopkins, University of Pennsylvania, William and Mary, and Yale.

David Harding

Swampy
I've been looking for the source of this quote.This course description in Cornell's History Department attributes it to Frederick Rudolf. In fact,the course title is "The First American University."

But I searched Rudolf's opus, American College and University: A History, not only for the phrase, but also for just "first," and came up with nothing.Rudolph is very complementary to Cornell and credits it with pioneering things like coeducation and dormitories. But I could not find the specific phrase. Perhaps he used it elswhere.

Do any of you know the exact source?

Curious, I Googled the phrase "First True American University". One reference attributes the designation to Morris Bishop. Other institutions claiming to be the first true American university include Johns Hopkins, University of Pennsylvania, William and Mary, and Yale.

Yeah, I thought it was Bishop too until I read the course description for HIST 2005. (But I can't find the quote in Bishop's History of Cornell either.)

Best quote from Rudolph, referring to a time shortly after Cornell's founding:

"Before long alarums and fright would overtake many of the old institutions, for which Cornell became a reincarnation of the devil itself." Still is, to some.

Rudolph's book is a really good read.

the first true american university is an unaccredited internet school that has no job placement office but a staff of two dozen to help applicants apply for student loans

ugarte
the first true american university is an unaccredited internet school that has no job placement office but a staff of two dozen to help applicants apply for student loans

Courses of study include open carry and applied smallpox.

[news.cornell.edu]

Al DeFlorio
[news.cornell.edu]

Thanks, Al. The story is great. Funny, the last reunion I attended, I was going to suggest such a thing as a mandatory part of Orientation. (But the session ended before I could voice my suggestion.)

It sort of solves my original question about where the quote comes from. The article says it's from a 1977 book by Frederick Rudolf. AFAICT, this must be "Curriculum: A history of the American Undergraduate Course."

But two things earn it a "soft of" decision: (1) I haven't had a chance yet to search the book for the quote, and (2) I heard Cornell called "the first American university" when I was an undergraduate during the 1960s. Perhaps I was prescient or, more likely, stoned, but if memory still serves me these days -- always a dangerous assumption -- then Rudolf's 1977 book can't possibly where this claim about Cornell originated.

This author needs to be stabbed repeatedly in the face, but this piece, against all expectations, traces the death of the American university.

The quick cheat is to reach out to Corey Earle '07, a historian of Cornelliana that appeals to alumni, especially those of us wanting to know how many Cornell bears there have been.

My understanding is Cornell's First Great American University means
* not just an elite handful, or handful of elite students (today Cornell is 1/8 of the Ivy League and educates 1/4 of the students)
* College is about more than studying ancient Greeks. It also means the physical stuff, even sticking your arm up a cow's ass. Thus,  "The analysis of soils is as important as the analysis of literature." - Jacob Gould Schurman, Cornell President 1892–1920

Hey, the New Yorker ran some 13 pages (13,000 words?) on knives, like thousand-dollar chef's knives. It was kind of interesting. It's just that not every story can be the length the author desires it.

Trotsky
This author needs to be stabbed repeatedly in the face, but this piece, against all expectations, traces the death of the American university.

Yeah, it's highly informative, but the completely incasual and clumsily nonoffhand way in which the author insisted on dropping the fact that he attended Harvard was just about as obnoxiously anti-innocent as any I've ever seen.

Beeeej

Trotsky
This author needs to be stabbed repeatedly in the face, but this piece, against all expectations, traces the death of the American university.

Yeah, it's highly informative, but the completely incasual and clumsily nonoffhand way in which the author insisted on dropping the fact that he attended Harvard was just about as obnoxiously anti-innocent as any I've ever seen.

Exactly my reaction reading that piece

Beeeej

Trotsky
This author needs to be stabbed repeatedly in the face, but this piece, against all expectations, traces the death of the American university.

Yeah, it's highly informative, but the completely incasual and clumsily nonoffhand way in which the author insisted on dropping the fact that he attended Harvard was just about as obnoxiously anti-innocent as any I've ever seen.

The author is an insufferable piece of crap, like 97% of New Yorker's contributers and readership. But I think it's presumptious to call the two trends acausal. Let's say they are both driven by the same Creeping Meatballism that has caused the public space to become denominated solely in terms of protecting wealthy interests rather than the common good for the last 50 years.

Which will change. It's all hemlines.

"acausal"? And you say the Harvard man is full of himself? But okay, I can admire cunning linguists.

Trotsky
This author needs to be stabbed repeatedly in the face, but this piece, against all expectations, traces the death of the American university.

TL;DR: It's the system (and class struggle) stupid.

P.S. I've been thinking about these issues for some time. This is my first attempt at a first draft. Comments welcome.

Thanks. This article is helpful and somewhat interesting, but its focus on the humanities, specifically English majors, leads to several important omissions and mischaracterizations:

1. The article's author, Nathan Heller, apparently graduated Harvard in 2006. So, as if the world began then, he arbitrarily chooses his examples from around 2012 to 2020. I prefer what Paul Baran called "The Longer View," partly because I find Baran's argument in its favor to be compelling, partly because a good deal of evidence justifies a different periodization, and partly because I first graduated Cornell in 1968.

So, if we look back to around 1970 and, at the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, publication of the infamous Powell Memorandum, we can see the trends Heller describes are not new.

2. Similarly, if besides lengthening our view we broaden it, beyond a simple opposition of humanities versus STEM, we can get a better picture of what's really going on.

3. In particular, using data from the National Center for Education Statistics, we can see a broad shift. In 1970-71 education majors received the largest share of all bachelor's degrees: 21.00%, but by 2019-20 this was down to 4.17%. Humanities (English, foreign languages, liberal arts, and philosophy) declined from 11.97% of all degrees to 5.35%. Social science and history declined from 18.50% to 7.91%.

Meanwhile, business majors shot up from 13.74% in 1970-71 to 19.03%, supplanting education as the most popular major. Health professions and related programs also increased their share, from 3.00% in 1970-71 to 12.62% in 2019-20. These were by far the most popular majors by 2020. Engineering, which is perhaps most emblematic of STEM, was the third-most popular in 2020, but its increase since 1970-71 was modest: from 5.36% to 6.30%. A more inclusive definition of STEM, including fields that didn't exist before the late 1960s (Biological and biomedical sciences, communication technologies, computer and information sciences, engineering, engineering technologies, mathematics and statistics, and physical sciences and science technologies) already had a large share in 1970-71 (16.1%), but still not as large as education's, and increased relatively modestly (by. 5.3 percentage points) to 21.3% by 2019-20, This is only slightly larger than business' share (19.03%).

Aside: These trends reveal the lie behind the claim that higher education has become the site of left-wing indoctrination. If anything, whatever the party preferences of students and faculty, the content of their educations has shifted to the right.

3. How to explain these patterns? I think the rise of neoliberalism provides the best explanation.

Coming out of the 1960s the U.S. government tried to maintain domestic consent while waging war on Vietnam by borrowing. This fueled the domestic economy without raising taxes to pay for the war. As a result, though, labor markets tightened and wages increased. Meanwhile, the anti-war and civil rights movements threatened the legitimacy of the war and, especially after the revelations of The Pentagon Papers, the government itself. The superheated, wartime economy also fueled corporate growth, leading for a time to increased concentration in major manufacturing industries. The forces combined to create a perfect storm that came to be known as "stagflation": high inflation despite economic stagnation: oligopolistic corporations would pass on price increases, which would cause inflation, which would cause more militant wage demands, which would cause the corporations to raise prices, etc., etc., etc. Yet if profitability was to be maintained, investment to raise productivity was limited.

How to break this pattern? The 1970s began a massive corporate offensive against labor. Facilitated by newly developed container shipping and international trade agreements, corporations invested overseas to increase their profits. This resulted in the deindustrialization of domestic manufacturing. The spatial mobility of capital also was a very effective weapon against labor. Aided by neoliberal administrations and policies, like those of Reagan and Thatcher, this new capital offensive undermined labor unions in manufacturing, while the increasing proportion of jobs in service industries were harder to unionize. Unionization declined precipitously, as did the strength of labor.

Financial (and other) deregulation under neoliberalism also had two important effects. On one hand, it encouraged financialization of most sectors of the economy because financial institutions were freed to lend precariously, executive remuneration increasingly depended on stock prices and short-term returns, and incentives shifted accordingly from long-term, "real" investments to short-term, "financial" returns. On the other hand, deregulation freed financial institutions from New Deal regulations (Glass-Steagall), which had been responsible for a long period (c. 1935 to c. 1980) of financial stability, in contrast to the financial instability that characterized the U.S. (and world capitalist) economy throughout the nineteenth century and first four decades of the 20th century. From the S&L crisis of the 1980s to the Great Recession of the oughts, financial instability and crises became commonplace.

On top of this, in the U.S. neoliberalism, of both Republican and Democratic flavors, reduced the publicly financed share of university budgets. Rather than pass on increased costs to taxpayers, many state legislatures reasoned that higher education could use tuition, especially out-of-state tuition, to make up for decreasing public contributions. Heller points out this change: in 1980 79% of public university revenue was state funding, but by 2019 this was down to 55%. At many public universities, executives responded by increasing administrative staff to recruit out-of-state students from targeted school districts where family incomes were high enough to pay out-of-state tuition but the academic profiles of large numbers of students matched the recruiting school's admission requirements. This also set off competition between higher ed institutions via local amenities, such as: climbing walls, posh dormitories, athletic facilities, cuisine, etc. This, and the expansion of higher education to include more lower-income students, a demographic that had been historically excluded, led to an increase in student debt.

The net result was a precarious economic world.This was the context in which students increasingly sought safety and stability in undergraduate majors like business or health care. [Since the data above pertain to undergraduate degrees, the observed pattern in health care largely pertains to undergraduate subjects like nursing and pharmacy.]

4. Heller may have majored in English, but he could benefit from dose of STEM, or at least data science. For example, he compares Arizona State University's "faculty-to-student ratio," a metric that takes account of the size of the student body, with that of U.C. Berkeley. But in the same sentence, he compares ASU's and Princeton's total expenditures on faculty research without considering the sizes of their faculties.

5. Heller describes two paradigms for higher education. One is modeled after British schools, and a report at Yale (in 1826, I believe) described its approach as cultivating the mind by equipping students with the "furniture" of the mind and encouraging them to strengthen their thinking by moving the "furniture" around. The other, Heller attributes to a German model, in which knowledge workers publish or perish by turning out research papers. I don't think this characterization is accurate. Wilhelm von Humboldt established the University of Berlin as a place based on Enlightenment ideas, where students would contemplate broad ideas of the Enlightenment, rather than the theological ideas emphasized at the time in more traditional universities. In many ways, U of B was the forerunner of the modern research university.

Heller cites Clark Kerr's "The Uses of the University" as describing the archetypical U.S. university as a "'multiversity': a kind of hodgepodge of both types." Ironically, soon after I was admitted, Cornell sent me a pamphlet in which James Perkins (Cornell's President at the time) quotes Kerr (I believe) as saying "perhaps Cornell" is an example of a multiversity. Perkins argued that Cornell was the best example of what a U.S. multiversity could be.

Heller goes on to describe the multiversity as incorporating "the tradition of land-grant universities, established with an eye to industrial-age skill sets. And it provides something for everyone." But this is a misunderstanding of the real intent of the land-grants, and of Cornell. Jonathan Baldwin Turner was the first person who proposed selling grants of federal land to endow a national system of higher education for the "indusrial classes." He said, "Education will usher in the millenium of labor." And after the Civil War and passage of the Morrill Act, Turner shifted his focus to fighting the growing influence of corporations in the U.S. economy. Justin Smith Morrill himself noted that the land-grant enabling legislation was never intended to teach "farmers how to plow or mechanics how to saw." And he goes on to point out that the Act doesn't require anyone to study agriculture or mechanic arts. These subjects just have to be offered somewhere in the state. Morrill explains this by saying agriculture and mechanic arts were added to the act in order to "tempt" students to attend university. We must remember that at the time less than 1% of the population attended college, and virtually no occupation required a university education. Lincoln, for example, became a lawyer by apprenticing in a law office, and not by attending law school. But Morrill does point out that the act says the education at land-grant institutions must not exclude "other sciences and liberal studies." The double negative's meaning is easily lost: Morrill is pointing out that "other sciences and liberal studies" must be in all land-grant degree programs. If we bear in mind that at the time, most colleges followed a classical curriculum, in which students read classic texts in the original Greek or Latin, we must admit that advocates of land-grant universities understood "liberal studies" in the original, classical sense, as meaning studies suitable for a free person, a non-slave.

So, far from Kerr's and Heller's view, the land-grant university was intended from the get-go to offer both the possibility of a "practical" education and the certainty of an education combining sciences & liberal studies. Instead of careerist concerns driving the cart, with humanities being a "passion project," as Heller describes students at Harvard today, the land-grant idea used "practical" concerns as bait, and knowledge for its own sake, as well as for personal liberation, as the mission.

6. Andrew Dickson White described five principles on which Cornell was founded. (1) Its mission would be to be a venue where people "seek truth for truth's sake." (2) To accomplish this, the university would be free of potentially corrupting influences; White specifically mentions religious, political, and commercial influences. Note how Cornell's contract-college design coupled with state-funded merit & need-based scholarships insulate Cornell from the sort of politically motivated destruction we're witnessing in Florida today. It's not a perfect mechanism, but it's a darn sight better than direct government ownership. (3) Also to accomplish #1, the university would be "broad and balanced, including all areas of higher education and being balanced among them." Instead of a design that gets rid of a car's heater if you don't want it, Cornell's design includes the heater no matter what. It's up to the university community to value all the subjects available, to integrate them, to preserve them, and to see their contributions as valuable. (4) Similarly, the university must be open to all people: men and women; persons whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower, a slave ship, or walked across the Bering Strait; persons of any religion or no religion at all. Finally, (5) instead of being condescending to the working-class students coming to university, White's vision was one of providing the highest academic standards possible. For example, when he taught an economic history class at Michigan, White discovered that his students, mainly children of farmers, lacked necessary knowledge of geography. Instead of dumbing down the course, either by teaching geography instead of history for a portion or by teaching "spaceless" history, White gave the students a reading list and told them that, even though there was insufficient time to cover the material in class, at mid-semester there would be an exam on the material, and only students who passed the test would be allowed to continue in the course. In other words, he raised academic expectations rather than lowered them.

7. I wonder about Heller's description of the role introductory statistics plays at Harvard. It sounds like a watered-down gut course one finds at far less selective universities than Harvard. When I took introductory statistics at Cornell, the course had five semesters of prerequisite subject: two years of calculus plus a semester of probability theory. I'm pretty sure that one finds something like this down the street from Harvard at MIT. I understand that it's possible to teach statistical subjects without such background, particularly now that students can download free "data science" software and let the computer do most of the math.But IMHO, this leads to a superficial, shallow understanding. I found it much more edifying to study number theory as part of my introductory calculus course, come to realize the theory arbitrarily assumed an atomistic world, and then see this reflected in a branch of mathematics often used for evidence. I always wondered if one assumes a relational instead of atomistic world, how would we interpret the evidence? To me this was liberating because I'm very aware of such things as sampling issues, but I have a far more "artistic" toolkit for designing mathematically rigorous sampling. I don't feel constrained by the formulaic methods taught in "math-light" introductory statistics courses.

Ironically, I recently came across a paper at the Heritage Foundation by Jay Greene. It claims to study "bloat" caused by diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs at universities. The study "sampled" 65 universities based solely on their membership in one of "the five 'power' athletic conferences." Of course, these are mostly the largest universities in the country, so the sampling design is biased upwards. Furthermore, the study only reports average employment in these 65 schools. Since averages are very sensitive to outliers, if one eliminates the University of Michigan's 163 DEI employees from the sample, the average drops from "over 45" to 43. Had Greene reported medians instead, the median DEI size would have been 41, and dropping Michigan would have only brought it down to 40. Greene also provides no conceptual discussion of DEI. Instead, he just gives examples of what the study considered to be DEI. For example, he counted employment in a "women's center" as DEI but never discusses what one should do with a "Christian Center." On the surface, both should be considered DEI because they involve administration dedicated to identity but not academics. But among conservative so-called think tanks, Heritage has been more open about pushing a Christian agenda, and certainly the conservative evangelical base would not welcome eliminating religious things like Christian centers, so Greene (along with other conservative ideologues) just keeps mum about such things.

But even then, in the hands of the Heritage Foundation's ideologues, these technical flaws pale by comparison to their substantive misinterpretations. Jarrett Stepman converts Greene's biased "power conference" sample into what to many people would mistake for a representative sample: "65 universities representing 16 percent of all students at four-year institutions in the United States." Then, Lindsey M. Burke, also at Heritage, refers to Stepman's column and writes: "The average American university has more than 45 individuals with jobs devoted to promoting so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion. DEI programs push divisive identity politics as well as distorted narratives about American history." And notice how Burke rhetorically converts Greene's unrepresentative sample into a representative one (the average for 65 power conference schools becomes "the average American university" ), and she follows this misinterpretation with the completely baseless claim that DEI programs "push identity politics" and "distorted narratives."

This is not the end of the story. I came across this trail of lies by reading a "guest column" in my local newspaper. It is by a reporter for USA Today, Ingrid Jacques. Her column quotes Burke's distortion without any apparent attempt to fact-check. So much for investigative journalism.

Now all this may seem like an interesting but irrelevant tangent, except for the educational credentials of the protagonists. Jaques is a graduate of Hillsdale College, the conservative icon that's being used to remodel New College, Florida's erstwhile honors college, and a master's degree from Michigan State. Burke has a bachelor's degree from Hollins University, a master's degree from the University of Virginia, and a Ph.D. from George Mason University. Stepman seems to be the most innocent of the bunch because he "only" has a bachelor's degree, Greene has a B.A. in history from Tufts and a PhD in government from Harvard. Since Greene has the most prestigious degree in the bunch, do you think he made the mistake of using a biased sampling plan by accident?

Whether from the standpoint of ethics or that of the rigorous use of technical tools, this Heritage Foundation example is one of academic malpractice. All these people except Stepman have advanced degrees, they all use their credentials to claim credibility, and they all misrepresent what they claim to know. Any assessment of U.S. higher education should address such malpractice.

8. Heller reports that a student at Harvard argued for the Humanities "to be more rigorous," but he seems to equate "quantitative" with "rigor." They're not the same. See my comments above about learning (and teaching statistics). Since statistics are often used to present evidence in scientific contexts, their proper use necessarily requires substantial understanding of philosophy, especially philosophy of science.

9. Related to this, Heller quotes the student saying, "One could easily walk away [from a humanities course at Harvard] with an A o A- minus and not have learned anything." I thought this is true of most courses at Harvard.

10. Heller talks about the U.S. government funding "high culture." It's an interesting point. He mentions overseas jazz tours: "The idea was: they don't swing in Sovetsk." I guess the Cuban Revolution ended this practice. Anyone who's been to Casa de la Musica in Havana knows that music and dance are not uniquely U.S. or capitalist.

11. I find the later portions of Heller's essay informative and insightful. But his "research design" makes his generalizations suspect. The essay draws primarily on anecdotes at Harvard and ASU. Harvard is hardly a place where resources are scarce, and ASU's President, Michael Crow, has brought substantial resources into ASU., albeit by using a corporate, top-down style of management and questionable practices that border on corruption. How do the lessons Heller draws transfer to places like University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point? It's great to hear words of wisdom, like Harvard student Saul Glist posing the important question: "What do investments in the humanities look like -- and what kind of ideal future [for the humanities?] can we imagine?" But schools like USSP have nothing to invest, and its administration has considered disciplines like the humanities as pointless drains on resources. Moreover, one can (and should) ask similar questions about all disciplines: "What do investments in [fill in 'archeology,' 'sociology,' "gender studies,' 'astrophysics,' 'education,' or what have you] look like?"

In sum, I find Heller's essay too narrowly focused on the humanities, rather than a slew of other fields -- including but not limited to some of the arts and to some extent the social sciences -- that also are experiencing declining enrollments, not because the field is obsolete but because they do not fit either students' preconceptions of what a university education is for or university administrators' conceptions of what best serves their own careerist aspirations. This narrow focus causes him to miss seeing the forest for the trees: i.e., the broader political economic forces at work. Nonetheless, he does provide some insights about the current state of the humanities. But he misses what I think is a crucial point. Investment in the humanities, or any other field for that matter, has to start at the top. If top university officials come to understand and respect what individual disciplines do, they can facilitate important evolutions and help generate student interest. On the other hand, without such understanding and respect, any field that experiences declining enrollment -- no matter how briefly -- becomes a convenient candidate for the chopping block.

Heller's essay is pragmatic, in the sense that he examines ways to resuscitate and advance the humanities (and other fields subject to similar trends). I just wish he put his analysis in broader, political-economic context, including broader trends of neoliberalization that touch much more than the humanities.

scoop85

Beeeej

Trotsky
This author needs to be stabbed repeatedly in the face, but this piece, against all expectations, traces the death of the American university.

Yeah, it's highly informative, but the completely incasual and clumsily nonoffhand way in which the author insisted on dropping the fact that he attended Harvard was just about as obnoxiously anti-innocent as any I've ever seen.

Exactly my reaction reading that piece

Heller writes like my wife talks, makes some good points, but after awhile I have to excuse myself to go to the bathroom. I assume that New Yorker contributors are paid by the word.

I usually just look at the cartoons, do some crosswords (but avoid the really challenging ones), read Shouts & Murmurs and David Sedaris. I’m pretty STEMy, an undergrad math major and grad in policy analysis, and as I read through it, couldn’t help but think, insert graph here, insert table there. Great cover this week, though.
.

Meanwhile, a somewhat earlier university.