CALL ME MAGGIE

READ MY NOTICE TO EXPRESS MYSELF
AS A FREE ADULT CITIZEN OF THE STATE OF TEXAS

Mushrooms on Luxuriant Soil

Philip Lindsley went to Nashville in 1824 because nobody there had a college. A Princeton graduate, a man who had already turned down several presidencies, he was drawn by the sheer emptiness of the map: a million people in the lower Mississippi Valley and not one institution of higher learning among them (Hofstadter 1996, 212). Less than twenty-five years later he counted thirty small, competing colleges within two hundred miles of his own front door, and nine within fifty. His verdict, and I want you to sit with the botanical violence of it before I say anything else: colleges, he wrote, “rise up like mushrooms on our luxuriant soil. They are duly lauded and puffed for a day; and then they sink to be heard of no more” (Hofstadter 1996, 212).

Mushrooms. Not oaks. Not even weeds, which at least have the decency to be hardy. Fungal blooms, here for a season and gone, feeding on rot they themselves accelerate.

I have spent two entries now walking you toward this moment, First Wave’s nine sober colonial foundations, the governance rupture that traded resident self-rule for an external board answerable to nobody who actually taught. What I did not tell you, because it belongs here and not there, is what happened once that trustee template, cheap to charter and cheaper still to abandon, got loose on a continent with no shortage of denominations and no shortage of towns wanting a school.

Brutal arithmetic

Nine colonial colleges existed by 1780. Sixteen more arrived by 1799, bringing the total to twenty-five. Then twenty-four more by 1830. Then, by 1861, on the very eve of a war that would finally break the pattern, another hundred and thirty-three, for a total of one hundred and eighty-two colleges that Donald Tewksbury, whose 1932 study Richard Hofstadter draws from directly, classed as having actually survived (Hofstadter 1996, 209 to 211).

Survived. That word is doing enormous work in that sentence, because survival was the exception, not the rule. Tewksbury found records of five hundred and sixteen colleges founded before the Civil War across sixteen states. Of those, one hundred and four made it. Nineteen percent. Four out of every five colleges chartered in this country during the entire antebellum era failed outright (Hofstadter 1996, 211).

Break it down by state and it gets worse, not better, the further you get from the coast. Fifteen of thirty-six survived in New York. Seventeen of forty-three in Ohio. Seven of twenty-six in North Carolina. Eight of eighty-five in Missouri. And in Texas, the state where I have spent my entire career, two out of forty (Hofstadter 1996, 211).

Two out of forty. I want to just leave that number sitting there for a second before I tell you what it actually looked like on the ground, because it looked like Waxahachie.

My hometown hosted two of these Texas colleges within a year of each other. Marvin College, Methodist, chartered around 1868, one of the forty. It failed within a generation, and its building became, eventually, a public elementary school. I attended that school, third through fifth grade, inside the bones of a dead college and nobody thought to mention it. Trinity University, Cumberland Presbyterian, founded the following year in Tehuacana, one of the two, the survivors, relocated to Waxahachie in 1902 for better rail access and a bigger population to draw from, and then relocated again to San Antonio in 1942, where it still operates. Same state, same decade, same denominational-college machinery, same trustee template inherited from Harvard’s Corporation. One became a schoolhouse. One became a university. Tewksbury’s two-out-of-forty is not an abstraction to me. It is the ground I grew up standing on, literally, since Marvin’s foundation is still under Waxahachie’s dirt somewhere.

Hofstadter’s own tally of what was actually founded, sponsor by sponsor: forty-nine Presbyterian colleges, thirty-four Methodist, twenty-five Baptist, twenty-one Congregationalist, fourteen Roman Catholic, eleven Episcopalian, six Lutheran, twenty more from smaller sects, plus twenty-one state institutions, three semi-state, three municipal (Hofstadter 1996, 213). Notice that last cluster. Twenty-one state institutions, sitting quietly inside this denominational flood. I will come back to them, because Jaspers has something to say about what a state institution actually is that the antebellum South and West had not yet worked out for themselves, and would spend the next century and a half failing to fully answer.

Survival Pedagogy

Assume, charitably, that your college is one of the nineteen percent. What did you actually get? The curriculum, in outline, would have been recognizable to a colonial student sixty years earlier: Latin, Greek, mathematics through trigonometry, a smattering of chemistry and botany, rhetoric, ethics, logic, and geology only “if the college was fairly advanced and not overawed by the book of Genesis” (Hofstadter 1996, 226). The dominant teaching method was recitation, meaning a student memorized a text and reproduced it aloud, while the instructor’s entire job was verifying he had gotten it right. One Harvard professor of the era called it, without much affection, “the humble and simple, old-school, tedious business of recitation” (Hofstadter 1996, 229). Francis Wayland of Brown, one of the era’s most committed reformers, watched the whole system from the inside and concluded that the average professor, bound this tightly to the text, “already knows more than he has the opportunity to communicate” (Hofstadter 1996, 229).

The libraries tell the same story from a different angle. When George Ticknor visited Göttingen in 1816, he found forty professors and two hundred thousand volumes, against Harvard’s twenty professors and fewer than twenty thousand. By 1839, Harvard, the best-stocked college library in the country, had fifty thousand books. Only one other institution, Yale, had even half that many (Hofstadter 1996, 231). You cannot do advanced scholarship in a room with a thousand books in it, and most of these colleges had rooms with a thousand books in them.

Now, the famous document. In 1828, facing real institutional crisis, the Yale faculty issued what became the single most influential defense of the fixed classical curriculum in American history, and I want to give you its actual sentence rather than the caricature people usually make of it: “There are many things important to be known, which are not taught in colleges, because they may be learned anywhere” (American Journal of Science and Arts 15, 1829: 303).

Sit with that for a moment before you decide it’s reactionary nonsense. Because I don’t think it is, and getting to why requires bringing Ortega into the room.

But first, one more thread from Blog Two that does not simply vanish once the colonial period ends. I told you there that Harvard’s Corporation completed its drift into a wholly nonresident body by 1780, and that the two tutors who tried to stop an earlier version of that drift lost for reasons that had nothing to do with the merits of their argument. Hofstadter records something quieter happening across the better colleges through this same antebellum stretch, a genuine if partial reversal: “the slow transfer of college management from the hands of trustees through the presidents and into the faculty bodies,” a process he ties directly to the size and complexity a faculty had actually grown to reach (Hofstadter 1996, 232). Notice the word slow. Notice, too, that this reversal happened only in the “larger and better institutions,” which is to say it happened nowhere near the mushroom colleges I have just spent several paragraphs walking you through. Wealth and size bought a college the one thing Sever and Welsteed could not buy Harvard in 1721: enough institutional weight that trustees meeting once a year at commencement could no longer plausibly manage the place themselves, and had to start handing pieces of it back to the people who actually taught there. This is not the medieval inheritance returning. It is something narrower and more contingent, an administrative concession wrung out by sheer institutional bulk rather than a principled restoration of self-governance. But it is real, it is measurable, and it means the governance story I am telling across this whole series is not a single unbroken line running from 1721 straight to the present. It has at least one place, here, in the antebellum decades, where the line bends back toward the people it had excluded, for reasons that were almost entirely accidental to any argument about what a university actually is.

The economy of a finite mind

Ortega y Gasset, in the chapter of Mission of the University he titles, with real precision, “The Principle of Economy in Education,” makes an argument that the Yale faculty were groping toward without quite having the language for it. Education exists, he says, for one reason only: because the amount of knowledge in the world vastly exceeds the capacity of any single mind to absorb it, and “scarcity of the capacity to learn is the cardinal principle of education” (Ortega y Gasset 1946, 53). Every curriculum, on this account, is an act of triage. You are not choosing what to teach. You are choosing what to sacrifice, and doing it honestly is harder than pretending you can teach everything to everyone.

This is the argument the Yale faculty actually made, stripped of its defensive crouch. Something has to be left out, because a finite mind cannot hold an infinite discipline, and the something they chose to leave out was the maximalist, encyclopedic, everything-at-once model that Jefferson was building at the University of Virginia at almost exactly the same moment. I don’t think this makes Yale’s faculty right and Jefferson wrong. I think it means both currents were solving the identical scarcity problem Ortega describes, and arrived at opposite economies, and neither side, reading them now, comes off as the villain of this story so much as two responses to the same finite mind, each convinced its own sacrifice was the necessary one.

Here is where I have to be honest about a complication in my own argument, because it would be too tidy to let it pass unremarked. Ortega’s own answer to the scarcity problem, worked out two chapters later, is not a defense of the research-saturated modern university at all. He wants the university built around five cultural disciplines, physics, biology, history, sociology, philosophy, plus professional training, and he explicitly, by his own description “heretical,” excludes original scientific research from the university’s primary function altogether (Ortega y Gasset 1946, 58). Which means that if you handed Ortega the old American college and the German-style research university side by side, he would not obviously prefer the second. The old college’s poverty, no laboratories, no graduate seminars, a library you could read through in a season, looks almost Ortegan from a certain angle: an institution economizing itself down to culture and profession, exactly as his principle demands. I don’t think this rescues the old college, whose failures Hofstadter documents too thoroughly for that. But it does mean the easy modern verdict, that more research and more electives is simply progress, is not a verdict Ortega himself would sign.

Why mediocrity multiplies on its own

Jaspers gives me the other half of this. In his chapter on the institution’s failure to live up to its own idea, he makes an observation about how any corporate body, university included, actually staffs itself: the “vested freedom to select its own new members” ostensibly favors the best candidate, but in practice, he argues, “tends to favor the second best,” since the genuinely excellent are excluded by fear of competition and the genuinely inferior are excluded for the sake of institutional prestige, leaving the safely competent to inherit every open chair (Jaspers 1960, 71). Read that against Tewksbury’s numbers and something clicks into place. Five hundred and sixteen colleges chartered, a hundred and four surviving, is not simply a story of frontier chaos or excessive piety, though it is certainly both of those things too. It is what happens when an institutional form built for self-perpetuation gets handed to hundreds of small, competing boards simultaneously, each one selecting, as Jaspers predicts, for the safely competent rather than the excellent, each one convinced its own mushroom will be the oak.

And notice, before we leave this entry, those twenty-one state institutions sitting inside Tewksbury’s tally, quiet and easy to miss next to the denominational flood. Jaspers has a whole later chapter on exactly this relationship, written, it’s worth remembering, by a man who had personally watched a state decide what a university was and was not permitted to teach. His verdict is double-edged in a way I don’t think Second Wave America had any way of anticipating: the state can protect a university’s independence by chartering it, or it can, with the same legal instrument, reduce that university to nothing more than “a public institution bereft of all individuality” (Jaspers 1960, 124; my emphasis). Twenty-one instances, in 1861, of a new kind of board entering the American picture, neither a self-perpetuating private trust like Harvard’s Corporation nor a denomination’s local sponsors like Marvin College’s Methodists. No, a legislature. That axis is still mostly dormant in this entry. It will not stay dormant.

I don’t have a tidy bow to put on this one. Third Wave is coming, land grant colleges, the Morrill Act signed in the middle of the Civil War itself, agriculture and the mechanical arts finally giving the state a reason to fund what it charters rather than simply charter it and walk away. That story starts with a federal government looking at exactly this wreckage, five hundred and sixteen colleges, four out of five of them already dead or dying, and deciding the old machinery could not be trusted to do it again.

References

Hofstadter, Richard. 1996. Academic Freedom in the Age of the College. Introduction by Roger L. Geiger. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Originally published as part of Richard Hofstadter and Walter P. Metzger, The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955).

Jaspers, Karl. 1960. The Idea of the University. Edited by Karl W. Deutsch. Translated by H. A. T. Reiche and H. F. Vanderschmidt. Boston: Beacon Press.

Ortega y Gasset, José. 1946. Mission of the University. Edited and introduced by Howard Lee Nostrand. London: Routledge.

“Original Papers in Relation to a Course of Liberal Education.” 1829. American Journal of Science and Arts 15: 297 to 351.