Gentlemen and Scholars: College and Community in the "Age of the University"

Capa
Transaction Publishers - 284 páginas

Historians have dubbed the period from the Civil War to World War I "the age of the university," suggesting that colleges, in contrast to universities, were static institutions out of touch with American society. Bruce Leslie challenges this view by offering compelling evidence for the continued vitality of colleges, using case studies of four representative colleges from the Middle Atlantic region Bucknell, Franklin and Marshall, Princeton, and Swarthmore. A new introduction to this classic reflects on his work in light of recent scholarship, especially that on southern universities, the American college in the international context, the experience of women, and liberal Protestantism's impact on the research university.

According to Leslie, nineteenth-century colleges were designed by their founders and supporters to be instruments of ethnic, denominational, and local identity. The four colleges Leslie examines in detail here were representative of these types, each serving a particular religious denomination or lifestyle. Over the course of this period, however, these colleges, like many others, were forced to look beyond traditional sources of financial support, toward wealthy alumni and urban benefactors.

This development led to the gradual reorientation of these schools toward an emerging national urban Protestant culture. Colleges that responded to and exploited the new currents prospered. Those that continued to serve cultural distinctiveness and localism risked financial sacrifice. Leslie develops his argument from a close study of faculties, curricula, financial constituencies, student bodies, and campus life. The book will be valuable to those interested in American history, higher education, as well as the particular institutions studied.

"This book continues the story started by Veysey's Emergence of the American University. Its innovative approach should encourage scholars to study colleges and universities as parts of local communities rather than as freestanding entities. Leslie's findings will substantially revise currently accepted accounts of the history of education in the late nineteenth century."--Louise L. Stevenson, Franklin and Marshall College

W. Bruce Leslie is professor of history at the State University of New York at Brockport.

 

Índice

Four Colleges and Their Communities
11
Rural Piety and Urban Wealth
31
When Professors Had Servants
55
What Knowledge Is of Most Worth?
79
Students as Gentlemen
95
Piety versus Prosperity in the Protestant College
117
Presidential Power and Academic Autonomy
147
Knowledge Fit for Protestant Gentlemen
177
The Side Shows Have Swallowed Up the Circus
189
The Age of the College
213
The College in the Social Order
237
Conclusion
251
Bibliography
261
Index
278
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Página 3 - You must extinguish, one after another, all those great lights of science which for more than a century have thrown their radiance over our land! It is, sir, as I have said, a small College. And yet there are those who love it.
Página 23 - That we esteem it desirable that a literary institution should be established in Central Pennsylvania, embracing a High School for male pupils, another for female, a College and also a Theological institution, to be under the influence of the Baptist denomination.
Página 18 - David W. Robson, Educating Republicans: The College in the Era of the American Revolution.
Página 5 - Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University (New York: Vintage Books, 1962); and John S. Brubacher and Willis Rudy, Higher Education in Transition, 2d ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1968). icon University in 1965 raised "the age of the university...

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