LibLog

April 5, 2010

The More Things Change . . .
By Iain Crawford, University of Delaware

In the early 1830s, Harriet Martineau, English novelist, journalist, economist and a writer now widely recognized as one of the founders of modern sociology, traveled across the Atlantic to spend two years exploring the American experiment in constructing a democratic society. Traveling more than 10,000 miles around the young nation, she energetically observed the ways in which it was evolving its institutions, manners, and culture, and she recorded what she saw in two books that deserve a wider contemporary readership: Society in America (1837) and Retrospect of Western Travel (1838). For readers of this blog, one part of Martineau’s observations may have a special interest – her account of Harvard University from the latter volume.*

Describing Harvard as “the aristocratic college of the United States,” Martineau suggests that this elite status will itself inhibit Harvard from change: “her pride of antiquity, her vanity of pre-eminence and wealth, are likely to prevent her renovating her principles and management so as to suit the wants of the period.” Nature abhorring a vacuum, Martineau anticipates that these needs are likely to be met elsewhere: “more and more new colleges are rising up, and are filled as fast as they rise, whose principles and practices are better suited to the wants of the time.” Moreover, and by contrast with Harvard, which has priced itself beyond the reach of all but the most affluent, in these new colleges “living is cheaper, and the professors are therefore richer with the same or smaller salaries; the sons of the yeomanry and mechanic classes resort to them; and, where it is the practice of the tutors to work with their pupils, as well as lecture to them, a proficiency is made which shames the attainments of the Harvard students.” For Martineau, the situation is hopeless as she doubts “whether, if a gratis education to poor students were to be dispensed from Harvard tomorrow, it would rival in real respectability and proficiency the orthodox colleges which have already surpassed her.”

One hundred and eighty two years later, however, Harvard still stands, does indeed offer a gratis education to poor students, and gives no sign that it is ready to surrender its status as one of the world’s leading universities. Yet even though Martineau’s bleak forecast for this one institution proved overly pessimistic, she certainly anticipated how a latter-day Harvard, once again in the doldrums, would need “a renovation of her management” to respond to a want of this time and deal appropriately with issues of gender and education. Moreover, her underlying point remains powerful and true for all our institutions: the urgency of finding ways to address the needs of the age and to meet the challenges from new providers of education is as real in 2010 as it was in the America Martineau visited, when James Madison and John Quincy Adams were still alive. Indeed, throughout American history, the defining characteristic of higher education in this country has been its ability to answer this call and to reinvent itself time and time again. Can it do so again now and in the years to come? Where will the most urgent challenges come? What will help and what hinder institutions as they seek to address these challenges? In the coming weeks, I’ll take on these questions, offering some reflections and hoping to prompt your questions and responses.

* Retrospect of Western Travel. 2 vols. London: Saunders and Otley, 1838. All quotations are from the chapter, “Cambridge Commencement,” in Volume 2.

Iain Crawford teaches in the department of English at the University of Delaware. He served as the vice president for academic affairs at The College of Wooster from 2003 to 2009.

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