USA > Massachusetts > Commonwealth history of Massachusetts, colony, province and state, volume 5 > Part 28
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Courtesy of Harvard University
SEVER HALL. HARVARD UNIVERSITY
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THE PRESIDENTIAL TASK
stubbornly protested against Eliot's proposal to establish writ- ten examinations because, as he explained, Harvard Medical students could not write answers to questions; and some of them could not write at all! The Divinity School was not a place either of scholarship or enthusiasm. The Lawrence Scientific School had only 122 students, it was overshadowed by the college, and to the end of Eliot's administration was never placed on the same basis of work and scholarship as Harvard College or as the neighboring Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Like conditions obtained in all the Massachusetts colleges, and the secondary schools were no better organized or taught. The most hopeful educational movement was the foundation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston in 1871, where Eliot had been able to test some of his educational ideas.
THE PRESIDENTIAL TASK (1869)
President Eliot's lifelong conception of the functions of a college president were clearly stated in his Inaugural Address of 1869: "The President should be able to discern the prac- tical essence of complicated and long-drawn discussions. He must often pick out that promising part of theory which ought to be tested by experiment, and must decide how many things desirable are also attainable, and what one of many projects is ripest for execution. He must watch and look before: watch, to seize opportunities to get money, to secure eminent teachers and scholars, and to influence public learning; and look before, to anticipate the due effect on the University of the fluctuations of public opinion on educational problems, of the progress of the institutions which feed the University, of the changing conditions of the professions which the Univer- sity supplies, of the rise of new professions, of the gradual alteration of social and religious habits in the community. The University must accommodate itself promptly to signifi- cant changes in the character of the people for whom it exists. The institutions of higher education in any nation are always a faithful mirror in which are sharply reflected the national history and character. In this mobile nation the action and reaction between the University and society at large are more
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sensitive and rapid than in stiffer communities. The Presi- dent, therefore, must not need to see a house built before he can comprehend the plan of it. He can profit by a wide inter- course with all sorts of men, and by every real discussion on education, legislation, and sociology."
THE ICONOCLASTIC PRESIDENT (1869-1880)
In this atmosphere of crusted conservatism and narrow- ness, the good men-such as Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes in the Medical School and Judge Parsons in the Law School- were helpless. There was a going in the tops of the mulberry trees when the new president appeared unsummoned at faculty meetings, and took the unheard-of step of presiding in the faculty meetings of these organizations, all of which were living chiefly on students' fees and endowed professorships.
One of the earliest and greatest triumphs of Eliot's regime was a reorganization of the Law School. He very soon called to the deanship Christopher Columbus Langdell, whose revo- lutionary views on the teaching of law had attracted Eliot's attention while Langdell was still a law student. The con- firmation of that appointment made possible the introduction of the Case System, worked out in Langdell's brain, aided by a body of enthusiastic young teachers in the new system. It was anchored in the consciousness of the whole country by the later success of graduates of the Law School as prac- titioners, consultants and judges.
In the Medical School, Eliot encouraged and aided the vig- orous professors to introduce new systems of research and of contact of students with actual cases of disease. To the Divin- ity School came a rapid change of instructors; and men of world-wide renown in their subjects were brought in. The Lawrence Scientific School did not fit into his system and went through several transitions. It took fifteen years from his induction as president to put into effect all his ideas of elective courses in the college, of research and laboratory re- quirements in the graduate schools, and of rigorous written examinations everywhere.
Thus he justified his own analysis of the relation of a president to a university: "The president of a university is
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THE ELIOT REFORMS
in the first place its chief executive officer; but he should also be its leader and seer. In order to give the competent man every opportunity to exercise the functions of a leader and inspirer, he should be the presiding officer of the trustees, or other property-holding and controlling board, a member ex officio of any supervising board which the constitution of the university may provide, and the presiding officer of every faculty within the university."
THE HUMAN ELEMENT IN THE ELIOT REFORM (1869-1880)
Throughout his career, Eliot carried through his educational reforms by first reforming the men who must put the changes into effect. Some mossbacks in professional chairs gave up the struggle and resigned. A few continued as monuments of the past. Of others and of their successes Eliot spoke on his ninetieth birthday.
President Eliot quickly gathered about him in all the facul- ties a body of men of power, men of vision and men who were born teachers. One of his first steps was to find resolute men of learning in their fields to be deans of the professional schools. He early created a deanship of Harvard College, held in succession by two men of might-Ephraim Gurney and Charles F. Dunbar. Thus was established a relation of confidence between the authorities and the students.
The next great step in organization, which was set in action after ten years of thought and experience, was the creation of organized departments in Harvard College, each headed by a chairman. Each department held frequent meetings which included the young instructors, and voted upon plans of im- provement in that particular field. With these officials, both the school executives and the committee chairmen, the presi- dent was in constant touch. They were consulted about new appointments; or the president, on his own initiative, called from other institutions in America and overseas men of mark to develop new fields of study.
THE PRESIDENT IN THE FACULTY
President Eliot always showed to very great advantage at the head of what first was a Faculty table, and gradually en-
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larged into a spacious Faculty room. His clearness, his fair- ness, his grasp of the subject, and his willingness to listen to everybody's contribution to a discussion, made him a model chairman. No man ever had reason to accuse him of taking amiss an argument against his own views. Late in life he admitted that he watched the debates and formed his judg- ments of young participants, whether they acknowledged the presiding officer or otherwise.
An example of his inability to look upon a difference of opinion on a standing question as a personal matter, was shown in the debate in the 'nineties over the president's proposition for a three-year course for the A.B.,-the only sweeping edu- cational change which he ever proposed without its being adopted. He won over the Corporation; he secured an affirma- tive vote in the Faculty; it remained only to take the decision of the Board of Overseers, which was practically never denied to such propositions made by the president. Professor Na- thaniel Shaler, who was greatly opposed to the plan, entered on an opposition which in other legislative bodies would have been called a lobby; and the Overseers killed the motion. Not long afterward there was a vacancy in the deanship of the Lawrence Scientific School; Nathaniel Shaler was made dean, because he was the man best fitted for that place.
ELIOT HUMOR
The president had the reputation of being an austere man; yet there were occasions when the brow of Jove relaxed. For instance, after a violent athletic quarrel with Princeton, re- sulting in a severance of all athletic relations, the president one day submitted to the Faculty a letter from President McCosh, beginning: "The time has come to cease looking backward into the past, and to begin looking into the future," which caused the president to burst into such inextinguishable laughter that he was unable to finish the reading. The im- plied invitation to negotiate was accepted, and soon the Dove of Peace returned to the joint arks of the two Noahs.
Now and then there was a flash of convincing wit, as when the Faculty was debating a proposed new requirement for entrance; and the point was made that it might be given up
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NATIONAL EDUCATION REFORM
because that requirement was not in force at Yale. Where- upon a member of the Faculty pointed out that the Yale Faculty had adopted it, to go into effect the next year. The President summed up the whole controversy in a sentence : "If we drop that requirement, and Yale puts it in effect, then Yale-will-take-our-place." That President Eliot was not devoid of a more searching humor was shown when a special public session of the Corporation was held in 1912 in order to do honor to Prince Henry, brother of the then German Emperor. In behalf of the Corporation, the President recalled the historical incident of Queen Victoria's declaration at the time of the Trent episode, in 1861, that she could not counte- nance war with the United States. Therefore the German visitor was created an LL.D. of Harvard "out of respect for his august grandmother," the Englishwoman.
NATIONAL EDUCATION REFORM (1869-1909)
Never did it enter Eliot's mind that the educational reforms which he brought about could stop at Harvard. From the day when his inaugural address rang out with its principles of freedom of choice, of contact with sources, of a learned body of teachers who would work with and not upon their students, President Eliot stood forth in the United States as the apostle of educational ideas which could be carried into effect in any live college, in schools far below the college grade, and in the highest laboratories of research. His position as head of a university rapidly growing in students, influence and wealth, gave access for his educational theories to other minds and other schools.
He always believed that those ideas could be applied almost at the beginning of the educational system. Therefore, throughout his active life he was in the habit of appealing to the American people in addresses before gatherings not only of the Harvard alumni but the alumni of other colleges, before learned societies, and before the great educational as- sociations, national and State, general and special, which about that time began to spring up throughout the Union.
He always fought against rote teaching and memorizing as an anti-educational process, at every stage from the kinder-
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garten up. For example, he attacked the system of teaching arithmetic in the lower Massachusetts schools ; and he proved, by the actual experience of a friend who went over the whole body of principles and examples in the school arithmetic, that an ordinarily bright child could do all the arithmetic work of seven years in school in about seventy hours of elapsed time. He attacked the usual rote-reading books. He insisted on drawing as a school requirement. He always emphasized the value of interest in study or in sport. He demanded a training of the senses; an opportunity of experiment. As President Hyde of Bowdoin, a lifelong friend, said of him: "He has sought to extend the helping hand of sympathy and appreciation to every struggling capacity in the humblest grammar grade; to stimulate it into joyous blossoming under the sunshine of congenial studies throughout the secondary years; to bring it to a sturdy and sound maturity in the atmos- phere of liberty in college life; and finally, by stern selection and thorough specialization, to gather a harvest of experts in all the higher walks of life."
ELIOT'S PERSONALITY
Before entering upon the nature and extent of the educa- tional reforms, enthusiastically taken up by a group of young college presidents in the East, the West and the Far West, and by enlightened States and city superintendents of schools, and heads of high schools and grade schools, upon the general lines first marked out by President Eliot, the personality of the new educational leader should be placed in the foreground. Charles William Eliot was a man of unusual height and physical vigor, always in excellent physical condition-prob- ably because almost to the end of his days he kept up system- atic exercise; his carriage was perfect, his voice deep and sonorous. A birthmark, which would have made most men painfully conscious, faded out of the mind of those who met him or heard him speak. He was a man of power; and at the same time a man of noble and gracious bearing, and of personal dignity which was rarely assailed and could not be withstood.
His intimate friend, President Neilson, who was a profes-
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HOME AND FAMILY
sor at Harvard College and later president of Smith College, thus sums up his character and bearing: "Strong emotions under yet stronger control; broad interests seen in their just proportions; faith in the dignity and worth of man; a spirit that measures all institutions, whether political, industrial, educational, or religious, by their effect on individual charac- ter; a profound faith in spiritual unity and none in enforced uniformity; aristocracy of birth, breeding, and culture, coupled with a democrat's faith in his fellowmen and a demo- crat's fellowship with them whatever their culture or want of it; tenacity in the pursuit of his ends, unwearied patience in waiting on time for their accomplishment; disinterestedness in service and absolute devotion to his self-elected form of service; comprehension of great principles with mastery of details; a profoundly religious temperament that is eloquent in deeds but reticent in words; a Puritan's absolute candor and a Puritan's reserve; an open mind to truth wherever discovered and a clear discerning judgment of it; a command of English that sometimes pierces like a rapier, coupled with a stately and courtly presence-all have combined to make Dr. Eliot a great educator and a great citizen, a maker of men and a Nation's counselor."
Dean Briggs, for years one of his closest friends and pro- fessional associates, has recorded his judgment in stirring words: "He is one whom the angel would write down, not, it may be, as one who loved his fellow men, though he gave his life to their advancement,-for, democrat as he was, he had a certain aristocratic discrimination, though he never sacrificed his conscience to it,-but as one who used his gigan- tic powers in the determination to give every man a chance; who tenderly loved his family and his friends; who neglected no duty to home, to college, to country, or to the world; a true evangelist who preached the intellectual emancipation of all mankind."
HOME AND FAMILY
His family relations were always very happy. His first wife, to whom he was deeply attached, died in 1869, leaving two sons. In 1877 he married Grace Mellen Hopkinson of Cambridge, who lived until 1924. His elder son, Charles
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Eliot, became a landscape architect, but died at thirty-eight. His younger son, Samuel Atkins Eliot, became the head of a numerous family of sons, for one of whom the name of Charles William Eliot was revived.
During the greater part of the president's academic life he lived in the president's house, which was situated within the college precincts. After retirement from the presidency, he bought and occupied a house elsewhere in Cambridge. Taken all together, several years of his life were spent on an island off Mount Desert, and later in a house that he built near Seal Harbor.
He was very fond of sailing, of horseback exercise, and later of the bicycle ; and he took particular pleasure in the pro- fession of his son Charles, which aimed to perpetuate and enlarge the beauties of nature. The fortunes of his father and mother were lost in the panic of 1857. From his college salary, some profits from shore lands and other sources, he lived quietly and unostentatiously. He made many journeys in the United States, usually on his way to a public address. In the course of his life he made four long journeys to Europe; and in 1910 he took a journey around the world, and was everywhere received as a great American, a great educator and a great prophet.
A NATIONAL CHARACTER
A most devoted son of Harvard and of Massachusetts, always full of dignity, always seeking the welfare of his uni- versity, Eliot's fame and his power were felt by the whole country. Few men of his time equalled him in the measured dignity of speech. His voice, his manner, his subject matter, were always original and effective. He was a powerful advo- cate and a bold antagonist; very apt in turning the tables on those who differed with him. He made many addresses, sometimes carefully written out in advance; frequently spoken without notes. He was never afraid to say what he thought, or to contradict statements that he did not believe. A friend says of him: "His very fighting was that of a great gentleman who observed all the rules of the game, and constantly played it on the terms suggested."
He never held any significant public office-perhaps a few
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A NATIONAL CHARACTER
appointments as a commissioner. For he would accept no appointment devoid of responsibility. In politics he did not adventure as a candidate, and very seldom made a political speech, except one in the 'seventies against the high pro- tective tariff. The only opportunity of high political prefer- ment that came to him was President Wilson's offer of the ambassadorship to Great Britain in 1913. This was the most serious mistake of Eliot's life. He was destined to live fourteen years longer. He was of the quality that was espe- cially needed in that important office, when within a twelve- month period the World War broke out. He had the health, the eloquence, the capacity, the courage, the patriotism neces- sary for that trust; and the history of the world might have been different had he been the intermediary between the American and the British governments in that troubled time.
Without being an officeholder, he was a great national char- acter, known from end to end of the land. This came about partly because, just at the time when he was reorganizing Harvard University, extending the departments of teaching, strengthening the professional schools, adding to the subject matter of education, and working out methods for applying the elective system to college work, a galaxy of rich and powerful universities was being formed. Columbia, the Uni- versity of Pennsylvania, the new universities of Johns Hop- kins and Chicago, and the great State universities, were all in a process of reorganization and enlargement, and took account of how Harvard was working out its educational problems. President Eliot was a large figure among those asked to advise in these new developments and enterprises. The other New England colleges, while standing by their own social traditions, all came over to the elective system, modified to meet their traditions and codes. Many Harvard teachers and professors and graduates were drawn into the service of these old and new universities as executives or teachers.
Eliot's unflinching belief in the elective system was backed up by the founders of these new colleges; and by those who were rebuilding the old systems of education. Many times he was attacked; but he had great powers of self-defense. He never withdrew a principle that he believed to be true,
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because other people disliked it. From the first he insisted on wide publicity in all Harvard affairs. The changes and advances, set forth in his annual reports and his addresses, were widely read, partly because of the storm of protest from many old-fashioned educators. President Eliot was a born propagandist, like Emerson and Horace Mann and William Lloyd Garrison in intensity of belief and unwearied courage and in putting forward what he thought was true and necessary.
ORIGIN OF THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM
The first chapter in what might be called Eliot's Bible of education was the provision for elective studies. This was the principle of the German universities, which had been attended by such Massachusetts men as George Bancroft, the historian; Goodwin, the Greek scholar; Longfellow, the poet ; and eminent scientific men. In Germany the disciplinary studies, making a body of uniform required work, were com- pleted in the gymnasia, which were a kind of superior high schools. In the universities, from the eighteenth century on, German students selected the courses of the professors whose subjects and treatment most interested them. The tests of their readiness to go out into the world as learned men was the special examination and a thesis, based on a study of sources, both of which were essential for the degree of Ph.D. These university students knew not the reproach of American college students against their Alma Mater that they had to study subjects that did not interest them under instructors who did not teach them.
CHAMPIONSHIP OF THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM (1869-1909)
The elective system, briefly described in his inaugural address, and in his mind never seriously altered, was the foundation of his educational gospel: viz., that interest in studies was the basis of scholarship, and that the elective system destroyed the main excuse of the lazy man. The one essential subject that he thought everybody must take, whether he liked it or not, was English Composition. He was also interested in students having a knowledge of the English
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classics. The main test in all studies was a written examination.
The whole Eliot theory of education has been summed up in a phrase which he never expressed in that brief form: "Everybody is more interested in the things that he is inter- ested in than in the things he is not interested in." Eliot (whose opinion was shared by most educated men brought up under his influence) to the end of his days believed that a genuine elective system should be free and unhampered; while on the other hand the conduct of elective courses, their standards, the amount of intellectual effort required, should be nearly enough equal so that any combination of (say) four or five courses taken in a year should involve as much work as any other combination. Another essential was that in sequence to the introductory courses in any subject would be maintained a body of related special courses in the same field. Another part of his educational gospel was that the secondary schools ought to provide the essential introductory courses in all the main subjects of learning.
Under this system grew up the Harvard curriculum, which included an imposing list of beginning courses, with follow-up opportunities. At the outset this system was confronted by the spectre of "soft courses." Courses at Harvard and else- where might be elected by hundreds-or in the great western universities by thousands-of note-taking students, for whom it was very difficult to supply the necessary pabulum. This difficulty was in part overcome at Harvard by a system of multiple teachers and assistants, combined with written theses and other individual pieces of work.
The elective system solved the problem of the arts colleges throughout the country; but it could not be made to fit in well with the curricula of scientific and engineering schools, where for each specialty there are courses which all students in those specialties must pursue. Under the Eliot system, wherever put in force, grew up a body of very large courses -for example, the Harvard courses in Fine Arts-which were difficult to handle. After the retirement of President Eliot, his successor, President Lowell, worked out a plan for groups of assistants in large courses, which gradually developed into the tutorial method of the 1920s.
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SCIENTIFIC FOUNDATIONS AND COLLECTIONS
From 1865 on, there arose in Massachusetts a sense of the value of special collections, museums and laboratories. Those were the days of development of the art museums, of scien- tific collections, of great libraries, of the foundation of its State Agricultural College.
Among them were the Harvard Observatory, which much preceded Eliot, and became one of the leading scientific insti- tutions in the world; though, until much later, it furnished no specific instruction to students. The great museum collections of Agassiz became the foundation of courses and laboratories in zoology and kindred subjects and a center for learned men. Lecture courses in the Fine Arts were followed by art collec- tions and museums. Anthropology was developed into a large apparatus of learning in that field.
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