A Practical Education Page 3
“I really have never encountered a place as exciting or as forward-looking as Stanford,” said Harvard grad William Damon, Class of 1967, who in 2014 was a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education. David Spiegel, who graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1971 and became a professor at Stanford’s School of Medicine, recalled in 2014, “When I joined the faculty at Stanford in 1975, the feeling was, ‘it is a great place to be, but it sure ain’t Harvard.’” He continued, “I don’t feel that way anymore. Nobody does.”2
Stanford’s location, in the heart of Silicon Valley, drew the most attention from Cambridge. The Crimson article included a description of a visit to one Stanford class, and the choice was telling: introduction to programming, Programming Methodology CS 106A. “There is a huge number of students at Stanford now who concentrate in engineering, almost half,” remarked Harvard’s president, Drew Faust. “That’s going to be a very different atmosphere from here.”3
Stanford’s celebration of the practical struck some observers at Harvard as vulgar, at least an abrogation of the values that the university should protect. “I have this romantic vision that a university is a really unique cultural institution whose purpose is to produce and conserve and disseminate knowledge,” said Stephanie H. Kenen, a director of Harvard’s Program in General Education. “It doesn’t build roads.”4
Harvard did not openly smirk at Stanford, the parvenu, but one detects an implied syllogism: Harvard is older than Stanford, and Harvard’s much, much longer history confers a permanent superiority in what it does. Harvard English professor Derek Miller drew the ineluctable conclusion: “Stanford’s still a startup.”5
The practicality that Harvard observers saw in Stanford’s institutional marrow today long preceded Silicon Valley—and was a direct contributor to the Valley’s birth. It was the distinguishing characteristic that Leland and Jane Stanford, the university’s cofounders, had in mind when they conceived of funding a new university. The occasion was a mournful one, however. The school was to be a permanent memorial to their only child, Leland Stanford Junior, who had just died of typhus fever at the age of fifteen while traveling with his parents in Europe.
Leland Stanford was the president of the Central Pacific Railroad—the company that supplied the western portion of the first transcontinental rail line—and a former governor of California, whose primary residence was in San Francisco but who owned a number of farms and other properties in northern California. San Francisco newspapers accorded the Stanford family extensive coverage, but it was the Harvard Crimson that two months after the death of the Stanfords’ son was the first to hear of their plans. A small untitled item published in May 1884 said, “A writer from Paris says: ‘I hear ex Governor Leland Stanford of California, who has been here for some time past and who is in very bad health, has decided to give several millions of dollars out of his immense fortune to the founding of a university for the sons of working men.’”6
When Stanford passed through New York City, the New York Tribune interviewed him, listening to his concern that universities did not provide graduates with the practical education needed to pursue a vocation:
I have, in my business experience, found that too much of the current college training launches young men on the world void of such practical knowledge of any calling as will enable them to earn their living at once. Scores of educated youngsters have been sent to me as President of the Central Pacific Railroad, seeking employment, and I could not do anything with them, because they would not fit in anywhere. When business men wish to employ people, they have specific services in their mind and mere general brightness will not serve their purpose. I, therefore, intend as far as possible to seek practical educational results.7
The university he and his wife contemplated founding would ensure that its graduates “know some business or trade so thoroughly that the question of bread and butter shall not be a stumbling-block to them on their entrance to life.”8
Leland Stanford’s models were technical schools in the United States and in Europe. He said that while he was in New York he would seek suggestions from Cornell University, not for its liberal arts curriculum but for its agricultural and forestry programs. Even before leaving for Europe with his wife and son on the ill-fated trip, Stanford had already decided to devote five hundred acres of the horse farm he owned in Palo Alto to developing an arboretum with every known species of tree. Now he had decided that that this would be the appropriate site to build the university, where the graduates “would be fitted for action as well as for reflection.”9 A local newspaper imagined that the new university would impart knowledge in the hundreds of trades for which California most needed skilled labor, such as learning “how to grow grapes, make wine, cultivate all kinds of fruit trees, improve the breeds of domestic animals, till the soil to the best advantage and preserve it from rapid deterioration.” These trades would be more remunerative than “any of the so-called learned professions”—and they would provide “more health and enjoyment” to boot.10
The practical, Leland Stanford felt, should not come after college but during it, dictating the college curriculum. He decried “the utter folly of attempting to convert the college-bred youth into the practical man of business affairs, without a larger amount of trouble than the manager of any enterprise can afford to bestow.”11
Harvard had a classical curriculum at its core, and Leland Stanford was contemplating how to build a university that was, in essence, the un-Harvard. But long before Leland Stanford embarked upon his plans, others had viewed Harvard not as the exemplar of classical education but as a school that was overly concerned with applied learning. Thomas Jefferson was one of the most outspoken critics of Harvard for this reason.
In Jefferson’s eyes, Harvard was the country’s original vocational school. Harvard College turned out ministers; the medical school, doctors; the law school, lawyers. Jefferson did not want his new university, the University of Virginia, to be modeled after Harvard. In 1823, as his university prepared to accept its first students, he corresponded with George Ticknor, a Harvard professor of French and Spanish languages and literatures. “I am not fully informed of the practices at Harvard,” Jefferson politely wrote Ticknor, “but there is one feature from which we shall certainly vary altho’ it has been copied I believe by nearly every college & academy in the [land?], that is the holding the students all to one prescribed course of reading,” restricting them to whatever is needed “to qualify them for their particular vocations to which they are destined.” Jefferson wanted each student at the University of Virginia to be allowed “uncontrolled choice” in the lectures they would attend. Whatever the student thought would improve his mind was fine with Jefferson. To him, unfettered choice was the liberal education ideal.12
In contrast, others in the early nineteenth century moved higher education in more applied directions. The U.S. Military Academy at West Point, established in 1802, was an engineering school. So too was the school that Stephen Van Rensselaer funded to establish an institution for “the application of science.”13 Yale established the Sheffield Scientific School in 1847, which for decades was operated wholly separately from Yale College; its students lived separately and took classes from only the school’s faculty. (A historian writes, “During the second half of the nineteenth century Yale College and Sheffield Scientific School, separated by only a few streets, were two separate countries on the same planet.”14) Harvard added its own scientific school, also in 1845, as did Dartmouth in 1852. Initially, at least, these semiautonomous or wholly separate science-school affiliates accepted students who were less prepared than those accepted by the classical colleges.15
Though higher education in the 1850s included degree programs, here and there across the country, for education that we would categorize as professional or applied education—in agriculture, the military, science, and engineering—one field was glaringly missing: business. The only post-secondary business education was offered by for-profit schools that sprang up, with short courses in bookkeeping, arithmetic, business correspondence, and penmanship.16
This movement toward applied professional education, but excluding the field of business, would spread broadly with the passage of the Morrill Act of 1862, providing federal land grants to the states for funding agricultural colleges and colleges devoted to the “mechanic arts,” that is, engineering. With only a few exceptions, these would be public universities.
In early 1869, Charles W. Eliot, a Harvard-educated professor of chemistry at the recently founded Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote an influential article for the Atlantic Monthly titled “The New Education,” critiquing in particular the experiments in nonclassical education that centered on the sciences and on living European languages rather than on Greek and Latin.17 Eliot opened with the question that he imagined would be uppermost in the mind of his intended reader, a parent contemplating sending his son off to college:
What can I do with my boy? I can afford, and am glad, to give him the best training to be had. I should be proud to have him turn out a preacher or a learned man; but I don’t think he has the making of that in him. I want to give him a practical education; one that will prepare him, better than I was prepared, to follow my business or any other active calling. The classical schools and the colleges do not offer what I want. Where can I put him?18
Eliot did not recommend that parents send their sons to the new science-school affiliates. He said that these schools had recruited many good students, but also many who were “shirks and stragglers,” those who were “incompetent to pursue the usual classical studies.” Both the faculties of the new science schools and the students “necessarily felt themselves in an inferior position” to the main colleges, in resources and
in reputation. “It is the story of the ugly duckling,” said Eliot. He did not advocate that the science schools be integrated into the colleges, however. He said that combining the scientific and the classical on a single campus had already been tried in France and abandoned; in Germany, separation was maintained, to the benefit of both. He advocated keeping the main college, with its classical curriculum, separate from the places where that hypothetical parent sought “a practical education” for his son. Eliot recommended instead the freestanding polytechnic university, like Rensselaer or his own home institution, MIT. These universities were more than technical institutes; they conferred in addition to professional training an education that we would call liberal. Eliot wrote, “To make a good engineer, chemist, or architect, the only sure way is to make first, or at least simultaneously, an observant, reflecting, and sensible man, whose mind is not only well stored, but well trained also to see, compare, reason, and decide.”19
Eliot’s opinions about classical and applied education would affect Harvard directly. Within months of the appearance of the article, he was chosen in 1869 as Harvard’s president and would go on to serve in the position for forty years, the longest tenure of any of the university’s presidents, before or since.20
The inventors and industrialists who gained great wealth in the nineteenth century were not as concerned with defending Latin and Greek and keeping applied disciplines at a distance as was Eliot, a classically educated academic. In 1859, Peter Cooper, an inventor and industrialist, founded the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City, which provided free tuition and offered night classes so that a college education would be accessible to the working class. Following Peter Cooper’s example was another wealthy patron of higher education who embraced practical subjects: Ezra Cornell, cofounder of the university in Ithaca, New York, which opened its doors in 1868, not so long before Leland Stanford prepared to visit the school in 1884. Cornell was an enthusiastic backer of education for agriculture and engineering and convinced the state legislature to designate the new university to be New York State’s land-grant institution.21 He also wanted to offer a free education to students who were willing to devote half of their time to manual labor, and he planned to build on campus a shoe factory and a chair factory for these students. But Andrew Dickson White, the university’s cofounder and its first president, talked Cornell out of the plan.22
Cornell University was one of several institutions that seemed to outside observers to be defining an entirely different kind of college education, a “Practical Education,” as the San Francisco Chronicle headline labeled it, using the same phrase that Charles W. Eliot had used a few years earlier. Cornell, along with the Massachusetts Agricultural College and the University of Missouri, adopted a curriculum “in bold antagonism to old ideas,” in which “theory is subordinated to practice, abstract speculation to utility, literacy and classical training to scientific, industrial and special instruction of a kind bearing upon the practical pursuits of life.”23
Cornell University’s first class was drawn largely from rural New York, described by one observer as “rough outside and inside.” But students who tried to support themselves by working on the university’s model farm earned less than was needed. Only one in ten members of that first class earned a degree.24 Over time, “it became less of a school of training for poor boys and more of an ordinary college for the education of the sons of wealthy or well-to-do parents,” said the San Francisco Chronicle.25
Shortly before Leland Stanford pondered how best to make his new university practical, the field of business had finally found a home within a university in 1881 when Joseph Wharton, whose fortune derived from the growth of the Bethlehem Steel Company and the American Nickel Company, made a substantial gift to the University of Pennsylvania for establishing what was initially called the Wharton School of Finance and Economy. And yet Stanford was more interested in the Cornell model, starting an entirely new university from scratch, rather than Wharton’s, adding a new school to an existing institution.26
Stanford did not want to plunge into planning without learning what he could from the examples of established institutions. While on the East Coast, he visited not only Cornell but also Harvard, Yale, MIT, and Johns Hopkins.27 At Harvard, he and his wife, Jane, were received by Charles Eliot who, when he recalled the meeting many years later, said that the Stanfords told him that they were considering three possibilities as a memorial to their son: a museum, a technical school, or a university, and asked for his opinion on which would be most suitable. Eliot said a university, ideally a free university that would not charge tuition. This would require, he said, an endowment of at least $5 million (equivalent to about $120 million in 2017). Leland Stanford turned to his wife: “Well, Jane, we could manage that, couldn’t we?”28 The couple decided, in effect, to create all three: a university that would encompass a technical school and its own museum. The land, stocks, and bonds that they gave for the purpose would be worth not $5 million but $20 million.29
The one institution that made the deepest impression upon Stanford, the one that he said he wanted his university to emulate, was Cooper Union. Stanford wanted the polytechnic school, the school of design, the art galleries, and the museum of inventions that he intended to build to reach “the working classes.”30 At Leland Stanford’s behest, a bill was introduced in January 1885 in the California legislature and subsequently passed, which provided for the creation of universities, using private funds placed in a state-protected trust, that would provide students with “a practical education, fitting them for the useful trades or arts.”31 In the summer, Stanford had Francis A. Walker, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, come to California to spend several weeks conferring with him about plans for the university.32
When the Stanfords were ready later that year to unveil the detailed vision for the university, in the form of “The Founding Grant,” spelling out their wishes to the university’s trustees, they revealed that they were unable to pick one thing over another. They wanted it all: mechanical institutes—plural—and museums—plural—and galleries of art and laboratories and conservatories and “all things necessary for the study of agriculture in all its branches and for mechanical training.” It was to include the liberal arts, too, everything needed for “the studies and exercises directed to the cultivation and enlargement of the mind.” The conversations that the Stanfords had had with leading university educators had apparently led them away from the narrow conception of applied education that they had begun with. Now they wanted everything needed to “qualify its students for personal success and direct usefulness in life,” and that meant supplying every existing form of knowledge, from the applied to the theoretical to the ethereal. The founders forbade “sectarian instruction” but did express their wish that the university would teach “the immortality of the soul, the existence of an all-wise and benevolent Creator, and that obedience to His laws is the highest duty of man.”33
The Stanfords sounded economic and social themes in 1885 that are no less present in the early twenty-first century. The telegraph and railroad had made the world flat, or in the Stanfords’ phrasing, had created “one great neighborhood in whose markets all producers meet in competition.” Everyone’s powers would be enhanced, the founders believed, by “labor-aiding machinery,” whose development was so important, in their view, that “too much attention, therefore, cannot be given to technical and mechanical instruction.”34 The university founders’ concern with fitting graduates “for some useful pursuit” impressed the San Francisco Chronicle as indicating a “liberal and catholic spirit;” the paper’s reporter interpreted the absence of explicit admission restrictions as the expression of a welcome to students without “limit as to age, sex, color, race or nativity.”35
Other elements of their vision reflected the founders’ idiosyncratic concerns. They expected that a portion of the land of their Palo Alto farm would be rented out to parents of students and others, generating a “handsome income” for the university. But they directed the trustees to take care that “no objectionable people are allowed to reside upon the estate, and that no drinking saloons shall ever be opened upon any part of the premises.”36 (Leland Stanford believed that 25 percent of world production was “destroyed by the use of intoxicants.”37)