The Practical Humanities

*Note: this transcript is from the original show broadcast. There may be slight differences from the rebroadcast.

ED: So today on the show, we’re looking at the ways Americans have thought about higher education through the years. What is college for? Who is it for? We’ll consider Thomas Jefferson’s vision of a new American approach to higher ed, and the reasons his model didn’t catch on. We’ll tell the story of the first big boom of for profit colleges, and we’ll take calls from you, our listeners.

PETER: We’ll begin in the 18th century, a time when classical civilizations loomed extremely large in the worlds of contemporary Americans. And when it came time to create a new nation, the founders looked to Greece and Rome for inspiration for the design of public buildings, as well as for the structure of government itself.

Caroline Winterer is an historian at Stanford who has written about how this obsession with the ancients shaped the mission of higher education. Far from being institutions that fostered the creation of new knowledge, universities were places where very old knowledge was passed along. But, says Winterer, that doesn’t mean that the classics were irrelevant. Far from it.

CAROLINE WINTERER: The study of the classics before the Civil War is highly utilitarian. We would even call it vocational, because it prepares people for the skills that are useful at the time. It teaches you to be a really good logician, for jobs like being a lawyer, and it helps doctors to learn medical nomenclature. And also, it helps people to communicate with other learned people in the world when the language of international learned communication is still Latin. And if you write something in English, it often has to be translated into Latin.

So again, learning Greek and Latin was not just a kind of ornament for lazy gentlemen who never did anything. It was really, really, really useful knowledge in the way that computer programming is today.

PETER: Caroline, we have a favorite premise on the show, and that is that the Civil War changes everything. I don’t know why that is, but Ed Ayers keeps talking about it. It seems like the Civil war did a lot to American higher education. Could you explain that a little bit?

CAROLINE WINTERER: Well, the Civil War transforms American society, and then the universities change in response to that. So suddenly you have an enormous explosion of population after the Civil War. You have massive urbanization, you have the movement of many people into the Western territories, which are then incorporated as states.

So the number of universities and colleges begins to swell. And even older places like Harvard, which had been founded in 1636, added totally new parts to the universities. You had the advent of the first graduate programs. You suddenly had to add a whole bunch of administrators. Presidents no longer needed to be ministers. Now they had to be fundraisers. A lot of listeners will recognize this as the universities that we have today.

PETER: So Caroline, I wonder, in the wake of these transformations, there was an argument being made against the classical learning that it was a positive impediment to what had to be done. The classics were on the defensive after the Civil War, weren’t they?

CAROLINE WINTERER: They were. No less than Andrew Carnegie himself went on the attack saying that universities are not about the distant past. Universities are about the future.

Now, that rhetoric is so common today that it is difficult for us to see that that was a really revolutionary thing to say. Before the Civil War, universities were all about the past. It was about preserving this wonderful fund of knowledge from the ancient world. And now universities are supposed to be about training young people for the jobs that are going to come in the future.

PETER: What do the classicists do to counterattack all this relevant stuff?

CAROLINE WINTERER: Well, they launch a full frontal assault on all of this language of reality and utility and modernity. What they say is that we actually offer something that is higher than mere utility. Anybody can screw widgets into whatever the thing is that you screw widgets into.

PETER: I don’t know. You’re out of my depth.

CAROLINE WINTERER: But only we, the classicists, and the other humanities that are now getting added on to the university, we can offer something that’s higher than that. We can offer spiritual redemption that will actually purge our souls of all of the horrible things that come along with urbanization and industrialization and massive capitalist interventions.

PETER: Right. So in many ways, you’re talking about the late 19th century as a kind of a success story in which the repositioning of classical studies, which is now not trying to emulate and recreate the classical world, but to study the classical world the way we study everything has really set the terms for the modern academy generally. Is there something lost, though, from that early culture of classicism?

CAROLINE WINTERER: Well, what was lost in this transformation was a cadre of people who had all gone to college and who all knew exactly the same thing. And that created a sort of amazing alumni club of Americans, some of whom we meet in places like the Constitutional Convention. So when one person stood up and said, and here’s how they did it in ancient Rome, everyone would nod and follow along in the discussion. This gets lost in the post Civil War university.

And there’s all these attempts to put a Band-Aid on it. So they invent things like the Western Civ course, right, in the early 20th century. And they say, well, all of this thing we’re calling Western civilization began in ancient Greece, and that we are the endpoint of this wonderful trajectory. And if everybody takes this Western Civ class, then we’ll go back to the 18th century, when everybody could understand everybody all the time.

And that way of thinking is very much premised on what then looks like this golden age before the Civil War. But we always have to look at the costs associated with that. There were so many students who absolutely hated it. They just couldn’t stand learning all this Greek and Latin. It was torture. Why would we want to torture young people?

We want them to like to go to school. And where is the scientific experiment that says that we all need to know the same things in order to be able to talk to one another?

So I think that it’s very important, always, as we move forward with debates on what American universities should do, to remember that there never was a golden age. There never was a time when everything was perfect. Colleges and universities always reflect the society that produces them, and there have always been these kinds of debates about what students should know, and why they should know them, and what should be taught in the university and what shouldn’t be taught.

PETER: Caroline, thanks very much for joining me today.

CAROLINE WINTERER: Thank you. It was a pleasure to be here.

PETER: Caroline Winterer is a professor of history at Stanford University. She’s the author of The Culture of Classicism, Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life.

ED: It’s time for a quick break. When we get back, drinking, dueling, and riots. 19th century college students give Animal House a run for its money.

PETER: You’re listening to BackStory. We’ll be back in a minute.