universitas: a number of persons associated into one body, a society, company, community, guild, or corporation. (The Harvard and Yale Corporations are the heart of the university system and, as we’ve shown, they fund explorers like the ‘real life Indiana Jones’ and founding lifetime member of the CFR, Isaiah Bowman to rediscover Macchu Piccu in 1911.)
Previously we discussed how the entire Western K-12 education model, and then the social sciences at large, were introduced to American higher learning through Prussian technology given to the founders of American sociology, economics, history, experimental psychology and philosophy. These Prussian founded social sciences were ‘grafted’ onto the American university model at the same time traditional curriculum consisting mostly of Latin, Greek, the Classics, the hard sciences, and especially liberal arts, were being removed from common education and placed only at institutions of the highest education. This movement part of the broader establishment of a network of American universities during the second half of the 19th century we call today, the Association of American Universities.
There is an accompanying Association of American State Colleges and Universities; and, the Association of American University Professors. Why was that created you ask? To protect against the dismissal of men like John Dewey, Edward Alsworth Ross, Richard T. Ely, Charles Beard, and James Harvey Robinson. These are all fathers of Progressivism, all were dismissed from universities due to their highly controversial teachings. John Dewey a founder of this professors union and, not by coincidence, one of the men who’s reputation was and still is even today, immersed in controversy.
As early as the 1840’s we see evidence of a move towards the creation of a network of higher learning centered around the liberal arts. In Illinois we see the first legislature to petition congress for federal land grants, Michigan, Massachusetts and many states then followed. Final resolutions in the State of Illinois stated, “Whereas, the spirit and progress of this age and country demand the culture of the highest order of intellectual attainment in theoretical and industrial science.
“The basis of education in the early Middle Ages consisted, as we have seen, of the so-called seven liberal arts. Three of these, grammar, rhetoric, and logic, were grouped as the trivium; the remaining four, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, made up the quadrivium.” pg. 27, The Rise of the Universities, Charles Homer Haskins.
“The occasion for the rise of universities was a great revival of learning, not that revival of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to which the term is usually applied, but an earlier revival, less known though in its way quite as significant, which historians now call the renaissance of the twelfth century. So long as knowledge was limited to the seven liberal arts of the early Middle Ages, there could be no universities, for there was nothing to teach beyond the bare elements of grammar, rhetoric, logic, and the still barer notions of arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music, which did duty for an academic Curriculum.” pg. 4, The Rise of the Universities.
The Medieval University
“Universities, like cathedrals and parliaments, are a product of the Middle Ages. The Greeks and the Romans, strange as it may seem, had no universities in the sense in which the word has been used for the past seven or eight centuries. They had higher education, but the terms are not synonymous. Much of their instruction in law, rhetoric, and philosophy it would be hard to surpass, but it was not organized into the form of permanent institutions of learning.
Only in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries do there emerge in the world those features of organized education with which we are most familiar, all that machinery of instruction represented by faculties and colleges and courses of study, examinations and commencements and academic degrees. In all these matters we are the heirs and successors, not of Athens and Alexandria, but of Paris and Bologna.” Pg 3,4, Rise of the Universities, Charles Homer Haskins,
The contrast between these earliest universities and those of today is of course broad and striking. Throughout the period of its origins the mediaeval university had no libraries, laboratories, or museums, no endowment or buildings of its own; it could not possibly have met the requirements of the Carnegie Foundation!” pg. 4, The Rise of the University, Charles Homer Haskins.
“The mediaeval university was, in the fine old phrase of Pasquier, “built of men” — batie en hommes. Such a university had no board of trustees and published no catalogue; it had no student societies — except so far as the university itself was fundamentally a society of students — no college journalism, no dramatics, no athletics, none of those “ outside activities ” which are the chief excuse for inside inactivity in the American college.
And yet, great as these differences are, the fact remains that the university of the twentieth century is the lineal descendant of mediaeval Paris and Bologna. They are the rock whence we were hewn, the hole of the pit whence we were digged. The fundamental organization is the same, the historic continuity is unbroken. They created the university tradition of the modern world, that common tradition which belongs to all our institutions of higher learning, the newest as well as the oldest.” Pg. 5, The Rise of the University.
The university was a necessary aspect to early Paris. An economic provider for the city.
The first universities created as a security measure, a student collective organized against the townspeople, for “the prices of rooms and necessaries rose rapidly with the crowd of new tenants and consumers, and the individual student was helpless against such profiteering. United, the students could bring the town to terms by the threat of departure as a body … and there are many historical examples of such migrations. Better rent one’s rooms for less than not rent them at all, and so the student organizations secured the power to fix the prices of lodgings and books through their representatives.”
Again, through nice sounding words, they instituted a giant network of mind control, a system of standardization directly opposed to human betterment. Behind a scholastic paywall goes key intellectual technology once taught in our common schools. The Common Senses you could say. The system first founded in Bologne and Paris still today the predominant system, but the direction of teaching has drastically changed with the inclusion of the social sciences. Today, when it comes to the university at least, tradition is embraced and the oldest universities carrying with them the most prestige (to trick or fool). A system of academic freedom and institutional autonomy still the prevalent characteristics of a university mission statement. In 1988, to mark the 900th anniversary of the founding of the first modern university in Bologna, the Magna Charta Universitatum was created and is signed by over 975 universities from 94 countries around the world and stands still today as the final text in the spirit behind the university.
“The aims of this document is to celebrate the deepest values of University traditions and to encourage strong bonds among European Universities.” European Higher Learning Education.
The university itself the entering wedge, similar to the labour union, only in the intellectual form, between us and the most empowering, freeing information. Both used to create a two class society of the conscious and the unconscious. Our ability to communicate with each other, our ability to discern through the development of our own senses, to know when others are being dishonest, disingenuous, or straight-up lying to us, all learned skills of logic and deduction and all were systematically removed in the name of standardization. Just as there was proclaimed a death of God, and then the Truth, Latin, the liberal arts, our free will, the free market; our gut feelings (in other words our common senses), were pronounced dead too. These, not by coincidence, are some of the most empowering aspects to the sovereignty of an individual.
Hard, measurable sciences replaced by soft sciences once thought to be pseudo science. The domination of the natural world and our human nature the goal. These social engineers strangely embodying the same message found in the Bible, when God gave Adam and Eve permission, to “go forth and be fruitful, replenish the earth and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon earth.” Genesis 1:28, The Scofield Reference Bible, KJV.
The Morrill Land Grants of 1862 and 1890
“Probably more than any other single factor, the land-grant college idea … has brought about the tremendous advance in agricultural efficiency. Great agricultural efficiency has made possible the industrialization of the United States through the release of agricultural workers to industry, and therefore our highly diversified, and productive and powerful economy.” Roland R. Renne, Montana State College, Phi Beta Kappa, American Economic Association, American Academy of Political and Social Science.
“At mid-nineteenth century approximately 80 percent of the United States’ work force were farmers and artisans. Dissatisfied with the classical education offered at liberal arts colleges, educational and political reformers determined that colleges should provide practical learning for the agricultural and mechanical/industrial arts.” Land Grant Universities, Oklahoma Historical Society
The Morrill Land Grant Acts of 1862 and 1890 were a response to the industrial revolution and their mission was to provide “for the more liberal and practical education of our industrial classes and their teachers.” It’s mandate also focused on agriculture science, military science, and the mechanical arts (engineering). This is what the A & M means in Texas A & M (Agriculture and Mechanical Arts). This an historical moment in that it marked the first federal funding of institutions of higher learning. Sponsored by Senator Justin Morrill, serving on the House Committee of Agriculture and Committee on Territories. Morrill “became convinced that more should be done to place the nation’s farming on a scientific basis.” Land was taken from Native American tribes, ceded through treaties, agreements, seizures, and under threat of violence and in many of these agreements “the federal government did not uphold its end of these treaties … It was a movement in complete contrast to the traditional education practiced up until this point centered on liberal arts curriculum.” National Archives, Milestone Documents, Morrill Act (1862).
Within the Act of 1862 it states:
An ACT Donating Public Lands to the several States and Territories … that there be granted to the several States … an amount of public land … equal to thirty thousand acres … that all the expenses of management, superintendence, and taxes from date of selection of said lands, previous to their sales, and all expenses incurred in the management and disbursement of the moneys which may be received therefrom, shall be paid … out of the Treasury of States … where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies, and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts … in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life … If any portion of the fund invested … be diminished or lost, it shall be replaced by the State to which it belongs, so that the capital of the fund shall remain forever undiminished.”
Subsequent related acts allocated more federal funding for each state: the Hatch Act (March, 1887), fifteen thousand per year, the Morrill College Aid Act of (1890) twenty-five thousand dollars per year, the Adams Act (1906) thirty thousand dollars per year, and fifty thousand dollars per year from the Nelson Act (1907). This income on top of the proceeds each university made from the original land grant of 1862. The total value of property held for the benefit of these institutions amounts to $113, 291, 998 in 1862. Around half a billion in todays dollars.
The federal gifts for expenses, buildings and “other special purposes … amounted to eight times the value of the income from the proceeds of the original land grant of 1862. If we compare the total income of all these institutions from all sources with the income direct and indirect from federal sources, the disproportion is still more striking.. The federal grant for this purpose has clearly proved a great stimulus to the individual states and to private citizens.”
The university becomes a federally funded perpetual profit machine, fueled forever by benefits accrued from dispossessed Native land.
“Whereas a system of Industrial Universities, liberally endowed in each state of the union, co-operative with each other, and with the Smithsonian Institute at Washington, would develop a more liberal and practical education among the people, tend to more intellectualize the rising generation and eminently conduce to the virtue, intelligence and true glory of our common country; therefore be it Resolved “the passage of a law of Congress donating each state in the Union an amount of public lands not less in value than five hundred thousand dollars, for the liberal endowment of a system of Industrial Universities, one in each state in the Union, to co-operate with each other … for the more liberal and practical education of our industrial classes and their teachers.“
The Association of American Universities
“The Association of American Universities (AAU) was founded in February 1900, at a two-day conference that 14 of the nation’s leading Ph.D.-granting institutions held at the University of Chicago.
The idea for the conference came from University of California President Benjamin Ide Wheeler, who had been proposing the formation of something like AAU in correspondence with Harvard President Charles Eliot and others. The purpose of the organization, in the words of the constitution that was adopted at the Chicago conference, was to consider “matters of common interest relating to graduate study.”
“The founders had quite specific matters in mind. In the quarter-century before 1900, American higher education had begun transforming itself using the German university model, which emphasized advanced study and laboratory research. Starting with the Johns Hopkins University in 1876, American universities had grafted the German structure onto the American college model, providing in a single institution both undergraduate education and advanced graduate study and research. Thus was born the American research university.” Association of American Universities website, history.
David Starr Jordan was a eugenicist, a member of the Bohemian Club, and the University Club in San Francisco. He was president of both Indiana (1885) and Stanford(1891) Universities. He was a member of the American Philosophical Society. He was an initial board member of the Human Betterment Foundation, advocating mandatory sterilization.
Five learned societies came into existence in the 100 years following the founding of the first—the American Philosophical Society in 1743—and an additional six appeared before 1880. Then the pace picked up and 16 such societies came into existence from 1880 to 1899. Another 28 followed in the next 20 years, from 1900 2 Five learned societies came into existence in the 100 years following the founding of the first—the American Philosophical Society in 1743—and an additional six appeared before 1880. Then the pace picked up and 16 such societies came into existence from 1880 to 1899. Another 28 followed in the next 20 years, from 1900 … The expansion is evident in the social sciences. Economists formed their society in 1885 and the rest quickly followed: psychologists in 1892, anthropologists in 1902, political scientists in 1903, and sociologists in 1905.” Pg. 39, 40, The Shaping of Higher Education: The Formative Years in the United States 1890-1940, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz.
By 1910 the university as an institution had taken shape. The idea of the research university was being widely accepted by 1910, the lecture method was adopted and the specialization of the entire university system was the goal.
“The era of the division of labor in higher learning had arrived.” Pg. 40, Goldin, Katz.
“Enrollment tripled from 1910 to 1940 … five-fold from 1890 to 1940 … quadrupled between 1940 and 1970 … From 1638 to 1819, only 49 institutions of higher education (40 of them private ones) were established in the United States. Then the pace began to step up. From 1820 to 1859, 240 more institutions (225 private) were established. The next 40 years witnessed the greatest expansion in the pre-1940 period with 432 colleges and universities (348 private ones) established from 1860 to 1899. In particular, there were 186 institutions (151 private_ opened from 1860 to 1879 and 246 more (197 private) from 1880 to 1899. Then the number of new institutions being established began to fall off. From 1900 to 1934, only 200 institutions opened (165 private). The closing decades of the 19th century, therefore, were the high point in the founding of four-year institutions of higher education before World War II. Pg. 42, The Shaping of Higher Education: The Formative Years in the United States 1890-1940, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz.
The reason for that peak in the founding of colleges and universities might be thought to be the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890. The 1862 act granted funds to existing and future states to endow universities and colleges that specialized in agriculture and the mechanical arts. The 1890 act set up many of today’s historically-black universities and also provided income to the institutions set up by the first act. But overall, about five times as many private institutions as public ones were founded during the entire period, and private institutions, more so than the public ones, were disproportionately founded in the closing years of the 19th century …
Not only were relatively few institutions founded after the turn of the 20th century, but those that were founded in the 20th century have tended not to be as prestigious. The 1890s, for example, saw the establishment of Stanford, Chicago and the California Institute of Technology. But among the 35 private institutions in the top 50 universities in the 1999 rankings by U.S. News and World Report only three began college-level instruction in the 20th century and just one was founded after 1900.
The three are the Carnegie Institute of Technology (later Carnegie Mellon University), established in 1900 with instruction beginning in 1905; Rice Institute (later Rice University), founded in 1891 with college-level instruction beginning 1912; and Brandeis University, founded in 1948. Brandeis is a special case. It was established, in large measure, because Jewish academics and students had long been discriminated against, because large numbers of Jewish scholars took refuge in the United States during the war, and because the Jewish community had amassed funds to found a great university …
“The formative years of American higher education from about 1890 to 1940 saw some major changes in the scope of institutions, including the emergence of the research university, the demise of independent professional institutions, and the decline of independent schools of theology and denominational institutions in general. For most of the 19th century, American institutions of higher education were centers of learning, not research.
That began to change in the latter part of the nineteenth century with the founding of the Johns Hopkins University (1876), the first dedicated research center in the United States, followed by Clark University (1889), the first U.S. institution with only a graduate program, and the University of Chicago (1892) (Veysey, 1965).
The American research university was to become a melding of all the components of higher education, serving a multitude of functions simultaneously.” Pg. 42, The Shaping of Higher Education: The Formative Years in the United States 1890-1940, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz.
“The U.S. Office of Education offered the definition that universities are ‘institutions in which there is considerable stress on graduate instruction, which confer advanced degrees in a variety of liberal arts fields, and which have at least two professional schools that are not exclusively technological’ … A ‘university,’ then, would appear to be a department store of higher education, combining the specialized disciplines with the broader ones of the past and adding the various professional subjects like law, medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, theology, and even business.” The Shaping of Higher Education: The Formative Years in the United States 1890-1940, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz.
“Medical schools were increasingly vulnerable in the late nineteenth century with the advent of stricter state licensing, designed in part to replace the ‘art of healing’ with science. Their numbers thinned further in the wake of a 1910 Carnegie commission report known as the ‘Flexner Report’ after its author Abraham Flexner which severely criticized many of the 155 medical colleges in the United States and Canada (Starr, 1982). Thus, the university came to combine the features of a department store, an integrated knowledge-production factory, and a brand name …
As universities emerged as major research centers and as the classical curriculum of liberal arts colleges gave way to a more modern one, higher education became secularized …
The change took place in a variety of ways. Many transformed themselves into non-sectarian, liberal arts colleges … Others merged with universities to become non-denominational divinity schools. Many simply vanished. The demise in denominational institutions that trained ministers was furthered by the decreased relative demand for their services. The ratio of the average salary of Methodist and Congregational ministers to that of all wage earners in manufacturing fell from 1.81 in 1890, to 1.68 in 1900, 1.44 in 1910, and 1.38 in 1925 (Historical Statistics, 1975, series D 781, 793). But another part of the secularization of colleges was due to the triumph of the scientific method and other aspects of secular thought that were incompatible with religious doctrine …
Teacher-training institutions, which before 1940 were often normal schools with a two-year curriculum, later became part of state universities … the share of total enrollments accounted for by publicly controlled institutions reaches 78 percent by 1994 (U.S. Department of Education, 1996) … the application of the scientific method and the increased division of labor and specialization in higher education disproportionately benefited certain types of institutions. Those that had access to research funds, were initially large and diverse, were non-sectarian, and had reputation and a long purse were in the best position to prosper from the changes. More public sector institutions than private sector ones were so situated and thus flourished and expanded in the wake of the changes to the structure of knowledge that shook higher education from around 1880 to 1910 …
Of course, certain private institutions also gained from the technological changes that affected higher education at the start of the formative period. Some were research and graduate institutions prior to the changes at the turn of the century, like Johns Hopkins and Chicago ” pg. 47, 48, 49, The Shaping of Higher Education
“Between 1909 and today, AAU has grown slowly but steadily, to the point where it now comprises 62 universities, still roughly half public and half private. Among the members are the two Canadian universities added in 1926: McGill University and the University of Toronto … Starting in 1914 and for many years afterwards, the association functioned in no small part as an accreditation agency. Almost as soon as AAU was founded, German universities began using membership in AAU as their measure of quality for graduate school admissions …
This era from 1890 to 1910 is considered by many historians as the New Manifest Destiny. Those who guided AAU in these early years included future US president Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton, who presided over the association’s 1910 conference … starting in the late 1930s, and ever since, the association has been increasingly focused on the relationship between higher education and the federal government.”
The university system subsidized by the federal government starting with Lyndon B. Johnson’s Higher Education Act of 1965. As part of Johnson’s, The Great Society domestic agenda. It was reauthorized in 1968, 1972, 1976, 1980, 1986, 1992, 1998, 2008.
A liberal arts department and the awarding of Bachelor and Masters of Arts degrees a necessary to university designation. Meaning the liberal arts are the key difference between the definition of a university, and a college. To be clear there were, and still are, liberal arts colleges, but most were either subsumed into the local university or disappeared altogether on purpose. If any exist today they are generally private institutions and within the Association of American State Colleges and Universities, an affiliated organization.
Up until the Prussian Historical Schools influence, universities taught hard sciences, the classics, Greek and Latin, and it was all based around the seven liberal arts (grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy).