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The Eighteenth Century Origins of the Split Between Private and Public Higher Education in the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Jurgen Herbst
Jurgen Herbst*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Extract

In the late eighteenth century are to be found the first beginnings of the to us so familiar division in American higher education between public and private institutions. Throughout most of the eighteenth century such distinction was unknown. Higher education and the preparatory Latin grammar schooling were viewed as intimately linked to the interests of state and church. This view applied to the three colleges existing in the first quarter of the century. Harvard, William and Mary, and Yale served as training centers for their provinces' political and professional leadership. They had been duly authorized and in part financially supported by their colonial legislatures. With the exception of Yale they were under the joint supervision and government of representatives of the colony's lay population and established church. These governmental arrangements reflected the Reformation concept of the unity of established secular and ecclesiastical government with the college, a concept which in turn rested on the assumed religious homogeneity of the province's population, Anglican in Virginia and Puritan in New England. It was precisely this assumption of a religiously homogeneous population which could no longer be upheld in the eighteenth century. As it was being swept away by the appearance of Baptists and Quakers, Lutherans and Dutch Reformed as well as by the migration of Puritans and Anglicans into all the colonies, it could no longer provide guidelines for college founding and governance. As a consequence in colonies with existing colleges—Massachusetts, Virginia, and Connecticut—traditions of college governance came under fire, and the weakening alliance of state and church forced the colleges to redefine their own position. In colonies without an established church there emerged during the Great Awakening of the 1740s a more particularistic perspective on college education as serving local or group interests and being largely without either financial support or direct governmental control from public authorities. It was under these conditions, also, that the first attacks appeared against the concept of a provincial college as a monopoly. These attacks were beaten back in 1762 in Massachusetts and in 1770 in Rhode Island. But when Queen's College opened in 1766 in New Jersey, a competing college appeared for the first time in one of the colonies, and a new development was inaugurated which, half a century later, would lead to the proliferation of the “private” colleges of the antebellum era.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , Fall 1975 , pp. 273 - 280
Copyright
Copyright © 1975 by New York University 

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References

Notes

The author gratefully acknowledges support received in preparation of this paper from the National Institute of Education. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the position of the Institute, and no official endorsement by the National Institute of Education should be inferred.

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