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How to Think about the Dartmouth College Case

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

John S. Whitehead  and
Jurgen Herbst
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Extract

Editor's note: The essays below are the product of an exchange between two scholars who have studied the impact of the Dartmouth College case on American higher education. The first essay is by John S. Whitehead, professor of history at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks; the second by Jurgen Herbst, professor of history and educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

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Forum
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 26 , Issue 3 , Fall 1986 , pp. 333 - 349
Copyright
Copyright © 1986 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1. One article in the recent literature on the Dartmouth College case clearly challenges my position that the Court's decision was at odds with reality. Bruce A. Campbell revives the traditional interpretation of the beneficent effects of the decision with added emphasis in “Dartmouth College as a Civil Liberties Case: The Formation of Constitutional Policy,” Kentucky Law Journal 70 (1981–82): 643–706.Google Scholar

Campbell claims that the case was beneficial because it dealt with the reality of the “negative American experience with relations between colleges and governments from the late colonial into the early national periods.” Looking at the college-state relation from 1740 to the Dartmouth case, Campbell asserts, “legislative threats to or attacks on colleges had produced at least stagnation in and often serious injury to the institutions and never any substantial permanent gain for education or government. In light of this record, the benign ‘public’ to whom Chief Justice Richardson thought colleges ought to be responsible was simply an unreal abstraction.”Google Scholar

With this background of college-state relations, Campbell argues that the Court stretched and imaginatively adapted the English common law on private eleemosynary corporations to protect Dartmouth from state encroachment because the English law “did not fit the American situation.” To Campbell, John Marshall shaped constitutional policy to fit a real need to protect American colleges.Google Scholar

Campbell's factual basis for the “negative experience” is highly questionable. He claims, “Functionally, Dartmouth had always been private, with only limited, sporadic contact with the state.” This is at odds with both my work and Jurgen Herbst's. He calls the New Hampshire legislature's action an “attack.” This is contrary to Eldon Johnson's perceptive analysis of the educational goals of New Hampshire governor William Plumer. He ignores the substantial financial aid given to such colleges as Yale and Harvard during this period.Google Scholar

Given this problem with the facts of the issue, I do not see that the inclusion of Campbell's article in the text would advance the dialogue between Herbst and me. Herbst does not take issue with Campbell as strongly as I do but agrees that it is difficult to know exactly what Campbell means by “negative experience” and the injury that the colleges sustained. The article does deserve to be noted as a part of the recent Dartmouth literature.Google Scholar