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The Making of the Liberal College: Alexander Meiklejohn at Amherst

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Robert Thomas Brennan
Robert Thomas Brennan*
Affiliation:
Harvard Graduate School of Education
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Extract

As president of Amherst College from 1912 to 1923, noted educational reformer Alexander Meiklejohn designed and implemented a new curriculum and revitalized the teaching force of the school. At Amherst he helped to determine what the modern liberal arts college would be. Although he brought new purpose to a campus that had fallen deep into the shadows of the burgeoning private and public universities of the late nineteenth century, Meiklejohn was dismissed by Amherst's trustees in an action so steeped in controversy and rumor that the college kept all records of the proceedings sealed for the next sixty years.

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Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 28 , Issue 4 , Winter 1988 , pp. 569 - 597
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 Meiklejohn's writings on education, his more radical proposals for reform at Amherst, and his accomplishments at the University of Wisconsin's Experimental College have been influential in the founding and operation of experimental colleges and in curricular reform. See, particularly, Gerald Grant and David Riesman, The Perpetual Dream (Chicago, 1978), 1, 20-21, 43, 45, 49-50, 291n, 369; Frederick Rudolph, Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study since 1636 (San Francisco, 1977), 237, 276-77.Google Scholar

2 Wilson, Douglas C., ed., “The Story in the Meiklejohn Files Part I “ Amherst 35 (Fall 1982): 8–15, 28-51; idem, “The Story in the Meiklejohn Files Part II,” ibid. (Spring 1983): 8-13, 53-57, 63-65. Although the bulk of the papers from the Meiklejohn administration were maintained as part of the open files within the Amherst College Archives, two reports prepared for the board of trustees as well as a variety of personal notes and letters generated during the board's consideration of Meiklejohn's finances and his relations with the Amherst faculty were sealed by the trustees and not reopened for public view until May 1982. The two-part series published in Amherst provides a more detailed and colorful account of the controversy leading to the forced resignation of President Meiklejohn than is presented here. The continuing controversy surrounding the Meiklejohn administration is quite apparent in the letters to the editor that followed the publication of the series. “Letters,” ibid. (Spring 1983): 66-68; “Letters,” ibid. 36 (Summer 1983): 72-75; “Letters,” 36 (Fall/Winter 1983–84): 66-67.Google Scholar

3 LeDuc, Thomas, Piety and Intellect at Amherst College, 1865–1912 (New York, 1969), 4 (quotation), 7, 8; David F. Allmendinger, Jr., Paupers and Scholars: The Transformation of Student Life in Nineteenth-Century New England (New York, 1975), 119.Google Scholar

4 Peterson, George E., The New England College in the Age of the University (Amherst, 1964), 69; LeDuc, Piety and Intellect, 23.Google Scholar

5 Peterson, , New England College, 126–36; Claude Moore Fuess, Amherst, the Story of a New England College (Boston, 1935), 220-27; LeDuc, Piety and Intellect, 50-61.Google Scholar

6 Rudolph, , Curriculum, 172; quotation from Peterson, New England College, 72.Google Scholar

7 Peterson, , New England College, 73 (quotation), 75. See also Allmendinger, Paupers and Scholars, for information about the career patterns and economic background of Amherst College students.Google Scholar

8 LeDuc, , Piety and Intellect, 108; quotation from Fuess, Amherst, 250. After some uncertain years toward the end of Seelye's administration, during which time the student senate (known as the “Amherst System”) was not taken very seriously by the students, the body assumed powerful proportions with Harlan Fisk Stone, Calvin Coolidge, and Dwight Morrow among the senators. In 1894 the senate took on the faculty and President Merrill Gates in an argument over who had authority to investigate and dispose of a student discipline case (a power granted to the senate under Seelye and reaffirmed only two years earlier by Gates). The battle was fought in the press, among the alumni, and before the student body. The result was an embarrassment to the college and a source of concern among trustees. The senate disbanded itself after losing its case (not to be re-established until Meiklejohn's Committee of Seven), and Gates, who never recovered from the controversy, resigned four years later. Peterson, New England College, 126-34; Rudolph, Curriculum, 163.Google Scholar

9 LeDuc, , Piety and Intellect, 138; Fuess, Amherst, 269; Laurence R. Veysey, The Emergence of the American University (Chicago, 1965), 204; Rudolph, Curriculum, 239.Google Scholar

10 Baab, Lawrence et al., Education at Amherst Reconsidered: The Liberal Studies Program (Amherst, 1978), 12; Interview with D. S. Otis, Dec. 1984. (Mr. Otis, a 1920 graduate of Amherst and a member of the faculty of Meiklejohn's Experimental College, described these men as “very definitely upper-class scholars.” As to Meiklejohn's relationship to those men, Mr. Otis commented, “How could he persuade some of those old boys? They weren't persuadable; [they were] dyed in the wool conservatives”); Fuess, Amherst, 271; and quotation from Amherst Graduates’ Quarterly, June 1912, cited in Fuess, Amherst, 275.Google Scholar

11 “The ‘85 Address together with Some Newspaper and Magazine Articles Discussing the Amherst Idea,” Class Material, 1885, Amherst College Archives.Google Scholar

12 Ibid.Google Scholar

13 “The Reply of the Trustees to the Class of Eighteen Eighty Five,” 1911, Class Material, 1885, Amherst College Archives.Google Scholar

14 Fuess, , Amherst, 278, 307. When the faculty was not consulted in the process of seeking a new president, they circulated a petition recommending alumnus Frederick J. E. Woodbridge, a member of Columbia's faculty, as their principal choice, as it was already understood that Dean George Olds was not a candidate. The board did extend an offer to Rush Rhees, also an alumnus, then president of the University of Rochester, who declined. Meiklejohn was selected over several other alumni nominees. Stanley King, A History of the Endowment of Amherst College (Amherst, 1950), 129.Google Scholar

15 Stokes Brown, Cynthia, ed., Alexander Meiklejohn, Teacher of Freedom (Berkeley, 1981), 5; Veysey, Emergence of the American University, 208.Google Scholar

16 Brown, , Alexander Meiklejohn, 5, 7–8; Veysey, Emergence of the American University, 410; Richard Hofstadter and Walter P. Metzger, The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States (New York, 1955), 421-22.Google Scholar

17 Bronson, Walter C., History of Brown University, 1764–1914 (Providence, R.I., 1914), 484.Google Scholar

18 “Some Addresses Delivered at Amherst College Commencement Time 1923,” Alumni of Amherst College, 1924, Amherst College Archives.Google Scholar

19 Meiklejohn, Alexander, Freedom and the College (New York, 1923), 170.Google Scholar

20 Ibid., 172.Google Scholar

21 Ibid., 196, 178, 188, 184.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 Ibid., 184, 185, 186.Google Scholar

23 Notes of Alexander Meiklejohn, ca. 1912, Alexander Meiklejohn Papers, Amherst College Archives; Meiklejohn, Freedom and the College, 186.Google Scholar

24 Meiklejohn, , Freedom and the College, 182.Google Scholar

25 Ibid., 177.Google Scholar

26 Seelye Bixler, Julius, “Alexander Meiklejohn and the Making of the Amherst Mind,” Amherst 25 (Spring 1973): 2.Google Scholar

27 Trustee Minutes, Nov. 1912, Meiklejohn Papers.Google Scholar

28 Arthur Rounds et al., “The Report of the Special Committee,” 1923, Trustee Material Concerning Alexander Meiklejohn, Amherst College Archives.Google Scholar

29 Trustee Minutes, 1914, Meiklejohn Papers.Google Scholar

30 Meiklejohn, Alexander, The Liberal College (Boston, 1920), 135. The only course similar to Meiklejohn's “Social and Economic Institutions” before World War I was probably the University of Rochester's freshman course. Columbia's first survey course in contemporary civilization began as an outgrowth of the War Aims course of the Student Army Training Corps curriculum of World War I. After the war such courses appeared on many campuses. Rudolph, Curriculum, 237.Google Scholar

31 Meiklejohn, , Liberal College, 138. Of note in this version of the curriculum is the absence of any study in the classics.Google Scholar

32 Ibid., 142.Google Scholar

33 Ibid., 149, 150.Google Scholar

34 Ibid., 152.Google Scholar

35 Ibid., 153-55. This proposal laid the groundwork for the curriculum of the two-year Experimental College Meiklejohn founded and led at the University of Wisconsin from 1927 to 1932.Google Scholar

36 Ibid., 161.Google Scholar

37 Notes of Alexander Meiklejohn, ca. 1912, Meiklejohn Papers; “The ‘85 Address.”Google Scholar

38 Brown, Alexander Meiklejohn, 15. Amherst paid pensions from the current fund of the college, although it did become eligible for the Carnegie plan, which until 1918 paid retired professors at the rate of 60 percent of their salary at age sixty (Rudolph, Curriculum, 223). In 1918 the terms of the plan changed and Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association was established, with a co-payment plan under which professors paid in up to 5 percent of their salaries with a matching contribution from the college. In November 1920 the trustees of Amherst first considered the establishment of a permanent fund to pay retiring professors at the rate of 50 percent of their salary at retirement if not eligible to receive Carnegie funds. Those receiving Carnegie funds would be paid the difference of the Carnegie payment and their salary upon retirement (Trustee Minutes, Nov. 1920, Amherst College Archives). It was not until 1940 that Amherst finally established a plan based on per capita contributions to the fund. King, Endowment of Amherst College, 169-70.Google Scholar

39 Fuess, , Amherst, 311; Wilson, “Meiklejohn Files, Part II,” 10.Google Scholar

40 Trustee Minutes, May 1913, Meiklejohn Papers (first quotation); Alexander Meiklejohn, Untitled Document (apparently the presentation made to the trustees at the May 1913 meeting), Amherst College Archives (second and third quotations). The salary of department heads at Dartmouth was $3,000. Leon Burr Richardson, History of Dartmouth College (Hanover, N.H., 1932), 756.Google Scholar

41 Quotation from Meiklejohn to G. A. Plimpton, 2 Nov. 1914, Meiklejohn Papers; Trustee Minutes, Nov. 1914 and 1915, ibid.Google Scholar

42 Table of Faculty Appointments, ca. 1921, Amherst College Archives; Robert A. McCaughey, “The Transformation of American Academic Life: Harvard University, 1821–1892,” Perspectives in American History 8 (1974): 246.Google Scholar

43 Trustee Minutes, May 1917, Meiklejohn Papers.Google Scholar

44 Martin Lipset, Seymour and Riesman, David, Education and Politics at Harvard: Two Essays Prepared for the Carnegie Committee on Higher Education (New York, 1975), 140. Laski was the center of serious controversy as a faculty member at Harvard resulting from his left-wing politics, particularly his defense of the Boston policemen's strike. David Riesman to Robert Brennan, 9 Feb. 1984; Riesman notes that in addition to these well-known left-leaning theorists, two of Meiklejohn's permanent recruits, Walter Stewart and Walton Hamilton, were considered to be very liberal. The reactions of alumni to the presence of such men on the faculty is described briefly by Wilson (“Meiklejohn Files, Part II,” 13); Alexander Meiklejohn, “The Measure of a College,” Amherst Graduates’ Quarterly 22 (Feb. 1923): 90.Google Scholar

45 First quotation from Robert Morss Lovett, “Meiklejohn of Amherst,” New Republic, 4 July 1923, 146; second quotation from Walter Lippmann, “The Fall of President Meiklejohn,” New York World, 24 June 1923; Meiklejohn to William J. Newlin, 30 Mar. 1922, Meiklejohn Papers.Google Scholar

46 Fuess, , Amherst, 316–17; Brown, Alexander Meiklejohn, 15; Wilson, “Meiklejohn Files, Part II,” 13. Harvard began military training as early as 1915, two years before Amherst. Lipset and Riesman, Education and Politics at Harvard, 136.Google Scholar

47 LeDuc, , Piety and Intellect, 133; first quotation from Meiklejohn, “Measure of a College,” 88; second quotation from Alexander Meiklejohn, “What Are the College Games For?” Atlantic Monthly 130 (Nov. 1922): 671; Malcolm P. Sharp, Alfred B. Stanford, and Theodore Ainsworth Green, “Statement to the Special Committee of the Board of Trustees,” 9 June 1923, Meiklejohn Papers.Google Scholar

48 Meiklejohn, , “Measure of a College,” 90; Lovett, “Meiklejohn at Amherst,” 147.Google Scholar

49 Wilson, , “Meiklejohn Files, Part II,” 11.Google Scholar

50 Meiklejohn, , Freedom and the College, 135; Terry Y. Allen, “Guichard Parris's Half Century with the Schomburg,” Amherst 40 (Winter 1987): 14.Google Scholar

51 Peterson, , New England College, 126–34; Fuess, Amherst, 220-22.Google Scholar

52 Wilson, , “Meiklejohn Files, Part I,” 12. Meiklejohn's salary was both for his position as president and as professor of philosophy; the president's house was given rent-free, and the college carried its expenses. Trustee Minutes, June 1911, Meiklejohn Papers. The treasurer's figures for 1920/21 show an allocation to the president's office of $3,116 (1984 equivalent $17,200) for entertainment and $1,742 (1984 equivalent $9,615) for travel. President William DeWitt Hyde's salary at Bowdoin College (combined for the office of president and his professorship) was $4,000 in 1909 (1984 equivalent $45,935) and increased to $5,000 in 1915 (1984 equivalent $51,493). In 1920 the president's salary was increased to $6,000 (1984 equivalent $31,282) and in 1923 to $7,000 (1984 equivalent $27,319). Louis Hatch reports that although the president's house was, in principle, provided by the college, President Hyde did at some points pay rent to the college. Louis C. Hatch, The History of Bowdoin College (Portland, Me., 1927), 215. The salary of the president at Harvard University for 1914 is listed as $6,000 (1984 equivalent $64,271); no additional funds appear to have been allocated for entertainment, although it is unclear whether this is the only money that President A. Lawrence Lowell received for his services. “Reports of the President and the Treasurer of Harvard College, 1912–13, Treasurer's Statement,” 20 Apr. 1914, Official Register of Harvard University, vol. 11, no. 1, part 8,Google Scholar

53 Quotation from Wilson, , “Meiklejohn Files, Part I,” 12. (This observation was shared by D. S. Otis in his interview.) Wilson also documents the extraordinarily high cost of utility service at the president's house. Some $1,000 was paid by the college in 1921 (1984 equivalent $5,846), at least double the expenses for a typical household of the size. Although this did not contribute to Meiklejohn's high expenditures, it does suggest that the household was not a thrifty one. Frederick S. Allis, Jr., “Letters,” Amherst 36 (Fall/Winter 1983–84): 67.Google Scholar

54 Wilson, , “Meiklejohn Files, Part I,” 13, 15.Google Scholar

55 Wilson, , “Meiklejohn Files, Part I,” 15; Amherst College Annual Budget 1922–23, Amherst College Archives; King, Endowment of Amherst College, 234. The deficit reported in the official budget was $84,911.91, and slightly less in Stanley King's account at $81,734.27. However staggering this figure may have been, it was probably not attributable to anything Meiklejohn did. Under Harris the college ran a deficit in all but three years. The deficit continued under Meiklejohn, and turned to a surplus following the centennial fund raising. The Olds administration managed a single year of surplus and the tendency to run in the red was unchecked until the college endowment was increased by $7 million under Presidents Arthur Stanley Pease and Stanley King. It seems fair to argue that the real cause of the deficit lay not in the spending habits of the Meiklejohn administration, but in the small size of Amherst's endowment.Google Scholar

56 Kennedy, Gail et al., Education at Amherst: The New Program (New York, 1955), 99–101.Google Scholar

57 Rounds, , “Report of the Special Committee,” 118.Google Scholar

58 Wilson, , “Meiklejohn Files, Part II,” 16.Google Scholar

59 Rounds, , “Report of the Special Committee,” 86, 8–9, 16.Google Scholar

60 Allis, Frederick S., “Excerpts from Memorandum Written in 1923 or 1924,” Amherst College Archives, 3–5; Wilson, “Meiklejohn Files, Part II,” 10-11, 13.Google Scholar

61 Price, Lucien, Prophets Unawares: The Romance of an Idea (New York, 1924), 130; Editorial, The Amherst Student, 16 June 1923, 3.Google Scholar

62 Woodrow Wilson to Meiklejohn, 25 June 1923, Meiklejohn Papers; “An Open Letter to Dwight Morrow,” New Republic, 25 July 1923, 222. This letter does not appear to have been written by Felix Frankfurter as has been stated elsewhere (Wilson, “Meiklejohn Files, Part II,” 65). Frankfurter apparently read the letter and commented to Amherst's Professor Gaus, “I assumed you liked the N. R.'s open letter to Morrow as much as I did.” (Frankfurter to John M. Gaus, 22 July 1923, Meiklejohn Papers.)Google Scholar

63 “Some Addresses delivered at Amherst Commencement Time 1923,” 50.Google Scholar

64 Lippmann, , “Fall of President Meiklejohn”; “An Open Letter to Dwight Morrow,” 221; Willard L. Sperry to Meiklejohn, 2 July 1923, cited in Brown, Alexander Meiklejohn, 13-14.Google Scholar

65 Price, , Prophets Unawares, 44–45 (first quotation); “Survey of Conditions at Amherst Shows Student Morale at High Level,” The Amherst Student, 16 June 1923, 1 (second quotation). Calculations of author from Table of Course Enrollments, 1920–21, Meiklejohn Papers. Although the table shows figures for each faculty member, it does not divide enrollments by course, and thus it is not possible to determine how much of this effect is due to curricular requirements. Since Meiklejohn tended to promote and reward his appointees rapidly, it seems unlikely that as a group, they would have been instructing significantly fewer elective courses than their more senior colleagues, and thus at least some of the discrepancy in class size must be attributed to the greater popularity of their courses.Google Scholar

66 Hamilton, Walton, “Reply to Inquiry of Trustees Regarding Instruction,” 30 June 1922, Amherst College Archives; Meiklejohn, “Measure of a College,” 87.Google Scholar

67 Price, , Prophets Unawares, 9.Google Scholar

68 “3,” The Nation, 4 July 1923, 5; Fuess, Amherst, 314.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

69 Baab, et al. Education at Amherst Reconsidered vii; Pouncey, Peter R., “An Amherst Education: The President's Report to the Trustees,” 11 Apr. 1987, 5.Google Scholar

70 Meiklejohn, , Liberal College 9.Google Scholar