G. Stanley Hall's desire to reform colleges and universities through promotion of the study of higher education was the beginning of efforts to professionalize administrative work and create higher education faculty. Although the study of higher education has yet to reach maturity, it possesses many of the attributes of a scholarly field. Programs designed to prepare persons for entry into professional work in higher education exist in profusion. There are approximately eight hundred professors who think of themselves as professors of higher education. Departments of higher education and centers or institutes affiliated with universities sponsor research concerning higher education as well as provide degree and public service programs. A growing literature deals with various parts of the higher education domain. And a growing bureaucracy associated with quasieducational organizations concerns itself with generating new and systematic knowledge about higher education.

President G. Stanley Hall hung only a portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson in his office at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. The philosopher embodied Hall's most cherished mid-nineteenth century ideas that comprised part of his intellectual worldview. In the 1840s, Emerson reflected on his transcendental concepts of the common mind and instinct, which held all innate human knowledge and behavioral patterns, in his Essays:There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same…. In every man's mind, some images, words, and facts remain, without effort on his part to imprint them, which others forget, and afterwards these illustrate to him important laws. All our progress is an unfolding, like the vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has a root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

Aspirations to advance knowledge led nineteenth-century American educators to create doctoral degrees and to found research universities. The original rationale for the doctorate was to teach graduate students who had an academic vocation how to conduct pure and applied research. The doctorate's 141-year-old degree requirements have remained substantially the same.

The centenary of higher education as a field of study occurred in 1993, commemorating the first course in higher education, offered in the autumn of 1893 at Clark University by G. Stanley Hall. This course also launched the first higher education program, for by 1924, three professors had offered 16 courses, written numerous publications, and advised the first 10 master's and doctoral students. This article reviews Hall's professional life, his concept of higher pedagogy, his rationale for its study, and the program's three developmental phases.

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