New England Students and the Revolution in Higher Education, 1800-1900

Abstract

WITHIN THE SMALL BUILDINGS and gatherings of young men at New England colleges in the early nineteenth century, a social transformation began to work that would alter the experience of being a student. Unlike the conscious reforms introduced by the rise of universities after the Civil War, the transformation of the early nine teenth century proceeded without plan. No theorist designed it ac cording to conscious pedagogical aims, and no institution either anti cipated or really controlled the changes between 1800 and 1840. Only after 1840, when New England colleges already had assumed new forms, did a consciousness arise concerning what had transpired. The material conditions of collegiate life, the old communal arrangements that had controlled the behavior and intellectual activity of students through most of the colonial period had been demolished, creating a new disorder. Only after 1840 did plans arise for dealing with this disorder, a consequence of social changes sweeping over every New England institution of higher education. Long before the rise of universities, antebellum colleges had become places of dynamic change through the needs and workings of the student population itself. A shift in the social origins of the student population caused this transformation. It began almost imperceptibly at the time of the American Revolution and then assumed unprecedented proportions after 1800. Into the New England colleges there came a flood of students from poor families. Never before had these families sent sons to college, nor could they afford to do so now; their sons came vol untarily to higher education, for the most part having made their own