A Philosophy of Prudence and the Purpose of Higher Education Today (Part II)
American Higher Education
Before delving into the details about prudence and its role in American higher education, a brief history is required in order to illuminate American higher education’s evolving character and how prudence could play a role. Initially influenced by the European Enlightenment, the American founders desired an educated and self-governing citizenry in order to keep the new republic intact.9 As Hellenbrand wrote, “many of Jefferson’s contemporaries fervently believed that only education and a general reformation of manners could ensure America’s political separation from Britain.”10 Education was to instill the republican values of liberty and self-government. There also was concern that American youth, as the future civic leaders, were being drawn to the great European universities. To remedy this situation, at least ten of the nation’s founders were also founders of academic institutions with the most famous being Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia which was established in 1819 and opened in 1825. As a nondenominational place of higher learning, Jefferson “wish to establish in the upper & healthier country, & more central for the state an University on a plan so broad & liberal & modern, as to be worth patronizing with the public support.”11
Although President Washington along with other prominent founders favored the creation of a national university, a system of many state-supported institutions emerged instead.12 Rev. Manasseh Cutler, an author of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, successfully negotiated with Congress for setting aside two square miles for a public university. Ohio University in Athens, founded in 1804, became the first state university west of the Appalachian Mountains. When new states entered the Union, they also received public land for the endowment of a university.13 By the time the Morrill Act of 1862 was enacted, land grant colleges and universities extended to the west coast with twenty states already having state universities.14
Prior to the Civil War, the primary mission of colleges and universities was teaching undergraduates to become good democratic citizens and leaders.15 These institutions offered a liberal arts curriculum because it was believed that a well-rounded preparation for the individual was necessary for them to fulfill this role.16 However, there also emerged institutions that emphasized technical education in agricultural and industrial sciences. The Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890 provided land grants and federal funding that stimulated state legislatures to establish agricultural and mechanical colleges and universities. Influenced by the German research-oriented university, these types of universities started after the Civil War with some of them later becoming leading institutions in American higher education.17
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, American colleges and universities continued their mission of serving the nation of making good democratic citizens and leaders through liberal and technical education. But they also expanded opportunities to previously excluded groups as the concept of democracy itself widen to include equal treatment of students and equal access for all people, including the poor, women, and racial and ethnic minorities.18 Adult education programs were established in such places like Chautauqua University (1883-92) that pioneered summer sessions, correspondence courses, and extension services. These ideas would in turn influence other institutions, culminating into what would be known in 1904 as the “Wisconsin Idea.”19
The democratization of American higher education continued throughout the twentieth century with the community college movement, the G.I. Bill, the California Plan, the Civil Rights Movement, and other federal funding programs. But it was the emergence and dominance of graduate institutions around 1900 that redefined the mission of American higher education as teaching, research, and public service.20 Teaching was a legacy from the American Founding of creating good democratic citizens and leaders, while research was influenced by German-style universities and comported well in the practical culture of the United States in the belief that great research universities would advance basic knowledge and provide technical expertise required by a modern industrial society.21 Public service came from the Progressive political ideology that sought to combine the teaching and research missions of colleges and universities to transmit higher knowledge to the public through external activities like applied research, off-campus courses, and service learning.
The “Wisconsin Idea” was the most famous articulation of this public service mission and became a model for subsequent schools. The “Wisconsin Idea” was the University of Wisconsin’s commitment to serve the entire population of the state. Specifically, university faculty expertise was incorporated into state government planning and the university extension services were made available throughout the state.22 Drawing national attention, the “Wisconsin Idea” influenced many other state universities to elevate public service with teaching and research as part of a university’s core mission.23
Critics of this new mission argued that public service was in practice submission to business or state interests. Faculty also was concern about business leaders involving themselves in higher education and universities patterning themselves after the bureaucratic structures of corporations and the state.24 Since this time, this threat of institutional autonomy whether from government or commercial pressures has remained a constant concern among faculty, whether during the Vietnam War or in the current age of economic globalization.25
Most of this concern has centered on the source of funding. Prior to World War II, funding for expensive and specialized research came from philanthropic foundations or business corporations. During and after World II, the federal government became the dominant patron of major research universities, although private foundations continued to fund academic research in the social sciences. Most recently, starting in the 1970s there has been a shift from basic and military research to civilian and commercial in order to meet the needs of a global economy.26 This latest shift from a theoretical model to an entrepreneurial one under the rubric of public service has raise questions about what actually constitutes public service and what should be its rationale.
Today the United States multifunctional university still clings to its three-fold mission of teaching, research, and public service. When looking back at the history of American higher education, these three activities have fulfilled critical functions in society: teaching democratic citizens and leaders, research for economic progress, and public service for the improvement of society. However, this mission has become increasingly questioned and criticized as to its relevancy. But what each of these three activities had implicitly promoted was an understanding of prudence whether in democratic politics, economic growth, or social stability. The cultivation of prudence therefore should be explicitly articulated as the central purpose of American higher education as opposed to the missions of economic utilitarianism, scientific research, liberal education, or civic formation. But before explaining why the cultivation of prudence is uniquely suited for institutions of American higher education, I want to present an understanding of Aristotelian prudence that differs from contemporary interpretations.
Notes
9. Lorraine Pangle and Thomas Pangle, The Learning of Liberty: The Educational Ideas of the American Founders (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press 1993), 4-5.
10. Harold Hellenbrand, The Unfinished Revolution: Education and Politics in the Thought of Thomas Jefferson (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1990), 11.
11. Thomas Jefferson, “Jefferson Plans the University of Virginia, 1800,” in American Higher Education: A Documentary History, ed. Richard Hofstadter et al, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 175.
12. E. L. Johnson, “The ‘Other Jeffersons’ and the State University Idea,” Journal of Higher Education 58 (1987): 129, 147; E.H. Roseboom and F.P. Wisenburger, A History of Ohio (Columbia: Ohio Historical Society, 1996), 47, 53.
13. John S. Brubacher and Willis Rudy, Higher Education in Transition (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 154.
14. Johnson, “The ‘Other Jeffersons’,” 127.
15. The mission of American religious institutions of higher education was slightly different in producing good clergy to serve their faith communities.
16. Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 4.
17. Brubacher and Rudy, Higher Education in Transition, 61-64, 288.
18. Laurence Veysey, The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 62-66.
19. J.C. Scott, “The Chautauqua Movement: Revolution in Popular Higher Education.” Journal of Higher Education 70 (1999): 389-412.
20. Veysey, The Emergence of the American University, 444.
21. Brubacher and Rudy, Higher Education in Transition, 177
22. Brubacher and Rudy, Higher Education in Transition, 164-65; Veysey, The Emergence of the American University, 108.
23. Brubacher and Rudy, Higher Education in Transition, 166-168; Christopher Lucas, American Higher Education (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), 174-75, 292.
24. Clyde. W. Barrow, Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education, 1894-1928 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 7,10; H. Perkin, “Defining the True Function of the University: A Question of Freedom Versus Control,” Change 16 (1984): 20-29.
25. Hugh Hawkins, The Emerging University and Industrial America (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1970), xi; Paul Axelrod, Values in Conflict: The University, the Marketplace, and the Trials of Liberal Education (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 3-7; Henry A. Giroux, “Introduction: Critical Education or Training: Beyond the Commoification of Higher Education,” in Beyond the Corporate University, ed. Henry A. Giroux et al, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 1-11; Eric Gould, The University in a Corporate Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
26. Shelia Slaughter, “National Higher Education Policies in a Global Economy,” in Universities and Globalization: Critical perspectives, ed. Janice Curie et al, (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998), 62.