Radio Script #1181

Little Talks on Common Things
December 10, 1978

Through the courtesy of Ludy Levine of Levine’s Store, I have a photocopy of a page in the Saturday Evening Post of May 13, 1899. The page is devoted to an article by Nathaniel Butler, President of Colby College. The article is entitled “The Advantages of the Country College.” The Post announced that it was printing in successive issues two articles on colleges: this one on the small college to be followed by another written by President Patton of Princeton on “The Advantages of the University.” Among all the distinguished private colleges of the nation was Colby sought out for its president to write this article. When George Horace Lorimer attended Colby as a special student in 1896-98 he was already 28 years old and had been for eight years in newspaper work. He had caught the eye of the new owner of the Saturday Evening Post, Cyrus Curtis, who told Lorimer he would make him editor if he could get some college training.

This was before the establishment of schools of journalism, and Lorimer knew that there was at Colbyy a very efficient teacher of English composition and literature, Arthur J. Roberts. All his life, after his attendance at Colby, Lorimer insisted it was Arthur Roberts who taught him how to write, and in gratitude he erected the first building on Colby’s Mayflower Hill campus, the Lorimer Chapel. When Lorimer attended Colby, the president was Nathaniel Butler, whose educational philosophy had deeply impressed Lorimer. Almost as soon as he became the Saturday Evening Post editor in 1899, Lorimer planned those companion articles on college education, and he invited Nathaniel Butler to write one of them.

Today, when almost all universities have strong undergraduate departments, as well as doctoral programs – and this now includes the state, land grant universities like our own University of Maine – it is not easy for us to accept the distinction made between college and university in Butler’s article. This is the way the article began:

”Two distinct types of institutions in America invite the prospective collegian on the completion of his preparatory studies. One of these types is represented by such schools as Colby, Bowdoin, Dartmouth, Amherst, Williams, Hamilton, Colgate, Bucknell, Beloit; the other by such as Harvard, Yale, Pennsylvania and Chicago. The function of the college (the first type) is the development of manhood; that of the university (the second type) is the enlargement of the boundaries of knowledge. The university is a collection of advanced, specialized professional and technical schools into which men and women are to be received after they have completed their general college courses, and have decided upon some definite line of investigation or training leading directly to expertness in their chosen lifework. The university thus presupposes the college. The highly finished product of the college is thus the raw material of the university.”

Butler went on to point out a difference between college and university that has been largely erased during the 80 years since he wrote the article. He said: “The university deals with men who are supposed to know what they want and who have enthusiasm for the work and need a minimum of discipline. Its faculty is made up of experts and investigators rather than teachers and advisers. It says to students: ‘Here are our lectures, our laboratories, our libraries. Choose what you want and use them as you will, or leave them alone; it is your affair'”

“On the other hand there is education. It seeks to discover what is in each individual, reveal that individual to himself, set his face and his feet in the right direction in relation to things intellectual and spiritual. Its business is to make the student not an expert, but a man, assuming that a man is the best material out of which an expert may be made.

“Unlike the university, the college is at least partly paternal. It does deal with men and women, but with those who are immature, who still need counsel and direction, who need personal contact with mature and sympathetic men in the kind of concrete ethical regard for which the small college affords the best opportunity.”

Butler was saying that the small college was expected to exercise the function “in loco parentis” in place of parents, in regard to discipline. Like the parents, it was expected to set rules and enforce them, grant rewards for good behavior and inflict punishment for bad. That is what most colleges no longer do. The final blow to “in loco parentis” carne as a result of the nation-wide student revolt of the late 1960’s, and very few colleges today place any restraint on student behavior short of actions that are misdemeanors or felonies under laws of the state.

As to the relation between college and university, Butler was explicit. “The business of the college is to fit men and women for the university. More and more the world is demanding the specializing that the university gives, and its perquisites must be met by the college. The college is to evolve the actual man from the possible man; the university is to equip him for his chosen work.”

Other changes besides disciplinary behavior markedly distinguish higher education in 1899 from what it is today. Butler’s article, while recognizing that both men and women attended colleges, was heavily weighted with male chauvinism. It would be vigorously attacked by the Women’s Lib advocates of today. Butler did say that the college should “fit men and women for the activities of life,” but not for a vocation. The college training makes the man or woman adaptable to any work except the learned professions (medicine, law and theology), the new scientific fields of investigation, or research in the humanities and social studies. The rise of vocational school at both secondary and post-secondary level was far in the future in 1899.

Butler did assume that there would be college graduates who would seek no further studies, but he firmly believed the main function of the college was to prepare men for the university. Why only men? Because in 1899 it was almost unthinkable that a woman could be a doctor, a lawyer, or a minister. Yet in comparatively few years Mme. Curie would be one of the few persons, male or female, to win two Nobel prizes, one in physics, the other in chemistry. Even before the first World War, there were a few woman ministers, and by the 1920’s their right to be ordained would be a hot issue even in the Episcopal Church. Because Butler contended the place of the college was to prepare for the university, he naturally emphasized again and again in his article the male sex.

Another assumption of Butler’s would not hold ground today. I have already quotoed him as saying the students enter the college immature and they need (quote) “contact with mature and sympathetic men.” He did not say “mature and sympathetic men and women.” It was assumed allover the country, with a few conspicuous exceptions, that college faculties, even the co-educational colleges, were made up entirely of men. It is true that in Butler’s own college in 1899 there was a Dean of Women and an instructor of women’s physical education, but neither one did any academic teaching and they were not considered members of the faculty.

In Butler’ s case there was a situation at Colby which made the line drawn between men and women more pronounced than in frankly co-educational colleges like Bates and Oberlin. The Colby president who preceding Butler was Albion Woodbury Small, who had made Colby the first college to adopt the co-ordinate system of two divisions separated by sex within the same college. Thus what Butler was really talking about in respect to preparation for the university was Colby’s Men’s Division. Its Women’s Division was intended to turn out either educated housewives or teachers for the secondary schools. It was left to the rapidly proliferating Normal Schools to train teachers for the elementary schools.

One advantage for what he called the small country colleges, asserted by Butler, is still claimed by such colleges today – the advantages of a rural setting over that in a large, tumultuous city. Butler wrote: “The location of the country college is in itself an advantage for undergraduates. The universities, situated in the metropolitan areas, must be there so the law students may be near the courts, medical students near the hospitals, ministerial students near many pulpits, and investigators near the large libraries and museums. The large city is literally. a collection of laboratories for the specializing student.

“But the undergraduate has little use for these. On the contrary, the small town, the seat of the country college, affords conditions especially favorable for accomplishment of personal work to which the college should devote itself, and at the same time be free from the distractions and temptations in which the great city abounds, and to which the undergraduates cannot be exposed without intellectual and moral peril.”

In those words Butler expressed the view of American life generally held at the dawn of the 20th century – the good countryside, the bad city. Admitting that 80 years later, crime and disorder have penetrated the smallest village, a great many people know they are likely to be safer and freer in a small town than in a metropolis.

Butler did not ignore the rise of the state universities, but he still considered most of them to be merely what the college in Orono was in Butler’s time – a college of agriculture and mechanical arts. He recognized that the new state universities of the middle west, such as Illinois, Michigan and Minnesota, were fast taking on the likeness of Harvard Yale, and Johns Hopkins – that they seemed, as he put it, “to be moving toward the realization of the idea of the university”, but at present they were more like the colleges and had a long way to go to achieve university status.

However great the changes since 1899 this may certainly be said: Very high compliment was paid to the little college in Maine, when its President was selected from all the small colleges of the nation, to write an article for the nation’s leading weekly, the Saturday Evening Post.

Year: 1978