Charles William Eliot (1834-1926)

President of harvard university

Source

Early Interest in Science. A graduate of the Boston Latin School, Eliot entered Harvard University at age fifteen. Unique experiences in Josiah Cooke’s laboratory interested Eliot in laboratory techniques in teaching chemistry. He tutored in mathematics at Harvard in 1854 and four years later became the first assistant professor of mathematics and chemistry. Eliot distinguished himself as a teacher by using the laboratory method in his classroom and giving Harvard’s first written examinations instead of the traditional oral tests. Denied tenure at Harvard, he taught chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studied education in Europe, and published two widely read articles on “The New Education” in The Atlantic Monthly in 1869. Partially because of the public regard he earned from these writings, he was selected that year as the twenty-second president of Harvard University, a position he would hold until 1909.

Tenure at Harvard. During his forty-year tenure at Harvard, he raised entrance requirements, organized Harvard’s specialty schools under the collegiate system, and turned the institution into a major university. His reforms strengthened the schools of law and medicine, and the theological program was broadened from training for the Unitarian ministry to one that served many denominations. Eliot opposed coeducation but agreed in the late 1870s to a “Harvard Annex,” a system of professors who offered instruction to selected women who were not allowed to earn degrees. In 1894 Harvard chartered Radcliffe College as a degree-granting institution. This model of the coordinate women’s college offering an “equivalent” degree was widely adopted: Barnard College of Columbia University and Sophie Newcomb College of Tulane University are two notable affiliate schools.

The Elective System. Eliot’s primary influence on education was his establishment of the elective system at Harvard, a reform followed throughout American higher education. Defining what liberal arts education should be became a problematic issue for educators in the last thirty years of the nineteenth century. Eliot’s curricular reforms were radical: in the year 1884-1885 the freshmen of Harvard College took seven out of sixteen classes as required courses, but for the remainder of their college career, with the exception of a few exercises in English composition, they took elective courses. Under Eliot’s leadership Harvard provided a groundbreaking curricular model for twentieth-century education by allowing students to choose from a widening range of subjects that became part of a greatly enlarged liberal arts study.

Other Influences. Eliot’s forty annual reports as Harvard president were landmark documents in the history of American higher education. The fifty-volume “five-foot bookshelf “of Harvard Classics and Junior Classics that he edited gave much of the American public an opportunity for self-education. As the chairman of the National Education Association’s Committee of Ten, he wrote the committee report in 1892 that set the curricular pattern for the American high school. As a result of that report, the study of foreign languages and mathematics was introduced in the seventh grade, a curricular change that led to the subsequent development of the junior high school. Eliot was awarded the first gold medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1915 and the Roosevelt Medal for distinguished service in 1924.

Source

Edward Howe Cotton, The Life of Charles W. Eliot (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1926).