Higher Education in the West

Sources

Denominational Colleges. Spurred by the revivals of the Second Great Awakening, Protestant denominations competed to establish colleges in the West, determined to spread their doctrines among Western settlers and to train ministers. Much of this impulse arose in Eastern colleges, such as Congregationalist Yale and Presbyterian Princeton, where revivals stimulated young missionaries to win the West from religious infidelity and Spanish Catholicism. Interest in the formation of denominational institutions also was encouraged by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Dartmouth case in 1819, which decided that privately organized colleges would be free from state intervention. Congregationalists and Presbyterians, who had joined forces in the Plan of Union in 1801, organized the Presbyterian Board of Education in 1819 and the American Home Missionary Society in 1826. After missionaries from the Connecticut Mission Society successfully founded Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1826, Congregationalists and Presbyterians established Oberlin College in Ohio, Hanover and Wabash Colleges in Indiana, Illinois College and Knox College in Illinois, and Adrian College in Michigan in the 1830s. Rival denominations, which originally had relied on itinerant preachers, sought an educated and settled ministry by the 1830s. To combat Presbyterian influence, Methodists founded DePauw University in Indiana, and Baptists established Franklin College in that state and Denison University in Ohio. A strong motivation for this proliferation of Protestant institutions was the Catholic founding of St. Louis University in Missouri and St. Mary’s College in Kentucky. By 1843 the Society for the Promotion of Collegiate and Theological Education in the West was organized in New York and began to act as a restraining influence on excessive denominational rivalry. Nevertheless, competing private institutions continued to proliferate in the Midwest and old Southwest, and the denominational impulse reached Oregon and California by the 1850s.

The Founding of Oberlin College

After Theodore Weld and other antislavery rebels left Lane Seminary in Cincinnati in 1834, they enrolled at Oberlin Collegiate Institute, which had recently been founded in northeastern Ohio by John Jay Shipherd, a Congregationalist minister, to advance the cause of Protestant Christianity in the West. Shipherd had designed the college as a manual-labor school, seeking to train the body and heart of each student as well as the intellect. According to his original plan, students would labor four hours a day; in addition to the Male Department, a Female Department already was contemplated, in which female students would engage in domestic tasks, the culture of silk, and the manufacture of clothing. Eliza Branch, the first female student, taught the infant school while she also was attending the academic course. In addition she helped Esther Shipherd care for the sixteen members of the tiny colony who boarded in the school’s log cabin. Shipherd planned to finance the endeavor by producing iron cooking stoves, which he advertised in local newspapers. However, short of funds, he seized the opportunity offered when Weld and the other rebels left Lane, enticing them to relocate at his college and welcoming their one supporter on the Lane board of trustees, Asa Mahan, as Oberlin’s new president. His coup was solidified when the renowned revivalist Charles Grandison Finney consented to join the faculty as professor of theology. Finney’s participation prompted the wealthy New York philanthropist Arthur Tappan to offer ten thousand dollars to fund the institution, and other supporters agreed to supply the salaries of eight additional faculty members. Oberlin’s board of trustees was then persuaded to consent to the demand of the Lane rebels and antislavery philanthropists that African Americans be admitted as students. In addition to thirty-two of the former Lane seminarians, young Protestant radicals flocked to Oberlin, eager to serve the cause of antislavery in the West. As the new college boomed, buildings and boarding houses were rapidly constructed, and preparatory manual-labor branches organized to ready students for the college curriculum. Religious revivals and radical causes continued to stimulate the students, and Oberlin College emerged as a flagship institution in the denominational effort to win the battle for Protestant Christianity in the West.

Source: Robert Samuel Fletcher, A History of Oberlin College, from Its Foundation Through the Civil War (New York: Arno Press, 1971).

State Universities. The West also proved to be fertile ground for the establishment of secular state universities, based on the model of Thomas Jefferson’s plans for the University of Virginia, established in 1819. In the late 1820s the Reverend Philip Lindsay sought to build a similar institution at the University of Nashville in Tennessee, as did Horace Holley at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. These liberal plans were dashed, however, as denominational interests sought control of higher education. Public lands had been granted by the United States for state universities since 1787, when members of the Ohio Company had refused to complete their purchase of lands in the public domain unless two townships in their tract be set aside as an endowment. After the state of Ohio took over these endowment lands in 1804, every new state west of the Appalachians was granted federal lands to support a university. States were required by enabling acts admitting them to the union to guarantee that these lands would be used for education. By 1857, when the Morrill Act providing federal land grants was first introduced in Congress, four million acres of public land in fifteen states already had been set aside for public universities. Yet the desire of denominational interests to influence higher education prevented state legislatures from enacting necessary taxes to produce permanent revenue. In Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana religious groups continued to dominate the state universities. In Michigan Territory in 1817 Judge Augustus B. Woodward worked out in consultation with Thomas Jefferson a secular plan he labeled the “Catholepistemiad,” which was based on the French centralized system of education. Although the plan was not carried out, it was confirmed by the territorial legislature in 1821, which helped strengthen resistance to sectarian

influence when Michigan became a state. President Henry B. Tappan of the University of Michigan fought the battle with denominational interests in the 1850s, hoping to implement the Jeffersonian ideal of a secular state university. Seeking to create a great educational institution based on the model of the University of Berlin, Tappan worked for a public university that could pursue scientific knowledge free from sectarian control. The 1837 charter for the University of Michigan became a model for other states and was followed in the planning of the University of Wisconsin in 1848 and the University of Minnesota in 1851.

Sources

John S. Brubacher and Willis Rudy, Higher Education in Transition: A History of American Colleges and Universities, 1636-1976 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976);

Donald G. Tewksbury, The Founding of American Colleg and Universities Before the Civil War (New York: Arno Press, 1969).