Talk:History of higher education in the United States

Commentary
Beginnings of conversation copied from Rjensen's User Talk page

Nice work on splitting out the history material in the original U.S. higher ed article into its own article! It was overdue and I appreciate you taking the initiative to finally do it!

I don't have the time or inclination right now - sorry but I'm on vacation! - but a few things immediately jumped out at me when I first glanced through the article. First, the history of higher ed in the U.S. predates the founding of Harvard so (a) the lead needs to be changed and (b) a bit of material on this pre-Harvard history needs to be added. I'll have to dig through my old notes, books, and articles to find some good sources on this but I seem to recall that some of the best work in this area focuses on Catholic institutions in the southwest created by Spanish missionaries. The major point to be made is that higher ed in what became the U.S. and continued well after its founding was a mixed up jumble of institutions that were founded by many different groups and people, had many different purposes, and were even named many different things (e.g., academies, seminaries, schools) that today we would simply consider "colleges." Second, I'm a bit alarmed at the age of many of the references. I'll have to read through the article more carefully to see if there are many assertions that have been challenged by more recent scholarship but the publication date of many of the references makes me suspect that there are some.

The standard history books - Thelin, Geiger, and now Eisenmann - should really be the bedrock of this article since they were written by highly respected historians and have been thoroughly vetted by other historians and scholars. They should be supplemented by other reputable work and the first place I'd look for this kind of material is the ASHE reader on The History of Higher Education. (Actually, that's the second place I'd look after I looked through my own notes from the history courses I took as a doc student a few years ago but obviously you don't have those!) Next, I'd look through the journals dedicated to this topic. I wouldn't place much or any weight on house histories commissioned by particular institutions or material that hasn't been peer reviewed. ElKevbo (talk) 19:55, 19 November 2014 (UTC)
 * thanks for the kind words. I have looked and not seen any examples of Catholic higher education pre Harvard -- none in California, New Mexico, Texas or Florida. Some of the refs are old--I guess I have been working on the topic for 45 years and the notes do get yellowed! Rjensen (talk) 21:03, 19 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Geiger's brand new History of American Higher Education could be particularly useful czar ♔   22:45, 19 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Yeah, it should be quite useful as the most recent attempt to synthesize the current literature by one of the leading historians in this field. Thelin wrote a review/response to it in either Inside Higher Ed or The Chronicle and his major complaint was that the book stopped too soon.
 * Rjensen, I've been looking for the pre-Harvard stuff for a while now and I can't seem to find much so apparently it's not something that should merit any focus or discussion. Except for brief mentions of a few failed attempts to found colleges, most of the texts begin with Harvard.  There were institutions founded in the Americas before Harvard's founding but none in the U.S. or what would eventually become the U.S.  Some of the standard histories begin with a discussion of the founding and development of European universities - Bologna, Oxford, etc. - but that's primarily to provide context since the European universities were very influential on U.S. universities, including their shift towards research and disciplinary specialization in the early 1900s that was heavily influenced by German universities.
 * This is not my area of specialization but my impression is that there has been a period of divergence in the study of the history of U.S. higher education over the past 20 years or so. As in other disciplines, there has been a lot of work examining the role (or lack thereof) of groups that have been previously overlooked in this area of study, especially women and Latino/Hispanic/Chicano students.  It seems like it's time for someone to integrate this new material into the larger narrative instead of having these separate streams of history that are parallel to but not connected to the standard history.  I hope that Geiger has done that in his new book.  If not, we might be forced to treat those histories separately in this article since that appears to be how the professionals have treated them so far. ElKevbo (talk) 23:10, 19 November 2014 (UTC)
 * In this new article I made an effort to include coverage of blacks and women as well as religious schools. Native Americans should have their own article (I know people who teach tribal colleges here in Montana). Rjensen (talk) 02:09, 20 November 2014 (UTC)

Great article
Hey super job. Another possible source here.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 13:48, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

19th century technical schools.
There's no mention of the establishment of early technical schools like the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the 1820s or MIT later in the 1860s. The 1800s seem like a time when the technical schools in the USA begin to be established, based on examples like the École Polytechnique and German? technical schools.

Removing duplicate text from the Higher education page
Higher education in the United States has become bloated again, and the new text is written in the style of an academic thesis- I have removed it and placed it below so you historical experts can decide what merits inclusion.

In 1659, Polish Aleksander Karol Kurcjusz first established higher education in New Amsterdam (Bobr-Tylingo 1982, 145). Harvard initially focused on training young men for the ministry, and won general support from the Puritan government, some of whose leaders had attended either Oxford or Cambridge. The College of William & Mary was founded by Virginia government in 1693, with 20000 acre of land for an endowment, and a penny tax on every pound of tobacco, together with an annual appropriation. James Blair, the leading Church of England minister in the colony, was president for 50 years, and the college won the broad support of the Virginia gentry. It trained many of the lawyers, politicians, and leading planters. Yale College was founded in 1701, and in 1716 was relocated to New Haven, Connecticut. The conservative Puritan ministers of Connecticut had grown dissatisfied with the more liberal theology of Harvard, and wanted their own school to train orthodox ministers. New Light Presbyterians in 1747 set up the College of New Jersey, in the town of Princeton, which later was renamed Princeton University.

Enslavement, oppression, and exclusion
In Ebony and Ivy, Craig Steven Wilder documented the history of early higher education in the US, including the oppression of indigenous people and enslaved Africans at elite colleges. Brown University, Harvard, Dartmouth, William and Mary, University of Virginia, Georgetown University, University of Alabama, University of South Carolina, Clemson University and Rutgers University, held enslaved people—and relied on captives to operate.

Adding section on Slavery at American colleges and universities
In 2021, this article is a whitewashed history of US higher education. There is a growing amount of literature on African Americans in US higher education, beginning with about 150 years of enslavement at elite universities. Those universities include Harvard University, Princeton University, Brown University, Georgetown University, and University of Pennsylvania. On a more macro-level, the US slavocracy fueled wealth accumulation for elites who founded schools like Johns Hopkins University. In the 21st century White supremacy still dominates US higher education despite a great deal of resistance. --CollegeMeltdown (talk) 13:43, 6 September 2021 (UTC)
 * I agree with this critique of the article. Frankly, I found it quite shocking that no mention was made of how higher education in the U.S. was, quite literally, built on the backs of enslaved people. This needs to be remedied straightaway. KevinHallward's Ghost (Let's talk) 15:14, 28 January 2022 (UTC)