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Localism, Denominationalism, and Institutional Strategies in Urbanizing America: Three Pennsylvania Colleges, 1870–1915

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

W. Bruce Leslie
W. Bruce Leslie*
Affiliation:
State University of New York at Brockport
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Extract

Small colleges in the “Age of the University” have been neglected. For years, historians have dismissed the college with a wave of President Eliot's inaugural speech and ushered the university builders onto center stage. Few studies have gone beyond Laurence Veysey's generalization that “the only course of action” those in charge of colleges “could urge was to hold on, perhaps making minor concessions, and hope that their institution would be able to survive.” Implicitly colleges have been assumed to be uniform and passive institutions that only broke from antebellum practices in reluctant response to the universities. Although the new models of higher education had an important effect, the prevailing stereotype misses the extent to which colleges shaped their policies in terms of local, denominational and institutional circumstances. The resulting diversity suggests that colleges, like other traditional institutions facing modernization, participated in the shaping of their destinies and were not merely passive victims.

Type
Article I
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , Fall 1977 , pp. 235 - 256
Copyright
Copyright © 1977 by New York University 

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References

Notes

The author wishes to thank Professors Ron Goodenow, John Ingham, Ken O'Brian, David Potts, Elizabeth Ross and George Woytanowitz for their generous assistance in writing this paper.Google Scholar

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53. This approach is demonstrated repeatedly in the Trustees Minutes throughout Harris' tenure.Google Scholar

54. Harris, , Thirty Years, p. 17.Google Scholar

55. Ibid., pp. 7–8, 43–45; Bucknell, Trustees, Minutes, Jan. 8 and June 23, 1891, Jan. 14, 1892, Jan. 11, 1893, Jan 10, 1895; Bucknell, Alumni Catalogue, pp. 5–6.Google Scholar

56. “Letter from the Bucknellians to all alumni,” July 15, 1908, Hill Collection, (Bucknell University Archives); Bucknell Trustees Minutes, June 23, 1903 and Jan. 15, 1915.Google Scholar

57. Bucknell, Trustees, Minutes, Jan. 10, 1889, Jan. 8 and July 20, 1891, Jan. 11, 1894, June 10, 1910, Jan. 15, 1915, June 13, 1916; Between 1891 and 1902 the budget for publicity increased from $87 to $1,638.Google Scholar

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59. Bucknell, Trustees, Minutes, June 16, 1908; Limbert, Paul M., Denominational Policies in Higher Education (New York, 1929), pp. 39–42; Oliphant, Rise, pp. 202–207.Google Scholar

60. Bucknell, Trustees, Minutes, Jan. 14, and June 21, 1904, June 22, 1909, Jan. 12 and June 20, 1911, Jan. 9, 1913; Oliphant, , Rise, pp. 202–207.Google Scholar

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