I wish to thank William Cutler, P.M.G. Harris and Peter Goldstone for their patient and helpful criticism of an earlier version of this paper which was presented at the Philadelphia Bicentennial Meeting of the American Studies Association in April of 1976.

1. The epigraph is from Foucault, Michael, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. Sheridan Smith, A.M. (New York, 1972), p. 44. Cheyney, Edward Potts, History of the University of Pennsylvania, 1740–1940 (Philadelphia, 1940), pp. 217–285. White's, Hayden Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973) provides a refreshing and compelling way of reopening discussion on the matter of “house history.” The problem is that the by now common rejection of organizing categories such as Cheyney's in the secure belief that they are “unrealistic” or not “properly historical” cannot be justified on epistemological grounds. Consider for example David Tyack's move against Cubberley in The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, 1974). After quoting Cubberley's list of “the alignment of interests” for and against public schools during the mid-nineteenth century, Tyack writes: “Here is Elwood Cubberley's morality play presented as sober history.” (p. 80) The point is that epics are no less “sober” —no less “realistic” —than comedies, tragedies, or satires. White's argument also undercuts successfully Bernard Bailyn's case for viewing “tragic” interpretations (as opposed to “Heroic” or “Whig”) as epistemologically priveleged. See the preface to his Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, 1974).Google Scholar

2. The total number of degrees awarded annually—i.e., collegiate and professional—were first compiled from the Pennsylvania commencement programs. To make up the sample, every tenth name was taken from the programs for each consecutive year between 1873 and 1885, and again between 1886 and 1892. Between 1893 and 1898 however, since the annual totals were growing larger, every fifteenth name was drawn. Given the totals arrived at for these three groups of years (2,852 for 1873–1885; 2,332 for 1886–1892; 2,691 for 1893–1898), a sample of 697 students was expected (i.e., 285, 233, 179) but the actual sample totaled 691 instead (i.e., 283, 230, 178). Given the argumentative purposes of this paper, these differences are inconsequential. The Harvard B.A. figures were taken from The Annual Reports of the President of Harvard College. Penn averaged 24 B.A.'s per year between 1873 and 1917, the first year that the total exceeded 50. Harvard averaged 328 per year for the same period.Google Scholar

3. Letter from Gale, John P. to his classmates, June 9, 1902 (Gale folder, U. of P. Archives). The University's archives contain a “biographical folder” for virtually every alumnus as far back as 1757. In some cases the folder bulges with newspaper clippings, alumni questionaires, photographs and correspondence; in others, it contains virtually nothing. These folders served as the first source of biographical information on the alumni in the sample. Use has also been made of registration records of individual departments or colleges within the University, yearbooks, class histories, and at least in the case of Philadelphia alumni, the city directories.Google Scholar

4. Allmendinger, David F. Jr., Paupers and Scholars: The Transformation of Student Life in Nineteenth Century New England (New York, 1975); Digby Baltzell, E., Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class (Chicago, 1971 edition), p. 324.Google Scholar

5. The Cattell, Henry W. Folder (U. of P. Archives); biographical sketch of Cattell, Henry in Chamberlin, Joshua L., Cheyney, Edward Potts, Oberholtzer, Ellis Paxson, eds., Universities and Their Sons: The University of Pennsylvania (Boston, 1902); Social Register (Philadelphia, 1898). The Cattells were not listed in the 1890 edition, the only other one consulted.Google Scholar

6. There were three women in the sample. One (Vassar, A.B., 1875) received an M.A. in 1895; a second (about whom no information on previous education was available) received a Ph.D. in 1897. The third (A.B. Wellesley, 1888) earned an M.A. in 1898. For more on women at Penn see Cheyney, , History of the U. of P., pp. 303–309. Only two of the sampled alumni were black. One of these men graduated from the College in 1896, the other completed his medical studies in 1889. In most cases religious affiliation remains unknown since that bit of information was not typically included in the school records consulted. Alumni questionaires did ask for this information, although individuals typically failed to provide it. The claim that the “majority” were Protestant (or perhaps indifferent Protestants) seems reasonable enough however based on what we already know of the period generally, as well as what little definite information could be gathered. The distribution was as follows: Google Scholar Needless to say perhaps, dealing with “graduates” is not identical to dealing with the matriculated “student” population, although at times for the sake of easy exposition the fiction is adopted here. At least two possible sources of differences between these two populations come immediately to mind which were part and parcel of the distinctive character of the nineteenth century educational arrangements emphasized later in this paper. In the first instance, there is the case of the College where attendance itself (i.e., without staying to complete the degree) counted socially in ways in which it not only does not, but could not count today. The second case is provided by the medical school. Although here attendance counted for little without formal completion of the requisite curriculum just as in our own day, the admissions policy was loose enough to allow large numbers of students to matriculate, only a percentage of whom presumably graduated. In the first case we might expect the students involved to be well-placed socially. In the second, perhaps they would be more ordinary.Google Scholar

7. Of course putting the matter this way plows over Baltzell's useful distinction between “elite” and “upper class” families (Philadelphia Gentlemen, pp. 15–43), but this data is not precise enough to allow for use of the distinction properly. In the context of this paper therefore, “elite” is a synonym for “upper class” (i.e., social register). Even if a young man's family was not listed in either of the editions of the Social Register consulted, he was still classified as “elite” if he was a member of any one of the four socially prominent fraternities at Penn. See Baltzell, , p. 325.Google Scholar

8. Baltzell, , p. 327. We can estimate that perhaps 12 per cent of the classes who graduated in the years between 1873 and 1878 were scions of Philadelphia's socially prominent families, and that this percentage increased to a high of 18 per cent for the classes between 1879 and 1885. The commencements between 1886 and 1892 saw the Social Register's representation within the College drop to 9.5 per cent however, while during the final six years of the period the proportion fell off even further to 7.4 per cent. 9 The areas of the city referred to here as well as the characterizations of each follow Warner, Sam Bass Jr., The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of its Growth (Philadelphia, 1968), pp. 177–200; Baltzell, , p. 177.Google Scholar

10. Of course it would be useful to have comparative information on the population sizes of the home towns of the alumni, but it has not yet been assembled. Most of the students appear to have hailed from small towns and rural areas however, whether they came from Pennsylvania or not. The one exception to this general rule was the foreigners, some of whom came from places like London, Paris, Geneva, Rome, Tokyo, Havana or Rio de Janeiro, usually to study dentistry.Google Scholar

11. “A peaked curve for nineteenth century graduates is a sign that the average student's college career differed little from those of his classmates; a graph of this type suggests that the great majority of students started school early, proceeded without interruption, and came from relatively similar social backgrounds. In contrast, a rounded curve is the sure sign of varied student careers, poverty, and heterogeneous social origins.” Allmendinger, , Paupers and Scholars, p. 129. See also Potts, David B., “‘College Enthusiasm!’ As Public Response,” Harvard Eduational Review 1(1977):28–42.Google Scholar

12. This fluctuating pattern may be an artifact of missing information on more ordinary students although we have seen fluctuations before in P.M.G. Harris' paper read before the O.A.H. in 1971, “Setting the Social Dynamics of American Higher Education, 1636–1745” (unpublished ms.). Whether or not changes in the size and social composition of the classes graduating from Penn between 1873 and 1935 can be said to conform to the requirements of Professor Harris' cycles thesis will be taken up in another paper.Google Scholar

13. In view of these fluctuations, as well as the increase in younger students noted in Graph 3, one wonders if the heckling and ensuing scuffles which occurred, first between the College freshmen and the medical graduates at the Medical School commencement in March of 1880, and then again between this group of College students (this time as sophomores) and medical students in December of 1881, had their source in age and social class tensions between these two groups. The episode is recorded in Chamberlin, et al., eds., Universities and Their Sons, p. 221 as well as in Adler, Cyrus, I Have Considered the Days (Philadelphia, 1941), pp. 24–27. Adler himself was a member of the College class of 1883. In any event the demographic and institutional factors which would condition such loyalties as well as allow for their expression in this way have been eliminated from modern university life.Google Scholar

14. This argument trades on a measure of ambiguity in Allmendinger's conception of “maturity.” Thinking of the undergraduate college he defined the “mature” as “those who entered college after their twenty-first birthday and graduated after their twenty-fifth” (p. 9). Here mature means “chronologically older than the average student” completing studies for the bachelor's degree. Part of the punch of Allmendinger's thesis derives from another sense of “maturity” however—i.e., that these students were “men” not “boys” (p. 115). Insofar as the concept is to be understood strictly as a chronological one, perhaps the minimum age of twenty-five should be revised upward for students in the professional curricula since the average age at graduation for the medical students was twenty-five. Google Scholar But if the concept is a psycho-social or developmental one, then presumably the lower limit of twenty-five years of age applies without modification. The case here may also depend upon overestimating to some degree the status of professionals — particularly physicians — in the nineteenth century. On this matter see Markowitz, Gerald E. and Rosner, David Karl, “Doctors in Crisis: A Study of the Use of Medical Education Reform to Establish Modern Professional Elitism in Medicine,” American Quarterly 25 (1973): 83–107.Google Scholar

15. Most of these were medical students. The undergraduate exceptions are consistent with Allmendinger's thesis however. One alumnus of the College (A.B., 1893) was blind, and his father was a laborer at the time of his matriculation, while one of the black students referred to earlier (B.S., 1886) was living with his widowed mother while he himself was employed as a clerk. The others were the female graduate students in the arts.Google Scholar

16. Part of the explanation for this was also rooted in what George Corner has termed the “economics of medical education.” See his discussion in Two Centuries of Medicine: A History of the School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1965), pp. 190–192. The quote is from the Law School's announcement in the University of Pennsylvania Catalogue, 1872–1873 (Philadelphia, 1872), p. 58.Google Scholar

17. The Temple College, Bulletin, 1888–1889 (Philadelphia, 1888); The Temple College, Bulletin, 1893–1894, p. 8; Cook, Arthur N., A History of Temple University (Typescript, Temple University Library, Conwelliana Collection), p. 25.Google Scholar

18. Presumably all the students were white, or virtually all of them. See DuBois, W.E.B., The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (New York, 1967 edition), pp. 349–350.Google Scholar

19. Cawelti, John G., Apostles of the Self Made Man: Changing Concepts of Success in America (Chicago, 1965), pp. 169–199.Google Scholar

20. Physicians and dentists who wanted to practice in Philadelphia were required to register with the Prothonotary in City Hall. The Medical Register listed five Temple medical graduates who were already practicing professionals when they took their degree: Google Scholar Interestingly enough, there were two female medical graduates in the class of 1906, neither of whom had previous degrees, and one female Ph.G. in the class of 1904.Google Scholar

21. Scott Nearing was one of the graduates in this last category. He pursued a full four-year evening course in Temple's School of Oral Expression in order “to overcome shyness and self-consciousness” while he studied economics full-time at the Wharton School during the day. See his autobiography, The Making of a Radical (New York, 1972), p. 36. Nearing received the Bachelor of Oratory from Temple in 1904, the same year as did Oscar Price (L.L.B., U. of P., 1903).Google Scholar

22. The other categories were “For Journalists,” “For Lawyers,” “For Physicians,” “For Engineers” and the “Elemental Course.” Temple College, Bulletin, 1889–1890, p. 11. Temple conferred a total of 1,275 Diplomas and 3,215 Certificates between 1888 and 1906, averaging about 338 per year after 1894. No Diplomas were conferred after 1920, but it was not until 1927 that the total number of Degrees (527) surpassed the total number of Certificates (247). Temple's commencement figures have been compiled by Ms. Miriam Crawford and are on file in the Conwelliana-Templana Collection, Paley Library, Temple University.Google Scholar

23. Ibid., pp. 7–9.Google Scholar

24. The sample of 124 matriculants has been characterized as “crude” because it was constructed by simply taking all of the names to be found on three separate pages of the Registration Book. These pages were at the beginning, the middle and the end of the volume in order to cover the alphabet. Within any alphabetical category the names were entered in the order in which the students appeared for registration. An identical approach to the names found in four other Registration Books, this time of the “branch academies” located in different geographical parts of the city (South, West, East and Tioga), yielded a sample of 183 students, and the age and occupational patterns were virtually the same as those derived from the first volume used at the main building. According to Cook, the Temple Board of Trustees voted to close the academies in 1896 because of low enrollments. A History of Temple University, p. 44.Google Scholar

25. This pattern also emerges from biographical information on Temple and Penn alumni who graduated between 1926 and 1935. 17.4 per cent of 259 Temple alumni who graduated between 1926 and 1930 (a sample composed of every twelfth name to appear on the commencement programs in those years) listed their father as deceased on the enrollment cards. Of 293 alumni who graduated between 1931 and 1935 (1/20 of the total) the percentage was 16.0. By way of comparison at Penn, 9.4 per cent of the sampled alumni who graduated between 1926 and 1930 (1/40 of the total), or 233 students in the sample) could be so classified, while for 222 Penn alumni who finished their studies between 1931 and 1935 (1/40 again) the percentage was 2.7.Google Scholar

26. The one exception to this was the Divinity students. Eleven out of twenty-three were from states other than New Jersey and Pennsylvania (two Canadians, one from France, and one each from Troy, N.Y., Connecticut, Indiana, Idaho, Delaware, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Michigan, and South Dakota), at least according to the commencement programs. It is not known if they sought this instruction from a distance, or were in Philadelphia for some other reason and decided to avail themselves of it.Google Scholar

27. Warner, characterizes the North and the Northwest as “the largest and most populous of all the five districts.” By the 1920's it was, according to him, “the fastest growing.” The Private City, p. 197.Google Scholar

28. Veysey, Laurence R., The Emergence of the American University (Chicago, 1965).Google Scholar

29. This line of argument is borrowed from Wisdom, John, “Gods,” Philosophy and Psycho-Analysis (Berkeley, 1969), pp. 149–168. As the title of his essay suggests, Wisdom was specifically interested in the logic of disputes about the existence of God, but his arguments and conclusions were also intended to delineate the common features of a whole genre of questions and the character of the disputes they generate. Mobility arguments belong to this genre, it seems. The point here is to characterize the different moments in a dispute — what we begin with, what we might do next, and so forth — not to dismiss the first stage as worthless or misguided. In retrospect perhaps what is most surprising about the first stage (i.e., when mobility questions were thought of as first and foremost empirical ones) is not that we learned that where one ended as an adult depended on where one began, but rather that anyone found this result surprising. At least part of the reason for this surprise can be attributed to the tendency of the literature to conflate questions about mobility with questions about social justice, but we shall not address that issue here. Work abounds which is representative of the argument in its first stage. Thernstrom's, Stephen Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City (New York, 1971) is already a classic; while specifically related to schooling, Colin Greer's Great School Legend: A Revisionist Interpretation of American Public Education (New York, 1972) is as fine an example as any.Google Scholar Of course to say that the ambiguity would persist is not to say that a more refined analysis would be of no value. It is instead a general point about what such an analysis would be valuable for. Again following Wisdom (p. 157), we can usefully think of disputes about whether or not the schools fulfilled their democratic promise as similar to those in which contending parties in a court of law are in possession of the same facts, or at least similar ones, and what is in dispute is whether someone exercised “reasonable care” or whether they were “negligent.” Google Scholar

30. “Unspoken connections” because clarification of the dispute at this stage is no longer “a process of setting out fairly what has been set out unfairly,” but trying to “set out fairly what has not been set out at all.” (Wisdom, p. 162) Notice that for Greer and others it is clearly a matter of “setting out fairly what has been set out unfairly.” For a different approach to this problem of clarification see Feinberg, Walter, “Revisionist Scholarship and the Problem of Historical Context,” Teachers College Record 1 (1977): 311–336.Google Scholar

31. Bailyn, Bernard, Education in the Forming of American Society (Chapel Hill, 1960), p. 14; Veysey, , The Emergence of the American University .Google Scholar

32. The difficulty we experience in securely assigning any contemporary institutional berth to the instruction represented by the diplomas and certificates at Temple only underscores the point. Following Michael Foucault, we are interested here in observing how a particular historical period experiences “the propinquity of things.” See The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York, 1970), p. xxiv, and The Archaeology of Knowledge .Google Scholar

33. For decennial changes in the average age of freshmen in the College Department at Penn between 1830 and 1899, see Chamberlin, et al., Universities and Their Sons, p. 219, and Cheyney's, History, passim., particularly his remarks on the “debasing” of the “collegiate standard by the admixture of the schoolboy alloy,” pp. 178–179. The situation in which the completion of grade twelve was neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for entrance to the undergraduate college nicely contrasts to our own era of course. John Gale, you will recall, spent only six months in an academy before attending college ten years later. Cf. Adler, , I Have Considered the Days, p. 22.Google Scholar

34. The U. of P. Catalogue, 1872–1873 , p. 58. One is reminded by this nineteenth century source of Ivan Illich's insistence on a “law forbidding discrimination in … admission to centers of learning based on previous attendance at some curriculum” in Deschooling Society (New York, 1970), p. 11. On the standards for medical school admission at Penn, see Corner, , Two Centuries of Medicine, p. 192 and surrounding discussion. See also Bledstein, Burton, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York, 1976), pp. 275–276. The practice of conferring the master's degree upon bachelor's of three years' standing who “apply for it” is one of a piece with these other distinctive aspects of the educational arrangements of the nineteenth century. See the U. of P. Catalogue, 1872–1873, p. 35 and Bledstein, , p. 275.Google Scholar

35. Temple College, Bulletin, 1889–1890, pp. 7–9. The concept of “radical monopoly” is of course from Illich, Ivan, Tools for Conviviality (New York, 1973). For the distinction between the “free” and the “protected” educational market, see McClellan, James E., Toward an Effective Critique of American Education (Philadelphia, 1968), pp. 38–53; the distinction between “ultimatums” and “opportunities” borrows from Ralph Page, “Opportunity and Its Willing Requirement,” Philosophy of Education, 1976: Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Philosophy of Education Society (Urbana, 1976), pp. 296–305. Cutler's, William “The Systematization of American Education,” The History of Education Quarterly 1 (1976): 79–92 along with the work he cites by McClellan, James E. and Green, Thomas F. gives us reason to think that this “ladder” itself is “the system,” and moreover that the current difficulties with schooling are not simply a function of these arrangements per se, but the cumulative effect of successive generations' experience with it as a means to the allocation of non-educational goods. For a well-developed version of the argument, at least insofar as the dynamics of allocation are concerned, see Hirsch, Fred, The Social Limits to Growth (Cambridge, 1976).Google Scholar

36. Katz, Michael B., The Irony of Early School Reform (Boston, 1968); Hofstadter, Richard, Academic Freedom in the Age of the College (New York, 1955). The reaction to the Hofstadter thesis can be sampled in the essays by Axtell, James, Hawkins, Hugh, and Potts, David B., all of which appeared in The History of Education Quarterly 4 (1971). Cf. Potts, David B., “‘College Enthusiasm!’ As Public Response,” Harvard Educational Review 1 (1977). Outside the historiographical mainstream, and in part no doubt because of it, the same attitude is at work. Notice how quickly Cook turns away in embarrassment from all that instruction which was so clearly of “non-collegiate caliber” to proudly seize the incipient undergraduate degree program. Cook, , A History, pp. 60–64. Or consider the Carnegie Commission's effort to portray Temple, and other schools like it, as a “post-secondary” institution for poor but “academically talented” youth of the late nineteenth century in The Campus and the City: Maximizing Assets and Reducing Liabilities (Hightstown, 1972). A similar case for the unhappy consequences of the academic division of labor, this time in economics, has been made by Galbraith, John Kenneth, Economics and the Public Purpose (Boston, 1973) and Hirsch, , The Social Limits to Growth .Google Scholar

37. The concept of a “primary social good” is taken from Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Boston, 1971), p. 62.Google Scholar

38. The “class biased” view is currently held with varying degrees of stridency by many historians of the public school, while the controlling metaphor of a “race” (complemented by the use of concepts like “advantages,” “disadvantages” and “handicaps”) has been integral to a good deal of the discussion about mobility. One can see this with exceptional clarity in Stephen Thernstrom's “Ethnic Differences in Occupational Mobility in Boston, 1890–1940,” in Thernstrom, Stephen and Sennett, Richard, eds., Nineteenth Century Cities: Essays in the New Urban History (New Haven, 1969), pp. 130, 131, 135, 141. Substantially revised, this paper appears as Chapter 6 of Therstrom's, Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880–1970 (Cambridge, 1973). Although he tells us that he now considers the “initial version outmoded” (Acknowledgments), the metaphor remains. Cf. Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York, 1974), pp. 235–239.Google Scholar

39. Page, , “Opportunity and Its Willing Requirement,” Philosophy of Education, 1976.Google Scholar

40. The democratization thesis is of course ubiquitous. For a classic statement, see for example Brubacher, John S. and Rudy, Willis, Higher Education in Transition: An American History, 1636–1956 (New York, 1958).Google Scholar

41. Temple College, Bulletin, 1888–1889; Temple University, Catalogue, 1934–1935 (Philadelphia, 1934), pp. 59–60.Google Scholar

42. Cf., Foucault's, Michael remarks on the relationship between the “penitentiary technique” and the “delinquent” in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Sheridan, Alan, (New York, 1977), p. 255.Google Scholar