The Purposes of a University Education
Erika Lindemann
Throughout the
University's antebellum history, the people to whom the
institution looked for support viewed the purposes of a university education
differently. Though the
University always had its influential advocates, many
North
Carolina political leaders were unsympathetic to supporting education at
public expense. They believed that the state had no right "to tax one
person's property to educate another person's child" (
Powell,
North Carolina through Four Centuries 248). Others
thought that a college education was an extravagance, possibly even a threat to
ordered society. Though the legislature had approved charters for 177 academies
by 1825, thirteen for girls, these schools were not supported by public funds,
and many vanished a few years after they were established (
Lefler and Newsome
304). The first public school in
North
Carolina would not open until 1840. According to
Lefler
and
Newsome, "the dominant aristocracy of wealth regarded
education as a privilege for the favored few who could afford it; education was
for gentlemen and the professions only. Its extension to the common people
would be costly and even dangerous" (304). Many people, then, regarded a
college education as a luxury, an opinion reinforced by important political
realities in
North
Carolina.
For others, though, including
William Davie
, who had struggled to bring the
University into being, a university education secured the
future of each rising generation by offering necessary preparation for
discharging "the social duties of life" (Davie quoted in
Connor
1:34). Supporters of the
University sent their sons to
Chapel
Hill because a university education provided mental discipline,
cultivated civic and moral virtues, developed character, and bestowed spiritual
and social benefits. Students' letters home refer to their studies as training,
a duty, and a means of exercising diligence and obedience.
William
A. Shaw
, in his inaugural address as president of the
Dialectic
Society, asserted that college studies not only are "adapted to the
purposes of public and private life," but also remain "an essential
prerequisite to association with the polished circles of society, and a just
claim to respectability" (William A.
Shaw, Dialectic Society Addresses, UA). Disciplining the intellect and forming moral
character were the two major aims of nineteenth-century higher education.
Successful students, thus equipped, were prepared to become good citizens and
leaders of society.
Those of us familiar with the courses offered in today's colleges
and universities may find it difficult to imagine how the curriculum of 150 to
200 years ago "improved" people. For admission into the
University, students were examined in Latin and Greek,
1 but not
in science or mathematics. First-year students studied primarily Latin and
Greek, reading the whole of the Psalmist,
Virgil's
Georgics,
Cicero's
orations, the Græca minora and the first volume of the Græca
majora, as well as other Greek and Roman antiquities. Ancient geography also
was part of the study of Greek and Latin. Arithmetic and algebra, geography,
English grammar, composition, declamation,
2 and
theses completed the course of study for first-year students. Sophomores
continued the study of Latin and Greek by reading
Horace, four
books of
Homer's
Iliad
, and additional works from the Græca majora.
In mathematics, students finished algebra and began geometry. The study of
modern geography, composition, declamation, and theses continued during the
second year. The juniors, called "junior sophisters," were largely
finished with Latin and Greek, though some students continued their lessons
"to keep it fresh in our mind." Juniors encountered natural
philosophy (physics) and several branches of mathematics, including logarithms,
plane trigonometry, surveying, mensuration of heights and distances, spherical
trigonometry, navigation, conic sections, and fluxions (differential calculus).
In English, juniors read "classics," principally
English authors of
Queen
Anne's reign, and continued work in composition and declamation.
Seniors, called "senior sophisters," studied the natural sciences of
chemistry, mineralogy, geology, and the philosophy of natural history. Pure
mathematics yielded to applied mathematics as seniors completed the study of
natural philosophy and began studying astronomy, chronology, and the
"progress of the mathematical and physical sciences." The course in
moral philosophy included metaphysics and the "progress of metaphysical,
ethical, and political philosophy." In English, seniors continued reading
"classics," writing compositions, and preparing declamations. They
also studied logic and rhetoric (1822 Catalogue 5-7; 1825 Catalogue 5-7;
Battle
1:256).
The method of instruction was primarily recitation. Students studied
a portion of the textbook and were prepared to recite the answers to the
professor's questions. Students sometimes were able to predict when they would
be "taken up" or called on; if their answers were insufficient,
students were "glistered" or disapproved, the professor recording the
poor performance in his grade book. Science faculty occasionally performed
experiments or demonstrations, but students were not responsible for laboratory
work. Some written work was required in Latin, Greek, and rhetoric courses, and
according to
University catalogues of this period, composition and
declamation were "taught through the whole [four-year] course" (1822
Catalogue 7; 1825 Catalogue 7). Final examinations were oral until the 1840s,
when some courses instituted written examinations. Faculty and students do not
say much about these end-of-course examinations. They occurred just before the
Christmas
vacation and again prior to commencement. Faculty members attended the fall
examinations of their colleagues' classes as "assessors," and in the
spring, visiting
trustees participated in the proceedings. Presumably the
trustees also could ask students questions, which would have
made the public performance a formidable ordeal, but they appear to have done
so only rarely. Indeed, faculty members sometimes complain that too few
trustees attended the examinations.
Battle
, a student from 1845 to 1849, explains that, in his
day, "the examinations counted hardly more than single recitations"
(
1:554).
Grades were given in each course, but the antebellum grading scale
was different from that used today. Students' work could be judged very good
(vg), good (g), very respectable (vr), respectable (r), tolerable (t), bad (b),
and very bad (vb). Faculty members determined a student's standing by averaging
all of his grades at the end of the year, and these rankings seemed much more
important to students than their grades in individual courses. As
Battle
explains, "Those who obtained 'very good' in
all, or nearly all, their studies, had the first distinction. Those who
averaged 'good' obtained the second distinction. The 'very respectable' had the
third distinction" (
1:553). Students referred to these classmates as the first,
second, and third "mite" men. Grade reports sent home to parents,
however, emphasized a student's deportment. The December 4, 1823, report for
Leander
Hughes
, for example, provides no course grades or rankings, it asserts
only that he has not been absent from prayers or recitations (
Leander
Hughes Papers, SHC).
Students and faculty members also were aware of a significant
"extra-curriculum" at the
University. Students sometimes broadened their academic
training by listening to visiting speakers and preachers, by attending
festivals in
Chapel
Hill or nearby
Hillsborough, or by traveling to
Raleigh to
meet famous political figures such as
Gen. Lafayette
. Apart from these special
celebrations, students devoted considerable time to the work of the
Dialectic and
Philanthropic Societies. Weekly writing, speaking,
declamation, and debate in these two societies extended the attention to
composition and declamation in the regular course of study. Most students took
their society duties seriously and paid fines for failing to perform them. The
extra-curriculum also included religious instruction. In addition to attending
daily prayers and a service in the Chapel on Sunday, students prepared
recitations on religious works for Sunday afternoon classes.
Seniors encountered special writing assignments in connection with
senior speaking and the annual commencement ceremonies. Senior speaking
required every graduating senior to deliver on the public stage an oration that
had been submitted to the professor of rhetoric for review.
3 Seniors
of this period prepared two speeches, one given in each term of the senior
year. Students worked on their speeches for weeks and practiced them
conscientiously. As solemn public events, senior speakings were attended not
only by faculty members and fellow students but also by local townspeople and
influential citizens. Students wore robes identifying them as members of one or
the other debating society and customarily delivered their speeches from
memory, without the aid of a prompter. Sometimes, music played by other
students rounded out the program. Following these speeches, seniors had a month
off prior to commencement, presumably to read law, medicine, or theology and to
prepare commencement speeches. Those who could, went home.
Those who attended the 1827 Commencement exercises had the good
fortune of hearing an address by
North
Carolina's most famous advocate of public education in the antebellum
period—Archibald
Murphey. A 1799 graduate of the
University,
Murphey became an attorney and by 1827 had already spent a
decade urging
North
Carolinians to adopt a comprehensive, publicly financed plan for
educating the state's children, especially those who could not afford private
schooling. Without such a system of public instruction, he maintained, the
state could not expect to progress.
In delivering his commencement address to the Class of 1827,
Murphey argued that a college or university education
"is intended only as a preparation of the mind for receiving the rich
stores of science and general knowledge, which subsequent industry is to
acquire. He who depends upon this preparation alone, will be like a farmer who
ploughs his land and sows no grain. The period of useful study commences, when
a young man finishes his collegiate course. At that time his faculties have
acquired some maturity from age, and some discipline from exercise; and if he
enter with diligence upon the study of a branch of science, and confine his
attention to that branch, he soon becomes astonished at his progress, and at
the increase of his intellectual powers" (
Murphey 2:358).
Murphey acknowledged that the classical curriculum, with
its two years of required Latin and Greek, was not immediately applicable to
the professions that most students entered. But for
Murphey, a collegiate course of science and literature,
properly engaged, strengthened the intellect, improved taste, and promoted
genius. This view explains why every student took the same course of study. The
assumption was that every student's intellect, sense of taste, genius, and soul
would profit from the same knowledge and the same processes of mastering it.
Such an education had value even for those who did not complete the
requirements for the degree. In the period from 1820 to 1829, some 450 students
enrolled in the
University, but only 236 students or fifty-two percent
graduated. For the rest, almost half of those matriculating, a few years of
University training were sufficient. Many of these
"irregular" students nevertheless "rose to eminence," as
Murphey put it, without the advantage of a college
degree.
Murphey also recognized, as did most students and their
parents, that a college degree was only the beginning of the training required
for successful professional careers. What careers did students pursue? For a
partial answer, we may consult the membership records of the
Dialectic and
Philanthropic Societies. These documents reveal that most
students attending the
University in the 1820s became physicians (69), lawyers
(49), planters or farmers (45), ministers (31), and politicians (28). A few
students went into teaching (13), became merchants (8), or joined the military
(4). The debating society records also identify two bankers, a journalist, an
engineer, and an architect. Unfortunately, such information is provided for
only 250 of the 450 students enrolled during this period, so the figures should
be construed as defining trends, not as providing precise employment
statistics. In some cases, too, students went on to multiple careers, a
minister also becoming a teacher, a planter becoming a lawyer who also held
political office, and so on. Nevertheless, the societies' membership records
confirm that
university graduates were most likely to become physicians,
lawyers, ministers, and planters or farmers.
What do we make of this evidence about the careers of students
attending the
University in the 1820s? Myths about the
moonlight-and-magnolias
South
notwithstanding, graduates of the
University did not all belong to the plantation aristocracy.
Though higher education was relatively expensive, the
University also enrolled students whose fathers were
merchants, tanners, postmasters, farmers, newspaper publishers, teachers, and
ministers, or whose mothers were widows with an estate large enough to support
the education of surviving children. In fact, a planter's oldest son might
attend college for only a year or two, his significant training taking place,
not in the college classroom, but beside his father on the plantation. Younger
sons, however, unlikely to inherit large estates, would be sent to college to
prepare for other careers. Young men whose families could not afford the
tuition nevertheless sometimes received a college education by securing the
support of a patron. Students who planned to enter the ministry could attend
the
University for free, and other students who were not well
off received scholarships from the debating societies to which they
belonged.
Though a liberal arts education provided important preparation for
"the battlefields of life," students seeking practical training as
physicians, lawyers, and ministers would spend a year or two after college
apprenticed to someone already practicing these professions. Letters written by
seniors sometimes explain that they were already reading legal, medical, and
theological books prior to entering a professional apprenticeship. Other
students might pursue advanced study at the
University of Pennsylvania's medical school, for example, or
Princeton's theological seminary. Like students today, some
were troubled by doubts about their future course; others discovered that the
professional goals they had set for themselves made them miserable. The
majority of
University graduates stayed in
North
Carolina and made their way professionally close to home.
"The next great object, after the improvement of the
intellectual faculties,"
Murphey argued, "is the forming of a moral
character" (2:358). Finding ethical principles too much entangled with
"the speculative doctrines of Theology,"
Murphey advised his commencement audience of 1827,
"We must look to our constitutional temperament, to our passions and
feelings as influenced by external circumstances; and for rules of conduct, we
must look to the sermons and parables of
Christ: they are
worth more than all the books which have been written on morals; they explain,
and at the same time apply that pure morality which is founded upon virtuous
feeling" (2:359). Though it may seem strange nowadays to read a statement
so obviously informed by a
Protestant
Christian ethic, most of
Murphey's audience would have agreed with it. Next to
intellectual training, the responsibility to guide students' behavior and shape
their character was a clear duty of the faculty, and parents expected them to
exercise it. Religious instruction was a part of this training, enacted through
daily prayers in the chapel, the requirement to attend Sunday services, and
religious instruction on Sunday afternoons. These religious experiences were
avowedly non-denominational, according to
Professor
Mitchell
, intended to enable the young men to "go home to their
parents better
Episcopalians, better
Presbyterians, better
Baptists
better
Methodists than they were when they came" to the
University (
Matthias Murray Marshall Papers, SHC). Because antebellum
records rarely reveal a student's religious background, it is difficult to
determine whether or not
Roman
Catholics or
Jews attended
the
University. At least one student in the 1820s was known to
be "a
Romanist," but most
Roman
Catholic students in the
South probably
attended
Georgetown University, founded in 1789.
4
Jewish
students do not appear to have enrolled until the late 1830s.
The "forming of a moral character" was one objective
behind many of the bylaws regulating student conduct. To be sure, these
regulations served to keep order and made it possible to pursue an education,
but they also enforced specific religious and social prohibitions against
playing cards, drinking, attending horse races, profaning the Sabbath, or
behaving inappropriately in the chapel or the classroom. The faculty, sometimes
under duress by the
board of
trustees, were pledged to enforce these rules in ways that nowadays seem
demeaning: checking students' rooms in the evening, doling out spending money
to ensure that it went toward appropriate purchases, enforcing dress codes, and
limiting where students might go in town. Minutes of faculty meetings reveal
much time being spent addressing infractions, investigating disturbances,
hearing testimony, and receiving written apologies for misbehavior.
Students quickly learned the importance of obeying the rules, which
served the further purpose of "forming character." They became the
means by which young men learned conformity to expected norms of gentlemanly
behavior and, more important, obedience toward those in authority.
Intoxication, for example, would surely bring a reprimand from the faculty, but
a refusal to reform, to apologize for past conduct and to pledge to uphold the
regulations in the future, would result in a student's suspension or expulsion.
From a contemporary perspective, informed by constructive talk of student
empowerment and self-actualization, we may find it difficult to understand why
some students and the faculty so often were at odds about the rules regulating
student conduct. In the 1820s, however, ethics, religion, and psychology were
not separate spheres. "Forming moral character" meant molding
students' passions, behavior, and "constitutional temperament," as
Murphey put it, in ways that would encourage them to
become educated
Christian gentlemen.
The faculty were not the only stewards of students' intellectual and
moral "improvement." Students themselves promoted their own education
in the debating societies. Writing in 1887,
Stephen B.
Weeks
prefaced his "
Register of Members of the
Philanthropic Society
" with the following
statement of the
Society's goals: "The objects of the
Society were and have continued to be two-fold. First, the
improvement of its members in the science and art of debating, in English
composition and the attainment of a good style, in the knowledge of
parliamentary rules and modes of conducting public business. Secondly, the
cultivation of moral and social virtues, and the formation of lasting
friendships, founded on co-operation in honorable works" (
Weeks 3).
In offering students valuable experience in reading, writing, and
debate, the societies helped support and enrich the academic curriculum.
Society debates addressed a wide range of contemporary and theoretical subjects
that could be researched in a library of books and periodicals rivaling those
available to the faculty. These debates obliged students to put their education
to use, to apply it to political, social, and religious questions of interest
to them. Students in these organizations also formed important pre-professional
contacts during their
Chapel
Hill years, alliances that they could depend on in "after
life," after graduation, to launch and sustain careers. In their letters,
students invariably include information about their respective societies and
its members in reporting their "news from the
Hill." For better or worse, the societies also
reinforced cultural and especially political values that students brought from
home. The societies replicated the east-west sectionalism dominating
North
Carolina politics, and students appear only rarely to have engaged
students from a rival society socially. Consequently, the societies legitimated
a uniformity of thought and a conformity of behavior. To their credit, the
students recognized and rewarded exemplary academic achievement, each society
competing with its rival for excellent students, scholastic honors, and
prominent honorary members. Graduating seniors also received a diploma from
their society as well as from the
University.
As
Weeks
notes, the societies also had as their object "the cultivation of moral
and social virtues." In other words, students participated in the
formation of one another's character. Though they avoided explicitly religious
instruction, they nevertheless stressed a student's "duty" to the
group and exacted fines for students who slacked off or misbehaved. Members of
the
Dialectic
Society elected an officer, called the
censor
morum, "to inspect the conduct of the Members while in
Society and at the close of each session he shall report to
the
Society the irregular and indecent behaviour of the Members
while in
Society" (Dialectic
Society Constitution, Article 5, Section 1, UA). The
Philanthropic Society had a similar officer, called the
supervisor, who monitored conduct during
Society meetings. Some of the regulations governing student
conduct in the society halls seem as trivial as the regulations enacted by the
trustees and enforced by the faculty, but they served to involve students in
definitions of gentlemanly conduct that prevailed campuswide.
Murphey concluded his 1827 Commencement address with
advice specifically directed to the "young gentlemen of the
Dialectic and
Philanthropic Societies." Like the faculty and most of
the students in his audience, he recognized the powerful influence that the
societies had "in maintaining the good order of this institution, in
sustaining the authority of the faculty, and in suppressing vice, and promoting
a gentlemanly deportment among the students. Every respectable student of
proper age, is a member of one or the other of your Societies, and feels more
mortification at incurring its censure than that of the faculty. This feeling
is the fulcrum on which the power of the Societies ought to be exerted. Let me
entreat you, then [. . .] to exert that power in sustaining the discipline of
the
University, in encouraging industry and good manners, and in
suppressing vice. The united efforts of the two Societies can do more in
effecting these objects than the authority of the trustees or faculty"
(2:360).
Murphey's charge to the members of the societies reflects
precisely those goals nineteenth-century educators articulated for college
graduates: to sustain the good order of society, to encourage industry and good
manners, and to suppress vice. The eloquence of educators and the aspirations
of parents, however, did not always coincide with students' own views of what a
university education should be. To be sure, most antebellum undergraduates
subscribed to the views of their elders, enumerating in similar language the
virtues of a liberal arts education. Others did not think much of the
University, yet determined dutifully to endure the
experience. Still others engineered their own expulsion. In reminding us of the
diverse reasons students attend college, antebellum students are not so
different from students today.