Author: Jane Shaw Stroup

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Good News about the 1600s, Part I

The seventeenth century in Europe was bloody and violent. Some examples: a continental war that went on for thirty years (1618-1648), three British civil wars (1639-1651),  naval wars between England and the Netherlands (1652-1674), and military efforts to rein in France’s Louis XIV and the Spanish Hapsburgs.

At the same time, however, economic changes were quietly occurring, laying a foundation for the Industrial Revolution. That’s the little-known subject of this post.

“What happened in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a wholesale shift of industry, including rather sophisticated sectors, from city to countryside,” writes Jan de Vries in his informative book Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600-1750.[1]

This shift from cities to rural areas is not the typical “Industrial Revolution” story, which says that peasants were forced off the farm and into the cities, making them available for burgeoning industrial factories. To some extent that did happen later, but manufacturing in England and other parts of western Europe started in rural areas, not cities.  Here’s how, according to de Vries.

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The Form that Failed

[Photo: credit: Campus facility (UA023.005), Special Collections Research Center, North Carolina State University Libraries, Raleigh, North Carolina.]

Like the child who pointed out that the emperor had no clothes, someone (Lawrence Biemiller) is admitting that the great wave of Modernist buildings on academic campuses—constructed from the 1960s until very recently—has not been a success.  We may think of universities as places of ivy-covered brick walls and quaint quads, but the fact is that for decades, universities chose to construct  stark “form follows function” buildings admired by architects, but rarely by students.

Here at  North Carolina State University,  Harrelson Hall, built in 1962, was torn down in 2016. Even the NC State website describes Harrelson as “a circular freak of a building that flummoxed students with its spiral ramps, windowless classrooms and ductwork that whooshed like a subway tunnel.”

Harrelson was over 50 years old when it was taken down, but I frequently walk by a newer construction, the Ricks Hall Addition, built in 2009. It is Modernist—a rectangular box connected on the second floor to the 1922 Ricks Hall, which boasts Ionic columns. The only similarity I can see to the original building is the color of the brick. I see nothing pleasing about it.

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Should We Admire the Greeks and Romans? Bastiat Didn’t

Frédéric Bastiat was a classical liberal who lived in France from 1801 to 1850. (For more information about Bastiat, see a previous post). His writing—which was rediscovered by American libertarians in the 1940s after years of disdain and neglect—is witty and insightful. It provides fables that help teach economics, such as his “Petition by the Manufacturers of Candles, Etc..” which carries protectionism to absurd lengths: Candlemakers petition the government to command people to cover their windows and stop letting in sunlight (thus “protecting” them from sunlight), because the sun is ruining the candle business.[1]

Bastiat was as harsh on French education as he was on protectionism. He split with classical liberals who accepted publicly provided education; he didn’t think the government should be involved in teaching.

But that is not what is extraordinary about his educational views. Rather, he challenged the French secondary-school curriculum because it revered the classical civilizations of antiquity. To Bastiat, the Greeks (both Athenians and Spartans) and Romans were violent, military, and disdainful of work—not worth the study that was slavishly given them. This is extraordinary because respect for antiquity permeated the views of educated Europeans. Among French educators, there were some intellectual disagreements along the lines of whether Athens or Sparta was “better,” but studying classical civilizations was the bread and butter of proper education.

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How Did We Get Land-Grant Colleges?

Land-grant colleges are state schools founded to teach “agricultural and mechanical arts.” Today, many are among the nation’s largest research universities. In this post I’ll share some thoughts about how they came about.

Let’s begin with conventional wisdom. Land-grant colleges  “emerged from an idealistic concern for the adaptation of existing educational resources to a changing society . . . .” [1] Oddly, this somewhat grandiose explanation for the land-grants comes from John Simon, a historian who deftly investigated the politics behind the 1862 act that authorized such schools. He also recognized that the typical American didn’t have much truck with higher education in the mid-nineteenth century.  One agricultural school was called the “Farmers’ High School” because the title “Farmers’ College” would sound too fancy.

Yet Simon’s statement reflects a still-prevailing image of the idealistic movement for land-grant colleges. Continue reading “How Did We Get Land-Grant Colleges?”

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The Durability of Universities

The American university system is remarkably durable, even though Its failings are clearly visible. Colleges and universities roll on, with the only sign of weakness a so-far modest decline in attendance. This is in spite of  mounting costs; scandals like admission bribing and cheating; equally scandalous student debt; high drop-out rates; grade inflation; etc.

In February 2018, I wrote an article about whether universities will face a “crackup” or if they have the stability to keep going as they have. I proposed that we might learn something from other institutions that persist over time, such as the European Catholic Church, especially in the medieval period (500-1500). (This was not an original idea but I haven’t seen it developed by others.)

Like universities, the Catholic Church was a complex body with many components. While it had a single head, the pope, it also had parish churches, charitable hospitals, cathedral schools, monasteries, convents, and bishoprics, all scattered widely geographically, as are our universities and their components.

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