Last week I wrote about the Transportation-Communication Revolution that has fostered economic growth around the world.[1] Yes, it may have sped up the international spread of the coronavirus but, if so, that is a short-run effect. Prosperity has been the long-run result.
In the late nineteenth century another transportation-communication revolution took place, as railroads enabled products to be sold over vast geographical distances.[2] In the United States this led to the emergence of mass marketers like Montgomery Ward and Sears, which sent catalogs, products and even kits for building houses all around the country.
You probably have heard of Robert Owen. He was a nineteenth-century British political activist (1771-1858) known for his “utopian socialism.“[1] He started communities that eschewed private property, including a colony in New Harmony, Indiana.
In those communities, he said, “the necessaries and comforts of life [will be] enjoyed by all in abundance,” and they “will ever be the abode of abundance, active intelligence, correct conduct, and happiness.”[2]
“Owenite” communities didn’t last for long.
Owen is rightly admired, however. He had a simple philosophy. He believed that all people are the products of both their inherited characteristics and their environment. If the environment is nurturing, they will develop into worthwhile beings, no matter what their economic surroundings. He held this view so strongly that, as a manager, he never punished anyone (except possibly for drunkenness) and was never visibly angry toward people. He knew their circumstances had made them as they were.
Had he stuck with being a businessman, he might have changed the world.
Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Jay Schalin, director of policy analysis at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.
As a professional commenter on higher education, one of the phrases I encounter ad nauseam is “shared governance.” That is the concept in which the faculty, the trustees, and the administration are roughly coequal partners in higher education decision-making, each having dominance in its own sphere of activities. What makes this so annoying is that one of the common justifications used for it is that it is our “traditional” form of governing universities, and therefore any attempt to question it is out of bounds.
But is it really our tradition? Or is it something that was grafted onto another tradition of governance during the Progressive Era?
One of the bases for this traditional shared governance narrative is the claim that American colleges descend from the scholar-centered University of Paris, and therefore the origins of American colleges are as “communities of scholars.” Higher education historian Edwin Duryea, in his 2000 book The Academic Corporation: A History of College and University Governing Boards, claims that, “The Parisian model appeared in Oxford and Cambridge that, in turn, carried over to America.”1
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.
