Charles William Eliot

American educator

• Born: March 20, 1834
• Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts
• Died: August 22, 1926
• Place of death: Northeast Harbor, Mount Desert, Maine

Combining administrative skill with a readiness to undertake novel and irregular ventures, Eliot transformed the structure and function of higher education in the United States. During his long and productive career, universities became a prominent force in American culture and progress.

Early Life

Charles William Eliot was the only son of Mary Lyman and Samuel Atkins Eliot, who were both from prominent New England families. After graduating from Boston Latin Grammar School, he entered his father’s alma mater, Harvard College, in 1849. There, he became especially interested in mathematics and science and profited greatly from his study with a number of notable professors, among whom were Louis Agassiz, Asa Gray, and Josiah Parsons Cooke. It was under Cooke, in fact, that the young Eliot was given the then unique opportunity for an undergraduate student to conduct laboratory and field work in science.

Eliot graduated in 1853, among the top three students in his class of eighty-eight, and the following year became a tutor in mathematics at Harvard. In 1858 he married his first wife, Ellen Derby Peabody, and in that same year he received a five-year appointment as assistant professor of mathematics and chemistry. While in this position, he introduced a number of curricular innovations at Harvard, including the first written examination and placing a greater emphasis on laboratory exercises as a learning tool.

Failing to secure promotion at the end of his five-year appointment as assistant professor, Eliot left Harvard in 1863 and even considered abandoning the teaching profession. The governor of Massachusetts offered him an appointment as lieutenant colonel of cavalry in the state’s militia, but poor eyesight and family financial reverses forced Eliot to decline the offer. Instead, he embarked upon the first of two voyages to Europe for the purpose of further study. During his first trip abroad, Eliot was appointed to the faculty of the newly founded Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he began teaching upon his return from Europe in September, 1865. Eliot gave four years of distinguished service to that institution. He not only organized the chemistry department in collaboration with Francis Storer but also collaborated with him in writing the Eliot and Storer manuals of chemical analysis, the first textbooks to feature laboratory and experimental work along with theoretical principles.

Eliot’s study of European education while abroad and his experiences as a teacher at Harvard and MIT convinced him that American colleges and high schools were inadequate for the needs of individual students and American society. His thoughts about secondary and higher education were presented in two notable articles on “the new education,” which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly early in 1869 and were widely read and quoted. These articles brought him to the attention of Harvard’s Board of Overseers, which was seeking a new president for the school. Despite initial opposition to his election by some board members, Eliot was inaugurated as the twenty-second president of Harvard on October 19, 1869.

Life’s Work

Photographs of the beardless, bespectacled middle-aged Eliot show a profile befitting that of a late nineteenth century college president: a receding hairline, firmly set chin, and muttonchop whiskers. His presidency marked a new era at Harvard. Under Eliot’s leadership, Harvard’s faculty grew from sixty to six hundred and its endowment increased from a mere two and one-half million dollars to more than twenty million. He restructured Harvard into a university, concentrating all undergraduate studies in the college and building around it semiautonomous professional schools and research facilities. In 1872, he developed graduate master’s and doctoral programs, followed in 1890 by the establishment of a Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. In the schools of medicine, law, and divinity, he formalized entrance requirements, courses of study, and written examinations. He assisted reformers who were interested in providing higher education for women, which led to the founding in 1894 of Radcliffe College.

Among Eliot’s policies affecting Harvard, none was more fundamental than the improvement of faculty working conditions. He raised faculty salaries and introduced a liberal system of retirement pensions that Harvard maintained independently until 1906, when the Carnegie Foundation made provisions for this purpose. His introduction of the sabbatical year as well as French and German exchange professorships provided faculty with greater opportunities for contact with European scholars and greater leisure for research.

The most radical and far-reaching innovation introduced during Eliot’s administration was the elective principle. This reform grew out of Eliot’s conviction that college students needed more freedom in selecting courses so that they might acquire self-reliance, discover their own hidden talents, rise to a higher level of attainment in their chosen fields, and demonstrate a greater interest in their studies. Eliot also believed that modern subjects such as English, French, German, history, economics, and especially the natural and physical sciences should have equal rank with Latin, Greek, and mathematics in the college curriculum.

Gradually under Eliot’s leadership, Harvard adopted the elective principle. In 1872, all course restrictions for seniors were abolished. Seven years later, all junior course restrictions were abolished. In 1884 sophomore course restrictions came to an end, and the following year those for freshmen were greatly reduced. By 1897, the required course of study at Harvard had been reduced to a year of freshman rhetoric.

Eliot’s influence was felt in other areas of college life. The long-standing rule requiring student attendance at chapel was abolished, and participation in all religious activities was made voluntary. Eliot demonstrated a keen interest in athletic policy, too. He established a general athletic committee, comprising alumni, undergraduates, faculty, and administrators. In addition, Eliot played an important role in the introduction of stricter eligibility requirements for college athletes at Harvard and other American colleges.

Although higher educational reform occupied most of his energies, Eliot used his position to influence primary and secondary schools as well. His numerous published articles and addresses covered a wide range of subjects. He argued for better training and greater security of teachers and for improved sanitary conditions in schools; he supported Progressive Era educators’ efforts to improve schooling; and he emphasized the need for teachers and schools to train the senses, the body, and the imagination of the student. At the same time, he raised and diversified admissions requirements at Harvard to exert pressure upon schools to improve the quality of their instruction.

After Eliot resigned from the presidency of Harvard in 1909, he continued to participate in a wide range of activities. As a member of Harvard’s Board of Overseers, Eliot maintained an interest in campus affairs. He was influential in shaping the policies of the General Education Board, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Eliot devoted the remainder of his time to writing, speech-making, and correspondence. Fully active until the last year of his life, he died at Northeast Harbor, Mount Desert, Maine, on August 22, 1926.

Significance

In countless ways, Eliot exerted a powerful influence upon the development of higher education in the United States. During his long and productive career, the university emerged as a preeminent force in Americans’ lives. It became the primary service organization which made possible the function of many other institutions in society. The university not only brought coherence and uniformity to the training of individuals for professional careers but also provided a formal structure for the techniques Americans employed in thinking about every level of human existence.

Eliot was able to accomplish so much because, to an extraordinary degree, his own outlook mirrored the hopes and fears of many other late nineteenth century Americans. Eliot’s contribution to change in higher education made a difference in American history at a crucial moment, when aspiring middle-class individuals were struggling to define new career patterns, establish new institutions, pursue new occupations, and forge a new self-identity. The university was basic to this struggle; it became a central institution in a competitive, status-conscious society. Eliot played a key role in this process by giving vitality to the American college at a time when its remoteness from society imperiled the whole structure of higher education in the United States.

Bibliography

Bledstein, Burton J. The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America. New York: W. W. Norton, 1976. The best single book about the activities and ideology of Eliot and other leaders of late nineteenth century American higher education. Although somewhat overcritical, offers a needed corrective to other accounts.

Eliot, Charles W. Charles W. Eliot and Popular Education. Edited by Edward A. Krug. New York: Teachers College Press, 1961. This short anthology includes nine of Eliot’s articles, addresses, and reports on education in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also contains a lengthy introduction which discusses and analyzes his contribution to the educational reform movement.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Educational Reform: Essays and Addresses. New York: Century, 1898. Reprint. New York: Arno Press, 1969. Contains some of Eliot’s early essays and addresses. Provides readers with a sample of his thinking on American education’s problems and their solutions.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. A Late Harvest: Miscellaneous Papers Written Between Eighty and Ninety. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1924. This volume contains typical products of Eliot’s thought during the last years of his life. In addition to a brief autobiographical piece, it includes papers on a wide range of subjects. Of particular note is a partial bibliography of Eliot’s publications from 1914 to 1924.

Hawkins, Hugh. Between Harvard and America: The Educational Leadership of Charles W. Eliot. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. The best single book on Eliot’s tenure as president of Harvard. It analyzes his efforts to make the university ideal a reality in the changing, sometimes hostile social environment of late nineteenth century and early twentieth century America.

James, Henry. Charles W. Eliot: President of Harvard University, 1869-1909. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930. Marred by its uncritical perspective, this nevertheless well-written, highly detailed biography of Eliot remains indispensable; all subsequent studies of Eliot’s life have drawn on it.

Mahoney, Kathleen A. Catholic Higher Education in Protestant America: The Jesuits and Harvard in the Age of the University. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. In 1893, Eliot helped implement an admissions policy barring graduates of Jesuit colleges from regular admission to Harvard University. Mahoney explains how his decision set off a controversy about the terms of Catholic participation in higher education. Her book describes how Eliot and other liberal Protestant educators sought to link the modern university with the cause of Protestantism, and how Catholic educators and students responded to this development.

Rudolph, Frederick. The American College and University: A History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968. Provides a rich analysis of Eliot’s early years as president and reformer at Harvard. Generally balanced and well researched, it provides a clear, objective account of the elective system’s revolutionary impact on higher education in the United States.

Tyack, David B. The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974. This highly readable, well-documented study only briefly discusses Eliot’s activities on behalf of public schooling, but it provides a detailed account of the social milieu in which he worked and shaped his ideas about education.

Veysey, Laurence R. The Emergence of the American University. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965. A massive study that includes more references to Eliot than to any other person. Valuable chiefly for its background information and incisive analysis of the social and intellectual context within which late nineteenth century American higher educational reform proceeded.