The idea of a national or “Federal” university was born around the campfires of the
Continental Army, but first given expression by Benjamin Rush, a prominent physician
and patriot of Philadelphia (Rush, 1788, in Hofstadter and Smith, 1961, 152-157;
Madsen 1966, 130-139). The idea gained its strongest supporter in George Washington,
who urged it on the Congress in his first and last messages (1790 and 1796), and made
a contribution towards it in his will. He argued that a University of the United States
would promote national unity, save young Americans the expense and bother of going
abroad for their higher education, promote their attachment to republican forms of
government, and provide the basis for one really first-class university in a country
already possessing a goodly number of institutions, all too small and poor to be
competitive with the leading European institutions. As he noted in his final message to
Congress:
Our Country, much to its honor, contains many Seminaries of learning
highly respectable and useful; but the funds upon which they rest, are too
narrow, to command the ablest Professors, in the different departments of
liberal knowledge, for the Institution contemplated, though they would be
excellent auxiliaries. (Hofstadter and Smith, 157-159)
The presidents and graduates of Harvard, Yale and Princeton were not happy to hear
their beloved colleges being patronized as "seminaries of learning" useful as "excellent
auxiliaries" – and this from a man however honored who had never even gone to
college, much less graduated from one! And while correct in his diagnosis of the need
for a first-class university in the new republic, Washington underestimated the hostility in
Congress to any attempt to strengthen the power of Federal institutions, especially one
which would have such clear implications for the creation and development of local,
state, and regional colleges and universities. Moreover, it sounded to them, as to us, as
a way of training an educationally qualified civil service.7 That is the last thing those early
congressmen wanted; they wanted a weak central government and a spoils systems.
They got the spoils system in the form of a relatively weak civil service in relation to the
number and power of political appointees in each new federal administration.
Washington and his allies had in mind a genuinely progressive institution, with a more
modern curriculum than could be found at that time in any of those “excellent auxiliaries”
that are now Ivy League universities. But the failure of the University of the United States
ensured that the burgeoning colleges and universities being created would be weak
academically as well as financially. While American colleges were modeled on British
and Scottish university colleges, “they could expect much less from students in the way
of secondary preparation and cultural background, and they were equipped to carry their
students a much shorter part of the way toward profound knowledge or serious
scholarship” (Hofstadter and Metzger, 1955, 226). But the most substantial impact of the
failure to create a national university arose out of its effects on the link between higher
education and government. “One of the most serious obstacles to university
development in the United States was the fact that higher education had no organicrelation to careers in civil service and diplomacy, as it had in England and some
continental countries. Thus the spoils system and “democratic” rotation in office deprived
American higher education of much of the potential importance of university
work….”(ibid.) .
Despite efforts to bring the issue back to the Congress by all five of Washington’s
successors right up to Andrew Jackson,8 who of course would not hear of it, a national
university was never created. While suggestions to create a University of the United
States were not accompanied by proposals to give it a monopoly over higher degrees, it
would surely have been, in colonial terms, “the Government's university,” and as such
would have had profound effects on all of American higher education. Its standards of
entry, curricula, educational philosophies, and forms of instruction would have provided
models for every college or “seminary” which aspired to send some of its graduates to
the university in the Capitol. A University of the United States might well have
established national academic standards for the bachelor's degree, for the qualifications
of faculty, even conceivably for entry to higher education, and in these ways have greatly
influenced the character and curriculum of secondary feeder schools. Eventually a
national university might have shaped and constrained the growth of graduate education
and research universities. It would surely have been the central instrument of Federal
government policy regarding higher education in the Union. Therefore the defeat of the
idea of a University of the United States was arguably the most important policy decision
affecting the role of central government in American higher education, determining or at
least conditioning the character of all future Federal government interventions.
Like a character in a zombie movie, you couldn’t kill the idea – it kept coming back to life
throughout the century. In 1873 President Eliot of Harvard was still speaking against the
creation of a tax-supported national university. I suspect he could hear the echoes of
Washington’s implicit reference to Harvard as one of those "many seminaries of learning
highly respectable and useful" that would be even more useful as "an excellent auxiliary"
to the national university.
The defeat of the idea of a central federal university needs to be discussed together with
a second event of momentous consequence, the decision by the Supreme Court in 1819
in the case of The Trustees of Dartmouth College v. the State of New Hampshire, for this
too had a profound effect on the place of public authority in the development of an
American higher education system (Whitehead 1973; Herbst 1982; Whitehead and
Herbst 1986). The New Hampshire state government seized the occasion of a dispute
between the President of Dartmouth and its Trustees to attempt to change the college
charter in order to bring public representatives directly on to the board. Other changes
affecting the governance of the college, its curriculum, and sectarian linkages were also
in train. New Hampshire maintained that although Dartmouth may have been
established in colonial times as a “private” corporation, it was founded to benefit the
people of the state. Consequently, the public, through the state's legislature, deserved
and required a voice in the operation of the college. The State of New Hampshire
intended to “improve” Dartmouth as a place of learning by modernizing its administration
and curriculum, creating the framework for a university, and encouraging a freer, nonsectarian
atmosphere. Like the University of the United States, this would have been a
distinctly progressive reform in higher education.