The Yale Report of 1828 and Liberal Education: A Neorepublican Manifesto

Abstract

In recent years, historians of higher education have mercifully taken us beyond the pinched and narrow conventional view of the nineteenthcentury college curriculum to a more meaningful contextual interpreta tion of that much maligned institution. In the process they have reinter preted the "Old College's" principal manifesto: the Yale Report of 1828. Earlier studies had depicted the Yale Report as either a document ce menting a collegiate education to the past or as one aimed at maintaining "a numerically tiny social elite against the hostile pressure of a rising Jacksonian equalitarianism." Recent studies have revised this interpre tation, on the one hand by arguing that the report simply reaffirmed the liberal arts as taught through the classical curriculum, and on the other by contending that it was "actually a thoughtful, responsible attempt to consider the place of the undergraduate college in the totality of the American educational scheme." Instead of representing the last "bulwark of educational reactionism, elitism, and authoritarianism," the revision ists argue, the report did not significantly differ "in its essentials from the vision held by most of America's foremost champions of university reform." 1 Jack C. Lane is Weddell Professor of American History at Rollins College. 1 The first quotation ("tiny social elite") is from Laurence Veysey, "Stability and Experiment in American Undergraduate Curriculum," in Content and Context: Essays on College Education, ed. Carl Kaysen (New York, 1973), 2. The other quotations are from Douglas Sloan, "Harmony, Chaos, and Consensus: The American College Curriculum," Teachers College Record 73 (Dec. 1971): 221-51. See pages 242-47 for a discussion of the Yale Report. Other writers who have interpreted the Yale Report as a conservative, even reactionary, statement are Richard Hofstadter and E. Dewitt Hardy, The Development and Scope of Higher Education in the United States

Legacies of the Yale Report of 1828 in Liberal Education

“…(Potts, 2010: 5-6, 8;Pak, 2008: 40;Geiger, 2015: 174-175, 194-195, n. 43 (Potts, 2010: 11-12, 21-22;Kimball, 2010: 263 (Geiger, 2015: 175-187;Potts, 2010: 15-20, 24-25, 44-45;Herbst, 2004: 220- (Urofsky, 1965: 53-67;Schmidt, 1936: 46-47;Kimball, 2010: 264, 265, n. 90 (Pak, 2008: 31-32, 43-44 (Pak, 2008: 35-38, 43-44, 56;Kimball, 2010: 264, 265, n. 90;Lane, 1987: 325). (Geiger, 2015: 188, 190, 202;Herbst, 2004: 231 (Geiger, 2015: 190, 202, 213;Geiger, 2010: 230-233;Potts, 2010: 1, 6, 24 (Herbst, 2004: 224;Kimball, 1995: 37-38, 165 (Rothblatt, 1976: 130 (Kimball, 2010, 265-266, n. 91: Pak, 2008한철희, 2009: 413-416 (Kimball, 1995: 152;Herbst, 2004: 230 (Pak, 2008: 34, 51-52;Potts, 2010: 46-47 (Lane, 1987: 336, 337-338, Neem, 2019Potts, 2010: 46-47…”