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The history of higher education in the United States is, in large measure, the story of the struggle to combine the German university and the British college. The first American university was Harvard, which included among its founders several Oxford graduates and about thirty-five Puritans, who were graduates of Cambridge’s Emmanuel College. Their firm commitment to the model of residential colleges with a strong emphasis on moral character development led the Puritans to harbor deep suspicions of education that had little practical purpose. For early pioneers—educational and otherwise—the aim of education was to train leaders for service in church, state and society. This practical orientation was reinforced by a profound sense of pragmatism that runs deep in the American grain. For many people who came to the New World, classical European education appeared to be antidemocratic and reflected aristocratic ideals from which they had fled. When universities strayed too far from principles of practicality, various legislative authorities often intervened. In 1850, for example, the Massachusetts General Court “called on Harvard to reform5 its curriculum in order to prepare ‘better farmers, mechanics, or merchants.’ ” Half a century later, Theodore Roosevelt expressed a similar sentiment on the occasion of the dedication of a new law school building at the University of Chicago: “We need to produce,6 not genius, not brilliancy, but the homely, commonplace, elemental virtues.” Such views did not, of course, go uncontested. At the same time as the Massachusetts court was issuing its edict, Henry Tappan, who would soon become the president of the University of Michigan, complained: “We have cheapened education7 so as to place it within the reach of everyone.” This concern reflects sentiments also expressed by Nathan Lord, president of Dartmouth from 1828 to 1863, when he insisted that college education was not intended for people who planned to “engage in mercantile,8 mechanical, or agricultural operations.”

Eventually, workable compromises between contrasting views of higher education were reached. Though the British college has been very important for American higher education, the model of the German research university also played a significant role from the country’s early days. In 1824, Thomas Jefferson, to the dismay of many of his critics, recruited faculty members from Germany and England to teach at the University of Virginia. The most important effect of German influence came in 1876, when Johns Hopkins used the proceeds from his Baltimore and Ohio Railway to create the first American university devoted to “pure scholarship.” Initially, it appeared that universities would be committed primarily to original research and scholarship, while colleges would have the responsibility for teaching the history and tradition of different disciplines and passing on the results of work being done at universities. However, a mere two years after Hopkins’s initiative, historian of higher education Frederick Rudolph points out, Charles William Eliot used the occasion of his inaugural address at Harvard to insist on the necessity of “purposefully obliterating9 or at least diffusing the lines between undergraduate and graduate, between collegiate and scholarly.” The poles of debate have remained relatively constant ever since.

American higher education has consistently wrestled with the problem of balancing the practical and the impractical, the common and the elite, the applied and the theoretical. The challenge of teaching is not merely to convey information but also to encourage students to ask questions they never imagined asking. This is what it means to think critically. But asking such questions is not enough; it is also necessary for students to learn how to formulate a position and develop thoughtful arguments to defend it. As I have suggested, there are practical implications to the most theoretical inquiry, and therefore questions