Liberal Education as a Vocation: 19th Century Practices for 21st Century Institutions

“Is individuality with us also going to count for nothing,” the Harvard philosopher and psychologist William James lamented in 1903, “unless stamped and licensed and authenticated by some title-giving machine?” Like so many critics of higher education past and present, James saw the business model of the modern college to be corrosive to what he saw as its counter-cultural mission —the moral and spiritual emancipation of individuals. In nineteenth-century America, however, education for freedom typically happened in places besides a college campus — embodied in habits of reading, writing, and speaking, enacted across formal and informal social contexts dedicated to self-improvement and mutual aid. This presentation seeks to locate the twentieth-century college within a nineteenth-century landscape of character education, amidst institutions such as the lyceum, the public library, and the settlement house. What might spaces and practices of liberal education prior to the expansion of higher education teach us about the cultural politics of distinction in our own time? And what lessons might the material and social history of the liberal arts in nineteenth-century America offer “the degree-granting machine” as it adapts to new forms of technological disruption, commercial innovation, and social inequality