Educationist, born in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Trained as a mathematician and chemist at Harvard and in Europe, he taught at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before assuming the presidency of Harvard (18691909). Having signalled his progressivism in The New Education (1869), he presided over a period of intense growth and reform at Harvard, which included the admission of women (1879) and the establishment of Radcliffe College (1894). His landmark report (1892) on secondary schools led to the standardization of public school curricula and the formation in 1901 of the Board of College Entrance Examinations. In later years he became widely known as the editor of the Harvard Classics, a set of significant books that were said to provide a complete education in a five-foot shelf.
Charles William Eliot (March 20, 1834 – August 22, 1926) was selected as Harvard's president in 1869. Eliot served the longest term as president in the university's history.
Background
The scion of a wealthy Boston family, Eliot was graduated from Harvard in 1853. In spite of his high ambitions and his obvious scientific talents, the first fifteen years of Eliot's career were less than auspicious. He was appointed Tutor in Mathematics at Harvard in the fall of 1854 and promoted to Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Chemistry in 1858. He taught competently, wrote some technical pieces on chemical impurities in industrial metals, and busied himself with schemes for the reform of Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School. Eliot had to face the fact that "he had nothing to look to but his teacher's salary and a legacy left to him by his grandfather Lyman." After a bitter struggle over the Rumford chair, Eliot left Harvard in 1863.
Eliot's approach to investigating European education was unusual. When Eliot visited schools, he took an interest in every aspect of institutional operation, from curriculum and methods of instruction through physical arrangements and custodial services. But his particular concern was with the relation between education and economic growth:
"I have given special attention to the schools here provided for the education of young men for those arts and trades which require some knowledge of scientific principles and their applications, the schools which turn out master workmen, superintendents, and designers for the numerous French industries which demand taste, skill, and special technical instruction.
Eliot understood the interdependence of education and enterprise. "Every one of the famous universities of Europe was founded by Princes or privileged classes - every Polytechnic School, which I have visited in France or Germany, has been supported in the main by Government," he wrote to his cousin.
"Now this is not our way of managing these matters of education, and we have not yet found any equivalent, but republican, method of producing the like results. In our generation I hardly expect to see the institutions founded which have produced such results in Europe, and after they are established they do not begin to tell upon the national idustries for ten or twenty years. The Puritans thought they must have trained ministers for the Church and they supported Harvard College - when the American people are convinced that they require more competent chemists, engineers, artists, architects, than they now have, they will somehow establish the institutions to train them.
While Eliot was in Europe, he was again presented with the opportunity to enter the world of active business. In spite of the urgings of his friends and the attractiveness of what for the time was the enormous salary of $5000 (plus a good house, rent free), Eliot, after giving considerable thought to the offer, turned it down. During nearly two years in Europe he had found himself as much fascinated by what he could learn concerning the methods by which science could be made to help industry as by what he discovered about the organization of institutions of learning.
Eliot's Career and the Crisis in the College
By the middle of the nineteenth century, American higher education was in crisis. Few offered courses in the sciences, modern languages, history, or political economy - and only a handful had graduate or professional schools.
As businessmen became increasingly reluctant to send their sons to schools whose curricula offered nothing useful - or to donate money for their support, some educational leaders began exploring ways of making higher education more attractive. Some backed the establishment of specialized schools of science and technology, like Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School, Yale's Sheffield Scientific School, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Harvard was at the center of this crisis. Boston's business leaders, many of them Harvard alumni, were pressing for change - though with no clear idea of the kinds of changes they wanted.
On his return to the United States in 1865, Eliot accepted an appointment as Professor of Analytical Chemistry at the newly-founded Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Early in 1869, Eliot presented his ideas about reforming American higher education in a compelling two-part article, "The New Education," in The Atlantic Monthly, the nation's leading journal of opinion. "We are fighting a wilderness, physical and moral," Eliot declared in setting forth his vision of the American university, "for this fight we must be trained and armed." The articles resonated powerfully with the businessmen who controlled the Harvard Corporation.
Eliot’s educational vision incorporated important elements of Unitarian and Emersonian ideas about character development, framed by a pragmatic understanding of the role of higher education in economic and political leadership. His concern in "The New Education" was not merely curriculum, but the ultimate utility of education. A college education could enable a student to make intelligent choices, but should not attempt to provide specialized vocational or technical training. Although technical training should be more explicitly vocational, it should also include instruction in history, languages, political economy, as well as providing a broad knowledge of science and mathematics. Only by differentiating the two levels of the educational process and making each as comprehensive as possible, could higher education hope to prepare students to cope with the rapid pace of technological, economic, and political change. A truly useful education, in Eliot's view, included a commitment to public service, specialized training, and a capacity to change and adapt.
Although his methods were pragmatic, Eliot's ultimate goal, like those of the secularized Puritanism of the Boston elite, was a spiritual one.
While he proposed the reform of professional schools, the development of research faculties, and, in general, a huge broadening of the curriculum, his blueprint for undergraduate education in crucial ways preserved - and even enhanced - its traditional spiritual and character education functions.
But Eliot’s goal went well beyond Emersonian self-actualization for its own sake. Framed by the higher purposes of a research university in the service of the nation, specialized expertise could be harnessed to public purposes. "When the revelation of his own peculiar taste and capacity comes to a young man, let him reverently give it welcome, thank God, and take courage," Eliot declared in his inaugural address:
"Thereafter he knows his way to happy, enthusiastic work, and, God willing, to usefulness and success.
Eliot did not understate the urgency of the task of educational reform. "As a people," he proclaimed,
"we do not apply to mental activities the principle of division of labor;
Under Eliot's leadership, Harvard adopted an "elective system" which vastly expanded the range of courses offered and permitted undergraduates unrestricted choice in selecting their courses of study - with a view to enabling them to discover their "natural bents" and pursue them into specialized studies. A monumental expansion of Harvard's graduate and professional school and departments facilitated specialization, while at the same time making the university a center for advanced scientific and technological research.
Eliot's Legacy
Under Eliot, Harvard became a national institution, recruiting its students from around the country using standardized entrance examination and hiring distinguished scholars from home and abroad. Eliot was an administrative reformer, reorganizing the university's faculty into schools and departments and replacing recitations with lectures and seminars. Eliot attracted the support of major donors from among the nation's growing plutocracy, making it the wealthiest private university in the world.
Eliot's leadership not only made Harvard the pace-setter for other American colleges and universities, but a major figure in the reform of secondary school education. Both the elite boarding schools, most of them founded during his presidency, and the public high schools shaped their curricula to meet Harvard's demanding standards. Eliot was a key figure in the creation of standardized admissions examinations, as a founding member of the College Entrance Examining Board.
As leader of the nation's wealthiest and best-known university, Eliot was necessarily a celebrated figure whose opinions were sought on a wide variety of matters, from tax policy (he offered the first coherent rationale for the charitable tax exemption) to the intellectual welfare of the general public.
Eliot was a fearless crusader not only for educational reform, but for many of the goals of the progressive movement -- whose most prominent figure head was Theodore Roosevelt (Class of 1880) and most eloquent spokesman was Herbert Croly (Class of 1889). Eliot was an articulate opponent of American imperialism and an advocate for racial equality. (Many talented African Americans were educated at Harvard during Eliot's tenure, including such notables as W.E.B. Washington was awarded an honorary degree by Harvard in 1896. Lawrence Lowell, Eliot opposed efforts to limit the admission of Jews and Roman Catholics.
Though he retired from Harvard's presidency in 1909, Eliot lived until 1926.
Eliot's son, Charles Eliot (November 1, 1859-March 25, 1897) was an important landscape architect, responsible for the public park system in Boston.
Eliot's opposition to football
During his tenure, Eliot opposed football and tried unsuccessfully to abolish the game at Harvard.
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