In "Harvard College by an Oxonian" Dr. George Birkbeck Hill suggests that John Harvard expected others to found similar institutions which collectively were to reproduce the University of Cambridge in New England. The supposition is by no means impossible, and the manuscript records in the Harvard Library would perhaps reward research. But whatever the intention, it is abundantly clear that in the full English sense of the word no second college was established at Cambridge. The first constitution was in all essentials the same as that of to-day. Hutchinson's "History of Massachusetts" records (1676): "There are but four fellowships, the two seniors have each 30l. per ann. and the two juniors 15l., but no diet is allowed: There are tutors to all such as are admitted students.... The government of these colledges is in the governor and magistrates of Massachusetts and the president of the colledge, together with the teaching elders of the six adjacent towns." The fellows are the forbears of the modern corporation, the tutors of the faculty; and though the institution has been separated from the state, the "teaching elders" are the earliest overseers. Furthermore, the endowment of Harvard has remained undivided; and generations elapsed before the present very un-English division was made by which the teaching force is separated into independent faculties for arts and the various professions. From the first the "college" was a "university" in that it granted degrees; and less than twenty years after its founding the two terms are used as synonymous; an appendix to what is called the charter of Harvard "College" calls the institution a "University." This confusion of terms still persists, and is found at most other American institutions, the constitutions of which were largely modeled after that of Harvard. For generations the endowments and the teaching force of the American college and university were identical. Thus as regards its constitution the typical American university is a single English college writ large.
Almost from the outset, however, there were, in one sense of the word, several colleges. In "An Inventory of the whole Estate of Harvd Colledge taken by the President & Fellows as they find the same to be Decemb. 10, 1654," the first two items are as follows:—
"Imprs. The building called the old colledge, conteyning a Hall, Kitchen, Buttery, Cellar, Turrett & 5 Studeys & therin 7 chambers for students in them. A Pantry & small corne Chamber. A library & Books therin, vallued at 400lb.
"It. Another house called Goffes colledge, & was purchased of Edw: Goffe. conteyning five chambers. 18 studyes. a kitchen cellar & 3 garretts."[3]
It is to be noted that "Old Colledge," which was Harvard's building, had a kitchen, buttery, and cellar, a pantry and a small corn chamber, and was thus primitively modeled after an English hall or college. Presumably the inmates, like their cousins across the water, dined in the hall. As for "Goffe's colledge," granting that the punctuation of the inventory is intentional, it had a kitchen cellar, which would seem to imply a kitchen; and it is not impossible that there should be a comma after "kitchen." No hall is mentioned, and it is hardly likely that there could have been so imposing a room in what was built for a private house; but it would have been possible and natural to serve meals in the largest of the five "chambers." A third building Hutchinson's history describes as "a small brick building called the Indian Colledge, where some few Indians did study, but now it is a printing house," the first printing house in British America. The two earliest buildings at Harvard would thus be the abodes of separate communities, and though I can find no intimation as to the Indian College, it can scarcely be doubted that since it was established for the separate use of the redskins, it contained a separate living-plant. A later record shows that there was a separate kitchen in the first Stoughton Hall.
These early "colledges" at Harvard are more properly termed halls, and such as survived are now so called. They had probably little in common with the democratic English halls of the Middle Ages. Both at Oxford and at Cambridge the halls of the seventeenth century were, as I have said, mere pendants of the colleges; they must have had a separate character as a social community and a certain independence; but if they had separate endowments, they did not manage them, and each of them depended for its instruction mainly on the college to which it was affiliated. The printed records of the early American halls are too meagre to warrant definite conclusions; but they seem to show that the halls were conceived in the spirit of the English hall of the seventeenth century, in that they provided for separate social and residential communities without separate endowment or teaching force. If the increase of students at Harvard had been rapid, it is not unlikely that many new halls would have been established, each the home of a complete community; but for half a century the number fluctuated between fifteen and thirty. If we take the English estimate of two hundred and fifty as the largest feasible size for a single community, the limit was not reached until as late as 1840. By 1676 the timber "colledge" built at the charge of Mr. Harvard, which bore his name, had been superseded by the first Harvard Hall, which Hutchinson describes as "a fair pile of brick building covered with tiles by reason of the late Indian warre not yet finished.... It contains twenty chambers for students, two in a chamber, a large hall which serves for a chapel; over that a convenient library." In these ample accommodations it was found that the student body could be most conveniently and cheaply fed as a single community. Thus, like the idea of a group of colleges with separate finances and teaching bodies, the idea of separate residential halls must have passed away with the generation of divines educated in England. The American college and the American university remained identical, not only educationally and in their finances, but as a social organization. This fact has caused a curious reversion in America toward the mediæval type of university, both socially and educationally.
As the university has expanded, it has declined socially: to-day the residential life is only a degree better than that in the ancient chamberdekyns. Educationally, the reversion has been fortunate: the university is alive to the needs of the life about it. If it here resembles the modern German universities, this is largely due to the fact that both have more faithfully preserved the system and the spirit of the Middle Ages: the resemblance is quite as much a matter of native growth in America as of foreign imitation. In England, the mediæval idea of a multiplicity of residential bodies has survived, and the educational idea of the mediæval university has perished. In Germany, the educational idea has survived, and the old community life has perished. In America, the two ideas have survived by virtue of their identity. But for the same reason both are in a rudimentary and very imperfect state of development.
V
THE PROBLEMS OF THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY
I