College and Research Libraries EDWARD G. HOLLEY Academic Libraries in 1876 A librarian should be much more than a keeper of books; he should be an educator . . . . The relation ... ought especially to be established between a college librarian and the student readers. No such librarian is fit for his place unless he holds him- self to some degree responsible for the library education of his students . ... Some- how I reproach myself if a student gets to the end of his course without learning how to use the library. All that is taught in college amounts to very little; but if we can send students out self-reliant in their investigations, we have accomplished very much.1 Otis H. Robinson, 1876 In the leading colleges we believe there should be a chair of "books and reading" specially endowed; but in the smaller colleges its duties might be discharged by the professor of English literature, or by an accomplished librarian. 2 William Mathews, 1876 A collection of good books, with a soul to it in the shape of a good librarian, becomes a vitalized power among the impulses by which the world goes on to improvement. . . . the object of books is to be read-read much and often. . . . At the average col- lege it is thought that if anybody gets any good from the library, perhaps it is a few professors; and if anybody gets any amusement, perhaps it is a few students, from the smooth worn volumes of Sterne and Fielding. What it is to investigate, a student rarely knows; what are the allurements of research, a student is rarely taught.3 ALL ACADEMIC LIBRARIANS have heard, to the point of tedium, the story of the venerable John Langdon Sibley, librari- an of Harvard from 1856 to 1877, who reportedly was met by President Charles W. Eliot one day and asked where he was going. Sibley replied with some en- thusiasm that all the books were in the library but two and he was on the way to fetch those. 4 When yet another aca- demic administrator tells this story be- fore any group of librarians, we laugh -J · politely as if we had never heard the Justin Winsor, 1878 anecdote previously, look askance at such antediluvian behavior, and devout- ly wish that no one had ever heard of Sibley and his custodial ways. The moral of the story is easy enough. Librarians are supposed to be educators, fellow sufferers in chasing the elusive footnote back home, to use Catherine Drinker Bowen's felicitous phrase. Yet there is more than a hint in the relish with which our faculty col-. leagues tell the story that suggests li- brarians would still rather conserve I 15 16 I College & Research Libraries • January 1976 their wares than service them. N onethe- less, the point is made that, contrary to the bad old days of the nineteenth cen- tury, higher education has now reached the point of enlightenment where the library is the very heart of the universi- ty and essential to its fundamental pur- poses. After all, we trot these views out at the dedication of new library build- ings and tell each other it is so. Our col- lective memory . of 1876 says that it marked the beginning of a new era in which the academic librarian moved away from the earlier conservatorial fashion, unlocked the doors, opened the alcoves, crossed over the iron railings separating the books and readers, and led students into the promised l'lnd of multiple use of books, period1c~ls, and other good standard library materials. How accurate was that picture and how much was happening to academic libraries in 1876? Was the general pic- ture true? Or do we, as Dee Brown has noted in his book, The Year of the Century: 1876, share the nostalgia and sentimentality of that age in our under- standing?5 That is the author's assign- ment for this initial article celebrating our centennial year. What kind of edu- cation, what kind of library collections, what kind of buildings, and what kind of librarians operated them as Ameri- ca's first century came to a close? As the quotations at the beginning of the article indicate, the struggle to make books used and to make the library an important part of the educational pro- cess had already begun to emerge in 1876. The fact that the quotations sound as fresh today as they did in 1876 may say something about the state of library service or at least about the per- sistence of major issues. That there were librarians around who even be- lieved in such statements will come as a shock to many who view the older American college library as a place of stuffiness, rarely disturbed by students or faculty, and conserved for future gener- ations by librarians like the oft-quoted Sibley who wanted every book in its place on the shelf. Our centennial pro- vides an opportunity to examine more closely some well-known myths as well as to sort out the origin of the concepts upon which we still base many of our actions. The intent of this article is to set the stage for those articles which will fol- low in the course of the year and to try to provide the background upon which subsequent efforts can be built. HIGHER EDUCATION IN 1876 Higher education in 1876 was in a major transitional phase. Basically the change involved a movement, first grad- ual and after 1876 more rapid, from a classically oriented and culturally elitist posture, to a more vocational, scientific, and democratic stance. If, unlike society generally, with the corruption of the closing years of the Grant administra- tion, and the emerging warfare between capital and labor, or science and reli- gion, the colleges and universities were not quite centers of turmoil, they were definitely beginning to examine their mission in society and evaluate the place of the newer disciplines in the curricu- lum. The backbone of the older cur- riculum, despite Thomas Jefferson's earlier attempts at change at the Univer- sity of Virginia, and Francis Wayland's mid-nineteenth century attempts at Brown, had been the classical languages and mathematics, natural philosophy, chemistry, and moral philosophy. 6 Cour- ses in the modern languages and history were tolerated, but science made its way grudgingly in college classrooms. In the two decades after the Civil War all this would change dnimatically. American higher education, a~ Sir Eric Ashby has noted recently, could be typified by the famous comment of Ezra Cornell, who in 1865, founded high above Cayuga's waters "an institution where any person can find instruction in any study."7 In many ways Cornell was a pacesetter for the emerging universities with its voca- j 1 • tionalism and courses in applied science added to the scholarship of the older college. Other universities might adopt somewhat grudgingly, but most would ultimately incorporate some changes from the newer approach. Whether it had been Cornell, or Pres- ident Eliot's elective system at Harvard, or Johns Hopkins' adoption of the Ger- manic model under Gilman, changes were inevitable as the country ap- proached its centennial.8 No social insti- tution could remain untouched by the fundamental changes caused by the Civil War. As Americans poised on the verge of their second century, they were experiencing such changes as seemed likely to. many citizens to threaten the republic itself. While there was the ir- rational optimism that these "sentimen- tal, reverent, earthy, skeptical, generous, rowdy, audacious people"9 were equal to any task they might face, many citi- zens also wondered if the moral decay, increasing corruption of business and government, and unemployment with its consequent poverty might not threaten a crisis more significant than that occa- sioned by the war itself. Changes were occurring with such ra- pidity that older institutions seemed un- able to cope with them. No wonder that the classical curriculum, and even the concept of Mark Hopkins and his log, gave way under the change from an agrarian society to a complex industrial era. Ironically, in the heartland of agrariansim would arise new institu- tions, the land-grant colleges, which would revolutionize agriculture and pro- vide farmers better able to cope with the world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The nation's centennial provided the opportunity to look back with pride in the achievement of a country whose boundaries now stretched from the Atlantic to the Pa- cific and whose institutions would be se- verely tested later in the year in a presi- dential contest where the candidate with Academic Libraries in 1876 I 17 the most votes failed to be elected. Even colleges where the students and faculty were protected from the evils of the world would have to face the conse- quences of the moveJ;Ilents outside their ivy-covered walls. Their curricula, their students, their faculties, and their li- braries would have to adjust to these new changes. And, as often happens to even the most perceptive individuals, they often found themselves unpre- pared for the changes and were am- bivalent in their approach to them. Arthur Bestor has named this period "the transformation of scholarship"10 and Samuel Rothstein has traced the emergence of the concept of reference service in research libraries to this pe- . riod. 11 Whenever the changes actually occurred, there is little doubt that the post-Civil War period represented a fundamental shift in higher education. Two strands appeared to be working to- gether to change the rigid pattern and leadership-oriented curriculum of the older American college: the land-grant idea, with its emphasis upon educating the farm boy or girl in the Midwest, and the research-oriented university on the German model with American vari- ations, exemplified chiefly by the new Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Both developments would owe much to the scientific spirit then abroad in the land as well as the expansion of wealth resulting from the industrial base creat- ed in the North during the Civil War. Scholarship, as Bestor has pointed out, would move from an individual to an institutionalized base,12 with the Ameri- can university becoming the home for professional scholars and providing the necessary libraries, laboratories, univer- sity presses, and, incidentally, the indi- rect subsidies needed by the new profes- sional associations and societies which made possible the dissemination of the results of the new scholarship. To keep these changes and their im- pact upon libraries in perspective, one 18 I College &·Research Libraries • January 1976 needs to look at the broad picture of American higher education in 1876. The -problem . when one repeats · the hoary story of Sibley and casts stones at what seems the incredibly short hours of opening, is that we tend to think in terms of modem colleges and universi- ties trying to cope with more than ten million students, complex curricula, ad- vanced graduate and professional work, and degree production which approach- es 35,000 doctorates annually.13 This phenomenal growth in· higher education has caused great stresses and strains in the 1960s and 1970s; just as the expan- sion of the 1870s did for colleges a hundred years ago. In 1876 there were 356 colleges and universities in the United States. They had 25,647 collegiate and 597 graduate students taught by 3,352 instructors. These colleges also enrolled an addition- al 28,128 students and employed 568 in- structors in their preparatory schools.1.4 Students and faculty members had some kind of access to 1,879,103 volumes in their college libraries plus an additional 425,458 volumes in various society li- braries. .These academic institutions, plus cer- tain other schools to be mentioned pres- ently, conferred a total of 9,179 de- grees in 1876, of which letters and sci- ence degrees (undergraduate mostly) ac- counted for a little over half, medicine for about one-third, and law for one- ninth.15 Just sixteen Ph.D. degrees were awarded in 1876, five at Harvard, three at Syracuse, seven at the University of Pennsylvania, and one at Illinois Wes- leyan, . while Yale, which had conferred the first Ph.D. in America . in 1861, awarded none that.year. 16 Higher edp.cation was, in some ways, more heterogeneous in 1876. The Com- missioner of Education's annual reports differentiated among the various types of institutions. Separate tables were ·giv- en for .colleges. and universities, includ- i~g their preparatory; . classical, and sci- entific departments; ·"superior instruc- tion for women,''· including women's colleges as. well as female institutes, not all of · which were of college · level; schools of science, by which ·he meant not only such institutions as the Law- rence and Sheffield Scientific Schools but also the polytechnics and land-grant col- leges (agriculture and mechanic arts); and the traditional professional schools of theology, law, and· medicine ( includ- ing dentistry and pharmacy). ·Table 1 provides overall figures for students, faculty, and collections · in "higher edu- cation in 1876." Not listed are the nor- mal schools, which were essentially high schools for training elementary teachers and would, for the most part, become teachers colleges ·later in the century. Medicine, whose enrollment seems so large, had not yet responded to Presi- dent Eliot's reforms at Harvard and was thirty-five years removed from Abraham Flexner' s famous report. From the statistical portrait one is struck by the relatively small ·numbers of students involved in higher educa- tion in 1876. That such extensive data are available is due chiefly· to the dedi- cated work of the second commissioner of education, General John Eaton, a former assistant commissioner of the Freedman's Bureau, and a strong pro- ponent of education at all levels, in- cluding that made possible by the public library. 17 With considerable skill Eaton made his reports do double duty: they gave the facts, and he interpreted what those facts meant in a democratic socie- ty; He had noted earlier that the need for education was never greater, since the 1870 census revealed that 5,658,155 citizens over. ten years of age were il- literate out of a ·total population above the age of ten of 28,238,945. In the spirit of Jeffersonian democracy, he did not believe that a democratic society could continue without an educated . ,.~ ;;'tl · g~<~~ _ ... !311) , ~!-a] . co~Zcot- ~~iS·~ ln~ .... .. g! · ''t- ~~c.; "'t' §>< C'l· ~ ~ ln C'l ·.a be ' coco coot-;as:: . :OOftt-ftricoft 'tl·a . ~ ~ ments ' can be seen even m~re dea;ly in o-4~ ~:--'tl the' data on Harvard and Yale; the· larg- ~g . o-4 ft est collegiate institutions in 1876, .with ...... R 821 and 571 students respectively; The ·a~>'; ~ ,_,ft total number ·of freshmen at .Harvard .~ ~ !;< was only 232 and at Yale 154. They. were - <,.... ·~ c;~ taught by 42 and 26 faculty members > > ft ·§ ~ >: r.espectively,19 '"d • v5 ~ Much the same point can be made g ~ ::5 ==ft about the number of graduates. In 1876 [!~ "S> ,;o ~ ="' the University of Michigan was first. 8 ~ ~~· Michigan awarded 409 degrees of which ..s:~ ~ ~ 30 were A.M., 8 Sc.M., 2 Ph.D., 93 M.D., !~ g~ · and 159 LL.B. The College of New ~.a cO'o-4 • · Jersey (Princeton) 'awarded 190 degrees, an~ e ~ft of ·which 73 were A.M. However, one ~ 'g ~ ~ 0 C3 ~ ~ needs to be careful in assessing the A.M. ~ ·~ : ~ degree, which often 'required no course 'tl G) ~J .. work and was often not an "earned de~ ~11 ::5~ ~ ~ .6 g gree."20 Two southern . schools refleqted a> .ii ~ ~ ~ their general poverty in the post- Civil :0: ~= G,)CJ .~ g ~ ~ ~ft~ War period: The University of Vir- ~~~~ .,; 2. ~ ginia awarded o:Qly 5Q degrees, and 22 -o ..... -g$ i~ :g of .those were M.D. and 20 LL.B., while c:: o ol ~ 4) ::!::f·S the University of South Carolina gave ~§=~'tlol.~ ~ ·.g ·s § c~ e 12~ of which 9 were LL.B. ~ S ~ "' g o § . Table 2 provides . a list of all ten col~ :;a~=~..§u ~ ~::: .g],: ~ leges with more than ·· .. 300 students . iP, o ·8 ~ -v; ~ ·~ ~ ·· 1876 and ·Table 3 .a.· list of the principal z 8,'g0l'g~ Qi 11 = C3 ~ C3 o · college and university' libraries as listed