F. A. P. Barnard and Columbia College: Prologue to a University

Abstract

IN THE LAST TWO DECADES of the nineteenth century Columbia College in the city of New York emerged as a modern university. Years of reform agitation culminated in major innovations: a graduate school of political science, Barnard College for women, Teachers College, expanded library facilities, and revised governing statutes. These changes reflected not merely national trends, though the obvious successes of Johns Hopkins and Harvard played important roles, but also the confluence of a number of features particular to Columbia. New faculty members-most importantly John Burgess-arrived with training from the research-oriented German universities. The governing board of trustees began, for the first time, to reflect New York's commercial and internationally oriented classes. Similarly, a generation of postCivil War liberal arts graduates, having found their classical education inadequate to industrial America, now provided organized pressure for curriculum reform and more advanced studies. But underlying these, were two and a half decades of agitation by Columbia's President F. A. P. Barnard for a university not a college--twenty-five years of hope and frustration. (r)