"The Most Powerful Instrument of College Discipline": Student Disorder and the Growth of Meritocracy in the Colleges of the Early Republic

Abstract

America's founding fathers seemed to agree: one of the best means to secure a virtuous new republic would be through the education of the upcoming generation. Even as faction gave way to party divisions, few disputed the importance of educational institutions. America's most promising youth would complete their training in citizenship and preparation for governmental leadership in college. The optimism of this vision for American schooling was perhaps best displayed in the prize-winning essay of University of Pennsylvania graduate and Jeffersonian newspaper editor Samuel Harrison Smith. In his anonymous 1797 essay for the American Philosophical Society, Smith identified the benefits of education for both the individual and society. The citizen would learn to protect liberty for himself and others: “(He) will be a free man in its truest sense. He will know his rights, and he will understand the rights of others.” If Americans could collectively concentrate on the science of government, they might achieve its perfection: “No circumstance could so rapidly promote the growth of this science as a universal illumination of mind. The minds of millions centering in one point could not fail to produce the sublimest discoveries.” In its perfected state, America would truly serve as a city upon the hill: “She would soon become a model for the nations of the earth.”