The Polytechnic Comes to America: How French Approaches to Science Instruction Influenced Mid-Nineteenth Century American Higher Education

Abstract

When it comes to foreign influences on American higher education, the historiographies of science and education have largely focused on two dominant models: British and German. British patterns of collegiate instruction dominated how and what early Americans learned in college. The earliest colonial institutions, such as Harvard, Yale, and William and Mary, reflected the values and traditions that colonists brought with them - centred on discipline, morals, character, and a great deal of Latin and Greek - and set the standard for institutions that followed. The historiography suggests that this British, classics-centred monopoly began to erode in the nineteenth century. Germanic traditions of research and Wissenschaft started to make inroads by way of individual scientists who studied in Berlin, Leipzig, Gottingen, and Heidelberg and who returned to the United States ready to reform educational practices at home. The crowning achievement for this line of reformers appeared with the founding of a graduate-level, research-oriented institution - Johns Hopkins University - in 1876. With the opening of Johns Hopkins, the story of European influences on American higher education often comes to a close. According to historians, reformers, from that point forward, took up the task of grafting graduate-level studies (German) upon the established undergraduate college (British). This gave rise to the American university.1Missing from this story as it is often told, is the French influence on American institutions. This is an oversight largely born out of a scholarly blind spot. The size, number, and significance of liberal arts colleges and research universities has cast a long shadow in the literature over the formation of specialized institutes of science and technology. In other words, attention to British and German patterns of education has in effect crowded out interest in the French.2Despite the oversight, French approaches to higher education had a profound impact on nineteenth century American higher education. This paper will explore this understudied influence by first examining the science-centred reform fervour that gripped antebellum colleges. The reform fervour and the strong backlash that followed allowed for the rise of alternative, French-styled technical institutions. This study will then consider four case studies - West Point, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Clemson University - that offer a starting point for assessing how elements of the Parisian Grande Ecole system, especially the Polytechnique, came to America. They either came into being as a result of a direct French influence or took on French patterns of science instruction that significantly characterized the nature of the institution's work. They did so within a context marked by dramatic change in terms of the classical college as well as public attitudes toward science instruction. The case studies presented in this paper are significant in that these institutions (which still exist) offered organizational forms that contributed to the rise of the modern university. They also allow historians to consider developments throughout the nineteenth century (antebellum, Civil War, post-bellum) and the country (northern versus southern regions in the USA). Furthermore, they are sufficiently varied so as to suggest that the French Ecole system was multi-faceted rather than homogenous. Thus, while illuminating the making of American science education, and its cross-national character, this study is also able to provide some insights on other national contexts such as the French.SCIENCE AND THE ANTEBELLUM COLLEGEAt the start of the nineteenth century science instruction in America was marginal to the work of traditional classical colleges. If college students of the era wanted science instruction they looked not to the college but to medical schools. Yale made a rare exception with the hiring of Benjamin Silliman in 1804. …