Preparing Students For Citizenship: The Pedagogical Vision of Yale's Noah Porter, Harvard's Charles Eliot and Princeton's Woodrow Wilson
Fernandez, Luke O.
The dissertation examines the historic role of elite higher education in
preparing students for active participation in political life. It does this by examining
the pedagogical visions and curricular commitments of Noah Porter (president of Yale
from 1871 to 1886), Charles Eliot (president of Harvard from 1869 to 1909) and
Woodrow Wilson (president of Princeton from 1902 to 1910). Educational historians
have usually cast Eliot as the progressive force in American higher education while
painting Porter and Wilson in diminished or even contrary roles. While this
dissertation does not take issue with the basic thrust of this history, it focuses on
deficiencies in all three of these educators' approaches that served to compromise their
commitment to strong civic education. These educators compromised, or threatened to
compromise, civic education because they ascribed to ideals and practices which are
often at odds with the development of citizenship.
The determination of these educators' civic commitments is circumscribed by
the dissertation's exclusive focus on a republican definition of citizenship.
Republicans equate citizenship with participation in political life and are consequently
threatened by rhetorical and economic practices which appear to discourage political
participation. The dissertation assesses how dedicated Porter, Eliot, and Wilson were
to the ideals of republican citizenship by examining their commitment to forms of
communication that foster political discussion, and by examining their attachment to
economic practices that republican theorists have found inimical to citizenship. The
rhetorical and economic proclivities of Porter, Eliot, and Wilson constitute the main
approaches for gauging their civic commitments. However, these two approaches are
framed and clarified by describing their sympathy for elite and exclusionary forms of
higher education and by delineating their overt exhortations to service and their
attempts to integrate their schools into a larger public sphere.
All of their civic visions were ultimately compromised but they were
compromised in different ways. Eliot's civic commitments were compromised by
rhetorical and economic proclivities that were closely tied to his strong sympathies for
professionalization . Porter's were threatened by an attraction to cloistered living and
by archaic pedagogies. Of the three, Wilson displayed the most abiding civic
commitments. But even Wilson's civic commitments were ultimately compromised
by his attraction to elite forms of education.
A Dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Luke O. Fernandez in May 1997.
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