raduates
fell the burden of directing civil and military affairs in state and
nation.

3. THE MODERN ERA

Were a visitor to Harvard or Columbia in 1860 to revisit it today, the
changes he would observe would be startling. The elective system,
graduate studies, professional and technical schools, an allied
woman's college, and a summer session are a few of the most noticeable
activities incorporated since 1860. It would be impossible to set any
date for the beginning of this transformation, so gradual and subtle
has it been, but the accession of Dr. Charles W. Eliot to the
presidency of Harvard College in 1869 and the establishment of Johns
Hopkins University in 1876 are definite landmarks.

This chapter is a history of the American college, and space will not
permit of a detailed description of these activities but simply of a
narration of the way they developed and of the forces which brought
them into being.

=The curriculum and the elective system=

It has already been mentioned that the curriculum of the average
American college at the beginning of the nineteenth century differed
but little from the curriculum followed in the middle of the
seventeenth. The reason is simple. The curriculum is based upon the
biological principle of adaptation to environment, and the environment
of the average American of 1800 differed but slightly from his
ancestor of a century and a half previous. The growth of the
curriculum follows, slowly it is often true, upon the growth of
knowledge. The growth of knowledge during the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries was slow and insignificant compared to its
marvelous growth in the nineteenth century, particularly in the last
half of it. The great discoveries in science, first in chemistry, then
in physics and biology, resulted in their gradually displacing much of
the logic and philosophy which had maintained the prime place in the
old curriculum. The interest aroused in the French language and
literature by our Revolution; in the Spanish by the South American
wars of independence; and in the German by the distinguished scholars
who studied in the German universities during the middle decades of
the nineteenth century, caused a demand that those languages as well
as English have a place in the curriculum. This could be secured only
by making them partly alternatives to the classical languages. The
Industrial Revolution, based as it was upon the application of science
to industry,