Between Harvard and America: The Educational Leadership of Charles W. Eliot

by Hugh Hawkins

Overview

"Charles William Eliot, President of Harvard from 1869 until 1909, was unquestionably the most influential leader of American higher education during the last one hundred years. Both born and married into Boston high society, he brought wisdom, administrative skill, tough-minded vision, and, above all, patience to his leadership of the nation's oldest and most prestigious college. In his 40 years as president Eliot transformed that college into America's leading university, becoming at the same time a prototype of the modern university executive. Charles Eliot was a man of affairs as well as judgment, a spokesman for American culture as well as higher education, and a consummate blend of conservatism and innovation in an age when each was highly valued.

Hugh Hawkins has written a book to match the man. Neither biography nor institutional history, this unconventional account traces the interaction between Eliot and Harvard on the one hand and American society on the other. In the process we encounter virtually every social question impinging upon education with which we are still dealing... Eliot had to resolve issues involving federal aid to higher education, the mixture of required and elective studies in both undergraduate and professional schooling, the relationship between teaching, research, and institutional health and prestige, the political activities of faculty and students, and the proper role of faculty, administration, and laymen in governing universities. Hawkins explores these questions in great depth and with a sure grasp of what their answers mean in the everyday lives of faculty and students. Calling upon a wealth of original research and previous scholarship, he outlines pressures, problems, and temptations which have a very contemporary ring." — The Journal of Higher Education

"Hugh Hawkins has written a lucid, stimulating account of the most crucial turning-point in the history of American higher education... Hawkins' scholarship is resourceful and meticulous... He writes with great clarity, attentiveness, and control... His thoroughness and cool intelligence produce solid monographic history at its very best... an important contribution to the social history of the age." — Laurence Veysey, The Journal of American History

"A thorough, well balanced appraisal of Eliot and of his relationship to Harvard and to American society. Mr. Hawkins has admirably combined historical analysis and narrative biography with mutually beneficial consequences." — John H. Fischer, Teachers College, Columbia University

"[A] fascinating and thought-provoking assessment of Eliot and the university milieu in which he operated... the book is a delight to read. The text does have a crisp quality, and it resonates from the author's obviously diligent researches... Hawkins has pieced together a first-rate portrait of a formidable man bringing great talents to bear on the many-faceted problem of improving education in the United States." — The New England Quarterly

"This is a first-rate study... informed, thoughtful, and well written." — The American Historical Review

"Hawkins argues that Eliot's liberalism became a force in Harvard's transformation, freeing faculty and students for a new kind of university life. Hawkins has formulated a major thesis, important for understanding both Eliot and the transformation of education in the second half of the nineteenth century. He also has written a committed, relevant book... the significance of Harvard in the academic revolution emerges more vividly than ever... In two superb chapters... Hawkins describes a process of historical change far beyond anything Eliot himself might have comprehended fully. Hawkins triumphs over the static, snap-shot effect of a structural analysis. He presents a dynamic story of a growing university..." — History of Education Quarterly

Product Details

BN ID:	2940162573630
Publisher:	Plunkett Lake Press
Publication date:	05/17/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Hugh Dodge Hawkins (1929-2016), the youngest of five children whose father was a dispatcher for the Rock Island Railroad, was born in Topeka, Kansas, graduated from high school in El Reno, Oklahoma, spent a semester at Washburn University in Topeka and switched to DePauw University in Indiana before going to study intellectual history in 1950 at Johns Hopkins University where he received his doctorate in 1954. Drafted into the Army, he spent two years in clerical jobs, mostly in Germany, before taking a job as instructor of history at North Carolina State University. In 1957, he joined Amherst College, where he stayed for 43 years until his retirement in 2000 as Anson D. Morse professor of history and American studies emeritus.

At Amherst, Hawkins held a joint appointment as professor of history and American studies. A civil rights activist, he flew to Selma, Alabama, in the summer of 1965 to participate in protests, and heard the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speak during a training session in Atlanta. Back at Amherst, he worked to expand diversity and to introduce African-American studies in the curriculum.

His first major book, Pioneer: A History of the Johns Hopkins University, published in 1960 received the American Historical Association’s Moses Coit Taylor Prize for best manuscript in intellectual history. His other books are Between Harvard and America: The Educational Leadership of Charles W. Eliot, Banding Together: The Rise of National Associations in American Higher Education, 1887-1950, and the more personal Railwayman’s Son: A Plains Family Memoir, They Spoke, I Listened: A Life in Quotes, and The Escape of the Faculty Wife and Other Stories.

As a gay professor who started teaching when his sexual orientation could end his career, Hawkins began in 1958 a long-term relationship with Walter Richard, with whom he shared a home in Plainfield, Massachusetts until Richard died in 2012.