| This study focuses on the work and ideas of four southern university administrators between 1880 and 1915. Edwin Alderman of the University of Virginia, Samuel Mitchell of the University of South Carolina, Walter Barnard Hill of the University of Georgia, and Charles Dabney of the University of Tennessee are the principal figures in this analysis. Promoting administrative reorganization and executive control, educational modernizers tried to graft the idea of progressive efficiency onto state universities. Similarly, they stood behind academic specialization, professionalization, technical instruction, and curricular reform in the interest of making higher education more responsive to the social needs of the New South. By promoting university extension, agricultural education, high school development and, in general, social reform, progressives in state higher education encouraged the idea that the university was an instrument of the state. educational progressives solidified the service idea of higher education by forging stronger hands between state governments and their universities. In the process, they played an important role in southern state formation. They also exerted their influence in the reinforcement of the South's traditional social conventions. By promoting a brand of education which they believed was peculiarly adapted to the capacities of southern blacks and their function in the region's economy, progressives endorsed black subordination. Together with their emphasis on middle-class social leadership and poor white compliance, educational progressives helped create a social order marked by race and class divisions.; Propelling educational reform, both at the high school and university level, was the vision a New South revitalized by practical education. Economic regeneration, progressives believed, required professional education and practical training. The classical tradition of the antebellum southern colleges came under steady attack from educational reformers. While American higher education experienced something of a crisis over the proper function of university training, many southern state colleges adopted practical education as their guiding principle. The trend toward a practical pedagogy did not preclude liberal or classical training; instead it achieved an uneasy alliance with the traditional curriculum. But the university presidents examined in this study spoke the language of practical education and social service, subordinating liberal culture to the demands for trained experts and professionalization. In this way, state universities under the guidance of educational progressives like Dabney, Hill, Alderman, and Mitchell cooperated in the emergence of the "Advancing South." (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
