Thinker

Charles William Eliot

He ran Harvard for forty years and gave American students the right to choose what they studied.

President of Harvard University, 1869-1909

Charles William Eliot was born in Boston on March 20, 1834, into a prominent New England family. He graduated from Harvard in 1853, taught mathematics and chemistry there, traveled to Europe to study educational systems, and returned to accept a professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In early 1869, he published a two-part essay in The Atlantic Monthly titled "The New Education," arguing that American colleges needed to broaden their curricula beyond classical studies.1

The essay caught the attention of Harvard's governing board. In October 1869, at thirty-five years old, Eliot was inaugurated as the youngest president in Harvard's history. He would hold the position for forty years, longer than any other Harvard president.2

Eliot's most consequential reform was the elective system. Before his presidency, Harvard students followed a prescribed classical curriculum with little choice. Eliot proposed that students should be free to select courses based on their own interests and aptitudes. By 1884, he had extended some choice even to freshmen. By the 1890s, the elective system at Harvard was nearly unrestricted.3

The elective system produced the college major. If students could choose what to study, they needed a framework for organizing those choices into a coherent program. Specialization followed freedom, and both became structural features of American higher education.

The number of years Charles William Eliot served as president of Harvard, from 1869 to 1909.

Eliot's influence extended beyond Harvard. In 1892, the National Education Association appointed him chairman of the Committee of Ten, charged with standardizing what American high schools should teach. The committee's 1893 report recommended four courses of study, all emphasizing rigorous academic preparation, and rejected the idea that different curricula should be offered to students based on whether they planned to attend college.4

Under Eliot, Harvard's enrollment grew from roughly 1,000 to 3,000 students, the faculty expanded from 49 to 278 members, and the endowment rose from 2.3 million to 22.5 million dollars.5 Woodrow Wilson, at Eliot's ninetieth birthday celebration, said of him that no one had ever made a deeper impression on the educational system of a country. Eliot died at Northeast Harbor, Maine, on August 22, 1926.6

Timeline

1869

Eliot is inaugurated as the twenty-second president of Harvard at age thirty-five, the youngest in the university's history.

1884

Harvard extends some course selection to freshmen, expanding the elective system across all class years.

1893

Eliot chairs the Committee of Ten, whose report standardizes what American high schools should teach.

1909

Eliot retires after forty years as president, having expanded Harvard's enrollment, faculty, and endowment several times over.

Endnotes

1 Charles W. Eliot, "The New Education," The Atlantic Monthly, February and March 1869.

2 "Charles William Eliot," Encyclopaedia Britannica.

3 Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968).

4 National Education Association, Report of the Committee on Secondary School Studies (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1893).

5 Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636-1936 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936).

6 Henry James, Charles W. Eliot: President of Harvard University, 1869-1909, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930).