Darwin Meets the Curriculum

This chapter analyses the 1885 curricular debate between President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard and President James McCosh of Princeton over the comparative merits of prescription and election in the undergraduate course. It contends that Eliot’s laissez-faire approach to higher learning possessed shortcomings, but that McCosh failed to unearth and expound on many of them. Wedded to a skills-based-education rationale based on the principles of faculty psychology, McCosh delivered a rebuke to Eliot that relied too much on mockery and innuendo. The chapter also stresses that McCosh’s defense of required Greek centered on outdated theological concerns The 1885 Eliot-McCosh debate thus amounted to a lost opportunity for supporters of the classical humanities. McCosh’s contentless apologetics for the ancient languages have much to teach proponents of the contemporary humanities in America.