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Some Mathematicians Are Different

This is a modified page scan of “The Ugly Duckling” a story from “Fairy tales and stories” by Hans Christian Anderson, translated by Hans Lien Brækstad, with illustrations by Hans Tegner. The book was originally published in 1900. and as such is in the Public Domain. Image is courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

From the comments I received after I published the recent post Are All Mathematicians Crazy?, it is obvious that I didn’t convince many readers that some mathematicians are almost normal. I readily admit that some mathematicians are off the chart on the eccentric side of the normality continuum. These famous curve busters make it difficult for the rest of us. There are mathematicians who indeed were strange birds and didn’t always fit the normal mode. They were different and stood out from their peers. Through the years, these unconventional mavericks have gotten most of the press coverage. Once you admit that you are a mathematician, you are automatically branded as different. 

In a series of posts, I will discuss some of the more stranger mathematicians among us. The earliest outlier that I want to discuss is Pythagoras of Samos (c. 570 – c. 495 BC).  He has been called by many the leading philosopher and ethicist of his day. Since there is no record of Pythagoras ever putting quill to papyrus, we have none of his works in his own words. All that we know of him and his teachings are what others have recorded. If half of the legends concerning Pythagoras are true, then in today’s vernacular, he could easily be labeled “a strange duck.”

Cropped photograph of the bust of Pythagoras in the Vatican Museum. Pythagoras is portrayed as a tired old man. This photograph was uploaded to English Wikipedia by Andargor in March 2008. Andragor released the image to the public domain. Image courtesy of Andragor and Wikimedia Commons.

Although he influenced many great philosophers, ethicists, and mathematicians, he is probably best known for the formula bearing his name, the Pythagorean Theorem, which states that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. However, Pythagoras didn’t discover this formula since it was used in construction in Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations at least one millennium before he lived. It bears his name because Pythagoras is credited with the first generalized proof of this relationship, which is the proof I referenced in my previous post Are All Mathematicians Crazy?.

In terms of Pythagoras’ life, there are many contradictory stories. We believe he was born on Samos, a Greek Island in the Aegean Sea near modern day Turkey. His father most likely was a European merchant living and trading on Samos. Legend has it that Pythagoras, as a child and young man, traveled extensively throughout Asia, Asia Minor, Europe, and Africa. He reportedly sat under the tutelage of the best teachers and priests in Asia Minor, India, Egypt, and Greece.

Photograph of a page from the book “The Story of the greatest nations” by Ellis and Horn, published in 1913. The scene depicts the Pythagorean School in Croton. Since the book was published before 1924, it is in the Public Domain. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

We know that he was a gifted thinker and a great teacher. People traveled from all over the world to sit at his feet and learn from the master. He started a school known as the Semicircle since that was the shape of the Pythagorean classroom. This classroom model is still very common in college settings today. Pythagoras would take center stage with a clear view of all students, while the students could see all other students and direct answers and questions directly to them as well as the teacher. However, students have always been students. Notice the lack of attention on the face of the one student in the foreground, staring off into space. Even the great teacher Pythagoras couldn’t keep her attention.

In the illustration of the Pythagorean School, most of the students depicted are women. Pythagoras was the first Greek philosopher or teacher who advocated education for women. He was also the first prominent Greek to promote monogamy within marriage. His influence on women’s rights and the education of women was felt for centuries.

From his time in an Egyptian temple, he may have picked up his ideas on metempsychosis, the belief in reincarnation.  It is reported that Pythagoras could recall all of his former lives. He entertained his students and followers for hours on end with stories of his former lives. Since he believed that he was there in one of his former lives, he supposedly enthralled his listeners with vivid accounts of the great battle and fall of Troy. In at least one incarnation, Pythagoras was supposedly a beautiful courtesan, a prostitute who lived an unhappy and unfulfilled life in the lap of luxury, courtesy of her wealthy customers. Some writers attribute his high regard for women to the time he spent as this oppressed woman with few rights.

A photograph of the Temple at Luxor in 1867 by Félix Bonfils. This image is in the public domain since Bonfils died in 1885 and the copyright subsequently expired. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

While in Egypt, it has been reported that he was admitted into the priesthood at the Temple of Karnak near the cities of Thebes (Greek name: Diospolis – city of the gods) and Luxor. If true, he would have been the only non-Egyptian to have ever been granted this great honor. Supposedly he learned much of his geometry from the Egyptian priests. They also instilled in him their lifestyle and moral codes, which included abstinence from sexual pleasure, and avoidance of clothes made from animal skins. The Theban priests were vegetarians with one quirk. They refused to eat or even touch beans. This unusual behavior was apparently well-engrained into Pythagoras.

Pythagoras studied at Luxor for ten years until Cyrus and the Persian army defeated the Egyptians in 526 BC. In the battle for Thebes, the Persians killed Egyptian Pharoah Psamtik III, son of Amasis II.  The Persians were so enamored by the size and beauty of the Luxor Temple that they ordered the defeated Egyptians to rebuild Thebes and repair all damages to the Luxor Temple. The Persians were also impressed with the intelligence of Pythagoras, a Greek they found among the priests at Luxor. They took him captive back to Babylon, where he studied under the wisest sages of Persia for another ten years.

Photograph of a page from an early 16th Century French manuscript drawn by an unknown artist using a pen, brown ink and watercolor on paper. It depicts Pythagoras repulsed by fava beans. The manuscript was a gift of Andrea Woodner to the National Museum of Art, Washington, D.C. Image courtesy of the Woodner Collection, National Museum of Art, and Wikimedia Commons.

Many historians believe that after leaving Egypt, Pythagoras had a life-long battle with an irrational fear of beans. If the legends are correct, his leguminophobia may have cost him his life. Years later when his school at Croton in Italy was attacked and destroyed, Pythagoras supposedly escaped. While running away from the attackers, he stumbled upon a field of beans. He froze in his tracks and would not go any further.  According to one legend, the rioters found him terror-stricken, cowering at the edge of the field he had refused to enter. They proceeded to beat and club the old man to death.

According to a second legend, the rioters knew Pythagoras was deathly afraid of beans. Thus, they never searched for him in the vicinity of the bean field because they knew that Pythagoras would have never approached it. After hiding in the weeds on the edge of the bean field for a long time, Pythagoras returned to his school. Seeing that it was destroyed and many of his students killed, he left Croton for Metapontum to escape persecution for his anti-democracy teachings. In Metapontum, he supposedly hid in the Temple of the Muses. He reframed from eating because the priests of the Temple didn’t provide the vegetarian diet he requested. They offered him meat and beans. After 40 days of a self-imposed hunger strike, he died of starvation in the temple.

There are many other stories and legends of the exploits of Pythagoras. If only a small fraction of them were true, Pythagoras was indeed different and could be considered a strange duck. The next unusual mathematician that I will consider is Archimedes. In the meantime, I will return to my series on the changing scene in American higher education.

 

 

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KPI – Part X: Post Revolutionary War Expansion of American Higher Education

My previous post KPI- Part IX: Higher Education in Colonial America highlighted the fairly slow start of higher education in colonial America. In this post, I will address the first age of expansion in American higher education, the post-Revolutionary War era. In the four-score plus years between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, higher education blossomed in the United States on several fronts.

Map of the United States in 1860 showing 33 states and a number of territories. This image is in the public domain in the United States because it only contains materials that originally came from the United States Geological Survey, an agency of the United States Department of the Interior. Image courtesy of United State Geological Survey and Wikimedia.

During this period the United States grew both in terms of population and geography. Although there was no census data in 1780, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that the population of the thirteen colonies was approximately 2.5 million. By 1860, the 8th official census put the population of the 33 states and several territories, which made up the United States just prior to the Civil War, at 31.4 million. This population increase amounted to more than a twelve-fold increase.

The addition of 20 states and territories added more than 2 million square miles of land mass to the 864,746 square miles of the original 13 colonies. By the start of the Civil War, the United States stretched from “sea to shining sea.” It had crossed the Appalachian Mountains, the Mighty Mississippi River basin, the great plains, and the Rocky Mountains. It spanned the great land gap between Canada and Mexico.

With more people spread out across more land, there is an increased need for primary and secondary education. It was only natural for the people of each town to demand their own local primary and secondary schools. This created an accompanying need for more teachers, which created the collateral need for more higher education. As more teachers are involved in the classrooms, in addition to deeper subject-content matter mastery, they found a need for more specialized training in teaching methods.

This colonial structure located in Lexington (MA), which now houses a Masonic Temple, was the first state-supported normal school. This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published in the United States between 1924 and 1977 without a copyright notice. Image courtesy of Boston Public Library and Wikimedia Commons.

This created a need for a new type of higher education institution. Thus the teacher education school or  “normal school” was created. Some of these schools were short-lived such as several founded and run by Samuel Read Hall. Hall founded teacher education programs as an adjunct to academies in Concord (VT), Andover (MA), Plymouth (NH), and Craftsbury (VT). The earliest teacher training programs were typically two years beyond the secondary level designed to introduce the best secondary students to the topics of curriculum and pedagogy in order to turn them into teachers.

As noted in the previous post, there were also no “official” medical or law schools in the colonial period. Although several of the colonial colleges did offer additional courses in anatomy and “physik.” they were not intended to train doctors. As the U.S. population grew and spread out all over the country, there was a much greater need for more doctors and lawyers. The apprenticeship model of education which worked well for a small demand proved totally inadequate for the much larger demand of the new world. A new, more efficient, model had to be instituted. We needed a model that would produce consistent, quality results. We needed schools for doctors and lawyers.

Litchfield Law School building constructed by Tapping Reeve in 1784. The building stands today on its original location, south of Tapping Reeve’s House on South Street in Litchfield, CT. This photo is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Image courtesy of Litchfield Historical Society and Wikimedia Commons.

The first institution established for the sole purpose of teaching law was the Litchfield Law School in Litchfield (CT). The school was founded in 1874 by educator, lawyer, judge Tapping Reeve. Reeve opened his law school to accommodate the large of apprentices that he was attracting.  Judge Reeve continued lecturing at his law school even after becoming the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the State of Connecticut, until shortly before his death in 1823.

Without the name and draw of its founder, the Litchfield Law School lasted just one more decade until it closed due to lack of students. However, during its sixty-year run of operations, it attracted more than 1,100 students. The most famous/infamous Litchfield graduate is probably Aaron Burr, Jr., the brother-in-law of Tapping Reeve.

Engravings of Stephen van Rensselar III, New York statesman, military general, and philanthropist, whose generous gifts established one of the first technical, scientific and engineering schools in the U.S. This image is available from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3c21159. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress and Wikimedia Commons.

As the country grew, so did the demand for more and better buildings, bridges, transportation, and communications. We needed people with technical skills. How could we possibly produce such people in sufficient quantities to meet the demands? We needed technical and engineering schools. Another new type of schools is instituted.

Technical and engineering schools began popping up in urban contexts. Two of the first technical and engineering schools were Norwich University (1819) in Northfield (VT) and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1825) in Troy (NY).

People are people and they must have their religion and their churches. With the population increase and with the dispersion of the population across a wider expanse, there was a need for more churches, and hence a need for more clergy. With the changing nature of the first round of religious schools, America needed schools that were again dedicated to educating individuals who could preach the gospel and teach their congregations the tenets of the faith.

A photograph of the 2-D work of art entitled: “Andover Theological Seminary,” lithograph printed in colors, by the artist J. Kidder. Image Courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery, Yale University, New Haven, CT, and Wikimedia Commons.

More seminaries and faith-based colleges teaching piety and virtue were created. Due to the lack of action in filling a chair of preaching, on the part of growing faction of liberal faculty at Harvard, a number of the older orthodox, conservative-Calvinistic faculty members left Harvard in 1807 to form the Andover Theological Seminary in Newton (MA). Similar events took place at many of the schools of religion within the Colonial Colleges.

The residence of the Superintendent of West Point. It is the oldest existent building (1820) on the campus. This image or media file contains material based on a work of a National Park Service employee, created as part of that person’s official duties. As a work of the U.S. federal government, such work is in the public domain in the United States. Image courtesy of the National Park Service and Wikimedia Commons.

Besides education, religion, and professional studies, one area of concern to the whole human race has been military activities. In the history of mankind, there have been wars and rumors of war. During this era of great expansion of higher education in America, war and military action went to college. In addition to the U.S. Military Academy, established in 1801 at West Point (NY), and the U.S. Naval Academy, established in 1845 at Annapolis (MD), there were at least a dozen more military schools established during this time frame.

This is a bird’s eye view of Mount Holyoke College in 1837. This is a faithful photographic reproduction of a two-dimensional, public domain work of art, as such this photograph itself is in the public domain. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and the Murray City School District.

In the previous post, I noted that almost exclusively the institutions in the first round of colleges were open only to men. As the nation matured and changed, women understood that education should be open to them.

 

The first solution to this new demand was the creation of women’s colleges. A few of the earliest women’s colleges were Georgia Female College (1836) in Clinton (GA); Stephens College (1833) in Columbia (MO); and Mount Holyoke College (1837) in South Hadley (MA).

Photograph of Old Main of Franklin College, built in 1847. This work has been released into the public domain by its author, Mingusboodle at the Wikipedia project. Image courtesy of Mingusboodle and Wikimedia Commons.

 

The second solution was a slow opening up of a few of the male-only enclaves to women. Oberlin College (OH) was the first college to formally admit women in 1837. A few institutions, like Franklin College (IN) followed suit in 1842.

 

During this period of history, the United States was deeply divided over the practices of slavery and segregation. Although slavery was prohibited in all Northern states by 1850, African Americans were routinely denied even basic education through institutionalized segregation.

This is a photograph of a 2-D work of art, entitled: Wilberforce University, Xenia, Ohio. (The colored peoples college.) It was drawn, lithographed and printed in oil colors by Middleton Wallace & Co. This image is available from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID pga.03979. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress and Wikimedia Commons.

 

By 1860  a few colleges were established for African-Americans. These institutions became known as the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU).  Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1854 was the first HBCU to offer college degrees to its graduates. The first HBCU to be owned and built by African-Americans, Wilberforce University in Ohio, soon followed in 1856. The Cheyney University of Pennsylvania (which was originally called the Institute for Colored Youth) was founded in 1837 and is currently recognized as the oldest HBCU in the United States. However, it did not offer college degrees until 1914. Oberlin College in Ohio is generally credited as the first of the historically white-only colleges to admit African-American students in 1835.

With the vast expansion of the educational enterprise in America, colleges began to engage in the first academic arms race. They began to look for prominent individuals that they could hire to be faculty or administrators, in order to attract a greater number of quality students. States and cities joined in their own version of the academic arms race. Every state, city or town had to have their own college, in order to outdo their neighbors.

All of these changes produced a drastic change in the number of colleges and students. From the ten schools that were really colleges in the colonial period, the number grew to more than 300 by the beginning of the Civil War. The number of college students in the United States is estimated to have grown from less than 2,000 in 1780 to approximately 50,000 students by 1860. This is indeed an era of expansion. Stay tuned for the next installment, the Post Civil War Expansion.

 

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KPI – Part IX: Higher Education in Colonial America

Photographic print of elevation perspective of Harvard College or “Old College” (1636 – 1670) used in an article by Samuel E. Morison, published in 1920. The image is in the public domain. Image is used by courtesy of Samuel E. Morison, Harvard University Archives and Wikimedia Commons.

There are five distinct periods in the history of American higher education. In this post, we will look at the initial stage, which we will call the Colonial Period. The beginning date is easy to set. It starts with the founding of the first American college, Harvard College, in 1636. The end date is much harder to define. We will arbitrarily set the ending date of this stage as 1776, the start of the Revolutionary War. As we shall see, using these dates makes the Colonial Period the longest and least active stage in the history of American higher education.

The academy is well known for its showy, even often ostentatious traditions and “pomp and circumstance.” By “pomp and circumstance” I don’t mean the Elgar military marches played at graduation or commencement ceremonies.

One long-standing tradition of the academy involves the ceremonial inauguration of new presidents or the opening of a new college. To celebrate this joyous occasion, other colleges are invited to send a representative to share in the festivities.

An image of part of the academic procession at the opening of the new University of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland with the historic Inverness Castle as a background feature. The event took place on August 25, 2011. The photograph is by David Watmough. The image is courtesy of Dreamstime (ID #208851111)

 

These visiting representatives are expected to wear appropriate academic garb (their caps and gowns) and march into the ceremonial arena following the representatives of the new college or institution installing its new president. These representatives include the governing board, the president, high ranking officers of the college and the college faculty.

The representatives of guest colleges are lined up according to the founding date of the particular institution, with oldest first. Thus it becomes a bragging point to be near the beginning of the line. Many institutions take this so seriously that they “may stretch the truth a little.”

My alma mater, the University of Delaware, could be accused of falling prey to this practice. It lists its date of origin as 1743, which is embossed on its seal. This date would make it the eighth oldest college in the United States. In reality, according to its website the University of Delaware:

One of the oldest universities in the U.S., the University of Delaware traces its roots to 1743 when a petition by the Presbytery of Lewes expressing the need for an educated clergy led the Rev. Dr. Francis Alison to open a school in New London, Pennsylvania.

Newark Academy Building on Main Street in Newark, DE. The photograph is by a photographer identified as “smallbones” and is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. Image courtesy of “smallbones” and Wikimedia Commons.

In 1765, Rev. Alison’s elementary and secondary school relocated to Newark, DE, as the Newark Academy. It wasn’t until 1834 when the name was changed to Newark College that the institution offered college degrees. In 1843, the name of the institution was changed to Delaware College. Throughout all of its earliest history, the institution was opened only to men. In 1914, a women’s college was opened in Newark. The two colleges merged in 1921 to become the University of Delaware. I’ll let you decide: What date should the University of Delaware use as its date of founding?

So as to not be accused of just jumping on the University of Delaware, of the 18 American colleges or universities that list a founding date prior to 1776, only ten were actually conferring college degrees in 1776. These ten colonial colleges with dates of their founding are:

  • Harvard University. MA (1636)
  • College of William and Mary, VA (1693)
  • Yale University, CT (1701)
  • University of Pennsylvania, PA (1740)
  • Princeton University, NJ (1746)
  • Columbia University, NY (1754)
  • Brown University, RI (1764)
  • Rutgers University, NJ (1766)
  • Dartmouth College, NH (1769)
  • Hampden-Syndey College, VA (1775)

The eight institutions which list a date of origin prior to 1776, but didn’t offer programs leading to college degrees until after 1776, are the following:

  • St. Johns’ College, MD (Est 1693/ College 1785)
  • Washington College, MD (Est 1723/ College 1782)
  • Moravian College, PA (Est 1742/ College 1863)
  • University of Delaware, DE (Est 1743/ College 1843)
  • Washington & Lee University, PA (Est 1749/ College 1813)
  • College of Charleston, SC (Est 1770/ College 1790)
  • Salem College, NC (Est 1772/ College 1890)
  • Dickinson College, PA (Est 1773/ College 1783)
A photograph of the doomers, gables, and spires of Salem College. The photograph was taken by Larry F. Lamb and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. The image is used by courtesy of Larry F. Lamb and Wikimedia Commons.

As a mathematician, I am always looking for patterns. In the case of these pre-revolutionary war colleges, several patterns are immediately obvious. All 18 institutions were founded by clergy or religious organizations for partially sectarian reasons. The primary religious reason was to provide an educated clergy for the churches. Since the pre-revolutionary war clergy was all male, it should not be surprising that 16 of the 18 colleges were strictly male institutions. The only two schools which enrolled women were the two Moravian institutions, Moravian College and Salem College.

Photograph of Randolph Hall, the main academic building of the College of Charleston. The photograph was taken by a photographer identified as Lkeadle who licensed its use under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Image courtesy of Lkeadle and Wikimedia Commons.

Interestingly those are only two that have maintained their religious affiliations. The other 16 either dropped their religious ties or had their support cut off by their founding denominations. Thirteen of these schools changed their classification to “private, non-profit“.  Two of the schools, Rutgers University (NJ) and the University of Delaware (DE) became public institutions supported by their respective states. The College of Charleston (SC) became the first college in the United States to be recognized as a municipally supported school.

Later, when the State of Delaware cut its monetary support of the University to less than 50% of the University’s budgeted income, it took a drastic step which defined a new status of educational institutions. The University of Delaware became the first college to become a private institution with limited state support. It was now known as a “state-supported institution.” Since that event, many other public schools have taken the same stance.

Another characteristic shared by all 18 pre-revolutionary war colleges is that they all began as exclusively residential or boarding schools. Most of the founding fathers of these schools were educated in England or Europe or were swayed by teachers or mentors who were trained in the “old-school” tradition.

William and Mary College 1898 postcard. The hand-written note says this main building was built in 1693 when the college opened. This image is available from the New York Public Library’s Digital Library under the digital ID 0ad0c090-c62c-012f-9c5a-58d385a7bc34: digitalgallery.nypl.org → digitalcollections.nypl.org. Image courtesy of New York Public Library and Wikimedia Commons.

The “old-school” traditions imparted two patterns into the fabric of these schools. The first was the idea that these schools were not about promoting or advocating social mobility. These schools were not founded to change society, but to maintain the social status of the day. After their religious ties were severed, their students were strictly the sons of the wealthy, politically connected, and social elite of the day.

These were the only families that could afford the cost of such an education. These families were also the most interested in preparing their sons to claim their birthright and seize their rightful place as leaders of the church, government, and business. It is interesting to read excerpts of early promotional pieces of these institutions and see how many advertised the alumni who were instrumental in the founding of America. They listed the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, as well as federal, state and municipal elected and appointed officials as their most distinguished graduates.

The second pattern inherently obvious among the colonial colleges is the emphasis of their curricula on the liberal arts. Many of these colleges evolved from institutions that were called “Free Academies.”  The term free definitely did not refer to the cost of attending the school. The term refers to the liberal arts or those subjects which humanize people and make them more human.

The curricula were heavily loaded with rhetoric, languages, religion, philosophy, history, music, mathematics and elementary science. In the colonial period, there were no professional schools. The professional disciplines were not taught at the colonial colleges.

Students who were interested in business, law, and medicine learned these “trades” by serving as interns to accomplished masters. The professional schools entered the American higher education scene in the next period of American higher education history, the Period of Post-Revolutionary War Expansion. That period will be the subject of my next blog post, due to be published, Tuesday, April 9th.

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KPI – Part VIII: European Roots of American Higher Education

This illustration is the photograph of a colored lithograph by J. Wolf. The photograph is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Image courtesy of J. Wolf and Wikimedia Commons.

Higher education has been around in some form for over two millennia. American higher education is not quite 400 years old. Why does American higher education get all of the hype and publicity instead of our older European, Middle Eastern, and Asian brothers and sisters? How did the younger sibling grow up to be the 800-pound gorilla?

First aside:  Q – “Where does an 800-pound gorilla sit?” A – “Anywhere he wants.” The problem with this joke is that most gorillas are less than 6 feet tall and weigh less than 600 pounds. Phil, an Eastern Lowland Gorilla raised in the St. Louis Zoo, is the only recorded gorilla in captivity weighing in at more than 800 pounds.

The courtyard and fountain of the Qarawiyyin Mosque and Fountain. The photograph was taken by Mike Prince and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. Image courtesy of Mike Prince and Wikimedia Commons.

Second Aside: I must apologize for a mistake I made in my previous post KPI – Part VII: Historical Development of Higher Education, Condensed View. I fell into a trap I was attempting to battle: the myopic view of the world centered on Western Civilization. My error was listing the University of Bologna, founded in 1088,  as the oldest, continuous existing, degree-granting university in the world. That title rightly belongs to the University of Al-Karaouine, also written as al-Quaraouiyine and al-Qarawiyyin (in Arabic: جامعة القرويين), located in the Moroccan city of Fes el-Bali. It was founded in 859 by the young Arab heiress, Fatima al-Fihri, to honor the city of her birth and to serve and educate the community that welcomed her and her family as emigrants.

Aside three: Surprise! Surprise! As I wrote this post, I found that I couldn’t condense the history of American higher education into 1,000 words. Thus I will deal only with its European foundations in this post. I will use my next post to pick up the story on American shores with the founding of the “Colonial Colleges.” That story will start with Harvard College in 1636. I may be able to use that post to get us to the 19th Century. From there I will need at least one more subsequent post to carry us to the higher education scene in America today.

One of the drumbeats of proponents of modern American higher education is the constant encouragement for students to attend a university to obtain a broader vision of the whole world. Students are bombarded with advertisements urging them to spend a semester or year abroad to break down the insular barriers isolating them from other cultures.

View over Trinity College, Gonville and Caius and Clare College towards King’s College Chapel, seen from St Johns College Chapel, Cambridge (UK). On the left, just in front of King’s College Chapel, is the Cambridge University Senate House. Photo by Bob Tubbs, 1997, the copyright holder of this work. Tubbs has released this work into the public domain. This applies worldwide. Image courtesy of Bob Tubbs and Wikimedia Commons.

It may be ironic that American institutions of higher learning trace their education model and form of organization to a single archetype. In doing this, they are ignoring the traditions of most of the world that they are commending to their students.

The sole archetype is a system epitomized by the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and the European form embodied by the University of Bologna and the Sorbonne (or University of Paris). In this system, faculty with similar interests gather themselves into colleges in order to stimulate each other to create new knowledge, organize existing knowledge into understandable formats, and disseminate that knowledge as widely as possible.

These colleges recruit and admit students to their ranks based upon students’ identity with the interests of the faculty. The colleges provide academic facilities for the faculty, such as classrooms and offices. They are also responsible for providing housing and boarding facilities for the students, and some faculty.

In their earliest years, the British colleges required students to commit themselves fully to their education. This meant that students had to “live” in the residence halls and be available on a 24/7 basis. Everyone, students and faculty, ate formal meals together. This permitted extended academic discussions to take place over the course of the meals. Many faculty lived on campus which meant that education could occur around the clock.

Photo of Keble, College Dining Hall, Oxford University. The Hall was built in 1878 to resemble the dining halls of the 13th Century. Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC-BY-SA 3.0. Image courtesy of David Iliff and Wikimedia Commons.

The separate colleges established a collective, called a university. Whereas colleges set their own curriculum and courses, the university set some minimal standards for degrees and conferred those degrees. Students could take courses in other colleges to complete their education. Most likely, only one college within the university offered music courses and programs. It was also likely that religion and philosophy courses were consolidated within one college. The disciplines of science, mathematics, humanities, literature, social sciences, law, and medicine would have had their own specialty colleges.

The interior of Christ Church Cathedral, on the campus of Christ Church College of Oxford University. Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC-BY-SA 3.0. Image courtesy of David Iliff and Wikimedia Commons.

Right from their earliest days, religion was an integral part of Oxford and Cambridge Universities. All faculty had to be communicant members of the Catholic Church. Students were required to attend religious services and receive instruction in religious matters.

Somewhat surprisingly in their formative years, the continental universities were not tied formally to the church. They also did not have housing for students. Students lived in the community, which resulted in many conflicts with the “townies.”

In both the British and European universities the faculty were the formal masters of the organizations. Every major decision was decided either by consensual agreement or a vote of the faculty. From this arrangement, American higher education derived its ideal of faculty governance.

A photograph of the 14th Century fresco by Spinello Arefino of Frederick I Barbarossa submitting to Pope Alexander III. The fresno is displayed at Palazzo Pubblico, Siena. The photograph was transferred to Wikimedia Commons by Naudefj. Image courtesy of Naudefj and Wikimedia Commons.

When the University of Bologna was founded, it was established as a school that was free from ecclesiastic control. In 1158, Frederick I Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Emperor, issued a writ which became known as the Privilegium Scholasticum.  Among its provisions, this law declared that every school should be a group of students overseen by a master (dominus). This master teacher was to be paid through monies collected from the students. These payments were the first tuition charges.

The submission of Frederick I Barbarossa, protector of the University of Bologna, to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, in order to secure his position as the Holy Roman Emperor, began two centuries of political wrangling among the faculty of the University of Bologna. It only subsided with the establishment of the School of Theology in 1358. For the next five centuries, Roman Catholicism was an integral part and a significant player in the life of the University.

Another provision of the Privilegium protected faculty and students in their pursuit of knowledge from the intrusion of all political authorities. This was a fundamental event in the history of the European university. The University has legally declared a place where research and new knowledge could develop independently from any other power. This was the beginning of the concept of academic freedom.

Finishing off this post, I will take leave of the palaces, halls, cathedrals, colleges, and universities of Europe and migrate to shores of the New World in North America. In my next post, scheduled to be published on Friday, April 5, I will look at the early development of American higher education

 

 

 

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KPI – Part VII: Historical Development of Higher Education, Condensed View

So many books; so little time. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

There have been many books written about the historical development of American higher education, particularly its colleges and universities. Much less has been written about higher education in the rest of the world, especially prior to the fourteenth century. This brief 1,000-word synopsis can’t touch on everything. It is meant only to highlight what I believe to be the most pertinent phases in the evolutionary process which has given us today’s higher education enterprise in America and our modern universities and colleges.

I begin with a definition of education: Education is the process of facilitating learning, or the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, beliefs, habits, and culture. From that starting point, what are the various levels of education? In particular, what is higher education?

Throughout most of today’s world, education is associated with schools and the process of schooling. Since 1945 the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has attempted to standardize the definitions of educational levels in order to collect, organize, and analyze education statistics on a worldwide basis.

In pursuit of this goal, UNESCO issued its first classification system in 1970 and has revised it several times. The most recent revision of the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) was published in 2011.

In the United States the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), a subdivision of the Institute of Education Science (IES), is charged by the federal Department of Education with keeping tabs on educational statistics in the United States and reporting that data to UNESCO.

NCES uses a slightly different format for reporting U.S. data than ISCED recommends. However, the two formats can be reconciled using the following crosswalk equivalencies:

ISCED/IES Educational Level Crosswalk Table of Equivalencies. Information gathered from the ISCED and IES websites by the author of this website.
Conceptual display of ancient family unit in Hong Kong Museum. The photograph was by Musestress and posted on Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. Image courtesy of Musestress and Wikimedia Commons.

From the above chart, it is obvious that education is clearly being tied to organized schools and the formal process of schooling. This has not always been the case. From historical legends, archeological records and anthropological observations of primitive peoples and tribes, it is believed that the earliest education of young children was the responsibility of family units as illustrated in the picture to the left. This education consisted primarily of simple survival skills. Young children were also taught the rudimentary communication skills of gesturing and the oral language of the parents.

The next phase of education coincided with the coalescence of families into communities and tribes. As families joined together with other family units, education evolved into a communal activity involving the whole community. In addition to more intricate survival and communication skills, social integration skills on how to live in groups were necessarily included in the education of the young.

These additions brought about the need for more specialized instruction which was satisfied by the appearance of master teachers. These master teachers were excellent communicators who could help the uninitiated acquire new knowledge, skills, beliefs, and values. They developed reputations and became much in demand.

A photograph of the Rosetta Stone, which contained the same passage in three forms of writing. The top script is Egyptian hieroglyphs, 2nd is Demotic Egyptian commercial script, and the 3rd is Greek. Photograph is from the Christian Theological Image Library. All of such works are in the public domain. They were scanned from out of copyright books, or photographs by individuals who offer their work to the public.

About this time in history, communications took on a new twist. The oral transmission of knowledge and culture was susceptible to transmission errors. Mankind began to transform oral language and gestures into symbols which were carved or pressed into stone or clay tablets. These symbols morphed into a written language which was inscribed on animal skins, tablets, or papyrus scrolls. The teachings of the best of the master teachers were transcribed and preserved for posterity.

The most well-known master teachers became legends: Confucius (China); Buddha (India); Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Archimedes, Pythagoras, and Thales (Greece); Muhammad, Hillel, and Gamaliel (Middle East). Potential disciples traveled many miles to sit at their feet and listen to them in order to soak in their wisdom. Their teachings were recorded by these disciples and are still studied today. This was the higher education of the ancient world.

Jesus teaching His disciples while traveling through Judea. Photograph of original 19th century art work in Brooklyn Museum. Image courtesy of James Tissot, photographer, and Wikimedia Commons

The master teacher who really changed the world lived in the Middle East and taught for only three years. Jesus began His ministry by selecting 12 unlikely individuals as his disciples. He spent three years traveling around Judea, healing the sick, raising the dead, doing other miracles, and teaching his disciples and many other followers. His death and resurrection formed the basis of Christianity. Eleven of His original disciples, along with a later convert, Saul of Taurus (also known as the Apostle Paul), spent 60 years after Christ’s ascension into heaven evangelizing the known world. The effects of their labors, some twenty centuries later, are still being felt.

For the first millennium after Jesus, it almost seemed that higher education went into hiding. Master teachers were harder to find. Those, who lived and taught, have been mostly forgotten in the passage of time. The period of time from the Fall of Rome to the Renaissance evidenced an apparent absence of serious intellectual activity in the Western World. This may be the reason that this era is known as the Dark Ages.

In Western Civilization, higher education was on life support during the Dark Ages. It was kept alive by nobles, the elites, and the wealthy, who hired tutors to teach their prodigies sufficient knowledge and culture so that they could maintain their family place in the ruling scheme of things.

An 1890 sepia depiction of the Library at Alexandria. This photograph is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

In the remainder of the world, higher education was kept alive by the noble families, organized religion, and a few cities or states.  Judaism had its yeshivas. Islam had its madaris. Hinduism had its mathas. Buddism had its schools for monks. In general, Eastern Civilization was more amenable to an open system of higher education than the West. A number of cities had schools which made education available to all worthy and deserving individuals, not just the wealthy, elite or connected few.

The Seal of the University of Bologna. Since the seal is hundreds of years old, it is not copyrighted. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

With the Rennaissance came the rebirth of higher education in the Western World and the founding of universities. The University of Bologna, founded in 1088, is the oldest university in continuous operation. Unfortunately, I have reached my self-imposed 1,000-word limit, so I will pick up the story of American higher education this coming Tuesday. Until then, class dismissed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Getting Back in the Saddle

Finally, back in the saddle and at least writing something. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

It’s been so long since I’ve posted something. Even though I am still fighting medical problems, I’ve been overrun with that urge to get back in the saddle and start writing again.

Reading today’s (1/21/19) Harvard Business Review Management Tip of the Day, I had a thought. Share this on By’s Musings to let people know that I’m still alive and thinking.

How to Work with Someone Who Bugs You

Some people have a way of getting on your nerves. They are as annoying as a blaring trumpet. Image courtesy of Presenter Image

Sometimes you have to work with a colleague you don’t particularly like. They may not be toxic or difficult — they might just get on your nerves. To work with them productively, remind yourself that while you won’t get along with everyone, there is potential value in every interaction. Think about the other person’s point of view: Why do they do the things that annoy you? What might be motivating them? And how do you seem to them? It also helps to approach conversations with a problem-solving mindset:

Working together and sharing thoughts can put the puzzle together quicker. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

“I don’t feel like we are working together as effectively as we could. What do you think? Do you have any ideas for how we can work together better?” If that doesn’t work, try asking for their help: “You’ve been around here longer than I have. What should I be doing more or less of?” This can ease tensions and reboot a difficult relationship because it shows that you value the person’s experience.

Adapted from “How to collaborate with people you don’t like,” by Mark Nevins

Admissions Multiplier Effect – a new proposed KPI for colleges and universities. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

Stayed tuned to By’s Musings because next Tuesday, January 28, I will be publishing a post on my proposal for a new higher education Key Performance Indicator: the Admissions Multiplier Effect.

Hopefully, I will also be able to outline so what is ahead for me, the projects I’m planning for Higher Ed By Baylis, LLC, and the future posts in this blog.