THE CORE CURRICULUM AS INTELLECTUAL MOTIVATION
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we of the academy, here and abroad, muster the courage and find effective
means to counter these forces, we face a shabby end to the discipline we
have served and to any system of education that we can respect.
Steven Marcus:
Those intellectual pursuits and academic organizations
that we think of as constituting the humanities are sustaining today in the
United States a course of change that is in consonance with their history.
The idea of the humanities, in point of fact, has altered in meaning at least
twice and possibly three times during the processes of intellectual, social,
cultural, and educational developments that took place, initially (and at a
limited number of sites) between about 1880 and 1935, and thereafter
throughout the American system of higher education as a whole, and once
again during the last two decades.
These alterations are to be understood in the first instance as parts of
the evolution of the American university and college system beginning
after the end of the Civil War and accelerating steadily as the century
ended. At the macro-level of ideal-typical structure these institutions may
now be understood as having borrowed something from each of the three
great European systems. From the nineteenth century German universi–
ties it adapted Humboldt's animating conception of dedication to original
research, combined (often secondarily) with instruction. From Oxford
and Cambridge, it secured the notion of the undergraduate residential
college, in which teaching included, ideally, educating the social and ele–
vating the moral character of privileged young men, and where, in a
community of learning, community often counted for as much if not
more than learning. And from the universities of France, it imported
notions of training young, middle-class men to be officials of the state and
servants of society-land grant colleges, state universities, and some nor–
mal schools, took over functions and responsibilities that bore upon the
formation of middle and upper-middle level elites at state, regional, and
occasionally national levels.
This three-part system that began evolving in the latter half of the
nineteenth century combined in a spectrum of configurations a hierarchy
of undergraduate colleges, graduate research schools and institutes, and
technical training centers. Its fully developed form, attained in the second
half of the twentieth century, is most distinctly visible in the pyramidal sys–
tem of institutional distinctions and interchanges that occur between and
among the different elements of, say, the California state system of post–
secondary education.
This structure did not exist a century or more ago, when the narrative
with which I am concerned began to take shape. Many of the institutions
of higher education themselves were historically derived from religious
