The image of Oxbridge and American Universities: English residential colleges and American research universities, 1894-1980.

摘要

Between 1894 and 1980, several American universities attempted to organize their undergraduate student bodies around systems of residential colleges modeled largely after the organizational pattern of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Proponents of these projects consistently asserted that adapting the residential college system would foster a social climate friendly to academic and intellectual values, while countering the debilitating effects on undergraduate education that they blamed on the increasing research orientation of faculty and growth of institutional size. The four most important of these efforts occurred at Harvard, where the idea was discussed as early as 1894; Yale, beginning in 1925; the Claremont Colleges, which adopted its Oxford-style Group Plan in 1926; and the University of California at Santa Cruz, which was organized on somewhat similar lines in 1962. Additionally, Princeton and the University of Chicago briefly explored the idea between 1905 and 1907.;None of the projects ever lived up to proponent's expectations. Although the specific causes for disappointing results varied over time and between institutions, there were generally two reasons that help explain the lack of success. First, the original impetus for emulating Oxbridge rested largely on popular perceptions of Oxford and Cambridge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These views presented the educational program of the English universities as a time-tested and perfected arrangement for educating undergraduates, while largely ignoring features of English university life and society that might have tempered enthusiasm for transplanting the collegiate structure to America. Second, once in operation, the residential colleges systems conflicted with a variety of entrenched organizational forces within American universities, most notably the departmental structure and the impetus for institutions of higher education to expand in size and scope.