Importing Oxbridge: English Residential Colleges and American Universities

by Alex Duke

Since the late nineteenth century, a number of American universities - Harvard, Yale, Princeton, the University of Chicago, the Claremont Colleges, and the University of California at Santa Cruz - have attempted to organize students and faculty into small undergraduate residential colleges similar to those at Oxford and Cambridge. Proponents of these projects believed that the residential college system would foster academic and intellectual values while countering what they saw as the deleterious effects on undergraduate education of the expansion of the university and the increasing research orientation of its faculty. This book tells the story of these efforts - some successful and some not - adding a new chapter to the history of higher education in America.

Genres: Education

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1996

Reviews

[Clark Maddux · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lucid, succinct survey of the history of university residential colleges in the United States. Examining only schools that aimed at fully integrating the British model into their curriculum, the author, Alex Duke, shows how Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Chicago, and, later, Claremont and UC Santa Cruz, relied upon incomplete or idealized versions of the histories of Oxford and Cambridge in their establishment of residential systems. Duke's study is useful not only for its careful explanation of how these sentimental notions of English universities affected colleges at each of the universities he studies: equally valuable is Duke's demonstration of how the residential college movement in America contended with German ideals of the University. Though I had often encountered this hermeneutic, I had not fully understood the tension that exists between these two cultural systems of education until I read Importing Oxbridge. This tension does much to account for the schizophrenic identity of most state universities, where a desire to create knowledge (the 'Germanic' aim of a university)--and students are merely revenue sources--frequently conflicts with the more 'English' background of teacher's colleges that were the origin of many state universities. Even if your own institution does not have a residential college, this book is worth reading for the context it provides on higher education in America.