Redefining the Collegiate Way: the Rise of State Colleges and the Expanding Conception of the College Experience, 1890-1930
University of Nevada, Reno Redefining the Collegiate Way: The Rise of State Colleges and the Expanding Conception of the College Experience, 1890-1930 A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History By Timothy P. Smith Dr. C. Elizabeth Raymond/Dissertation Advisor May, 2017 Copyright by Timothy P. Smith 2017 All Rights Reserved THE GRADUATE SCHOOL We recommend that the dissertation prepared under our supervision by TIMOTHY P. SMITH entitled Redefining the Collegiate Way: The Rise of State Colleges and the Expanding Conception of the College Experience, 1890-1930 be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY C. Elizabeth Raymond, Ph.D., Advisor Dennis Dworkin, Ph.D., Committee Member Greta de Jong, Ph.D., Committee Member Catherine Chaput, Ph.D., Committee Member Rita Laden, Ed.D., Graduate School Representative David W. Zeh, Ph.D., Dean, Graduate School May, 2017 i Abstract For over two hundred years, the college experience in the United States was defined by the traditions of historic eastern college, such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. This model of the college experience came to be seen as elite, private, and eastern. Representations of college life in popular novels reflected this idea and served to subtly reinforce the position of these colleges as the torchbearers for American higher education. However, as public higher education proliferated in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the dominance of such a narrative began to be challenged. With the passage of the Morrill Land–Grant College Act in 1862, the college experience was now open to reinterpretation because of the markedly different missions of state colleges as well as the new types of students who attended them.
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