Where Did College English Studies Come From? Author(S): Thomas P

Home , John Aikin (Unitarian), Warrington Academy

Where Did College English Studies Come from? Author(s): Thomas P. Miller Source: Rhetoric Review , Autumn, 1990, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Autumn, 1990), pp. 50-69 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/465417

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This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Wed, 16 Jun 2021 11:12:26 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms THOMAS P. MILLER University of Arizona

Where Did College English Studies Come From?

Twenty-five years have passed since William Riley Parker asked "Where Do English Departments Come From?". Parker's answer that "the teaching of English, as a constituent of college or university education, is only about 100 years old" has become a basic premise of discussions of our history (Parker 3). Like Parker, historians such as Graff, Mathieson, and McMurty have dated our discipline from the introduction of English literary studies in universities like Oxford and Harvard in the last half of the nineteenth century. Such eighteenth-century developments as Hugh Blair's professorship in rhetoric and belles lettres at Edinburgh have been discounted because they were not really "first steps in the development of an academic discipline" (Parker 7). However, if we set aside our concept of what qualifies as an academic discipline and simply ask when English was first taught in a concerted way at the college level, then even Blair is too late. Lectures on English literature, rhetoric, and composition were delivered in the Scottish universities as early as 1730, and English was being studied at numerous Scottish and American colleges at about the same time that Blair became Regius Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in 1762. The teaching of college English actually began almost exactly a century before Blair, for English was first taught at the college level in the academies that English Dissenters established when they were forced to leave the universities by the introduction of religious tests in 1662. All the major figures in eighteenth-century college English studies were either Scots, Americans, or Dissenters, and they form a recognized school of thought, which Howell has termed the "new" rhetoric. The best-known figure to come out of the Dissenting academy tradition was Joseph Priestley, tutor in Languages and Belles Lettres at Warrington Academy from 1762 to 1767. From Scotland came the most influential sources of early college English studies-Hugh Blair and George Campbell. According to Howell, Guthrie, and Kitzhaber, the first significant American rhetorician working in English was Blair's classmate John Witherspoon, who was President of the Presbyterian college at Princeton from 1768 to 1794. Any account that fails to include these figures will inevitably fail to account for why college English began in the first place. College English originated not at the elite universities but in the British cultural provinces as a result of basic disruptions of the dominant educational and cultural traditions: When the Dissenters were removed from the classical university curriculum, they began to study the logic, language, and social experience of contemporary life because their

50 Rhetoric Review, Vol. 9, No. 1, Fall 1990

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direct participation in the dominant culture was limited. Dissenters could not serve in the government or the military, and their political and religious rights were broadly restricted. Dissenters began to teach the contemporary culture for the same reason they began teaching contemporary politics: they wanted to prove to their children and themselves that they had a legitimate right to be fully accepted as members of educated society. Like the "North Britons" and colonial Americans who first taught college English, the Dissenters were cultural provincials, outsiders for whom the contemporary idiom was problematic enough to be studied and important enough to be taught. If we ignore this period and begin with the introduction of literary scholarship in the elite universities a century later, we will fail to understand the broader significance of where college English came from. Priestley, Smith, and Witherspoon helped introduce the study of modem history, politics, economics, and experimental science as well as English. Locke is often identified as a source of this break from the classics, but Calvin had as much to do with it as Locke did. Virtually all of the first college English teachers were middle-class clergymen of Calvinist backgrounds. The Dissenters came almost entirely from the middle classes, and the Scottish universities included far more middle and lower class students than the English did (see Hans 28). In America, the study of English had its most propitious beginnings in those colleges with the closest ties to the Dissenters and Scots, colleges like those at Princeton and Philadelphia, which had broader student populations than Harvard or Yale. While one can make a number of other broad generalizations about the first teachers of college English, a whole host of questions have yet to be asked, let alone answered. Why did teachers break from accepted tradition and begin to study English? How was English actually taught? Why was college English first taught by seventeenth-century Dissenters, widely established in Scotland and America in the eighteenth century, yet ignored in the English universities until a century later? How did the social and educational contexts of each country shape the founding assumptions and goals of college English? And finally, did these developments represent the beginning of college English in a sense that has contemporary significance? The published texts alone will not answer such questions. For example, from the text of Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres one cannot even tell if he assigned compositions because he deleted his references to student papers when he revised his notes for the reading public. Yet, when we try to reconstruct how English was taught, the lack of records and the vagaries of educational history become daunting. Even defining what "college" meant is not as easy as one might think. Except for an initial Latin oration, John Ward delivered an influential series of rhetoric lectures in English at Gresham College from 1720 to 1758. However, while Gresham is important as the home of the Royal Society, Gresham was not a "college" but a foundation for supporting public lectures that did not have a

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student body or grant degrees. On the other hand, the Dissenting academies were colleges. They offered a wide range of scholarly and practical subjects to students of college age (then around fifteen to eighteen) who went directly into the professions, or in some cases completed their education with a year of MA studies in Scotland (see Curtis 115-17; Barnard 29). "College English studies" is also a problematic term. Prior to the development of English as a field of study, students learned to read and write the vernacular by studying Latin, and professors were lecturing in English before they were lecturing on it. Sometimes English was even used to teach rhetoric, but English itself was not the object of study, as in the case of Ward and John Lawson (Professor of Oratory and History at Trinity College, Dublin from 1750 to 1758), both of whom remained bound to classical models and generally ignored English composition and literature. To understand the origins of college English, we need to know much more about the educational traditions and social experiences of the Scots, Americans, and English Dissenters. Often the differences among the three traditions are not apparent in the major texts themselves. For example, if we read only their published rhetorics, Blair and Priestley appear to be belletristic rhetoricians with similar epistemological and cultural assumptions. However, if we examine their educational and rhetorical practice, we can see that Priestley was a radical reformer in politics and religion as well as education, while Blair was a conservative defender of the political status quo. To understand these figures, we have to go beyond the history-of-ideas approach that has lumped them together as followers of Locke and explore the social and educational practices that informed their theories of rhetoric, composition, and literature. In this essay I will try to show that by the end of the eighteenth century there were three interrelated traditions in college English studies. I will concentrate particularly on the Dissenting academy tradition that first introduced the teaching of college English because we know almost nothing about our practical educational origins. To understand how the major theories were shaped by educational and social practice, we must develop a more detailed understanding of the educational context and a broader understanding of the social context, and to do that, we have to go beyond the major texts.

The Origins of English Studies in the Dissenting Academies

One thing is clear about the history of college English studies: it does not begin in the English colleges. The reasons why English was first introduced in the British cultural provinces are obvious. Correct usage and polite taste would have been quite important to someone from America, Scotland, or Yorkshire (where Priestley came from) because a provincial accent or phrase marked one's class as well as one's region. The Scots, Dissenters, and Americans studied proper English for the same reason that the English studied Latin: the prestige language was that which stood one step removed from common life, and thus one step above the common

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people. There were also other reasons why college English appeared almost two centuries later at the two English universities than at the over two dozen colleges in eighteenth-century Scotland and America. The most prestigious universities were committed to the traditional social and cultural needs of the upper classes and as a result proved to be among the least responsive to innovations in science, philosophy, and culture (see Curtis 14-16). After the ouster of the middle-class Dissenters, the students of Oxford and Cambridge came almost entirely from the upper classes, and with the decline of the tradition of the poor scholar, the English universities "degenerated to a large extent into a preserve for the idle and the rich," a preserve that served to protect endangered intellectual orthodoxies (Barnard 24). The origins of college English are found not in the elite universities but in the Dissenting academies. The Dissenters were forced to leave the English universities by the Act of Uniformity in 1662, which required oaths to Anglicanism of all students and teachers. These Test Acts initially forbade Dissenters to open schools, so the first academies were held in isolated homes. While many Dissenters confined themselves to the only curriculum they knew, early reformers began to depart from the moribund scholasticism of the universities, and their successors developed their own well-articulated educational tradition. This tradition developed through three distinct generations. For those interested in English studies, the most interesting early reformer is Charles Morton (1627-1698), who taught a wide range of subjects-experimental science, contemporary political affairs, and English composition and literature-to such students as Daniel Defoe (1659?-1731) and Samuel Wesley (1662-1735), the father of the famous evan- gelist. The next generation was dominated by Phillip Doddridge (1702-1751) and Isaac Watts (1674-1748), who shaped the Dissenting academies' evolution into semipublic colleges with specialized programs for those interested in law, business, and medicine as well as the ministry. The most significant third generation reformer is Joseph Priestley (1733-1804). Charles Morton was one of the first to go beyond the traditional studies in classical languages, Aristotelian philosophy, and mathematics to introduce the study of contemporary life and letters. Morton taught entirely in English, and he emphasized English composition. Morton also taught the other subjects that became common in the Dissenting academies: basic Calvinist theology, civil and ecclesiastical history, contemporary political philosophy, Constitutional law, geography, and experimental science. Morton wrote a work on political philosophy and a science text that was "at least fifty years ahead" of other university textbooks (Girdler 589). Morton's school was run democratically by a student government according to Samuel Wesley, who later conformed to Anglicanism and attacked the radical Whig politics taught by Dissenters like Morton. Defoe, who studied under Morton from 1676 to 1681, defended his teacher in More Short Ways with the Dissenters (1704), and Defoe also refers to Morton's teaching in The Present

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State of Parties (1712) (319-20) and the Compleat English Gentleman (written 1728) (218-20). According to Defoe, in addition to classes in "eloquence" and weekly declamations in English, Morton regularly had students write English compositions. For example, Morton's students would imagine themselves ambas- sadors and international businessmen and write letters suited to their affairs and audiences (Compleat Gentleman 218-19). Defoe was certainly a very successful student of English. He wrote over 500 political pamphlets, novels, travel and self-improvement works, works that document the social functions of popular literacy in the early eighteenth century. Texts like Defoe's self-help manual The Complete Tradesman (1725) suggest that literacy was becoming important to working people as a means to understand and improve their social status. Defoe's other works provide further insights into how the Dissenters' educational philosophy was motivated by their status as prosperous but disenfranchised members of the bourgeoisie. In the Compleat Gentleman, for example, Defoe argues against the prevalent emphasis on Latin because it limits the spread of knowledge and creates barriers to the aspirations of self-educated "tradesmen, merchants, soldiers, and seamen" (273). Defoe notes that the learning of such "bred Gentleman" "will generally out-do the born Gentleman" (268), and he stresses that "the knowledge of things, not words make a scholar" (212). While such comments obviously echo Locke, Defoe was speaking not as a philosopher but as a man of business and politics. With the Toleration Acts of 1689, second generation Dissenting educators could more freely learn from each other and from Scottish reformers. Phillip Doddridge was the most influential figure of this generation. Like some fifty-six other Dissenting educators, Doddridge held Scottish degrees, and his students continued the custom of going to Scotland for the last year of their MA studies, often with scholarships from Presbyterian organizations (Sloan, Scottish 69-70; Smith 21). Doddridge was close friends with the other major Dissenting educator of the time, Isaac Watts. Watts' Logic or the Right Use of Reason (1724) and Improvement of the Mind (1741) have been recognized as important contributions to the "new logic" (Howell 331-45). The latter work is not really a philosophical treatise like those of Locke but a reading, writing, and speaking textbook that was "one of the best known textbooks of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries" (Davis 88). The second part is a teachers' manual that covers such topics as leading class discussions, teaching the composing process, and publishing. Watts and Doddridge themselves published widely. Though less prolific than Defoe or Priestley, Doddridge was an active pamphleteer for religious dissent, and both Watts and Doddridge wrote devotional literature for the expanding reading audience of the time. Watts' catechisms went through over 600 editions, sold 7,000,000 copies, and were translated into every language from Armenian to Zulu (see Davis 74-90).

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Doddridge was himself the product of a Dissenting academy education that was far broader than anything available in the established universities. For four years at John Jennings' academy, Doddridge studied mathematics, theology, and the classics, but he also studied modem languages, experimental science, political history, geography, and the writings of Locke, Shaftesbury, Sprat, and Bacon. Doddridge's own academy at Northampton from 1729 to 1751 had an equally broad curriculum, with specialized studies for those not planning on becoming clergymen. Doddridge taught entirely in English, and he was "famous" for his emphasis on English composition according to Smith (138). Students used Tillot- son and Sprat as models in composition; English literature and drama were studied; and logical disputations in English and Latin had moved beyond the syllogistical method of the scholastics (see Smith 114-19). Like virtually all the Dissenting educators, Doddridge emphasized political theory and practice, particularly natural rights doctrines and Constitutional law. He lectured on Locke's Two Treatises of Government and on the works of Pufendorf and Grotius that were important in the continental natural rights tradition (Orton 91). For the Dissenters, such studies were directly relevant to their efforts to secure equal rights, but the study of the political world (like the study of natural world) was also emphasized because it offered insights into the Divine order and the nature of the religious experience. While such assumptions provided the unifying justification for the early Dissenters' education, their perspective was at its best far from parochial or conservative. A good example of their relative openness is the use of the comparative method, which Doddridge helped make the common instructional approach of the Dissenting academies. In this method of instruction, the teacher did not lecture on a single canonical text to teach accepted dogma, as was common in the established universities. Instead, Doddridge and later Dissenters presented con- flicting views on controversies and referred students "to Writers on both sides, without hiding anything from their Inspection," in the assumption that above all students must be able to "judge for themselves" in matters of contested doctrine (Orton 101). Doddridge's pedagogy was spread through his popular Course of Lectures on Principal Subjects in Pneumatology, Ethics, and Divinity (1763), which includes long sections on Locke and related epistemological questions. His Lectures on Preaching was also widely circulated in manuscript before publication in his Works (1805). The comparative method of instruction was perhaps the Dissenters' most important contribution to the history of educational practice, and this method of instruction is particularly important to us because it helped create an educational environment that gave considerable emphasis to writing and speaking on controversial issues. The link between the second and third generations of reformers is made by Caleb Ashworth (1722-1775), who studied with Doddridge and taught Priestley.

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According to Priestley's Memoirs, "the general plan of our studies, which may be seen in Dr. Doddridge's published lectures, was exceedingly favourable to free inquiry, as we were referred to authors on both sides of every question, and were even required to give an account of them" (Works 1.1:23-24). This method contributed to the widespread Unitarianism of the later academies. Of the eight teachers educated at Ashworth's school, four became Unitarians, including Priestley himself (Smith 149). In addition to being a major Unitarian theologian, scientist, and historian, Priestley was one of the most controversial reformers of his day. Because of his advocacy of the American and French Revolutions, his home and church were burned by loyalist rioters, and he finally had to emigrate to America in 1794. Priestley was equally radical in other areas. As a "Socian," he viewed Jesus as a prophet but not as divine. Following his major philosophical source David Hartley, Priestley was a "materialist" and a "necessitarian." In other words, he rejected the existence of the spirit apart from the body and viewed thought as a biological phenomenon, and he believed that we are necessarily controlled by our desires and needs. If nothing else, such interesting viewpoints call into question unqualified generalizations about the conservativism of eighteenth-century rhetoric.

Joseph Priestley and the Contribution of the Later Dissenting Academies

Warrington Academy was founded in 1758 with tutorships in Divinity, Natural Philosophy, and Languages and Belles Lettres. Priestley was preceded in the last tutorship by John Aikin, who has been called "the first systematic lecturer in English Literature" by George Saintsbury (qtd. in Turner ii). Aikin taught classical languages and literature, history, logic, and French as well as English grammar, oratory, and criticism. Aikin's students studied the poetry of Milton, Pope, Thom- son, Young, and Akenside and composed sermons and essays on philosophy and literature (Turner 20). Aikin thus established a program of English studies that was fuller than any offered by the English universities for almost a century. Warrington had a broad curriculum, and it also had specialized tracks of study for the growing numbers of students in law, medicine, and business. The religious purpose of the academies had largely been left behind, for in its later years at least one-third of Warrington's students were Anglicans (McLachlan 17). According to the original proposal, Warrington was intended for "those that are to be engag'd in a Commer- cial Life, as well as the Learned Professions" (qtd. in McLachlan 16). The Trustee's report of 1760 also stressed the ongoing effort to advance "Natural Knowledge upon the Foundation of Experiment," particularly "that Part of it which has Connection with our Manufactures and Commerce" (qtd. in Gibbs 17-8). Such statements show how the Dissenters' economic interests contributed to their reforms, but like earlier academies, Warrington was also influenced by Scottish educational philosophy. Both Aikin and the school's founder, John Sedon,

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studied in Scotland. Sedon graduated from Glasgow, where he studied with Francis Hutcheson, who is widely regarded as one of the founders of the Scottish En- lightenment. Hutcheson is particularly important to us because as professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow from 1730 to 1777 he was one of the first Scottish professors to lecture completely in English (see Smith 160). After attending Doddridge's academy, Aikin studied with Thomas Reid's teacher, George Turnbull. Aikin also knew Reid, David Fordyce, and William Duncan. Such relationships demonstrate that the introduction of English studies in the Dissenting academies was far from an isolated event. Like Hutcheson at Glasgow, Turnbull and Fordyce were apparently the first to lecture in English at Aberdeen (see Sloan, Scottish 25). Fordyce wrote the moral philosophy text in Dodsley's Preceptor (1748), which was extremely popular in America. Duncan is important as a major proponent of the "new logic" (see Howell 348-61), and of course Reid's common- sense philosophy dominated American education until the middle of the nineteenth century. Priestley himself received an honorary doctorate from Edinburgh in 1764, and he corresponded with Hutcheson's student, William Leechman, who delivered lectures on "Composition" at Glasgow from 1743 to 1776, lectures that Cohen has argued are important predecessors to Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric. Priestley took over Languages and Belles Lettres in 1762, the same year Blair formally became Regius Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at Edinburgh. Priestley states in his Autobiography that he would have preferred teaching natural philosophy (Works 1.1:47), but he did publish three influential works from his English courses at Warrington and at his own school at Nantwich from 1758 to 1761: Rudiments of English Grammar (1761), Theory of Language (1762), and Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (1777). Against prescriptivists' fears that English needed to be preserved against change, Priestly argued that widespread literacy had already stabilized the language, and he goes on to develop a theory of acceptable usage that was the most progressive offered in the eighteenth century (see Baugh and Cable 182-84). Unlike his grammar, Priestley's rhetoric is generally regarded as derivative, perhaps because he could not bring himself to revise it fully for publication (Works 1.1:298-99). Priestley did not doubt the value of teaching English, just the value of teaching by textbook precepts. In a letter to a teacher interested in his grammar text, Priestley suggested that teaching grammar is less helpful than "making the scholars compose dialogues [and] themes, . . . correcting their bad English, and making occasional remarks" (1.1:64). He further advised that teachers should "omit no opportunity" to assign compositions, particularly essays modeled on the Spectator and essays about works like Robinson Crusoe (1. 1:67). At Warrington, Priestley in fact established a library of such texts for this purpose, and he instituted a program of regular oratorical and dramatic performances (1.1:67, 53).

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Such points suggest that we should not judge Priestley by his textbooks alone, just as we would not want to be judged by ours, because textbooks provide at best only partial records of actual teaching practices. Priestley's writings and his students' accounts show that he worked to create an environment where students could express their most radical ideas. Rather than students being mere copyists for lectures, Priestley advised that teachers should lecture in a "regular but familiar" way to draw students into the classroom "conversation," which should incorporate student discussion and questions (24:20-21). His comments show how important the comparative method was for teaching critical literacy and composition:

Upon every subject of importance, let the tutor make references to the principal authors who have treated of it; and if the subject be a controverted one, let him refer to books written on both sides of the question. Of these references let the tutor occasionally require an account, and sometimes a written abstract. Lastly, let the tutor select a proper number of the most important questions that can arise from the subject of the lectures, and let them be proposed to the students as exercises, to be treated in the form of orations, theses, or dissertations. (24:21)

He advised teachers to work to foster controversy in the classroom (24:22), and one of his students recounted the satisfied smile they received when they challenged him: "his object, as well as Dr. Aiken's, was to engage the students to examine and decide for themselves, uninfluenced by the sentiments of any other person" (qtd. in Turner 26). Such goals were quite different from those served by the pedagogy of the dominant tradition. Priestley stressed the study of modem history, particularly the history of politics and "Commerce," because he sought to prepare students for a "civil and active life" rather than just "the learned professions" (1. 1:50). For Priestley, history was not literature or philosophy teaching by example, but a cause and effect development to be scientifically documented and analyzed. According to J. W. Smith, Priestley was in fact the first to make modem history a unified discipline (243-45). As tutor of Languages and Belles Lettres, he introduced lectures on "History and General Policy," "History of England," and "Laws and Constitution of England" because he believed such subjects were essential to those who would enter business and public affairs (Works 1.1:50; 24:4). He published outlines of these courses in 1765 in An Essay on a Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life, and in 1803 he published Lectures on History to take account of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and other developments in the emerging "science" of political economy. Priestley believed that the study of history, politics, and economics would fill the gap between the universities and the "education for the

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counting-house, consisting of writing, arithmetic, and merchants' accounts" (Works 24:7). In this respect, Priestley helped to define and justify the curriculum the Dissenters had developed to bridge the gap between the universities and the business schools that were confined to such subjects. Unlike earlier Dissenters, Priestley justified his education in practical utilitarian terms. Utilitarian is not a casually chosen term here, for Bentham attributed his basic political ideal of the greatest good to the greatest number to his reading of Priestley (see Priestley 1.1:52n and 15:445). Like his predecessors, Priestley's educational approach had strong connec- tions to his own political activism, but his notoriety was equaled by few prac- titioners of the art of rhetoric in the eighteenth century. In his writings on politics and religion, Priestley argued for the same spirit of "free inquiry" that was fostered by the comparative method. In the "Importance and Extent of Free Inquiry," Priestley argues that "should free inquiry lead to the destruction of Christianity itself, it should not, on that account, . . . be discontinued; for we can only wish for the prevalence of Christianity on the supposition of its being true" (Works 15:78). His "Reflections on the Present State of Free Inquiry" includes his notorious statement that Unitarians were "laying gunpowder grain by grain, under the old building of error and superstition, which a single spark may hereafter inflame so as to produce an instantaneous explosion" (18:544). And when the people have exploded Anglicanism, "a small change in the political state of things ... may suffice to overturn the best-compacted establishments at once" (18:544). These lines were quoted by pamphlets, poems, and speeches in Parliament as just the sort of sentiments that had to be suppressed by continued restrictions on Dissenters, but while Priestley was more blunt than many Dissenters would have liked, he was within the tradition of reform that they had publicly advocated and privately taught from the the first academies. In the classroom, as in public life, Dissenters believed that rational inquiry would create personal freedom and spiritual and economic prosperity. While such beliefs today seem more than a little naive, they defined the limits of eighteenth-century reform and prepared the way for nineteenth-century liberalism (see Gibbs 186).

The End of the Academies and their Lasting Contribution to English Studies

The teaching of college English thus began at the end of the seventeenth century as part of the same tradition that helped establish the study of modem history, politics, and science. So what happened to that tradition after Warrington academy? The short answer is that the Dissenting academies ended in 1828 with the opening of the University of London, the first English university to be free of religious tests, and also the first to be supported by public subscriptions. However, the Dissenting academy tradition made important contributions to the University of London and to the other "red brick" universities that finally broke the stiffling

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dominance of Oxford and Cambridge. According to Barnard, the academies were "the forerunners" of these public universities, which offered a broad course of study with a practical emphasis to those who might not have attended a traditional university (30). These schools went beyond the classics, which were still enshrined at Oxford and Cambridge, to include the concerted study of English. According to Parker, the University of London included "England's first English professor," Thomas Dale, and by 1850 "the embryonic or new universities of England had made English a familiar if not yet wholly acceptable part of the curriculum" (10, 11). Unfortunately, like many scholars, Parker uses the elite universities to measure reform, despite the fact that they often steadfastly opposed the social and educational philosophies that contributed to reform. Dale was not the first English professor. He was following in a well-defined, if not well-"accepted" tradition. Priestley was succeeded at Warrington by William Enfield (1741-1797), author of the elocutionist text The Speaker (1774), which has been called "the most widely used of all school anthologies" (Michael 186). Other teachers of English in the later academies included Andrew Kippis (1725-1795), who spent over nine hours a week on composition in his courses in rhetoric and belles lettres at Hoxton academy and Hackney Unitarian College according to his student William Hazlitt (Smith 171-74). Despite our limited knowledge of these developments, some general conclusions can be made. First, the introduction of college English studies was not widely or deeply influenced by the classical rhetorical tradition because the Dissenters were removed from the classical curriculum and had to establish their own educational tradition, a tradition based not on Aristotle and Cicero but Locke and Calvin. In important respects the Dissenters fit Howell's characterization of the new logic and rhetoric, but the Dissenters also show how closely tied these new perspectives were to the social context of the period. Second, despite their practical orientation, the Dissenters did not treat English as a basic study of limited social and intellectual significance. Following in the tradition of his predecessors, Priestley stressed the need to understand the rhetoric of political discourse, write for diverse public audiences, and read historical texts with a high level of critical literacy. A third point that is important to recognize is the broader context of the Dissenters' reforms, both the immediate socioeconomic sources of those reforms and the international cultural context in which they developed. As Priestley's educational philosophy most clearly indicates, the Dissenters viewed English study as a means of economic advancement and political reform, and not the vehicle of polite self-improvement that the Scottish belletrists made it. The disenfranchised but prosperous Dissenters and their Presbyterian brethren in the northern cultural provinces used English to pursue different social agendas because they faced different social contexts. Nonetheless, Dissenters, Scots, and Scottish-American emigres like Witherspoon shared basic values and experiences

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that led them to depart from established custom and begin to teach English. Even a brief examination of the Scottish and American origins of college English will show that they were not simply a series of isolated incidents, as one might expect from the accounts of those who have written them out of the history of college English.

The Origins of College English Studies in Scotland

Scottish, American, and Dissenting educators had close social and institutional ties. As already noted, Dissenting and Scottish teachers were in close contact, and Dissenting students often went on to finish their MA studies in Scotland. In America, "the two English universities, Anglican, medieval in organization, and somnolent in spirit, offered few usable precedents. Colonial colleges consequently often looked for precedent and advice to the more lively Scottish universities and the far more innovative Dissenting academies of England" (May 33). A number of basic changes were emerging in the colleges of the British cultural provinces: a transition from tutorial systems of instruction to a more specialized professoriat, a replacement of deductive reasonings from classical authorities with inductive inquiries into social and physical experience, and a general movement toward more concerted studies of the language, logic, and social relations of contemporary life. These reforms were part of an emerging educational philosophy that viewed tradition itself as less reliable than the individual experience. This educational philosophy was influenced by the breaks from tradition that followed the Union of Scottish and English Parliaments in 1707 and preceded the American Revolu- tion. As in the Dissenting academies, college English studies in Scotland and America emerged out of a disruption of the dominant tradition, a disruption that made the cultural idiom problematic enough to merit concerted study. College English studies did not emerge until the 1730s in Scotland because Scottish reformers were working from a curriculum long dominated by the classics. As a result, Scottish teachers of English were more indebted to classical sources than the Dissenters had been. The first professor to teach English composition, literature, and rhetoric was apparently John Stevenson, Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Edinburgh from 1730 to 1777. While Stevenson left no publications and few records of his teaching, he is an important figure because he taught Hugh Blair, whose Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres came to define college English studies at the end of the eighteenth century, and John Witherspoon, who helped institutionalize the study of English in America when he emigrated in 1768 to become President of Princeton. According to their biographers, Blair's and Witherspoon's approaches were shaped more by Stevenson than by any other figure (Schmitz 11; Collin 1:14). With Stevenson, they covered a full course in rhetoric, literature, and composition. Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, and Longinus were studied alongside Locke and "a judicious selection from the French and

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English critics" (Carlyle 48). Students read Dryden, Pope and Addison and heard "many excellent examples and useful practical rules of composition" ("Account of Gordon"; Sommerville 13). A collection of student essays from Stevenson's course remains at Edinburgh. About half are in English, with many of those on the belletristic topics that Blair would make the staple of English studies ("Book of Essays"). Before becoming Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, Blair gave a popular series of public lectures sponsored by the Select Society, which included such members as Smith, Hume, and Kames. Blair's lectures had been preceded by those of Smith, who also lectured on English rhetoric and belles lettres as professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow from 1752 to 1763. Robert Watson delivered public lectures at Edinburgh after Smith's departure, and like Smith, Watson continued lecturing on English when he went on to a traditional university chair in 1756, the Chair of Logic, Rhetoric, and Metaphysics at St. Andrews (see Bator). Adding subjects to the curriculum that had proved popular in public lectures was not without precedent at Edinburgh, and there were important practical reasons for the University's responsiveness to changing public interests. The University was governed not by academics or bureaucrats, but by the merchants and tradesmen of the town council, which was limited by law to such groups. The University's popularity among the English Dissenters and the Scottish bourgeoisie was important to the council because these students generated income and added to the reputation of a city that was still adapting to being a provincial capital. The University's popularity was also important to its professors because they were paid very low salaries and had to rely on fees paid by students in their classes. Unlike English academics, who were paid even if they did not lecture, Scottish professors were thus rewarded for lecturing effectively on subjects of current interest. The spread of English studies is evident in the movement of Smith and Watson to other universities, in Campbell's teaching at Aberdeen, and in William Leechman's lectures on "Composition" at Glasgow. The increasing attention to English can be attributed to the fact that the Scottish universities were much less elitist than the English (see Hans 28-30). Most students came from public parish schools, rather than private grammar schools, and students came at a younger age, as early as thirteen or even twelve. The universities were also pressed by public critics to institute studies suited to ""a commercial people" (Thom 181). Such critics often focused on the arcane classicism of the traditional curriculum and called for more attention to English taste and usage. The educated elite were responsive to such criticisms because they themselves wanted to be accepted into polite British society. Literary societies like the Select Society helped spread the study of English throughout Scotland, and these groups helped to define the social agenda and cultural ideals of college English studies. In the Philosophical Society of Aberdeen, Thomas Reid and George Campbell developed the common-sense philosophy and

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rhetorical theory that along with Blair dominated American education through the middle of the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, the public interest in English culture that was fostered by such groups was marked by an incredible insecurity about the Scots' own public culture. We need to remember that the most influential founders of college English were not English at all, but provincials who turned to the study of the dominant culture as a means to rise above the traditionalism of their own society. We should remember how ill at ease they were in the language and culture they taught because such feelings shaped their attitudes to everything from politics to humor, and these attitudes were institutionalized along with college English.

The Origins of College English Studies in America

Scottish literary societies helped define college English in ways that clearly suited the educated Scottish public, but in America, the origins of English are less easily defmed because American higher education and society were themselves less defined. Student literary societies did begin to foster an interest in English composition and literature from the 1720s onward, while at the same time a broader perspective on rhetoric began to emerge in the classroom with the decline of Ramism. By the end of the eighteenth century, Latin syllogistical disputations had been replaced at most colleges by forensic debates in English, and courses in English had become standard, generally using the texts of Blair, Campbell, and Kames. However, before assuming that these familiar texts shaped the origins of college English, we should examine what happened between the first stirrings of interest in English and the institutionalization of Scottish belletrism at the end of the century. New colleges like those at Philadelphia and Princeton provide the clearest indications of how and why English was first taught because they were less encumbered by the classical tradition. Since the colleges at Philadelphia and Princeton-like the twenty-seven other American colleges founded between 1750 and 1 800-were themselves the products of revolutionary social change, they also provide direct insights into how educational reforms were shaped by social change. Scottish sources had a formative impact on the colleges founded at Princeton and Philadelphia. Franklin wrote his proposal for the "College, Academy, and Charitable School of Philadelphia" after reading William Smith's Some Thoughts on Education: With Reasons for Erecting a College in This Province (1752). Franklin persuaded Smith, a graduate of Aberdeen, to become provost of the reorganized college in 1755. Under Smith, one third of the curriculum was devoted to such studies as science, political affairs, and English composition and literature (Rudolph 32). Smith established the first American professorship in English in 1753, the professorship in "English and Oratory" held by Ebeneezer Kinnersley. Smith's assistant was another Scottish emigre, Francis Alison, who served as vice-provost and professor of moral philosophy. Alison had graduated from Edin-

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burgh in 1732 and may have studied with Stevenson before going on to Glasgow and studying under Hutcheson. Alison is important because he taught Hutcheson's moral philosophy, as did Witherspoon at Princeton, and Hutcheson's doctrines of natural rights and the social contract became key concepts in American revolutionary thought (see McAlister). Before coming to Philadelphia, Alison had run his own Presbyterian academy, which like the Dissenting academies had a broad curriculum that included English composition and literature (see Sloan, Document- ing 176). The College of New Jersey at Princeton developed out of a similiar academy, known as the "Log College." From its founding in 1746, Princeton had close ties with Scottish Presbyterians and with Dissenters like Phillip Doddridge and John Aikin. The best example of the Scots' influence on the origins of college English studies in America is Witherspoon's presidency of Princeton from 1768 to 1794. Witherspoon's evangelical predecessors had visited the Dissenters and Scots to enlist their support, and they naturally turned to Scotland to find a new president when the established Presbyterian clergy tried to take over the college from the evangelicals in 1765. Even before Witherspoon came to Princeton, Shakespeare, Milton, and Addison were being studied; students were delivering daily orations in English as well as Latin on subjects that they had researched in the library; and the final year of study was devoted to "composition" and review (Blair 24-26). Under Witherspoon, English was studied in all four years of the curriculum, which culminated with his lectures on rhetoric and moral philosophy. Witherspoon also instituted a program of oratorical exercises that was the most extensive of any American college according to Bohman (68). What is perhaps most significant about Witherspoon is that he instituted an approach to college English that was quite different from that which Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres eventually established. Witherspoon maintained the classical relationship between rhetoric and the ethical and political topics covered by moral philosophy. His students wrote and spoke on the political topics of the day, rather than critiquing the stylistic niceties of belletristic texts as Blair's students did. Such differences provide important insights into how the social contexts of post-Union Scotland and pre-Independence America shaped the origins of college English. Witherspoon translated the civic vision of classical rhetoric into the contemporary cultural idiom in a way that the eviscerated belletrism of Blair did not. At Princeton and at Philadelphia, the study of English was closely related to moral philosophy, and students learned how to write and speak by addressing the political topics that they had studied in moral philosophy, rather than the depoliticized themes emphasized by belletrists. The introduction of college English in America was indebted to the Scots, not to the belletrism of Blair or the common-sense philosophy of Reid, but rather to the rhetoric of Witherspoon and the moral philosophy of Hutcheson, which shared a strong Ciceronian commit-

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ment to an active civic life. The relationship between rhetoric and moral philosophy withered away at the end of the century when belletrists reoriented English studies from public politics to the private aesthetic response at the same time that common-sense moral philosophers reoriented moral philosophy from public life to the logic of the individual experience. This educational reorientation contributed to what Halloran has termed the "decline of public discourse" in late eighteenth-century American colleges. Like the Scots and Dissenters, Americans turned to the study of English because they were cultural provincials who viewed the dominant cultural idiom as a means to gain social advancement, but they taught English differently because they faced a different social context. The Dissenters taught English out of a practical utilitarian desire to get ahead in business and regain their rights as English citizens. In "North Britain" the dominant culture was studied as a means to polite self-improvement, but the Scots were so alienated from their own cultural traditions that their approach to English was dislocated from the larger public context. And in colonial America, the creation of a new nation reinvigorated the traditional relationship between rhetoric and moral philosophy in a way that gave the study of English a strong political orientation, an orientation that it unfortunately did not maintain. The complex relationships among the Scots, Dissenters, and Americans have not been explored by historians of English studies, but the importance of the Scottish-American relationship has been recognized by those with broader interests. According to Garry Will's controversial analysis, "the education of our revolutionary generation can be symbolized by this fact: At age sixteen Jefferson and Madison and Hamilton were all being schooled by Scots who had come to America as adults" (63). In each case what they studied was English and moral philosophy, and what they learned was how to speak to the public about politics. The significance of such studies is obviously not confined to the history of our discipline, though it is surprising how little attention we have paid to these first teachers of college English.

So Why Should We Care Where College English Studies Came From?

The question of where college English came from has been answered differently because people define college English differently. English composition and literature were first taught to college-aged students in the Dissenting academies in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, but contemporary scholars may be hesitant to accept a group of Presbyterian divines as the first professors of English. Parker was, and later scholars have agreed that college English did not begin until English literature became a subject of scholarly interest in the elite English universities in the nineteenth century. To be fair to Parker's insightful analysis, he did not really ask where college English studies came from, but "Where Do English Departments Come From." However, this is a rather

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anachronistic way to view our early history because none of the emerging fields of political economy, experimental science, or English were institutionalized in the ways that they are today. We have not seen eighteenth-century college English studies as an integral part of our history because we have looked for the wrong things in the wrong places. We have generally assumed that the most respected universities would provide standards for judging the origins of English as a scholarly discipline. However, the texts that founded college English were written for teachers and students, not scholars. The most prestigious English universities did not include English studies until the nineteenth century for the simple reason that their students did not need to be taught the taste and style of the cultural elite because they were the cultural elite. Thus, if we look only at the most prestigious universities, we will miss not only where college English studies began, but why and how they began as well. Despite the fact that most of us now believe that intellectual history is not just the history of intellectuals, we persist in judging our past by the dominant cultural elite. We ask when Oxford introduced this text or instituted that requirement, but we rarely ask when Ohio State did so. At least in practice, we still assume that historical change begins at the top. Foucault or any number of diverse theorists should lead us to broaden our scope of reference. Our own practical experience should also encourage us to ask if the history of language instruction may not be like the history of language change itself-a process that begins at the margins of the discourse community where populations meet and develop new ways of expressing themselves to those who do not share their language. If so, might not developments at public institutions be a better barometer of the pressures placed on education by changing social conditions? The recent development of composition studies drives home the implications of this question, for we see that only after the study of composition became widely established (generally in large public universities) has it finally begun to be accepted by the most prestigious institutions and organizations. These groups maintained that composition was not an acceptable scholarly field until social and institutional change finally impressed on them that the practical reality of college English had changed. The study of composition was only then accepted when it became theorized and institutionalized in forms compatible with dominant ideologies, in some cases by defining itself as a science and in others by reasserting its humanistic tradition or its theoretical ties to literary studies. Nonetheless, if we were today to write the history of rhetoric and composition by what was happening at Harvard or Oxford, would we not conclude that there was no such field, just as we have concluded that college English began only when the elite universities finally accepted scholarly inquiry into English literature almost two centuries after English composition and literature were first taught to college students?

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We should question such conclusions because they rest on problematic assumptions about what college English is and how it came to be what it is. Historians in practice tend to assume a hierarchial model of the progress of knowledge within disciplines that places scholars at the top and leaves teachers at the bottom waiting around to be told what to teach. This model is tacitly imported from other fields like the sciences, where it is assumed that knowledge is first discovered and accumulated and then disseminated. However, such assumptions are at odds with the view that knowledge is not simply discovered but socially constructed. While we have come to recognize that the shared problems and customs of communities determine what qualifies as knowledge, we have not really worked through the implications of social constructivism for historical inquiry because we still tend to valorize the major theorists and largely ignore the complex history of educational practice. Looking again at our recent past, we often refer to this or that scholarly publication of the 1960s as the start of the "new" rhetoric, but we would have to admit, I think, that institutional and social changes like open admissions were probably more responsible than any piece of scholarship for establishing the "new" rhetoric. The professional elite have remained indifferent to the new rhetoric, not because they have failed to study I. A. Richards, but because they have not had to teach much composition. Is it not possible that the "new" rhetorics of the twentieth and the eighteenth centuries are both examples of how theory and research develop out of trends set by teachers and students working together to address a changing social world, and that those schools with broader public contacts often respond more quickly to change than elite institutions? To answer such questions, we will have to learn much more about the history of college English as a social and educational praxis. Only then can we understand the relationship between where college English came from and where it is going.

Works Cited

"Account of the Late Duke Gordon, M.A., including Anecdotes of the University of Edinburgh." The Scots Magazine 64 (1802): 18-32. Barnard, H. C. A History of English Education From 1760. 2nd ed. London: U of London P. 1961. Bator, Paul. "The Formation of the Regius Chair of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at the University of Edinburgh." Quarterly Journal of Speech 75 (1989): 40-64. Baugh Albert C., and Thomas Cable. A History of the English Language. 3rd ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice, 1978. Bohman, George V. "Rhetorical Practice in Colonial America." History of Speech Education in America. Ed. Karl R. Wallace. New York: Appleton, 1954. 60-79. "Book of essays written by Students in the class of John Stevenson." U of Edinburgh Mss. Carlyle, Alexander. The Autobiography of Dr. Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk, 1722-1805. Ed. John Hill. London & Edinburgh: Foulis, 1910. Cohen, Herman. "William Leechman's Anticipation of Campbell." Western Speech 32 (1968): 92-99. Cohen, Sheldon S. A History of Colonial Education. New York: Wiley, 1974. Collins, Varnum Lansing. President Witherspoon. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1925. Curtis, S. J. History of Education in Great Britain. London: University Tutorial, 1961.

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Davis, Arthur Paul. Isaac Watts. New York: The Dryden, 1943. Defoe, Daniel. Compleat English Gentleman. Ed. Karl D. Bulbring. London, 1890; n.p.: Folcroft, 1972. -. More Short Ways with Dissenters. London: n.p., 1704. -. The Present State of the Parties. London: Baker, 1712. Doddridge, Phillip. Works. Ed. Job Orton. 10 vols. Leeds: Baines, 1802-05. Gibbs, F. W. Joseph Priestley. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons LTD, 1965. Girdler, L. "Defoe's Education at Newington Green Academy." Studies in Philology 50 (1953): 573-91. Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1987. Guthrie, Warren. "The Development of Rhetorical Theory in America 1635-1850: II." Speech Monographs 14 (1947): 38-54. Halloran, Michael S. "Rhetoric in the American College Curriculum: The Decline of Public Discourse." PREITEXT 3 (1982): 245-69. Hans, Nicholas. New Trends in Education in the Eighteenth Century. London: Routledge, 1951. Howell, Wilbur Samuel. Eighteenth-Century British Logic andRhetoric. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971. Kitzhaber, Albert Raymond. "Rhetoric in American Colleges, 1850-1900." Diss. U of Washington, 1953. McAllister, James L. "Francis Alison and John Witherspoon." Journal of Presbyterian History 54 (1976): 33-60. McLachlan, Herbert. Warrington Academy: Its History and Influence. Manchester: n.p., 1943. McMurty, Jo. English Language, English Literature: The Creation of an Academic Discipline. Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String, 1985. Mathieson, Margaret. The Preachers of Culture: A Study of English and its Teachers. London: Allen and Unwin, 1975. May, Henry. The Enlightenment in America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1976. Michael, Ian. The Teaching of English from the Sixteenth Century to 1870. London: Cambridge UP, 1987. Orton, Job. Memoirs of ... Philip Doddridge, D.D. of Northampton. London: Cotton and Eddowes, 1766. Parker, William Riley. "Where Do English Departments Come From?" College English 28 (1967): 339-5 1; rptd. The Writing Teacher's Sourcebook. Eds. Gary Tate and Edward P. J. Corbett. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. 3-15. Priestley, Joseph. Theological and Miscellaneous Works. Ed. John Towill Rutt. 25 vols. London: n.p., 1817-31. Rudolph, Frederick. The American College and University: A History. New York: Vintage, 1962. Schmitz, Robert Morrell. Hugh Blair. Morningside Heights, New York: King's Cross, 1948. Sloan, Douglas. The Scottish Enlightenment and the American College Ideal. New York: Teachers College P, 1971. . The Great Awakening and American Education: A Documenting History. New York and London: Teachers College P, 1973. Smith, J. W. Ashley. The Birth of Modern Education: The Contribution of the Dissenting Academies 1660-1800. London: Independent P LTD, 1954. Sommerville, Thomas. My Own Life and Times 1741-1814. Edinburgh: Edmonton & Douglas, 1861. Thom, William. The Defects of an University Education and its Unsuitableness to a Commercial People. Glasgow: Dymock, 1761. Turner, William. The Warrington Academy Monthly Repository 8-10 (1813-15); rptd. Warington: Library and Museum Committee, 1957. Watts, Isaac. Works. 6 vols. London: n.p., 1753. Wills, Garry. Explaining America: The Federalist. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1978.

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Thomas Miller is an assistant professor of English at the University of Arizona, where he teaches courses in rheorical theory and history in the PhD program in Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English. He also helps to administer the undergraduate composition program. He has published work in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, College English, Journal ofAdvanced Composition, and Rhetoric Review. He has also published an edition of John Witherspoon's Selected Works (SIUP, 1990). Research for "Where Did College English Studies Come From?" was supported by funds granted by a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar, which was conducted by Lloyd Bitzer at the British Library in 1988. Since completing his PhD at the University of Texas in 1984, Professor Miller has been doing archival research for a book on the origins of college English in America, Scotland, England, and Ireland in the eighteenth century.

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