The death of Abraham Flexner on September 21, 1959 at the age of ninety-three ended a remarkable career. Here was an educational researcher and later a foundation executive who made significant contributions to American education. His report in 1910 of medical schools in the United States and Canada had a phenomenal result. It practically remade medical education and helped it achieve the respected status it now enjoys. How did he do it?

A great deal is being said and written about the importance and significance to contemporary society of liberally educated people. But few pause to define the term “liberal education” or “liberal arts.” Implicit in the words of their advocates is the assumption that people are generally agreed as to the content which the terms comprehend, and that this content is much the same now as it has been in the past. Historically this supposition is inaccurate; nor does it correctly picture the current temper of thought. The liberal arts curriculum and its product the liberally educated man, changed, albeit more slowly, as society changed. As we shall see, they represented something quite different in past ages, or even a century ago, from that with which they are invested by varying current opinions.

Probably the first published directory of American colleges is found in the issue of the Connecticut Journal, a five-column weekly newspaper, for July 29, 1817. This periodical was published at New Haven for fifty-three years from 1767 to 1820. The list gives brief information concerning thirty-nine colleges in seventeen states and the District of Columbia. It occupies two-thirds of a 2 1/2-inch column on the first page of the Journal. It is reproduced on the next page with original spelling, capitalization, and punctuation.

The most interesting problem faced by the Spanish conquerors in the early years of Mexico was the cultural assimilation of the native population. Although from the very first the Spanish policy was to bring the Indian into the new social order, his status in this society was undoubtedly contingent on the amount of his assimilation. Thus the Indian stood as one of the most controversial puzzles. What were his mental capacities? Would he be able to absorb the new culture? These questions and many others about the natives arose as one of the greatest challenges in the colonization of Mexico.

In a recent publication of Columbia Teachers College's Institute of Higher Education, Earl J. McGrath charges that graduate education “has had a direct and profound, and on balance a harmful, effect on liberal education and the institutions society believes it has established to provide such education.” That the emerging graduate schools did exert a direct and profound effect on the American undergraduate college of the late nineteenth century, nobody will deny. That the effect has been “on balance” harmful, I believe, is open to questions.

Historically speaking, the idea of university autonomy has existed since the Fourth Century A.D. when St. Augustine taught in Carthage. Throughout this long span of time, encompassing some 1500 years, the most consistent characteristic of autonomy has been its mutability. The basic reason for this propensity to change has been the constant onslaught of redefinitions which have been superimposed upon it by a continuous flow of political and social innovation. In his confessions, Augustine noted that students were allowed to rush insolently about at random into a classroom of a teacher with whom they were not enrolled. He commented further on the foul, unrestrained license among students and then stated, “They break in boldly and, looking almost like madmen, they disrupt whatever order a teacher has established for his students' benefit. Augustine condemned them the more because they thought they acted with impunity, and he stated that their recklessness and injurious acts would have been punished by law, except that they had custom as their patron. Augustine felt that the students hurt themselves far greater than they did others by this form of irresponsibility; however, his greatest complaint was that as a teacher he was forced to suffer manners he did not wish for himself when he was a student. Primarily as a result of this abuse, Augustine decided to take a teaching position in Rome where he “had heard that young men studied in a more peaceful way and were kept quiet by the restraints of a better order and discipline.” This comment was footnoted to the effect that in Rome there were laws governing students; however, he failed to elaborate as to their exact nature.