In recent years, historians of higher education have mercifully taken us beyond the pinched and narrow conventional view of the nineteenth-century college curriculum to a more meaningful contextual interpretation of that much maligned institution. In the process they have reinterpreted the “Old College's” principal manifesto: the Yale Report of 1828. Earlier studies had depicted the Yale Report as either a document cementing a collegiate education to the past or as one aimed at maintaining “a numerically tiny social elite against the hostile pressure of a rising Jacksonian equalitarianism.” Recent studies have revised this interpretation, on the one hand by arguing that the report simply reaffirmed the liberal arts as taught through the classical curriculum, and on the other by contending that it was “actually a thoughtful, responsible attempt to consider the place of the undergraduate college in the totality of the American educational scheme.” Instead of representing the last “bulwark of educational reactionism, elitism, and authoritarianism,” the revisionists argue, the report did not significantly differ “in its essentials from the vision held by most of America's foremost champions of university reform.”