Charles W. Eliot

1834–1926 · 92 years

The chemist who rebuilt the American university around choice

Portrait of Charles W. Eliot — E. Chickering and Co. of Boston — 1904 — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

A purple birthmark covered the right side of Charles William Eliot's face, down to the mouth, and an attempt to remove it while he was a student failed. He minded it all his life. He was born into Boston money — his grandfather was one of the wealthiest merchants in the city — and then the money went, his father ruined in the panic of 1857. Eliot had a tutor's salary and a legacy from his mother's side to live on. He taught mathematics and chemistry at Harvard, wanted the Rumford Professorship of Chemistry, lost it after a bitter fight, and left in 1863. He spent the next two years inside the schools and laboratories of France and Germany, taking notes. The plan came from there. He was 35.

Forty years, 1869 to 1909 — no Harvard president has served longer. He dismantled the fixed classical curriculum and let undergraduates choose their own courses, and the elective system spread to nearly every American college, which is why students pick a schedule today instead of receiving one. He pushed the law and medical schools up to graduate standing with entrance requirements that meant something and examinations that could be failed. He reorganized the faculty into departments, hired scholars to produce research rather than hear recitations, and left the wealthiest private university in the world.

For decades he kept women out of Harvard, saying the world knew next to nothing about the natural mental capacities of the female sex. When the Harvard Annex became Radcliffe College he countersigned its degrees with reservations and kept insisting the sexes be taught apart. He was a eugenicist in public: on the central committee of the first National Conference on Race Betterment in 1914, for sterilizing the feeble-minded, and on record in 1909 that the races should be kept apart in every respect and that the South had a wise policy. He warned that immigration was blending stocks that should stay pure. He also would not bar Black students. Harvard's first Black graduate, first Black PhD and first Black faculty member all arrived under him, and he opposed the quotas on Jews and Catholics his successor imposed.

In 1909 he put his name to a 51-volume set of world literature, philosophy and science that P. F. Collier sold by subscription as the Harvard Classics — 15 minutes of reading a day, he promised, was a fair substitute for a liberal education. The five-foot shelf sold in the hundreds of thousands, and for two generations it was what self-education in America looked like. The schools moved too: he chaired the NEA's Committee of Ten in 1892, which set the shape of the American high school curriculum, and helped found the College Entrance Examination Board. He died at his summer house in Northeast Harbor, Maine, on August 22, 1926, at 92, and was buried at Mount Auburn.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

Charles W. Eliot's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

The New Education other
Two-part Atlantic Monthly manifesto that won him the Harvard presidency 1869
The elective system at Harvard other
Begun at his inauguration and widened until almost nothing was required — nearly every American college followed 1869
Abolition of the Greek entrance requirement other
Samuel Eliot Morison called it the greatest educational crime of the century 1887
Report of the Committee of Ten other
He chaired it — the report that set the shape of the American high school 1894
Educational Reform: Essays and Addresses book
The inaugural address and three decades of argument in one volume 1901
The Harvard Classics book
51 volumes edited for P. F. Collier — the five-foot shelf 1909

Life in brief

with age at each point

1853 aged ~19 Graduates from Harvard College and stays on to teach Tutor in mathematics from 1854, studying chemistry under Josiah P. Cooke.
1857 aged ~23 His father is ruined in the panic of 1857 It left him, in a biographer's phrase, nothing to look to but his teacher's salary and his grandfather Lyman's legacy.
October 27, 1858 aged 24 Marries Ellen Derby Peabody at King's Chapel in Boston She died of tuberculosis in 1869, at 33, the year he took the presidency. They had four sons.
1863 aged ~29 Loses the Rumford Professorship of Chemistry and leaves Harvard He borrowed against the Lyman legacy and spent two years examining European schools instead of going into business.
1865 aged ~31 Becomes professor of analytical chemistry at the new Massachusetts Institute of Technology He later tried at least five times to absorb MIT into Harvard, and failed every time.
October 19, 1869 aged 35 Inaugurated president of Harvard at 35 The youngest president in the history of the oldest university in the country.
June 24, 1896 aged 62 Hands Booker T. Washington the first honorary degree Harvard gave a Black man Thirteen degrees were conferred that day in Sanders Theatre.
1909 aged ~75 Retires after 40 years and publishes the Harvard Classics He was made Harvard's first president emeritus. The 51-volume set appeared the same year.
August 22, 1926 aged 92 Dies at Northeast Harbor, Maine, at 92 Buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge.