ABSTRACT
The goal of educating for leadership, thereby establishing a new political identity in the new nation, was complicated and important. The Enlightenment is the philosophical beginning of higher education for the United States, to articulate through graduates the possibilities of progress and reform. In actuality, it is only the philosophical beginning, because many key roots of US higher education institutions stretch back to the Middle Ages. The beginnings of the modern academic profession with divisions by areas of study and rank are, however, visible in the colonial era and the Early Republic at Harvard. The oldest colleges began in great part or whole with Enlightenment ideas, and while the philosophies of the Enlightenment addressed new concepts for humanity, the implementation of the ideas was consistently for white males. Women increasingly articulated their rights and abilities during and after the Revolutionary War, but the colleges remained all-male.
