ABSTRACT
The absence of mature professionalism contributed, as did denominationalism, fragmentation, and poverty, to the inadequacies of the old-time college. An excellent illustration of the impact of the great retrogression upon enlightened scholarship in an older college is the later career of Samuel Stanhope Smith at Princeton. While the curriculum bore the brunt of the criticism, the great failure of the old college probably lay less in its course of studies than in its pedagogy and its pedagogues. In the contemporary American educational system the great universities and leading colleges call the tune, and even the smaller church-related institutions often share to some degree their ideals of academic freedom. Of all the churches, the Presbyterians were the most vigilant and censorious, as men like Jefferson, Thomas Cooper, Horace Holley, and Francis Lieber painfully learned. While sectarian controversies and repressions were by no means absent from the Western colleges, some of the most interesting academic controversies arose out of abolitionism.
