Eliot, Charles William

Charles William (1834-), a president of Harvard College. He was a native of Boston. He was graduated at Harvard in 1853. He remained in the college as a tutor in mathematics. In 1858 he was made assistant professor of mathematics and chemistry. The years 1863-5 he spent in European universities. In 1865 he was elected professor of analytical chemistry in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1869 he was elected president of Harvard, a position he held until 1908. President Eliot's administration of Harvard was marked by intelligence and liberality. Among the innovations made were the removal of Latin and Greek from the list of required studies, the emphasis of modern languages, the expansion of laboratory methods, and a wide choice in the selection of subjects in all years of the college course.

In 1909 President Taft offered Dr. Eliot the position of ambassador to the Court of St. James (London), but he declined on the score that his private means would not enable him to maintain the dignity of the office fittingly, as the rent of a house deemed suitable is more than the salary of an ambassador.

President Eliot was a forceful writer on educational topics. Among the earlier articles to arrest attention were the New Education in Atlantic Monthly for 1869; Wise and Unwise Economy in Schools, Atlantic Monthly, 1875; The Elective System in Our Continent, 1882; What is a Liberal Education? Century, 1884. A number of his best educational papers were published in a volume bearing the title of Educational Reform.

The attitude of President Eliot toward college and school may be seen in the following passage chosen from the epoch-making Report of the Committee of Ten made in 1893. This committee was appointed by the National Educational Association, President Eliot, chairman. It is understood that the words are those of the chairman:

The secondary schools of the United States, taken as a whole, do not exist for the purpose of preparing boys and girls for colleges. Only an insignificant percentage of the graduates of these schools go to colleges or scientific schools. Their main function is to prepare for the duties of life that small proportion of all the children of the country--a proportion small in numbers, but very important to the welfare of the nation--who show themselves able to profit by an education prolonged to the eighteenth year, and whose parents are able to support them while they remain so long at school. . . . A secondary-school programme intended for national use must therefore be made for those children whose education is not to be pursued beyond the high school. The preparation of a few pupils for college or scientific school should in the ordinary secondary school be the incidental, and not the principal, object. At the same time, it is obviously desirable that the colleges and scientific schools should be accessible to all boys and girls who have completed creditably the secondary-school course. . . . In order that any successful graduate of a good secondary school should be free to present himself at the gates of the college or scientific school of his choice, it is necessary that the colleges and scientific schools of the country should accept for admission to appropriate courses of their instruction the attainments of any youth who has passed creditably through a good secondary-school course, no matter to what group of subjects he may have mainly devoted himself in the secondary school.

King Log has made room for King Stork. Mr. Eliot makes the corporation meet twice a month instead of once. He comes to the meeting of every faculty, ours among the rest, and keeps us up to eleven and twelve o'clock at night discussing new arrangements. He shows an extraordinary knowledge of all that relates to every department of the university, and presides with an aplomb, a quiet, imperturbable, serious good-humor, that it is impossible not to admire. We are, some of us, disposed to think him a little too much in a hurry with some of his innovations, and take care to let the corporation know it. "How is it, I should like to ask," said one of our number the other day, "that this faculty has gone on for eighty years managing its own affairs and doing it well--for the medical school is the most flourishing department connected with the college--how is it that we have been going on so well in the same orderly path for eighty years, and now, within three or four months, it is proposed to change all our modes of carrying on the school? It seems very extraordinary, and I should like to know how it happens." "I can answer Dr.----'s question very easily," said the bland, grave young man: "There is a new president."--Oliver Wendell Holmes to John Morley, April 3, 1870.