Here is a parochial footnote to my post on “Death By Lightning.”  As I said in that post, Garfield was intent on ending the spoils system and professionalizing the civil service. This was in line with a dramatic increase in professionalism across sectors of society. It was also in line with a more robust understanding of democracy, fueled in part by Reconstruction and the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution — the second revolution, as the historian Eric Foner has said — and also by the growing labor movement, the growing women’s suffrage movement, even the increasing understanding of the natural beauty of the continent. Of course, for context we have to remember that Rutherford B. Hayes ended Reconstruction in 1877 as payoff for a remarkably cynical election deal, and that this is also the period of extended wars against Native Americans, who were struggling for their survival (the Battle of the Little Bighorn, for instance, took place in 1876, just four years before the 1880 election of Garfield)).

Still, there was a new understanding of what democracy might mean, and this was reflected in events at the University of Michigan. In 1879, James Garfield, then a Congressman from Ohio, was slated to give the commencement address at U-M. Garfield late in the day was unable to do so, and as a result, after much deliberation, the University’s President James B. Angell delivered the address. His speech stands as a manifesto for the mission of higher education and a document exemplary of the changes underway in the country at the time.

The address, “The Higher Education: A Plea for Making It Accessible to All,” makes the case for universally accessible higher education: “. . . it is of vital importance, especially in a republic, that the higher education, as well as common education, be accessible to the poor as well as the rich.” Although Angell here talks in socioeconomic terms, he is quite clear elsewhere in the address about the scope of his vision, e.g., “The son of the millionaire has no advantage over the son of the washerwoman or over the liberated slave.” And he includes women: he waged a vigorous public debate on behalf of their inclusion in higher education against the presidents of Ivy League institutions.

Angell lays out five reasons for accessible higher education:

1. It is “due” to every child that they should have “proper facilities” for development of their “talent and character” – or as we might say, education at all levels should be a right.
2. It is best for all of us, for society, that we cultivate knowledge wherever we can:  “We need all the intelligence, all the trained minds we can have. There is never a surplus of wisdom and true learning.”
3. To educate the privileged only would be “to form an aristocracy of considerable strength.” If the underprivileged have access to higher education, “we have little to fear from an aristocracy of wealth.” (Wish that were enough.)
4. We are a large and distributed nation, and we need the educated in every region and at every level of society.
5. From time immemorial society has sought to provide to the young, without a burden on them, the education that the time demands.

These principles articulate not only a philosophy of higher education but also of the belonging of all in society that a democracy — government of the people, by the people, for the people — requires. 

Sadly, we have placed this mission for higher education in significant jeopardy, and Trumpism has done the same with the larger society.