History of Randolph-Macon College

The First Curriculum

The most obvious element of the academic chemical process is the curriculum, that is to say, the arrangement of units of study whose successful completion results in the granting of a degree. In setting up the college, the trustees had followed the pattern, or something like the pattern, set at the University of Virginia and had four distinct departments which the student could join ad lib: languages, mathematics, natural science, and ethics. (Such an innovative spirit might well reflect the absence of college training among the trustees, especially the dominant clerical members.) The faculty, for reasons that are unclear, disliked that model in 1833. L. C. Garland remembered that upon Olin's arrival in 1834, he without hesitation. ..renounced the system, and, at the ensuing meeting of the board of trustees. effected a reorganization of the institution after the older models. Dr. Olin had no sympathy with new-fangled and untried systems of education."

The trustees approved a plan of the faculty's, presented by Olin in june 1834, to introduce the common system of Classification, that is, to have freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors. The Course of Studies was left to be arranged by the Faculty. The course of instruction followed the nearly universal line of the so-called curriculum college, with heavy emphasis on Latin, Greek, mathematics, science, and philosophy. By 1837 according to the Trustees' Minutes, the courses crystallized:

Freshman year: Greek, Latin, Algebra, Geometry, Geography.

Sophomore year: Greek, Latin, Geometry, Trigonometry, Mensuration, surveying, navigation, and analytical geometry.

Junior year: Latin, Greek, differential and integral Calculus, Rhetoric, Chemistry, Mechanics, Geology, Mineralogy, Evidences of Christianity. (textbook by Paley).

Senior Year: Moral Philosophy (textbook by Wayland), Political economy (same author), Mechanics, Hydrostatics, pneumatics, optics, magnetism, electromagnetism, astronomy.

The minutes of the Trustees also record that Declamations, Compositions, & Translations are required throughout the course and the members of the senior class pronounce orations of their own composing. Lectures are delivered at stated times, upon the following subjects: Roman Literature, ...English Literature, Political Economy, Nat: Philos. (with [Experiments]), Chemistry, Geology & Mineralogy. The textbooks by Paley and Francis Wayland could be found in many colleges and were not exclusively used by any one denomination.

This curriculum could still serve the original goal of an educated ministry, but it seems as though the faculty, including Olin, a preacher himself, intended to ground the academic program in tradition. The goal of educating clergymen was incidental. Apart from some minor changes of Latin and Greek authors made in 1842 and the use of different classical textbooks in the sophomore and junior years, the 1837 curriculum continued until 1859. The full classics course for 1837 in the sophomore and junior years was: Greek text (once a week), four books of the Iliad, Horace; second term: Demosthenes, Aeschiles, Horace. Sophomore year: Sophocles, Cicero's de Officiis, Euripides, Cicero, Horace, Homer (two books), Sophocles; second term: Horace finished, Terence, Demosthenes or Aeschi- les (two orations), Sophocles. Junior year, first term: Cicero De Oratore, or Brutus, or de Officiis, two plays of Euripides; second term: Juvenal and Perseus (Expurgatio edition), two plays of Aeschylus or Sophocles. The reader will have noticed the absence of history, foreign languages (other than the classics), art, psychology, political science, and economics in their modern epiphanies. In other words, absent was much of the college program of today. This disparity is the result of the intense conservativism of the American educational world in the nineteenth century. Most schools followed the general lines laid down by William Smith of the University of Pennsylvania in the time of the French and Indian War, when George Washington was still young.

Previous | Contents | Next