Here’s my take - and the irony here is that in putting together this reply, I found myself relying heavily on AI. Specifically, I asked my search engine a series of questions:
- When did the teaching of Shakespeare become commonplace among liberal arts colleges?
- Is the word, “cult“ the root word of the words, “culture“ and “cultivate“?
I asked the Shakespeare question because here in the 21st Century, it’s easy to assume that the Ancient Bard was always a part of what we call a well-rounded, liberal arts education. What I found was that it took nearly 250 years after his death in 1616 and well after most of them had been established, before the NESCAC college curriculums deemed his work worthy of study at the college level, and only because by that point the entire idea of studying literature at all had finally taken root.
This is where the second question comes into play. For nearly a thousand years, Anglo-American scholars had hewn fairly closely to what many described as a classical education based almost exclusively on the writings of ancient Greek philosophers. Why would I call that a “cult”? Because of its origins in the Dark Ages, classical education (aka, the liberal arts and sciences) owes its existence to the painstaking work of monks and priests. They were the only people in Western Europe who could read and they were especially adept at translating ancient Greek into Latin. We all know the story: without them, our knowledge of Plato, “the Socratic Method”, Archimedes, Pythagoras, Sophocles and Aeschylus would most certainly have been lost for hundreds of years.
These people tended to live in cloistered circumstances and under the patronage of the Western European churches. By sharing their discoveries and pooling their resources they were able to organize themselves into collequia or small conferences and later into universities where they were able to produce literate people capable of filling the needs of a rising civil service much of whose business was still conducted in Latin. Thus, university graduates were able to make themselves both indispensable and members of an elite class at the same time.
Add their association with the growing popularity of Gothic architecture and it wasn’t long before the idea of “the ivory tower“ became a label that stuck.
I think that in the period leading up to the inclusion of Shakespeare (as well as modern languages and modern science) as part of the expanded canon of the NESCACs, ordinary people in Europe and America became literate in their native tongues, books (including the Bible) were published in the vernacular and grammar schools became more common.
This left small New England college education increasingly the domain of the very rich and parallel to a time when Oxford and Cambridge became the destination for English public school (their phrase for boarding schools) graduates and just in time for intercollegiate sports (which included sailing and rowing regattas) to take off in popularity in America. I think it remained that way through the second half of the 20th century. What would ultimately become the NESCAC colleges still depended on patronage, but it was the patronage of the rich and not necessarily of a church denomination.
Were NESCAC graduates still “useful” to society? Yes, if you believe a well-educated, (i.e., cultured) professional class (doctors, lawyers, bank presidents, foreign service workers) were a value-added proposition. The popular culture of the time - mainly “screwball comedies” - are full of upper-class characters with pseudo-British accents performing all sorts of jobs.
The real change was after WWII with the returning GIs who came from all economic classes, introduced to a world far beyond their birthplaces and perhaps with a shared determination to make it a better place. They swelled the basketball teams and football teams of many of the hallowed halls of ivy and pretty soon these exclusive diplomas, many of which were still written in Latin became the preserve of ordinary middle-class Americans.
What had begun as a trickle, became a tidal wave following the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957. Big Science exploded, and suddenly all that math, calculus and astronomy were able to gather the imagination in ways the Ancient Greeks could not possibly have foreseen. And universities in general became “useful” again, even indispensable. Their patrons had shifted once more to include billions of dollars in federally sponsored research as well the tuition from a rapidly expanding middle-class.
The NESCACs, true to their nature. tended to depend more on the tuition and endowment growth rather than federal dollars (Tufts and Wesleyan being the outliers). but they too were more actively middle-class than ever in their histories.
Which brings us to The Present. The K-shaped economy has certainly challenged middle-class patronage. But also, the sooner than expected dominance of so-called, “artificial intelligence” has made the entire idea of “knowledge” and how it’s acquired an open question. Mutatis mutandis.