What 19th Century Distance Education Can Teach Us in the Age of COVID-19
This op-ed was written in April 2020 in the midst of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic that prompted American colleges and universities to go remote en masse for the first time. The piece was never published. It might nonetheless be of interest to readers of Making Lawyers By Mail.
It seems we never learn. The coronavirus-induced shift to online instruction this spring and its likely continuation at many American universities and colleges this fall have touched off a firestorm of debate about the vices and virtues of distance education. Over the past two months administrators, professors and students have taken to the nation’s editorial pages as champions of classroom pedagogy, the “college experience” and tradition on the one hand, or as exponents of innovation, lower cost, and broader access on the other.
The commentators’ shared commitment to teaching and learning is admirable, but they’re engaging with each other in a historical vacuum, blissfully unaware that their general debate over the value of remote instruction is very old. It goes back over a century to the years when the method was new. History need not repeat itself in 2020, but as we consider how to proceed academically in an age of COVID-19 it might be helpful to remember what happened when the plans and hopes of the “founding generation” of distance educators confronted some practical realities.
Post-secondary distance education began in England in the late 1860s when Cambridge University lecturer James Stuart hit upon the idea of teaching non-resident female students by mail, a technique more proper to many Victorians than live instruction of adult women by men. English suffragettes interested in empowering women soon set up private correspondence programs of their own and eventually persuaded other Cambridge dons to experiment with postal pedagogy as a step towards the establishment of formal women’s colleges.
The progressive practice soon crossed the Atlantic. In 1873 Anna Ticknor, the learned daughter of a Harvard professor, launched the Boston-based Society to Encourage Studies at Home, engaging her college-educated female friends to teach housebound American women by correspondence. The same year, English-born Methodist clergyman Samuel Fallows, president of Illinois Wesleyan College, sidestepped looming institutional insolvency in a year of nationwide financial panic by offering degree programs by mail to would-be Methodist ministers. With the burgeoning post-Civil War rail network delivering letters faster and further than ever before, both initiatives grew rapidly, reaching thousands of students within two decades.
Meanwhile other individuals and organizations experimented with the exciting idea of teaching anyone, anywhere, anytime. Cornell University mathematics professor Lucien Wait launched a multidisciplinary “Correspondence University” in 1883, recruiting public-spirited American and English academics to help him. The organizers of the Chautauqua system of educational camp-meetings in upstate New York developed a correspondence branch in the mid-1880s led by William Rainey Harper, a linguistics professor at Chicago’s Morgan Park Academy who had taught Hebrew by mail. In 1890 William Sprague, a young lawyer heading a legal publishing house in Detroit, set up the first for-profit correspondence school in the US to teach law to small town up-and-comers, working men, women and minorities who could not attend traditional law schools. He printed his own textbooks, hired staff to grade tests and answer letters, and published a monthly magazine for his students. Distance learning even got a nod from Gilded Age philanthropy when in 1891 John D. Rockefeller had Harper installed as president of the new University of Chicago, where he hoped to create a comprehensive program of correspondence instruction.
But most American academic leaders were suspicious of distance education. They thought it removed students from the moral example of their teachers, eliminated the social aspects of college life, and lacked the rigor of classroom interactions between teacher and student. They worried it would undermine the personal status of professors and open university-level learning to too many people of low social standing. And poring over their ledgers, they feared distance education would reduce the need for libraries and other campus buildings that aspiring universities would want to show off and rich donors might want to endow.
In the midst of all this, remote instruction proved more challenging to established educators than was first thought. Simply duplicating classroom techniques by mail did not work. Teaching at a distance took more time than many mainstream professors were inclined to spend beyond their regular curricular and research obligations. Hiring additional instructors who could develop new methods and handle the remote teaching load was expensive. Finally, very few students who had the option of residential instruction preferred to learn by mail, limiting the constituency of correspondence programs to poorer, less prestigious and less powerful groups.
These problems and difficulties eventually burst the first bubble of remote learning in American higher education. Without strong institutional backing, few of the early exercises outlasted their visionary founders, and later efforts at other universities and colleges were much less ambitious, even as they reached beyond correspondence to radio and television. Anna Ticknor’s Society folded shortly after she died in 1893. Illinois Wesleyan continued its correspondence degree programs for several decades after Samuel Fallows’ departure, but no other college could duplicate his success, or seemed inclined to. At Cornell, an exhausted Lucien Wait was demoralized by the disinterest of Cornell’s leadership and abandoned his Correspondence University after barely two years. Chautauqua gave up correspondence after William Rainey Harper left for the University of Chicago, where his distance learning dreams faded in the face of faculty opposition.
And what of William Sprague and his attempt to leverage the mail to make American legal education more inclusive? The Sprague Correspondence School of Law thrived for almost 20 years, introducing legal learning to thousands of formerly marginalized students while enabling hundreds to pass their bar examinations and become successful local lawyers. But in the first decade of the 20th century the institution began drawing the ire of elite university law professors who for both academic and self-serving reasons regarded legal instruction by mail as an abomination. Teaching law by correspondence, insisted the dean of the University of Chicago’s law school at the 1909 American Bar Association Annual Meeting, was about as advisable as teaching aerial navigation by mail. Dismayed that the leadership of his profession was turning on his vision and the men and women that he had helped, Sprague sold his school in 1910. He devoted his remaining years to developing the field of commercial law, far away from academic endeavors.
One wonders what William Sprague would think of higher education’s sudden shift to distance education after so many decades spent resisting and even suppressing it. Perhaps he would be optimistic, believing that with the support of forward-looking university leaders impelled by events an age of always-on education for the many may finally be dawning. Perhaps he would be pessimistic, waiting for timidity, tradition and established academic interests to prevail a second time, limiting post-secondary instruction to the fortunate few who can get it face-to-face.
But of course we will never know. William Sprague died in New York City in 1922, of influenza.
Bernard Hibbitts teaches legal history at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. He is currently writing a book on the history of legal education by mail, to be published by the University of Chicago Press.
