From the founding of Harvard College in 1636 until the Civil War, American university education was mostly about sending pious and hopefully well-read gentlemen forth into the world. As Louis Menand, a Harvard English professor and literary critic, has written, what Americans think of as the university is of     1    recent vintage (流行的事物). In 1862 the Morrill Act created land-grant universities, broadening opportunities for those for whom college had been a     2    impossibility. Menand and other historians of collegiate curriculums     3    that at Harvard in 1869, Charles William Eliot became president and created a culture in which the bachelor's degree became the key credential for     4    professional education—a culture that came to     5    the rest of the American academy. The 19th century also saw the rise of the great European research university; the German model of scholar-teachers who educated undergraduates while     6    their own research interests moved across the     7    .
    The notion that a student should graduate with a broad base of knowledge is, in Menand's words, "the most modem part of the modern university." It was only after World War Ⅰ, in 1919,     8    Columbia College undertook a general-education course, called Contemporary Civilization.     9    reading classic texts—from Plato's <em>Republic</em> to <em>The Prince</em> to the Declaration of Independence, with the Bible and Edmund Burke thrown in     10    —and discussing them in the context of enduring issues in human society, every student was     11    to engage with ideas that formed the mainstream of the American mind. The     12    for the move reflected a larger social and cultural concern with     13    the children of immigrants into American culture. Robert Maynard Hutchins     14    a similar approach at the University of Chicago. The courses were not about rote memorization; they were (and are)     15    reading followed by discussion. They were (and are) required of all students, something that     16    Columbia and Chicago apart from many other colleges—and still does.
    World War Ⅱ helped     17    the Harvard Report of 1945, an effort by America's oldest college to provide a common cultural basis not only for its elite students but also for the rising middle class. Students were     18    to read, for example, the great books. As the decades     19    , however, the assumption that there was a given body of knowledge or a given set of authors that had to be learned or read came     20    cultural and academic attack. Who was to say what was great? Why not let teachers decide what to teach and students decide what to study?