The tradition of liberal arts education at Williams College began two hundred years ago with a handful of professors and young men and a small settlement in the isolated Berkshire mountains. At that time it was one of but a few colleges in the United States. It had a President, a tutor, and 18 undergraduates.[3] Young men were sent to Williams to acquire the finishing touches of scholars and gentlemen.

Of course, Williams has changed since then, in its property, its policies, its goals, its faculty--and its students. But to understand the college today, it is helpful to understand the college as it began, in 1793.

Williams began operation in the Early Republic, when the newly created United States faced the uncertainties and problems of a newly established independent nation. Long dependent on Old World industry, the country had now to establish its own manufacturing industry, in order to achieve and maintain economic independence. At the same time, it had to improve and develop agriculture, both for domestic and international markets.

To that end, both rhetoric and practice contributed. In practice, a great number of societies were founded for the encouragement, improvement, and dissemination of agricultural and industrial knowledge. One of the nearest to Williams was Albany's Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, Arts, and Manufactures. Societies, if sufficiently large and long lasting, usually sponsored the publication of a journal. Such technological and scientific journals carried, in addition to their scholarly and practical articles, a powerful rhetorical message to their readers, that science and technology constituted the foundation, the twin pillars, of the proud and rising empire that future America would become. Unencumbered with the institutional and historical legacies of the Old World, the United States, free to experiment with democratic government, would, through the application of reason through science and technology, construct an exemplary nation, a nation such as the world had never seen.

Against this background of faith in the power and beneficence of science and technology, it is surely no accident that nearly a third of the courses required of Williams students fell in the natural sciences and mathematics -- some three times more than what is required two hundred years later.

With a strong and unwavering commitment to general education, an education in which science plays a major part, Williams, like other small, non-denominational liberal arts colleges, provided exceptionally fertile soil for the undergraduate training of American scientists, in numbers all out of proportion to such colleges' size.[4] If, for the past century, graduate faculties at major research universities have provided the formal finishing touches to professional education in science, such universities have not furnished proportionately as many undergraduate candidates for advanced research and training as their smaller, non-university counterparts.

In that sense, schools like Williams, Carleton, Kenyon, Oberlin, Swarthmore, and Amherst have been the primary breeding grounds of this country's scientists for the past century. Consequently, it is interesting to examine their history, in hope of finding some clue about what accounts for their peculiar distinction, a distinction all out of keeping with what one would expect. Eventually comparative studies may clarify why science education seems to have worked better in these small and collegiate academies than in larger, more well-equipped and nobly staffed universities.

Not surprisingly, historical accounts of science in America have concentrated on the roles of major universities, institutions, and organizations in the development of science, and have also treated extensively America's most eminent scientists. But history which focuses only on the elite overlooks the large part played by lesser agencies. Just as it has become increasingly fashionable in the past 20 years to turn to the excavation of the relatively hidden histories of the not-so-elite, to provide a leavening, an historical counterpoise to the adulatory stories about the heroic greats, so too is it appropriate and timely to dig up and display the none too well known history of science at Williams.

Williams enters its third century facing an anticipated era of globalism, with all the attendant uncertainties and problems of a newly emerging international economic and political order. Much has already been made of the consequent need for scientific and technological research and for corresponding technical literacy on the part of the public, if the United States is to compete and maintain its position in the new order. It seems that the same faith in the power, if not the beneficence, of science and technology still animates American society.

[3] Leverett W. Spring, A History of Williams College, (Boston, Houghton Miflin Company, 1917), pp. 45-47. | Back |
[4] See, for example, R.H.Knapp and H.B. Goodrich, Origins of American Scientists, (Chicago, University of Chicago Press for Wesleyan University, 1952) | Back |