"Enthusiasm and Mutual Confidence": Campus Life at State Normal Schools, 1870s–1900s

• In Event: New Perspectives on the History of Being a College Student

Abstract

An observer of California’s San Jose State Normal School in 1897 wrote that its “spirit” was “that of enthusiasm and mutual confidence” (Rothery, 1897, p. 75). This paper focuses on student life at state normal schools in the United States during their heyday from the 1870s through the 1900s. First established in Massachusetts in 1839, these institutions spread to all regions of the country and numbered 180 by 1910. While their official purpose was preparing teachers for the public schools, state normal schools also offered general academic courses and served for many students as an accessible form of higher education long before the 1910s, when they began to transform into state teachers colleges and grant bachelor’s degrees (Ogren, 2005). The objective of this paper is to describe normal-school student life and consider how it furthers historiographical understanding of college life. The theoretical/ historiographical framework for this paper is Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz’s (1987) Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present, the leading work in the field. Horowitz argues that the specific undergraduate culture she calls college life took hold in U.S. higher education in the mid-nineteenth century and dictated student relations and experiences thereafter. Focusing mainly on private and state flagship institutions, Horowitz does not discuss state normal schools or the regional colleges and universities into which they eventually grew. The history of campus life, however, is incomplete without attention to these ubiquitous institutions.

Using historical research methods and based on analysis of primary sources, this paper focuses on student-created and –run organizations and the social sphere at state normal schools from the 1870s through the 1900s. The majority of normal-school students, or “normalites,” were female, members of racial/ethnic minority groups, and/or from the lower end of the social-class scale. The paper argues that while these types of students were generally excluded from the fraternity and sorority life and football culture at the heart of Horowitz’s college life, they created a vibrant campus life at normal schools. Whereas college life arose in opposition to campus rules and formal studies, normal-school student life augmented the curriculum and students’ professional development as teachers. Rather than reinforcing class differences as did college life, activities at normal schools facilitated socialization into the middle class. In addition, female normalites were not relegated to second-class status as “coeds,” but instead were active participants and leaders in campus life. After briefly outlining normalites’ backgrounds, this paper demonstrates how campus life at state normal schools enhanced students’ intellectual and professional growth, welcomed all students into middle-class society, and invited women students into public life. The enthusiastic and mutually confident collective life of students at state normal schools contradicted the rigid system Horowitz describes at private colleges and flagship universities. Examining campus life at state normal schools demonstrates that Horowitz’s college life was far from universal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Author

• Christine A. Ogren, University of Iowa