Reconstructing the Campus by Michael David Cohen

Author:Michael David Cohen [Cohen, Michael David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, Civil War Period (1850-1877)
ISBN: 9780813933177
Google: N2RlWZmdGecC
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2012-01-15T01:41:36+00:00

Fig. 10. Geographic origins of students at South Carolina College before and after the long Civil War era, 1859–60 and 1882–83. (Data derived from catalogue of South Carolina College, 1860, 12–17, and 1882–83, 18–23)

When it reopened in 1866 as the University of South Carolina, despite the grander name it was a more local institution, with 18 percent of students hailing from Columbia and only 3 percent from outside the state. The trend continued through the early years of Reconstruction. By 1869–70 Columbians made up 48 percent of the student population, and non–South Carolinians only 2 percent—a single student. As at Wesleyan, the rising cost of room and board likely discouraged out-of-towners from attending. Young men from Columbia, living with their families, could more easily afford to come. In fact, room and board apparently were such a financial strain that, despite the law permitting each county to send one student to the university free of tuition, many counties in the late 1860s and early 1870s did not.27 Merely the cost of living in Columbia, never mind studying there, prevented distant young men from attending. Financial barriers had made the university a local institution.

In the early 1870s students from a distance began to make a comeback. In 1870–71 out-of-state students made up just over one-quarter of the student population and included young men from as far away as Texas and Pennsylvania. Columbians, meanwhile, dropped below one-third of the total. Why this happened is unclear, but whatever the reason, the new trend did not last. Just as the school at Columbia was again starting to become a regional, and potentially national, university, changes to the admissions policies abruptly halted and reversed that trend.

In 1873 the trustees opened the university to African Americans. In doing so they effectively closed it to non–South Carolinians. We might expect otherwise. Although racial prejudice ensured the withdrawal of most white students, blacks from across the South might have enrolled. Probably many non–South Carolinian freedpeople with some education and an intellectual inclination would very much have liked to enroll. Indeed, Grandison Harris, the justice of the peace who wanted to send his son to the law school, hailed from Georgia. But the attractions for South Carolinians and the barriers for most others were too great. First, like Missouri and California, South Carolina made it clear in promotional literature that it intended this free university for the citizens of South Carolina.28 Second, travel expenses kept others away. Finally, African Americans were making great efforts to reconstitute families that slavery had dispersed.29 Unless they could bring entire kinship groups to Columbia, those from far away were unlikely to go themselves.

When the trustees instituted free tuition and housing in 1873, they did more than open educational opportunities to lower-class and black Americans. They created a new relationship between the state and individuals’ education. Just as California and Missouri were doing in different contexts, South Carolina was developing a modern state university. No longer an independent college with state funding, it now became a mechanism through which South Carolinians funded one another’s education.

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