Perspective

The Making of the College of Education, Lehigh University

(Taken from LEHIGH UNIVERSITY: A History of Education in Engineering, Business, and the Human Condition, W. Ross Yates, 1992)

The faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences was caught up in the spirit of self-study and reform inspired by the Wisconsin Idea –vocational education using the scientific method- as opposed to the old-style teaching of the classics- and education of the public as service. The years from 1908-1910 saw many changes in the courses of instruction, some of which were of lasting importance.

Two changes, begun much earlier, were a general summer school and teacher education. Although conceived separately, almost from the beginning they became joined at Lehigh. Their usefulness to Lehigh undergraduates appears to have been a byproduct and not the main reason for starting and, in the early years, continuing them.

In 1898 President Drown asked the heads of departments to consider the “feasibility and advisability of establishing courses in various subjects, elementary or otherwise, open to nonstudents, in connection with the Summer School.” The heads of departments went to work. Extension courses and the Summer School brought older people from the Bethlehems and surrounding areas onto the campus. Many came seeking instruction in order to improve performance in their jobs. Among these were school teachers, who soon were the largest occupational group taking advantage of the new opportunities.

The first professor on the Lehigh faculty to have heeded the interest of elementary and secondary school teachers appears to have been Stewart, who in 1902 was authorized by the faculty and the trustees to offer a summer course for teacher on Methods of Teaching History and Civics.

Drinker supported the community-oriented projects begun under Drown, and he found in Percy Hughes a person to supervise them. Hughes came in 1907 as an assistant professor to fill the position in philosophy vacated several years earlier by Stewardson. Hughes had received a Ph.D. from Columbia and was a follower and friend of John Dewey, then in the process of revolutionizing educational methods.

Hughes immediately developed a core of courses for teacher education. The faculty agreed that his department should be known as the Department of Philosophy, Psychology, and Education. The department soon contained an undergraduate concentration permitting students, upon receiving the B.A. degree, to become teachers in the elementary and secondary schools. Hughes also took over the extension and summer school work by which school teachers might gain extra work in the extension courses to receive graduate credit. This was, in effect, the beginning of a graduate program in education.

In 1918, when many young men were in military service and the nation’s schools needed women as teachers, Hughes persuaded the faculty and the trustees to allow women to study for M.A. and M.S. degrees. The motion accepted by the faculty read in part, “And provided that, as at present, classes in which women are students should largely be limited to the late afternoon, and to Saturdays, so that the general character of campus life shall not be affected by this innovation.”

The introspection of the faculty in Arts and Sciences from 1908 to 1910 produced not only large support for the Summer School and teacher education but also a broadening of undergraduate opportunities for vocational preparation.

In 1932-1933 Professor Hughes Department of Philosophy, Psychology, and Education was split three ways. Palmer had told the trustees that sufficient students existed for majors in all three fields. In 1931 the trustees agreed to the split in ordered that it take place in two stages, with psychology being sliced off first. Accordingly, in 1932 Adelbert Ford, an expert in applied psychology form the University of Michigan, came to head Psychology. The next year Harold Prescott Thomas, with a Ph.D. , arrived for Education.

The formation of the Department of Education signaled a considerable advance in teacher preparation. In 1920 a summer session for teachers has been held, concentrating on special education of the subnormal and mentally gifted. “A demonstration school was conducted in one of the Bethlehem school buildings and there were numerous clinical studies of children.” In 1923-24 Richards had reorganized the administration of the Summer School so that it would have its own budget and accounts. The faculty had left the school unchanged as to its functions of providing graduate and undergraduate courses for elementary and secondary school teachers and offering other courses for students wishing to accelerate or make up work. Hughes had reported an enrollment in the first session of 1924 of 123 students paying tuition. The number had increased almost every year, attaining a figure of 407 in 1936. In 1925 the faculty and trustees had approved a three-year teacher training program for the Summer School. Undergraduate women had been allowed to enroll in summer sessions beginning in 1929.

When Thomas took over the newly organized Department of Education in 1932, he supervised a complete restructuring of the courses in teacher education.

The Department of Education operated almost entirely at the graduate level and its mains programs were occupational, designed to produce teachers for the elementary and secondary schools. Every year the department led all others in the university in awarding master’s degrees. In addition, it sponsored conferences, the most persistently popular being an annual reading conference in the spring, and workshops for guidance counselors, administrators, and teachers of various subjects.

Harold Thomas, the head, encouraged elementary and secondary schools within commuting distance to regard Lehigh as a resource.

In 1959 Thomas and his faculty began programs leading to degrees of Master of Education (M.Ed.) and Doctor of Education (Ed.D.). The department awarded its first M.Ed. degrees (nineteen of them) on Founder’s Day 1961. The first Ed.D. was given out at the June commencement exercises in 1963.

In 1966 Education ceased to be a department within the College of Arts and Sciences and became the School of Education. John A. Stoops was the first dean. Well before 1966, the Department of Education had ceased to be functionally dependent on the college office. Almost all undergraduate work in education had ended by 1962 when Harold Thomas, the incumbent head, retired. Shortly thereafter the little that remained was terminated. A big field was opening in graduate education. A nationwide shortage of elementary and secondary school teachers, principals, and professionals of other sorts existed. Within the Lehigh Valley a vacuum in teacher education appeared which Lehigh could fill. Lehigh, ready with cadres and programs, became eager through the person of it provost, Glenn J. Christensen, and became doubly able through him and Stoops, Thomas’s successor.

Stoops had been assistant superintendent for instruction in the Neshaminy School District, Pennsylvania, and part-time lecturer at Lehigh. From 1962 until Christensen retired as provost, the two men labored to improve instruction in the education professors. They worked on campus, through the Middle States Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools, and with educational, civic, and political leaders at local, state, and regional levels. Never since the collaboration of Packer and Bishop Stevens in 1865 had two men at Lehigh worked together as harmoniously in as favorable circumstances to inspire growth.

They brought in new faculty, including several older men of established reputation: John S. Cartwright (1962), former superintendent of schools at Carlisle and Allentown with special responsibility for school administration; Natt B. Burbank (1964), former superintendent of schools in Colorado, specializing in secondary education and school administration; and Merle W. Tate (1965), nationally known for his work in educational research. Among the younger faculty were Norman H. Sam (1962); Robert L. Leight (1963); Alfred J. Castaldi, Estoy Reddin, and Nancy Larrick (1964); ThomasFleck, Jr. (1965); and two who soon received Ed.D.’s from Lehigh. Alice D. Rinehart and Charles W. Guditus (both 1965), both of whom had extensive previous field experience.

The inattention given teacher education by the alumni of the college and the trustees was amply evident in the department’s physical quarters. For years it had occupied two wood-frame barracks, the last temporary structures remaining from the era of the Second World War, situated at the southeast corner of Packer Hall. Christensen used his influence to obtain and renovate several private residences on the west side of Brodhead Avenue, downhill from the Alumni Memorial Building. The department moved into these and rented other properties in and about Bethlehem for some of its programs.

In the early years of the Stoops’s tenure, scarcely a month passed without the department undertaking some new activity, making an important commitment, or receiving an honor. Stoops, Cartwright, and Burbank gave effect to the Ed.D. Program, which had been authorized in 1958. Ellis Hagstrom and Norman Sam designed a fifth-year intern program for elementary and secondary school teachers, the Master of Arts in Teaching Program, patterned on a model begun at Harvard in 1952.

Norman Sam became director of the Summer School. Beginning in 1964 and every year thereafter, the number of graduate students taking summer work exceeded the number of undergraduates.

In 1965 the Pennsylvania Department of Public Instruction accepted graduates of the Master of Arts in Teaching Program for permanent certification, thereby allowing Lehigh’s Department of Education to determine the standards and courses necessary for professional recognition. Accreditation by the newly formed National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) soon followed.

The department augmented its service activities, began summer workshops in children’s literature, art, economics, and mathematics and inaugurated programs for training teachers and administrators for community colleges. In 1965 the department received a grant of eight-eight thousand dollars from the U.S. Office of Education to support a program for training in educational research.

In 1966 the department formed a Lehigh Regional Consortium for Graduate Teaching Education, which within a few years included Lehigh University and Beaver, Ursinus, Allentown, Muhlenberg, Moravian, Marywood, and Wilkes colleges; and it developed a Regional School Study Council for aiding public schools in the nearby areas. Also in 1966 the department began an association with Inter American, a private university with campuses located at San Juan and San German, Puerto Rico. The initial contract was for two years and was succeeded by a five-year agreement in which Lehigh augmented its assistance to Inter American through a consortium arrangement.

In February 1964, the department opened a laboratory school to take care of youth in need of special instruction. The first class met in the basement of Drown Hall. Eight children of elementary school age attended. Charles Versacci was general supervisor. Shortly thereafter Ruth B. Parr began preparing a library. During the next half dozen years, the school occupied various location – a garage, a synagogue, churches, university structures, and abandoned public school buildings.

The energy within the department activated some special community efforts. Christainsen and Cartwright worked to bring an educational television station to the Lehigh Valley. They and others inspired the formation of the Lehigh Valley Educational Television Corporation, which set about raising capital from local businesses and industries. On 8 April 1964, the trustees of Lehigh voted to lease the land needed for the station atop South Mountain for a fee of one dollar per year. WLTV began operating in 1965 with Christainsen as founding president.

Another community-oriented project produced the Northampton County Area Community College. Christainsen , Stoops, and other educational civic leaders succeeded in establishing a locally chosen board with financial support coming from the area’s local governments. Christainsen became the first chairman of the board of the NCACC in 1966 and held the position until 1977.

The change of status for Education from a department to a school met with a general acceptance from members of the university faculty. Several faculty were added to the new school, including Lloyd W. Ashby, Raymond Bell, John A. Mierzwa, and Paul Van Reed Miller, Jr.

Within the next several years, the School of Education improved the Master of Arts in Teaching Program; gave separate professional identities to elementary and secondary school teaching and to the education service professions of Counseling, School Psychology, Administration, and Reading; and in the early 1970’s it added Programs in Career Education, Social Restoration, Special Education, and Educational Measurements and Research. Candidates for the degree of Ed.D. could specialize in Administration, Reading, Educational Foundations, Counseling, or Educational Measurements and Research.

In 1967 the name of the Laboratory School was officially changed to that of Centennial School. In that year the superintendent of public instruction of the commonwealth approved it for the work being done with exceptional children. Enrollments rapidly increased as parents sought to enter children with special learning problems. Financing came from tuition, which after 1969 was supplemented by payments from the commonwealth.

In 1970 the growing number of students of secondary school age necessitated a seperation from elementary school students. The elementary school was called Centennial I and the secondary school, Centennial II> A housing crisis led to negotiations for a permanent meeting place on the eastern edge of the Saucon Valley playing fields. The Forum enthusiastically supported the project. On May 1 1972, Centennial I and Centennial II, with a combined enrollment of approximately 160 students and a children’s library of upward of four thousand titles, occupied the new structure.

Until 1973 enrollments justified the expansion of programs. In that year the students in education accounted for approximately half of the total graduate student body of the university. The school in 1973-1974 awarded thirty-four doctorates as compared with fifty-three given by all other parts of the university; and it gave out more than 50 percent of the master’s degrees.

After 1973 enrollments declined. Rising tuition at Lehigh in the face of the national economic crisis was adversely affecting all graduate enrollments. Also, the national shortage of teachers disappeared; an oversupply was forecast for an indefiinite period. Other losses occurred. Hagstrom resigned; Cartwright died (1970); Burbank, Ashby, Tate, and Larrick retired. Christensen in 1969 had resigned as provost, and in 1976 Stoops gave up the deanship. Stout served as acting dean in addition to being dean of the Graduate School.  In the fall of 1977, Perry A. Zirkel began tenure as dean of education and professor of administration and supervision.

Enrollments in Education continued to drop, although they started to rise for gradaute students in science and engineering. By 1979 the School of Education had only about three-fifths as many students as it had in 1973. The centennial schools fared even less well. By 1979 the enrollment was down to seventy, less than half of what it had been when the schools had occupied their new building in 1972. Income correspondingly fell.

In contrast with these buffets to enrollments and finances, members of the faculty in Education were gaining in experience and becoming more active in university affairs. They worked on university committees and in the Forum and cooperated with departments in the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities.

In 1975 the faculty of the university voted to allow the school a representative on the Committee of Educational Policy. Paul Van R. Miller became in 1977-78 the first person from the school to serve as chairman of this committee; and after  a year of energetic activity in heading it, chiefly by reducing the number of members of the administration who say thereon.

Then on 7 December, 1979 – the anniversary of Pearl Harbor – President Lewis dropped a bomb. He met with the faculty of the school, told them that the school was not an integral part of the university in the same sense that the other three colleges were, called attention to the shakiness of it financial position, and announced that unless deficits were substantially reduced within two years, the school was operating at approximately a break-even point by the end of five years, the trustees would close it.

Members of the School of Education immediately took the matter up with the university faculty. Dean Zirkel read a statement in the Osborne Room three days later, calling the president’s estimate of the school’s financial condition “unrealistic and misleading,” labeling the statement that the school was not an integral part of the university “capricious” and “repellent,” and asking the president to withdraw a letter he had sent to faculty on the subject “before it become self-filling by destroying the school’s credibility with our students, the schools, and the public.”

The university faculty eagerly seized on the issue and discussed it, not so much for ht merits as for the administration’s failure to consult. Feelings against the administration ran high. A movement to censure the trustees and the administration was barely avoided. The faculty approved a motion declaring the failure to consult “a direct and serious affront to the entire Lehigh faculty.” Professor Barbara Frankel, chair of Committee on Educational Policy, appointed a committee to investigate the matter. The outcome had nothing much in it for the School of Education but obtained form the president a promise to consult with the appropriate faculty committees in the future before announcing structural changes that substantially affected educational programs and policies.

It is unlikely that Lewis, Zettlemoyer, and the trustees wished to put an end to the School of Education. True, the trustees as a group seemed largely indifferent to it. From time to time voices among them were heard expressing fears that the growth might overshadow engineering education. But they did not seriously suggest that the school be terminated. On at least one occasion Lewis expressly told the trustees that the development of the school was consistent with the purposes of the university. Furthermore, the school has the faculty and the Forum behind it. A year before Lewis issued his warning, faculty had given the school a vote of confidence by accepting a highly controversial Undergraduate Education Minor. In effect, teacher education and the programs associated with it were too well entrenched within the university to be easily dislodged. A more likely explanantion of Lewis’s action is that he was genuinely concerned about the financial position of the school, wanted it to curtail or desist from activities that it could no longer financially support, and chose ill-advised language to convey the message.

The School of Education did some retrenching. The centennial schools gave up the building in the Saucon Valley, which became storage space for the university libraries, and rented more suitable quarters closer to the main campus. The retrenchment did not mean stalemate. The faculty in education also strengthened existing programs and developed some new ones.

The public heard no more about plans to close the school. In 1983 it was reorganized as a single department. Zirkel resigned as dean and became university professor of education. Miller took the chairmanship of the department, which shortly thereafter was restyled as College of Education with Miller remaining as dean.

And so, these are the roots of the College of Education here at Lehigh University. Of course, the history doesn’t end here and we will be adding the mid-1980′s to the present.