“I have hitherto discouraged all proposals to make Princeton College a university,” President McCosh told the trustees in June of 1885. “I am of the opinion,” he went on to announce, “that the time has now come for considering the question.” Seizing the momentum from what many in Princeton considered a victorious debate with Harvard’s Charles W. Eliot, McCosh launched a formal campaign to make the College of New Jersey a university. He promised that his forthcoming paper, “What an American University Should Be,” would fully explain how and why the board should take this next logical “step” in the institution’s development. Although this was the first time that he officially broached the subject with the trustees, McCosh had long been laying the groundwork to build what he considered would be the crowning achievement of his presidency. With regard to this ambition, the trustees’ minutes preceding this announcement reveal a calculated plan by McCosh to convince the board that the college was making exceptional progress toward becoming a university. He would begin by winning the board’s approval for a particular reform or a new program on the grounds that it was essential if the institution was to advance its civic mission like its rivals, Harvard and Yale. Then, within a year or two, he would proclaim the reform or program a remarkable educational success and a major benefit to American society. The reorganization of biblical instruction in 1876 illustrates this process. Although McCosh had promised the Princeton community in his inaugural address that he harbored no plans to “revolutionize your American colleges or to reconstruct them after a European model,” the College of New Jersey experienced a gradual evolution toward becoming a university under McCosh’s leadership. Spurring consistent improvements in the faculty, curricula, and campus, McCosh led the college out of its antebellum educational doldrums, and, by 1885, he was ready, like his peers at Harvard and Yale, to lead his college into the promised land of American universities.
Big man on campus: A university president speaks out on higher education
