Chapter 3Charles Eliot, Father of American Higher Education
Onto a Harvard stage set for change walked the leading actor in the institution's history, Charles Eliot. Eliot was a Boston Brahmin, born into a family of wealth, political power, and strong Harvard ties. He inherited the family intellect but not its wealth; his father lost everything in the financial panic of 1857, when Eliot was twenty-three. By then, he was a graduate of Harvard working at his alma mater as a tutor. The loss of the family fortune and the resulting responsibility to provide for his parents and three unmarried sisters made an already serious Eliot the more so. At the age of twenty-four, he married and won a professorial appointment in mathematics and chemistry. ...
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