Charles William Eliot

Charles William Eliot (March 20 1834 - August 22 1926) was unquestionably the most important figure in nineteenth century American higher education. Selected as Harvard's president in 1869, he tranformed the provincial college into the preeminent American research university.

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The scion of a wealthy Boston family, Eliot graduated from Harvard in 1853. In spite of his high ambitions and his obvious scientific talents, the first fifteen years of Eliot's career were less than auspicious. He was appointed Tutor in Mathematics at Harvard in the fall of l854 and promoted to Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Chemistry in 1858. He taught competently, wrote some technical pieces on chemical impurities in industrial metals, and busied himself with schemes for the reform of Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School. But his real goal, appointment to the Rumford Professorship of Chemistry, eluded him. This was a particularly bitter blow because of a change in his family's economic circumstances -- the failure of his father in the Panic of 1857. Eliot had to face the fact that "he had nothing to look to but his teacher's salary and a legacy left to him by his grandfather Lyman." After a bitter struggle over the Rumford chair, Eliot left Harvard in 1863. His friends assumed that he would "be obliged to cut chemistry and go into business in order to earn a livelihood for his family." But he did not. Instead, he used his grandfather's legacy and a small borrowed sum to spend the next two years travelling in Europe, studying the educational systems of the Old World.

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