Before the 1850’s, the United States had a number of small colleges, most of th

Before the 1850’s, the United States had a number of small colleges, most of them dating from the colonial days. They were small, church connected institutions whose primary concern was to  shape the moral character of their students.
Throughout Europe, institutions of  higher learning had developed, bearing the ancient name of  university. In Germany a different kind of university had developed. The German university was concerned  primarily with creating and spreading knowledge, not  morals. Between mid-century and the end of the 1800s, more than nine thousand young Americans,  dissatisfied with their training at home, went to Germany for advanced study.
Some of them returned  to become presidents of famous colleges and transform them into modern universities. The new presidents broke all ties with the churches and brought in a new kind of faculty.  Professors were hired for their knowledge of a subject, not because they were of the proper faith and had a strong arm for disciplining students. The new principle was that a university was to create knowledge as well as pass it on, and this called for a faculty composed of teacher-scholars. Drilling and learning by rote were replaced by the German method of lecturing,  in which the professor’s own research was presented to the class. Graduate training leading to the Ph.D., an ancient German degree signifying the highest level of advanced scholarly attainment, was introduced.