Importing Oxbridge: English Residential Colleges and American Universities

Since the late nineteenth century, a number of American universities—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, the University of Chicago, the Claremont Colleges, and the University of California at Santa Cruz—have attempted to organize students and faculty into small undergraduate residential colleges similar to those at Oxford and Cambridge. Proponents of these projects believed that the residential college system would foster academic and intellectual values while countering what they saw as the deleterious effects on undergraduate education of the expansion of the university and the increasing research orientation of its faculty. This book tells the story of these efforts—some successful and some not—adding a new chapter to the history of higher education in America.

Alex Duke begins by describing the origins of the residential college system at Oxford and Cambridge, showing how the reality contradicts many American perceptions of Oxbridge. He then describes the unsuccessful campaigns at Harvard, the University of Chicago, and Princeton between 1894 and 1910 to create support for new systems of student residences modeled after the Oxford colleges; the creation of the Harvard house and Yale residential college systems in the late 1920s; the development of the Claremont Colleges beginning in 1926; and the planning and evolution of the University of California, Santa Cruz, the most ambitious undertaking of the contemporary revival of interest in residential colleges.