In the late nineteenth century, when universities were being created in the United States, the question arose of whether colleges could survive in the new era. When, for example, a faculty member from the University of Chicago traveled to a nearby college town in 1894, the local audience had to be assured that “the lean and hungry universities” did not intend to devour the fat and innocent colleges. In fact, the occasion of this visit provides an illustration of one way in which colleges survived in the age of the universities.

On the eve of his retirement as the first president of Johns Hopkins University there came to Daniel Coit Gilman the opportunity to direct the fortunes of an institution that promised to become the most important research enterprise in the United States. Moreover, with the financial backing of the institution's founder, Andrew Carnegie, who had set aside as an endowment United States Steel bonds worth ten million dollars, Gilman faced the refreshing prospect of guiding an institution that was free of the usual budgetary deficit.

At the south edge of New Harmony, Indiana, in Maple Hill cemetery, over the grave of Joseph Neef, a monument erected by his daughter, Mrs. Richard Owen, bears the inscription, “Joseph Neef was a co-adjutor of Pestalozzi, in Switzerland and was the first to promulgate the Pestalozzian system of education in America.” Mirroring the epitaph on his stone memorial, American educational historians have interpreted Neef as the lengthened shadow of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi in America. Neef, although in many ways a reflection of his Swiss mentor, was also an educational theorist in his own right. Pestalozzi, as a European, had waited for the coming of a benevolent monarch to inaugurate a natural system of education. Neef quickly accepted the frontier egalitarianism of his adopted nation, blending both Pestalozzian and republican principles to develop an original theory of ethical education.

American Herbartianism was to an astonishing degree the creation of three men, all of whom were connected with the Illinois State Normal University: Charles DeGarmo, Charles McMurry, and Frank McMurry. Though they were aided and abetted in very important ways both by other American members of the movement and by various distinguished educators who were never card-carrying Herbartians, any account of American Herbartianism must focus primarily on these three, for they were both its theoretical proponents and its practical agitators.

The position of Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841) in the annals of education is due largely to Herbartianism, a movement which adopted his name but which really became active only a quarter of a century after his death and had relatively slight connections with Herbart's own theory and practice. Yet Herbart's pedagogical theory and his philosophic doctrines in general are not wholly irrelevant or unimportant to students of education if only because they constitute the baseline against which the developments (and aberrations) of the Herbartians must be plotted.

I appreciate the opportunity of replying to Professor Wieruszowski's lengthy and generally critical review of the Seven Medieval Kings. That I found her strictures for the most part unwarranted will not surprise. Few writers can admit that they could have been so wrong!