In an article I read today (Donald C. Stewart. “Harvard’s Influence on English Studies: Perceptions from Three Universities in the Early Twentieth Century.” College Composition and Communication. 43 (1992) 455-71.) that discussed the perceived influence of Harvard's late-nineteenth-century writing program on other schools, Columbia's Brander Matthews applied this moniker to MLA. Matthews, it turns out, would become MLA's president two years later. And during these years, he and other colleagues from Columbia, such as Joel Spingarn, struggled with Harvard faculty over control of MLA. One cause of the struggle, Donald Stewart suggests, was an intense animus based on Harvard's exportation of what has come to be called current-traditional rhetoric, which these men, along with Michigan's Fred Newton Scott, considered pedantic and vapid.
Stewart more or less agrees. Of Harvard's Adams Sherman Hill, the fifth Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and a major force behind current-traditional (his Principles of Rhetoric is representative), Stewart writes: "when one considers the damage done to writing instruction in this country for so long by Hill's influence, and the tremendous difficulty of overcoming that damage, even now, one has good reason to regret the failure of more English teachers in this country to look to Ann Arbor instead of Cambridge for guidance in shaping their writing programs" (469).
But apparently vitriolic banter was far more common (or more commonly published) in academics 100 years ago. One Columbia graduate had this scathing evaluation of Harvard's George Lyman Kittredge:
Kittredge taught Old Norse, and Old and Middle English, which had previously been taught at Harvard, and introduced courses in Icelandic, Germanic mythology, and the history of English grammar. He took over from Child the teaching of Shakespeare, which he turned into a word-by-word analysis of the plays, and the conduct of the doctoral examinations. In his regime the form of the dissertation-a device for killing the last spark of sensibility in the future teacher of literature-became as standardized as the American Mercury under Mencken. His students spread out over the land and occupied for a time most of the major positions in teaching. Noteworthy and typical of these are the late John Manly, recently chairman of the department of English at Chicago, Karl Young ofYale, and John S. P. Tatlock of California [a colleague, it should be noted of Scott at Michigan for more than a decade in the first years of the century; Tatlock was in the English Department, however; Scott in Rhetoric]. The precise contribution of these gentlemen to our culture is worth considering. Professor Manly is chiefly known for a card index, compiled at great expense, with a subsidized staff, of every line of Chaucer's writings in every known manuscript in every library in the world. What this index has done, however, to increase our knowledge or our appreciation of Chaucer is not apparent. Certainly the Manly and Rickert six-volume edition of The Canterbury Tales (1939), made out of it, has been a disappointment even to the followers of the Chicago teacher. Professor Young is the author of two tremendous tomes, heavy enough to hold down a tent in a Kansas cyclone, on The Drama of the Medieval Church, in which he has painstakingly catalogued and discussed every antiphonal scrap of Latin song he is confronted by a genuine dramatic piece, like the Jeu d'Adam, his only comment is that it is "transitional." Professor Tatlock, in addition to discovering "Muriel, the earliest English poetess" (of whose writing not one line exists!), is the joint compiler of a concordance to Chaucer-a clerical task notable chiefly for its dimensions. When the work of this triumvirate is considered, one is sorely tempted to ask if there was such a multiplication of zero by nothing, ever such a preoccupation in history with the absolutely meaningless, as this. Yet the students of Kittredge and his disciples are legion-they are spread not only throughout the institutions of higher learning, but through their offspring and through their text-books they exercise still a dominant influence upon the secondary schools. (qtd in Stewart 468)
But Stewart isn't quite interested in letting the vitriol remain in the past. In a footnote, he has this to say: "When we speak of Harvard's influence on composition instruction, we are really talking about A. S. Hill, his texts, and his program. And no one has succeeded yet in convincing me that this man was not mean-spirited, arrogant, dogmatic, and, on the subject of rhetoric, intellectually shallow" (470).
