The Dartmouth Exception

The early nineteenth century was a formative era for American higher education, a time when colleges were fragile, smallscale institutions, often caught between their colonial legacies and populist hostility to privileged elites studying the liberal arts. These tensions came to a head in the case Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, which helped to establish the independence of American higher education from governmental control. At issue was the very nature of a college. Is it a public utility, subject to the demands of the state? Or is it a selfgoverning institution whose autonomy deserves constitutional protection?Dartmouth had been founded in 1769 under a royal charter from King George III, and for nearly fifty years it had operated as a private institution governed by an independent board of trustees. But in 1816 the New Hampshire legislature passed a law aimed at converting it into a state-run university. National political divisions hovered in the background. Dartmouth’s trustees were aligned with the Federalist Party. The legislature and governor were Democratic-Republicans aligned with James Monroe, who was elected president later that year; they viewed the unaccount...