American Universities

George Ticknor 1807 was the youngest Dartmouth freshman ever to matriculate; he enrolled at age 12 and graduated at 16. He was no mere wunderkind, however; he went on to become not only one of the leading intellectuals of his day but the man who brought the German-style university to America.

Admitted to the bar, Ticknor realized that his true passion was literature. With letters of introduction from James Madison, John Marshall, and Thomas Jefferson, Ticknor traveled through Europe and met with Goethe, Lafayette, Pope Pius VII, Lord Byron, and top academics. Returning to America, Ticknor joined the Harvard faculty as the nation's first professor of belles lettres. He introduced modern European literature into academic circles. He also imported Germanic scholarly ideas of liberalism, intellectual freedom, and elective courses. Eventually these curricular reforms spread to most American colleges.

"Never before, in America, had anyone invested with such glamour the life of the poet and the man of letters," wrote Van Wyck Brooks in The Flowering of New England.

Polyglot Ticknor brought the German system to Harvard.