Following the Civil War and the passage of the Morrill Act, there was an explosion of public state universities. At the same time, many of the private universities, notably Harvard under Charles W. Eliot, sought to diversity their student body and admit more students from public schools. The importance of knowledge of Latin and Greek declined, in part because the great private universities' were becoming more secularized. Gradually, colleges dropped the requirements of Latin and Greek, and the curricula of public and prep schools converged. | Following the Civil War and the passage of the Morrill Act, there was an explosion of public state universities. At the same time, many of the private universities, notably Harvard under Charles W. Eliot, sought to diversity their student body and admit more students from public schools. The importance of knowledge of Latin and Greek declined, in part because the great private universities' were becoming more secularized. Gradually, colleges dropped the requirements of Latin and Greek, and the curricula of public and prep schools converged. |