Humanities Ph.D. student, Matthew Jonathan Longcore, will defend his dissertation titled "Dreaming Spires: Collegiate Gothic Architecture on American Campuses" examining how in the19th and early 20th centuries, Collegiate Gothic became a favored architectural style on the campuses of several key educational institutions in the northeastern United States attended by members of the American upper class. Ivy League colleges and New England boarding schools were modeled after Oxford, Cambridge, Eton, and Harrow. Anglophile values included a romantic idealization of the piety and purity of the medieval past, and a pedagogical philosophy which placed cultivating Christian gentlemen, and liberally educated well-rounded amateurs, above the modern educational trends toward secularization and narrow specialization. The rise and decline of the Protestant Establishment as an American aristocracy from the 19th to the early 20th centuries correlates to the widespread popularity of the Collegiate Gothic movement and its subsequent fall out of fashion.