Thelin Chapter 4

The Quest for the Great American University

• Between 1880 and 1890 there was only a small amount of institutions in the US that were actual universities
• In 1900, presidents of 14 institutions form the Association of American University
• Charter members: Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, University of Chicago, University of California, Clark University, Cornell University, Catholic University, University of Michigan, Leland Stanford, Jr., University, University of Wisconsin, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and Yale University
• “Growth and success characterized the era of the “university-builders” between 1880 and 1910” pg 111
• “The similarities prompted Thorstein Velben to coin the satirical term “captains of erudition,” echoing the popular phrase “captains of industry,” to characterize the university-builders’ approach to academic affairs” pg 111
• Between 1893 & 1896 an economic depression drove down the stock market of serval universities
• Because there was this focus on “competing for talent, rating the faculty of rival institutions, and building lavish facilities” pg 112 institutions would loose their high rating(?) between 1880 and 1910.
• Ex. Clark University focused on graduate studies and advanced work in behavioral sciences lead to them going over their budget leading them vulnerable to faculty raids
• Industrial organizations—> models for academic structure
• One of which is “the approximation on the campus of a corporate model of hierarchy and offices for faculty and staff.”
• Religion also helped in institutional evolution with donors gifting money to do things like creating a Baptist institution or revive a struggling Methodist institution
• A prominent example of that was in 1884 where a group of wealthy people provided money for the founding of the Catholic University of America
• Science was seen as something connected with efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability which lead to the conflict between the industrial entrepreneurs and the experts and engineers in the way they attempted to shape organizational life. (a bit confused by this)
• The amount of gifts going to colleges went from 47% to around 75% between 1893 and 1916.

Campus Architecture and the University Spirit

• pg 116 “The American university had captured the popular imagination both as a tourist destination and as a source of inspiration.”

A Profile of Campus and Community: Chicago in 1893

• Columbian Exposition of 1893 brought 27 million visitors to Chicago and also attracted people to the opening of University of Chicago.
• With the starting up of the picture-postcard industry, there were mass produced postcards of “the ornate buildings of the Columbian Exposition and the Gothic spires of the University of Chicago.“
• Chicago’s president William Rainey Harper enrolled as a freshman at Muskingum College at the age of 10. Went to Yale, earned a PH.D in philology in 3 years before his 19th bday. He taught Hebrew, Assyrian, Arabic, Aramaic, and Syrian and then later on went to give public lectures on the Bible. Because of his reputation he was invited by John D. Rockefeller to be the president of the new University of Chicago.
• He raided the faculty of Clark University to enhance the behavioral sciences at Chicago.
• He added new features like a two-year junior college and an extensive summer school.
• The University of Chicago was coeducational.
• pg 121 “Harper obtained generous funding for scientific laboratories, an observatory, a university press, and a graduate school with numerous Ph.D. programs, professional schools, research institutes, and a library.”
• He also emphasized intercollegiate football with a stadium, created a prototype for an athletic department.
• “…on his deathbed he was busy making plans for his elaborate funeral processions, including detailed instructions for Chicago faculty to march wearing full academic regalia.” (that’s crazy)

Large-Scale Philanthropy: The Gospel of Giving as the Religion of Higher Education

• pg 122 “Commerce in the United States of the late nineteenth century was characterized by a lack of federal regulation or intervention.”
• Maverick enterprises became a source of money to colleges like Tufts University having its mascot be Jumbo in honor of P.T. Barnum’s Greatest Show on Earth”.
• Most of the devotion and financial support new endeavors received were not from alumni or colleges graduates but “friends” of higher education.
• Fund-raisers, nicknamed “honorable beggars” were mostly Protestant clergy with access to business leaders, who devoted themselves to fund-raising. They were basically scammers/manipulators in a sense that would make people with the money feel more inclined and willing to donate money to the institutions.
• Frederick Gates was a secretary of the Baptist Education Board and the son of a Baptist minister “represented the connection between the old-time religion and the modern philanthropy of university-building.”
• (pg 125, last paragraph for how) Frederick managed to convince Cornelius Vanderbilt to help fund a university with a Methodist affiliation alongside an undergraduate college, graduate school and professional schools in Nashville. Interestingly enough Vanderbilt didn’t meddle with the operation of the university or visit it. (I wonder why that is)

University Presidents as Entrepreneurs

• Presidents typically served for a longer time and had “influence extended beyond the campus into local, state, and national affairs.”
• It was typical for University presidents in major cities to serve on the local school board which was established by Eliot of Harvard for Boston’s schools and Columbia University’s Nicholas Murray Butler for NYC’s public schools.
• Eliot helped in the expansion of the American Red Cross therefore playing a role in the “advancement of a vigorous private sector for varied social and humanitarian services.”
• The University presidents of that era were involved in national politics as they wrote on current events in national periodicals. For some presidents this caused trouble for them like Benjamin Andrew of Brown who had angered his own board of trustees. (Similar to what’s happening now)

Taking Stock: Characteristics of the Great Modern American University

• Philanthropy on a large scale = universities had a permanent financial base which allowed for private universities
• Presidential presence = pg 127 “A university president was expected to be enterprising and able to interact with the external political and industrial world as well as to move in academic circles.”
• Professors as professional experts = The professors were such experts that they participated in disciplinary groups and publications (national association and journals)
• A sign of institutional prestige is for a university to be the host institution of a scholarly journal which would then lead the university to provide office space and staff assistance. (Johns Hopkins University and the University of Chicago did that)
• “Academic freedom was institutionalized beyond the individual campus with the creation of the American Association of University Professors, intended to provide assurance and redress for faculty members who claimed to have had their academic rights violated by irate presidents or cankerous board members.”
• Pedagogy(method and practice of teaching) = lectures provided a large audience for professors as experts and seminars which allowed a group of advanced students to discuss research with a professor. Teaching and learning occurred outside of school through libraries, museums, observations, fieldwork and research expeditions
• Professional schools = Entrance requirements like having to complete 2 years of undergraduate study before being admitted to professional school. Ex. John Hopkins required a bachelor’s degree. pg 129 “The net result was a sequential curriculum, a hierarchy of instruction and certification whose capstone was the Ph.D.”
• Curriculum = pg 129 “Harvard elective system, deemphasis on patrolling student life, and its secular character pitted it against Yale with its fixed curriculum, cohesive student life, and Congregationalist tradition.” This is the start of having a major and later into graduate studies with a master’s or a doctoral candidate declared for a particular field.
• Professionalization of students = Most students had already completed a bachelor’s degree and other requirements before starting their doctoral studies.
• Facilities = More science labs and tools compared to just libraries
• The dynamics of the academic enterprise = Doctoral students, after completing the Ph.D. would write documented papers and monographs which would be published in academic journals sponsored by national scholarly associations.
• J. Franklin Jameson was the influential director of the American Historical Association wanted an American scholarship which he hoped to build a base for over time

Analyzing the Great American Universities

• “Between 1898 and 1909, committeemen to doctoral programs was uneven.” pg 131
• Despite university-builders saying that they would transfer law, medicine, and theology into “learned professions” outside of the bachelor degree few universities did. Most universities failed to integrate their medical schools into the advanced scholarship of the life sciences.
• Universities were intertwined with the availability of American public high school which was not widely accessible. University of Michigan worked with state government and local communities in certifying public high school but most universities “continued to operate preparatory departments for students who could not pass the college entrance exam.”

Land-Grant Universities: The Second Wave of Funding and Legislation

• pg 135 “By 1880 there were signs of stagnation among the colleges and universities that had been designated as land-grant institutions as part of the 1862 Morril Act.”
• George Atherton worked with other people in an attempt to promote passage of the 1887 Hatch Act for the funding of agricultural experiment stations at the land-grant colleges.
• pg 135 “The second land-grant act, the Morrill Act of 1890, replenished federal funding for the land-grant programs and authorized the founding of additional land-grant colleges. In sum, between 1887 and 1914 Congress passed a secession of major pieces of legislation that expanded and consolidated federal interest in such fields as agriculture, military training, and engineering”
• New Fertilizer Law= farmers brought fertilizer would be analyzed for content of nitrogen and other essential chemicals
• Home economics was used to attract women into higher education as teachers and students as well as making sure they stayed in the “women’s sphere”
• The second wave of land-grant legislation was made to have the image of land-grant colleges as a collective idea. It also helped bring three federal units (The Department of Agriculture, Interior, and War) together and bring both resources and accountability to the land-grant campus. It also helped lessen some tenses within land-grant colleges.

Midwestern State Universities

• “The University of Wisconsin gained early on from its sponsorship of applied research, as some of its faculty innovations—namely, a procedure for measuring butterfat content in milk—revolutionized American agriculture and brought respect as well as royalties to the university.”
• High schools that passed faculty muster received university certification which was that any graduate of a certified high school was guaranteed admission to the University of Michigan.

The “California Idea” in Higher Education

• “In practical terms this meant that the University of California charged no tuition. This policy, combined wth a statewide public elementary and secondary school system, would nurture an educated, informed state citizenry that would be antidote to the abuses and corruption of the “trusts” associated with the Southern Pacific Railroad and the oil companies.“ pg 139.
• Abraham Reuf, an 1887 graduate of the University of California who was responsible for fires after the earthquake of 1904. After his conviction he was sent to prison where he gained fame by establishing the first University of California Alumni Chapter of San Quentin.
• “The distinguishing feature of the “California idea” in higher education was that utility was to be fussed with educating for character and public service.”

State Universities in the South

• “Between 1880 and 1920 a generation of presidents set aside the “moonlight and magnolias” campus idea. Instead they embraced Progressivism and its emphasis on utility and accountability.
• The state university-builders cautioned against donating money to black schools and colleges in the south for two reasons.

1. Limiting their investments to black educational programs would increase racial tensions within the South and therefore it should be extended to projects involving both race.
2. “..if the aim was overall state and regional economic development, then resources simply had to be concentrated in the institution that could do the most good—that is, the all-white flagship state universities.”

• Because of this by 1910 foundation policies went through a shift that was advantageous to the all white state universities.

Catholic Colleges and Universities

• Since most state universities were located in small, rural towns away from major urban centers, students were able to maintain homogeneity of both religion and ethnicity.

The Academic Kitchen: Women as University Scholars

• Agnes Faye Morgan of the University of California wanted to build home economics as a substantive, scientific field. However her plan was always thwarted. In 1962, University of California named a Berkeley building in honor of her when they could’ve just provided her with a decent department operating budget.
• The inhospitality of universities hiring women cause them to look to federal agencies, museums and laboratories.
• Women scientist would from “proteges chains” where senior women scientist would sponsor and mentor younger scholars.
• In 1881, The Association of Collegiate Alumnae was created which would later evolve into the Association of American University Women. By 1900 it had a membership of two thousand.

From Vertical History to Horizontal History: The Great Foundations

• After 1900 doors were less inclined to undertake the building of new campus for multiple reasons:
• Donors got tired of rejecting all the request to fund something
• There was the worry that American higher education was overhyped and focus on with many unstable/small institutions
• Philanthropic foundation= establishing special institutes that would attract scholars from all over the world & steering higher education at the level of fundamental policies
• Ex. Carnegie Institute in Washington, D.C. pg 145 “Between 1907 and 1928 its focus was the nationwide support of history as a discipline. After that, the emphasis shifted to archaeology.”

From Heroic Chaos to Coordination and Standards

• pg 147 “Soon thereafter the College Entrance Examination Board was founded, a private voluntary association committed to creating reliable standardized college admissions test. In the absence of any federal ministry of education, it was left to private voluntary associations to become arbiters of standard.”
• pg 147 “Rating, rankings and reputations were the new “three Rs”
• One of the plan for Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (CFAT) was to use it as an incentive of a faculty pension plan to have colleges “standardize their admissions requirements, purge the bachelor’s degree curriculum of denominational emphasis, and demonstrate that they had attained some threshold in minimum enrollments.”
• Most controversies involving religion and science were in the social and behavioral sciences.
• Abraham Flexner’s 1910 report on medical education in the US and Canada demonstrated the power of systematic analysis to bring reform issues into the public domain.

Conclusion

• According to Paul Mattingly, even as late as 1910 the definition of “university” was vague. For Slossom it was that it offered graduate work. For other a university had commitment to science.
• The lack of federal ministry of education decreased the amount of funding and source of substantive regulation. However at the same time it allowed innovation and avoided government intrusion.