Shils, Ascendancy of University

The Order of Learning in the United States: The Ascendancy of the University
Edward Shils

The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860-1920
Edited by Alexandra Oleson and John Voss

I

The history of the order of learning in the United States from the end of the Civil War to the end of World War I may be seen largely as the history of a fundamental change in institutional structure. One particular class of institutions, the university, gained ascendancy over other institutional forms for the discovery and diffusion of knowledge, and specific universities within that newly dominant class came to be recognized as the central elements in the academic order. The ascendancy of the universities was based on superiority in productivity, both qualitative and quantitative, and in prestige--a prestige acknowledged not only within the order of learning but by the wider public as well.

In a sense, the history of learning in this period is characterized by two important developments. First, the amateur scientists and scholars were displaced by those who earned their living by studying and teaching within an elaborate institution. Second, those institutions whose members regarded study and teaching as their major obligation came to be recognized as the primary instruments for the cultivation of learning in America. In the decades following the end of the Civil War, the productive scholars and scientists of the United States increasingly became members of academic institutions. Instead of relying on their own financial resources and carrying out their work at home or in the private libraries of learned societies, the new scholars and scientists gained their livelihood primarily through employment by a college or university, using the books, journals, laboratories, and equipment provided by these institutions. Far less common and prominent were scholars and scientists who had no obligation to concern themselves with the discovery and communication of truths to their peers and juniors through learned papers, classes, and seminars--the men of learning who lived from their own privately amassed or inherited fortune or conducted their intellectual activities avocationally while earning their living as administrative civil servants, diplomats, journalists, private businessmen or practitioners of a learned profession, sacred or secular.

This important change in the life of the scholar was graphically depicted by Max Weber in Wissenschaft als Beruf. Weber did not, however, lay equal stress on the concomitant ascendancy of' the university, perhaps because a similar transition had already occurred in Germany and Weber thus took for granted the preponderance of the university in the order of learning. It is true that during this period amateur scientists and scholars were also being absorbed by governmental research institutions, such as agricultural experiment stations, the Geological Survey (including the Bureau of Ethnology). and, following the turn of the century, by such private research organizations as the Carnegie Institution of' Washington, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, the Bell Telephone laboratories, and the General Electric Laboratory. Nonetheless, in the midst of this more pervasive incorporation of scholars and scientists in institutions, the growing dominance of the universities within the cosmos of American learning appears in retrospect to have been the most significant feature of the time

In 1865 most of the serious and productive intellectual life of the country was still carried on outside the universities. Of the most famous scholars and scientists alive in the early part of the period, Henry Adams, J. H. Motley, George Bancroft, Joseph Henry, and Henry C. Lea were not university teachers, although both Adams and Bancroft briefly held posts at Harvard, J. W. Powell taught for five years at Illinois Wesleyan University and at the Illinois Normal University, and Charles S. Pierce taught at The Johns Hopkins University for five years. The tradition of private and avocational learning in the United States persisted but it was unable to maintain the dominance it had once enjoyed, largely because it could not meet the demand for greater opportunities for scientific and scholarly research and training that led to the institutionalization of learning in the universities. Even in the time its greatest prominence, the American amateur tradition lagged behind its European counterpart, particularly that of France and Great Britain, in both scale and achievement. The striking difference between the United States on the one side and Great Britain and France on the other was that the United States did not produce that closely serried sequence of geniuses that made British and French science and scholarship of the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth centuries so distinguished. The United States never attained the great height of amateur learning of Great Britain's mighty mountain chain that linked together peaks like William Harvey, Robert Boyle, Joseph Priestly, John Dalton, Humphrey Davy, Charles Darwin, Edward Gibbon, David Hume, Thomas B. Macaulay, George Grote, David Ricardo, and James and John Stuart Mill.

Indeed, American scholars and scientists were very conscious of their peripherality with respect to Europe and this probably influenced their level of aspiration; they seem not to have thought that it lay within their power to produce works of the quality of their European contemporaries. It is clear that America lacked sufficient concentration of talent in a center; the intellectual community that existed was too attenuated to produce the necessary self-confidence. In addition the reservoir of persons sufficiently educated and wealthy to devote themselves to learned pursuits was probably too small. Even in cities like Philadelphia, Boston, and New York, persons with a high degree of concentration of purpose and energy were too few in number to embody and express, in a sufficiently compelling way, standards that could compete with the immediate, practical, and highly absorbing professional, political, and commercial preoccupations of the time. The local and state academies did not have enough prestige to compel individuals without very strong intellectual character to live up to the highest standards. Perhaps the original mental endowment was lacking; perhaps family traditions and the informal, local intellectual communities and academies in the United States were neither dense enough, intense enough, nor stringent enough to call forth the exertions and the accomplishments that emerged in Great Britain. Perhaps there were just not enough geniuses who were sufficiently committed to scientific or scholarly studies to give an immediately apprehensible form to the mode of proceeding and the ethos needed for outstanding accomplishment. Undoubtedly, there was a circularity of effect. In any case, in no field, except perhaps historical studies, did the United States have of eminent amateur scholars and scientists of the quality attained at the higher reaches in Europe.

Yet is unlikely that either a larger number of practitioners of greater accomplishments would have saved the tradition of amateur, scholarly, and scientific research in the United States. More young persons wanted to do research than were able to support themselves from their own private means, and the knowledge of how German universities had turned such aspirations into reality increased the number of American aspirants to careers in college and university teaching. Thus the amateur tradition was bound to yield, just as a much more productive amateur practice in Europe had yielded, to competing academic in institutionalization, or-- as Max Weber would have called it--academic bureaucratization

Prior to the opening of The Johns Hopkins University in 1876, the learned world in the United States was rather inchoate. It had no center and no hierarchy, yet it was somewhat differentiated. There were colleges, universities (at least in name), governmental scientific bureaus, and the bare beginnings of industrial research enterprises. A few learned associations and scientific and scholarly journals had been established. One national quasi-governmental academy, two old academics that purported to be national, and a number of academies of local jurisdiction were also in existence, as were museums and several large libraries. The result was an amorphous agglomeration of institutions and activities that were scant in number and widely dispersed territorially; the connections between them were infrequent and of marginal importance.

With the retreat of amateur research, the cognate institutions of amateur research, namely, the local scientific and scholarly academies, went into decline. The avidity of intellectual desire could not be satisfied by the occasional meetings of academies or by the limitations of private means nor could local academies attract more specialized audiences. What they offered was too slight in comparison with the opportunities for intercourse and investigation offered by universities and especially university departments and laboratories that were the most fundamental elements of the emerging translocal scientific and scholarly communities.

The few outstanding individuals who dominated science and scholarship in this period--among them Asa Gray, Joseph Henry, and Simon Newcomb--did not plan for or foresee the ascendancy of the academic order. Insofar as they thought that a single institution or institutional order should predominate, they looked to the National Academy of Science or the Smithsonian Institution to perform that role. It was felt that these bodies should give advice to the government on matters that involved science and technology, recognize and honor past achievements in science, and guide and encourage scientists toward the study of certain fields and problems.

The establishment of Johns Hopkins, Clark, and the University of Chicago changed the intellectual environment in unpremeditated ways. Governmental scientific institutions lost their previous position of relative predominance as their work was exceeded in volume and at least equaled or surpassed in quality by the products of academic research. There were, moreover, many areas of scientific endeavor that lay beyond the concern of the government; here the universities had a free hand.

Yet the close link between science and the universities that emerged might not have developed had the American government chosen to promote science as the French government had done in the seventeenth century through the honors granted and the resources allotted by the Paris Academy of Sciences, or as the Soviet government has deliberately done by elevating the Academy of Science above the universities and giving it control over all research except that carried on by the various ministries. Despite widespread confidence in progress through the "arts and sciences," the government of the United States was not inclined to establish a comprehensive program to promote such endeavors because it was believed that the "arts and sciences," like economic life, would develop from the initiative of private persons. Instead, governmental scientific institutions became complementary or ancillary to the universities, providing practical services, conducting surveys, and offering employment to university graduates and facilities for publication of their research.

The American government's scientific interests were limited to specific areas, as evidenced in its support of the Coast Survey, the Geological Survey, and the Permanent Commission of the Navy Department. The Smithsonian Institution could have been used for the furtherance of scientific research but the government never attempted to develop it in this way. Until the end of the period, the National Academy of Sciences performed little more than honorific functions. Since it had no resources for the support of research, the NAS could do little to advances science in general, or even in particular directions. Unlike the Royal Society of London or various German academies, the National Academy could not even function as a meeting place because its members were separated by large distances. Until the creation of the National Research Council, the NAS did not even carry out functions for which it had been expressly founded--to serve as advisor to the federal government. In a sense, the fact that the National Academy of Sciences was not promoted to a position in which it could exercise influence by its accomplishments, example and prestige left the way open for the academic order to attain ascendancy.

In agriculture, the field in which governmental science reached its peak, colleges and experiment stations had to await the ascendancy of the universities before they could become effective. The founding of the first agricultural experiment stations more or less coincided with the establishment of the Johns Hopkins University. The first land grant colleges preceded Hopkins by about a decade. Both institutions were in some measure the result of the same ideals that had inspired the creation of the new universities--ideals that were embodied, or were thought to have been embodied in German practices. Even before the Civil War, these ideals were being advocated by young men like Evan Pugh and Samuel Johnson, two American chemists who studied in Germany in the 1850's. They maintained that scientific results comparable to those achieved in the German universities could contribute to the improvement of the quality of agriculture in the United States, and they went on to take leadership roles in the development of America's agricultural colleges and experiment stations.

Yet until the new type of university was well established, agricultural institutions scarcely advanced. In the agricultural schools of the land grant colleges and state universities, teaching was the primary function, leaving little time for research prior to the passage of the Hatch Act in 1897, the few existing experiment stations conducted only limited research activities. Neither the staff members of the early colleges and stations nor their public "believed" in science with the ardent conviction that led to its application. The farmers who formed the lay Constituency of these institutions had no understanding of how fundamental scientific research could improve their productivity: they wanted information about the quality of the seeds they purchased and the fertility of' the soil they tilled; they were interested in testing by specific and reliable methods; and they thought that agricultural colleges should provide practical training in farming.

In the 1880's enterprising deans of agricultural colleges and directors of experiment stations tried to create among farmers an appreciation of the results of scientific agriculture that they were not in a position to deliver, partly because trained agricultural scientists were still in short supply and partly because money was not available either to employ scientists or to provide them with the resources needed for research. When funds were forthcoming after 1887, the administrators turned to the universities in search of scientists. What they found were individuals infused with the new ethos of the American academic order and determined to do more than conduct tests and analyses and manage model farms. The young agricultural scientists shared the values of the pious pioneers, Pugh and Johnson. They were offended by both the contemptuous attitude expressed toward them by teachers of the humanities and sciences at their own state universities and by the layman's belief that they were simply analysts. The ideal of the university as a place of fundamental learning impelled them and they wanted to conform to its implicit demands.

The entry of the United States Department of Agriculture into the promotion of' agricultural research and the bonds established among the younger scientists on the staffs of the agricultural experiment stations---through the formation of sections of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences and of specialized scientific societies and through the creation of journals--reinforced the pressure of this ideal and the determination of the better-trained "station men" to be regarded as scientists. For these individuals who felt themselves cut off from the academic center, the Department of Agriculture provided the experience of solidarity and consensus with like-minded persons and embodied the ideal to which they were devoted.

The agricultural scientist's conception of himself as a scientist was further strengthened by attending conferences, reading scientific journals, which in turn fortified his attachment to the scientific ideal. Yet the presence of the university remained the essential element for agricultural scientists seeking professional identity. In the first instance, they could not establish a system of science wholly separate from that cultivated in the universities. They were trained in universities, some of them had taught in universities; the basic sciences on which they drew were developed in universities, and the universities presented to them the realization of the scientific ideal. Their principal achievements in genetics and plant pathology were offshoots of the science of the universities and they wanted the approbation of their colleagues within their own scientific disciplines. Passage of the Adams Act (1906), which allocated federal funds for original scientific research bore witness to the ascendancy of the standards of the university over the scientific activities of extra academic institutions. As Charles Rosenberg has observed elsewhere, in the end, the significant contributions of agricultural experiment stations to both the improvement of' farming practices and the advancement of biological sciences can be attributed to their "willing adherence" to the values of the academic order.

The agricultural experiment stations remained in a dependent and supplementary position to the university in part because they adopted the principle of specialization; in this sense, their status was analogous to that of the independent research institutions, such as the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and the Carnegie Institution of Washington, which appeared early in the twentieth century. The prestige of specialization was great in America during this era, but it was not unequivocal. Despite the respect accorded specialization as a form of moral self-discipline and a more efficient way of conducting research, the older ideal of breadth of perspective was still vital and the standing of research institutions suffered accordingly. The university was unique in that it covered the entire range of learning. There was always an opportunity for a specialist whose interest impinged on an adjacent or occasionally remote field to seek guidance from a colleague in that field. Moreover, because the universities were able to reincorporate their most distinguished graduates, they came to form an intellectually self-sustaining order. In contrast, research institutions, both private and governmental,. were designed to cover a narrower range topics and often proved to be less attractive to the best university graduates. Even in those specialized fields in which they carried out important work, their accomplishments were never imposing enough for them to represent an alternative dominant order to the universities.

The dependent relationship between the universities and private research institutions in this period is exemplified by the development of an institution that did not become an independent research center--the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole established in 1888. As in the case of the universities, a German model was chosen. The pattern was sketched by Karl Vogt who organized the first summer classes in marine biology in 1844; it was established in a more elaborate and stable form by German zoologist, Anton Dohrn, who founded the Stazione Zoologica in Naples in 1872. Charles Otis Whitman, the first director of the Marine Biological Laboratory, had taken his Ph.D. degree at Leipzig and had worked at the Stazione Zoologica; he argued that if a comparable American institution were not established and supported, American work in the pertinent subjects would remain permanently inferior to that of Germany.

Unlike Carnegie and Rockefeller, the marine Biological Laboratory was not intended to be an autonomous institution with its own permanent staff of investigators and completely independent financial resources. The model on which it was based emerged from a situation in which its own permanent staff of investigators and completely independent financial resources. The model on which it was based emerged from a situation in which the academic order had become dominant; the institution in Naples was conceived as an indispensable auxiliary in certain field of science. In America, the MBL depended on the universities to provide investigators, young and old, who worked at Woods Hole during the summer months. The leading American biologists of the period before the First World War came to the MBL--but their sojourns there were interludes in their academic careers.

The dependence of the Marine Biological Laboratory on the universities is illustrated by the career of Whitman. When he was young and not yet famous, he thought of the Laboratory as an institution that would compensate for the deficiencies of research in the universities. After he became a famous professor at the University of Chicago, he viewed it as ancillary or complementary to the work of the universities. It acquired a dual function that postulated the prior existence of the universities; it had the characteristics of a three-month meeting of a set of closely related professional scientific societies, yet it was also a laboratory where university teachers could turn their attention to specialized topics difficult to work on elsewhere, while also engaging in a continuous informal exchange of information and interpretation. The MBL became a unique part of the academic world--an interuniversity institution that established a precedent for the consortia that developed after the Second World War around the accelerators at Brookhaven and Westom.

Just us the MBL, the Rockefeller Institute and the Carnegie Institution we dependent on the prior and continuing existence of the universities to sustain their composite of activities, bodies such as the New York Museum of Natural History the Field Museum, and the American Geographical Society lived alongside the universities but did not form a national system for the organization of learning They sponsored important research and publications by members of their state who were also custodians of their collections; they maintained serial publication of scholarly monographs and developed their collections. Their work, however was marginal and supplementary to the large volume of high-quality research carried out in the same fields at the universities. If they were rivals of the universities, they were rivals only in the relatively narrow ranges of learning that they covered. At the same time, their dependence on the universities was inevitable. Unless they were to rely largely on learned amateurs, they had to recruit their staff from persons who had been trained in universities and who continued to look at universities as the centers of learned production. In addition, the main audience for the publication. of the most important of the autonomous research institute was to he found in the universities.

There was yet another reason why the private research institutions could not compete effectively with the universities they were imply too few in number. When the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and the Carnegie Institution of Washington were established at the turn of the century, there were practically no similar institutions with which to form an alliance and create a sense of community: the two together were not enough to serve as a point of crystallization. Independent research institutions as constituencies of an autonomous and dominant order within the whole order of learning had no precedent. The Kaiser- Wilhelm-Gesellschaft was not established until 1911. The Physikalischtechnische Reichsanstalt was largely governmental, as was Britain's National Physical Laboratory The Royal Institution, distinguished though some of its associates were, never presented a pattern that was recognized by public opinion as an example of how scientific research and training should be organized. At the same time, there were already many universities and their very existence challenged and supported those who sought to reform them. To be sure, the universities had to be reformed before they could ascend to a dominant position, but, their prior existence in considerable numbers gave substance to the belief that they were endowed with the power of endurance. For all these reasons, the autonomous research institutes, however distinguished their accomplishments in specialized area of research, were compelled to function as somewhat peripheral parts of the academic order.

The industrial research laboratories were even less well qualified to compete with the universities. Not only were they very few in number, relatively small in size, and specialized within a narrow range, but they did not accord freedom of publication to their scientists and were, for the most part, devoted to applied rather than practical research. They were considered to serve rather than an ideal of the selfless pursuit of truth and were regarded in public opinion as less worthy of deference than were the universities.

In a different way, libraries were also confined to a peripheral position. From the beginning, university libraries were clearly subsidiary. The great public and private libraries performed invaluable functions but mainly as adjuncts to the academic order. Libraries in this period were no longer collections assembled primarily for the sake of giving a permanent resting place to the results of human creativity; having ceased to be ends in themselves, they became instrumental to the desires of' their users. Nonetheless, neither the Library of Congress nor the Library of' the Surgeon-General, any more than the Bibliotheque Nationale, the British Museum, or the Preussische Staatsbibliothek, could become centers of a national system of learning. The tasks of a library are principally curatorial and hence auxiliary to the use of the books, manuscripts, etc., that it houses. A library does not teach; the training and formation of a staff of librarians, archivists, and paleographers, whether they are engaged in full-time research or whether their research is supplementary to their curatorial functions, does not approximate the teaching in universities.

Independent and specialized professional schools, particularly those concerned with the study of medicine, were also largely overpowered by the universities over the course of this half century. Advanced technological institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology were the only ones in their category that approached the eminence and centrality of the leading universities and they did so by approximating the broad functions and interests of the university. Despite the promise of their early beginning, independent engineering colleges like Rensselaer fell by the wayside. Once entry into the legal profession became conditional on systematic study, independent law schools, apart from universities, never emerged from a rather lowly obscurity. By the end of our period, only a few independent medical colleges survived without incorporation into universities. Again, it was the German model that showed the way. The growing recognition that education for the learned professions required systematic and fundamental training in scientific subjects made it imperative that professional schools be associated with universities. The alternative was to wither.

Independent liberal arts colleges that provided education for it undergraduate were the only institutions that managed to withstand the tentacular dominance of the universities--an achievement that can he attributed mainly to their decision to concentrate on the instruction of younger students and to eschew research. For many years their proponents fought a rear-guard action that was partly successful, partly unsuccessful. They became subsidiaries of the universities by sending many of their graduates on to postgraduate and professional studies and by drawing some of their teaching staff from the universities. Those that grew into universities, as did Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Columbia, were able to retain some of their identity, largely by resistance and concessions.

III

After examining the various classes of learned institutions in some detail, the general question remains: Why, in this period, did the universities succeed in establishing and maintaining dominance over the American order of learning? The main part of the answer lies in the universities' dual function of teaching and research. An institution that produced both its own Nachwachs and the staff of other learned institutions assured itself of centrality in the system of learning. It aroused identifications and loyalties that later experience did not extinguish. It fostered parochial traditions that provided the motive for more widely acclaimed achievements. By teaching, the universities guided the future of their subject, they infused their influence into members of the next generation, encouraging students to go beyond what they had been taught and to do so in the tradition in which they themselves had discovered and learned. Teachers were enlivened by their relations with students. Teaching maintained identification with a wider discipline yet it did not prevent specialized research.

The American university's dual commitment to teaching and research was not evident when the leading state universities of the Midwest were founded in the period before the Civil War. Both the legislatures and the wider public thought of these state institutions primarily as agents for the spread of an "improving" knowledge, as disseminators of the best of inherited knowledge and only secondarily as the creators of new knowledge. The concept of improvement was vague and comprehensive, signifying not only improvement of a practical sort but spiritual improvement as well. Moreover, an interest in practical improvement was not identical with an interest in research; rather, it reflected the work undertaken by the schools of agriculture and mechanical arts that came to be associated with these universities as a result of the Morrill Act.

An indisputable place for research in American higher education did not come until the later decades of the nineteenth century. As the reflux of young men from the German universities began in earnest, complaints were heard that American universities did not conduct research, that they were reluctant to demand that professors undertake research, and that they did not give due reward, in terms of appointment and promotion, to past and prospective accomplishments in research. It was only with the founding of The Johns Hopkins University in 1876, Clark University in 1887, and the University of Chicago in 1892 that a pronounced shift occurred in the nature of the American higher education. The establishment of Johns Hopkins was perhaps the single most decisive event in the history of learning in the Western hemisphere. It was the impact of competition from Johns Hopkins and the embarrassment of comparison with it that led academic leaders including Charles Eliot of Harvard to respond to demands from some of their teachers to provide in various ways for ongoing research.

In the second half of our period, American universities sought to make research an integral and major part of their program, while never abandoning the teaching function that had enabled them first to attain, and then to maintain, their dominance in the world of learning. They were determined to uphold the expectation that everyone in the university would engage in research. They did not succeed. Then as now, there were some who did a great deal of research many who did a little, and others who did none. There were also some who protested plaintively or vehemently against the effort to reward accomplishments in research. At universities like Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, and Yale, large groups of professors regarded the teaching of undergraduates as their primary obligation and viewed with unease the precedence in fame and salary accorded to their colleagues who were more productive in research. Their criticisms were sometimes intertwined with the resentment of humanistic scholars toward the natural scientists, a resentment that seemed to be the epitome of all that was most detrimental to the preservation of the traditional culture of the educated man.

In some respects a compromise was attained through division of labor. There was first a division between the universities which did both research and teaching with a marked emphasis on the former, and the liberal arts colleges which concentrated mainly on teaching and neither encouraged the practice nor provided support for research. Second, within the universities that emerged, a division of labor between the younger teachers who were assigned the more elementary courses and their older colleagues who taught the advanced courses that were more directly related to research. (This dichotomy had been observed by Max Weber when he travelled in the United States in 1904.) While the junior faculty had heavier teaching responsibilities, they were also expected to engage in research. especially in the Midwestern state universities and the new private universities At the same time, more established senior scholars had less teaching to do and their teaching was more congenial to research.
Except for this division of' labor, the balance between teaching and research was never free from stress. It was a delicately poised equilibrium in which each part appeared to be ready to fly off centrifugally. Yet the break never occurred. Fragile and distressing though it often was, the equilibrium was held within the institutional vise of the university as an institution, and sustained by the German ideal of what a university should be.

The advantage which the universities had over other organizations in securing funds to support research was another factor contributing to their ascendancy within the order of learning. Again, the importance of the pedagogical function is evident. Little financial support was obtained by the universities explicitly ad exclusively for research. Nonetheless, despite what might appear from the perspective of today as an arduous round of teaching responsibilities, scientists and scholars who wanted to do research, especially those above the rank of instructor, could find time for it. They were paid to teach but they also could do research "in the interstices" of teaching. Financial requirements for research were not large and there were few projects for which many assistants were required.

Although the two decades between 1880 and 1900 were years of praise for science, that praise was not accompanied by a readiness to spend much money on research, particularly fundamental research. As noted earlier, industrial enterprises moved very slowly to establish laboratories; they still counted on purchasing inventions offered to them by individual inventors. The federal and state governments recognized the value of research but they usually thought of it as survey, assay, testing, and routine analysis; the '"users" in agriculture or mining wanted exactly such services. The stale and local academics of science and the three national academics--the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences--had very little money for research, they sought mainly to give honors to those who had done research without their aid. The universities were in an advantageous position because their relatively large staffs were paid to devote themselves professionally to activities which were close to research in a place where libraries and laboratories existed. The universities, moreover, were increasingly committed to an ethos which held that scientific and scholarly research was essential to the advancement of knowledge.

While the tradition of "pure research" was adopted from the German universities its successful institutionalization in the United States can be attributed largely to the structure of the universities that cultivated it. In the American universities, research was what later came to be called a "spin-off" of the provision for teaching. The money spent on research might not have been as great as was desired by the academic scientists--although one does not encounter many complaints about its paucity--but because it was hidden in an "unvouchered" budget, the resulting arrangements allowed academic scientists to pursue their own interests and follow their own convictions as to what was scientifically important. Scientists in agricultural experiment stations had to respond to a public of "users" demanding immediately practical, but often scientifically insignificant results. Scientists in government and industrial enterprises could not choose their research subjects nor were they always free to publish their results. Academic scientists however, had no masters who prescribed practical or routine research; they were limited only by their own capacities and imaginations and the demands of teaching which did not by any means consume all their little and energy.

Those who carried out research in the university benefited in yet another way. With a public consisting of' university teachers in their own field, they could become famous in that field throughout the whole academic order--a distinction that was more difficult to achieve for those without the advantage or a preestablished public and the means of communicating with it. The plurality of the universities gave the impression of a mighty concourse which was reinforced by the linkages and interchanges between the members of various learned institutions. A translocal identification was strengthened in the minds of those who experienced this plurality of connections and thus felt themselves to be engaged in a vast, national. and international movement of the spirit. Despite the growing specialization in research, the coexistence of the practitioners of disciplines within faculties and of faculties themselves within universities created a density and radius of intellectual intercourse which supported the general conviction that the advancement of' knowledge was an end of the highest value.

The universities dominated the institutionalized system of learning for still another reason, namely, their comprehensiveness. They taught and investigated over the entire range of learning. This multitude of diverse, specialized interests enabled the universities to receive the deference that had hitherto been accorded to the churches. In addition, they could focus their attention on fundamental problems; they were not circumscribed by practical necessities. At a time of faltering theological conviction, the university scholar or scientist assumed the role of an earnest seeker after fundamental truth.

In the allegedly practical and "materialistic" American society of' the period after the Civil War, there was still a deep piety that had ceased to be monopolized by the doctrines of ecclesiastical Christianity. The seriousness with which fundamental knowledge was pursued by universities aroused the admiration of those possessed by this enduring piety. By their concern with fundamental learning, the universities were able to become, in a sense, the heirs of the churches. More specialized, more practical institutions could claim neither that vital inheritance nor the consequent support of private patrons and stale legislatures.

Finally, pervading all the factors contributing to the dominance of the university was the decisive element--the love of learning. It is said, quite frequently, that the scientific side of the American academic order, particularly chemistry, developed in response to the needs of industrial capitalism in the United States; that is not, in fact, the case. As late as 1900 only a small fraction of the chemists in the United States were employed full-time in the chemical industry. In an era when most firms were still operated by single owners or partnerships, the individual units were simply too small to support research. By the first decade of the century, there was much talk of the positive contribution of scientific research to industrial progress. Publicists and ceremonial orators repeatedly praised the practical powers of scientific knowledge. Academic scientists themselves began increasingly to legitimate their scientific research by reference to the practical benefits it would produce. Enthusiastic discussions about the introduction of Frederick Taylor's "scientific methods" into management became common. Nonetheless. even in the large firms Taylor's ideas were not seriously implemented until after the First World War. Had industry been more insistent on the utilization of the results of scientific research, industrial laboratories attached to particular firms and independent laboratories working on scientific problem would have been more common. As it turned out, the motive force of scientific research lay within the university--in the interest of the scientists themselves and in the willingness, if not the active desire, of strong university presidents to reserve a portion of the academic budget for research. The situation was no different in the other disciplines. In the case of the social sciences, the desire for social improvement was a supplementary factor. However, in all areas of learning the primary motivation for growth was intellectual curiosity--an irrepressible desire to understand.

Through its various endeavors the university managed to accommodate specialization as well as breadth, practicality as well as fundamental enquiry. The university was, moreover, self-reproductive and self-extending. The combination of research and teaching might have been adventitious: however, once it was put into practice, the result was an unsurpassed arrangement for promoting the discovery, diffusion, and influence of knowledge. Taken together, these factors resulted in the increased visibility of academic research, a mutual awareness on the part of members of the academic order, and a sense of community among academic scientists and scholars across institutional and disciplinary boundaries, as well as within them. Universities had long been visible to the educated and to some sections of the governing classes. But as science grew in prestige, they were recognized and given increasingly more prominence by or organs of public opinion. Science and the universities became almost identical for the broader public, scholarship in the humanistic and social science disciplines gained from the association When the "demand" for science increased, as it did in the early decades of this century and especially during the First World War,
the universities were in the first line to satisfy this demand, thus ensuring and increasing their ascendancy within the order of learning.

One of the principal elements of the German tradition--and a major factor in the triumph of the university within the American order of' learning--was the emergence of specialization as a requirement of scientific and scholarly achievement. Systematic training in the universities, especially in the postgraduate level, was more conducive to specialization than was the self-education of the amateur. The specialized academic was in regular contact with his specialized colleagues and he was expected to demonstrate both a detailed mastery of numerous minute details and an acquaintance with a large number of publications dealing with these details. The amateur, following some other occupation and proceeding at a more leisurely pace, could not cover the same ground at the speed required by specialization. As the number of persons working on a limited range of closely linked or similar problems increased, the results of scientific experiment and other experiment types of research could not be allowed to lie about in drawers. The need to achieve, manifested in the desire for recognition, loyally to a department and university, personal ambition, and the scientific ethos all pressed for publication as rapidly as possible. The more productive specialists became the more imperative specialization became--it was impossible for any one person to master more than a narrow sector of the expanding body of scientific literature. The increased number of specialists and the creation of new journals greatly enlarged the body of literature on particular topics; the expanded holdings of university libraries likewise made the task of "keeping up with the literature" more demanding and possible only at the cost of general reading.

Specialization displayed both lights and shadows. Its lights were a seriousness of purpose and an intention to make a contribution--the desire to win recognition from those qualified to judge whether a given piece of work added to the body of significant knowledge in a field and made further progress possible. The growing conviction that "truth always lies in the details" meant that the details had to be explored with increasing thoroughness. As the word dilettante became a term of scorn, the American academic order increasingly turned to the German model of Fachmenschentum (To be a serious scientist or scholar required that one be a Fachmann.) There was a stern moral overtone to specialization. It meant no trifling, no self-indulgence. It was unsympathetic to false pride and omniscience. In sum, specialization was consistent with the secularized Protestant puritanism of' the quarter century preceding World War 1.

To be sure, the ideal of Bildung was not wholly vanquished by the concept of Fachmenschentum. It should he noted that many of the scholars and scientists who entered American academic life in the 1880s and 1890s were widely read in philosophy and literature. Despite the praise of the specialist that was heard everywhere in Germany, the breadth of the reading of the German professors appeared overpowering to the young Americans studying in Germany. William James' description of Dilthey in one of' his letters home in 1867 spoke for the thousands who came after him. Many of the young Americans themselves had already studied modern literature and classics as well as scientific subjects. In Germany they sometimes became intoxicated with reading not just in their own subjects but over a wide range. The aftermath of religious doubt deepened their philosophical interests. In later years, many of' those who had studied in Germany retained their knowledge of German; this too kept them from exclusive concentration on a single subject.

Nonetheless, specialization was making its way under the shadows of a narrowing range of mention. Its progress was aided by the departmental system that permitted a measure of specialization in teaching. Still. the degree of' specialization in teaching was never as pronounced as it was in research where it went hand in hand with the extension of the radius of the academic's interest beyond the boundaries of his own college or university. The individual investigator who wished to follow closely the most recent literature in his field inevitably became part of a national and international academic community. And since the names of universities were never completely severed from the names of individuals, the deference accorded to individuals for their respective achievements was diffused onto their universities, producing an institutional hierarchy based on distinction in science and scholarship. By requiring the academic to direct his attention outward, specialization in research contributed to the definition of the centers of the academic order--those institutions that provided the models of topics to be studied, observations and interpretations to he examined, and standards of achievement to be built upon.

Yet specialization did not result in the fragmentation of the academic order, although it did reduce the magnitude of a culture common to most academics. The reputation of the leading universities was not based on achievement in a single area but in many different fields of research. By supporting the translocal elements of the scientific and scholarly community, specialization served to consolidate the academic order and its hegemony over the amateur and other intellectual institutions.

From the 1880 onward, the holders of doctorates from American universities and those who had studied in German universities-- -in outlook and status, they were increasingly identical--became aware in the qualities and interests they
shared as practitioners of particular disciplines. The result was the growing prominence of national scientific and scholarly associations and their journals. Before the Civil War and in the two decades immediately following it, the activities of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, like the efforts of the earlier established Verein deutscher Naturforscher and The British Association for the Advancement of Science, had provided occasions for intellectual intercourse. Contact within the boundaries of loosely defined disciplines was eagerly sought, and for this reason the special sections of these societies multiplied. The disciplinary learned societies, formed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, were expressions of a desire for a more regular and intense intellectual interchange that would link men of learning who had been dispersed throughout a burgeoning national territory.

For many, the desire for such contact had been quickened by their intense intellectual experiences in smalll Germany university towns or in university quarters of larger towns where they found themselves in the company of other young men equally passionate in their devotion to enhancing their understanding and improving their knowledge, and where the "professor" appeared to be the embodiment of learning in its most exalted form. This close contact among intellectuals was evident not only in lightly knit university communities but also at the national level in the existence and activities of national scientific and scholarly associations such as the Verein fur Sozialpolitik. American scholars had never been exposed to such intense intellectual activity at home and the experience left an indelible mark.

For these young men, returning to the United States in the years immediately following the Civil War meant reentering a life where the intellectual air was very thin. Those who found employment in colleges and universities fell isolated. The older generation of teachers was neither accustomed to nor interested in engaging in serious scholarly discussions at a local or national level. In most colleges and and universities, departments, which first emerged as administrative conveniences attendant on the system of electives, were small, and thus there was little opportunity to encounter like-minded colleagues. Students as serious about the pursuit of learning as these young scholars had been were rare. The "Germany-returned"-- to use a term parallel to the "England-returned" current in India--had a sense of being cut off from a vital source of intellectual substance. Unlike the "England-returned" Indians, however, the Americans were in a more invigorating environment. They felt a need not only to teach and to do research in their chosen fields but also to create a sense of intellectual community. Rather than repining or losing themselves in feelings of impotence, they set about to stimulate American intellectual activity by pursuing scholarly and scientific labors and by founding societies and journals to fill the empty, isolating space around them.

In contrast with the older academics, the scientific and scholarly societies that began to emerge in the 1880s were formed around specialized disciplines and were relatively independent of universities. They represented an effort by amateurs and scientific and scholarly organizers to break out of the boundaries set by locality and to reach across space into national communities. Increasingly they were taken over by academics, in consonance with the ascendancy of universities, and became the periodic gathering place of' scientists and scholars from various universities.

In terms of' the "Germany returned" Americans, the establishment of these societies was more than an effort to confer legitimacy on and to elevate the status of the new academic professions while increasing their public influence. Both the organizations and their publications were intended at least as much to uphold intellectual morale of the young generation of academics who were not wholly at ease in the sparsely settled intellectual domain of their own country. By providing the conditions of intellectual community, young academics gave their ability to influence scientific and scholarly progress. The journals that they founded were, of course, a means of communication but more important they and the learned societies served to sustain the faith of young scientists and scholar in the value of their undertaking by bringing more impressively into their consciousness the similar interests and activities of others.

These academics were fortunate to live in a period when the larger movements of society, before and during their own time, were favorable to their goals. At the very foundation of their good fortune was the widespread persistence of Christian belief. Their own failing away from the basic theological and historical tenets of Christianity in their literal form did not dissolve the more the more general bearing and active force of character that such belief engendered. These academics adhered to the value of exertion for the purpose of seeking an ultimate truth and of subsequently transfiguring the earth in accordance with that truth---in whatever sphere--and they believed that exertion brought commensurate reward. They had ceased to believe in a literal Christian interpretation of the universe and of human existence, yet they were determined to repair that loss by replacing it or shoring it up with scientific and scholarly knowledge, which if it did not disclose God's design, would at least reveal the lawfulness of some of the workings of nature and society.

They were fortunate too in returning to the United States at a time when universities and colleges were beginning to look favorably on "modern subjects," at least to the extent of employing young scholars who had studied them. The departmental organization of universities had not been designed to create local intellectual communities but it made their formation easier by bringing together in circumscribed spaces persons of overlapping and sympathetic interests. Moreover, the departmental pattern of organization gave scholars the opportunity to undertake specialized investigations, which had been emphasized in their German training as one of the decisive requirements of intellectual progress. The fact that research could be launched with small grunts or none at all was another fortunate element. As active researchers, young academics were able to consolidate their identification as scientists and scholars working in particular disciplines. It is true that they did not have the leisure and freedom of the German Privatdozent; they had to teach elementary courses and they had to teach more hours weekly but they also had the advantage of being paid. Although unsteadily poised on the lowest rungs of the academic ladder, they were at the beginning of an academic career. The increased number of posts in a department and the gradation of ranks offered the promise-- not certain but at least possible--of advancement. A young scholar or scientist was no longer a school teacher or an assistant master serving at the pleasure of the head master or president --a "hand" taken on at short notice and dismissed at equally short notice. He was beginning to become a college teacher "or a university teacher." There was new dignity in the status of "college" and "university teacher," a new conception of the powers, privileges, and obligations of the position. "Practical men" might have spoken disparagingly of such an occupation but university teachers themselves often felt that they had embarked on a lofty calling.

Yet this new image of the university scientist and scholar would not have emerged without another closely allied change. Before the Civil War, presidents of colleges had been imperious and autocratic; they were the chief agents of their governing bodies, all their teachers were their "assistants." Powerful though the presidents were, they had not been influential in advancing the cause of learning; they had regarded themselves largely as administrators of schools in which the moral character of selected youths was formed. About 1870 onward, a major change occurred. College and university presidents remained powerful, but an influential group of them emerged to exercise their power on behalf of learning. Daniel Coit Gilman of Johns Hopkins was the first and foremost followed by Andrew White of Cornell, G. Stanley Hall of Clark, William Rainey Harper of Chicago, and Charles Eliot of Harvard all of whom moved in the same direction. Like their junior faculty they were persuaded that the life of learning had become one of the highest vocations of man.

Just as the young teacher could feel himself at the beginning of an academic career, full of potentialities, so too did the presidents of the colleges and universities acquire a sense of their potentialities. At the end of the nineteenth century it was the great magnates of industry and commerce who, despite the roughness of their methods, represented in the eyes of the educated public the forward surge of the country toward greatness. Yet university and college presidents were not insignificant figures in this powerful wave of moral progress and national eminence. They shared the confidence of leading businessmen, politicians, and publicists in the grandeur of what was a collective national undertaking, Their particular jurisdiction was the world of learning and they benefited from the approbation that was accorded to it by many of the leading figures of American society. A spectrum of' "anti-intellectual" elements including fund fundamentalist Christian sects, rough anti vulgar politicians, Gradgrind-like businessmen, cultural philistines, and the ebbing reservoir of the genteel tradition persisted in the United States, but they did not dominate the newly forming and reforming universities. The receptivity of state legislatures in the Midwest and on the Pacific coast and the philanthropic largesse of' great businessmen assured university presidents, and in turn university teachers, that the currents of public opinion were running in their direction.

Thus the "Germany-returned" young American scientists and scholars did not come home to a barren waste. Even the hindrances to their progress were in flux and they were encouraged by evidence of like minds and situations. They knew that there were others facing similar problems and possessing a similar resolve to prove themselves in the world of learning and to bring that learning to bear on the shortcomings in their society. They gravitated toward the universities led by presidents whose ideals and goals they admired--universities where they saw the lamps of the German tradition burning, dimly in some, more brightly in others.

Accompanying the ascendancy of the universities over the American order of learning was the ascendancy of a few universities within the national academic order. Important scientific papers and distinguished learned dissertations were not produced at every university, and the audience for scholarly work was as unevenly distributed as those who addressed it. At the same time, it was rare that a given university could point to a complete concentration of intellectual talent and production in a particular subject. One university might exceed another in the number of its eminent teachers and investigators and in the number of' Ph.D's granted in a given field, but it never held a monopoly. Thus what emerged was not a single intellectual center, but a constellation of centers that were in competition with one another and were, at the same time, infusing their ideals on the peripheral institutions.

The greatest concentration of scientific and scholarly activity was to be found in a relatively small number of institutions: the new universities like Johns Hopkins, Chicago, and Stanford; the slowly self-transforming older universities of the East; and the state universities in the Midwest and California. The work undertaken at these centers helped to create an intellectual consensus about what was true and important in a given field, in terms of both substantive issues and methodological problems.
The research and publications of individual faculty members were the basis for the distinction achieved by those institutions that comprised the central constellation. The importance of a given department was frequently the result of the towering accomplishments of one person. The simultaneous elevation of four or five departments within a major branch of learning or eight or ten in a university as a whole made that university into a center sought out by graduate students and professional academics alike.

Columbia University was one such center. In anthropology for example, it look the lead because the figure of Franz Boas towered above all his colleagues. The department of anthropology at Columbia produced a steady stream of' learned publications and distinguished research students. Boas' work was not only an enduring contribution to knowledge; it was also a model for other investigators in the field. Anthropology had existed in the United States before Boas, but the emergence of a department that trained future anthropologists and brought forth men like Kroeber, Lowie, and Sapir, each of whom in his turn became a point of crystallization of anthropological study, transformed the loose "consciousness of kind" into a sense or being part of a discipline of universal validity. Moore and Seligman in economics, Burgess in political science, Dewey in philosophy, Morgan in genetics, Beard and Robinson in history were a few of those who made their departments and Columbia University into an important center of learning.

The University of Chicago was another such center. Moore in mathematics, Michelson and Millikan in physics, Loch in physiology, Manley in English, Thomas and Park in sociology, Freund and Merriam in political science, Show Shorey
in classics were the individuals whose light was diffused over the rest of their institution. Sociology at Chicago illustrates the role of a leading center of research and training. Sociology was a "movement " of the mind before it became a discipline. As it grew academically a substantive body of literature developed, consolidating the subject and strengthening the sense of identify of its practitioners. The department of sociology at the University of Chicago was a crucial element in the process. Yet "Chicago sociology," like "Columbia anthropology," never monopolized all the activity in its field. It did, however, draw out and emphasize certain themes and techniques, thereby providing a common conception of the substance and methodology of a field through the works that its members produced.

Johns Hopkins University and Harvard University in historical studies, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Chicago, Columbia, and Wisconsin in economics performed similar roles. In the social sciences as in other subjects, the development of' academic departments transformed heterogeneous and somewhat inchoate bodies of intellectual activities and beliefs into disciplines.

Of course, centers did not always remain centers. Within the central constellation particular institutions waxed and waned, while some of the lesser universities became independent centers in their own right, each sharing and reinforcing the common culture of a field and developing its own distinctive features. The important element was not the specific composition of the constellation but rather its very existence. Its emergence helped to make the academic order into community-- a necessary condition of the ascendancy of academia in the order of learning.

The sense of community was nurtured by movements within the central constellations and between the central and the concentric peripheral circles. An American student seldom pursued his graduate studies at the same institution at which he had taken his bachelor's degree. If he succeed in entering the academic profession, he rarely began his career at the same university at which he had taken his advanced degree; as he progressed, he moved from one university to another. American universities did not have the degree of "inbreeding" that was characteristic of the British universities; the greater egalitarianism of' American society permitted a young man trained at the center to settle more easily into an institution a little removed from it than appears to have been the case in Britain at that time. The movement of academics among universities was further facilitated by the fact that student bodies, the number of available teaching posts, and the number of universities themselves were growing more rapidly in America than elsewhere.

These consolidated the collective self-image of the academic order and the position of the central constellation within it. Academics came to believe that they were part of a mighty regiment, somewhat distinct from the rest of' American society-- contributing to it, criticizing it,supported by it, and harassed by it. They also saw themselves as separate from the other intellectual institutions of the learned and the literary worlds--from industrial laboratories and governmental scientific service with which they had only irregular contact and from the world of artists and literary men with whom they had very little interchange, even in New York and Chicago. Finally they were united by a common universe of discourse that was sustained, in large measure, by the preponderance of' scholarly work emanating from the central constellation. Although separated by fields and specialization within fields, by the end of the century, scientists and scholars could still be bound together across institutional boundaries by reading common bodies of scientific and scholarly literature which originated primarily from within the university.

Moreover, it was the universities themselves that increasingly became the source of most scientific and scholarly publications. In the last years of the nineteenth century, universities that had already achieved a position at the center of the academic order further strengthened their ascendancy by establishing scholarly publishing houses. The presses of The Johns Hopkins University, the University of Chicago, Cornell University, Columbia University, Harvard University and the University of California were initially organs for the publication of works, including multi-volumed series and journals, written and edited by teachers at these institutions. Series such us the Johns Hopkins Studies in History and Political Science, the Columbia University Studies in Public Law and Political Science, and the Harvard Oriental Series offered the newer members of the various disciplines a ready opportunity to bring their research results to a wider audience. They also underscored the identification of these younger scholars with the institutions where they were trained and where some held appointments. By coupling the scholarly and scientific eminence of the institutions and departments with the names of particular scholars, these publications thickened the lines that defined the centers and linked them to the periphery.

The academic press was also an important element in making the university the focal point of scientific and scholarly communications. The transactions and proceedings of those academics that managed to survive in this period could not compete with the specialized learned journals emanating from the universities and published by university presses, scientific and scholarly societies, and sometimes by commercial enterprises under academic editorship. Industrial research, insofar as it existed, likewise contributed little to the flow of learned communications. In the particular fields in which they specialized, independent museums such as the Field Museum and the American Museum of Natural History produced works which were read and respected. Some of the governmental scientific services, such as the Bureau of Ethnology, published reports which became part of the standard literature of their subjects.

Taken as a whole, however, it was the publications arising in the universities and produced by university publishing houses that dominated the network of scientific and scholarly communication. In short, the universities were not only filling up much of the world of learning; they were also expanding its space.

VII

Beneath the widespread recognition of the legitimacy of disciplines as universally valid bodies of knowledge, there remained a sensitive institutional parochialism within the American academic profession. Like all loyalties to a collectivity, allegiance to a scholarly institution was not an emotion expressed with equal force by all academics. Young, recently recruited teachers could not be expected to feel the same degree of loyalty to their university as those who had long been members of the faculty and had risen to prominence by office, seniority, and accomplishment attained in "their" university or college. Although an emulative
pride and sensitivity about the reputation and good name of a college or university had existed even before the "cognitive revolution" that spread and deepened after the Civil War, sentiments of loyalty on the part of a president and faculty were heightened by the standing of their university as a center of scientific and .scholarly endeavor.

When William Rainey Harper was founding and presiding over the University of Chicago, his aim was to establish an institution that while specifically "American," would be in the same class as the German universities. Daniel Coit Gilman set a similar goal for Johns Hopkins. The presidents bore the responsibilities for making their universities as "great" as they could be while the professors wanted to make their own departments "the best. " For the former, "greatness" meant not only intellectual accomplishment but also public reputation and the financial benefits of such a reputation. The desire of a group of professors to build a great department might have been intertwined with personal vanity and corporate pride. It was clear, however, that their aspirations could be realized only through the production of distinguished scientific and scholarly work addressed to other scientists and scholars in the United States and abroad, most of whom were by then associated with universities. In these circumstances, self-awareness of the academic status of the intellectual world and of the hierarchy of center and periphery became acute.

Ultimately, eminence in the larger academic order was based on the achievements of departments: for individual teachers, this meant their own departments; for the president and some professors, it meant many departments within the university. Yet great departments could not be created without financial support. Before the First World War, the largest portion of funds for research came not from patrons outside the universities but front the internal budget of the university. As university presidents came to recognize the extent to which intellectual achievement aided them in building their institutions, they became increasingly willing to support the appointment of distinguished faculty. Of course, many scholars and scientists who were less than eminent had to be hired to provide for the routine teaching of various subjects, but at the level of professorships, proud and aspiring presidents placed resources at the disposal of their more ambitious and successful departments to enable them to attract the best scholars and scientists available. Departments and universities that were content to do more than "fill the slots" allotted them sank in the hierarchy; such was the fate of institutions with more limited resources or those in which emulative institutional
patriotism was weak. Although these universities were not necessarily devoid of outstanding departments, they "contracted out" of the race and accepted their peripherality.

Only a small number of universities had both the individuals and the resources needed to bring them to the forefront of the American academic order. These few were determined to live up to the German standard, not only to benefit students who would be instructed and inspired by the most outstanding workers in their respective fields, not only to stimulate faculty through contacts with distinguished colleagues, but also to satisfy the personal pride of the president and the leading professors who sought the distinction of association with a "great" department and a "great" university.

The effort to he among the best of institutions or departments was spurred by the growing prominence of research. As long as universities and colleges confined themselves to teaching, to the formation of character and the "molding of men," they were visible only locally and to those who had direct contact with them. Few easily and widely recognized marks of accomplishment resulted from pedagogical activities. However, achievements in research were discernible not so much by the general public as by the public consisting of other workers in the same or related fields. Colleagues at other universities were more effectively present in the minds of those academics who did research than was the case with those whose affections were given in the first instance to teaching. The audience of the latter was the student body, locally circumscribed; the audience for the former was national and international.

Indeed the emergence of central and peripheral universities was conditional on the existence of translocal scholarly and scientific communities. These national communities and the organizations and organs through which they were given form aided the comparison and assessment of scientific and scholarly production. Through publication of the results of research, academics and their works were placed on a stage that enhanced their visibility. Evaluations of individual works and their authors were consolidated into assessments of departments and entire institutions. The result was a stratification of works, individuals, departments, and institutions. Some individuals withdrew from the competition and some never entered it. Others, at or nearer to the center, were sensitive to their reputation and were close enough to distinction to believe in the value of such prominence This belief was especially apparent when appointments were about to be made, and there was an opportunity to raise the prestige of one's university by attracting a distinguished scientist or scholar.

The ranking of universities in a national hierarchy was affected by the deliberate efforts of university presidents and professors to maintain or raise the status or their institution. It was in this period that American university teachers and administrators developed the policy of "going after" a man, of making a deliberate effort to bring to their universities the best, or prospectively best, scholars and scientists. The practice of Berufung had long been in use in Germany when it was taken up in the United States. The new universities tried to win to their service the best of the newer men at the older universities. It was relatively easy for Johns Hopkins, Chicago, and Stanford to leap to the forefront while other universities in the country were slumbering, and ambitious and talented younger persons were suffering from the restraints imposed upon them by their more traditional institutions. But the older universities rallied; they made efforts to satisfy those who wished to do research and to bring back the best of those they had lost.

The dynamics of American universities determined to enhance their reputation and hence to build their intellectual and material fortunes stood in marked contrast to the practice of the older English universities that were so confident of their superiority that they had no need to exert any effort to attract the leading scientists and scholars. In Great Britain, the pattern of an academic career from the 1870 to the First World War was relatively simple: graduate front Oxford, Cambridge, or London; obtain an appointment for a time at one of the provincial universities like Manchester or Liverpool: and then, for those who reached the highest eminence, return as professors to Oxford, Cambridge, or London. The provincial universities could compete only for scholars or scientists who had not yet reached the peak of accomplishment; in attracting persons of great distinction, all the advantages lay with the three universities in the South. The vice chancellors of Britain's modern universities either did not have or did not choose to exercise the powers of American university presidents.

No such predetermined path or unchanging hierarchy existed in the United States. In this sense, the American academic order more closely resembled that of Germany. The Prussian Minister of Education, Friedrich Althoff, was much like an American university president in his solicitous intrusiveness. In Some of the German states, the initiative was borne by a few senior professors who sought to attract to their universities the best men available anywhere in Germany. (They were the beneficiaries of a tradition inherited from the time of the princely states when rulers vied with one another for the greater glory of possessing an eminent university.)

There was nothing comparable to the American or German system in France, where the Sorbonne so far outdistanced the universities of the provinces that the latter could do little more than reconcile themselves to their inferior status. Only the University of Toulouse once sought to break out of that condition and, in the end, its efforts were unsuccessful. As a consequence--and despite the fact that the national university system was a legal reality-- the stimulus of institutional emulation was absent. The preponderance of the grandes ecoles, the College de France, and the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes prevented the universities from attaining the ascendancy in France that they secured in the United States, Germany, and to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom.

Emulation was an essential motivating force in the shifting status of American academic institutions. Yet none of the emulative actions of the American universities would have occurred had presidents and professors not expressed both a passionate attachment to their universities and departments and a jealous concern for their personal reputations. Here was a parochiality that was perfectly compatible with intellectual attachment to scientific and scholarly communities extending far beyond the boundaries of individual universities.

VIII

The story of the ascension of the universities is not one of even and unimpeded progress along a single front. There were contrary movements in public opinion and within the learned world against the dominance of the universities, and against the major universities that were the most visible parts of the academic dominance. The universities were criticized by radicals for too subservient to the earthly powers and by conservatives for being too critical of them; they were criticized by "practical" men for concentrating on interests too remote from the ordinary business of daily life and by men of letters for being too close to it. Members of more rustic universities criticized the universities of the Eastern seaboard. Specialization and narrowness, utilitarianism, triviality and the "ivory tower," the reactionary support of capitalism and irresponsible radicalism, and excessive secularism and piety were among the charges leveled against the universities.

There was a kernel of truth in all these accusations. The American universities were sometimes subservient to external powers who charged that university teachers taught doctrines subversive of existing institutions and arrangements. The cases of Edward Ross at Stanford, Scott Nearing at Pennsylvania, Louis Levine at Montana, and Charles Beard and James McKeen Cattell at Columbia indicate that these criticisms were not baseless. At the same time, the universities were also hospitable to stringent critics of the existing order, such as John Dewey, Richard Ely, Simon Patten, and their numerous intellectual progeny, whose ideas contributed markedly to the collectivist transformation of American society in the half-century following World War I. Those businessmen and publicists who thought that "the universities" were preaching "socialism" exaggerated, but they were not wholly off the mark. In addition, the American universities performed a variety of trivial activities ranging from semicommerical football spectacles and numerous practical programs with little respectable intellectual content to worthy but distracting activities in extramural teaching and service. Yet in the half-century between the Civil War and the end of the First World War, these criticisms and diversions did not deflect the universities from the course on which they had been launched by the zeal for learning of the "Germany-returned" generation and by attendant circumstances in the structure of' knowledge and society. They withstood critics, opponents, and rivals and developed, among other things, economic theory, oriental studies, sociology, genetics, theoretical physics, and the most recondite branches of mathematics.

Successful as the universities were in gaining intellectual dominion over alternative modes of organization for the cultivation--both discovery and transmission--of learning, they were less successful in their relation with alternative modes of thought and expression. Whereas their organizational rivals fell into the places "to which they had been called by God," their intellectual rivals did not readily accept the preeminence of the universities. Academics, amateurs, librarians, officials of learned societies, directors of independent research institutions and scientists employed by the government took the ascendancy of the universities with good grace. Priests and clergy, bohemians, socialists, literary men and artists, mystics, and devotees of the occult were not so easily reconciled. However, the opposition was never unified, even within each or its constituent currents. Neither the fundamentalist Christian nor the populist rivals could forge a united front because their numbers were so prevalent within the universities. The radicals and bohemians were held at arms length, discouraged from entering the universities or extruded from them if they did succeed in gaining entrance. A few novelists and poets could he found on university faculties, although their tasks were to do research and to teach from the general body of learning. Likewise the mystics and pantheists in the university were directly engaged in science and scholarship. Artistic expression and communion with the deity did not fall within the terms of reference of the university; those who practiced them had to do so avocationally.

The profession of letters would have been in more severe conflict with the universities but for a spontaneously achieved division of labor. Academics studied literature historically and philologically, in a scholarly way; they edited texts and wrote historical works about genres, traditions, epochs and authors of the past. Men of letters were primarily concerned with contemporary authors and their writings. As long as men of letters, such as Ellery Sedgwick of the Atlantic Monthly and Paul Elmer More of Princeton, were still predominantly devoted to the genteel tradition, there was a truce or alliance. Novelists seldom treated the subjects dealt with by university faculties. The break came first in the outer areas of the republic of letters. But by 1920 the members of university departments of English and modern languages and literature had begun to turn their attention to contemporary works. Men of letters, particularly H. L. Mencken, became aggressively scornful of universities and of university teachers. The result was a conflict between the academics who generally disdained modern literature and the men of letters who generally supported it. Students of literature within the universities although much criticized from outside, were themselves critical of specific features of the universities. Some of them bitterly attacked the scientific and scholarly side of university activity.

At Harvard, Irving Babbitt was a scholar who belonged to the ascendant academic order, but he was hostile toward the scientism and utilitarianism that he saw in the universities. He shared his antiutilitarianism with the exponents of the genteel tradition who did not approve of the research activities of the graduate schools and who were committed to the undergraduate schools. It was the survivors of the genteel tradition who became the defenders of' "the humanities" within the universities and continued their defensiveness against science, technology, and the social sciences.

In literature, unlike religion, the external critics of the university were victorious--although not in the period before World War I. First, scholarship triumphed over the genteel tradition and then after the Second World War, scholarship itself was shaken by "modernism, " which ended by bringing the bohemian outlook into the universities. But that story belongs to a later chapter.

In the end, the severity of their critics, internal and external, did not deter the universities from the course set by Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago. Columbia and Harvard regrouped their forces and moved in the same direction as did Yale. They were joined by Stanford University, the University of Michigan, and the University of California; the Universities of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana were scarcely behind their sister institutions in the Midwest and West

What propelled the university movement was a drift of opinion toward the appreciation of knowledge, particularly knowledge of a scientific character. There was general agreement that knowledge could be accepted as knowledge only if it rested on empirical evidence, rigorously criticized and rationally analyzed, and that this kind of knowledge was worthy of all the effort and resources required to attain it. Great businessmen, leading state politicians as well as a few major national politicians, important publicists and, in a vague way, much of the electorate joined in the appreciation of this kind of knowledge and of the university as its proper organ. The universities were supported because they performed a dual function: they infused knowledge into the young who would apply it in their professions and whose lives would be illuminated by its possession, and they contributed to the improvement or the stock of knowledge, penetrating further and further into the nature of reality. The knowledge that was appreciated was secular knowledge which continued the mission of sacred knowledge, complemented it, led to it, or replaced it; fundamental, systematically acquired knowledge was thought in some way to he a step toward redemption This kind of knowledge held out the prospect of the transfiguration of life by improving man's control over the resources of nature and the powers that weaken his body; it offered the prospect of a better understanding of society that it was felt, would lead to the improvement of society. It was thought that the progress of mankind entailed the improvement of understanding simply as a state of being and not solely as an instrument of action. The honor and the glory of a country that promoted the acquisition of such knowledge was assured, its power and influence would grow proportionately and deservedly.

It was this movement of belief that carried forward the universities--a movement to which both leading academics and the leading university administrators subscribed. There were, of course, disagreements on particular points--on the emphasis to be given to theoretical and fundamental knowledge in comparison with practical, useful discoveries, or on the value of immediate intervention into practical affairs as against the postponement or avoidance of intervention until knowledge was sufficiently reliable. Certain studies were sometimes more favored than others because they attracted more financial support or at least did not discourage it. There were other disagreements too, and not all institutions and subjects moved with equal speed in the same direction. Nonetheless, the movement went on: the centers spreading their influence over the peripheries; the centers competing with each other and sometimes changing places. The universities at the center moved into new spiritual terrain, drawing the rest of the intellectual order with them.

The universities were vouchsafed this vocation because they appeared to be the best imaginable instrument for the performance of the dual cognitive function. They could not only produce more knowledge more reliably and more continuously than any other learned organization, but they could also transmit it, thus making provision for the persistence of that progress. No other arrangement of intellectual activities could approximate their success in this regard. Universities moved forward over the whole of the legitimate cognitive front. They worked in a way that drew most fruitfully on the cooperation and contributions of numerous individuals and institutions in many countries. Libraries became their instruments, industrial and governmental laboratories their executants. Within the ascendancy of the university community, order was maintained and kept in movement by the ascendancy of a central constellation of universities over most of the others

This was the situation at the end of the First World War. Traditions of thought and loyally had been founded and reinforced in the preceding half century. In the ensuing half century, these traditions and loyalties were to bear fruit, but they were also to be subjected to unprecedented strains precisely because they had been so successful.