PicoBlog

Welcome to Making History, a newsletter about how historians make history. Also sometimes a newsletter, as in this series on the origins of “leadership,” that doesn’t so much go behind the scenes of history-making as it offers a preview of some of the latest arguments and findings in the field. For the beginning of the series, go here. And to subscribe, go here. It’s free!

Last time we saw how the rise of the early American research university was driven less by a thirst for knowledge or a corporate need for bureaucratic expertise than by the entry of so many business heirs into higher education. These young men, in turn, inaugurated what might be called, in contrast with the research university, the “collegiate university”: the sports-dominated student culture that first came to prominence at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, the national models for collegiate competitive athletics and the winners of nearly every football championship from 1870 to 1900. Alternatively embraced, tolerated, and repressed by administrators from the 1860s to the 1920s, the collegiate university survived and thrived because it proved to have an elective affinity — in Goethe and Weber’s sense of a development that could not occur in isolation but that in combination proves catalytic and mutually intensifying — with two contemporaneous developments, the research university and the large corporation.

Student athletics and extracurriculars were both limited in the early nineteenth century. Before the Civil War, college officials found in individual physical education a means to discipline the body like the mind; students, by contrast, turned to team sports as a way to rebel against collegiate authority. This is why college officials before the Civil War quickly suppressed most team athletic competitions, with Harvard banning football in 1860. Until the end of the 1850s extracurriculars in general were marginal, frequently suppressed, and not particularly distinctive or culturally celebrated — youthful versions of common adult activities.

After the Civil War, everything changed. First, in the 1870s and 1880s, college officials, desperate for ways to defend their institutions against accusations of insufficient manly vigor, changed their minds about team athletics. As the course work at leading institutions transitioned from a religious to a secular focus, college officials also found in ideas about fair play a way to exercise moral influence without appealing to religion. All agreed, finally, that no role in higher education offered better training for future captains of industry than that of quarterback of a football team. “The only thing worthy of serious reprehension,” wrote Woodrow Wilson as a student coach in 1878, “is the stubborn manner in which some of the men shut their ears to the command of the captain.” Two years later, at the University of Michigan, another student happily observed how “the players no longer rush about as of old,” since the “captain, by means of signals, manages so as to have all his men act as a unit.”

Nowhere were the makings of the collegiate university more evident than in the organization that typified the student experience at the turn of the century: the YMCA. In the 1870s and 1880s, officials in the Y’s national office focused above all on character and “service” in the programming offered to young collegians. In the 1890s, 1900s, and 1910s, the Y’s curriculum shifted: the organization now attempted to “train college men for leadership” through the development of both “moral initiative” and “full personality.” These attributes came together in a new social type: the “all-round student.” At most universities, the term “all-round” was applied exclusively to discuss students who succeeded across academic subjects — the lab as much as the library. As the Y and student athletics rose in prominence, what it meant to be “all-round” changed to emphasize extracurriculars as much as academics. The epitome of the all-round student appeared in the exemplary scholar-athletes such as Yale’s Amos Alonzo Stagg that the Y began touring to campuses around the country; it also manifested in a new Christology that touted “Jesus’ personality” and his “masterful leadership.” For more secular fraternity members and the campus wags that satirized them, the all-round student was typified by another new figure then first appearing on the scene: the “big man on campus.”

The American research university came into being alongside this new student culture, and the two were in tension from the first. Johns Hopkins in 1876 became the first institution to try to mimic the German research model on American soil. Harvard immediately turned to compete, trailed by other members of the Ivy League and the wealthiest state universities, along with newly founded upstarts like Chicago and Stanford. In the midst of this turn to research, however, undergraduate grades dropped precipitously, along with the social status of academic success. “Nowhere except in a college,” the dean of Harvard College reported after a precipitous drop in studiousness, was “so low a standard of quality endured.” At many institutions, the amount of financial aid offered to poor students, typically among the top scholars each year, also fell off a cliff.

But as the culture of the collegiate university rose to ascendancy in the 1880s and 1890s, so too did the research university’s needs for capital. Unlike the narrowly defined scope of the antebellum college, intent on imparting moral character by inculcating a limited knowledge of the classics, the ambitions of the research university were, like knowledge itself, essentially limitless. A growing emphasis on recruiting and funding the most prominent researchers also fundamentally shifted the economic rationale of higher education from an emphasis on competent teaching to a new system based on positional goods, i.e. the conspicuous consumption of the faculty star system. This drive to recruit stars drove up costs not only via faculty salaries but above all via the research budgets used to bring in top candidates. Caltech, for instance, recruited the physicist Robert Millikan away from the University of Chicago by offering a handsome $15,000 salary along with a completely unprecedented $100,000 annual research budget ($1.5 million in 2023 dollars).

To fund these demands, university officials moved beyond their small previous benefactors — predominately those who shared a college’s religious orientation along with a few local business magnates — and turned to a funding source whose financial potential was growing with rapid speed: all those business heirs and their friends, now alumni, assuming positions of power in growing companies.

The conflict between the research and the collegiate sides of the university, and the connection of both to the world of business, came to a head in discussion of athletics. As early as 1881, Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, the leading establishment spokesman for the research university, recognized that sports might detract from academics. What tempered this conflict was the institution’s connection to the world of industry. Athletics should be retained, Eliot insisted, because experience on the field instilled “qualities valuable in business.” Later a prominent critic of the violence of football in the 1890s and 1900s, Eliot nonetheless remained a strong supporter of college athletics so long as students didn’t shed too much blood on the field. The presidents at the country’s mammothly endowed new research institutions, Chicago and Stanford, both founded by captains of industry, similarly gave qualified but passionate endorsements of college sports. “Athletics,” president David Starr Jordan made clear at Stanford, was the “secret of our influence.” Among the most renowned spokesmen of the Progressive Era, these university presidents characteristically accommodated financial interests not by rejecting the problem-child of college athletics, football, but by regulating it.

The dangers of failing to find a way to marry the collegiate and research sides of the university were nowhere better illustrated than at Princeton. Francis Patton, elected president in 1888, began his career by promising to fulfill the alumni’s demand that the institution would, first, compete with Harvard by becoming a research university, but, second, remain a safe space for the sons of alumni who preferred to have “gone and loafed than never to have gone at all.” The attempt to combine the research and collegiate sides of the university is clear in Patton’s approach to fundraising. From one side of his mouth, he demanded unprecedented levels of alumni donations so that the school could compete in research; from the other, he insisted that the “brawny contests” of college athletics produced the “very best elements of manhood.” Any “alleged” conflicts between the academic and athletic sides of the institutions, Patton argued, could easily be overcome.

On his athletic promises, Patton made good. The 1890s was the decade when Princeton acquired its “country club” moniker; football boomed. An unprecedented wave of alumni donations followed. But although Patton appended the name “university” to his institution in 1896, his failure to combine research success with collegiate spirit proved to be his downfall. Princeton alumni exercised the new power that came with a reliance on their donations by threatening to withhold funds unless the president fulfilled both their athletic and academic ambitions. After using financial threats to secure positions on the board of trustees, the young alumni fired Patton in 1902.

For a replacement, the alumni turned to a former Princeton football student-coach who had gone on to become a nationally prominent member of the faculty: Woodrow Wilson. An up-and-coming political scientist, Wilson promised the alumni he would build new dormitories for collegiate living and new laboratories for science, a new gymnasium along with a new graduate school. Millions in donations followed. But administrators knew only too well how delicate the balance between the research and collegiate sides of the institution remained. A few years after Wilson’s first successes, the alumni again threatened to withhold donations when he tried to ban Princeton’s exclusive eating clubs. The research university and the collegiate university were two sides of the same delicately balanced coin.

To Thorstein Veblen, the economist who witnessed the rise of the collegiate university to its early heights while teaching at Chicago and Stanford, a break-up appeared necessary. The “gentlemen’s college” and the research university worked at such cross-purposes, he argued, that a “divorce” was “in the interest of both parties.”

Wilson disagreed. At Princeton, he never threatened to eliminate the research ambitions of the institution or the opportunities for academic specialization among his undergraduates. Instead, Wilson promised to “bring these two extremes together,” both “leadership and expert organization.” The athletic “side shows” or “circus,” Wilson insisted, should never be eliminated; extracurriculars need only be “subordinated” to a more general end. As much as the research university was essential for teaching “a real capacity for understanding the conditions of progress,” only the collegiate university could instill “elevated ideals.” The aim for Wilson, after all, was not the education of mere scholars or professionals, helpless in the face of scientific socialism. His intent was to produce young men who could dominate modern science, who could face down the most extravagant claims of socialism with both abstract expertise and personal authority, and who could bring any doubters among their class to their side.

ncG1vNJzZmilkaCyqbXSraarsV6owqO%2F05qapGaTpLpwvI6wn7JllKSytHnHmqmvmaKZeqmt1Z5kmmWWpLy1rsClow%3D%3D