American Colleges Develop Research Roles

Sources

Johns Hopkins University. In 1876 Johns Hopkins University opened in Baltimore with a mission different from that of any other American university. Under the leadership of President Daniel Coit Gilman, Johns Hopkins provided extensive nonprofessional graduate study similar to that available at German universities. Nearly all of the fifty-three faculty members had doctorates from institutions in Berlin, Heidelberg, Jena, and Halle, and this new center of graduate learning soon attracted scores of scholars whose work would spread the new ideals of study to other institutions in the United States. Among them were Josiah Royce and John Dewey in philosophy and psychology, Henry C. Adams and John Commons in political economy, J. Franklin Jameson and Woodrow Wilson (who later became president of the United States) in history and political science, and Edmund B. Wilson and E. G. Conklin in biology.

The Model Becomes Popular. Many eastern institutions, spurred by the success at Johns Hopkins, began to build their graduate programs. Soon a significant number of state universities also built graduate facilities, their interest in research usually spreading outward from their departments of agriculture. Fellowships, or small stipends for financial support of graduate research, became increasingly more available, and soon the numbers of scholars pursuing doctorates soared from four hundred in 1878 to nearly five thousand in 1898.

Expansion. Three universities emulating the Johns Hopkins model were soon founded: Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1887, supported by a million-dollar gift from Jonas Gilman Clark; Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C., in 1889; and the University of Chicago in 1892, backed by the Rockefeller family. Clark University, headed by G. Stanley Hall, formerly a Johns Hopkins professor, specialized in the study of psychology and a few closely related subjects. Registration at Clark University consisted of giving one’s name and address to an assigned thesis professor. There were no class lists, no grades; professors lectured whenever they chose, and students graduated whenever they successfully wrote and defended a thesis. Clark and the other new universities soon became quite competitive. With the monetary support of the Rockefellers, President William Rainey Harper of the University of Chicago was able to offer professors salaries twice as high as those at Clark. Hall, frustrated with a University of Chicago raid on his highly select faculty, characterized Rainey’s courtship of his professors as “comparable to anything that the worst trust had ever attempted against its competitors.” The location of the University of Chicago in a great and growing city was also an important factor in its success, and except for several large state universities, most progressive centers for research were located in or near urban areas. Near the end of the nineteenth century, for example, both Columbia University and New York University, crowded beyond capacity, were forced to move to larger, much more expensive New York City sites as their graduate programs expanded.

Sources

Arthur Schlesinger, The Rise of the City: 1878-1898 (New York: Macmillan, 1933), pp. 202-246;

Laurence R. Veysey, The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 125-158.