|
« AAUP Homepage
|
Stand, Columbia: A History of Columbia University in the City of New York, 1754-2004
Reviewed by Katherine Reynolds Chaddock
On the occasion of its 250th anniversary, Robert McCaughey provides us with Columbia's fifth published institutional history. Potential readers may wonder about the need for a 715-page addition to the previous volumes. Why not simply publish a twentieth-century update to the most recent saga, Frederick P. Keppel's 1914 book Columbia? However, McCaughey, chair of the Barnard College history department, demonstrates that a book returning to well-plowed ground can contribute in valuable ways—one of which is to model unusually compelling historiography for future authors of college and university evolutions.
Stand, Columbia: A History of Columbia University in the City of New York, 1754-2004 confronts the common organizational problem of chronological order versus topical arrangement by opting for a middle ground, happily deviating from institutional histories organized by parades of successive presidential reigns. Early chapters follow the calendar, moving from attempts by colonial governors and denominational leaders in the early eighteenth century to promote a collegiate impulse in commercially enthusiastic and religiously plural New York to the 1754 start up—with Anglican support and under denominational auspices—of King's College, which was to become Columbia University. Later chapters use as a framework key issues, including Jews at Columbia; women at Columbia; the bumpy starts of the law school, the medical school, and Teachers College; the core curriculum and great books courses; the influence of faculty public intellectuals such as John Dewey, Mark Van Doren, Lionel Trilling, Robert K. Merton, and Richard Hofstadter; and, of course, student unrest.
Although McCaughey correctly asserts that "Columbia's story often departs from the typical collegiate saga," the volume is noteworthy for depicting struggles not uncommon in other institutions then or now. Early American colleges, for example, typically shared with Columbia an emphasis on elements of the classical curriculum, influential and highly involved trustees, a faculty ranging from committed to shirking, and struggles to rein in rowdy boy students. Later, Columbia joined the University of Chicago, Stanford and Johns Hopkins Universities, and others in seeking approaches to maintaining undergraduate quality while reaping research gains. Strong, often overbearing, presidents on many campuses struggled against the realities of faculty governance and the expectation that faculty would collaborate and be consulted in the conduct of university affairs. McCaughey's account of how Columbia approached these and other issues can be seen as a set of case studies that are interesting and instructional for their commonalities with other institutions and with other times, including the present.
The narrative strength of Stand, Columbia, and an element that sets itapart from most other college histories, is its depiction of institutional actions as human actions. Resolutions, trustee votes, presidential dicta, and the like are enlivened with discussions of motives, individual experiences, and personal preferences and interactions. For example, the discussion of Columbia's handling of the "woman question" in the late nineteenth century is a story of people who lined up for or against admitting female students. We learn that powerful faculty star John W. Burgess, who had built the School of Political Science for Columbia and a national reputation for himself, was a white supremacist and Confederate Army veteran from a Tennessee slave-owning family who wanted no Jews, women, or African Americans at Columbia. President Frederick A. Barnard, clearly a favorite of the author, pushed for women's admissions after growing up in a family of strong women and observing women's success in some classes during his faculty years at the University of Alabama. His persistence, juxtaposed against Burgess's prejudices, becomes the metaphor for actions that variously brought about a Collegiate Course for Women in 1883, Barnard College in 1889, and undergraduate co-education in the College of Columbia University in 1983. Gender issues also surface as a compelling story about the resolve of prominent female professors, including English professors Kate Millett, Catherine Stimpson, and Carolyn Heilbrun, who fought for equal status and pay for Columbia's women faculty.
Similarly, the story of Columbia's prominent position in initiating the American great books movement early in the twentieth century is as much a narrative of faculty interactions as of curricular design. First proposed by English professor John Erskine in 1915, but turned down by the faculty, the idea was revived in 1919 as a General Honors course that became highly sought after by the brightest students. After Erskine began publishing somewhat steamy popular novels, to the disdain of his colleagues, and in 1929 was appointed president of the Julliard Conservatory, the classic Western literature courses were suspended. Later, they were revived by nationally recognized historian Jacques Barzun and established Columbia's recognition as a leader in the American general education movement.
The most visible and controversial among Columbia's leaders, president Nicholas Murray Butler, appropriately receives more thorough treatment in Stand, Columbia than any of his predecessors or successors. Butler, who served from 1902 to 1945, was a "master of multitasking a century before the term came into use," McCaughey writes, and had a preference for "the company of the nonintellectual wealthy and the politically connected over academic friendships." Butler generally garners high marks from McCaughey although he played the heavy-handed autocrat with faculty, who felt he circumscribed academic freedom.
McCaughey carves a path of critical Butler study that is somewhere between the early favorable insider account in early twentieth-century Columbia English professor Brander Matthews' edited A History of Columbia University (1904) and the outraged objections found in social activist and novelist Upton Sinclair's self-published The Goose Step: A Study of American Education (1922). Sinclair reports that Butler and his trustees dismissed or forced the resignations of some of Columbia's most noteworthy faculty members, perhaps for questions they raised or for their leftist political leanings. He quotes resigning professor Charles Beard as charging, "The status of a professor in Columbia is lower than that of a manual laborer." The Matthews book, in contrast, portrays Butler as an energetic fundraiser, friend of students, and supporter of excellent young faculty. McCaughey concludes that Butler was not to blame for the faculty firings and resignations that marked his early administration, nor for the suicide of dismissed chaired professor Harry Thurston Peck. Rather, faculty seeded "self destruction," as they took their gripes against Columbia and Butler to the public and the press. The large clutch of faculty who were pushed out during the early Butler years, insists McCaughey, committed "academic suicide" when they "implicated Butler personally and called forth his defensive response."
Notably, the high regard for human action at the heart of McCaughey's Columbia saga reaches beyond faculty and administrative leaders to include students. From the extensive use of the diary of George Templeton Strong, a member of Columbia College's class of 1838, to the detailed accounts of Mark Rudd and his fellow Students for Democratic Society activists occupying campus buildings in 1968, student voices remind readers that even those who are only briefly part of the scene are fully part of the history.
McCaughey's version of institutional history, decidedly driven by the complexities of human actions and interactions, interprets events and processes by considering "why" and "who" questions, generally answered with multiple possibilities that may differ from others' perspectives. Clearly, much of what is reported in Stand, Columbia continues to resonate in the contemporary academic scene. McCaughey tells fascinating stories of the past that seem eerily familiar in the present, even for those who have never set foot on the Columbia campus.
Katherine Reynolds Chaddock is associate professor of higher education and director of the Museum and Archives of Education at the University of South Carolina. Among her recent books are Carolina Voices: 200 Years of Student Experiences and Visions and Vanities: John Andrew Rice of Black Mountain College.
|