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Ethan W. Ris, "Other People's Colleges: The Origins of American Higher Education Reform" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
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An interview with Ethan W. Ris
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Professor Ethan Ris
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Professor Ethan Ris
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Rome, Host of New Books in Education
Hi there. My name is Rome and I'm the host of the New Books in Education, a podcast channel of the New Books Network. Today we'll be talking to Professor Ethan Ris in his new book, Other People's the Origins of American Higher Education Reform, published by the University of Chicago Press. Ethan is an assistant professor of higher education leadership at the University of Nevada, Reno, and his book focuses on the effects of activist philanthropy on American undergraduate education in the first half of the 20th century. Ethan, welcome to the podcast.
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Professor Ethan Ris
Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here.
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Rome, Host of New Books in Education
Yeah. So I wonder if you'd begin this interview by saying a few words about yourself, your academic background, in your academic interests.
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Professor Ethan Ris
Absolutely. Thank you. I am, as you said, assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Reno. I've been here for just going into my sixth year. I do a couple of things. I run our Higher Education administration program, but I'm also the in house historian for the College of Education at the University of Nevada. That speaks to my scholarly interests as well. I'm certainly dual trained, I would say as both a historian and as a scholar of education broadly. And I attend both history conferences and higher ed conferences and try to keep one foot in each field. So as you might guess, that means I'm a historian of higher education specifically. We're A small sort of academic tribe, but we all get along and stick together. That's my training and my focus. And as we'll certainly discuss today, my main academic interests are higher education policy and reform, and especially how external actors influence policy and reform. When I say external, I mean external to either an individual campus, so what perhaps a leader at one university thinks that other institutions should be doing, or external entirely to higher education itself. So big philanthropic foundations, folks in government, including people in elected office, the business community, how all of the those interests sort of bring their ideas and their money and their politics into American colleges and universities?
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Rome, Host of New Books in Education
Yeah. Wonderful. And can you tell us also a little bit about the idea for writing this particular book and where that came from?
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Professor Ethan Ris
Yeah, absolutely. So I got my PhD at Stanford, where I was very lucky to study at the knee of some great historians of education like Larry Cuban, David Tyack, David Laboury. And they're folks who have carved out a field, along with other scholars like Michael Katz and James Anderson, on a study of school reform of looking at how generally powerful people have attempted to reshape the form and function of American K through 12 schools. As I steeped myself in that literature as a graduate student, I found that there was somewhat of a gap, specifically that a lot of the leaders of the school reform movement focused on K12 schools were affiliated with research universities. I started poking around in the archives and looking beyond the excellent work that had already been written and realizing that in fact, K12 reform was just kind of a side project for a lot of these folks, in that they spent an enormous amount of time thinking about how American higher education could be reformed. Then it turned out that a lot of them were circling around two newly established. I'm talking about the first couple decades of the 20th century. They were circling around two newly established philanthropic foundations, one established by Andrew Carnegie, one established by John D. Rockefeller Senior, who of course at the time were the two wealthiest private citizens in the world. And they each started a foundation with the express purpose of higher education reform. Even before they started their general purpose foundations like the Carnegie Corporation and the Rockefeller foundation, they were starting these things with permanent offices in New York, permanent endowments, permanent staff, all of that that we associate with the modern foundation specifically devoted to this cause of getting American colleges and universities to shape up. So I knew something was up. There's something going on here. When really, really rich guys like that start putting money into a cause, we should probably pay attention. So that's sort of where the. The idea originated. And I went into the project really with a lot of just sort of note, no hypothesis, just curiosity, just trying to figure out what, what exactly was going on. And when I got deep into the AR, at the, you know, the records of those two foundations, the records of people like Carnegie and Rockefeller themselves, their personal papers, and then especially when I started visiting university and college archives all across the country, ended up going to about 20 of them and seeing the work of these big foundations all over the place and seeing how, how really active they were and what a clear agenda they had, I sort of, I knew, okay, there's a book here.
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Rome, Host of New Books in Education
Oh, wow. Yeah. That's wonderful. So let's maybe just take a step back for a second and provide our listeners with some context into the world of higher education reform. And I think you do a good job of motivating that. In your book, you basically say that today, trying to relate that education reform in the early 20th century that you discussed to contemporary issues as well, you basically say that today higher education policy has become the same as higher education reform. Can you maybe speak a little bit about that so we can have some context before diving into the book more deeply?
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Professor Ethan Ris
Absolutely. So when I say that, I'm really talking about a condition that is not uncommon in American history in the sense that when we talk about what we should be doing at a policy level in terms of American colleges and universities, the first sentence following that is, how do we reform them? How do we shape them? How do we make them change? There's really, I would argue, a consensus across businesses, government officials, foundations, and really political partisans from both the right and the left that higher education in the US Must become more efficient, more accountable, and more useful both to students and to American society. So I think that's an important context and it has not always been the case. Certainly in the middle of the 20th century, there were several decades in which the focus of higher education policy was on expansion and growth and opening up access and building new colleges, starting new universities, putting tax taxpayer dollars and philanthropic dollars into the sector so that it could grow and that it could keep doing what it was doing just on a larger scale. But that is not how we think about higher education today, and it's definitely not how the policy arena was being played out 100 years ago, which is the focus of the book.
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Rome, Host of New Books in Education
Yeah, very interesting. Okay, so let's dive a little bit into the book just to advance a couple of things to our listeners. The book has mostly three parts. One is in which you discuss a period where ideas about higher education reform emerged, and then a Time in which foundations advanced those reforms and they were able to have important effects. And then finally some fight back and some resistance against those foundations, and then the emergency of a different kind of consensus. And again, please correct me if I'm framing anything in the wrong way here. So thinking with those major parts in mind, let's focus on the first one. And there you identify that in the early 20th century, some business oriented actors shared a sense of dissatisfaction with the state of higher education in America. I wonder if you could speak about where this dissatisfaction came from and were the major concerns that they had.
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Professor Ethan Ris
Absolutely. So, yeah, you sort of nailed the framework of the book. And let's talk about that first section, which I call the ethos of reform. Sort of the genesis and nature of these ideas that the reformers had. So thinking about the Progressive Era in general, and that's really what I'm talking about, the periods in straddling the turn of the 20th century. And I'm especially focused on the late Progressive Era, sort of the 1910s, 1920s. That's really the theme of the book. So a great historian, Michael McGurr, wrote a book, I think it came out 20, 25 years ago, called A Fierce Disconne Intent. And that book really challenged a lot of what scholars and students had assumed about the Progressive Era. That sort of the old notion of progressivism was that it was sort of a virtuous movement to clean up government, to make the American society work better, to, you know, open up American society to the world and to free markets and to essentially just you know, make things more modern. Get us into the 20th century in an ethical way that would not. Would not replicate the old, the bad old days of the 1800s when there was cronyism and, you know, nepotism and bossism in politics. Sort of the Tammany hall image we had. So McGurr argues that. Well, not really. And really what the Progressive Era was about was about middle upper class people trying to impose their vision of order and modernity on a nation that was anything but unified. There was tremendous immigration. People were coming in from all over the world at the time. There was tremendous flux in internal migration. People were moving to cities. The economy was industrializing and it was kind of chaotic. The Progressives, who, who my main characters certainly identified as progressives with that, with a capital P, they were dismayed by all of this chaos. They wanted to impose rational order. They wanted to make things sort of. I mean, efficiency. Efficient was their huge word. They kept saying that over and over again. It's not entirely clear that they were using it correctly, but they kept saying it nevertheless. And so that was the idea. And they worked on efficiency in all sorts of different areas. But in one area which I think prior to my book has not really been explored, was in higher education specifically. So they thought that much like the United States was too chaotic, was too full of people speaking different languages, practicing different religions, following different political systems. They thought the American higher education system was chaotic, was dominated by parochial interests, had way too much influence from organized religion, and was generally just not doing the work of social efficiency that they really believed it could. So that point is important. They believed in the power of higher education. They believed it was really an important, potentially important part of the United States, you know, political economy. But they thought lots needed to change before we got to that point. So I called those folks the academic engineers. And they were the people who were sort of revolving around these big foundations and doing a lot of the work of reform.
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Rome, Host of New Books in Education
Yeah. So I wonder. So one of the things that I thought it was interesting your description was the framing of those folks as engineers. That has to do, from my understanding, from my reading of the book, it has to do with some of the ideas that shaped their perspective. I wonder if you could expand a little bit on that as well.
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Professor Ethan Ris
Absolutely. These folks were definitely not actual engineers, to be clear, however, meaning they weren't trained in engineering. However, they revered engineering as a discipline and as a practice. It was just sort of becoming an academic discipline in the late 1800s to begin with. And certainly the funders, people like Carnegie and Rockefeller, had gotten rich off of the work of, or the ideas, certainly of engineers, and then of course, the hard and poorly compensated labor of lots and lots of working class people. But they saw engineering as this sort of pathway to modernity, and they saw it as a real science. But the trouble came, and they weren't wrong, the trouble came was when they started borrowing ideas from engineering and applying them to humanity. So we see. You know, I mentioned that word efficiency, which is a word that comes directly from engineering. You know, if you ask an engineer, what's an efficiency? Well, you know, it's a ratio of, of inputs to outputs. Essentially, how efficient is the machine or whatever apparatus you're working with at preserving energy? Essentially, however, they use that word in a really wide variety of ways. In one sense, yes, it was about inputs and outputs. They saw tremendous power and money going into American higher education. And they thought that what came out on the other end, end in terms of the students they produce, in terms of the credentials they produced, et cetera, et cetera, were not worth the cost. So that's one sense. But they also just used efficiency sort of willy nilly as meaning their vision of what should be right. So they would just label entire universities. This is an efficient university, or this is an inefficient university. And it basically meant, this is one that we like and this is one we don't like. Another word that they borrowed directly is a word that we use so often today that we forget where it comes from. And that word is system. So system is very much an engineering term describing. Well, I'm not an engineer, so I won't even attempt to give the engineer's definition of it. But when we think of American higher education, we always slap that word on the American higher education system, which is sort of a misnomer. Unlike a lot of other nations in the world, almost all nations in the world, there is no national system of American higher education. But that is not entirely. Excuse me, let me rephrase that. That is partially due out of the failure of the academic engineers to get what they wanted done. They wanted a national system of higher education. They pointed to nations like Germany which were developing national systems and said, we should emulate that. That's what we need. And they. The whole idea that we would have interconnections between universities, that there would be tiering and stratification, that there would be differentiation between colleges and universities. They came up with all those ideas and tried to put them into practice. They were totally dismayed at the concept that in the US there were small colleges that were issuing PhDs. There were schools that called themselves universities but were essentially glorified high schools that some states, they really found this one annoying. Some states with taxpayer dollars were supporting multiple universities. They thought that was crazy. One unifying thing was that they really believed there should only be one public university per state and that basically everything below that would feed into an apex university. A lot of them also thought that there should be one apex university for the entire United States that would crown the system a national University in Washington, D.C. that would get federal support. And in theory, sort of all ideas would flow down from, and talent would flow up to. So it would serve sort of the same function as the University of Berlin or the University of Paris. So. So that was, you know, that was their vision. They didn't get what they wanted. Of course, we don't have a national university. There's no national system. But that idea that we still talk about, that there's a System. And of course many states have systems. I teach at the University of Nevada Reno, which is the flagship of the Nevada System of Higher Education. And other states have, have similar sort of statewide agencies that oversee all of their public institutions. That's not universal, but it's relatively common. Those types of ideas were ones that they were borrowing directly from actual engineers and slapping on to educational institutions, which was sort of a problematic thing.
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Rome, Host of New Books in Education
And in the book you talk about that, one of the central things that transformed these ideas into really a project for reform was the involvement of philanthropists, Andrew Carnegie or John Rockefeller. And I wonder why do you think those ideas were so appealing to them or to folks like them?
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Professor Ethan Ris
Absolutely. It's important to distinguish. When I talk about the academic engineers, I'm talking almost exclusively about folks who are involved with these two big foundations. The Carnegie foundation for the Advancement of Teaching founded of course by Andrew Carnegie, and then the General Education Board founded by John D. Rockefeller Sr. And so those incredibly wealthy people wrote the checks that supported those foundations. I don't classify those two particular people as academic engineers themselves mainly because sort of higher education reform was a side project for them. They, you know, they wrote the checks, but they were writing lots and lots and lots of different checks. Carnegie was pretty involved with his foundation and kept an interest in it and actually served on the board of Rockefeller's foundation. Rockefeller himself sort of couldn't be bothered, but he appointed his son, John D. Rockefeller Jr. To chair the board of the General Education Board. And he was the one who represented the family in, in the education reform sphere. So all of that is to say that they were the guys writing the checks. But this really got the attention of them, this sort of nascent movement. And then early academic engineers got in the room with them and convinced them to write checks very effectively to bankroll the movement. But it was a natural fit for them, which was kind of ironic because neither Rockefeller nor Carnegie had gone to college. Carnegie was a sixth grade dropout. Rockefeller had taken sort of eight weeks of a business program after he finished high school in a little. It called itself a business college, but it didn't offer degrees. They really had no personal familiarity with college education certainly, but they had become convinced that colleges and universities were potential instruments that towards making the United States modern. And they were very sympathetic to the academic engineers concept that what was needed in, in the sector was system. Definitely connecting everything together, but also centralized control. That was a huge issue for them. So thinking about their business ethos and their sort of economic ethos, we might sort of, you know, if we don't think too hard about it, we might assume that those early capitalists were kind of like today's economic right wing. That they believed in the power of the free market above anything, that regulation was bad, that taxation was bad and that that was their worldview. Not the case at all in the Gilded Age when these guys were getting so deliriously wealthy. People like Carnegie and Rockefeller were against the free market. They hated the free market and everything they did to build their famous industrial trust was anti competitive. That's why in 1914 the Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust act to crack down on the Industrial Trust to impose free the free market ideas on the business sector. So their whole scheme with the Industrial Trust was consolidation and then vertical integration. So you know, when John D. Rockefeller, when we talk about him as the oil baron, the oil king, he was his company, Standard Oil, owned every aspect of oil from literally from extracting it out of the ground to transporting it, to refining it, to selling it. They also owned the gas stations at every step. Then they owned the railroads too. I mean they, they, they had every aspect under one umbrella. And of course they were able then to set their own prices and drive up their profits tremendously. But they saw all of that as virtuous. Again going back to that fierce discontent of elites in the Progressive Era. They didn't want the free market, they didn't want people competing. They saw that is as wasteful, as inefficient. Inefficient as, you know, duplication. They always talked about duplication of effort. They thought all of that was, was really bad. So when folks came to them with these plans to say, well hey, you did such a good job, you know, making the business sector efficient and systematized. Let's do that to colleges and universities. And those in turn will, you know, help the United States get into a better place and help us become a world power. They bought what the academic engineers were selling and they eventually ended up donating the modern day equivalent of billions and billions of dollars to these foundations.
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Rome, Host of New Books in Education
Yeah. So so far we have this picture of the academic engineers partnering with philanthropists in order to advance this agenda of education reform. And in the book you one of the next steps that you go through, you basically describe some of the obstacles in attaining this goal, some of the enemies that probably would pose some resistance or that didn't emphasize that picture that they had in mind. Could you also describe some of that to our listeners as well?
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Professor Ethan Ris
Absolutely. When they looked at the higher education system, well, I Shouldn't use that word yet because they thought it should be a system. The higher education landscape is a better term. In let's say 1905, when both foundations got their endowments, they saw just a total mess. And especially they saw too many institutions. They simply thought there were too many institutions calling themselves colleges or universities and specifically too many institutions offering the bachelor's degree. That was really the big sticking point was the bachelor's degree at that time was really a coveted thing. Students went to college seeking it just like they did today. But it was rare and it conferred a lot of status. And these folks, these elites thought that that status should be rationed, that there should be fewer institutions offering the bachelor's degree and therefore fewer students earning it because they thought the current system was sort of cheapening that credential. And they had a few targets in mind when they talked about well, we have to reduce the numbers of colleges and universities in the country. One of the leaders, the leader of the geb, which was Rockefellers foundation, went so far as to say there should only be 100 degree granting institutions in the United States, down from about 500 or 600 at the time. And so he wanted to reduce those numbers. And basically everybody agreed that the numbers had to be reduced. Of a special interest in terms of reduction were small colleges and especially colleges that were supported by religious denominations, meaning Christian Protestant denominations as well as Catholic institutions. They saw these as incredibly inefficient, as anti modern, as duplicating work. So they would look at especially states in the Midwest and say, well look in western Ohio, we have 12 different colleges within a 90 mile area. And we've got the Presbyterians have their college and the Methodists have their college and the Baptists have their college. And all of this is horribly inefficient. And none of those essentially should exist. We should be pouring the resources into a much smaller number of institutions which will then create efficiencies. Excuse me. So they, they definitely wanted to do battle with those as a result of that, sort of against the small college, against denominational colleges. They ended up attacking and calling for the closure of the vast majority of the United States, what we now call historically black colleges, most of which were affiliated with Christian denominations and most of the women's colleges as well, which again were often affiliated with Christian churches, but in general very small and not well endowed. So they thought that those institutions should die off or that perhaps they should merge with other ones or become a different kind of institution, which I can talk about in a bit, but those were sort of the chief obstacles. And then I mentioned earlier when it came to public higher education, which at the time was still sort of not that common thing, most students until actually until the 1950s in the US went to private institutions. But when they saw publicly supported universities and colleges in states where the state was supporting more than one, they thought that was incredibly inefficient. So they, I mentioned Ohio. They were also very concerned about Ohio publicly because Ohio had three universities at the turn of the century that it was supporting with tax dollars on an equal basis. They had Ohio University, which was the oldest in the east. They had Miami University in the west. And then they had Ohio State University, which was actually the newest of the three in the state's land grant college. But that was in the middle of the state, in Columbus, in the state capitol. And their belief was that Ohio, the Ohio legislature should cut off the two peripheral schools and focus all of their funding and support on Ohio State and that that should be the one actual university in the state. So they had ideas like that as well. So they saw all sorts of sort of duplication and waste and they wanted to crack down on that. So good.
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Rome, Host of New Books in Education
So good.
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Professor Ethan Ris
So good.
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Rome, Host of New Books in Education
So so far we've been talking at the abstract level about the ideas about where the the project that those folks had in mind. So now maybe we can jump into what actually happened, right? So what were they able to achieve? Were they able to advance this agenda of a higher education system? What are some of the successes they were able to have early on in the start of the 20th century?
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Professor Ethan Ris
So yes and no is my answer to your question about success. Because I do at many Points in the book I talk about how these folks failed to achieve their dreams. But that's not to say that there weren't a lot of successes, as you aptly point out. So I mean one, a lot of their successes were, well, they sort of came in two categories. There was an infrastructural type of success and then there was an ideological type of success. So I'll talk about the structural one first. So I mentioned that system and the idea that, that there should be linkages between institutions. And to a large extent they did succeed in, in sort of getting that idea out there. So especially in the public sector. So while they didn't really get states to shut down publicly funded colleges and universities that, that were sort of, they thought should be second class, they were able to put in this idea that there should be an apex institution, what we now call a flagship public university. One per state in every state. And in general, with a couple exceptions, that's still the world we live in. We talk about flagships now. Even when institutions are sort of equally prestigious in the public sector, one of them is going to be the flagship. You know, Berkeley and UCLA are both, you know, truly, you know, world class, phenomenal institutions, but everyone knows Berkeley is the flagship. And that's sort of the idea that they got out there. So that's at one end of the spectrum. The other huge success that they had was at the sort of the bottom of the status spectrum and that's the creation of the community college. The academic engineers were directly responsible for coming up with this new type of institution which now educates 40% of American undergraduates. It's a hugely important part of US higher ed today. The idea actually was for community colleges, which they called junior colleges, was not as sort of a new, brand new institution that they would start building as sort of an access into higher ed as it's so often described today, but rather as a consolation prize for these sort of low status, inefficient four year colleges that they knew couldn't really be shut down, that the too many people were loyal to them and it would be too much to actually kill them off. Their idea was, well, why don't you decapitate yourselves? Essentially stop offering the third and fourth years of undergraduate education, only offer two years and then transfer your best and brightest students onto robust universities where they can finish their degrees. Of course, that's a concept that is very, very much with us. It's changed a lot. So they were specifically thinking, the academic engineers were specifically thinking of private colleges. Doing this. So private two year schools and they wanted them to have direct affiliation schemes with elite universities. The most famous of these was through the University of Chicago, which was headed by a leading academic engineer, William Ramey Harper, who sat on both the Carnegie and Rockefeller boards. And he was the one who came up with that term, junior college. And he worked hard to get four year schools, particularly Baptist schools across the, across the country, both in the Midwest and the south, to become junior colleges and then to formally affiliate with the University of Chicago. So he thought there should be this private pyramid across the country with everything leading up to his university. It didn't work out because, surprise, surprise, the four year schools really didn't like that idea at all. Eventually he convinced about six colleges to do it and to formally affiliate. But they got tremendous pushback from their students and their faculty wanted to sort of participate in that scheme. So the idea died in the private sector, but it flourished in the public sector. And so from the 1920s on, community colleges were increasingly junior colleges were increasingly public ones that would only offer the first two years, would not offer the bachelor's degrees and would offer the prospect of transfer into the big universities. We know both then and today that the data tell us that most students who go in intending to transfer and earn their bachelor's degree who start in a community college, most do not make it, but they still, the pathway is still there. So that was a huge, huge success for them. But then there are also lots of ideological successes that they had. And one is this sort of lingering ethos of reform which I talk a lot about in the book. And we started our conversation with this. We still hear these same watchwords. We still hear about efficiency, we still hear about accountability. Those things were established by the academic engineers and they never really went away. We still think of American colleges and universities as something in need of, of reform constantly. But to the point of, you know, the book's title, I should be explicit, it's other people's colleges, right? We're not talking about the elite universities that so many of the academic engineers were affiliated with, either then or now. You know, when reformers from either, you know, the foundation world or from the government come in and say, well, you all need to shape up. They're not talking about the Columbia universities or the Stanfords or the Berkeley's, they're talking about the institutions that educate the vast majority of undergraduates. Two year schools, private schools for sure. And yet still church affiliated schools come in for a lot of scrutiny and the big sort of regional Universities that are publicly funded and educate the bulk of undergraduates. So we're still talking about other people's colleges, not the colleges of the elites. When it comes to that reform ethos.
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Rome, Host of New Books in Education
And their strategy of trying to create a more hierarchical order of educational institutions and trying to create a more elitist framing to the bachelor degree had collateral effects or implications in particular for some groups specifically. Right, so like you point out in the book, that they had implications in particular for women students of color and immigrants. And I wonder if you could also expand a bit on that.
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Professor Ethan Ris
Absolutely. So to be very clear, these academic engineers were total bigots. They were prejudiced against, you know, against immigrants, new newcomers to the United States, which is ironic because Carnegie himself was an immigrant. They were incredibly racist, especially towards African Americans and they were terribly sexist towards women. Importantly, they never made the argument that none of nobody from those groups should be allowed to get a true college education. As you know, many even more extreme racists in the south were arguing that, you know, the doors of, of any legitimate education past the primary grade should be closed to black people. Nobody ever said that. But what they said in, in terms of these reformist circles in New York, what they said instead though, were that, that the opportunities for those groups should be fewer because, and they were very much on the record saying this, they thought that a smaller percentage of black people or a smaller, smaller percentage of women had the intellectual capacity for advanced study. So that's why I say there were such obvious racists and sexist. But even then they still allowed that there could be a handful of institutions. So that would be truly as much a university as anything else would. So in terms of black colleges, they frequently cited Howard University in Washington as well. This should be the apex institution for black higher education in the country. For women's higher education, Bryn Mawr was frequently talked about. It was run by an academic engineer, one of the few academic engineers who, who was a woman, Carrie Thomas, who. Bryn Mawr was the only women's school that offered the PhD, and Thomas really wanted it to become sort of a European style research university. She had earned her own PhD in Switzerland and had studied in Germany. The idea was, yes, there are a few people from these groups who can ascend to the top, but for the vast majority of those groups, they should be relegated into sub baccalaureate schools. Again, they weren't saying no after high school age, you should just be immediately sent to work. They believed in some sort of training for these folks, but that it should not be a traditional liberal arts education. And it should not come with a bachelor's degree. So certainly there was the junior college idea, which they suggested many, many, many women's colleges, black colleges, et cetera, should convert themselves to junior colleges. But they also promoted much more sort of purely vocational institutions. So when it came to women, the big one there was the normal school, which was in general a two year program that would train people to become elementary school teachers. Normal schools eventually became teachers colleges, and then a lot of them became what we now call regional state universities, which, as I mentioned, are frequently the ones that reformers target. But the academic engineers were all about the normal school idea. They thought that was great because it was preparing students for a specific job to be a teacher. And conveniently, it was shuttling lots and lots of women who they thought were generally unfit for a true college education into a totally different track. You could not transfer from a normal school into a four year institution. That was sort of a terminal degree when you got that certificate. So they thought that was great. When it came to African Americans, the heavy push was behind industrial institutes. James Anderson, a tremendous scholar, has identified, he calls it up the Hampton Tuskegee model, which is accurate because Hampton was the first Hampton Institute in Virginia, sort of the first to pioneer this idea. And then Tuskegee Institute in Alabama was the one that really made it nationally famous. And those types of schools look like colleges. They had big beautiful campuses with dormitories and classroom buildings and gyms and libraries and all of that. So they looked like colleges, but they were very much not colleges. They did not offer any academic degrees. And a lot of their work was dedicated to vocational training. So they both had normal departments and they trained folks to become teachers, but they also had their industrial departments which train people for manual labor. At Tuskegee, they offered classes in sewing and in bricklaying and certificates in these fields. And in, in laundry. You could earn a certificate in laundry. So, so these were the types of institutions that the academic engineers loved because they thought that, you know, the vast, again, the vast majority of women or people of color should be in those types of jobs, those manual labor or low skilled jobs. So they backed those institutions at the same time that they were trying to boost up a small handful of research universities.
- [45:11]
Rome, Host of New Books in Education
So even though they had those successes that you point out too, especially ideological successes, as you frame the reform, overall wasn't able to achieve the primary goal of transforming higher education in the US Into a system, into a hierarchical system of institutions. Could you tell us a little bit about why that success wasn't the final chapter of the story and the kinds of actors that either organized or informally organized to resist to the reform proposed by the academic engineers.
- [45:54]
Professor Ethan Ris
Yeah, so the last section, the third section of other people's colleges is focused on this resistance and what happened after the big foundation started doing their work. So it turned out they were really unpopular. This should not come as a surprise. They were unpopular amongst multiple groups. So needless to say, the leaders and faculty and students of those small institutions that were targeted for closure or demotion, and they were very upset about this situation. But also, you know, state legislators, state governors, folks who had state rather than national interests in mind, they really pushed back on the big foundations as well. When the Carnegie foundation in particular tried to sign agreements with a lot of states that would essentially trade grants and money and some legitimacy to them in exchange for specific reforms, and legislatures started pushing back, some went along with it, others rejected it. And they invoked a classic cry, which was local control. Why should this unaccountable, unelected foundation from New York come to Louisiana or to Colorado and start telling us how to order our affairs? They found that really offensive. Journalists very much gotten involved in the game, and colleges and universities did an excellent job of sort of educating future journalists. A lot of them had college degrees even at that time, and keeping them as loyal alumni. And they spoke very loudly, you know, don't. The old saying, don't mess around with people who buy ink by the barrel. They also ran afoul of religious leaders. Again, no surprise. They, you know, they were targeting religious colleges which were affiliated with Christian denominations. And in some areas of the country, not generally New York City and sort of Washington, but lots of areas of the country, religious leaders were still the most important people around. So you had Methodist and Baptist bishops and ministers, you know, railing against these big foundations, calling them evil and satanic in some cases, and saying they had to get out of town and stop messing around in our local affairs. So you had this massive sort of informal resistance coming from all different corners. But then there was also formal resistance that really got going about a decade into the movement. So the huge gifts started coming in to the foundations in 1905. And then after a decade, in 1915, suddenly all of these organizations start popping up with the express goal of pushing back on reform. So probably the most famous one today that was established in 1915 is the AAUP, American association of University Professors. And if you, as I quote extensively in, in my book from their publications and conferences for the first few years of their existence, they were their Pure motivating factor was to push back on these big foundations, especially on the Carnegie foundation, which they thought were meddling too much in their affairs and, and destroying the idea of academic freedom. After, after those first few years, and especially after the academic engineering movements sort of died off in the 20s and 30s, they shifted their focus to representing individual professors who had been accused of misdoing or denied tenure or et cetera, fired without due process. That's how we know them today. But that wasn't their initial focus. In 1915, in the same month that the AAUP was founded, the AAC was founded. The association of American Colleges, which is now called the aacu, added universities onto there, but that was formed as a direct retort to the aau, which had the American association of Universities, which was founded in 1900, 15 years earlier, as a club of the elite institutions that the academic engineers came from largely and were affiliated with. So the AAC was specifically sort of the David to that Goliath. They joined together with the express purpose again of fighting against these institutions. As one speaker at the very first AAC conference said, he was paraphrasing from Ben Franklin, he said, we must hang together or we will all hang separately. Meaning that if we want to survive as small colleges with our own autonomy, then we need to band together. We need to get together and form our own association that'll have the power to fight back. And that was really very effective. Especially, I'm not going to throw too much, this will be the last acronym I say, I'll note without saying acronyms, Associations of black colleges, of women's colleges, of junior colleges, of teachers colleges that all formed between 1915 and 19, 19, 20. But probably the most important one was my final acronym, ace, which still very much exists, the American Council on Education, which was an umbrella organization that essentially it was an association of associations. And so the AAU was a member of that, but the AAC was as well in some of those smaller associations. So that provided a forum for everybody to come have a seat at the table. It started in 1918, but within a decade it had really sort of taken over the place of the Carnegie foundation and the General Education Board, which were these exclusive spaces dedicated to higher education policy. And the ACE really opened that up so that all kinds of stakeholders were able to come and have their viewpoints heard and participate in the policy making process and the agenda setting process especially.
- [52:22]
Rome, Host of New Books in Education
Yeah, thank you. That's all very, very interesting. So this has been our quick navigation to some of the major topics of the book to our listeners, I should say that this is just scratching the surface of the amount of details and storytelling and examples which are in the book, which are all fascinating. So if you're interested, go ahead, take a look at the book. I think it's really fascinating. But now, for the sake of our conversation here, I wanted to jump in into lessons learned and some broader implications or discussions that came from this investigation of an early reform in the history of higher education in the US and in particular, I have two main questions and I'll ask them together and I'll give you the chance to kind of address them however you prefer. One of them is how the book really contributed to the study of philanthropy, which I think it's really interesting. Even though it's a higher education book, it's really a book as well about the history of philanthropy because it describes some of the first actions of philanthropers into the public arena, from my interpretation. So that's one of the lessons. I think it's there. I would love if you could expand on that. And second, about how this discussion of a higher education reform in the early 20th century relates to current discussions of higher education reform, which still persists and as you argue along similar lines. Right. So.
- [54:05]
Professor Ethan Ris
Yeah, absolutely. So thinking about the study of philanthropy, which is really a new field, philanthropy was sort of taken for granted or not that closely examined by scholars until the last 20 years or so. And it's really taken off and I intend to. One of my goals is to incorporate historical analysis into that emergency emerging field. So I think this book does a lot of that work and it's really notable. I think maybe I'm biased because this is my research project. I think it's an important thing that the, the cfat, the Carnegie foundation and the GEB Rockefellers equivalent were the not only the first two foundations established by those two incredibly wealthy people, they were the first true foundations ever established in the world. So they, when I say foundation, I don't just mean like a charity fund. I mean a foundation with a permanent endowment, with central offices and with a permanent staff, which earlier. There were earlier charities and funds that existed in the 1800s. But, but they, they were designed to sort of spend down their capital and, and not be around forever. These, these were intended to be around forever. And in fact, the Carnegie foundation still is in existence. The General Education board in the 60s merged with the Rockefeller foundation and sort of transferred their assets over, but they still exist sort of as an arm of the Rockefeller Foundation. So that was established and I think it's really significant that these foundational foundations, as I call them, were created to reform American colleges and universities, not to end disease or to fight poverty or to, you know, bring about world peace. It was about reforming these institutions. And specifically it was about sort of restricting access to some of the privileges of American society. So I want scholars of higher education and critics, especially of higher education, to note that, that, you know, there's a notion, there's, there's a lot of critique today of big foundations, you know, doing work that seems at odds with the public good. And I very much want to make the case that, yeah, that is true, but they've always been doing that. This has been going on forever. There was no period there. You know, we, we, we fantasize. Maybe there was a period when philanthropists really just, they were just really generous and they just wanted to help people. No, organized philanthropy has always had an agenda. It's always had strings attached. And I think we can learn a lot about that by looking at these very early foundations and not only the work they were doing, but also the purpose for which they were formed. So I very much want to bring that to bear then moving forward to the present. So, yes, foundations, big philanthropic foundations, are still interested in higher education reform, although I should say really post secondary reform, because much like the academic engineers, a lot of their focus is on sub baccalaureate programs, either on community colleges or on training, you know, sort of vocational training programs leading to certificates or even alternate paths to degrees. Right. So the Lumina foundation is one of the huge players in the this field. They have all sorts of initiatives about, well, maybe you can earn a bachelor's degree, but not the traditional way. You'll earn it by showing competencies or things outside of traditional classroom hours then. The Gates foundation, of course, has tremendous interest in post secondary education, but so much of it is focused at the two year level or at the vocational level. So that's still very much going on. And certainly as I opened our conversation, I think there's this broad consensus still that efficiency and accountability and utility are things that colleges and universities need to demonstrate. So everybody, whether you're on the left or the right, wants colleges to cut down waste and to eliminate inefficiencies for different purposes. The left says they want to do that to reduce tuition and reduce student debt, which are certainly important and major crises today. But then on the right, they say the same thing. They want to cut waste and make things more efficient in order to save taxpayer dollars and so taxes can go down. They see lots and lots of bloat. Actually, both sides see bloat. That's a common word. We're still that ethos that I talked about. The ethos of reform is still very much with us. There is something new that I do feel compelled to mention that really was not the case 100 years ago when we think about higher education reform today. A lot of the calls for higher education reform are coming from the right wing cultural warriors that we see not just on Fox News, but all around us and who increasingly show up on university campuses. They're coming from a position of pure politics. It's a little bit different from the efficiency ethos. And they want colleges and universities to shape up to, to quote, unquote, go back to basics, to stop teaching about race and gender and identity and, and become sort of a more conservative version of themselves. So that's new. But the. I talk a lot in the book about sort of the toolbox of resistance, that's my term, that colleges, universities just developed in the 1920s and 30s to, to battle the academic engineers. But I think that toolbox is still very much in play. So even against these sort of new barbarians at the gate. So I think the ideas of banding together, of associating and issuing joint statements rather than individual statements and lobbying state legislatures and, and Congress jointly is still an incredibly powerful thing that colleges and universities should be doing. Cultivating allies, yes, in journalism, but also in local business communities and in religious communities, even at public institutions. Sort of getting them on board as allies is incredibly important. And those are lessons learned from 100 years ago that I think are still really important today.
- [61:08]
Rome, Host of New Books in Education
Yeah, thank you. I think that's all very, very interesting and fascinating and relevant to today's issues in higher education as well. So we've taken a lot of your time already. So to wrap up, I'd just like to ask our traditional final question in the New Books Network, which is what other projects are you working on now or that you plan on working in the future? I know you just finished the book, so that's probably a major milest. I don't know if you have been already thinking about new things forward.
- [61:42]
Professor Ethan Ris
Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, the book did just come out a month ago, but I really finished writing it a year ago. The editing and publishing process took up all of the last year. So I have had headspace to get to work on my next project, which is another book project. And it's going to take my same framework and sort of looking at external influence on, on higher education in the US but, but move it forward to a new time period. And so the name of the book, in the nature of the book, is going to be really different from, from the first one because the rhetoric and ideas around higher education changed dramatically after World War II. So there's this notion that, that gets tossed around of the golden age of American higher education, which I classify as lasting from 1944 to 1972. So those two and a half decades roughly following World War II, when public support was at an all time high for higher education, taxpayer support was flowing in, state legislatures and the national government were being very generous in terms of subsidizing both students and institutions. And there was a tremendous amount of growth. At one period in the 50s, a new college was opening every week in the United States. I mean, it was really an incredible time. And so my new book looks at that and I think my working title says a lot. The idea is the working title is When College was the Solution. And I mean that as really stark contrast to both the themes of my first book and the current present day themes, when college is perceived as the problem, a problem to be solved. So my argument is that in the 40s, 50s and 60s, all sorts of folks, especially from not just from the institutions themselves, but also from government, from business, and from the philanthropic foundation world, work together to create a narrative that higher education could solve social problems. It wasn't the problem itself. It was a solution to things as varied as national defense to economic security, to, you know, labor, labor market issues, including to, you know, combating inequality and racial prejudice and gender bias. So. So for a few decades, all of those things were perceived as possible. And so my book is trying to understand the ideological underpinnings of those concepts, how they were played out in both sort of federal and state policy, as well as in programs of nonprofit foundations. But then also to explain why it all came to an end and why many of the promises for racial equality and socioeconomic justice went unfulfilled, leaving a lot of students in the dust. And why the generosity of the 50s and 60s died out in the early 70s and left us with sort of a long standing period of austerity, which we still very much live in today. So that's the new book at work on it, collecting data and. And we'll get to work writing the manuscript soon. I hope to be back on your podcast in two or three years to talk about that one. Give me a little bit of time.
- [65:17]
Rome, Host of New Books in Education
Yes, for sure. That's all very interesting. I'm very curious to hear and It'd be great to welcome you back. Ethan, thank you for being with us. Thank you for joining the podcast. And to our listeners who have been with us, thank you for listening. And until next time, thank you so much.
- [65:34]
Professor Ethan Ris
It was a pleasure talking with you. And, yeah, let's keep the conversation going.