Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science, 1865-1905 by Mary Furner

Author:Mary Furner [Furner, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017-07-12T04:00:00+00:00

9

Permissible Dissent

A cartoon on the cover of Life showed the dignified figure of a university president and former economist leaving the college gate with his suitcase, while a plump trustee nailed a want ad to the ivy-covered pillar. The message read: “WANTED: By the Corporation of Brown University, a young man of submissive disposition as president. A reasonable amount of scholarship will not be a disqualification, but the chief requisite will be an obsequious and ingratiating behavior toward millionaires and an ability to RAKE IN THE DOLLARS. Opinions and first-class board furnished by the Corporation. No gentlemen encumbered with a back-bone need apply.”1

If the near dismissal of Elisha Benjamin Andrews from Brown University could generate humor when earlier academic freedom cases involving social scientists could not, it was because the Andrews case was actually a good deal less serious. Between 1897 and the end of the century, three more professional social scientists—Andrews, J. Allen Smith, and Edward A. Ross—were endangered or actually removed for their views. Though the personal consequences were temporarily rending, in each case the victim emerged stronger than before. In addition, academic social scientists further clarified the level of advocacy that they believed their professional authority should permit. The techniques they devised for united action enhanced their image and broadened their opportunities.

The difference in the outcome of these cases that occurred in the late 1890s lay partly in the experience that economists had gained in defending their interests and partly in a change in the nature of the issues. From Haymarket through Pullman, the possibility that organized labor might precipitate social upheaval seemed real enough to unite conservative trustees and administrators against academics who encouraged the spread of frightening foreign ideologies like socialism and anarchism, and to cool the ardor of defending social scientists as well. The hard economic demands of insurgent western and southern farmers and their startling success at the polls in 1894 had added populism to the list of dangerous beliefs. Through 1895 the menace of mass radicalism fueled repression, but the fears that coalesced in the Bryan campaign of 1896 were dispelled by his crushing defeat. There would be no class party, no radical union of producers against the propertied classes. The academic freedom cases of the late 1890s grew out of unresolved ambiguities in the academic power structure and domestic disagreements over conventional American political issues such as money and the tariff.

Both elements were present in the Andrews case. Some of the Brown trustees wanted to fire E. Benjamin Andrews because he favored international bimetallism and free trade. Both policies were detrimental to certain economic interests, but they fell well within the institutional borders of industrial capitalism and found support in conservative quarters. Other trustees approved of disciplining Andrews merely because they believed that his public advocacy of views that were unpopular with wealthy industrialists drove huge gifts away from the university’s embarrassingly empty coffers. They pointed to John D. Rockefeller, who had showered millions on the University of Chicago but allowed his son to graduate from Brown in 1897 without donating a cent of the grand bequest expected.

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