Envisioning an association.

IF THERE IS ONE REALITY that being both a college president and an American historian brings home to you, it is that our presidential predecessors lived and worked in times every bit as complicated as our own. The presidents who gathered in Chicago for the first annual meeting of the fledgling Association of American Colleges (AAC) had much on their minds.

Some of the topics the first AAC members discussed over their three-day meeting in January 1915 and published in Volume 1 of the Bulletin are entirely familiar today. Consider, for example, the session called "The Best Manner in which the Executive of a College can Employ Time and Put Forth Effort." It is comforting to learn that nearly a century ago, the presidents of Northwestern University, Occidental College, and the College of Wooster had a hard time reconciling the needs of students and faculty on campus with the inexorable material need to find enough money to keep the place going.

Presidents' concerns

College presidents then, just like presidents today, worried about their competition. New research universities, which included doctoral programs as well as undergraduate colleges, commanded growing prestige and resources. Public land-grant institutions were robust and growing fast. They commanded substantial public support not available to the independent and denominational undergraduate colleges.

By 1915, universities already threatened to dominate higher education. More than a decade earlier, they had already established their own associations: the Association of American Universities held its first meeting in 1900, and the National Association of State Universities came into being in 1905. Through these associations, the universities were making an effective national case that research, or creating new knowledge, was as important to the mission of American higher education as the traditional work of transmitting knowledge.

What role, then, remained for the many hundreds of undergraduate colleges--almost all of them small, some denominational, an increasing number of them independent of any church affiliation--that had played such a prominent role in nineteenth-century educational life? Where would these colleges find support? These questions, too, were addressed at the first AAC annual meeting. "Shall the denominational or independent college ask for state support?" was a question posed by the Chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh, and no doubt a topic of much discussion. Another presenter on the same panel was to have been the United States Commissioner of Education, P.P. Claxton, Ph.D. Although federal assistance to higher education was not yet on the table, the AAC program committee was clearly thinking ahead. However, in Claxton's absence President Robert L. Kelly filled the place on the panel, and by that stroke of fate, we have his thoughts on the founding of the Association.

Reform and standards

If these problems were not enough, AAC presidents in 1915 worried about how to respond to growing calls for the reform of American higher education. An entire session of the Chicago meeting was devoted to "College Efficiency and Standardization." Nineteenth-century colleges had been, to put it gently, unregulated, but the regulatory zeal that defined the Progressive Era did not overlook colleges and universities. The accreditation movement began in the early 1890s, and with it the effort to ensure that any and all institutions of higher learning met some modicum of academic standards. By 1915, accreditation had gained a lot of ground. In 1906, the Carnegie Foundation had begun a major campaign to establish educational standards for colleges. The American business community, amazed then, as now, by the inefficiency of college and university governance, urged that institutions adopt rational and systematic administrative practices and policies. (1)

By 1915, considerable reform had already taken place, but the wide variety of educational standards and goals and the splendid heterogeneity of American colleges still prompted commentators to charge that they existed in a state of chaos. Some colleges admitted any student who wished to attend; others practiced selective admissions. Some required their faculty to complete graduate degrees, or at least some graduate course work; others did not. There was no consensus on the question of what subjects American undergraduates ought to study and what they needed to learn. Nor was there agreement upon the shape of an undergraduate curriculum--some institutions allowed their students great flexibility in picking and choosing courses of study; others were completely prescriptive. Throughout the first years of the twentieth century, colleges worked to establish academic standards for student performance and academic requirements that students were required to complete for a degree, but such standards varied widely from institution to institution. (2)

Then, too, some affluent undergraduate colleges, taking inspiration from the universities, had begun to enlarge their missions to include research. Other schools retained their traditional focus on transmitting an established corpus of knowledge and a set of moral values. The emerging focus on creating new knowledge led to the construction of ambitious science laboratories, art museums, and major libraries on some undergraduate campuses, along with a new focus on the natural and social sciences as central components of the undergraduate curriculum. This focus on the importance of creating new knowledge also led to secularization--a sensitive issue at a conference of presidents from both traditional denominational institutions and increasingly secular ones. (3)

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Call for collaboration

Robert Kelly, Earlham's president and the first president of AAC, used the opportunity to make the case to his diverse audience that American colleges had more similarities than differences, and that all undergraduate institutions, whatever their location, size, affluence, or affiliation, would benefit from membership.

President Kelly clearly composed his speech carefully. There is little hint of the differences among American colleges, or even of the problems they came together to confront. Instead, the first AAC president delivered a nationalistic and optimistic tribute to American colleges and American culture. Readers today may well be surprised by his unqualified and apparently uncritical faith in the United States and its future. But in the early twentieth-century, Kelly's outlook and words were very much part of mainstream American thinking.

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Fifty years before, the United States had fought a brutal civil war to save the Union. In the years following, the nation had built a national transportation network, created the greatest industrial economy in the world, and linked all of its diverse regions into a national political economy and culture. President Kelly--and, in all probability every other participant in the 1915 AAC meeting--celebrated this national unity.

If American colleges were to participate fully in American culture, Kelly stressed, they would have to lose the "considerable amount of state and sectional feeling" that still characterized them. One of the purposes of AAC, he declared, "undoubtedly would be to wipe off the map any such things as an educational north, south, east, or west." President Kelly's concerns about regionalism were real. It is striking that the great majority of presenters at the first AAC meeting came from the vast middle of the country, from Pittsburgh to Colorado. Several presidents journeyed to Chicago from the West Coast. But few eastern colleges were in attendance, and among the southern schools, only Vanderbilt was represented. "We have not yet developed a national educational consciousness," he concluded, "and in general terms the purpose of this organization is that we may do that thing." In short, although President Kelly may have been too polite to say it outright, American colleges had to lose their parochialism if they were going to be up to the task of defending their turf and defining for all the principles and goals of American undergraduate education. As he put it, "We differ in many things, educationally, and in many other respects, but fundamentally as Americans, we are all alike, and our problems are all alike."

But what kind of education did the nation need? President Kelly does not fully elaborate a vision. But he did make it clear that American colleges needed to see themselves as central to the future of the United States. "Why should not the colleges, which are the formative centers of our civilization, the institutions that preeminently will make or mar this country, join in interpreting the meaning of this genius of America, in fostering its development, and in determining to some extents its destiny?" These were ambitious goals for American colleges in 1915, but in many ways they have been realized. Higher education in general and undergraduate education in particular have become central to American experience, and American colleges as well as its universities have made incalculable contributions to American social, cultural, and economic life.

American diversity

And, like most Americans, President Kelly was very much aware of the growing diversity of American life. "Many of our citizens are of German, Italian, and Bohemian descent," he told the assembled AAC presidents. "We have within the limits of our country Puritans, Knickerbockers, Cavaliers, Cowboys and Hoosiers. We have among us Hebrews and Catholics, Mormons, Mohammedans and Methodists. We have Republicans, Democrats and Socialists. We have indeed a great conglomeration of citizenship, from one point of view; but above all and beyond all we have American citizens. There is such a thing as an American spirit, as the soul of America."

In President Kelly's view, and in the view of educational progressives generally--most notably, John Dewey--the most important role of education at all levels was to advance the national project of melding diverse peoples into one nation. Significantly, President Kelly does not mention African Americans anywhere in his catalog of American diversity, although there were two historically black colleges among the founding members. Neither did John Dewey nor the overwhelming majority of other white progressive reformers. Well into the twentieth century, black Americans

were excluded from both the American "melting pot" and the triumphant idea of American democratic unity.

Vision realized

The new Association of American Colleges' vision of a national organization that could speak for and work with all American institutions responsible for educating undergraduates has been realized. Over the course of the twentieth century, American colleges and universities developed common principles and goals for undergraduate education. The most important of these principles has been the notion that undergraduate education, at its best, should be a liberal education. The broad agreement that American colleges and universities have been able to forge about the nature of an excellent undergraduate education and the vitality and prominence of American undergraduate institutions were in good part facilitated by President Kelly's vision of a national educational consciousness.

The present-day reader will also find it striking that Robert Kelly could make such a confident and optimistic speech in January 1915. Doubtless he and his fellow presidents were paying attention to the Great War in Europe that had begun the previous summer. Probably they still believed that it would be a short conflict. But, 400 miles of trenches from Switzerland to the North Sea had already been dug, and the agonizing war of attrition had begun. Within a few months of the AAC meeting, what started as a European war with limited mobilization had become total war. The new weapons of war in Europe--machine guns, tanks, strategic air bombing, and poison gas--and the social divisions and repression of dissent here at home brought to an end the once-limitless early twentieth-century American optimism.

As educators, our world today is one influenced far more by the outcomes of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles than it is by the vision of nationalism so confidently put forth at the first AAC meeting. Critical national challenges remain, of course. But equally important is a global challenge: How can we see to it that American colleges and universities find ways to further equity, justice, and peace in the United States and around the world?

To respond to this article, e-mail [e-mail], with the author's name on the subject line.

NOTES

1. The best discussion of the standardization movement in American higher education movement remains Lawrence Veysey, 1965. The Emergence of the American University. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 311-317, 342-360.

2. Veysey, 180-259, 356-360.

3. The best discussion of the transition from religious affiliation to secularization is George M. Marsden, 1994. The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief. New York: Oxford University Press.

RELATED ARTICLE: 1915

Events and People

"The War" in Europe was only months old.

A German submarine off the coast of Ireland sank the British steamship Lusitania, with 1,100 passengers aboard--124 were Americans.

Woodrow Wilson was in his first term as President of the United States.

At Ebbets Field, the Brooklyn Robins--later called the Brooklyn Dodgers, and later still, the Los Angeles Dodgers--played baseball.

Booker T. Washington, African-American educator, died.

The Galveston storm, with winds of 93 miles an hour, submerged Galveston under nine feet of water.

"The Birth of a Nation," "a controversial, explicitly racist but landmark film" produced and directed by D. W. Griffith, appeared.

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The Arts

The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Romain Rolland of France, specifically for his novel, Jean Christophe: "as a tribute to the lofty idealism of his literary production and to the empathy and love of truth with which he has described different types of human beings."

American realist artists such as John Sloan and Maurice Prendergast, with an exhibit in 1910, founded a movement that later was called the Ash Can School for its portrayal of urban life.

American painters--James McNeill Whistler, Childe Hassam, and Mary Cassatt--were practicing artists.

Poets of the period included William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Carl Sandburg (right).

American novelists of the period were Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Zane Grey.

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Born in 1915 were writers Saul Bellow, novelist, and Arthur Miller, dramatist.

Also born that year were musical luminaries: Billy Strayhorn of the Duke Ellington band, jazz singer Billie Holliday, and singer Frank Sinatra.

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Business and Invention

The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) was established to "supervise and direct the scientific study of the problems of flight, with a view to their practical solutions."

The first transcontinental phone call carried voices across the Atlantic.

Radio service connected the U.S. and Japan.

The Victor Talking Machine Co. introduced a phonograph, the Victrola.

IBM's first sales convention was held.

The Panama Pacific International Exposition was held in San Francisco, with many countries represented.

NANCY DYE is president of Oberlin College.