“The goose that lays golden eggs has been considered a most valuable possession,” Louis Brandeis wrote in Other People’s Money, his famed 1914 exposé of the nation’s big banks. “But even more profitable,” he added, “is the privilege of taking the golden eggs laid by someone else’s goose.”Footnote 1 Ethan W. Ris’s Other People’s Colleges: The Origins of American Higher Education Reform traces how a different but no less influential group attempted to control the dispensation of another kind of golden egg: college education. Ris’s book outlines how a loose coalition of reformers, referred to as “academic engineers,” worked to restructure American higher education between the 1890s and 1930s.
Most narratives of Progressive Era school reform, especially concerning elementary and secondary education, focus on would-be reformers’ attempts to expand the scope and reach of schooling. While many of those efforts were coercive or propped up existing social hierarchies, they nonetheless operated under the premise that the more schools, the better. In contrast, academic engineers who sought to transform American higher education felt there were too many colleges and, by extension, too many college students. They favored a system wherein only a few prestigious institutions dispensed bachelor’s degrees to only the most promising students. Their quest had the support of two powerful foundations: the Rockefeller-funded General Education Board and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
The academic engineers deplored smaller schools attempting to provide the same educational services that the nation’s leading institutions—typically states’ flagship public universities and, in some cases, well-established private colleges—already offered. These supposedly superfluous colleges, they argued, watered down the value of higher education. For instance, in 1912, Edwin Craighead, a typical academic engineer, took the helm of the college now known as the University of Montana (UM) and fought to correct what he and other state engineers saw as a grave miscalculation: the fact that Montana, a state with a miniscule population, had four separate institutions of higher education. Craighead pushed to consolidate all four colleges, which, in addition to the flagship UM, included an agricultural college, a school of mines, and a teacher’s college. Although Craighead’s plan became a statewide ballot initiative in 1914, voters roundly rejected it.
The failure of Craighead’s scheme—a top-down attempt to consolidate and downsize the state’s higher education infrastructure by elevating the importance of a single institution—speaks to a key point of Ris’s book: the academic engineers’ vision was ultimately unsuccessful. Communities generally liked having colleges nearby, however small, and saw no reason that these institutions should be sacrificed upon the altar of efficiency. So why, a skeptical reader might ask, should we care? As Ris argues, academic engineers may not have achieved their loftiest goals but they nonetheless left their mark on the nation’s colleges and the public’s perception of them: “The academic engineers didn’t create the elite notion that society should be stratified.… But they did create the idea that colleges and universities should be the primary guide to the strata” (297).
One plank of the academic engineers’ program that did come to fruition was the creation of junior colleges, or today’s community colleges. Academic engineers also supported, or at least tolerated, agricultural and industrial schools, although they fought those institutions’ attempts to transition into “real” universities. A particularly absurd example is provided by the case of the Connecticut Agricultural College at Storrs. Academic engineers opposed its rebranding as the University of Connecticut six years after it took the state’s land grant status from Yale, because, they argued, the state “already had Yale” (129).
Perhaps the greatest strength of Other People’s Colleges is its focus on a strikingly diverse range of institutions. For instance, chapter 5, “Separate and Unequal,” tracks both efforts to end coeducation at Connecticut’s Wesleyan University and the demise of integrated learning at Kentucky’s Berea College, the latter providing a fascinating and instructive case study. Ris also highlights the role of Black colleges both as targets of the academic engineers, who sought to make them conform with what historian James Anderson termed “the Hampton-Tuskegee” model of higher education, and as key sites of resistance to such an agenda. Ris’s focus on non-elite institutions throughout the book is commendable. After all, as he puts it in the introduction, “the history of higher education is, largely, their history” (10).
Other People’s Colleges seamlessly weaves together what could seem like disconnected case studies. Ris is a strong writer who ably injects what could have been a dry institutional history with color and humor. He has produced a stellar first book with a truly national scope that will stand as a useful model for future studies of higher education. At three hundred pages (not counting the notes and index), the book is perhaps overlong, at least compared to other similar, contemporary monographs, and could have benefited from judicious trimming. Ris at times spends too much time explaining where the book is headed: the phrase “I will describe” appears frequently. Such interventions can be helpful, but this reviewer would’ve appreciated more showing and less telling. One could even see a leaner version of Other People’s Colleges, a book that has much to say about our current educational moment, finding an audience outside of the academy. These minor stylistic gripes aside, this is a smart, well-argued book that should interest scholars of higher education, the Progressive Era, and American political development.
