Strong Men of the Academic Revolution

Abstract

What takes place without executive sanction need trouble no one. Thorstein Veblen, 1~he Higher Learning in America (1918). Sly hands must be put to writing the biographies of the university presidents who led American education into the twcnricth century. Powerful, pompous, unloved men like those who bossed Harvard, Clark, and Columbia between 1869 and 1945 can still command reverence. They preserved the necessary documents or wrote the articulate autobiographies that still hold historians in awe. We still can see the presidents as they saw themselves-c-as prime movers who made it their business to oversee changes in secondary schools, universities, and the scholarly disciplines during the half-century of academic revolution that followed Charles W. Eliot's accession to power in 1869. The influences on modern scholars all lead toward sober biography that strays not very far from what the old executives themselves might have sanctioned. The compelling presence of the presidents is enlarged by the unhesitating approval we still feel for the institutional revolution they directed. So we confront a merciless temptation to see them through their own eyes, to accept their own judgments of their .ucompf islnucms. Genuine analysis fails, too often the victim of a mere cva luation of the great men's "achievements." The task of detaching ourselves from this ceremonial past will require some subtle sahotaze. In three new hiographical studies 01' presidential personages, the old executives continue to wield their power. Richard Whittemore has not written a full biography of Nicholas Murray Butler. He intentionally limited the scope of his book to a brief sketch of Butler's youth, his role in founding Teachers College, and his part in reforming secondary education. The story ends in ]911, when Butler was president of Columbia; Whittemore does not discuss the presidency. Whit