China had just four universities in 1900; Japan had two – a third would be founded in 1909; Iran had only a series of specialist colleges (the Teheran School of Political Science was founded in 1900); there was one college in Beirut and in Turkey – still a major power until World War I – the University of Istanbul was founded in 1871 as the Dar-al-funoun (House of Learning), only to be soon closed and not reopened until 1900. In Africa south of the Sahara there were four: in the Cape, the Grey University College at Bloemfontein, the Rhodes University College at Grahamstown, and the Natal University College. Australia also had four, New Zealand one. In India, the universities of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras were founded in 1857, and those of Allahabad and Punjab between 1857 and 1887. But no more were created until 1919.2 In Russia there were ten state-funded universities at the beginning of the century, plus one in Finland (Finland was technically autonomous), and one private university in Moscow.
If the paucity of universities characterised intellectual life outside the West, the chief feature in the United States was the tussle between those who preferred the British-style universities and those for whom the German-style offered more. To begin with, most American colleges had been founded on British lines. Harvard, the first institution of higher learning within the United States, began as a Puritan college in 1636. More than thirty partners of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were graduates of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and so the college they established near Boston naturally followed the Emmanuel pattern. Equally influential was the Scottish model, in particular Aberdeen.3 Scottish universities were nonresidential, democratic rather than religious, and governed by local dignitaries – a forerunner of boards of trustees. Until the twentieth century, however, America’s institutions of higher learning were really colleges – devoted to teaching – rather than universities proper, concerned with the advancement of knowledge. Only Johns Hopkins in Baltimore (founded in 1876) and Clark (1888) came into this category, and both were soon forced to add undergraduate schools.4
The man who first conceived the modern university as we know it was Charles Eliot, a chemistry professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who in 1869, at the age of only thirty-five, was appointed president of Harvard, where he had been an undergraduate. When Eliot arrived, Harvard had 1,050 students and fifty-nine members of the faculty. In 1909, when he retired, there were four times as many students and the faculty had grown tenfold. But Eliot was concerned with more than size: ‘He killed and buried the limited arts college curriculum which he had inherited. He built up the professional schools and made them an integral part of the university. Finally, he promoted graduate education and thus established a model which practically all other American universities with graduate ambitions have followed.’5
Above all, Eliot followed the system of higher education in the German-speaking lands, the system that gave the world Max Planck, Max Weber, Richard Strauss, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein. The preeminence of German universities in the late nineteenth century dated back to the Battle of Jena in 1806, after which Napoleon finally reached Berlin. His arrival there forced the inflexible Prussians to change. Intellectually, Johann Fichte, Christian Wolff, and Immanuel Kant were the significant figures, freeing German scholarship from its stultifying reliance on theology. As a result, German scholars acquired a clear advantage over their European counterparts in philosophy, philology, and the physical sciences. It was in Germany, for example, that physics, chemistry, and geology were first regarded in universities as equal to the humanities. Countless Americans, and distinguished Britons such as Matthew Arnold and Thomas Huxley, all visited Germany and praised what was happening in its universities.6
From Eliot’s time onward, the American universities set out to emulate the German system, particularly in the area of research. However, this German example, though impressive in advancing knowledge and in producing new technological processes for industry, nevertheless sabotaged the ‘collegiate way of living’ and the close personal relations between undergraduates and faculty that had been a major feature of American higher education until the adoption of the German approach. The German system was chiefly responsible for what William James called ‘the Ph.D. octopus’: Yale awarded the first Ph.D. west of the Adantic in 1861; by 1900 well over three hundred were being granted every year.7
The price for following Germany’s lead was a total break with the British collegiate system. At many universities, housing for students disappeared entirely, as did communal eating. At Harvard in the 1880s the German system was followed so slavishly that attendance at classes was no longer required – all that counted was performance in the examinations. Then a reaction set in. Chicago was first, building seven dormitories by 1900 ‘in spite of the prejudice against them at the time in the [mid-] West on the ground that they were medieval, British and autocratic.’ Yale and Princeton soon adopted a similar approach. Harvard reorganised after the English housing model in the 1920s.8
Since American universities have been the forcing ground of so much of what will be considered later in this book, their history is relevant in itself. But the battle for the soul of Harvard, Chicago, Yale, and the other great institutions of learning in America is relevant in another way, too. The amalgamation of German and British best practices was a sensible move, a pragmatic response to the situation in which American universities found themselves at the beginning of the century. And pragmatism was a particularly strong strain of thought in America. The United States was not hung up on European dogma or ideology. It had its own ‘frontier mentality’; it had – and exploited – the opportunity to cherry-pick what was best in the old world, and eschew the rest. Partly as a result of that, it is noticeable that the matters considered in this chapter – skyscrapers, the Ashcan school of painting, flight and film – were all, in marked contrast with aestheticism, psychoanalysis, the élan vital or abstraction, fiercely practical developments, immediately and hardheadedly useful responses to the evolving world at the beginning of the century.
The founder of America’s pragmatic school of thought was Charles Sanders Peirce, a philosopher of the 1870s, but his ideas were updated and made popular in 1906 by William James. William and his younger brother Henry, the novelist, came from a wealthy Boston family; their father, Henry James Sr., was a writer of ‘mystical and amorphous philosophic tracts.’9 William James’s debt to Peirce was made plain in the title he gave to a series of lectures delivered in Boston in 1907: Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. The idea behind pragmatism was to develop a philosophy shorn of idealistic dogma and subject to the rigorous empirical standards being developed in the physical sciences. What James added to Peirce’s ideas was the notion that philosophy should be accessible to everyone; it was a fact of life, he thought, that everyone liked to have what they called a philosophy, a way of seeing and understanding the world, and his lectures (eight of them) were intended to help.
James’s approach signalled another great divide in twentieth-century philosophy, in addition to the rift between the continental school of Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl, and Henri Bergson, and the analytic school of Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and what would become the Vienna Circle. Throughout the century, there were those philosophers who drew their concepts from ideal situations: they tried to fashion a worldview and a code of conduct in thought and behaviour that derived from a theoretical, ‘clear’ or ‘pure’ situation where equality, say, or freedom was assumed as a given, and a system constructed hypothetically around that. In the opposite camp were those philosophers who started from the world as it was, with all its untidiness, inequalities, and injustices. James was firmly in the latter camp.