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Teaching at Johns Hopkins: The First Generation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Charles C. Bishop
Charles C. Bishop*
Affiliation:
Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas
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Extract

As appropriate as research is as the focus of energies and resources in the research university, the exclusive concern with research in the training of recipients of the Ph.D. degree—to the neglect of any concern with teaching or with any professional responsibility other than to scholarship—has encouraged college faculties to abandon the sense of corporate responsibility that characterized professors of the pre-professional era.

(From Integrity in the College Curriculum: A Report to the Academic Community, 1985, by a committee of the Association of American Colleges.)

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 27 , Issue 4 , Winter 1987 , pp. 499 - 515
Copyright
Copyright © 1987 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 The entire text of the report was reprinted in the Chronicle of Higher Education 29 Feb. 1985, 12–14. For an account of earlier attempts to reform college teaching, see Robinson, Chester H. “The Work of Eight Major Education Associations toward the Improvement of College Teaching” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1950). See also, Munro, William B. “Report of the Committee on College and University Teaching,” Bulletin, AAUP 19 (May 1933).Google Scholar

2 A few examples of this literature are Mayhew, Lewis B. and Ford, Patrick J. Reform in Graduate and Professional Education (San Francisco, 1974), 188; Heiss, Ann M. Challenges to Graduate Schools (San Francisco, 1970), 141, 229–41; Brandis, Royall “The Rehabilitation of University Undergraduate Teaching,” Educational Record 45 (Winter 1964): 56–63; Klapper, Paul “The Professional Preparation of the College Teacher,” Journal of General Education 3 (July 1949): 228–44; and the President's Commission on Higher Education, Higher Education for American Democracy: A Report (New York, 1947), 16.Google Scholar

3 Rudolph, Frederick The American College and University: A History (New York, 1962), 403–4.Google Scholar

4 Ibid., 272.Google Scholar

5 Gilman, Daniel Coit “The Johns Hopkins University in Its Beginnings,“ in University Problems in the United States (1898; New York, 1969), 16; Francesco Cordasco, The Shaping of American Graduate Education: Daniel Coit Gilman and the Protean Ph.D. (1959; Totowa, N.J., 1973), 80, 62.Google Scholar

6 Cordasco, The Shaping of American Graduate Education, 35–53.Google Scholar

7 Gilman, Daniel Coit “The Johns Hopkins University in Its Beginnings,“ 14 13, 17.Google Scholar

8 French, John C. A History of the University Founded by Johns Hopkins (Baltimore, 1946), 64; Hawkins, Hugh Pioneer: A History of the Johns Hopkins University, 1874–1889 (Ithaca, 1960), 22–28, 238ff. French argues that undergraduates were always in the picture at Hopkins. My account follows Hawkins's view.Google Scholar

9 Quoted in Cordasco, The Shaping of American Graduate Education, 76. Andrew Peabody, Peirce's mathematics tutor in 1832–34, said that Peirce had difficulty teaching beginning students. See Linda Armstrong Chisolm, “The Art of Undergraduate Teaching in the Age of the Emerging University” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1982), 232.Google Scholar

10 Ibid., 77; French, History of the University, 79. The “group” system developed at Hopkins was an attempt to avoid the fragmentation of the elective approach, such as at Harvard, and the total prescription of the old classical curriculum. See Hawkins, Pioneer: A History of Johns Hopkins, 244ff.Google Scholar

11 Flexner, Abraham I Remember: The Autobiography of Abraham Flexner (New York, 1940), 55.Google Scholar

12 Gilman, Daniel Coit “The Idea of the University,“ North American Review 133 (Oct. 1881): 360–62, 367.Google Scholar

13 Hawkins, Pioneer: A History of Johns Hopkins, 256.Google Scholar

14 Gildersleeve, Basil L. to Gilman, 8 Jan. 1875, Gilman, Daniel Coit Collection (hereafter DCGC), Eisenhower Library (EL), Johns Hopkins University, Portfolio no. 1, 1878–81.Google Scholar

15 Sylvester, James to Gilman, 1 Nov. 1880, ibid.Google Scholar

16 French, History of the University, 37 92–93.Google Scholar

17 Martin, Henry Newall to Gilman, 9 Apr. 1877, DCGC, no. 1.Google Scholar

18 French, History of the University, 92 433.Google Scholar

19 Newcomb, Simon “The Teaching of Mathematics, Elementary Subjects,“ Educational Review 4 (Oct. 1892): 277–86. See also Ira Remsen, “Science Teaching in Secondary Schools,” Journal of Proceedings and Addresses of the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Southern Educational Association (1902), 141–45. For commentary on the pedagogical concerns of the nation's first generation of university professors, see Veysey, Laurence R. The Emergence of the American University (Chicago, 1965), 263–341; and Herbst, Jurgen The German Historical School in American Scholarship: A Study in the Transfer of Culture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1965), 46; and for an extended discussion of the interplay between teaching and research in the new universities, read Hugh Hawkins's important essay, “University Identity: The Teaching and Research Functions,” in The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860–1920, ed. Oleson, Alexandra and Voss, John (Baltimore, 1979), 285–312.Google Scholar

20 The Johns Hopkins University Circulars 2 (May 1883): 103–5.Google Scholar

21 Barnes, Sherman B. “The Entry of Science and History in the College Curriculum, 1865–1914,“ History of Education Quarterly 4 (Mar. 1964): 44–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 Hoist, Hermann von “Methods of Historical Study,“ in the Records of the Historical and Political Science Association and of the Seminary of History and Politics, MS, 24 Jan. 1879, xvii, box 1, EL. This invaluable resource has recently been published by Garland Publishing, Inc., of New York.Google Scholar

23 Adams, Herbert Baxter “The Seminary Method,“ reprinted in University Circulars 3 (Nov. 1883): 2.Google Scholar

24 Hawkins, Pioneer: A History of Johns Hopkins, 226ff.Google Scholar

25 University Circulars 2 (June 1883): 120, and 3 (June 1884): 117–18. Student attendance was determined by comparing lists in 3 (Mar. 1884), 69 with 3 (June 1884): 119–20. Hall, a lecturer at Hopkins in 1883, gave two of the presentations in Gilman's series. See 2 (June 1883), 120. His course continued to draw students; over 100 enrolled in his Saturday offering in 1885. See 4 (July 1885): 107.Google Scholar

26 Cordasco, The Shaping of American Graduate Education, 106; Hawkins, Pioneer: A History of Johns Hopkins, 236.Google Scholar

27 Rowland, Henry A. “A Plea for Pure Science,“ Science, 24 Aug. 1883, 242, 244.Google Scholar

28 Quoted in Moore, A. D. “Henry A. Rowland,“ Scientific American, 246 (Feb. 1982): 156.Google Scholar

29 Quoted in Hawkins, Pioneer: A History of Johns Hopkins, 218. The only laboratory classes Rowland taught were for advanced students. See the class listings in the University Circulars for 1879 to 1884.Google Scholar

30 Quoted in Moore, “Henry A. Rowland“ 158, 161.Google Scholar

31 Lurie, Edward Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science (Chicago, 1960), 240ff.; Shaler, Nathaniel S. “I Become Agassiz's Pupil,” in Great Teachers; Portrayed by Those Who Studied under Them, ed. Peterson, Houston (New York, 1946), 205–19; Cooper, Lane ed., Louis Agassiz as a Teacher (Ithaca, N.Y., 1945), especially Samuel Scudder's account, 55–61.Google Scholar

32 Quoted in Moore, “Henry A. Rowland,“ 155.Google Scholar

33 Rowland, Henry A. to Oilman, 12 Mar. 1884, DCGC, no. 1, EL. According to Hugh Hawkins, the executive committee had to request formally that Rowland deliver his lectures. See Pioneer: A History of Johns Hopkins, 138.Google Scholar

34 Ibid. In the spring semester of 1884, Rowland had ten advanced students in his laboratory class; in the fall of 1884, he had seven. The undergraduate laboratory course enrolled nineteen and thirty-four, respectively. See University Circulars 4 (Mar. 1884): 65, and 4 (Nov. 1884): 3. Rowland's comments about his cramped laboratory space were probably his response to the completion of two separate buildings in 1883 just for laboratory work in biology and chemistry. His persistent nagging evidently paid off, for in 1886, Johns Hopkins erected its largest building to date—the physics laboratory. See French, History of the University, 60–62. French erroneously lists Charles S. Hastings as an associate professor in history. See French, History of the University, 346.Google Scholar

35 The listed salaries are from the Minutes of the Board of Trustees unless asterisked, then they are from the Cash Book, part of the records of the Treasurer's Office. Google Scholar

36 Quoted in Moore, “Henry A. Rowland,” 157.Google Scholar