Science and philanthropy: Wickliffe Rose and the International Education Board.

Abstract

The early 1920s were years of rapid change in social relations of science, especially academic science. For the first time, both business and philanthropic leaders began to take an interest in developing strong scientific departments in universities. Both were mainly concerned with training scientists, for somewhat different reasons. Industrial firms were interested in a reliable supply of scientists for their research and development laboratories. The officers of foundations were interested in scientists as agents of "rational social change". Neither supported research for its own sake; their aim was to develop scientific institutions, especially those responsible for training future leaders in science. This conception of the value of scientific development was the hallmark of the patronage of science into the 1930s.1 Philanthropists' interest in science was most marked in the Carnegie Corporation and Carnegie Institution, and in the Rockefeller boards: the International Education and General Education Boards, and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial. These organisations concentrated on strengthening centres of graduate training and research by awarding fellowships, making grants for research programmes, and by subventions for co-operative research committees. Foundation officers and their boards of trustees believed that scientists could play important roles in economic growth, mass higher education, and efficient provision of health and social services. These ideals were hardly new in 1920; what was new was their wide currency, and the fervour with which they were espoused. Many of the idealistic humanitarian, Utopian and revolutionary movements that swept Europe in the early 1920s were paralleled in the United States by the belief that the condition of mankind could be improved by the application of scientific knowledge and the use of "scientific methods". Foundation officials, business men and government reformers, looked to science to stabilise and improve European societies shaken by the First World War.2 These optimistic expectations about science as a beneficent force were encouraged by scientists, some of whom had been seeking governmental 1 Kohler, Robert E., "Philanthropy and the Community of Science: The 1920s", Osiris, 3