The Components of Reputation: Pragmatism, Science, and the Transformation of the University of Michigan, 1852–1900

Abstract

The Michigan Historical Review 43.1 (Spring 2017): 57-84©2017 Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved The Components of Reputation: Pragmatism, Science, and the Transformation of the University of Michigan, 1852-1900 By Francis X. Blouin Jr. In 2017, the University of Michigan will celebrate the 200th anniversary of its founding in Detroit as the Catholepistemiad or University of Michigania. In the course of its first century the university moved to Ann Arbor and emerged as one of the principal research institutions in the nation. In 1855, Henry Phillip Tappan, then president of the university, engaged his friend Jasper Cropsey, the now well-known Hudson River School artist, to visit Ann Arbor and complete a painting of the campus. Cropsey’s work resulted in two small paintings, one featuring Tappan’s beloved observatory and the second a panorama of the campus from the Northeast. In that second picture we see six of the original buildings, with cows grazing in the foreground. The campus appears so small and remote, far from the dynamic urban centers of the day. The question then is how, by 1900, did that small and remote institution become one of the earliest and most prominent research universities in the nation? What accounted for this transformation? What were the components of this reputation? By 1880, the University of Michigan was one of a handful of institutions of higher education positioned to rise to the highest levels of intellectual achievement. It was a time of intellectual transformation in the nation as a whole, and a small group of institutions, including Michigan, were positioned to seize the moment. And they did. The scale and scope of a new urban and industrial order at the end of the nineteenth century posed new problems and inspired new ideas. At Michigan, successive groups of scholars engaged new concepts about the nature of scientific inquiry, particularly the application of scientific concepts and methods to an understanding of the self and society. Only a few institutions, including Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Chicago, and Michigan were developing these ideas. Each carved out a particular intellectual position in this broader conversation. Michigan focused on the application of scientific 58 The Michigan Historical Review thinking to the dynamics of social and economic change, all set within the emerging American philosophy of pragmatism. To fully appreciate the scale and reach of these ideas at Michigan, it is important to consider three things: first, the intense debates between religion (primarily protestant Christianity) and science during the period; second, the university’s secular origins, particularly the influence of Henry Tappan and the presidency of James B. Angell; and third, the way in which the university fully engaged in an academic conversation among a small and extraordinary group of intellectuals that led to new ways of thinking and categorizing knowledge. Moreover, their published work boldly defined a new role for universities in general, one in which institutions created knowledge as well as conveyed it in the classroom and through research. In the early seventeenth century, the debates between science and religion that led to the trial of Galileo were over the natural sciences—the sun, the moon, the stars, and the earth. Up until the late nineteenth century, especially in the United States, the province of human behavior, that is of “moral man” in the terminology of the time, was considered bound to a moral authority rooted in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. Even if the world was not flat and was not created in seven real days, most people still generally accepted that it was through biblical authorities that we understood ourselves, our relationship to others, and our relationship to God. Joyce Appleby and other historians note that in some parts of seventeenth-century Europe these religious authorities were encroached upon by secular writers like Rousseau, Montesquieu, Hobbes, and Locke. And those writers surely were formative in the politics of the American Revolution. But Appleby also notes that religion in America, perhaps because of its Puritan origins, remained inextricably bound in the national fabric. Perhaps this was also because the American experiment was suspicious of things European, since America, after...