To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American Research Universities, 1900–1940 by Roger L. Geiger

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 499 ments, particularly as evidenced by their organization of the Sierra Club in 1892. Smith concludes his monograph with a discussion of the PanamaPacific Exposition of 1916 that celebrated the industrial progress of the Pacific Coast and dramatized the enormous changes that tech­ nology had brought to California’s pristine landscape in little more than half a century. This is a well written and interesting volume that focuses on the human dimensions of the broad changes that swept California. Much of the material presented here is quite familiar to specialists in the Held, but Smith has placed it in a suggestive context. And he raises major questions that invite further exploration in the future. To what degree were science and technology as practiced in California differ­ ent from developments in the East? Historians interested in the effect of technology on the environment of the West will find this a most stimulating work. Gerald D. Nash Dr. Nash is Presidential Professor of History at the University of New Mexico. His books include State Government and Economic Development: California, ¡850—1933 (Berke­ ley, 1964) and The American West in the Twentieth Century (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1973). His next book, to be published bv the University of Nebraska Press, is World War H and the Wes/: Reshaping the Economy. To Advance Knowledge: The Growth ofAmerican Research Universities, 1900— 1940. By Roger L. Geiger. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Pp. x + 325; tables, notes, appendixes, index. $29.95. The subtitle of this book is to be taken literally. In precise terms, this is a history of the changing sources for support that spurred the growth of research inside America’s leading universities during the early 20th century. It is not a comprehensive history of American higher education, or even of those leading universities, during that span of time. Such a broader book still has not been written. The sources for support of research included the budgets of the universities themselves and also those of private foundations—in these years the Rockefeller and Carnegie institutes were the most impor­ tant—as well as private businesses and the federal government. The book therefore jumps back and forth between the internal histories of the leading research universities and the histories of these other institutions, but always with its single-minded question in view: what made for more (or less) spending on research based in universities at a given moment in time? Another important bias affects the book: it is clearly friendly toward pure science and toward a so-called best science policy in the granting 500 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE of funds, and it is cool toward applied science, or a more democratic tendency within research. Sixteen universities, including MIT and Caltech, are seen to have been dominant throughout the period, and the focus is exclusively on them. At times the author fosters the impression that these sixteen institutions were the only universities in America that mattered. The inclusion among them of such tail-end campuses as the Universities of Minnesota and Illinois raises the ques­ tion of whether exactly sixteen institutions can be so confidently set apart from all the others, especially since in the mid-1930s they con­ tained only 48 percent of the “distinguished” scientists in America (see p. 262). Within these sixteen universities, everything is seen from the point of view of what promoted unfettered research in pure science; all else, including both teaching duties and research earmarked for ap­ plied science, is regarded as an enervating distraction. Thus MIT’s tendency to let business-sponsored contracts for industrial research dominate the scene in the 1920s is viewed as a temporary deviation from higher goals that threatened the welfare of the institution. Sim­ ilarly, the historic function of the federal government in sponsoring research into such practical fields as geology and agriculture is re­ garded as making the government a major provider of research funds in formal terms only before World War II, as its funds did not go into areas of “real” importance. Research is valued in this book always according to how big a splash it made in the world of theoretical learning...