The Education of Andrew Carnegie: Strategic Philanthropy in American Higher Education, 1880–1919

ABSTRACT

In the decades around the turn of the 20th century, American business leaders took their first sustained interest in higher education. This historical article, based on archival analysis, challenges the traditional understanding of these wealthy individuals’ philanthropy as either passive or ill-intentioned. Using Andrew Carnegie as a case study, the article shows the evolution of one very visible industrialist from a critic of American higher education who oriented his philanthropy elsewhere to one of its most ardent supporters. In between those extremes, Carnegie became a reformer who administered his largesse strategically and helped to bring American colleges and universities into closer connection with the interests and ethos of the business world. His evolving project ultimately bolstered the legitimacy and stability of both sectors.

KEYWORDS:

• Administration
• foundations
• history of higher education
• philanthropy
• policy

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank the following for their generous comments on this article: James Anderson, David Labaree, David Nasaw, Adam Nelson, Harold Wechsler, and Jonathan Zimmerman, as well as Scott Thomas and the anonymous reviewers of The Journal of Higher Education.

Notes

^1. Joseph Frazier Wall gave a more balanced overview of the philanthropist’s agency in this period, although it is largely anecdotal and decontextualized from the larger history of American higher education (Wall, 1970). With the exception of Wall, most Carnegie biographies have devoted little attention to his deep interest in higher education.

^2. Cooper Union introduced a controversial plan to charge tuition in fall 2014, for the first time since Carnegie’s 1902 gift.

^3. Carnegie Tech began awarding the bachelor’s degree in 1912. Andrew Carnegie appears to have not objected to the switch at that time, having entered what I call his “friend of the colleges” phase.

^4. The German research university was never fully transplanted to the United States. The one earnest attempt at a graduate-only institution, Clark University, was a dramatic failure (Veysey, 1965, pp. 165–170). Instead, most institutions developed the hybridized “multiversity form” (Kerr, 1963), incorporating undergraduate instruction and practical research alongside the academic ideal. This hybridization was particularly true at research universities that also received federal land grants, like Cornell, Wisconsin, and California. For more, see Geiger (1986), pp. 58–93.

^5. Lagemann described this concern for professors as dating back to Carnegie’s early days as a Cornell trustee, citing Wall and stating, “This has been the standard explanation for Carnegie’s establishment of the CFAT” (Lagemann, 1983, pp. 48, 213 n. 29). Wall, in turn, cited Lester, who told the same story, dated back to 1890, without any citation or attribution (Lester, 1941, p. 45; Wall, 1970, p. 870). Even in the unlikely event that this sympathy was genuine, the fact that Carnegie waited 15 years before acting on it raises serious questions about his commitment to the cause.

^6. Princeton of course did not cease playing football after Carnegie’s gift; the subheadline of a newspaper account of the new lake went out of its way to assuage such fears (“Princeton Now Has Best Rowing Course … Will Not Hurt Football,” New York World, 16 December 1905).

^7. The Coe College letters are largely contained in Box 113 of the Andrew Carnegie Papers. While a typical year of correspondence in the Carnegie papers spans seven or so boxes, April 1905 alone spans four, the bulk of it in the form of solicitations from colleges.

^8. For more on pensioning, rationalization, and welfare capitalism, see Sass (1997). For pensions in higher education, see Graebner (1979). Charles F. Thwing, first secretary of CFAT, also wrote a history and justification for academic pensions in the foundation’s 1st year of operations (Thwing, 1905). Rodgers (1998) repeatedly dealt with pensioning as one of many social reforms that originated in Europe but failed to fully integrate into American policy.

^9. Statistics on colleges and universities that dropped religious affiliations are based on a comparison of data in the annual reports of the U.S. Commissioner of Education. The data are incomplete, so 37 is the minimum number of institutions that became nonsectarian during the period (Report of the Commissioner of Education, 1905, 1917).

^10. For more on the “Carnegie Unit,” see Tyack and Cuban (1995, pp. 91–93), who echoed the critique that it has created “an accounting mentality better suited to a bank than to a school.”

^11. These “college men” were not simply experts tapped for ad-hoc work at CFAT; they were Carnegie’s trusted friends, a brain trust on which he increasingly relied. When he chose directors for his antiwar “League for International Conciliation” in 1906, 5 of the 11 were university presidents.

^12. In the case of Illinois College, Carnegie’s gift was so clearly identified with a rationalizing, antireligious mission that it led William Jennings Bryan to quit its board of trustees in protest.

^13. The most thorough treatment of corporate takeovers of college and university boards of trustees is Barrow (1990), a Marxist analysis that largely picks up where U. Sinclair (1923) left off.