Other People's Colleges: The Origins of American Higher Education Reform by Ethan W. Ris (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Other People's Colleges: The Origins of American Higher Education Reform by Ethan W. Ris Erica Eckert, Assistant Professor Ethan W. Ris. Other People's Colleges: The Origins of American Higher Education Reform. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. 368 pp. $35. ISBN 9780226820224. While commonly regarded as a path for social advancement, it is well-known that higher education is a stratified system (Taylor & Cantwell, 2019). In Other People's Colleges: The Origins of American Higher Education Reform, Ethan Ris illustrates an underappreciated yet essential originator of postsecondary stratification—the philanthropic foundation. From the outset, Ris explains his goals are to look behind the curtain at the people, organizations, and movements seeking to reform higher education between 1890 and 1936. This period represents the earliest years in which philanthropic foundations leveraged financial resources to form higher education into a stratified system of vertically integrated institutions serving specific populations of students while systematically excluding or diverting others. These efforts and the pioneering opposition to these efforts comprise the book's scope. Ris argues that these higher education reform efforts and the efforts to oppose shaped higher education as it exists today. The book spans three phases of reform: ideas (1890–1905), efforts (1905–1915), and resistance (1915–1936). When most people think of the Progressive Era in the early 20th century United States, they likely think of muckraking journalism and individuals such as Jane Addams, W. E. B. DuBois, and Theodore Roosevelt (despite his more problematic beliefs) advocating for grassroots change. Progressivism also coincided with the scientific management movement, social Darwinism, and the prevailing belief that with sufficient expertise, all problems could be solved. Having amassed their fortunes by relying upon the labor of others, Gilded Age captains of industry John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie believed adherence to principles of scientific management and engineering could improve society at large. The first two major philanthropic organizations were Andrew Carnegie's Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (CFAT) and John D. Rockefeller's General Education Board (GEB). Ris presents the origin stories of these foundations, which were formed in large part to reshape the system of American higher education at the system rather than at the institution or individual level. The foundations were animated by the people who ran them and Ris characterizes these people as academic engineers. Ris carefully explains how the academic engineers developed their perspectives and inflicted them on higher education. This creates a rather dramatic storytelling landscape throughout the early sections of the book and Ris draws from a mass of personal papers and correspondence, historical essays and scholarship, journalism, and organizational documentation as evidence. The first section of the book describes the ideas and aims of higher education reform. In the first chapter, Ris introduces the academic engineers. Although their views were not completely uniform, most academic engineers held the belief that American higher education was not living up to its promise, needed to be fixed, and only those outside the system could fix it. Many of the academic engineers failed to complete (or attend) college, viewed themselves as self-made, and had the superiority complex to match. Most academic engineers were formally or informally affiliated with CFAT or GEB, although some served as college leaders or government officials. [End Page 127] CFAT and GEB wanted higher education "To earn the right to survive" by being "more efficient, more accountable, and more useful to both students and society" (p. 1). They did not, however, plan to create efficiency and accountability through competition. Instead, as Ris explains in the second chapter, they sought to reduce the total number of institutions and reduce competition among institutions. They aimed to reorganize the system of higher education, which would have the consequence of reinforcing social structures by directing students (along class, citizenship, racial, and economic lines) to specific institution types and geographic areas. Their mechanism of influence was money doled out by CFAT and GEB administrators using seemingly arbitrary guidelines. The classic and well-described example Ris provides is the CFAT pension fund for professors that could only be secured at the institution level, provided the institution abided by certain requirements. The promise of pension funds...