Milking the Sacred Cow: Research and the Quest for Useful Knowledge in the American University since 1920

The American university is now roughly a century old,1 even though there exists no particular date to mark this auspicious anniversary. One hundred years ago, the great experiments of Daniel Coit Gilman at Johns Hopkins and Andrew D. White at Cornell had not only survived and sunk roots, but had also begun to exert an influence on other leading universities. The American Ph.D., first awarded by Yale in 1861, had by the 1880s become commonplace, if not numerous. That decade saw Charles W. Eliot's elective system put fully into place and the transformation of Harvard from college to university well under way. By the late 1880s as well, the fruits of the Morrill Act, the state land-grant colleges, were entering a new and more robust phase, even though it would be another two decades before they would begin to rival their privately controlled counterparts. This decade was in fact the high tide of influence of German universities in this country; but as the brightest and most motivated young American scholars returned from their obligatory German tours of study, they would spend the next generation adapting the ideals of Wissenschaft and Lehrfreiheit to the realities of higher education as they found them in this country. The university-builders of that era had to wrestle with two ineluctable features of American higher education. First, the American college was basically a teaching institution. It received a relatively large number of poorly prepared students, and devoted much of its energy to providing them with basic instruction. Only a small number of these students seemed to possess the ability and the motivation for what was called university workthe investigation of advanced subjects at or near the frontiers of knowledge. The second major obstacle was that research-the hallmark of a true