Professors and Progressivism had strong ties both in the emergence of the modern American university and in the distinct but related formation of a new academic profession in the first decades of the twentieth century. Strong ties, however, did not mean clear connections as these innovations were marked by complexity and conflicts as well as cooperation. Hans-Joerg Tiede's University Reform relies on exhaustive archival research to provide a fresh analysis that makes sense out of these entangling alliances. His focus on the founding of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) also gives historians the bonus of a new understanding of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (CFAT). These, after all, were the organizations that went through fluctuations of alliance and mistrust in the campaigns to determine what exactly was meant by the professionalization of faculty. As such, they illustrate graphically the inconsistencies and trade-offs that characterized reform groups who converged on public issues in the Progressive Era.

In the decades after 1890, professors at American universities who had earned the PhD in such disciplines as economics, political science, and sociology gained unprecedented respect and influence in public affairs. This made professors integral to discussions and legislation associated with reform policies and legislation. Yet the same expertise that had potential for consequence in the real world of public debates about tariffs, trade, and commerce legislation also made professors vulnerable to scrutiny and retaliation from Captains of Industry who had become part of American universities as Captains of Erudition who served as university trustees and donors. Hence, the faculty stature that led to university appointments now called for some codification of academics as a bona fide profession.

The conventional interpretation of the AAUP emphasized that leading professors joined together to seek protections for faculty in hiring and firing and in tenure and promotion deliberations. Tiede makes the compelling case that this emphasis was not the initial, defining hallmark of the new AAUP. It came about only after the CFAT, led by former Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Henry Pritchett, pushed hard for the AAUP leaders to detour from the AAUP's original goal of trying to assure that professors had a place at the table along with trustees and presidents in the “shared governance” model for universities. Pritchett and the CFAT thought that the AAUP strategy distracted from the CFAT's priority of making sure that university presidents, not professors, were respected by boards of trustees. The CFAT had some power of the purse in that it held out the real and exaggerated promise of funding for faculty pension plans, familiar to professors today as TIAA-CREF. Professors who were pioneering leaders of the AAUP warned in vain that trust and reliance on the CFAT gave unprecedented and unwise deference to a private foundation whose endowment came from industrial wealth, with little if any responsibility for the public good. Eventually, however, the CFAT tended to prevail and the AAUP shifted gears to assure that professors at colleges and universities got reasonable safeguards when subjected to arbitrary retirements or dismissals. These were the issues and procedures that made the AAUP Statements from around 1920, which would be hailed as the academic profession's equivalent of the Magna Carta.

Tiede characterizes the CFAT as representing a business perspective for higher education. That is correct, but a little incomplete. In fact, the CFAT with its emphasis on standards and standardization might be more accurately cast as advocating an engineering point of view (recall that their leader, Henry Pritchett, had been president of MIT). In pushing to professionalize university presidents, the CFAT tried to provide academic life with some buffer from the meddling of business executives who dominated university trustee boards. Their problem was that they were supposed to govern, not to administer. So, the CFAT wanted to give more attention to presidents than to professors.

Tiede's research style and selection of sources places his book into the genre of a “cabinet history.” It is a tightly constructed, well-documented narrative dealing overwhelmingly with a relatively small cadre of influential in their discussions, memoranda, hearings, and other correspondence. As for secondary sources, Tiede makes good use of Ellen Condliffe Laggeman's Private Power for the Public Good, a history of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.Footnote ¹ Tiede also incorporate Clyde Barrow's 1990 historical analysis of boards of trustees, Universities and the Capitalist State both for context and for rebuttal and revision.Footnote ² And, in reviewing the historiography on academic freedom, Tiede gives readers briefing on the interpretations offered by Walter Metzer and Richard Hofstadter more than a half century ago. Tiede might have made more use of two outstanding secondary sources readily available. I saw no citation for or mention of Hugh Hawkins's 1992 book, Banding Together, dealing with the intersection of numerous national higher education associations in this era.Footnote ³ That is unfortunate since Hawkins, a long-time prominent history professor at Amherst College who also wrote about the founding of the Johns Hopkins University, died in May 2016. Another surprising absence is that of Edwin Slosson's 1910 anthology, Great American Universities—a period piece commentary whose detailed profiles of fourteen universities was influential at the time of its publication prior to World War I—and which, later, would be central to historian Laurence Veysey's 1964 classic, The Emergence of the American University.Footnote ⁴

Perhaps, however, Tiede's strict constructionist story based on his own careful analysis of archival documents combined with his discovery of heretofore unanalyzed primary sources was a necessary approach, given the hagiography and mythology that had fossilized around the founding of the AAUP. What we do have now is an excellent story of university reform that includes a thorough exhumation of the compromises and conflicts that were central to the founding and priorities of the AAUP—all of whose principles and liturgy are still invoked a century later.