In the early 1860s, with the nation fractured by the Civil War, Congress passed two measures that became deeply intertwined over the next forty years. First, in 1862, it passed the Morrill Land Grant Act, which provided federal property to the states for use in establishing colleges and universities “to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts.”Footnote 1 Arguably the most important step in the history of U.S. higher education, the Morrill Act sparked a university-building boom while lining the pockets of financiers who benefited from the requirement that land sale proceeds be invested in stocks.Footnote 2 Two years later, in 1864, the wartime Congress passed another land grant act, in this case transferring Yosemite Valley to the State of California with the stipulation that it remain “unalienable for all time” and “be held for public use, resort, and recreation.”Footnote 3 Yosemite became a major draw for tourists and naturalists, among them John Muir, who came to California after a sojourn in Canada during the war to avoid military service. After several false starts, the California State Legislature accepted its federal land grant in 1868 to convert the private College of California in Oakland into a public state university located in Berkeley.
Governor Henry Haight, a Yale University alumnus, stacked the new university’s Board of Regents with lawyers and bankers who had supported his campaign.Footnote 4 The Regents actively recruited faculty from the South who had supported the Confederacy. These professors included the brothers Joseph LeConte (professor of geology and natural history) and John LeConte (professor of physics). As Joseph explained his motives for leaving South Carolina: “When the negro legislature began to talk about what they were going to do with the University, I thought it time to quit.”Footnote 5 These sentiments aligned with Haight’s opposition to Reconstruction – a key plank of his gubernatorial campaign in a state where populism and white supremacy were intertwined.Footnote 6 But Haight’s Democratic coalition was complex. He was an early supporter of Henry George, an advocate of radical land reform, and among the first faculty hires was William Swinton (professor of English), one of George’s associates.Footnote 7 Among the few local hires were Ezra Carr (professor of agriculture), who had moved to California from the University of Wisconsin, and Martin Kellogg (professor of classics), a Yale alumnus already on the faculty of the College of California. The regents eventually brought in another Yale man, Daniel Coit Gilman, to serve as president in 1872.
As president, Gilman moved the university away from the model of practical education envisioned by the Morrill Act, instead seeking to build what Swinton derided as “a literary and ‘pure science’ school of the Connecticut type.”Footnote 8 In his inaugural address, Gilman laid out his ambitious plans for building a research-oriented university.Footnote 9 Despite insisting that the university would serve California residents from all walks of life, his speech mentioned neither investment in a demonstration farm nor a significant role for industrial training. As it became clear that Gilman was hostile to vocational education, with resources flowing instead to research and indoor lectures, his presidency came under fire from labor groups demanding that the university offer meaningful training in agriculture and the mechanic arts. These farmers and laborers “viewed the university and its Board of Regents as conspirators engaged in a plot to further a new and primarily urban caste of wealthy Californians.”Footnote 10 The ferocity of the backlash drove Gilman to resign in 1875 and move to Baltimore, where he became one of the educational architects of the new Johns Hopkins University. But the accusation of “indoor learning” threatened public support for the university even after Gilman’s departure.
To some extent, the standoff between the Board of Regents and its dissenters can be understood as a local policy dispute reflecting a collision of interests in Gilded Age California, wherein a series of political accommodations shaped the institutional history of the university.Footnote 11 But the protests calling for the University of California to better serve the interests of working people also reflected a national movement. Scholar Nathan M. Sorber notes that the Morrill Act facilitated the rise of a new middle class in fields such as “finance, accounting, sales, marketing, and advertising,” with popular literature giving the impression that “everyone was getting in the game.”Footnote 12 The backlash against the new universities, in Sorber’s telling, represented agrarian resistance to the rural outmigration that this economic transformation would entail.Footnote 13 But other historians have framed the dispute more as a “war of position” wherein the tools of power – including education, capitalism, and other trappings of modernity – were challenged and redeployed, not rejected.Footnote 14 As Charles Postel argues, the populists were American moderns who “seized on education as a weapon to break the corporate stronghold” on democracy.Footnote 15 Historian Scott Gelber builds on this line of argument, noting that populists pushed for reform on the premise that “public colleges and universities could disperse intellectual capital and soften distinctions of professional status.”Footnote 16 Following Postel and Gelber, the case of California adds further nuance to the anti-intellectual streak illuminated by Sorber. Elitism aside, a key problem with universities modeled after Yale was that they required spending too much time indoors. This problem reflected emerging anxieties about “neurasthenia,” or white racial weakness from nervous exhaustion. Writer Julie Beck notes that neurasthenia “was a disease of culture as much as of the mind and body,” placing universities squarely in the crosshairs of this discourse.Footnote 17
Many other Morrill Act universities responded to agrarian populists by establishing demonstration farms where students could receive practical training in agriculture.Footnote 18 But thanks to its natural resources, California offered another path that suggests vocational training was only one part of the equation for critics of higher education in the Gilded Age. In places like the High Sierra, students could study the fundamental processes of nature directly, without the mediation of a university. John Muir recognized the symbolic potency of this idea, using caricatures of overeducated professors as a foil for building his own reputation. In 1869, Muir described an encounter in Yosemite with his former mentor James Butler of the University of Wisconsin. Despite cordially greeting one another, Butler turned down Muir’s entreaties to participate in an extended camping trip. Butler’s departure left Muir “pitying the poor Professor” for being “bound by clocks, almanacs, orders, duties, etc.”Footnote 19 Two years later, in 1871, the aging philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson arrived in Yosemite Valley with an entourage from Harvard University. Like Butler, however, Emerson refused Muir’s invitation to camp in the mountains, preferring to protect his health by sleeping in cabins. Emerson’s party, wrote Muir, was “full of indoor philosophy” and captive to “the house habit,” failing to see that one was more likely to catch a cough in a cabin than in the clean air of the Sierra.Footnote 20
Muir’s disdain for indoor education seemingly aligned with populist attacks on the validity of knowledge produced in the “educational furnaces” of the university.Footnote 21 He sparred bitterly with Josiah Whitney, a professor at Harvard, over the origins of Yosemite.Footnote 22 Whitney contended that an earthquake or other cataclysm had caused the valley floor to sink, whereas Muir argued that Yosemite had been formed instead by glaciers. Whitney’s refusal to reconsider his hypothesis became a vehicle through which Muir expressed disdain for academic elitism.Footnote 23 Indeed, the story has appeared repeatedly in guidebooks on Yosemite, remaining a key element of Muir’s hagiography.Footnote 24 But from a historiographical perspective, Muir’s fame obscures the extent to which professors at the University of California actively engaged with Yosemite. Far from avoiding the High Sierra, many professors embraced it. Indeed, the idea of outdoor learning as a struggle against white racial decline allowed former Confederate elites like the LeConte brothers to make common cause with white populists in California who shared their animosity toward racial others.
The scholarship on higher education in the Gilded Age has illuminated another key facet of populism: it was a movement of readers. According to Postel, reformers sponsored “social science clubs, literary societies, and lending libraries,” sparking a “profound and democratic upheaval” in attitudes on reading and learning.Footnote 25 The activists who battled over the direction of the land grant universities were also readers of novels, nature writings, newspapers, magazines, and other forms of popular literature. This world of reading was a key point of intersection between the University of California and Yosemite. Many of these texts fell into the domain of popular science, as faculty worked to explain California’s natural wonders, but they also extended into the realms of fiction and humor. These texts are far from hidden or unknown. Environmental historians have widely utilized popular writings on Yosemite, most notably in relation to the American conservation movement.Footnote 26 This historiography has brought much-needed skepticism to the work of activists such as Muir who cast the High Sierra as a place free of corruption, and it has underscored how places like Yosemite contributed to a range of cultural and political projects, including the eugenics movement.Footnote 27 But historians examining higher education in the Gilded Age have, for the most part, only glancingly dipped into this literature.Footnote 28
And yet, Yosemite was a critical component of the university’s efforts to shift the tide of public opinion. Arguably more than any other place in San Francisco’s hinterlands, Yosemite functioned as a sort of shadow to the University of California – a space of middlebrow intellectual sociability where cultural hierarchies found in the classroom could be temporarily abrogated through vigorous outdoor activities, such as camping.Footnote 29 Professors recognized that an image of the university as a bastion of highbrow culture could be softened through the grit and grime of outdoor activities.Footnote 30 In other words, the park functioned as a site of persuasion where representatives of the university could convince the public that they were building the kind of institution that Californians wanted, even if the campus at Berkeley lacked sufficient facilities for vocational education. This essay examines how Yosemite – as both a symbol and a place – served the ideological and intellectual projects of higher education during the Gilded Age. Both critics and supporters of the University of California were keenly aware that cultural representations of higher education could sway public support for the institution. Despite the unflattering portrayal of professors in writings like those of Muir, a small number of influential faculty members saw Yosemite as a tool for containing and neutralizing some of the sharpest attacks on the university during this period. As a public trust, and as a space where professors could gain the trust of the public, Yosemite offered both a physical and representational field by which the educational architects of the University of California sought to redirect popular resistance and position themselves as trustworthy stewards of public resources.
The Professor in Popular Literature
From its earliest years, the University of California made its presence felt in popular literature on Yosemite. These cultural representations, in turn, inflected the politics of higher education within the state. In 1870, the British writer Therese Yelverton arrived in Yosemite to gather material for a new novel. During her visit, she met Joseph LeConte – who was leading a university camping expedition that summer – and John Muir.Footnote 31 Both men later appeared as characters in her novel, Zanita: A Tale of the Yo-Semite, published in 1872. The protagonist is a young girl, Zanita, who was born in Yosemite but raised for several years in Oakland after losing her mother. Zanita eventually attends a boarding school in Santa Clara, seduces a mysterious artist, and drowns in Yosemite’s Mirror Lake in what is suspected to be a murder-suicide. Yelverton made no effort to conceal Muir as the inspiration for a wild adventurer named Kenmuir. LeConte appears as Dr. John Brown, “a Professor of Geology in a College of California” who helps raise Zanita in Oakland with his wife, Sylvia Brown (the novel’s narrator).Footnote 32 Sylvia first meets Kenmuir as he is standing on the precipice of Glacier Point, seemingly inches from plunging to his death. Swept up in his charisma, she grows self-conscious of her social position as “a Professor’s wife, and a sensible woman,” who should not be associating with the likes of Kenmuir. After spending time with her new friend, however, Sylvia concludes that any disapproval from her husband would be wholly unfounded: “Kenmuir, I decided in my mind, was a gentleman; and behind this bold rampart I resolved to intrench myself against the sarcastic tiltings of the Professor.”Footnote 33
Early on, the novel contrasts Kenmuir’s practical knowledge of the Valley with the absurdity of Professor Brown’s abstract theories. Discussing the geological origins of Yosemite, Sylvia tells Kenmuir that “when we get the Professor here, he will fight you tooth and nail as to the origin of everything.” Professor Brown turns out to be a staunch believer in Josiah Whitney’s view that a sudden cataclysm had formed Yosemite, allowing Kenmuir to offer a “wholesale destruction” of the Professor’s hypothesis. Appealing to the evidence of experience, Kenmuir exclaims, “Why! I can show the Professor where the mighty cavity has been grooved and wrought out for millions of years…. I can take you where you can see for yourself.”Footnote 34 In reality, LeConte largely agreed with Muir’s contention that Yosemite had been carved by glaciers, and he routinely credited Muir in publications and lectures, hedging only slightly as to the conclusiveness of the theory.Footnote 35 In an 1872 address to the California Academy of Sciences, LeConte explicitly cited Muir’s involvement in developing the theory.Footnote 36 This admission did not stop Muir from criticizing LeConte in Harper’s Monthly as typical of the professorial tendency to build theories based on fleeting observation of geological phenomena. “Professor LeConte,” wrote Muir, “had never before seen a glacier of any kind, and did nothing more by way of investigation of this one than to spend a few minutes on the terminal moraine.”Footnote 37 Not unlike his scorn for the “indoor philosophy” of Emerson’s party, Muir’s skewering of LeConte contrasted the academic training of professors with his own sensory proximity to the High Sierra.
The archetype of the bumbling professor appeared throughout Zanita. Beyond his disagreement with Kenmuir about the origins of Yosemite, the “unpoetical Professor of Geology” is mocked for his preoccupation with scientific investigation at the expense of social relationships. At one point, the novel describes the Professor as an “idiot” who could be found “a moping and a mowing about the rocks.” At another point, Sylvia asks her husband about Mr. Egremont, an artist who appears midway through the novel with designs on Zanita. “I wonder,” asks Sylvia, “who he is, and where he comes from, and how he got here?” The Professor mistakenly thinks she is asking about the sample of rock that he is studying and launches into a lecture about geological origins before she interrupts him to clarify. So distracted is the Professor with a study that he can barely take care of himself. When Sylvia leaves for a trip, she complains “that he would mope and grow sick; wear two odd stockings,—even if he were fortunate to find two; never have a handkerchief, and appear in a disreputable neck-tie; that all his linen would take the opportunity of my absence to go astray at the laundry.”Footnote 38
More than simply a source of humor, Professor Brown’s role in the novel allows Yelverton to explore, with an anthropologist’s eye, the complex relationship between Oakland, San Francisco, and Yosemite as the author experienced it during her visit. Yelverton arrived within a year of the opening of the University of California, spending only the summer of 1870 in the state, but already she could see that the new institution straddled geographic and cultural boundaries in its bid for public legitimacy. Until 1873, when the campus in Berkeley opened for classes, the university operated at the site of the old College of California in Oakland, where most of its professors lived, including LeConte. The location of the campus became a source of contention, with some critics pushing to locate the campus in San Francisco instead of Berkeley. As one observer wrote, “The truth is the University ought to have been located in the city. Here is to be found some of the elements upon which to base an Institution of learning: population, boarding houses, buildings, bakers, tailors.”Footnote 39 Critics also proposed free lectures at the San Francisco Mechanics’ Institute as a way to provide educational programming to citizens where they lived and worked. LeConte was one of several professors who accepted the offer of delivering free lectures at the Mechanics’ Institute, but the process of gaining the public’s trust was long and slow.
In the novel, Zanita’s removal to Oakland following her adoption by Sylvia and Professor Brown offers a glimpse into how this cultural geography appeared to Yelverton as a visitor to the region in 1870. By sending the family from Yosemite to Oakland to San Francisco and back to Oakland and finally to Yosemite again, the novel points to the complicated cultural networks that structured educational practice and status in the San Francisco Bay Area. When Sylvia decides to adopt Zanita early in the novel, the Professor keeps his distance from the whole process, grudgingly approving only on the understanding that he is not to be held responsible for her education. Upon arriving in Oakland, the Professor “declared he was ashamed to go out with [Zanita], for her hat could never be kept straight on her head.” He soon discovers that sartorial infelicities are the least of his worries. After Zanita carries out a series of pranks, the Professor finds himself locked in “a struggle for mastery” over the sanctity of his study and its cabinet of “geological and biological specimens,” which Zanita aspires to disturb for no apparent reason other than to assert power.Footnote 40
At the crux of the tension between Zanita and the Professor is control over space, with the two characters – each, in their own way, outsiders – serving as closely adjacent metonyms for Yosemite and the university. The Professor removes Zanita from Yosemite, but Zanita has the power to make the Professor look ridiculous in Oakland. A few months after the adoption, Sylvia arrives home to find the house empty. Soon the Professor returns from teaching, but Zanita is nowhere to be found. Fearing that Zanita has escaped to San Francisco, where “she might choose to remain in any den of iniquity,” Sylvia for the first time begins to regret taking her from Yosemite. Sylvia and the Professor cross the Bay hoping to rescue Zanita from what they believe to be the pernicious influence of the city. As it turns out, Zanita had been hiding at home in Oakland the entire time, using the occasion of their absence to go “camping” in Sylvia’s pickling cabinet, making liberal use of her “tea-set, jam-pots, apples, peaches, dry tea, and coffee-beans.” Zanita’s “squirrelism,” as Yelverton calls it, constitutes a reversal of the usual agency of environmentalism that would mark writings on Yosemite for decades; instead of describing the destruction of wilderness by modern technology, here the “wildness” of Yosemite creates havoc in the Professor’s home in the city.Footnote 41
Yelverton was only one of many writers from Europe and the eastern United States who traveled to California to visit the High Sierra during this period. Touristic expectations of grandeur structured almost every account of visiting Yosemite. The actress Olive Logan noted that a trip to Yosemite was “de rigueur” for tourists. As she wrote in Galaxy Magazine in 1870, “No sooner do you announce to your friends in New York that you are going to California than they immediately cry out, ‘Ah, then you will see the Yo Semite!’” She added that few actual residents of California had visited the famed valley. “Of the scores of people I met in San Francisco,” wrote Logan, “only two or three had been to Yo Semite.”Footnote 42 This culture of tourism in the High Sierra was pilloried in Mark Twain’s Roughing It, which sold 75,000 copies within a year of its publication in 1872. Drawing on his experience as a reporter in Nevada and San Francisco, Twain emphasized that Roughing It was neither a “pretentious history” nor a “philosophical dissertation,” but simply a story of “variegated vagabondizing.” As he noted near the end of the book, “Our wanderings were wide and in many directions; and now I could give the reader a vivid description of the Big Trees and the marvels of the Yo Semite – but what has this reader done to me that I should persecute him? I will deliver him into the hands of less conscientious tourists and take his blessing.”Footnote 43 Clearly familiar with the high-minded language used by geologists and journalists in their writings on Yosemite, Twain turned the expectations of aesthetic reverence and geological investigation into a source of humor.Footnote 44 On one trip to Lake Mono, Twain described finding petrified gulls’ eggs. “How did they get there?” asked Twain, “I simply state the fact – for it is a fact – and leave the geological reader to crack the nut at his leisure and solve the problem after his own fashion.” In Roughing It, such “facts” are never what they seem, and in mocking them Twain delivered on the promise not to “goad” the reader with science. Twain argued that “the real grandeurs of the Pacific coast are not Yo Semite and the Big Trees,” but rather the tall tales repeated endlessly throughout the region.Footnote 45
In their pilgrimages to Yosemite, travelers and professors alike brought readymade models of behavior with them, whether in the geological study of the rocks or touristic astonishment at the view. To residents, these outsiders came to California to bank the experience – hence Logan’s carefully chosen title, “Does it Pay to Visit Yo Semite?” – and leave. Josiah Whitney, for example, participated in the Geological Survey of California and published The Yosemite Book in 1868 before returning to his professorship at Harvard. The cynicism about outsiders using Yosemite for their own benefit went hand-in-hand with California’s anti-elitist politics, but it also opened the door for faculty like LeConte to overcome caricatures of out-of-touch professors by building a reputation of genuine commitment to the long-term stewardship of Yosemite as a public trust.
Populist Critiques of the University of California
The publication of Roughing It and Zanita in 1872 coincided with the arrival of Daniel Coit Gilman from Yale to serve as president of the University of California. As Gilman sensed, but did not fully appreciate, he was stepping into a firestorm that had been burning since the establishment of the university. Two years earlier, in 1870, the Board of Trustees of the Mechanics’ Institute in San Francisco filed a petition with the California State Legislature urging the university to better serve the interests of industrial workers by moving a portion of the campus into the city, where children of workers could avoid the “heavy expenditure” of relocating to Berkeley. In their view, “the colleges of applied sciences, if established at Berkeley, will become practically useless to the public.”Footnote 46 The petitioners also demanded that the university make speedier progress toward offering vocational training in the “mechanic arts” as specified in the Morrill Act. The demands of the Mechanics’ Institute illuminated a fissure in the politics of education reform, with agrarian populists seeking outdoor education and industrial workers advocating for a campus in the city. On the other hand, labor groups in San Francisco formed a core constituency for the racial politics of white supremacy that LeConte and other faculty embraced, creating an opening for a different sort of rapprochement.
Gilman would not be part of the solution. In his view, the most immediate challenge facing his presidency was finding a way to implement his vision while navigating the reputation for corruption that the Regents had already amassed in three short years. The university’s professor of agriculture, Ezra Carr, was particularly vocal in seeking to expose its failure to serve the needs of working people in California. Carr saw the Regents as the root of the problem, particularly their designation in the state’s Organic Act of 1868 as private individuals not required to take an oath of office and whose employment “shall be held and deemed exclusively as a private trust.”Footnote 47 The Board of Regents was ignoring its duty to the people, Carr argued, since it had become “a self-perpetuating close corporation, managing a property already worth more than a million dollars, commanding an important and constantly increasing political influence. Already the skillful dispensing of patronage has made itself felt at Berkeley.”Footnote 48 Carr supported his accusations with specific details, noting that two members of the Board of Regents had acted as property brokers in university land transactions in 1870—including the purchase of property in Oakland at an inflated price and, even more damningly, the sale of a swath of the Berkeley campus that had been envisioned as the site of a demonstration farm.Footnote 49
Carr characterized the Regents as corrupt, self-dealing officials who were ignoring the plain meaning of the Morrill Act to offer practical education in “agriculture and the mechanic arts.” As he wrote, “There can be no doubt that Congress meant to endow schools that would bear the same relation to those pursuits that schools of law and medicine do to those professions.”Footnote 50 University officials first sought to deal with Carr’s complaints by sending him away from campus, passing a resolution requiring the professor of agriculture to visit “all the agriculture centers of population in the State, and in every convenient neighborhood, where suitable accommodations can be obtained, deliver one or more lectures, illustrated where practicable, upon subjects connected with agriculture likely to be of most value and interest to the people of the locality.”Footnote 51 The following year, it added that Carr should continue his lectures across the state but that the university would no longer cover his expenses. Although Carr recognized this policy as a form of retaliation, the requirement that he travel to communities around the state introduced him to a wide range of constituents. Upon arrival as president, Gilman failed to see the base of power that Carr had been building. Instead, Gilman courted support from the Board of Regents for his academic vision while defending it against charges of corruption. Carr found an unlikely ally in English professor William Swinton, who blamed Gilman for the wave of popular discontent in testimony before the California State Legislature, asserting, “I think he has put the Board of Regents in a sort of tacit attitude of antagonism to the wishes of the people of the State in regard to certain phases of practical education.”Footnote 52 In 1874, both Carr and Swinton lost their jobs, but Carr was soon elected to statewide office as Superintendent of Public Instruction, making him an ex officio member of the very body that had fired him. This sharp rebuke of the Board of Regents by voters caught the attention of politicians across the state, making clear that public trust in the university would need to be earned.
The same year, the Mechanics’ Deliberative Assembly joined with the California State Grange to press forward another petition, this one more radical in its aspirations.Footnote 53 Seeking a greater voice for working people in the university’s administration, the petition’s goal was “to secure to the industrial classes, through the State University, its educational advantages.” Their main complaint was that the university had made no effort to establish vocational courses for industrial workers. Furthermore, the university’s few agricultural offerings were focused on lecture-based instruction rather than Carr’s vision of a demonstration farm modeled after public universities like that of Wisconsin.Footnote 54 The petitioners emphasized that they were not attempting to subvert the liberal arts but instead seeking a balanced curriculum that would better serve the entire population of California. As a symbolic reminder of the institution’s core mission, they called for a sign to be erected on “the main building of the University, marking it for all time with the words, “AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA.”Footnote 55 The relentless populist backlash drove Gilman to resign in 1875.
California’s populists were far from alone in this period. As Scott Gelber notes, a similar backlash emerged at land-grant institutions across the United States, including Kansas, Ohio, Vermont, Illinois, Minnesota, and North Carolina, with one publication in 1876 asserting that “the industrial classes have been shamefully cheated out of their just rights.”Footnote 56 The philosophy of populist critics in this period was distilled in a pamphlet, “The New Education,” published in 1874. The author, G. W. Pinney, argued that the University of California had built a curriculum designed for law, medicine, and other professions already deemed elite. The main purpose of the Morrill Act, in Pinney’s view, was to “work a long-desired revolution” in agriculture and the mechanic arts by placing them on an “equal rank with the learned professions.”Footnote 57 By combining liberal education with practical training, critics were not seeking to create more workers but to change the class status of these fields. Building a college to serve a broader swath of the public promised to create “avenues to cultivated society” for working people and allow them “intimacy in personal relations with men of education.” At the same time, Pinney believed farmers and mechanics would never embrace the university and its benefits without a revolution in teaching methods to emphasize practical over theoretical instruction. As Pinney explained, “The lessons of the lecture room must be illustrated in the field and the workshop. These are the real laboratories where the student can practice and observe the benefits of applied science – the only means by which he can make an accomplishment of an otherwise hard and laborious occupation. Nothing less than a thorough, radical course of instruction can ever convince the farmers and mechanics of the utility of the new system.”Footnote 58 Populists sounded this call for vocational training and fieldwork for the rest of the decade, placing pressure on the university to demonstrate the public utility of its course offerings. The open question was how to do so. Did the university need to reimagine its curriculum around vocational education? Or was there another way to convince the public that the university was indeed working to serve the best interests of Californians?
In the eastern United States, elites perceived the complaints of farmers and mechanics as an unsettling product of California political culture that risked ending its experiment with serious higher education. In 1874, the Atlantic Monthly reported on what it called “an interesting discussion in California respecting the scope of university education, which is not yet closed.” After detailing the university’s strong prospects for becoming a leading institution, the article cast the populist grievances as “a serious danger” to its future. In California, explained the Atlantic, the state legislature was “supreme, having in its hands a despotic power such as kings and parliaments have never possessed in the management of colleges and universities.” The legislature’s receptivity to the views of the farmers and mechanics was placing the university’s fate in the hands of “ignorant and prejudiced men, acting in haste, under personal pique, and without full consideration of the consequences which are involved.” The author speculated that the real source of discontent was that people “who have spent their vital force in muscular exertion” were thereby too “feeble and confused” to succeed in a university with high standards and would only be satisfied with an easier curriculum.Footnote 59 The contempt for working people expressed in a national magazine like Atlantic Monthly did no favors for the university, helping reinforce the notion that Gilman’s vision for the school had been a product of East Coast elitism. But Gilman was far from the only face of the institution, and Carr and Swinton were not the only faculty members who engaged with populist critics.
Securing the Public Trust
When Joseph LeConte arrived in California as a new professor in 1869, he was an unknown outsider. Unlike some of his colleagues, however, LeConte saw public outreach as a top priority. He was among the core group of professors who regularly accepted invitations to speak at the Mechanics’ Institute in San Francisco, thereby satisfying a key demand of labor interests in the city. In 1870, eight students invited LeConte and Frank Soulé Jr., a professor of mathematics, to join them on an expedition to Yosemite. Soulé wrote that the trip transformed his impression of his colleague. Far from appearing uncomfortable outside the classroom, LeConte shared all camp duties equally with the students, from baking bread to building fires. As Soulé wrote, “I was moved by the intense love of nature that saturated Doctor Joe’s mind and soul. He loved all men and all things [and] took any good-natured joke upon himself in the best of temper.”Footnote 60 Indeed, LeConte’s journal of the trip, published in 1875, included several passages that made fun of his propensity for turning ordinary experiences into “investigations.” At one point, he described the disappearance from camp of a bag of cheese and bacon as if it were a scientific conundrum. Although its cause would remain a mystery, he noted that “there are many hounds about the premises; this may furnish a key to the investigator.” He pushed the joke further with a footnote providing “an additional fact in favor of the hound theory.”Footnote 61
Through his willingness to make fun of himself and eschew standard hierarchies for the duration of the trip, LeConte found a mode of intellectual sociability that could evade, for a while, the status boundaries of academic professionalism that were so toxic to the university’s public image. The 1870 trip was only one in a long series of university camping expeditions that brought together students, faculty, and people with no academic affiliation – including painters, poets, tourists, and policymakers. Even though the total number of participants was small, the symbolic power of these trips allowed the university to position itself as a bulwark of rugged white manliness, where fears about neurasthenia at eastern universities could be put to rest. Explaining the expedition as a transitory community, LeConte wrote, “Our party is but a type of all earthly life; its elements gathered and organized for a brief space, full of enjoyment and adventure, but swiftly hastening to be again dissolved and returned to the common fund from which it was drawn.” The notion that the “elements” gathered around the campfire were drawn from a “common fund” was critical to the populist vision of the university that LeConte proposed to readers and listeners. Prioritizing social interactions above specialized research, LeConte expressed pleasure when the group’s conversations reached beyond his areas of expertise. LeConte described one evening in the valley: “After supper we lit cigarettes, gathered around the campfire, and conversed. Some question of the relative merits of novelists was started, and my opinion asked. By repeated questions I was led into quite a disquisition on art and literature, which lasted until bedtime. Before retiring, as usual, we piled huge logs on the camp-fire; then rolled ourselves in our blankets within reach of its warmth.” Here again, LeConte blurred bodily and intellectual experience, avoiding the specifics of his “disquisition on art and literature” in favor of details such as the maintenance of the fire, lighting of cigarettes, location of the conversation, and warmth of the blankets. The reader can feel, taste, and smell the scene. Elsewhere LeConte offered a glimpse into the bonding of the group through a series of nicknames, including “Kangaroo,” “Our Poet,” “Samson Nipper,” and LeConte’s nickname, “Don Quixote,” due to his being “long and lean and lantern-jawed, and in search of romantic adventure.”Footnote 62
Although his earliest camping trips gave rise to caricatures like that of Zanita, Yosemite became a critical site through which LeConte worked to cultivate the university’s reputation for public engagement beyond the classroom. He saw that the primary challenge facing the university was to demonstrate the public utility of its activities. Instead of speaking out against the corruption of university officials, which had cost Carr and Swinton their jobs, LeConte slowly built a network of allies outside the university through camping trips, clubs, public lectures, and other activities. But although he never spoke out against Gilman, neither was he drawn to the model of academic specialization that Gilman encouraged. Instead, LeConte’s published writings encompassed optics, philology, geology, zoology, evolutionary theory, religion, visual art, and more. His breadth of interests made him an ideal ambassador of the university to the general public in a time of widespread populism, where overspecialization was routinely condemned.
Such was the model of intellectual life that LeConte cultivated over the next three decades at Berkeley. He became an enthusiastic member of several discussion clubs that brought faculty together with students and people outside the academy.Footnote 63 His public engagement made him a beloved local celebrity who generated significant goodwill for the university. By the time of his death in Yosemite in 1901, newspapers across the region hailed him as a local luminary.Footnote 64 For many students, an expedition to Yosemite with LeConte became a highlight of their college experience. Among them was Charles Palache, an undergraduate in the late 1880s who wrote an autobiographical essay of his time at Berkeley that emphasized camping as the most significant aspect of his education. According to Palache, “The great event of my college years was the horse back trip to the High Sierra with Professor LeConte at the end of my 2nd college year.”Footnote 65 Although, as Palache put it, “I came back from it well experienced in roughing it and taking care of myself in the open,” he reported learning “next to nothing” of geology. That he would call such a trip “the great event” of his time at Berkeley was not simply a matter of prioritizing social life. Rather, the trip awakened Palache to the idea that research could be collaborative and was not simply a matter of solitary work in the laboratory or library. The expedition also made Palache a firm believer in the value of fieldwork as opposed to theory, a view that he eventually brought to his work as a professor of mineralogy.
LeConte’s writings similarly emphasized the social dimensions of camping as a form of experiential knowledge production. He argued that beauty, for example, was contingent on actually visiting a place and, even better, sharing the experience with others. Although a place might be “picturesque,” beauty had as much to do with smells, sounds, and fellowship as sight – and hence a terrible stench, for example, could tarnish even the most visually magnificent scenery. After one particularly stunning vista, LeConte blurred the lines between visual and gustatory experience. He explained, “From this feast I went immediately to another, consisting of excellent bread and such delicious mutton chops! If any restaurant in San Francisco could furnish such, I am sure it would quickly make a fortune. Some sentimentalists seem to think that these two feasts are incompatible; that the enjoyment of the beautiful is inconsistent with voracious appetite for mutton. I do not find it so.”Footnote 66 The metaphor of a “feast” figured visuality as something so visceral and intimate that it could be merged with the body like food. Elsewhere in his journal, he positioned ideas – not just beauty – as the product of embodied experience. Observation in a place like Yosemite was inextricable from the physical challenges of hiking and climbing.
By accepting experience as a form of knowledge, and by simultaneously embracing the scientific method, LeConte was able to contrast his work with the touristic culture of tall tales in which writers like Mark Twain, Olive Logan, and Ambrose Bierce had thrived. In this way, LeConte built a reputation for himself as a reliable narrator who was comfortable outside the classroom. In his journal, LeConte mocked the myths about Lake Tahoe – including the notion “that it is impossible to swim in it” due to “diminished atmospheric pressure” – that had been propagated by “newspaper scientists, and therefore not doubted by newspaper readers.” He did so not through reasoned argument, but by stripping his clothes and diving straight into the lake as soon as his party arrived, proving the rumors wrong through the evidence of experience. LeConte had nothing but scorn for an unnamed photographer who saw Yosemite as little more than a visual commodity. “We met here,” wrote LeConte, “at the foot of the fall, a real typical specimen of a live Yankee. He has, he says, a panorama of Yosemite, which he expects to exhibit in the Eastern cities. It is evident that he is ‘doing’ Yosemite only to get materials of lectures to accompany his exhibitions.”Footnote 67 This passage encapsulated LeConte’s strategy for distancing his work as a scientist from the more facile experiences offered by the tourism industry.Footnote 68
At the same time, LeConte’s description of the photographer as a “Yankee” was far from innocent, for the shadow side of his critique of “pure theory” was his nostalgia for a particular subject position: the antebellum gentleman scholar in the American South. LeConte grew up in a wealthy family in Georgia, and he enslaved over sixty people, showing no remorse for exploiting their labor and separating families.Footnote 69 After the Civil War, he used connections from his graduate training at Harvard to secure his position in California.Footnote 70 In 1892, LeConte wrote a tract on The Race Problem in the American South that underscored his lasting commitment to white supremacy, arguing that “the blacks as a whole are unworthy of the ballot” and praising what he called legitimate efforts “to diminish the incapable vote.”Footnote 71 LeConte’s views on racial hierarchy pervaded his writings; even a piece on “Domestic Ducks That Fly Abroad Like Pigeons” attributed the incomplete domestication of some ducks in the South to the idea that many “belonged to the negroes, and were tended with but little care.”Footnote 72 As he put it in a Popular Science Monthly article, “There is little doubt that the survival of the weak and helpless, and the sustentation of the unfit and the vicious, are beginning to poison the blood and paralyze the energy of the race.”Footnote 73 Far from marginalizing him, LeConte’s racist views endeared him to labor groups such as the Workingman’s Party of California, headed by Denis Kearney, which led the charge against Chinese immigration in the 1870s and 1880s.Footnote 74 Indeed, this common ground was central to the university’s ability to ward off populist attacks – a dynamic also recognized by David Starr Jordan of Stanford University, discussed below.
As a practitioner of the dying field of natural history, which prized descriptive breadth, LeConte aspired to holistic knowledge drawn from all five senses even as he accepted without question the validity of racial hierarchies. In the journal of his 1870 trip, LeConte wrote about the Indigenous inhabitants of Yosemite as if they were animals: “Several Indians visited us while at dinner. This is a favorite time for such visits. They know they will get something to eat.”Footnote 75 In other trips, he was accompanied by a Chinese cook, whom his daughter Emma described in her own Yosemite journal as “our little Chinaman.”Footnote 76 Comfortable with the jingoism of white working-class politics in California in the 1870s, LeConte saw no incompatibility between white supremacy and the promise of democratic education; he supported the policy of free tuition yet vigorously opposed integration. His sympathetic writings on the South received a response from none other than Jefferson Davis, who wrote, “I would be very pleased to receive the lecture of Prof. Joseph LeConte on ‘The South Revisited.’ I love the old South & all who cherish its meaning.”Footnote 77
The public outreach of figures like LeConte may have helped subtly shift the political landscape by the time of California’s Second Constitutional Convention in 1878–1879, thereby protecting the university from proposals to restructure the institution radically, and possibly even to abolish it.Footnote 78 As acting president ever since Gilman’s departure in 1875, John LeConte (Joseph’s brother) was asked to submit a report on behalf of the Regents justifying the university’s expenditures. His report emphasized free tuition, noting that the university was offering instruction “in all branches of culture and useful knowledge, free to all residents of California, both male and female.”Footnote 79 In addition, Eugene Hilgard – who replaced Carr as professor of agriculture – gave remarks to the convention on how the university’s agricultural activities were serving the needs of the farmers.Footnote 80 In a sharp contrast to Gilman’s presidency, such claims carried the day. The state constitution that emerged in 1879 included a provision protecting the independence of the University of California and affirming that it “shall constitute a public trust.” According to historian John Aubrey Douglass, the new constitution afforded the university an “unusual level of autonomy” compared to other states.Footnote 81
The People’s Classroom
The notion of the University of California as a “public trust” explicitly repudiated the controversial language in the Organic Act of 1868 that allowed the Regents to function as a “private trust.” It instead moved the university more closely in line with the emerging language of the conservation movement for places like Yosemite, which offered experiences and modes of sociability not possible within the institutional confines of the academy. Joseph LeConte, in particular, had challenged the caricature of the out-of-touch professor by casting Yosemite as a place where hierarchies between students and faculty could temporarily collapse. He offered numerous impromptu lectures in Yosemite despite operating wholly outside the infrastructure of courses, credits, and schedules. Among those who witnessed this activity was future president Herbert Hoover, then a student at Stanford University, who recalled his trip to Yosemite in his memoirs: “Professor Joseph LeConte was camped nearby, and I listened spellbound to his campfire talk on the geology of the Valley.”Footnote 82 LeConte’s lessons included formal lectures that he prepared in camp, in direct response to questions from fellow campers. At night, his companions asked him “many questions about stars and nebulae and spectrum analysis, and shooting-stars and meteoric stones, which led to quite a dissertation on these subjects.”Footnote 83 Such activities positioned Yosemite at the center of an ecological middlebrow culture, helping bridge the gap between the university and the general public.Footnote 84
The prospect of such a thaw was foreshadowed in Yelverton’s Zanita, which had used LeConte as the model for the fictional Professor Brown, the archetypal bumbling professor in California. When the novel’s young protagonist Zanita (Brown’s adopted daughter) is expelled from a day school in Oakland due to “determined insubordination,” the Professor’s neighbors begin to question his judgment. Indifferent to these whispers, the Professor grows increasingly fond of Zanita, taking “infinite amusement from her eccentricities.” Zanita, in turn, becomes “keenly alive even to the most abstruse of his conversations, and delighted him by her bright intelligence.” Far from getting angry, the Professor laughs when he learns that Zanita has been imitating him behind his back, “with a book in hand, a pair of scissors for an eye-glass, her feet crossed upon another chair, and her mouth puckered up,” as if absorbed in reading. By the time Zanita returns to Yosemite as a young woman, the central conflict of the novel – between Zanita and the Professor – has turned on its head, as Brown has become her strongest supporter. When Zanita and Mr. Egremont, her erstwhile lover, are found dead, and suspicion immediately falls on Zanita due to her reputation for jealousy, the Professor carefully analyzes the material evidence and determines that “a series of accidents” caused them both to slip and fall. By showing the value of his methodical outlook, the Professor modeled how LeConte and others would go about demonstrating that the university was serving the people of California through its educational and research mission.Footnote 85
Yosemite’s status as an example of public land held in trust was critical to its symbolic power for LeConte, allowing him (like Muir) to deftly position himself as sympathetic to the growing agitation against land monopolies.Footnote 86 In 1878, Denis Kearney cast the High Sierra as one of the few havens for white working people in California, stating, “The poor Laborer can find no resting place, save on the barren mountain, or in the trackless desert. Money monopoly has reached its grandest proportions. Here, in San Francisco, the palace of the millionaire looms up above the hovel of the starving poor with as wide a contrast as anywhere on earth.”Footnote 87 Likewise in Progress and Poverty, Henry George condemned the pernicious consequences of land monopoly in California, where disputes over land and corporate power were arguably more acute than anywhere else in the nation.Footnote 88 Among the reasons why the University of California evaded restructuring was that it avoided getting swept up in a struggle over land monopoly. The language of the 1879 Constitutional Convention had insulated the university, to an extent, from legislative interference, but it still required ongoing public support, since state appropriations remained its primary source of funding.
In 1890, the congressional land grant of Yosemite to the state of California was revoked with the establishment of Yosemite National Park under federal control. However, the scientific community in the Bay Area did not allow public perceptions of their stewardship role to slip away with this shift. Two years later, in 1892, LeConte and other members of the university community sought to reinforce the connection between Berkeley and Yosemite through the creation of a new organization: the Sierra Club. Muir served as president and remained its symbolic center of gravity, but the impetus for the club came largely from professors and students at the University of California.Footnote 89 LeConte was a charter member of the club along with several of his colleagues and students. The Sierra Club attracted members from several other clubs in Berkeley, including the Philosophical Union, Evolution Club, and Berkeley Club, each of which involved a combined educational and social mission and included members of the general public. In 1893, the Berkeleyan, a student newspaper, published a note urging students to join the new club, which “was originated by alumni and students of the University.”Footnote 90 The Sierra Club’s origins in the Bay Area scientific community help explain its push for treating Yosemite as a public classroom under the de facto stewardship of the region’s scientists. As historian Michael L. Smith has noted, Yosemite not only helped shape the “professional identities” of the region’s scientists, but also “served as a crucible for their political education.”Footnote 91
The formation of the Sierra Club also reflected another key development in the region: the establishment in 1885 of Stanford University, which was home to several charter members of the club, and which directly imitated the strategies of Berkeley professors in building public support. The actions of Stanford’s early leaders suggest that they recognized the important symbolism of Yosemite in the region’s educational imagination. Although technically a private university, the university’s tenuous finances required state intervention. In 1900, an amendment supporting Stanford University was added to the California Constitution with a 67 percent majority of the vote, thereby turning the university into “a quasi-public institution.”Footnote 92 In its early years, Stanford was beset with an array of problems, including what historian Richard White has called “a curriculum without rhyme or reason.”Footnote 93 Its president, David Starr Jordan, was a staunch advocate for eugenics who wrote in the Atlantic Monthly that “California is essentially a man’s state” with “an out-of-doors public opinion.”Footnote 94 A charter member of the Sierra Club, Jordan mimicked the efforts of Berkeley’s scientists to shake their reputation for elitism by clinging to Yosemite as a space of middlebrow intellectual exchange that could shore up anxieties about racial decline. The election results for the 1900 amendment, which saved the university from collapse, underscored the widespread support that Stanford had gained by the turn of the twentieth century.
While Stanford claimed the dividends of its “quasi-public” status, the University of California continued to face pressure to serve the public of a rapidly growing state. To meet this need, the university developed initiatives that could be beneficial for both the citizens and business interests of California. In the 1890s, the university rebranded its agricultural extension programs as “Farmers’ Institutes” in collaboration with agrarian populist leaders.Footnote 95 Another telling example was the university’s partnership with the Southern Pacific Railroad to operate agricultural demonstration trains in the early twentieth century. Recognizing their mutual public image challenges, the university and railroad joined together to operate blue-and-gold festooned trains – a “university on wheels” – between 1908 and 1912 that offered exhibits and lessons on scientific agriculture.Footnote 96 Even more significant in belatedly satisfying the spirit of the Morrill Act was the transformation of the University of California into a statewide system with the opening of an agricultural research station at Davis (1905), a citrus research station at Riverside (1907), and a biological research station at La Jolla (1912), which dramatically reduced pressure on the campus at Berkeley to satisfy all constituencies across the state.Footnote 97
A century later, the University of California again found itself under fire for accessibility, with skyrocketing costs of attendance and pressure to reserve more slots for in-state students. It also found itself under scrutiny as part of a national effort to address the legacy of racism in public spaces.Footnote 98 In 2020, the University of California chose to remove Joseph LeConte’s name from a building on campus, due to his service to the Confederacy and his advocacy of racist ideas.Footnote 99 Stanford followed suit by renaming campus spaces that had honored David Starr Jordan, a noted eugenicist. Although important and meaningful steps toward inclusivity, these maneuvers go back to the nineteenth century insofar as they generated positive press without making significant structural change. Renaming LeConte Hall has done little to mitigate the University of California’s inaccessibility, with the cost of attendance for the year 2025–2026 estimated to be $45,234 for in-state, on-campus students.Footnote 100 And while LeConte and Jordan have had their names removed from buildings, their most audacious markers of Gilded Age memorialization—University Peak (named after the University of California) and Mount Stanford (named after Stanford University)—still tower among the High Sierra.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks Katie Lennard, Frank Kelderman, Jay Cook, Philip Deloria, Kristin Hass, and the anonymous referees for their feedback and guidance.
