William Barton Rogers and the Idea of MIT (review)

A. J. Angulo, assistant professor of social foundations at Winthrop University, has written a biography of William Barton Rogers, the natural scientist and educational reformer who founded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in April 1861. The first book-length biography of Rogers since his wife Emma Savage’s Life and Letters . . ., Angulo’s study traces Rogers’s professional life from the end of his undergraduate study at the College of William and Mary to his sudden death at the podium during his commencement address at MIT in May 1882.

Based on extensive archival research in Rogers’s papers and the MIT Archives, among other collections, Angulo’s book is equal parts biography of Rogers and biography of the useful arts ideal that undergirded Rogers’s founding vision for MIT. The useful arts ideal as Angulo defines it is Rogers’s dual epistemological commitment to—and unified educational vision of—both theory and practice. Angulo’s main thematic concerns are Rogers’s field-based and theoretical work in the geological sciences, his role in the institutionalization and professionalization of science in the nineteenth-century United States, and his goals as an educational reformer in Virginia and Massachusetts. The book is structured around these three themes, which roughly follow the historical trajectory of Rogers’s career.

The first chapter, “An Uncertain Future,” begins in 1825 with Rogers’s first foray into higher education and scientific study as an instructor at the Maryland Institute. It depicts the uncertain fortunes of the Rogers family, with William’s father Patrick Kerr Rogers, a professor of chemistry and natural philosophy at William and Mary, straining against the intellectual and cultural isolation he found in small-town Williamsburg, as did his four sons, future scientists all.

When Patrick Rogers died in August 1828, William accepted his father’s professorship at William and Mary, where he remained for the next seven years. Chapter 2, “Tenure in the Tumult,” chronicles Rogers’s political education as he endured persistent student violence and what he termed “‘illiberalism’” at William and Mary, oversaw the state’s first geological survey (1835–1842), and took up a professorship in natural philosophy at the University of Virginia, where also served as chairman (1844–1845) (19). There Rogers again contended with violent student uprisings against an international faculty and with a state legislature that sought (unsuccessfully) to revoke the university’s funding. Rogers tendered his letter of resignation in 1848 but didn’t leave UVA until five years later, when he moved to Massachusetts with his wife, Emma Savage.

The third chapter, “From Soils to Species,” argues that Rogers’s state survey work embodied the useful arts ideal: It yielded a scientific model that integrated Baconian collection and induction with broader analysis of what Humboldt termed “‘the great and constant laws of nature’” (32). In this intriguing chapter, Angulo charts “Rogers’s mission to strike a balance in advancing both practical and theoretical knowledge” throughout his scientific career—from his geological field observations and subsequent laboratory testing, to his original theories and numbering systems for rock formation, and finally, to his six public debates with Louis Agassiz over evolutionary theory in the years immediately after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in November 1859 (33).

In his section on the evolutionary debates, Angulo depicts Rogers as a more effective critic of Agassiz than botanist Asa Gray and ultimately credits Rogers with “influenc[ing] the reception of Darwin in ways that Gray could not” (51). Angulo attributes Rogers’s efficacy as a public spokesman for evolution—and his ability to counter Agassiz’s dismissal of Darwinism as “‘fanciful theory’”—to his field experience in the Virginia geological survey as well as his theoretical endeavors in mountain formation and natural philosophy more generally (53).

Chapter 4, “Advancing and Diffusing,” appraises Rogers’s role in the professionalization of American science. Angulo focuses in particular on a “crisis” in the American Association of...