Colleges, Colleagues, and Cowley: An Essay Review

The Review of Higher Education Fall 1980, Volume 4, No. 1 Pages 33 to 38 Copyright © 1980 Association for the Study of Higher Education All Rights Reserved COLLEGES, COLLEAGUES, AND COWLEY: AN ESSAY REVIEW John R. Thelin* W. H. Cowley, Presidents, Professors, and Trustees: The Evolution of American Academic Government (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1980) xviii + 260 pages, $15.95. Edited by Donald T. Williams, Jr. Disagreements among presidential economic advisors led one journalist to complain, “ If all the economists were placed from end to end, they could not reach a conclusion.” A happier version for higher education is that all of W. H. Cowley’s disciples placed over the map have, indeed, made a difference in the way we work in and think about colleges and universities. Cowley (1899-1978) hardly was inconspicuous. He was a college presi­ dent, a university professor, and a member of several national commissions. Yet he was not center stage in the style of a William Rainey Harper or a Robert Maynard Hutchins. In fact, Cowley opted out of that role in 1945 when he turned down an offer to be the president of the University of Minnesota. His reputation was acquired as a scholarly analyst, yet even here he remains a bit elusive. One searches in vain for some pivotal report which assured his public standing at an early age, some sign that he was a successor to Abraham Flexner. What one finds is that his projects and writings were scattered, hardly a frontal attack on higher education problems. The test is that if you probe a campus, you are likely to find a Cowley cult—informal clusters of professors, deans, or presidents who attest to the *Assistant Director, Association of Independent California Colleges and Univer­ sities. 33 34 The Review of Higher Education import of Cowley’s insights on the study of higher education. On closer inspection, the consensus of praise breaks down: each enthusiast seems to have “discovered” Cowley through a different source or incident. For one, it was an article which Cowley wrote in 1939 for a professional journal; for another, it was his public lecture series in 1961. He was, of course, mentor to many graduate students at Stanford from 1954 to 1978. Less obvious are the sundry accounts of scholars not enrolled at Stanford who wrote or talked with him, well illustrated by the example of a Yale doctoral student of the 1970s who made a pilgrimage from New Haven to Palo Alto to discuss college-state relations, even though Cowley had formally retired. As for myself, I first stumbled on to Cowley’s controversial writings in the Dartmouth archives where, quite by accident, I read his lively columns from the 1920s when he was student editor of the college newspaper. Ironically, the bond among disparate cult members was a book that was yet to be written. Each Cowley enthusiast I met over the years eventually brought into conversation the question, ‘‘When is the book going to be finished?’’ His aggregate studies and total vision had not been presented as a comprehensive, polished work. Well, the book is published now.Presidents, Professors, and Trustees: The Evolution ofAmerican Academic Government stands as an essay, an attempt, to fit together almost a half-century of Cowley’s investigations. The tempta­ tion is to say that the book has been well worth the long wait. This is not so, since it was not published until two years after Cowley’s death at age seventy-nine. That it was published at all is remarkable, thanks to the work of editor Donald T. Williams, Jr., a former Cowley student and now a professor at the University of Washington. Why Cowley waited so long to submit the manuscript is unknown to me. Whether by accident or design, one of his legacies is that we are left to argue among ourselves the issues and data he crafted. The book is a magnum opus without pretending to be the final word. Topical History: Setting the Records Straight The genius of Professors, Presidents, and Trustees was Cowley’s an­ noyance with academic folklore. In 1938, for example, he listened patiently to the valedictory address of the president...