John Bascom and the Origins of the Wisconsin Idea by J. David Hoeveler (review)

Given the national and midwestern animosity to on-campus liberalism, a deep reassessment of that ideology's higher education roots feels urgent. Battles in Wisconsin between Governor Scott Walker and officials at his flagship campus in Madison, over funding, teaching load, tenure, and the institution's public service focus, underscore the relevance to the region. Perhaps a long look at that university's history can bring into focus core issues? In other words, a past-present dialogue about the roots of the "Wisconsin Idea" might be productive for present-day readers in terms of getting at the stakes in debates in recent controversies.

On way to think about the meaning of liberalism in relation to the Wisconsin Idea is to look at the biographies, backgrounds, and influences of university leaders. Like many midwestern universities, Wisconsin has had a number of influential and prominent presidents: Richard T. Ely, Charles Richard Van Hise, and others. Yet, when outsiders reflect on Wisconsin's leadership, John Bascom is not generally the first name that comes to mind. Yet, in the thirteen years he led the institution (1874–1887), argues J. David Hoeveler, Bascom changed entirely its trajectory. Bascom sowed the seeds of the Wisconsin Idea, which would make it a beacon of inspiration for the Progressive Era.

The Wisconsin Idea named, in essence, a particular kind of symbiotic relationship between a state and its public universities, or at least its flagship campus. This interactive, cooperative utilitarianism enabled innovative legislation, new efficiencies, and a greater profile for higher education. The state and its people benefitted immensely from its public institutions working together. Wisconsin pioneered this kind of relationship.

Hoeveler explores the deep roots of this cooperation in a new intellectual and historical biography, John Bascom and the Origins of the Wisconsin Idea. Therein Bascom is situated in a longer philosophical, ethical, and ideological trajectory. Bascom moved Wisconsin from a state institution working to implement the 1862 Morrill Act tenets to gloriously fulfilling an Americanized iteration of the German research model. Along the way he influenced his successors, Ely and Van Hise. Indeed, Hoeveler notes that it was a biographer of Van Hise—Maurice Vance, writing in 1960—who recognized the "large place" of Bascom in inspiring his subject (203). Hoeveler also realized, historiographically, that intellectual historians had "not generally appreciated" Bascom's work on sociology, and the philosophical idealism and moral philosophizing that stood behind his efforts, and how that work formed the foundation of his views of the university in society (93, 93n4). Bascom's "special achievement," to Hoeveler, was to synthesize German philosophical idealism, liberal Protestant theology, and evolutionary thought into a philosophy and practice of "institutional leadership" at the university (5–6).

Bascom acquired many of his social and political convictions before arriving in Wisconsin. At Williams College, as a student and later instructor, he began the process of giving his religious and philosophical ideas a "social application." There he also obtained "an agenda of economic and political reform" (19).

Those convictions appeared in relation to his liberal Protestant theology and contextual philosophical movements. Bascom first absorbed elements of Scottish "common sense" realism at Williams under his mentor, Mark Hopkins, but later embraced Kantian idealism and, eventually, the Hegelian dialectic. From Hegel, Bascom obtained an "interactive dualism, of matter and spirit." All our thinking, he believed, "involve[d] a constant interplay of facts and ideas," and intuitions, Hoeveler relays, that reach their "unifying source in God." In true progressive fashion, Bascom saw knowledge as growing over time, increasing by degrees and making "gains amid the flux and flow of life." Even if the universe was designed by a maker, that creation was not "fixed and controlled." The universe embodied "chance and change, seeming at times to be 'half-accidental, half-caused'." On top of those metaphysical convictions, Bascom also embraced science and Darwinian evolution as a verification, in Hoeveler's words, of "chance, growth, and progression." (12...