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November 17, 1999 Stanford Professor Created
By Bess Keller
When a former student and colleague sought an affectionate nickname for Ellwood P. Cubberley, the Stanford University professor who would become one of the century's most influential educators, the young man chose "Dad." The name stuck, and from about 1903 to his retirement in 1933, "Dad" was how Cubberley was known to his students. The teacher and scholar had no children of his own, but he fostered the careers
of two generations
of school administrators. Cubberley, in fact, helped create the profession. In
large part as a
result of his work, school administration parted ways with teaching, growing
into a separate field
with its own conventions and body of knowledge.
Cubberley, the founding father of a profession,
was paternal in other senses, too. Though hardly remarked on in his day, his
views were riddled
with assumptions about the natural superiority of men like himself—white, Anglo-
Saxon,
native-born—and the American society they had shaped. In practical terms, the
reforms he and his
circle spurred helped ensure that women would largely remain the workers in a
system managed by
men. Born just after the Civil War in the tiny town of Andrews, Ind., the
future leader attended
the local public schools and helped out at his father's drugstore. Because his
high school lacked a
year of the required four for admission to college, Cubberley completed a
college-preparatory
program at Purdue University. He was cool to his father's plan that he
attend the pharmacy
school
there, but it was not until he heard David Starr Jordan, the president of
Indiana University,
lecture on "The Value of Higher Education" that he set his own course.
Cubberley entered Indiana
University with Jordan as his adviser. During his senior year, Cubberley ran
the stereopticon
lantern that often enlivened Jordan's public lectures. Handsome, friendly, and
hard-working, the
physics major made a good impression. After a year's interruption to teach
at a one-room school
near his hometown, he earned his degree in 1891. Jordan successfully
recommended him for a science
teaching position at a small Baptist college and a little later for a similar
position at Vincennes
University, also in Indiana. After two years as a professor there, at the
age of 25, Cubberley
was named president of the institution. In 1896, once again thanks to his
mentor Jordan, the
young
college president moved up to become the superintendent of the San Diego public
schools. Probably
without knowing it at the time and still thinking of himself as a scientist
with a particular
interest in geology, Cubberley not only changed jobs, he also changed the focus
of his professional
life from then on. His two-year tenure in the
California district
was not smooth, and it left the former college president with a strong
sentiment against
"politicized" school boards and elected school officials. Already an
enthusiastic student of
biological
evolution, Cubberley concluded that a similar process was at work socially. The
existing social
order was therefore the product of an objective process that weeded out
maladaptive arrangements.
Further, in the face of massive immigration and labor unrest, the urgent
mission of the schools was
to win the day for solidarity and the American way of life while preparing
individuals for their
differing destinies by class. Reflecting the temper of the times, Cubberley
was also enamored
of
"business efficiency." He believed that the best way to achieve efficiency in
education, as in
business, was by building a multilayered organization headed by
experts. "Cubberley had an
intensely hierarchical view of leadership,'' with little room for
decisionmaking by teachers, write
David B. Tyack and Elizabeth Hansot in their comprehensive 1982 account of
public school
leadership,
Managers of Virtue. Craving a wider scope for his talents, Cubberley
in 1898 accepted an
appointment to Stanford University, which was then headed by his old mentor,
Jordan. Though he had
never taken an education class and had no advanced degree, Cubberley became the
second professor in
the new education department, with orders to make the field respectable or face
closing up shop.
The energetic and organized Cubberley not only saved the department, he also
remade himself into
a fit head for it, earning master's and doctoral degrees at Teachers College,
Columbia University,
during leaves from Stanford. At the same time, he began to formulate a program
for the
"scientific''
study of school administration and met other educators who were to form his
intellectual
circle. Entrenched school bureaucracies and
the "tracking" of
students in
high schools have their roots in the successes of Cubberley and other members
of the informal
network of academics, foundation leaders, and urban school superintendents that
held the greatest
sway in American education from about 1910 to 1930. Like Cubberley, many of
them attended graduate
school at Teachers College in the early years of the century. In time,
Cubberley became a
renowned author and consultant, carrying his message of social improvement to
the nation. In the
midst of public lectures, teaching, and scholarship, he found the time to
propose and edit the
first
widely used series of textbooks in education—106 of them, 10 written by
Cubberley himself. And
he
published in 1919 what for many years was the standard history of American
education, Public
Education in the United States. In California, "Dad" Cubberley's
influence was widespread.
Eventually stepping up to dean of the education school at Stanford, he advised
on professional and
policy matters related to education, and he helped dozens of graduates find
jobs through his
personal connections—a power one observer likened to that of New York City's
Tammany Hall
politicians. Much of that activity was profitable, and Cubberley invested
well. He enjoyed a
comfortable life with his wife, Helen, provided for her after his death in
1941, and in the end
gave
more than $360,000 to his beloved Stanford University for a new building to
house the school of
education. The leadership ideal that Cubberley held and embodied was, in
Tyack and Hansot's term,
"an educational Teddy Roosevelt''—charging up the San Juan Hill of ignorance
one minute, gracious
to
women, children, and subordinates in the next. The image, however, cannot
comfortably stretch to
cover non-European men, or lay people, or women, and the dean led the way in
disparaging the very
electoral processes that were most likely to bring outsiders to the
decisionmaking table.
Cubberley's influence was profound for a half-century, but by the 1970s, his
outlook and many of
his ideals seemed hopelessly outdated and undemocratic. What the education
historian Lawrence A.
Cremin called the "wonderful world'' of Ellwood P. Cubberley had dimmed at
last.
Read about the history of Stanford's school of education.
© 1999 Editorial Projects in Education |
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