"Anthropology at Chicago" by George W. Stocking, Jr.

Case 4: Anthropology at Harper's University

By 1890, anthropology was beginning to find a niche in the system of graduate education then emerging under the influence of German academic traditions. In 1888, the newly founded journal of the anthropological society organized by government anthropologists in Washington announced the world's first doctorate in the subject - at a German university. The next year, anthropology was introduced at Clark University when Franz Boas was appointed Docent in the psychology department. Before leaving in 1892 to take charge of anthropological work at the Chicago Columbian Exposition, Boas trained the first American Ph.D. at Clark. However, for a discipline still largely based on the collection of skeletal material, archaeological remains, and items of material culture, the most likely institutional milieu was one connected to a museum - as the Bureau of Ethnology was tied to the Smithsonian Institution. Such a connection existed at Harvard University, where Frederick W. Putnam had long been in charge of anthropological work at the Peabody Museum. With the reorganization of its academic structure in 1890, Harvard soon became one of the two major producers of doctorates in anthropology. The other was Columbia, where Boas was hired in 1896, when he also accepted a position as anthropological curator at the American Museum of Natural History.

When William Rainey Harper accepted the challenge of converting Rockefeller millions into a major university in the Midwest, one of his first acts was to appoint an anthropologist. Rather than reflecting a clearly defined sense of the role of anthropology in the University, Harper's choice seems to have been the result of personal association. Frederick Starr had been registrar at the summer school in Chautauqua, New York, where Harper served as principal. Although Starr was an effective popular lecturer in anthropology and had just undertaken a year's postgraduate work in anthropologically-related topics at Yale, the doctorate granted him by his undergraduate alma mater (Lafayette) was honorary, and his scientific experience was primarily in geology.

Stan's appointment was originally in the "scientific department," but when the University opened, other arrangements had been made. Harper had committed himself to the development of "social science" (or sociology) under Albion W. Small. Having second thoughts about how much of the University's limited resources should be committed to anthropology, Harper decided for the time being to include Starr's work within Small's department. Given the rather marginal position anthropology held between the natural historical and social theoretical traditions, it was not an unjustifiable choice. But in this period the more typical connection, as Starr insisted, would have been with the natural sciences. He certainly would have rejected Small's suggestion that anthropology was to sociology as arithmetic was to mathematics. Despite Starr's insistence that the connection was to be only temporary, and that his position was in no sense subordinate, Harper's judgment of administrative convenience was to have important consequences for the history of anthropology at Chicago.

Starr's situation was further complicated by the failure of hopes he shared with Harper that the University might include a major museum of natural history, in which anthropology would have found what was then a more normal institutional home. Although Harper made an attempt to attach to the University the new museum planned to house the exhibits from the Columbian Exposition, his efforts were frustrated. The intended museum building, which was donated by a University trustee, George C. Walker, did receive certain anthropological collections, but the main body of the Exposition's anthropological materials went to the new Field Columbian Museum. To Walker's irritation, the building bearing his name was used primarily for faculty offices and classroom space. Given the rather traditional orientation of Starr's anthropology, his institutional situation was unpromising; a natural scientist by training, he was attached to what was to become the nation's premier department of sociology; a museum anthropologist in style, he was deprived of an effective working relationship to a museum of natural history.

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