Wandering scholars? Academic mobility and the British World, 1850-1940

Journal of Historical Geography

Volumn 36, Issue 4, 2010, Pages 377-387

  Pietsch, Tamson ^a  

^a NEW COLLEGE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Australia; Britain; British Empire; British World; Canada; Migration; Mobility; Professors; Universities

Indexed keywords

ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE; EDUCATION; MIGRATION; MOBILITY; SETTLEMENT HISTORY; UNIVERSITY SECTOR;

AUSTRALIA; CANADA; ENGLAND; LONDON [ENGLAND]; UNITED KINGDOM;

EID: 78149406058     PISSN: 03057488     EISSN: 10958614     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/j.jhg.2010.03.002     Document Type: Article

References (69)

1. Quoted in E. Ashby, Community of Universities: An Informal Portrait of the Association of Universities of the British Commonwealth 1913-1963, London, 1988, original edition 1963, 22-23.
2. Symonds, Oxford and Empire: The Last Lost Cause? Hampshire and London, 1986, 274-276. See also Fleming, Science in Australia, Canada and the United States (note 9), x; E.T. Williams, The Rhodes Scholars, in: B. Harrison (Ed), The History of the University of Oxford, Vol. VII: Nineteenth Century Oxford, Part 2, Oxford, 1994, 717-726. The term 'brain drain' was coined by the Royal Society to highlight the migration of scientists from the UK to the US in the 1950s. Emigration of Scientists from the United Kingdom, London, 1963.
3. Auchmuty, The Idea of the University (note 9), 146; G. Blainey, The University of Melbourne: a Centenary Portrait, Melbourne, 1956, 34. Exceptions are S. Macintyre, History, the University and the Nation, London, 1992, 8 and F.B. Smith, Academics in and out of the Australian Dictionary of Biography, in: F.B. Smith, P. Crichton (Eds), Ideas for Histories of Universities in Australia, Canberra, 1990.
4. See L.J. Proudfoot and M.M. Roche, Introduction: place, network, and the geographies of empire, in: L.J. Proudfoot, M.M. Roche (Eds), (Dis)placing Empire: Renegotiating British Colonial Geographies, Aldershot, 2005, 1-15.
5. See especially P. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London, 1993; M. Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The 'Manly Englishman' and the 'Effeminate Bengali' in the Late Nineteenth Century, Manchester, 1995; A. Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915, Chapel Hill, 1995; C. Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, Oxford, 2002, 1830-1867.
6. C. Bridge and Fedorowich, Mapping the British World, in: C. Bridge, K. Fedorowich (Eds), The British World: Diaspora, Culture and Identity, London, 2003, 6.
7. See P.A. Buckner, R.D. Francis (Eds), Canada and the British World: Culture, Migration, and Identity, Vancouver, 2006 and the essays collected in Bridge, Fedorowich (Eds), The British World (note 14).
8. C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870, Cambridge, 1996; A. Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain, London, 2001; Z. Laidlaw, Colonial Connections 1815-45: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government, Manchester and New York, 2005; T. Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire, Hampshire and New York, 2002; S. Potter, News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System 1876-1922, Oxford, 2003.
9. S.J. Potter, Webs, networks and systems: globalization and the mass media in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century British empire, Journal of British Studies 46 (2007) 622.
10. D. Lambert and Lester, Introduction: imperial spaces, imperial subjects, in: D. Lambert, A. Lester (Eds), Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, 2006, 24.
11. M.J. Heffernan, A state scholarship: the political geography of French international science during the 19th century, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 19 (1994) 21-45; F. Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire, Oxford, 2001; K. Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe: Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries, Delhi, 2006, 21. See also P. Howell, Geographies of Regulation: Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the Empire, Cambridge, 2009.
12. Official Report of the Allied Colonial Universities Conference, The Empire Review 6, 31 (1903) 85.
13. K. Dean, Settler Physics in Australia and Cambridge, 1850-1950, Phd thesis, Cambridge, 2004, 1.
14. See, for example, H. Jöns, Academic mobility and collaboration across the Atlantic: experiences in the humanities and the social sciences, in: H. Foundation (Ed), What Factors Impact the Internationalization of Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences? Bonn, 2005; D. Epstein, R. Boden, R. Deem, F. Rizvi, S. Wright (Eds), Geographies of Knowledge, Geometries of Power: Future of Higher Education, New York and London, 2008; T. Kim, Shifting patterns of transnational academic mobility: a comparative and historical approach, Comparative Education 45 (2009) 387-403.
15. P.J. Taylor, M. Hoyler and D.M. Evans, A geohistorical study of 'the rise of modern science': mapping scientific practice through urban networks, 1500-1900, Minerva 46 (2008) 402.
16. Dean, Settler Physics in Australia and Cambridge (note 20).
17. H. Jöns, Academic travel from Cambridge University and the formation of centres of knowledge, 1885-1954, Journal of Historical Geography 34 (2008) 338-362. See also, H. Jöns, Transnational mobility and the spaces of knowledge production: a comparison of global patterns, motivations and collaborations in different academic fields, Social Geography 2 (2007) 97-114; M.J. Heffernan and H. Jöns, Degrees of influence: the politics of honorary degrees in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, 1900-2000, Minerva 45 (2007) 389-416.
18. Work is also emerging on the migration patterns of other professions. Marjory Harper, for example, has been undertaking a systematic study (not yet published) of the doctors who trained under Joseph Lister at the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh.
19. Official Report of the Allied Colonial Universities Conference (note 2), 109, 73.
20. Cooper and Stoler, Between metropole and colony: rethinking a research agenda, in: F. Cooper, A.L. Stoler (Eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, Berkeley and London, 1997, 15.
21. Halsey, Oxford and the British Universities (note 6), 575, 580.
22. H.B. Charlton, Portrait of a University: 1851-1951, Manchester, 1951, 34-35.
23. Official Report of the Allied Colonial Universities Conference (note 2), 101.
24. This was in contrast with the system in operation in Oxford and Cambridge where the title 'Professor' referred to the holders of endowed offices that did not entail teaching responsibilities or the power of patronage. It was also different to the situation in the United States where, rather than denoting seniority, the title indicated that its holder was pursuing an academic career generally.
25. C. Turney, U. Bygott and P. Chippendale, Australia's First: A History of the University of Sydney, Vol. I: 1850-1939, Sydney, 1991, Appendix 3, 639-641; Charlton, Portrait of a University(note 29), Appendix 7, 172-182.
26. Annals of Kings College Toronto, Toronto, 1850-51; University College Toronto Calendar, Toronto, 1856-57, 1868-69, 1877-78; Calendar of the University of Toronto, Toronto, 1887-88, 1891-92, 1908-09, 1918-19; University and University College Calendar, Toronto, 1898-99; University of Toronto Directory, Toronto, 1928-29.
27. Sources used include: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Bright Sparcs website, Who's Who, Australia, Canadian Dictionary of Biography Online, Who's Who in Canada, Nature, Obituaries of Fellows of the Royal Society.
28. With the exception of the 1850-1880 period in Toronto, I was unable to find information for less than 10% of the total number of appointments in each period. In this period I was unable to fully account for 12.5% of new professors.
29. B. Bekhradnia and T. Sastry, Migration of Academic Staff to and from the UK, Higher Education Policy Institute Report, London, 2005.
30. The University of Toronto opened matriculation to women in 1877, permitting them to sit for degrees in 1884, while at Sydney women were first admitted as undergraduates in 1881. In 1932, the percentage of professors who were women in Australian universities was zero. In Canada it was under 1%. Britain, New Zealand and South Africa were marginally higher at 1.5%, 3.8% and 1.4% respectively. F. Perrone, Women academics in England, 1870-1930, History of Universities 12 (1993) 339-367.
31. Academic men also sometimes married their students or assistants; an event that could both aid and abort a woman's academic prospects. At Cambridge, for example, J.J. Thompson, Director of the Cavendish Laboratories 1884-1919, married Rose Paget, daughter of the Regius Professor of Physics and one of the first female researchers in the Laboratory.
32. Recent works addressing the impact of mobility on the shaping of these disciplines include: S.R. Rajan, Modernizing Nature: Forestry and Imperial Eco-Development, 1800-1950, Oxford, 2006; J. Endersby, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science, Chicago, Ill., 2008; Driver, Geography Militant (note 19).
33. Arthur Balfour at the Conference dinner, Official Report of the Allied Colonial Universities Conference, The Empire Review 6, 31 (1903) 109.
34. James Bryce and F.H. Chase in Official Report of the Allied Colonial Universities Conference, The Empire Review 6, 31 (1903) 74, 78.
35. Official Report of the Allied Colonial Universities Conference (note 2), 77, 79.
36. The term 'native' was used at the time to differentiate those settlers who were colonial-born from those who had emigrated from Britain.
37. M.L. Friedland, The University of Toronto: A History, Toronto and London, 2002, 235.
38. See P. Morison, J.T. Wilson and the Fraternity of Duckmaloi, Amsterdam Atlanta, 1991, 325.
39. J. Horne and G. Sherington, Extending the Educational Franchise: the Social Contract of Australia's Public Universities 1850-1890, Parallel Paper Session A, International Standing Conference for the History of Education, 2008.
40. P. Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair, New Haven, 2006; P. Mandler, What is national identity? Definitions and applications in modern British historiography, Modern Intellectual History 3 (2006) 271-297.
41. For Manchester this means English.
42. Official Report of the Allied Colonial Universities Conference (note 2), 75.
43. Official Report of the Allied Colonial Universities Conference (note 2), 82.
44. Official Report of the Allied Colonial Universities Conference (note 2), 87.
45. See R.A. Dallen, The University of Sydney: Its History and Progress, Sydney, 1925; J.C. Beaglehole, The University of New Zealand: an Historical Study, Auckland, 1937, esp. viii-ix; The University of Toronto: A Brief Outline of Its History and Its Administration, Toronto, 1924.
46. James Bryce and W. Peterson in Official Report of the Allied Colonial Universities Conference, The Empire Review 6, 31 (1903) 77, 83.
47. Halsey, Oxford and the British Universities (note 6), 592.
48. A. Hill (Ed), Congress of the Universities of the Empire, 1912: Report of Proceedings, London, 1912, 70.
49. Hill (Ed), Congress of the Universities of the Empire, 1912 (note 52), 368. James Cappon, who graduated from Glasgow University with an MA in 1879, taught in Europe and Great Britain before he was appointed Professor of English at Queen's University Ontario, in 1888.
50. Hill (Ed), Congress of the Universities of the Empire, 1912 (note 52), 59. Frank Allen was appointed Professor of Physics at the University of Manitoba in 1904. He was born in New Brunswick and completed his PhD at Cornell University.
51. Between 1920 and 1946, of 538 DPhils awarded at Oxford, 113 went to students from the Dominions (279 went to British students and 85 to American students). At Cambridge during the same period, out of a total of 1104 PhDs, 204 went to students from the Dominions and 757 and 60 to British and American students, respectively. F. Aydelotte, The Vision of Cecil Rhodes, London, 1946, 61.
52. (of 18) new appointments at Sydney during this period had Scottish experience, seven of whom were Scottish-born.
53. The first British doctoral students enrolled at Oxford in 1917 and were awarded their D.Phil degrees in 1920. See R. Simpson, How the PhD Came to Britain, Guilford, 1983, 135.
54. British academics did not generally train in the United States, where doctoral degrees were available since Yale imported the model from Germany in 1861.
55. See Simpson, How the PhD Came to Britain (note 57).
56. Colonial universities do not figure in any of the major studies of British academia: A.H. Halsey and M.A. Trow, The British Academics, London, 1971; A.H. Halsey, Oxford and the British Universities, in: B. Harrison (Ed), The History of the University of Oxford, Vol. 8: The Twentieth Century, Oxford, 1994, 577-606; A.H. Halsey, Decline of Donnish Dominion, Oxford, 1995; S. Rothblatt, The Revolution of the Dons: Cambridge and Society in Victorian England, London, 1963.
57. The destruction of the war must also have played a part in re-orientating students away from Germany and towards Britain.
58. One other professor, the foundation Professor of Mathematics and Philosophy, Morris Birkbeck Pell, was born in Illinois; the grandson of an English social reformer and founder of the prairie settlement of Albion, he returned to England with his mother following the separation of his parents at age 7 and attended school and university in England.
59. Those who had United States experience were the Professors of Botany (2), Engineering, Anthropology, Economics, Public Administration, Psychiatry and Physiology and Bacteriology.
60. Average number of international moves per professor: 1850-80 - Sydney: 1.71; Toronto: 1.81; Manchester: 0.9; 1881-1900 - Sydney: 1.86; Toronto: 2.19; Manchester: 1.22; 1901-18 - Sydney: 1.83; Toronto: 1.57; Manchester: 1.7; 1919-30 - Sydney: 2.5; Toronto: 1.5; Manchester: 1.25; 1930-40 - Sydney: 2; Manchester: 1.82.
61. Fleming, Science in Australia, Canada and the United States (note 9), 183-184; Auchmuty, The Idea of the University (note 9), 146; Blainey, The University of Melbourne (note 11), 34.
62. A recent study by Heike Jöns also suggests that mobility can work to connect rather than isolate national academic communities: 'Brain circulation' and transnational knowledge networks: studying long-term effects of academic mobility to Germany, 1954-2000, Global Networks 9 (2009) 315-338.
63. Rutherford, for example, while at McGill, made a number of visits to the United States.
64. Manchester in the period 1880-1900 is a noted exception.
65. F.H. Chase, Official Report of the Allied Colonial Universities Conference, The Empire Review 6, 31 (1903) 71.
66. On the extent and nature of the 'British academic world' see T. Pietsch, Universities and Empire: Academic Networks in a British World, 1850-1940, Manchester, forthcoming.
67. See E. Ashby, Universities: British, Indian, African, London, 1966; D. Nicol, Politics, nationalism and universities in Africa, African Affairs 62, 246 (1963) 20-28; J.M. Fletcher, The universities in the age of western expansion. The colonial factor in research and higher education: Leiden, 27-29 September 1991, History of Universities 11 (1992) 268-269.
68. In the settlement colonies, argued Cole, what 'nation' meant was deeply problematic. D. Cole, The problem of "Nationalism" and "Imperialism", in British settlement colonies, The Journal of British Studies 10, 2 (1971) 160-182. This bind was the subject in 1971 of the Frank Gerstein Lectures held at York University in Toronto. See E.V. Rostow, J. Harney, A. Côté and E. Sirluck, Nationalism and the University, Toronto, 1973.
69. See D. Fleming, Science in Australia, Canada and the United States: some comparative remarks, in: Proceedings of the Tenth International Congress of the History of Science, Paris, 1964, x; J.J. Auchmuty, The Idea of the University in its Australian Setting, Melbourne, 1963, 164-165; W.J. Gardner, Colonial Cap and Gown: Studies in the Mid-Victorian Universities of Australasia, Christchurch, 1979, 10; Gardner quoted R.J.W. Selleck, The Shop: the University of Melbourne 1850-1939, Melbourne, 2003, 26.