Current
(1) A history of the Science Studies program at the University of San Diego, California.
(2) The cultural production and reception of the 1925 Tennessee anti-evolution law. To what extent the law was just a symbolic protest.
Recent
Abstract
In the opening months of 1925 North Carolina was on the brink of becoming the first state in the union to formally outlaw the teaching of evolution in public schools. Instead, Tennessee famously claimed that honor. The success and therefore primacy of Tennessee over the failure and therefore obscurity of North Carolina raises an interesting historical problem—namely, how did this happen? Contemporaries recognized the important roles that Presidents Harry Chase of the University of North Carolina and Harcourt Morgan of the University of Tennessee played in each outcome. Here I examine the forces that led the two university presidents under consideration to pursue direct action or inaction, and the consequences thereof, in terms of their individual political situations and ideological commitments with respect to education. For example, President Chase’s commitment to an “open road to learning” implied a particular organizational relationship between the state and the university that was not taken for granted but had to be fought for and negotiated, while Morgan was more pragmatic than principled. Finally, I show how, in the case of North Carolina, latent informal networks of university alumni were activated to mobilize support among divided elites and how such networks of support seemed to be lacking in Tennessee.
