What Happened to the "International Mind" Movements? 1930s Curricular Reform and 1940s Gatekeeping in Elite American Universities

• In Event: 44.035 - Historical Perspectives on Critical Internationalization

Abstract

This paper examines the reaction from elite American universities -- namely Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale --- to the "international mind" movements in the 1930s. After World War I, American reformers and their counterparts abroad called for a "new curriculum" which would be comparative and international in scope. They revised textbooks and sought to reshape American education toward "world citizenship." Intersecting with the progressive and intercultural education movements, the "international mind" movements were popular at U. S. state universities such as Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan, as well as at small progressive colleges. Advocates imagined a radical departure from academic tradition, discarding disciplines in favor of "problems"-based curricula, practical courses, and intercultural experiences on and off campus. In the 1940s, however, conservatives launched an assault against these efforts. The history of conservative backlash against these reforms is fairly well known (Montalto, 1982; Banks, 2005; Hartman, 2008; Selig, 2008; Burkholder, 2011). What is less known, though, is how elite American universities also coordinated together in the '40s to stop reforms at the gates. These coordinated efforts involved the presidents of the universities as well as trustees. This paper, based on a dissertation, looks at how elite institutions took ideas from the international mind movements and reshaped them for their own purposes, seeking to permanently banish all "foreign" philosophies from American education.
Historians and scholars have recently devoted scholarship to the international mind and intercultural education movements of the '20s and '30s (Fischer, 2008; Goodman, 2012; Wegener, 2015; Osborne, 2016). Most of this scholarship, however, focuses on internal disagreements, world affairs, or conservative backlash as "stopping" the movements. Instead, I look at how the movements were consciously reshaped by elites, so that many of the features became associated with elite institutions and power rather than with state universities and popular reform. Subsequent internationalization in American universities has since had a conservative and timid edge.
To examine these coordinated efforts, I utilize archival sources at Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. I look at letters, committee meetings, and internal documents. In general, I have avoided the common textual approach of analyzing major educational theorists, such as John Dewey. Instead, I explore the everyday, quotidian texture of academic life: the politics of knowledge as arguments for control played out in committees and faculty meetings.
The paper begins by giving an overview of the international mind, progressive education, and intercultural education movements of the '30s. It then looks at a secret society originating at Princeton in 1932 explicitly organized to stop such movements. Moving briefly to similar efforts at Yale and Dartmouth, it concludes by looking at the efforts of Harvard president James Bryant Conant to stop the movements in their tracks. Conant took over the "Harvard Committee" which produced the 1945 book General Education in a Free Society, changing the document from a manifesto of the "international mind" to an Anglo-American, Protestant theory of knowledge. This paper seeks to shift our understanding of the early history of internationalization in the U.S. by pointing out that it began on the heels of reaction.

Author

• Bryan McAllister-Grande, Harvard University