Jordan, Cornell, Indiana, Stanford: Some Connections
All systems of connection, I should warn you, start in odd places. My own connection with this story begins long before I moved my laboratory into the other Jordan Hall, two thousand miles west of here -- and longer still before either of my daughters was old enough to be enrolled in David Starr Jordan Junior High School in Palo Alto. It begins, I think, in the summer of 1953, in a small boat navigating rather uncertainly through a fog on Buzzards Bay off Cape Cod.
The pilot was Donald R. Griffin, then a professor of Biology at Cornell. The passenger list included an assortment of graduate students and others with a common interest in animal behavior and physiology, and a shared susceptibility to the lure of Don Griffin's often rather harrowing expeditionary schemes. Our goal was a small island at the end of the Elizabeth chain, and there we intended to trap terns, take them inland, and release them to see whether they could get home. What I remember best about the trip was a growing uncertainty, out there in the fog, that we could get home.
Later the sun broke through and we made our landfall on a lonely, rubble-strewn island that contained the nests of thousands of circling, screaming terns. A group of ruined buildings in the middle added to the impression of desolation. This chunk of terminal moraine, deposited by some glacier off the base of Cape Cod, looked as though it might once have been a bombing range -- and indeed it had been.
We trapped our birds, explored a little, had lunch, and headed back for Woods Hole. A dozen resentful terns were put into light-tight boxes with internal illumination that could be timed to give them an artificial day shifted in phase from the real one, so that we could evaluate whether they were using sun navigation. Then we drove them north in an old station wagon and, in a bad-weather oddessy though New Hampshire and Vermont, we released them from one small-town airport after another. Our routine was to set each bird loose and to have two widely-spaced observers follow it throught binoculars mounted on alidades; in that way the final heading could be approximated by triangulation. The results were surprising only if you were as bound up in the preliminary hypotheses as we were. From a tern's point of view they made perfect sense. Irrespective of internal "time" or location, they flew southeast. If you nest on the New England coast and you are lost inland over unfamiliar territory. That is exactly what you ought to do.
The other explorers dropped out in Boston toward the end of this exercise and I found myself alone with Don Griffin driving southeast, of course -- on route 28. It was a great opportunity, Griffin was on his way from Cornell to Harvard, where I was a first-year graduate student in the process of converting from animal behavior to ecology. He had developed an extraordinary reputation for his work on echolocation in bats and on the migratory navigation of birds; in the previous year he had brought Karl von Frisch from Munich to Cornell to describe, in the Messenger lectures, his new experiments on homing and communication in honeybees. Griffin and I talked that night about the puzzle the terns had given us, and then about behavior and physiology more generally. I remember an explanation of the cochlear microphonic potentials, with a crude diagram drawn on a dusty dashboard. I suppose that was a scientific watershed for me; in any event I later became Griffin's graduate student, and went into caves with him after bats and released other birds in other places. The tradition of research on animal navigation is still alive and well at Cornell, where the late William Keeton and his group have analyzed the role of magnetic field detection and other sensory abilities in the homing performance of racing pigeons. Griffin later took the same tradition from Harvard to Rockefeller University.
In another part of the conversation that evening, I learned a little more about the island on which we had collected our experimental subjects. The most remote and uninhabited member of the Elizabeth Islands, it was named Penikese; and eight years before our trip it had played a brief but extraordinary role in the history of American biology. There Louis Aggasiz, Professor of Zoology at Harvard, had begun a Summer School of Science, in which he tested his conviction that the only way to teach natural history effectively was to bring a selected group of students face-to-face with the material under expert guidance. There were a few buildings on the island, including an unfinished dormitory, and some sheep. To this remote site, a little ferry steamer brought fifty selected students over from New Bedford early in the summer of 1873. They had been selected from several hundred applicants, and included college teachers, school principals, and a few "beginners." Agassiz quickly got them to press beyond the names of things, in which their previous teachers had been chiefly interested, to a deeper intimacy of understanding. He would lecture; but he also made students confront an organism or a problem and wrestle with it until they had gotten beneath superficial description. His impact upon the students at the Anderson School -- named for the New York merchant who loaned the island and paid for the experiment -- was profound. But the experiment survived only for a single season; Agassiz died in the winter before the second session of 1874 was due to start. Of the experience at Penikese, one of the students later wrote: "......the school with the most extended influence on scientific teaching America was held in an old barn on a little offshore island. It lasted only a few months, and it had virtually but one teacher. When he died, it vanished!"
The student who wrote that knew something of barns, and something of good teaching. By the time David Starr Jordan disembarked on Penikese in the summer of 1873, he had already been once an academic pioneer. After a brief encounter with high school teaching, in which he functioned more in keeping order than in instruction, he exchanged his own upstate New York hill farm for that of Ezra Cornell. There an important educational experiment was under way. Under the leadership of Andrew Dickson White. Cornell was developing a new concept of academic democracy, in which many courses of study, including training in the practical arts, were thought respectable as long as they were pursued with energy and rigor. The elective system installed by White gave Jordan a chance to indulge a broad taste for liberal culture while preparing himself for a career in natural history. And the personal influence of White, only thirty-six and able to relate in a comfortable and informal way with students, left a significant mark. So did the kind of associations students formed to contend with life in a raw, new institution in a small town. A "boarding club" organized by Jordan and some contemporaries interested in natural history -- ten years after Darwin's publication of the Origin of Life -- was called the "Struggle for Existence." Today's students might assume it was a rock band, but they would understand perfectly that Jordan and his contemporaries always referred to it as the "Strug."
After graduation from Cornell but before his summer at Penikese Jordan had put in a brief, unhappy year as a teacher of natural history at Lombard college, a conservative universalist institution in Galesburg. Illinois. His Cornell progressivism had gone down poorly there, and he must have been especially ready to affiliate himself with another great man, and in many ways Agassiz and White were alike. Both believed in the value of hands-on academic work: "Study Nature, Not Books," the motto Agassiz loved and that his bereaved students had hung on the wall after his death at Penikese (to be taken later to the marine biological laboratory in Woods Hole by Jordan's own student Eigenmann) would fit comfortably on the Cornell seal beneath "I would found an institution where any person could find instruction in any study," and Agassiz had helped develop the natural sciences at Cornell, serving at White's request as a visiting professor. Jordan writes, in Days of a Man, that Agassiz once told him of being reproached by a Harvard overseer for his efforts on behalf of Cornell, on the grounds that to help build up a rival institution made him a "traitor to Harvard." Clearly such foolishness would have been as unwelcome at Penikese as at Cornell. In both places the zest of the practical replaced the stuffiness of the classical curriculum; and one guesses that a certain social stuffiness was left behind as well: Cornell and the Anderson school were also unique in the belief, strongly advocated by both Agassiz and White, that there is solid academic value in coeducation. 0f the first summer class at Penikese, thirty-five students were men and fifteen were women.
Agassiz was not a progressive in all respects. He would probably have been pretty uncomfortable as faculty advisor to the "Strug," contending with the enthusiasm of those young naturalists for the brand-new doctrine of Darwinism. E.P. Whipple quotes Agassiz on Darwin at a dinner party:
"You don't know what this new tendency of science will lead to. God will go out of the universe as fast as Darwinism comes in. If the theory were demonstrated by facts, I would be the first to sustain it; but I can't give up God Almighty for an ingenious hypothesis when I know there are facts which contradict the hypothesis. I am, first of all, a man of science; I follow whithersoever science leads; but I get enraged when I am voted an old fogy by a man behind the age, because I decline to accept a theory which my generalized knowledge and my daily investigations forbid me even to tolerate."
But clearly Agassiz imposed on his students more of his analytical style than of his doctrine. Like Jordan, most of Agassiz’ students were converted to the evolutionist position by a growing belief in the evidence, arrived at through the very methods of investigation their teacher urged on them. There is no sign that the master was alarmed by this gentle rebellion. Indeed, one is left to wonder that Agassiz himself -- having contributed to the decline of uniformitarianism in geology though his work in glaciology -- did not move to a similar view on the mutability of species.
How could it be, given their conflicting positions on the great issue of the day, that Agassiz could admire Darwin so, and Jordan Agassiz? I think it is because the central focus of their scientific work was not dogma but data. Although he disagreed about evolution, Agassiz knew that Darwin's work on the Beagle and its sequelae was great natural history. Jordan knew that Agassiz, whatever his views on evolution, was the world's expert on the taxonomy of fishes and the most analytical naturalist of his time. The three men form part of the skeleton of late 19th century biology, which is to say expeditionary biology. The conversion of that tradition into twentieth-century experimental biology -- one of the really significant events in the history of science -- begins on Penikese island. And David Starr Jordan is an important agent of it.
The second summer on Penikese must have been bittersweet for Jordan and his fellow students, who included his sister Mary -- later to marry the entomologist E.A. Edwards, one of the Lombard students who had gone to Cornell after Lombard had fired Jordan! Agassiz' son Alexander tried to keep the program going, but it was no use and the school closed its doors forever at the end of the summer. Jordan had been recommended by Agassiz for a curatorship in zoology at Harvard, but had instead taken a teaching position at Appleton Collegiate Institute in Wisconsin between the two Penikese summers. He used the last summer to extend his knowledge of fish, in which Agassiz had interested him as a project the year before, and to continue work on marine algae. He also continued his courtship of the young botany student from Mount Holyoke, Susan Bowen, whom he married in 1875.
And then, after two midwest years and two summers of devotion to Agassiz, Jordan began his Indiana period. A year at Indianapolis High School and four at Butler University preceded his appointment to the Professorship of Natural History at Indiana University. While teaching high school he found time to "scarcely earn" (as he put it) an M.D. Degree from Indiana Medical College, which he got because he thought it might help him with physiology. (I find it an interesting subsidiary connection that the same degree was obtained for similar purposes by Jordan's friend Harvey W. Wiley, who later established food and drug regulation in this country.) The Indianapolis years were not happy ones professionally: Jordan sought and failed to get positions at Princeton, Vassar, Williams, Michigan and Wisconsin. But he used his summers to extend his knowlege of the fresh-water fishes of the midwest and south, and to establish scientific comradeship with the major zoologists of the day. To the students who accompanied him on these field trips or "tramps," Jordan evidently appeared as Agassiz had to Jordan -- inexhaustible in his knowledge of nature, and charismatic in his capacity to inspire comradeship through pickup baseball or the artful cadging of rural room and board.
No sooner had Jordan accepted the Indiana job than he took leave of it in order to do the fishes of the Pacific Coast for the Fish Commission. That expedition, which lasted nine months, was followed by no less than three European expeditions and two to the Southern United States, in just five years, Indiana teaching loads must have been good in those days; Jordan turned down offers from Illinois and Iowa to stay on, continuing collaborations he had developed at the Smithsonian and extending his own work with Gilbert, Evermann, and others on the fishes of North America.
In 1884 he became president of the University, following a scandal about his predecessor that is gracefully ignored in his own autobiography, and that I shall overlook here: American higher education could not possibly have been in greater ferment than it was at the time he assumed the Presidency at thirty-four. The elective system pushed by Eliot at Harvard and White at Cornell was fifteen years old; the German system of graduate education had been rooted at Johns Hopkins only a decade before; the Morrill act was a little more than twenty. From this welter of influences, from his own earlier instruction at the hands of Agassiz, and -- perhaps most of all -- from his devout, almost dramatic belief that an institution is the lengthened shadow of an individual man, Jordan set the pattern for a university that in its previous six decades had grown only to an enrollment of 150 and an annual budget of $35,000. He wheedled a stubbornly anti-education legislature, he brought old friends onto the faculty, he lectured and politicked in every one of Indiana's 92 counties, and he inspired a university community that had scarcely known what it was getting.
What it got was a mainstream location in the development of progressive higher education in this country. Jordan soon established electives and the major subject plan, developed an administration, and made it clear -- in the words of Indiana University's historian, Thomas Clark, that "......thenceforth the institution would become a practical social and scientific laboratory in which the student would prepare himself to serve the larger objectives of a rising technological society." Soon both the budget and the number of students had doubled, and in 1891 Jordan was a distinguished academic leader and his university full of promise.
But not all his ventures had succeeded. The Bloomington of that day was not a magnetic location for aspiring academics; the fear of frontier social life discouraged many, including a promising prospective appointee from Bryn Mawr named Woodrow Wilson. Perhaps that is why Jordan, even as president, spent such an astonishing amount of time away from the university. It is, at any rate, entirely characteristic that on the occasion of his most dramatic career change, he was out of town when the offer came.
In the spring of 1891 Senator and Mrs. Leland Stanford had visited Cornell, after an earlier discourament at Harvard, in search of advice about -- and leadership for -- the university they were building in memory of their son. Andrew Dickson White, much admired by Stanford for his attention to the practical arts at Cornell, refused the presidency gracefully, and recommended Jordan. Perhaps White told Stanford of Jordan's apprenticeship to Agassiz, whom the Senator had hosted on a visit to San Francisco and whom he also admired. In any event, there followed the famous telegram from White to Jordan -- "decline no offer from California until you hear from me" -- and Jordan's return to Bloomington to find the Senator's private railroad car parked on the siding.
One can guess at the excitement that must have been generated by these events in the Bloomington of that day; the written record merely hints at it. The magnificent private railway carriage, delivered to the small Hoosier town to loom in fin-de-siecle elegance, awaiting the President's return from Illinois where he had been giving a speech -- ironically -- on the importance of public higher education; the rumors flying to and from the National Hotel; the imposing presence of Senator Stanford, a picture of the nineteenth century tycoon at five feet eight inches and two hundred ninety-five pounds; the rustle in local church when Mrs. Stanford left a five dollar gold piece in the collection plate only to have it returned by the student preacher who thought she had put it in by mistake. These events must have titillated the townspeople, who hardly can have known that one day they would be thought of by all Americans as the great-grandparents of bicycle racers.
If it titillated the townspeople, it surely troubled the trustees. Jordan accepted Stanford's offer (of nearly three times his Indiana salary) and immediately set about recruiting his friends to accompany him to California. Clark lists the extent of the depredation -- a dozen of Indiana's twenty- nine faculty members, including Gilbert, Douglas H., Campbell, and his old Cornell fraternity brother John Branner -- and adds, wryly, it would hardly be historically correct to say that he served the institution with thorough unselfishness." As if that were not enough, Jordan took with him to Stanford thirty-five students, a group described as including some of the best athletes at Indiana. (At Stanford we suppose they were the ones who threw well.)
The educational philosophy Jordan had developed was eminently suited to a pioneering venture in the Far West, and matched up well with Senator Stanford's own view, the tradition of academic democracy and the affection for the practical arts were just right for the newer frontier. And Jordan's evolutionist views extended comfortably from Darwin to Herbert Spencer: he believed in the survival of the fittest as institutional as well as biological doctrine. Jordan and Stanford, both from modest families in rural upstate New York, were powerful individualists, and agreed on the importance of "useful education" and of the opportunity for upward mobility, Stanford was founded practical, coeducational, and tuition-free. It lost the last of these principles in the twenties, but to an important degree it has retained the first two.
In the very first year at Stanford, Jordan circled back to his Penikese experience by starting a marine biological laboratory. But in the meantime, a good deal had been going on back east. Spencer Baird had established a fisheries laboratory in Woods Hole in 1874; and later the beginnings of the Marine Biological Laboratory, the successor to Penikese, had been made there under the leadership of Charles Otis Whitman -- a fellow student of Jordan's at the first Penikese summer.
Back in California, in 1891, Jordan and Charles H. Gilbert worked out with Timothy Hopkins, a railroad partner of Stanford's, the plan for a marine station on Monterey Bay as part of the University's scientific program. To the encounter Jordan brought his recollections of Penikese and the same intellectual background that was then evolving into the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole; Hopkins brought his acquaintance with Anton Dohrn's Stazione Zoologica in Naples Bay. With a few small gifts from Hopkins and The Pacific Improvement Company, a laboratory was built on Lovers Point in Pacific Grove; it was called the Hopkins Seaside Laboratory and it had its first summer class 1892.
Hopkins immediately began a Penikese tradition that had seeded itself also at the Marine Biological Laboratory: investigators came from inland universities to work on marine material for the summer. Among the turn-of- the-century visitors to Hopkins were Jacques Loeb, Bashford Dean, Wesley R. Coe, T.H. Morgan, William K. Gregory, and E.G. Conklin. A young Stanford graduate student named A.J. Carlson began studies on electrical conduction in giant fiber systems there, and eventually moved in the other direction to Chicago.
In Woods Hole, a new and powerful tradition of developmental and cellular biology was being established. Researchers from midwestern universities played an important role in these events through the new habit of summer migration to the seacoast. Among them was Carl Eigenmann, the Indiana student of Jordan's who had carried Agassiz' motto from Penikese to the Marine Biological Laboratory. He had been trained in Jordan's tradition of systematic ichthyology, but he found a new interest in the development of the germ cells in teleost fishes. From men like Eigenmann and F.R. Lillie, the embryology of the twentieth century was to emerge. It reconnects back and forth between Indiana and that coast, for example, through Briggs and King, Jim Ebert, Crowell, and others.
The subsequent history of modern biology on the two coasts presents an interesting contrast. In Woods Hole a strong tradition of "general physiology" developed in the twenties and thirties under the leadership of 0sterhout and Heilbrunn. Similar work proceeded at Hopkins, to be continued by C.V. Taylor and 0sterhout’s student, Blinks. But at the beginning of the 1930's, the basis for an entirely unexpected development has established. C.B. van Niel came from Holland to Hopkins and began, in that somewhat unlikely location, a summer course in microbiology. It emphasized experimental work in the laboratory, and was soon a remarkable success, attracting students from all over the country. Among these later pilgrims were George Beadle, Edward Tatum, Joshua Lederberg, Max Delbruck, Seymour Benzer, and Arthur Kornberg. A significant part of the foundation for modern molecular genetics was thus laid, of all places, in a marine station founded by Jordan, in buildings named for Loeb and Agassiz.
Others have emphasized Jordan's role as a pioneer in progressive higher education. A pioneer he certainly was; never in his life had he any association with a settled academic enterprise. Instead, he moved from one newly founded or developing school to another: Cornell, Penikese, Indiana, Stanford. Population biologists now distinguish between species well adapted for the task of colonization, which they call k-selected, and those better suited to carving out a niche in a fully differentiated, well-settled environment, which they call r- selected. If ever there was a k-selected man, it was David Starr Jordan. To each new community of learning -- the tiny university in Bloomington, the cadre of students gathered for the summer "tramp" through the Appalachian highlands, the boldly unlikely new oasis campus in California -- he brought a special version of what an educational institution was. It was a community of scholars in which guidance from experts in particular chosen fields was combined with a moderate amount of liberal culture, set in a mold of utilitarian moral discipline. Above all it was a community responsive to the inspiration personal leadership in the tradition of White and Agassiz.
Jordan transported this vision westward across the breadth of this continent, following and recapitulating, as did Wallace Stegner in The Big Rock Candy Mountain, the earlier movement of the frontier. As he did so he served, surely without knowledge, as a kind of Johnny Appleseed for the development of modern experimental biology in this country. Firmly wedded himself to the expeditionary tradition, he founded institutions and produced students who traced out its transition into the new biology, Jordan's own scientific accomplishments were, to be fair about it, significant but not monumental. He left important survey work on the fishes and major contribution, to our understanding of the importance of geographical isolation in speciation. But the institutional seeds of growth he left behind germinated into something more far-reaching than any of his own ideas.
Somehow I think Jordan would not be dissatisfied with that judgment. He believed in teaching and in institution-building at least as much as he believed in scientific work itself. It is odd how, in exploring an earlier life, one sometimes encounters curious little connections that carry even greater meaning than the major historical ones. A dozen years ago a group of us at Stanford, including an Indiana graduate named David Hamburg, started a new field of undergraduate concentration called the Program in Human Biology. We thought it time to blend the developing understanding of human evolution, genetics, biochemistry -- the strictly biological sciences -- with the analysis of human behavior and institutions. That program was a remarkable success, and during the half-dozen years in which I taught in it and served as its chairman it produced a number of extraordinary students with interests ranging from primatology and psychobiology to bioethics and public policy. It strikes some as unusual that I continued to teach in it after I became an admtnistrator. (It is scarcely more than a cameo appearance, but the wonder is that the dog dances at all.) You may imagine the surprise of the eighth president of Stanford University at reading, in the autobiography of the first, this: ".....Throughout my thirty-three years service at Indiana and Stanford I gave each year (unless absent [a wise disclaimer]) a course of lectures on what was later called by Professor Patrick Geddes of Edinburgh the Science of Bionomics. This deals with the philosophy of Biology, beginning with the laws of organic life and leading up to Eugenics and Ethics." It is for Jordan an entirely characteristic idiosyncracy, and for me a source of comfortable connection.