Correspondence: Ropp on SolbergAuthor(s): Henry C. Johnson, Jr.Source: AAUP Bulletin, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Dec., 1970), p. 459Published by: American Association of University ProfessorsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40224501 .

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CORRESPONDENCE

Ropp on Solberg

Ordinarily it is sufficient to allow the general judgment of informed scholars to affirm or rebut the ade-

quacy of any given review. In the case of Theodore Ropp's egregiously in-

adequate and misleading comments on Winton U. Solberg's The University of Illinois, 1867-1894: An Intellectual and Cultural History, AAUP Bulletin, (Summer, 1970, pp. 253-4), however, the field is narrow enough that the normal remedy will be unlikely to cir- culate widely and rapidly enough to

prevent unwarranted damage. Simple justice therefore demands an exception.

How is an adequate critical review

generated? Presumably it stems from the reviewer's own special knowledge or reasoning ability which provides a

perspective for weighing the issues of fact and/ or inference which are prop- erly under judgment. Professor Ropp's review is utterly innocent of this gen- erally accepted and thoroughly defen- sible strategy, however, possibly be- cause he himself is innocent of the

prerequisites. (If that seems an in-

temperate criticism, the groundlessness of the review, as well as the unjustified acidity of its tone, furnish at least an excuse if not quite a justification.) Whatever his credentials, the reviewer

clearly does not provide the general reader with any special knowledge of either the University of Illinois or of American higher educational history against which he may judge Professor

Solberg's work. It would appear that all Professor Ropp has done is to read Allan Nevins's 1917 history of the Uni-

versity and compare the two, on the

gratuitous assumption that Nevins's work furnishes some sort of unassail- able criterion against which the ade-

quacy of Solberg's scholarship and

interpretative validity can be tested.

Unfortunately, because of this pe- culiar strategy, a thorough refutation of Ropp's review is impossible without an extensive analysis of both Nevins's work and the University's history in context. That is a project which no

mere letter can accomplish. Suffice it to say that Nevins's Illinois offers no such definitive treatment of the Uni-

versity's early period. (It was, in fact, one of a series of literate but popular chronicles of American universities

designed to meet the widespread inter- est occasioned by the rapid expansion of the nation's higher educational en-

terprise. One doubts that even its author would any longer point to it.) The volume, whatever its original merits and purposes, will no longer bear careful scrutiny in the light of fresh and deeper evidence and it con-

sequently cannot support the weight which Professor Ropp hangs upon it. Professor Solberg's treatment may not be errorless - although it certainly has

proportionately far fewer errors than

Ropp's own review - and his conten- tions are not of course beyond honest debate. But that is not the point. The

difficulty, as anyone with even mini- mal acquaintance with either historical method or proper reviewing procedure will recognize without further evi-

dence, is simply that no honest assess- ment of this or any other book could be produced from such an obviously defective starting point.

Given its fundamental wrong-head- edness, there is little reason to attack at length the confusion and illogic of Professor Ropp's murky analysis. Accusations of "boosterism" or -

whatever this means - the "quixotic" use of statistics are shabby and not worth the space for the tilt. Ropp's closing condemnation of Solberg's content, grounded once more on a

vague statement from Nevins which

purports to suggest that, since "many people" in Illinois didn't think the

University very important and Nevins

appears to have agreed, therefore, Sol-

berg can hardly be right, is patently unwarranted if not absurd. His un- demonstrated negative judgment on

Solberg's style and interpretation would be laughable (particularly in juxta- position to his own jumbled para- graphs and summaries) were it not so

unbecoming. Ropp is maliciously pleased that Solberg's eighty-three pages of background - which, I take it, any reader will automatically regard as excessive - go back only as far as Harvard. I now wish they had both gone back farther and ranged more

widely. Had they done so, perhaps Professor Ropp would have had more with which to work in constructing his jerry-built review.

Henry C. Johnson, Jr. Education

Illinois State University

Professor Ropp Replies

Dr. Johnson's idea that Dr. Sol-

berg's definitive history of the Univer-

sity of Illinois should only be reviewed

by specialists in Illinois or university history is a sign of that parochialism which still affects many historians of American education. I must apologize to Dr. Solberg for any undue acidity of tone, but I still think that his and Nevins's real conclusions were similar. The University of Illinois, in the years covered in Dr. Solberg's first volume, was not a leader in American higher education. Dr. Solberg has "had only occasional attacks of that boosterism which affects so many educational chroniclers," and might well agree that his conclusions (p. 292) that "science and technology [there is no

qualifying adjective] . . . were still in their infancy" in 1894, and that "the

University had already trained hosts of scientists and technicians who had contributed significantly to the eleva- tion of material welfare in America and beyond" are overstated. Burrill and Forbes might also have agreed. But they had stuck with the school, and knew what had to be done to meet the challenge of the new University of

Chicago.

Theodore Ropp History

Duke University

Linguistic Discrimination?

No doubt like many women in the

profession, I was pleased to learn that the Fifty-sixth Annual Meeting of the AAUP noted "with approval the in-

creasing commitment to full equality for women in employment and in pro- fessional activities" and that it opposed "discriminatory policies and practices which may adversely affect the status of women in academic life ... in ap- pointments, the granting of tenure,

WINTER 1970 459

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