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Research Universities, Periodical Publication, and the Circulation of Professional Expertise: Onthe Significance of Middlebrow AuthorityAuthor(s): Janice RadwaySource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Autumn 2004), pp. 203-228Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/427308 .
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Critical Inquiry 31 (Autumn 2004)
� 2004 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/04/3101-0012$10.00. All rights reserved.
203
This essay is a shortened and revised version of a much longer chapter on the history of
learned and literary culture in the United States from 1880 to 1915 in Carl Kaestle and Janice
Radway, Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–
1945, volume 4 of A History of the Book in America, ed. David Hall and Hugh Armory
(Worcester, Mass., forthcoming). I am grateful to David Hall, the American Antiquarian Society,
and Cambridge University Press for permission to publish this essay.
Research Universities, Periodical Publication,and the Circulation of Professional Expertise:On the Significance of Middlebrow Authority
Janice Radway
IntroductionIn 1936, well into the course of a literary career as a magazine and mid-
dlebrow professional, Henry Seidel Canby, editor of the Saturday Review of
Literature and chief judge at the Book-of-the-Month Club, published a
thoughtful memoir about academic life. Entitled Alma Mater: The Gothic
Age of the American College, his book attempted to take stock of how chang-
ing definitions of learning had altered American society. On the basis of his
experiences at Yale both as a student and then as a young professor, Canby
suggested that “there has never been anything quite like the American col-
lege of the turn of the twentieth century, never any institution more con-
fused in its purposes, more vital, more mixed in its ideals.” He claimed
furthermore that “just as the typical American of the nineties was a small-
town man, so the dominant American type of our thirties is college bred.”
Canby proposed, therefore, to assess the impact of the modern college, to
figure out “what it was, what it did to us, what powerful hands it laid upon
the United States of our generation.”1
In laying out his purpose, Canby cautioned that he was writing about
1. Henry Seidel Canby,Alma Mater: The Gothic Age of the American College (New York, 1936), p.
viii; hereafter abbreviatedAM.
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204 Janice Radway / The Circulation of Professional Expertise
the American college, not “that larger organization of professional schools,
service bureaus, and organs of scholarship, called a university” (AM, p. xii).
Nevertheless, his account is thoroughly hauntedby thefigure of themodern
research university and the changing definition of learning it promoted. As
Canby acknowledged, the American college was a dramatically different in-
stitution in 1910 from what it had been as late as 1870 because the years
between witnessed “the triumph of applied science, the breakdown of ste-
reotyped religion, the defeat of the classics in American education, and the
dramatic appearance, full blown, ofAmerican confidence in ourownschol-
arship and our own literature” (AM, p. x). Although these developments
altered the American college irrevocably, their emergence was bound up
most intimately with the appearance of the American research university
in the years between 1870 and 1915. And though the history of the American
university is traditionally connected to the rise of the corporation inAmer-
ican business, to increasing specialization and bureaucratization, and to the
emergence of modern professionalism, it must also be connected to the
vastly changed print culture that developed during these years as well.
In fact, one might argue that the learned culture that emerged slowly in
the universities in the last decades of the nineteenth century was as much
a matter of changed reading and writing practices and altered networks for
the transmission and circulation of information as it was of shifting epis-
temologies, changed subject matter, and altered goals. Although traditional
bound books continued to play an important role in learned culture be-
tween 1880 and 1915, especially within the disciplines that would be de-
scribed as the humanities, increasingly, the highly specialized culture of
advanced learning that emerged in these yearswas furtheredby regularized,
repetitive, and predictable forms of journal publication as well as by new
forms of professional association. As a consequence, learning lost some of
its associations with the preservation and appreciation of settled tradition,
especially at the new research universities.
It was reconceived after a model that emerged in the sciences. Where
once science had been conceptualized as a process of inductive reasoning
Janice Radway is professor of literature and chair of the literature program
at Duke University. She is the author of Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy,
and Popular Literature (1984) and A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month
Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (1996). She is coeditor, with Carl
Kaestle, of the forthcoming Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and
Reading in the United States, 1880–1940, volume 4 of A History of the Book in
America.
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Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2004 205
2. On the history of the discipline of English, see RichardOhmann, English in America: A
Radical View of the Profession (New York, 1976);MichaelWarner, “Professionalizationand the
Rewards of Literature: 1875–1900,”Criticism 27 (Winter 1985): 1–28; Gerald Graff, Professing
Literature: An InstitutionalHistory (Chicago, 1987); and Kermit Vanderbilt,American Literature
and the Academy: The Roots, Growth, and Maturity of a Profession (Philadelphia, 1986).
from established principles, increasingly it was associated with empirical
investigation and conceptualized as a dynamic, evolutionary, and progres-
sive practice, one that was ever-changing and ever-advancing in its claim to
mastery. Distinct precincts of the world were scrutinized by a small group
of specialists reading and writing principally for each other.
This reconception of learning was so widespread and consequential that
it affected even the standardmethods for the teachingof the receivedliterary
and cultural tradition. As Henry Canby observed,
Now the scientific approach became fashionable. Scholars in literature
who called themselves scientific began to dominate the graduate schools
and extend their influence into the sacred precincts of the undergradu-
ate college. Applying the technique of scientific research to language,
they revealed an evolutionwith laws of its own the discovery of which
was a noble extension of knowledge. [AM, pp. 197–98]
As a consequence, philology and literary history moved to the center of
the emerging discipline of the modern languages, which began to supplant
the traditional classics curriculum. At first, professional literary scholars
preoccupied themselves with tracing the fine points of linguistic evolution
and with the particulars of literary source study. Later, adopting the pre-
dilection for the new and the paradigmatic habit of seeking conceptual
breakthroughs familiar to the sciences, the discipline involved itself in gen-
erating continually new literary interpretations andpromoting recent theo-
retical breakthroughs.2
This shift did not go unchallenged, however, as Canby’s own memoir
makes clear. Self-described generalists like Canby, who clustered in under-
graduate teaching colleges, championed an alternative model of learning
known as the liberal arts ideal. A modification of the older classical curric-
ulum, this course of study opposed both the rising dominance of the sci-
ences and the specialization associated with literary history and philology.
Liberal arts advocates sought to cultivate character and intellect rather than
the practicality and utility they associated with the sciences. They also
tended to oppose the sciences’ fetishism of the new. At the same time, they
set themselves in opposition to the development of a technical and highly
specialized body of knowledge about an isolated aesthetic realm shearedoff
from the rest of the world. Insisting on the moral and even political rele-
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206 Janice Radway / The Circulation of Professional Expertise
3. On the history of the Book-of-the-MonthClub, see Janice Radway,A Feeling for Books: The
Book-of-the-MonthClub, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997).
4. On the history of middlebrow culture and role of popularizationwithin it, see Joan Shelley
Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992), esp. chap. 5, “Merchant of
Light:Will Durant and the Vogue of the ‘Outline,’” pp. 210–65.
vance of the liberal arts to contemporary society, many humanities advo-
cates like Canby left the university in despair at the insularity of highly
technical literary study in order to take up the work of championing the
powers of culture and literature for educated general readers.
Although middlebrow cultural organs like the Saturday Review and the
Book-of-the-Month Club initially preoccupied themselves withmarketing
literature and poetry to a broad general audience, increasingly the health
of these enterprises depended on their ability to capitalize on widespread
general interest in the forms of professional expertise and knowledge pro-
duction that emerged in the 1880s and then flourished in the early decades
of the twentieth century. Increasingly, middlebrow intellectuals wrote, ad-
vocated, and marketed handbooks, encyclopedias, and guidebooks to this
new knowledge even as they publicized popularized versions of technical
information that had beendevelopedfirstwithinhighly specializedjournals
written for professional knowledge producers. Despite the reliance of an
organization like the Book-of-the-Month Club on an older Arnoldian lan-
guage of the universal, the unchanging, and the best, it was in fact organized
tomaximize sales by promoting periodicity and the cachetof thenew;hence
it offered “the best book of the month.”3 Interest in the timely was a con-
stitutive principle not only of the club but also of othermiddlebrowcultural
organs like the Literary Guild, the Reader’s Digest, and the radio show In-
formation Please which then naturally became cultural popularizers.4What
they sold to their educated general readers in the form of summaries and
handbooks was the assurance that they could keep up with the bewildering
pace of evolving knowledge about the modern world.
In the context of this volume on the arts of transmission, I think it is
worth underscoring the fact that Canby’s Alma Mater exposes the complex
connections among several cultural and historical developments: the rise
of the research university in the United States, the emergence of new prac-
tices of professionalized knowledge production and transmission, changes
in the disciplines, and the growth of a popularly oriented periodical culture
from which emerged a distinct new cultural configuration known as the
middlebrow.WhileAlma Mater is most centrally the work of amiddlebrow
literary authority, a generalist who believed in the value of literature and the
humanities as a form of critical knowledge about the world, it was also the
work of a man who was able to make a successful living precisely because
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Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2004 207
5. The literature on professionalization is vast and impossible to survey here. The sources with
the most relevance for the subjects under discussion in this essay include Burton J. Bledstein,The
Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America
(New York, 1976);Magali Sarfatti Larson,The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis
(Berkeley, 1977); and Samuel Haber,The Quest for Authority and Honor in the American
Professions, 1750–1900 (Chicago, 1991).
6. On this struggle, see Janice Radway, “The Scandal of theMiddlebrow: The Book-of-the-
Month Club, Class Fracture, and Cultural Authority,” South Atlantic Quarterly 89 (Fall 1990): 703–
36. See alsoWarner, “Professionalizationand the Rewards of Literature,” esp. pp. 7–20.
a developing body of educated readers eagerly sought familiarity with ex-
citing forms of new knowledge about the world. Canby and others like him
made their middlebrow living by consolidating a powerful new circuit of
production and circulation that, though distinct fromprofessionalizedand
specialized academic circuits of transmission, was significantly related to
them. As we shall soon see, this dependence worked to the advantage of
some of the disciplines and the professionals who worked within them
because middlebrow organs circulated news of their work and helped to
legitimate them by increasing their professional prestige. In effect, middle-
brow culture augmented and extended what had been begun by key por-
tions of the newspaper and magazine industries; they helped to create and
strengthen markets for professional expertise. In effect, they proved a criti-
cal component in the emergence of what Burton Bledstein and others have
called a “culture of professionalism.”5
But a productive symbiosis between middlebrow culture and profes-
sionalized, academic, literary culture could not be easily established, how-
ever, in part because middlebrow authorities like Canby actively competed
with others laboring within the changing literary field. Most middlebrow
arbiters disapproved of the philologists and literary historians as well as
those seeking to create a new literary avant-garde because they could see no
use, commercial or otherwise, for the literary products such efforts gen-
erated. Use was important to middlebrow authorities because, as literary
entrepreneurs, their work depended on the viability of marketing appeals
that could explain to potential consumers how theymight benefit from the
purchase of books, magazines, or other cultural materials. What ensued,
once middlebrow authorities began to elaborate their own arguments for
the use-value of culture, was a struggle over the authority to pronounce on
the role of literature in the world.6
In the countervailing efforts of academics and the literary avant-garde
to distance themselves from middlebrow arbiters like Canby, such entre-
preneurs were characterized as little more than literary businessmen. Sig-
nificantly, in differentiating themselves from themiddlebrowwillingness to
court the denizens of Main Street, academics and modernist writers es-
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208 Janice Radway / The Circulation of Professional Expertise
7. I have adapted the phrase “the ecology of knowledge production” fromCharles Rosenberg,
“Toward an Ecology of Knowledge Production:On Discipline, Context, andHistory,” in The
Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860–1920, ed. AlexandraOleson and John Voss
(Baltimore, 1979), pp. 440–55. Rosenberg uses the phrase to capture something of the dynamic
complexity andmultiplicity of relationships among the institutions, disciplines, practitioners, and
knowledge forms that emerged in the years between 1880 andWorldWar I. He is especially acute
about the need to remember that inasmuch as larger economic and cultural developments affected
the nature of knowledge production in this period, so, too, did the nature of the knowledge
produced differentially exert its own impact on the institutions and individuals generating it. The
Voss/Oleson volume as a whole is still one of the best on the early history of the research university
in the United States and the role of the modern disciplines within it.
8. In addition to the aforementionedOleson/Voss volume, there is another indispensable guide
to the early history of the university in the United States. Notable for its sweep as well as for its
attention both to dominant trends and important exceptions, is Laurence R. Veysey,The
Emergence of the American University (Chicago, 1965). For a less historical andmore
organizationally focused account, see Edward Shils, The Order of Learning: Essays on the
ContemporaryUniversity (New Brunswick,N.J., 1997). Other useful sources on the early history of
the American university include Julie A. Reuben,The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual
Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago, 1996); Roger Geiger,To Advance
Knowledge: The Growth of American Research Universities, 1900–1940 (New York, 1986); Roger L.
chewed the circuits of transmission associatedwithmiddlebrowcultureand
opted instead for the small, specialized circuits of the scholarly journal and
the little magazine. These publicationsmay have helped to construct a kind
of social, technological, and ideological outside to the dominant culture
from which both groups could advance their own versions of cultural cri-
tique. But, at the same time, these academics andwriters were isolated from
an educated general audience that might have been persuaded of its need
to rely on their cultural authority rather thanon that ofmiddlebrowarbiters
like Canby. Lacking a large audience and market for the specialized dis-
course they continued to produce, literary professionals of both the aca-
demic and avant-garde varieties were vulnerable to being shunted aside
within both the university context and the larger culture not only by the
discourse and public intellectuals associatedwith the sciences and the social
sciences but also, eventually, by newer cultural producers working with
transmission technologies even broader in scope than print—technologies
like radio, film, television, and digital communication. What I would like
to do now is to provide a schematicmap of this larger ecology of knowledge
production and transmission in order to show how the structural role
played by magazine and middlebrow culture in the culture of profession-
alism that emerged between 1880 and 1945 can help to illuminate part of
what troubles English and the humanities today.7
Universities and the Growth of ResearchMuch has been written about the development of the researchuniversity
in the United States. The literature is vast in part because somany different
factors can be highlighted as the critical determining agent.8 The influence
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Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2004 209
Williams,The Origins of Federal Support for Higher Education: George W. Atherton and the Land-
Grant College Movement (University Park, Pa., 1991); and PaulWestmeyer,An Analytical History of
American Higher Education (1985; Springfield, Ill., 1997).
9. On the evolution of American colleges during this period, see The American College in the
Nineteenth Century, ed. Geiger (Nashville, 2000). See also Thomas Le Duc, Piety and Intellect at
Amherst College, 1865–1912 (New York, 1946).
of the German model of higher education figures centrally in most narra-
tives. Others focus on the outmoded nature of the traditional college cur-
riculum, on the growing success of science and its ability to meet the needs
ofAmerican business andmanufacturing, on the riseof technicallyoriented
and utilitarian forms of knowledge, on the impact of specialization, andon
the development of modern professionalism itself. In fact, all of these de-
velopments contributed to the emergence of the American research uni-
versity and helped to change the culture of learning in the United States.
Together, they slowly transformed localized, avocational circles of learning
into a highly differentiated business of professional knowledgeproduction.
Prior to the CivilWar, the vastmajority of colleges in theU.S.were small,
denominationally organized institutions seeking to cultivate mental disci-
pline in a population of elite youngmen preparing for professional training
in divinity, law, or medicine.9 After the war, efforts to reform the colleges
multiplied as critics of the traditional curriculum attempted to adapt it to
a rapidly changing world. Spurred on by the sense that new forms of train-
ing would be necessary in a world transformed by the market revolution,
factories, railroads, and augmented communication networks, the colleges
also altered their curricula because they realized that new forms of knowl-
edge were rapidly being generated within the natural sciences. Some, like
Harvard and Yale, actually created scientific colleges.Others expandedtheir
faculties and adopted the elective system pioneered at Harvard. Eventually,
the colleges were joined by innovative institutions with new purposes, dif-
ferent organization and funding structures, and an altered relationship to
learning.Where the college focused almost exclusively on the cultivationof
mental discipline and character in undergraduates by familiarizing them
with the known—whether in literature, moral philosophy, or natural sci-
ence—universities, land grant agricultural schools, and technical research
institutes focused at least in part on the generation and communication of
new knowledge. Faculty time, as a consequence, was increasingly devoted
to the business of research and the reading and writing that supported it.
Research faculties had always taught. But now they began to apportion
their time differently. Hired by institutions recently created to foster basic
research or to provide technical and utilitarian support for local popula-
tions, new faculties gradually focused their activities in laboratories and li-
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210 Janice Radway / The Circulation of Professional Expertise
10. See Oleson and Voss, introduction to The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America,
pp. vii–xxi.
11. See, for instance, Geiger,To Advance Knowledge, p. 8.
12. On the history of land grant colleges, seeWilliams,The Origins of Federal Support for Higher
Education;Coy F. Cross II, Justin Smith Morrill: Father of the Land-Grant College (East Lansing,
Mich., 1999); and Geiger, “The Rise and Fall of Useful Knowledge: Higher Education for Science,
Agriculture, and theMechanic Arts, 1850–1875,” in The American College in the Nineteenth
Century, pp. 153–68.
13. See Oleson and Voss, introduction, p. xiii.
braries and sought to generate new knowledge in their particular areas of
expertise. Although they also sought to communicate evolving knowledge
to their students, they defined their primary academic relationshipsas those
with their specialist peers. Because they sought regular association with re-
searchers engaged in similar projects, they formulatedover timeanewsocial
and communication infrastructure that became essential to university life.
Disciplines, departments, professional associations and societies, as well as
specialized journals and university presses all were installed as critical com-
ponents of learned culture during these years.10
It is common to associate the development of this changed culture of
learning with the development of research universities in particular. Thus,
the 1876 founding of the JohnsHopkinsUniversity looms large innarratives
that also credit the creative leadership of Daniel Coit Gilman in adapting
the German model of university training in the advanced sciences to the
American context.11 Indeed, the example Hopkins set in the last quarter of
the nineteenth century was an inspiration to many who sought to reorient
American higher education around the graduate training of research spe-
cialists, especially in the rapidly advancing sciences of chemistry, physics,
biology, and mathematics. It was at Hopkins, for instance, that a close and
consequential relationship among scientific research, graduate training,
and new forms of association and publication would most significantly be
forged. Still, other institutions that developed both before and after Hop-
kins also had a long-term impact on the reorganization and reorientation
of higher education in the U.S. Chief among these were the land grant col-
leges and universities that developed predominantly in the Midwest in the
years following the passage of the 1862Morrill Act.12 Additionally,however,
technical schools and research programs and institutes sponsored by the
federal government—such as those at the U.S. Department of Agriculture,
the Geological Survey, and the Bureau of American Ethnology—as well as
by philanthropic foundations and industrial enterprises all began to exert
pressure on older conceptions of learning.13
Land grant colleges and universities, for example, were noted early on
for promulgating the assumption that learning should have utilitarianpur-
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Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2004 211
14. See Geiger,To Advance Knowledge, p. 5.
15. See, especially, Veysey’s extended discussion in The Emergence of the American University,
chap. 2, “Utility,” pp. 57–120. See alsoMerle Curti,The University of Wisconsin: A History
(Madison,Wis., 1949).
16. On the transformationof the conception of learning, see Shils, The Order of Learning, esp.
chaps. 1 and 2, pp. 1–70.
17. See HughHawkins, “University Identity: The Teaching and Research Functions,” in The
Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, pp. 285–312.
18. Quoted in ibid., p. 289.
pose. Spurred on by the Morrill Act’s requirement that institutional recip-
ients of federal funds offer agricultural and mechanical education to the
people of their states, these institutions focused on agricultural research,
sought to provide advice on legislative programs, and pioneered the crea-
tion of extension courses to foster ongoing education.14 Although therewas
a substantial measure of disagreement in land grant institutions over what
counted as a more utilitarian and democratic education, most of them
aimed to broaden the typical college’s offerings and to root themmore res-
olutely in the so-called realities of everyday life.15 They also began to admit
women. Although many of these institutions continued to train under-
graduates in the liberal arts, they also innovated by linking vocational train-
ing in agriculture and engineering with research in the basic sciences.
Cornell University, led by Andrew D. White, the University of Michigan,
headed by James B. Angell, and the University of Wisconsin, headed by
Charles Kendall Adams and Charles Van Hise, were pioneers in training a
democratically selected population for a range of practical and politically
oriented vocations.
These changing approaches to education reconfigured older understand-
ings of learning as the mastery and profession of a stable body of generally
accepted truths, canons, and traditions. Instead, learning was reconceived as
the command of a highly specialized body of constantly evolving knowledge
about a particular fraction of the world through the mastery of a specialized
set of techniques for apprehending it.16 At both researchuniversities and land
grant institutions where the latter definition of learningwas encouraged, the
pedagogical function of faculties, while never eliminated entirely, gradually
began to take second place to the growing importance of the research func-
tion. This shift even took place within the humanities, where most of the
resistance to the evolutionary model of knowledge production was con-
centrated. Still, some humanities scholars like the LatinistWilliamGardner
Hale enthusiastically acquiesced in the new dispensation.17 As Hale once
commented, “It is the minds that have advanced beyond what they have
received from others that have brought us to the point where we are. It is
the discoverers, in far greater measure than to the transmitters, that the
world is under obligation.”18
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212 Janice Radway / The Circulation of Professional Expertise
19. In addition to Rubin on the subject of popularization and its importance to the “general
reader,” see Radway,A Feeling for Books, esp. pp. 88–94, 101–14, and 235–60.
Hale accurately diagnosed a shift in the relative weights accorded re-
search and pedagogy within the university around the turn of the century.
However, by opposing research to transmission and by simply valuing the
former over the latter, he missed the significance of a critical structural re-
lationship between research and more mediated processes of transmission
that intensified within the culture of learning at this time. Althoughmany
research professors placed less emphasis on face-to-face teaching than had
their predecessors or did those employed in undergraduate colleges where
the liberal arts held sway, they did not give up their involvement in the busi-
ness of transmitting information entirely. In fact, as the business of con-
ducting original research began to gain more andmore prominence and to
grow both more specialized and more complex within the fraternity of the
learned, it became ever more important to communicate with peers about
commonpursuits. At the same time, as research communitiesandacademic
disciplines specialized and professionalized, it also became critical to dis-
seminate information about research findings to the lay population from
whom financial support and a client base in the form of students had to be
drawn. Increasingly, both practiceswere conducted through themediations
of a rapidly differentiating print culture. Researchers communicated with
each other through specialized journals. They communicated with the
broader public through popularized accounts of their research inmagazine
articles, in trade books designed for the educated, general reader, and
through an ever-multiplying number of handbooks, guidebooks, and en-
cyclopedias that codified this new knowledge.19 Before one can understand
fully why this intensified symbiosis between the generation, communica-
tion, and transmission of knowledge developed at this time, it is necessary
to understand something more about the altered social context within
which the new colleges and universities turned their attention to research.
Incorporation, Information, and “Brain Workers”In the years after the Civil War, a potent combination of factors signifi-
cantly altered the nature of work and employment for a large segment of
the American population. This in turn contributed to the need for differ-
ently trained workers and thus to a notably enlarged populationof students
who sought new formsof education fornewkindsofwork.Ultimately, these
interlocking developments increasedAmerican society’s dependenceonthe
rapid development, transmission, and circulation of information and thus
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Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2004 213
20. See Oleson and Voss, introduction, p. xi. On the financing of the new universities, see also
Geiger,To Advance Knowledge, pp. 39–57.
21. Oleson and Voss, introduction, p. xii.
22. See ibid.23. See Alan Trachtenberg,The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age
(New York, 1982).
the need for a transformed infrastructure capable of accomplishingall three
tasks.
In addressing the question of why research institutions, land grant uni-
versities, and technical institutes all emerged within a thirty- or forty-year
period, it is as important to consider external financial andsocialconditions
as it is to address internal organizational and intellectual developments.
Both sets of forces contributed to the transformationofeducationalpractice
in these years and both thereby helped to alter the way knowledge was gen-
erated, discussed, and transmitted to immediate and more distant popu-
lations alike. To begin with, these institutions were made possible by the
availability of a large concentration of surplus capital that could be invested
in higher education.20 Although a significant portion of this capital came
from the hands of a new social elite involved inmanufacturing andbusiness
rather than in mercantile or real estate transactions, some of it also came
from state legislatures and alumni. Additionally, as Alexandra Oleson and
John Voss have pointed out, “It was the students who came to colleges and
universities in expanding numbers who formed the principal economic
base of American science and scholarship.”21 Indeed the number of Amer-
ican undergraduates rose from about 52,300 in 1870 to 156,800 in 1890,
237,600 in 1900, and 597,900 in 1920.22
Larger numbers of students enrolled in colleges and universities in part
because they could. That is to say, their families could financially afford to
spare them from the responsibility of contributing to family upkeep. But
they also enrolled in increasing numbers because it appeared to them and
to their families that a university or college education was an investment in
the future. Where once higher education led only to the ministry, law, or
medicine for the children of the social elite, by the 1880s it was clear that it
could prepare a more diverse population for careers in business or in any
number of the new technical and specialized professions that emerged at
this time.
This was the case in large part because the transformation of American
culture by the complex phenomenon Alan Trachtenberg has called “incor-
poration” created an increased demand for individualswho couldproduce,
organize, and circulate information, act as managers of processes and peo-
ple, and generally foster integration amongandwithinAmericanbusinesses
and institutions.23 Significantly, the period during which the research uni-
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214 Janice Radway / The Circulation of Professional Expertise
24. Alfred Chandler,The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business
(Cambridge,Mass., 1977), p. 1.
25. Ibid., p. 7.26. On the subject of the relationship between laborers,managers, and capitalists, see Harry
Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New
York, 1974). On the rise of “brain workers” and their status as a new class, see Barbara and John
Eherenreich, “The Professional-ManagerialClass,” in Between Labor and Capital, ed. PatWalker
(Boston, 1979), pp. 5–45. See also Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the
Turn of the Century (London, 1996) and Politics of Knowledge: The Commercialization of the
University, the Professions, and Print Culture (Middletown, Conn., 2003).
versity emerged was also the period in which the modern corporation be-
came the dominant organizational form within business and industry.
Described by Alfred Chandler as a “modern multiunit enterprise,” the
modern corporation entailed the internalization and administrative coor-
dination of business units that could theoretically have operated indepen-
dently.24 However, by integrating them into a single overarching enterprise,
significant economies of speed and scale could be achieved.
Chandler’s enumeration of how those economies were achieved isworth
quoting here because it gives a good sense of why these developments re-
quired different kinds of workers with new kinds of education and new
abilities to work efficiently with information.
By routinizing the transactions between units, the costs of these trans-
actions were lowered. By linking the administration of producing units
with buying and distributing units, costs for information onmarkets
and sources of supply were reduced. Of much greater significance, the
internalization of many units permitted the flow of goods from one unit
to another to be administratively coordinated.More effective schedul-
ing of flows achieved a more intensive use of facilities and personnel
employed in the processes of production and distribution and so in-
creased productivity and reduced costs. In addition, administrative co-
ordination provided a more certain cash flow andmore rapid payment
for services rendered.25
In other words, when corporations acted to integrate organizations,pro-
cesses, and people, they increased their need for capable managers and si-
multaneously found it necessary to generate and circulate vast quantities of
information to facilitate control and coordination. Where once a business
owner performed all sorts of functions himself in a small, often family-run
business, in the new, more extended corporation he found it necessary to
employ managers, technicians, and specially trained individuals to coor-
dinate diverse activities.26 Described at the time as “brain workers,” these
individuals depended upon complex computational and literacy skills as
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Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2004 215
27. See James Beniger,The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the
Information Society (Cambridge,Mass., 1986).
28. Ibid., p. 7.29. For a magisterial account of the relationship among these various factors and the emergence
of a national print culture, see Ohmann, Selling Culture, esp. chap. 2, “The Origins of Mass
Culture,” pp. 11–30.
well as on the social skills required to work with large numbers of people.
Indeed, as James Beniger has pointed out, the managerial revolution in
American business documented by Chandler was itself accompanied by an
equally consequential social and cultural revolution in thewaybusinessprac-
tices were integrated and coordinated.27 “Before this time,” Beniger notes,
“control of government andmarkets haddependedonpersonal relationships
and face-to-face interactions; now control came to be reestablishedbymeans
of bureaucratic organization, the new infrastructures of transportation and
telecommunications, and system-wide communicationvia thenewmassme-
dia.”28 The control revolution, as Beniger terms it, united efforts to amassand
manage different forms of information with an equally important push to
circulate that information both quickly and extensively.
During the post–Civil War period, machines as well as corporations had
become far more complex. As a consequence, they both depended on the
circulation of large quantities of data to keep them running. Faster, more
sophisticated machines depended on the careful calibration and prepro-
cessing of materials to be fed into the system as well as upon the use of
complex feedback devices to track the results. Similarly, corporations re-
quired trainedworkers, specialized accountingpractices, professionalman-
agers, “scientificmanagement” techniques, and statistical quality control to
oversee the integration of far-flung units and subunits. The vastly aug-
mented industrial output that resulted from these innovations then de-
manded parallel control of distribution processes. The new, vertically
integrated corporations learned to utilize the national railroad and tele-
graph systems and an expanding U.S. postal system tomanage distribution
more efficiently. More effective distribution, of course, then demanded
equally effective efforts to control consumption. As a consequence, awhole
new retail system developed that depended asmuch on complex devices for
tracking inventory as on the publishing of information about available
goods. The latter, like virtually all of the control schemesmentioned above,
depended at least in part on the auxiliary circulation of words andnumbers
at ever-faster rates. All of it, then, was dependent upon the perfection of the
power-drive, multiple rotary printing press, a highly complexmachine that
was itself essential to that which emerged as a consequence, a differentiated
yet nationally oriented print culture.29
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216 Janice Radway / The Circulation of Professional Expertise
30. Bledstein,The Culture of Professionalism, esp. chap. 2, “Space andWords,” p. 78.
31. See ibid., p. 47.32. See John Y. Cole, “Storehouses andWorkshops: American Libraries and the Uses of
Knowledge,” in The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, p. 367.
33. Veysey,The Emergence of the American University, p. 113.
34. See Geiger,To Advance Knowledge, p. 14.
In the years between 1870 and 1920, in fact, a highly variegated print cul-
ture generated the “riot ofwords”describedbyBledstein.30Dailynewspaper
circulation multiplied by seven times between 1870 and 1900. During the
same period, the number of post offices tripled while the sale of ordinary
postage stamps increased by a factor of eight.31 Between 1880 and 1910, the
number of new titles published in the United States increased sixfold from
about two thousand books a year to thirteen thousand.32 This was made
possible by a significant increase in the number of publishing firms as well
as by the growth of literacy of the general population. Indeed it was this
more broadly literate population that devoured theperiodical literaturethat
increased fivefold between 1865 and 1885. And, as RichardOhmannhasdoc-
umented in Selling Culture, that literature was essential to the elaboration
of the new retail infrastructure and the advertising industry that facilitated
its efficient functioning.
Even this highly compressed version of a complex history should dem-
onstrate almost immediately that nearly everyone who would labor in the
control sectors of the economywould require sophisticated literacy andnu-
meracy skills. At the same time, they also needed more focused educations
to enable their work in the increasingly specialized spaces, sites, and regions
of an ever-more differentiated yet integrated society. It thus should be clear
why the elective system first imagined at Harvard looked so sensible to the
officers of innovative colleges anduniversities around the country.The free-
dom of choice and specialization that it promoted among students would
enable those institutions to prepare their students for a range of different
careers. At the same time, newuniversity and collegepresidentsadditionally
advocated increased vocational and technical courses of study for those stu-
dents in order to prepare them for emerging lines of work as specialized
“experts” of one sort or another. Little wonder that a college educationsoon
looked like a guarantor of future employment for the children of the ex-
panding middle classes. Indeed, as Laurence Veysey has pointed out, “Such
untraditional disciplines as pedagogy, domestic science, business admin-
istration, sanitary science, physical education, and various kinds of engi-
neering were all becoming firmly established at a number of leading
universities by the turn of the century.”33 Roger Geiger has noted as well
that the applied sciences and engineering expandedmost rapidlyduring the
eighties and nineties and tended to attract the newer kind of college student
interested primarily in professional preparation.34
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Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2004 217
35. See Oleson and Voss, introduction, p. xv, and Veysey, “The Plural OrganizedWorlds of the
Humanities, in The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, pp. 51–106.
36. See, for instance, Veysey’s extended discussion in chap. 3, “Research,” in The Emergence of
the American University, pp. 121–79. I have drawn heavily on his discussion here.
The drift toward the dominance of the sciences, both natural and social,
was so marked, in fact, that those professing the older arts of literature,
language, history, and philosophy increasingly defended their work under
the rubric of the humanities and began to coordinate their efforts in order
to seek financial support from college presidents and university adminis-
trations.35 However, the very fact that the humanists had to operate in this
way in order to secure university resources only further testifies to the fact
that by the 1890s the research university and the new scientific orientation
it encouraged hadmounted a strong bid to dominateAmericanhigher edu-
cation.
Professional Knowledge Production and the Creationof the ExpertThe sciences and the social sciences emergedaspowerful forces at this time
not simply because they held out the promise of creating new technologies
and methods for addressing the problems and potentials of a rapidly incor-
porating society. They also pioneered the adoption of organizational forms
that institutionalized the intellectual specialization that had become thehall-
mark of the scientific enterprise. In fact, as the sciences marked themselves
off fromeachother theoretically andmethodologically, thosewithspecialized
competencies increasingly moved to organize their efforts more effectively
through the creationof autonomousdepartments,professionalsocieties,spe-
cialized journals, and particular forms of credentialing. In effect, through the
process of disciplining their own work and that of the specialists they sought
to train, they began to organize knowledge production in newways. Theuni-
versity, in turn, itself began to take on the character of a complex corporation
with semiautonomous departments whose coordination had to bemanaged
at any number of different levels, whether administratively, financially, or
pedagogically.
Historians disagree about what constituted professionalization in the
sciences and in academia more generally. Nor do they agree about the pre-
cise causes of the phenomenon. Still, it is clear that it had everything to do
with specialization, with the growing emphasis on laboratory research, and
with the creation of a communications infrastructure that enabled thepub-
lication, circulation, and discussion of research results not only among
peers but within a larger society called upon to finance such research, to
support it with students, and to understand its value.36 As the various dis-
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218 Janice Radway / The Circulation of Professional Expertise
37. Hawkins,Pioneer: A History of the Johns Hopkins University, 1874–1889 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1960),
p. 74; hereafter abbreviated P. See Geiger, To Advance Knowledge, p. 31. On the relationship
between the university, the developing sciences, and journal publication, see also Shils, “The
Order of Learning in the United States From 1865 to 1920: The Ascendency of the Universities,”
The Order of Learning, pp. 1–38, esp. 15–19.
38. Daniel Kevles, “The Physics,Mathematics, and Chemistry Communities: A Comparative
Analysis,” in The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, p. 140.
ciplines professionalized, they sought and obtained the kind of autonomy
that would enable them to control the credentialing of new members. At
the same time, that autonomy could never isolate the discipline and its av-
atars from the larger population that was required to recognize its special
legitimacy and to turn to it for professional advice, assistance, and treat-
ment. As a consequence, it became necessary to find ways to foster rela-
tionships with nonspecialists as well.
Again, it is common to associate the emergenceof theneworganizational
forms with the founding of Hopkins. In his detailed history of the insti-
tution, Hugh Hawkins has pointed out that the scholars assembled in Bal-
timore byGilmanmoved quickly to consolidate disciplinaryautonomyand
to assume vanguardpositions in their respectivedisciplines.Oneof theways
they sought to do both was through the establishment of scholarly journals.
Hawkins claims with good cause that “Hopkins was the cradle of the schol-
arly journal in America.”37 Indeed five of the six original departments at
Hopkins organized specialized journalswithin a fewyears of theuniversity’s
founding. They did so, in part, because there were few regularly appearing
journals available to them in the United States for the publication of their
research results. As Daniel Kevles has pointed out, although “a count of
research papers appearing in the 1870s indicates that about thirty chemists,
twenty physicists, and probably still fewer mathematicians pursued and
published research with any regularity” in the U.S., that small number still
had to resort to journals published abroad to make their work known.38
This seemed an inadequate solution to ambitiousmenwhowereattempting
not only to establish their own individual reputations but alsoweremaking
claims about the excellence and legitimacy of thenewAmerican institutions
that employed them. Indeed, the faculty atHopkins quickly recognized that
if they were to make claims not only about the excellence of their own re-
search but also about the stature of their institution and the American re-
search community more generally, they would need reliable means to
convey their activities and findings to their scholarly peers.
In fact, only a few months after the university was officially founded,
Gilman encouraged and extended financial support to a group of mathe-
maticians led by J. J. Sylvester in their efforts to form the American Journal
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Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2004 219
39. Quoted in John Tebbell,A History of Book Publishing in the United States, 4 vols. (New York,
1975), 2:536.
of Pure andAppliedMathematics. Thefirst issue of the journalwaspublished
under university auspices in 1878. Although this did not mean that a full-
fledged university press had been established in Baltimore—in fact, the title
Johns Hopkins University Press wouldn’t be used officially until 1891—it
did mean that Gilman and the Hopkins trustees at least recognized that it
was in the interest of the institution to subsidize the cost of disseminating
research results (see P, pp. 74–75, 107–12). Even as Sylvester was organizing
this mathematical journal, Ira Remsen of the chemistry department sought
to create a parallel journal in his own field that would enable him and his
laboratory colleagues to publish their earliest research findings (see P, p.
75). His stated rationale for the journal demonstrates clearly that the de-
veloping research culture at Hopkins valorized the creation of new knowl-
edge. Concomitantly, it sought to use the apparatus of print to establish
American claims to scientific expertise and authorship aswell as to transmit
the knowledge thereby produced to an international community of peers.
Remsen explained to Gilman that a university-supported journal shouldbe
organized for two reasons:
1st. That we may be recognized as soon as possible as belonging to the
working Chemists of the country; 2nd. That the results of our labors may
be insured to us or, in other words, to establish our priority.
In Germany, France and England there are journals intended for
such preliminary publications, and articles sent to them are sure to ap-
pear promptly. [P, pp. 75–76]
Remsen hoped that the creation of a regularly publishing journal would
establish his laboratory’s claim to innovation and origination and assist in
the consolidation of a specifically national scientific community thatmight
compete with then dominant European scientists. Gilman supportedRem-
sen as he had Sylvester, and soon thereafter a “flood of scholarly journals”
and monograph series began to issue from Baltimore (P, p. 112). Gilman
reported with satisfaction to the trustees:
Publication has been encouraged—so far as possible through channels
already established—butwhen necessary through agencies of our own.
We have not instituted a university press, but we havemade arrange-
ment for the systematic printing of mathematical, chemical, biological,
and philological papers.We have hoped in this way to extend the use-
fulness of this foundation far beyond the company of those whomwe
constantly instruct.39
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220 Janice Radway / The Circulation of Professional Expertise
40. See Geiger,To Advance Knowledge, pp. 32–33.
41. See ibid., pp. 32–35.42. See Kevles, “Physics,Mathematics, and Chemistry Communities,” pp. 152–53.
43. On the relationship between speed, periodicity, andmass culture, see Ohmann, Selling
Culture, pp. 11–30. For the way this new constellation affected cultural productionmore generally
andmiddlebrow culturemore specifically, see Radway,A Feeling for Books, pp. 168–76.
Mediated dissemination, in Gilman’s view, because it was more extensive,
was equally as important as the dissemination of knowledge that occurred
in the classroom.
Because there is as yet no comprehensive history of the scholarly journal
in the United States, it is difficult to generalize about its development, or-
ganization, or funding. Many of the journals sponsored by national schol-
arly associations were funded by subscription fees and subsidized by an
association’s membership dues. But the impulse to create venues for the
research findings of the growing cadre of university-based researchers led
also to the enthusiastic founding of department-based journals at anumber
of leading universities throughout the eighties and nineties whose sole pur-
pose was to publicize the results of local faculty research. In the years be-
tween 1880 and 1906, Hopkins sponsored six such journals, Chicago funded
twelve, the University of California created four, Columbia six, Cornell five,
and Harvard sponsored eight.40 Most of these department-based journals
disappeared relatively quickly because few departments generated enough
research on their own to keep them going. By the second decade of the new
century, then, scholarly publication tended to be split between journals
sponsored by national associations and subdisciplinary organs arising from
interuniversity communities of specialists.41 In the field of chemistry, for
instance, the original,more catholic journalswere joined laterby the Journal
of Physical Chemistry, the Journal of Biological Chemistry, and the Journal of
Industrial and Engineering Chemistry.42
It seems clear that by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century
the activities of an increasingly prominent segment of the fraternity of the
learned were intricately bound up with an elaborate print and publication
infrastructure that emphasized the regular, periodic publication of new re-
search results. In some ways, developments in the learned world paralleled
those in the culture at large, whichwitnessed the explosion of popularmag-
azines and newspapers during this same period. In emphasizing speed and
timeliness of reporting, these developments helped to transform the very
idea of learning and culture from themastery of a limited collection of uni-
versal truths to an understanding of it as an evolving, ever-improvingbody
of information and knowledge about the realworld.43 In addition, thismove
toward periodical publication constituted a significant challenge to thepre-
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Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2004 221
44. See P, p. 119.
45. AlbertMutomakes this argument in his history of the University of California Press. As
evidence, he cites the comments of both Charles Eliot andWoodrowWilson on the occasion of
the twenty-fifth anniversary of Hopkins. In tribute to Daniel Coit Gilman,Wilson observed, “You
were the first to create and organize in America a university in which the discovery and
dissemination of new truths were conceded a rank superior to mere instruction, and in which the
efficiency and value of research as an educational instrument were exemplified in the training of
many investigators” (quoted in Albert Muto,The University of California Press: The Early Years,
1893–1953 [Berkeley, 1993], pp. 5–6).
46. See Tebbel,A History of Book Publishing, 2:537. On the history of the University of Chicago,
see Richard Storr,Harper’s University: The Beginnings: A History of the University of Chicago
(Chicago, 1966).
47. See Tebbel,History of Book Publishing, 2:536.
eminence of the boundbook as the principal technology for theproduction,
dissemination, and circulation of information in American society. Haw-
kins notes for instance that though it possessed a remarkable collection of
periodicals in its early years (one thousand serials by 1889), the library at
Hopkins had only one-tenth of the books claimed by Harvard.44 Inasmuch
as the period from 1880 to 1925 or somight be deemed the high-watermark
of book culture in the United States, so too must it be seen as the period in
which significant challenges to the book developed. Though these chal-
lenges would multiply with the appearance of new broadcast technologies
like radio, film, and television, I think it fair to suggest that the process
gathered steam behind the expansion of a highly differentiated periodical
culture that ran the gamut from the American Journal of Pure and Applied
Mathematics to Philatelic Monthly to Munsey’s and Cosmopolitan.
This is not to say, of course, that bookpublicationwasoutmodedentirely
in the academic world any more than it was in the culture at large. Bound
books still carried a significant amount of prestige, and many researchers
sought to present their work in the extended format made possible by the
traditional codex format. In fact, the very years that saw the rise of the schol-
arly association and periodicals also saw the development of the first uni-
versity presses in the United States. Although Andrew White and Cornell
University are usually credited with the creation of the first such press in
America, Hopkins was again more influential in fostering the belief among
university administrators that the status of their institutionswasdependent
on publicizing the research results of their faculties.45 Indeed it is significant
that when theUniversity of Chicagowas organized in 1893 a universitypress
was incorporated as one of the fourmajor divisions of the institution.Pres-
ident William Rainey Harper ranked publication the equal of research and
teaching at the new university.46
In addition to Cornell, Hopkins, and Chicago, Pennsylvania, Notre
Dame, Sewanee, Howard, Columbia, Northwestern, NorthCarolina, Stan-
ford, Princeton, Yale, andHarvard all organized university presses by 1919.47
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222 Janice Radway / The Circulation of Professional Expertise
48. SeeMuto,University of California Press, p. 43.
49. See Robert Frederick Lane, “The Place of the AmericanUniversity Press in Publishing” (Ph.
D. thesis, University of Chicago, 1939); cited in Tebbell,A History of Book Publishing in the United
States, 2:535.
50. See ibid.
Most were relatively small operations designed to emphasize the more ab-
stract publication function than the profit-making business of printing for
paying readers. In fact, distribution was largely carried out through gift and
exchange, a practice that helped to augment the collections at many uni-
versity libraries but did not disperse copies of the books much beyond the
scholarly community itself.48 The early university presses tended to issue
monographs, specialized studies, and series of scholarly books that could
never have been published by the trade. The University of California Press,
for instance, had twenty-three differentmonograph seriesby 1913, including
series in geology, botany, zoology, entomology, archaeology, andethnology,
as well as classical, Semitic, and modern philology.
Despite this kind of variety, however, even in the period 1918 to 1937 uni-
versity press output still constituted a very small portion of the books pub-
lished in the U.S. Robert Frederick Lane reported in the first real study of
university presses ever that total title production of all university presses
during this period amounted to only 5,382 titles at a time when the yearly
output of the trade hovered around the 9,000 titlemark.49 Despite the small
number of actual titles published, however, university presses did signifi-
cantly increase the percentage of nonfiction titles they published in com-
parison with the trade during this period. Where once they had published
only 2 percent of all nonfiction titles, by 1937 theywere publishing 10percent
of nonfiction titles.50 Clearly, the increase reflects the growth of the knowl-
edge-producing class itself. Still, both the small sales numbers associated
with those titles and the fact that 90 percent of all nonfiction continued to
be published by the commercial trade suggests that the reading population
capable of making sense of such specialized and technical matter remained
small.
These figures are emblematic of amore general situation that challenged
the new, professionalized, knowledge-producing classes as well as themore
pragmatically oriented “experts” they trained in their classrooms, libraries,
and laboratories.Without reliablemeans to generate awareness of and sup-
port for their activities, they could not easily insure their ownfinancial sup-
port. More to the point, if they wrote for and communicated onlywith each
other, they would fail to secure their standing as experts, that is, as individ-
uals with a special competency that enabled them to direct, advise, teach,
and control others. While the professionalizing disciplines could internally
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Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2004 223
51. Bledstein,The Culture of Professionalism, p. 90.
52. On the various practices that constituted the aura of professionalism, see ibid., pp. 92–104.
credential and thereby authorize their students, they could not legitimate
themselves or their claims to special statuswithout the consent of those they
aimed to inform, lead, and serve. As Bledstein has observed:
Laymen were neither prepared to comprehend themystery of the tasks
which professionals performed, nor . . . were they equipped to pass
judgment upon special skills and technical competence. Hence, the cul-
ture of professionalism required amateurs to “trust” in the integrity of
trained persons, to respect themoral authority of those whose claim to
power lay in the sphere of the sacred and the charismatic. Professionals
controlled themagic circle of scientific knowledgewhich only the few,
specialized by training and indoctrination,were privileged to enter, but
which all in the name of nature’s universalitywere obligated to appreci-
ate.51
The story of the growth in prestige of the various new “sciences” and the
concomitant rise to prominence of the professional expert is a complexone
that cannot be told in any detail here. Suffice it to say, however, that if a
culture of professionalism were to be established, it was necessary, first, to
surround all forms of scientific knowledge with a distinct aura. Then, itwas
necessary to produce the requisite forms of trust and obligation. Univer-
sities and the disciplines they harbored evolved a whole range of practices
that functioned to do both. Technical language and specialized jargon
played an important role in constituting the insularity of professionalism.
Similarly, formal credentialing practices like comprehensive examinations,
dissertations, medical boards, and the bar examination did much to create
the sense that professors, doctors, and lawyers had stepped beyond their
peers in their mastery of the difficult and the arcane. In addition, the nu-
merous ceremonial occasions, awards, prizes, and titles that emerged in ac-
ademic life during the period 1880–1915 further augmented the sense that
academic life and the business of knowledge productionwere investedwith
high drama and consequence.52 The fact that academic and professional
forms were widely imitated throughout the culture, giving way to the crea-
tion of business, cooking, and secretarial colleges, to name only a few, sug-
gests that these efforts were largely successful.
Though it is clear that universities, disciplines, andprofessionsdidmuch
to establish their own special stature and status, I don’t think they would
have succeeded so thoroughly without the supporting role played by a bur-
geoning print culture, itself buffeted by pressures to specialize and profes-
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224 Janice Radway / The Circulation of Professional Expertise
53. Stansell Christine,American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New
Century (New York, 2000), p. 74.
54. See ChristopherWilson,The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era
(Athens, Ga., 1985) and Ohmann, Selling Culture.
55. On the connection between these newmagazines and the professional-managerial class, see
Ohmann, Selling Culture, pp. 118–74.
sionalize. As I have already indicated, it seems to me that a crucial role was
also played by the large literature of popularization that developed amidst
the “explosion of language” issuing from U.S. printing presses in the years
after 1880.53 Indeed, college presidents, educators, engineers, chemists, bi-
ologists, psychologists, economists, anthropologists, and sociologists were
all called upon repeatedly as specialists and experts by the periodicals of the
era, especially the new-style magazines like McClure’s and Munsey’s.
First developed in the 1880s and 1890s and reaching their heyday during
the Progressive era, these magazines were significantly different from the
older, more literary monthlies like the Century, Harper’s, and the Atlantic
Monthly, all of which were associated with the traditional elites of Boston
andNew York.54 As ChristopherWilson and RichardOhmannhave shown,
the new magazines differed from their predecessors in organization, fund-
ing structure, and audience orientation. Designed principally as money-
makers, thesemagazines were underwritten by the advertising revenue they
solicited extensively. That revenue enabled their owners to offer them to
subscribers at a nominal fee, thereby exponentially expanding their audi-
ence base.More significantly, however, that revenue effectively transformed
the very nature of the magazine business from a textually oriented literary
business to one involved in leveraging print content to gather an audience
together in order to deliver its attention to the advertisers who made the
whole thing possible. What this meant, as Ohmann has argued so vigor-
ously, is that these magazines actually invented a new product—the audi-
ence’s attention—and thus were absolutely crucial to the development of a
nationally oriented consumer culture. They were also significantly involved
in the business of class consolidation as a result. The class they helped to
constitute was the professional-managerial class itself, that group of brain
workers who trained in the new colleges and universities, labored with
words and numbers in offices rather than on farms or in manufacturing
plants, and who moved to the new suburbs. It was this group, and all who
aspired tomembership within it, who struggled to keep pacewith the grow-
ing complexities of modern life andwork by seeking to overcome their own
narrow specialization by consuming the latest information about theworld
offered through key agencies of the flourishing print culture.55
The new-style, mass market magazines and the large city dailies whose
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Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2004 225
56. Neil Harris, “The Lamp of Learning: Popular Lights and Shadows,” in The Organization of
Knowledge in Modern America, p. 435.
numbers were also exploding during this period were among the first cul-
tural institutions to establish themselves as indispensable guides to thecom-
plexities and pace of modern life as well as to the arcana of specialized
knowledge production. Instantiating the modern pace both in their own
relentless periodicity and in their emphasis on the news opened channels
of communication with regular audiences that had to be filled with con-
stantly changing content. This led to an eclectic mix of information about
modern life, self-help advice, and celebrity gossip, as both Wilson and
Ohmann have shown, but it also led to a complex synergy between these
newprint forms and the emerging experts and specialistswho, for theirown
reasons, hoped for access to a broad general population. Because the new
magazines emphasized the agentive editor and the practice of commission-
ing pieces on topics generated in the editorial office, they had to give up
reliance on submissions thatmight trickle in fromamateurs andunknowns.
It provedmuchmore efficient to turn to expertswho alreadyhad familiarity
with some aspect of modern life and to ask them to summarize their par-
ticular forms of expertise for a generally educated thoughneither classically
nor technically trained audience. Thus, while university professors increas-
ingly served on government boards and commissions and testified before
legislative committees, so too did they offer expert advice to the public
throughmagazines and newspapers on subjects as diverse as “child rearing,
decoration, sports, civic improvements,military preparedness, foreignpol-
icy, food preparation, health, morals, and religion.”56
In offering their more broadly basedmiddle-class audiencesmuchmore
nonfiction, including popularized science, interviews with experts, spe-
cialists, and celebrities, self-help articles, and muckraking investigations of
pressing social issues, these magazines and newspapers functioned symbi-
otically with the apparatus of scholarly knowledge production. They im-
plied by their practices that knowledge was evolving, that the new was
always better than the old, and that the expert was more authoritative than
either the amateur dabbler or the generalist. Translatingmaterial originally
created for highly specialized audiences, the magazines run by FrankMun-
sey, S. S. McClure, George Lorimer, and Edward Bok did much to enhance
the credibility of the expert and the prestige of the various new “sciences”
by creating public trust in their ability to make sense of a fast-changing,
bewildering, modern world. They were essential, then, to the establishment
of the client base necessary to the practice of the professional expert.
A further development of and negotiation with this new culture of the
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226 Janice Radway / The Circulation of Professional Expertise
expert, what became known as middlebrow culture was created when the
periodicity and marketing strategies associated with the magazines was al-
lied to new forms of educational and literary expertise and ironically
grounded upon an older, Arnoldian understanding of culture as a spiritual
guide and source of moral instruction. Moving to capitalize on the bewil-
derment many felt in the face of the explosion of print and knowledge pro-
duction, book publishing entrepreneurs sought tomarket aids, handbooks,
and schemes for ordering, cataloging, controlling, and even countering the
new. They did so by relying on literary experts in the worlds of education
and print who were asked to lend their names and authority to cultural
materials to be sold as ways to counteract modern anxiety about constant
change. As early as 1909, for example, P. F. Collier & Sons relied on the
names of Charles Eliot and Harvard to sell a set of classics, which they sug-
gestedwould groundweightlessmoderns in the ballast of traditionandpro-
vide them with all that an educated man needed to know. They were
imitated by many in subsequent years, including Charles and Albert Boni
who teamed up with advertising man Harry Scherman to sell cheap sets of
classics by mail, initially bymarketingminiature Shakespeare plays in a box
of candy.
Then, in 1926, in a scheme that effectively consolidated this newmiddle-
brow formation, Scherman created the Book-of-the-MonthClub (BOMC)
with the intention of selling hundreds of thousands of books to a stable
group of magazine-like subscribers by billing his offerings as the “best”
books published each month. In order to better echo the Arnoldian lan-
guage of the best, that is, of the timeless and the universal rather than the
ephemeral and the new, Scherman based his operation on the choices of a
panel of literary experts. He used their previously established legitimacy in
academia, in journalism, and in the world of belles lettres to testify to their
ability to select the best book published each month for “general” readers
who had neither the technical competence to know what the best might be
in any number of different fields nor the time to winnow through the vast
output of titles issuing from a growing number of publishing houses. Thus
he both countered the threat of the ever changing and the new and adopted
it as the basic mechanism of his operation.
WhatHenryCanby andhis colleagues,DorothyCanfieldFisher,William
AllenWhite,HeywoodBroun, andChristopherMorleyofferedBOMCsub-
scribers was a diverse, ever-changing mix of serious but not avant-garde
literary fiction; biographies and autobiographies of the usual historical fig-
ures and statesmen, but also of scientists likeMarieCurie andLouisPasteur;
popular history and science; and awelter of outlines, summaries, andguide-
books to the new knowledge. Over the years, the BOMC has been famous
for sending out Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Philosophy, William
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Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2004 227
Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. By
issuing books like these alongside quite conventional, story-driven novels
with some literary pretensions, the BOMC simultaneously authorized the
regime of the scientific expert and challenged the legitimacy of university-
based academics to define what ought to count as specifically literary ex-
pertise. In effect, though the club operated to justify the hegemony of the
expert more generally, it created competition within the literary field by
challenging the authority of academic English departments to determine
what it meant to know literature or to make proper use of it.
Disputing the philologists’ interest in linguistic origins and source study
as well as literary professors’ eventual championing of the aesthetics of a
modernist literature of bourgeois critique, the middlebrow Book-of-the-
Month Club offered its clientele several things. First, it offered them a view
of books as literary material broadly conceived. That is to say, novels and
poetry were not cordoned off as something particularly special or worthy
of a different form of attention. Rather, both were construed, much like
biography and popular history, as reading matter, that is, as a tool for pro-
viding both entertainment and instruction, both escape andmoral enlight-
enment. Second, it offered its clientele expert knowledge in the form of
advice about what books might best live up to that view of literarymaterial
as ameans to certain functional ends. Finally, in selling thebooks thatwould
deliver the required reading experience, the club offered its subscribers the
promise that they, too, could master the modern world and all its new in-
formation.
Scherman’s operation became so famous in the decades after 1926 that
countless marketing schemes offered consumers a range of commodities-
of-the-month from religious and socialist books to fruit, flowers, and art-
works. Similarly, his panel of expert judges was widely imitated, as was his
even more famous negative option reply card—in which subscribers re-
sponded only to a monthly solicitation if they didn’t want that month’s
selection.Onemight suggest, then, given this sort of evidence, that theclub’s
influence was a function of its marketing success. Though this would cer-
tainly be correct, it would ignore the fact that the club was also surprisingly
successful because it managed to persuade a large population of educated
general readers that it offered them something they needed, that is, the ex-
pert advice of learned literary specialists who could help themnegotiate the
world of books in order to gain access to the highly valuable “information”
they contained. Thus they opened a reliable channel of communicationbe-
tween themselves and a reading audience willing not only to rely on that
advice but also on the books they recommended, most of which shared a
certain ideological specificity.
There is neither space nor necessity for detailing that ideological for-
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228 Janice Radway / The Circulation of Professional Expertise
mation here. Rather, I simply want to suggest in closing that it was this
structural relationship with a broad general audience that university-based
English professors and their other humanist colleagues failed to establish.
Though they could certainly credential their own students, codify their
methodological specificities, and couch their research in a technical lan-
guage quite distinct from the language of everyday book conversations, in
their efforts to distinguish themselves from their middlebrow competitors
they disdained everything associated with the Babbittry of themiddlebrow.
Thus they scorned the cultural earnestness of book club subscribers and
their belief that the literary should be both comprehensible and useful. At
the same time, they increasingly defined the literary in opposition to the
commercial, thereby marking print and broadcast circuits with large au-
diences as illegitimate and off-limits. As a consequence, they failed tomake
a larger case in the public sphere for the usefulness of their expertise just as
they failed to specify exactly what sort of product they offered to those they
would advise, counsel, and shape. Small wonder, then, that the Englishpro-
fessor increasingly came to stand in for the fusty academic squirreled away
in his ivory tower, writing away amidst his books and the dust.While some
would argue, justifiably I think, that the distance thereby gained from the
dominant culture enabled the discipline to function as a source of cultural
critique, it seems to me that the recent proletarianization of English and
other humanities departments by reliance on adjuncts and graduate stu-
dents, the proliferation of writing across the university programs, and the
shrinkage of department budgets and faculty lines suggest that the faith in
humanistic expertise is now at a critically low ebb. Unless humanities fac-
ulties and specialists learn to address a broad, general audience and tomake
a case for the knowledge they offer, they will be replaced by departments of
communication and media studies that already offer specialized and tech-
nical knowledge of cultural and knowledge production and transmission.
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