This book—the first long-term study of educational travel between France and the United States—suggests that, by studying abroad, ordinary people are constructively involved in international relations. Author Whitney Walton analyzes study abroad from the perspectives of the students, schools, governments, and NGOs involved and charts its changing purpose and meaning throughout the twentieth century. She shows how students' preconceptions of themselves, their culture, and the other nationality—particularly differences in gender roles—shaped their experiences and were transformed during their time abroad.
This book presents Franco-American relations in the twentieth century as a complex mixture of mutual fascination, apprehension, and appreciation—an alternative narrative to the common framework of Americanization and anti-Americanism. It offers a new definition of internationalism as a process of questioning stereotypes, reassessing national identities, and acquiring a tolerance for and appreciation of difference.
This book—the first long-term study of educational travel between France and the United States—suggests that, by studying abroad, ordinary people are constructively involved in international relations. Author Whitney Walton analyzes study abroad from the perspectives of the students, schools, governments, and NGOs involved and charts its changing purpose and meaning throughout the twentieth century. She shows how students' preconceptions of themselves, their culture, and the other nationality—particularly differences in gender roles—shaped their experiences and were transformed during their time abroad.
This book presents Franco-American relations in the twentieth century as a complex mixture of mutual fascination, apprehension, and appreciation—an alternative narrative to the common framework of Americanization and anti-Americanism. It offers a new definition of internationalism as a process of questioning stereotypes, reassessing national identities, and acquiring a tolerance for and appreciation of difference.
Internationalism, National Identities, and Study Abroad: France and the United States, 1890-1970
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Internationalism, National Identities, and Study Abroad: France and the United States, 1890-1970
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This book—the first long-term study of educational travel between France and the United States—suggests that, by studying abroad, ordinary people are constructively involved in international relations. Author Whitney Walton analyzes study abroad from the perspectives of the students, schools, governments, and NGOs involved and charts its changing purpose and meaning throughout the twentieth century. She shows how students' preconceptions of themselves, their culture, and the other nationality—particularly differences in gender roles—shaped their experiences and were transformed during their time abroad.
This book presents Franco-American relations in the twentieth century as a complex mixture of mutual fascination, apprehension, and appreciation—an alternative narrative to the common framework of Americanization and anti-Americanism. It offers a new definition of internationalism as a process of questioning stereotypes, reassessing national identities, and acquiring a tolerance for and appreciation of difference.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804773386 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/02/2009 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Internationalism, National Identities, and Study Abroad
France and the United States, 1890-1970By Whitney Walton
Stanford University Press
Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6253-3
Chapter One
1 The American Quest for Knowledge and the French Quest for Americans, 1870-1919
John W. Burgess, political scientist and founder of the School of Political Science at Columbia University, wrote in his memoirs that in 1863 he pledged himself to a career in education with the intention of helping to avoid future wars and destruction. Graduated from Amherst College and enjoying his teaching appointment at Knox College in Illinois in the late 1860s, he nonetheless felt dissatisfied that he was not accomplishing much educationally. In his memoirs, he maintains that he said to himself: "Now is the time to interrupt your teaching and seek elsewhere the education in history, public law, and political science, which you have been vainly striving to secure in America." In 1871 he was en route to the University of Göttingen in Germany carrying a list of German scholars with whom he would study. Other educated young men, and some women, in the United States shared this experience in the late nineteenth century. As Edward Alsworth Ross, professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, remembered of the time he was teaching in an Iowa prep school from 1886 to 1888: "I was happy in my work and setting but still restlessness grew upon me. I must have broader opportunities. The German University was then the loftiest thing on the educational horizon, so I resolved to be off to Germany." Ross, too, made the journey to Europe, studying mostly in Berlin from 1888 to 1889.
So common was the practice of Americans spending a few years in Germany and elsewhere in Europe to pursue postgraduate studies that popular magazines offered guidance on the subject. In 1885 a Popular Science Monthly article titled "Studying in Germany" asserted that "there is a steadily growing class of Americans who visit Germany to spend from one to five years in study." The main reason for this was that "the center of the world's scholarship is there, and, if a young man knows that he wants learning, there is the place to get it at its best." In an article published in Century Magazine in 1887, Morris B. Crawford wrote: "Now that multitudes of American college graduates annually migrate to Berlin, Leipzig, Göttingen, and Strasburg, it may not be out of place to call attention to some widespread misapprehensions concerning the charms and advantages to life in a German university town." This popular migration of American graduate students to Germany was anathema to many French academics. But what could they do, as they also recognized the attraction of German universities?
As many historians have shown, in the nineteenth century Germany represented the acme of academic scholarship in a variety of fields in the sciences and humanities, and several thousands of American college graduates, mostly men, took courses or sought advanced degrees there to further their education and enhance their job prospects when they returned to the United States. Many of them contributed to the restructuring of American universities toward research and to the professionalization of academic disciplines. In the process a German academic model of empirical research and a seminar format of educational and scholarly discussion were adapted to American conditions. The reformed American universities combined a more secular and scientific approach with the existing emphasis on moral guidance, according to historian Julie A. Reuben. These institutional reforms accompanied significant social changes within and beyond the university that were all part of a broadly defined modernizing process. Konrad Jarausch asserts that universities in the United States and in Europe contributed to modernization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by enrolling more-and more diverse-students, expanding recruitment, and professionalizing newer fields, such as education, engineering, sciences, and social sciences. Jarausch argues that, because of the growing proportion of middle-class students, universities simultaneously contributed to social mobility and meritocracy, while still preserving traditional elites, culture, and status.
Part of this modernization of higher education was the inclusion of women, and foreign study also played an important role. Like men, women also sought scientific training and advanced degrees in Europe that were unavailable in their own countries. For example, historian Thomas Neville Bonner charts the determination of American women to obtain medical instruction, degrees, and training in Europe when they were either barred from universities in the United States or limited to inferior women's medical colleges. Because foreign students in Germany, Switzerland, and France were not required to hold that country's secondary school degree for admission into universities, and until these countries provided equal secondary education and degrees for all their citizens, foreign women were often the vanguard in gaining university access for women.
Historians of higher education in the United States have emphasized the ways that study in Europe affected American institutions, professions, and scholarship in the nineteenth century. They are much less concerned with the dimensions of personal transformation and the effects of study abroad on American national identity and internationalism, with a few notable exceptions. In his book on the transatlantic circulation of ideas about social reform from the late nineteenth century to World War II, Daniel Rodgers touches on the sense of personal and social liberation that studying and living in a European country meant for young, educated Americans. And Adam R. Nelson contends that study in Germany from 1850 to 1853 led American philologist William Dwight Whitney to advocate transnational cooperation in scholarship while simultaneously affirming his sense of American identity. My own reading of Americans who studied in Europe from 1870 to World War I focuses on the ways that this experience fulfilled aspirations for social mobility and professional advancement, altered personal identities, and precipitated reflection on American and European cultures. Although motivations for study in Europe were primarily careerist, studying and living abroad also made some of these ambitious young Americans less provincial and more cosmopolitan. And women confronted particular challenges that men did not while pursuing similar educational and professional goals.
A second component to this examination of American study abroad from 1870 to 1918 is the semi-official French intervention. Although France was also on many academic itineraries, French educators regarded this American preference for Germany as a national affront, especially after the French defeat by the emerging German empire in 1871. Along with some American supporters, they proposed reforms for French universities to increase their appeal for students from the United States. These efforts intensified when World War I dramatically changed relations among the United States, France, and Germany. French academics capitalized on this transformation to draw American students away from presumably discredited German institutions and into French universities and thereby combat the German influence in American higher education. What began as a manifestation of French cultural imperialism actually led to a better understanding of and even appreciation for American higher education among French educators. In addition, American soldiers studying in France between the armistice of 1918 and the peace treaty of 1919 provided a foundation for a new kind of American student migration to France after the war. Thus, the history of Americans studying in Europe from 1870 to 1919 is inseparable from the history of German, French, and American international relations.
The transatlantic flow of American students to Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries coincided with what historian Harvey Levenstein calls "the golden age of travel." He and other scholars have noted that technological improvements on steamships shortened the ocean voyage from two or three weeks before the American Civil War to about ten days in the 1870s and six days in the 1890s. At the same time capacity and comfort increased as the major transatlantic shipping lines introduced a second-class rate and accommodation between first-class luxury and steerage overcrowding. By the end of the nineteenth century, middle-class Americans could enjoy a safe, pleasant, and short voyage at an affordable price. For about $63.00 an American could purchase a second-class round-trip ticket to Europe, berth with one to three other passengers, and eat quite well in the ship's dining hall. Travel to Europe meant different things to different Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and even particular countries, namely, France and Germany, represented distinctive attractions. In the years before World War I, articles providing physical descriptions of France and Paris and about French literature and art proliferated in popular American magazines. According to Levenstein, wealthy, upper-class Americans traveled to France to cultivate the high arts and society, while middle-class men sought pleasures of the senses, in contrast to middle-class women aspiring to cultural enrichment. Levenstein identifies this era as marking a general transition from cultural travel to leisure travel. But unlike either cultural or leisure travelers, young, ambitious American graduate students journeyed across the Atlantic to enhance their academic careers and headed for Germany rather than France. For the most part, this generation of students abroad came from modest backgrounds: historian and educator Henry Johnson grew up in a small town in Minnesota; economist Richard T. Ely's father was a civil engineer, but his family lived and worked on a farm in upstate New York; orphaned at age eight, sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross worked on family farms in Illinois as a child and young man. Travel to Europe was no lark for these men and others like them; rather, they approached study in Germany with the same forethought, concentration, and drive that characterized their entire life narratives of academic achievement.
James A. Harrison, a professor of Teutonic languages at the University of Virginia, noted in 1900 that American travelers to Germany and France divided into two extremely dichotomous groups. Whereas, Harrison states, "our student population, our elect young men, the bloom and flower of our masculine youth poured into Germany," France attracted "the fashionable, the frivolous, the modish, the voluptuary, [and] the sybarite." Harrison's characterizations are overdrawn, and, in previous decades at least, hundreds of American doctors traveled to Paris to study French medical theories and practices. In addition, Harrison's article is primarily about how French university reforms of 1896, as we will see below, completely changed this dichotomous pattern and drew more and different Americans to France. Among American academics, however, Germany was the place for serious study from around 1870 to 1914.
Many publications in the United States in the late nineteenth century recognized the popularity of study in Europe, especially Germany, and offered advice on how to negotiate the German university system and daily life. A supposed private, anonymous letter from an American student who succeeded in earning the highest degree of praise, summa cum laude, for his PhD work in chemistry, physics, and mineralogy at the University of Heidelberg in 1875 detailed the procedure for obtaining the degree. He wrote little of actual coursework and more about the administrative aspects and examination formats, because he was focused more on the degree than on anything else: "Not long after the commencement of my student-life here, I saw that it would be of great advantage to me in my scientific life to possess such a rank [PhD], which has recognized worth in all the world and is not obtained by friendship or favoritism, as is so often the case in America." As he and others noted, studying in German universities was relatively easy in terms of admissions requirements and costs. Students with a diploma from an American college or university were admitted to attend lectures, though gaining degree candidacy was not automatic and entailed a specific application procedure and passing or waiving of the classics (Latin) examination. As one commentator wrote, "it is a fact that fewer difficulties beset the American in this quest [for a degree] than the German himself," because Germans had first to pass the secondary school (gymnasium) leaving examination, and competition for places in the university was fierce. Germans did not worry about Americans taking courses or even earning degrees because they would not compete for scarce positions in German academia. University study in Germany was easily accessible to American men, but the very different educational system presented pitfalls for the unwary. First, American students rarely knew enough German to follow lectures immediately on their arrival, and several months' study of the language alone was necessary for any meaningful coursework. Second, students in Germany were far more independent than their American counterparts; that is, class attendance was not required, and professor-student relations were distant, to say the least. These conditions meant that young American men were likely to congregate together in the most popular university town destinations (Berlin, Heidelberg, Leipzig, etc.) and spend too much of their unstructured time at concerts or in beer halls or coffee houses, often at the expense of learning German and studying their chosen subjects. One author warned parents that even the most "virtuous" and "industrious" young man might succumb to the unfamiliar freedom of student existence in Europe generally, in contrast to the United States: "He has also been accustomed to domestic and conventional restraints at home, which he will not feel in Europe." Noting that "the social instinct at this age is very strong," this author cautioned against providing American male students with too much money, because "in their anxiety to master the language they find a pretext for frequenting theaters, coffeehouses, clubs, and other places of public resort where those who spend most freely are always most welcome, and where they are beguiled into social alliances which in the main are to be deprecated." For author Horace M. Kennedy, studying in Germany was a tradeoff for Americans, because German universities were "the center of the world's scholarship," but offered un-American (and contradictory) examples of overwork, authoritarianism, pedantry, excessive smoking and drinking, and immorality. Considering the overall value of studying in Germany, he concluded: "while the boy may lose promptness, alertness, manners, fluency in English, and even health, the man gains, besides knowledge, incentives and standards that may make him a better citizen."
Successful American academics of the turn of the century often published memoirs of their lives, including study abroad as an important part of their careers. John W. Burgess, a political scientist who lived and studied in Germany from 1871 to 1873, modeled his own teaching after that of German university professors. As a professor at Amherst College, Burgess claimed that his students requested that he continue teaching them history after they graduated, which he did, despite faculty opposition, imitating his German mentors: "I followed in instructing them the methods of the German seminar, assigning to each a special field of investigation and bringing them together twice a week to hear the results of their researches and subject the same to discussion and inquiry by myself and the other members of the seminar." He then advised them all to go to Germany and continue their studies, which, according to Burgess, they did. Although he never realized his hope of transforming Amherst into a graduate school, he did have some success later, when he became a professor at Columbia Law School, by creating there a School of Political Science similar to those in Germany and in France.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations....................ixPreface....................xi
Acknowledgments....................xv
Introduction....................1
1 The American Quest for Knowledge and the French Quest for Americans, 18701919....................12
2 Making Internationalists? The Albert Kahn Around-the-World Scholars' Reports on France and the United States, 18981930....................39
3 Internationalism and the Junior Year Abroad: American Students in France in the 1920s and 1930s....................62
4 American Girls and French Jeunes Filles: Negotiating National Identities in Interwar France....................85
5 Warm Relations in a Cold War Atmosphere: Resurgence and Expansion of Study Abroad Following World War II....................109
6 American National Identity and French Student Life: Politicization and Educational Reform in the 1960s....................141
7 Sexuality, Gender, and National Identities in Twentieth-century Franco-American Exchanges....................171
Abbreviations Used in Notes....................195
Notes....................197
Index....................253