Current
(1) A historical analysis of the Science Studies program at the University of San Diego, California.
(2) The cultural production and reception of the 1925 Tennessee anti-evolution law. To what extent the law was just a symbolic protest.
(3) A comparative study of the politics of public education and evolution in the 1920s from the institutional perspective of the state sponsored university.
"An Open Road to Learning? Evolution and the Politics of Education in North Carolina and Tennessee, 1925" (In Progress).
Abstract
In the opening months of 1925 North Carolina was on the brink of becoming the first state in the union to formally outlaw the teaching of evolution in public schools. Instead, Tennessee famously claimed that honor. The success and therefore primacy of Tennessee over the failure and therefore obscurity of North Carolina raises an interesting historical problem—namely, how did this happen? A focus on Presidents Harry Chase of the University of North Carolina and Harcourt Morgan of the University of Tennessee illustrates not only how the presence or absence of influential allies helps shape political opportunities in terms of the mobilization of opposition but also how such decisions to be present or absent are made. I examine the forces that led the two university presidents under consideration here to pursue direct action or inaction, and the consequences thereof, in terms of their individual political situations and ideological commitments. President Chase’s, for example, commitment to an “open road to learning” implied a particular organizational relationship between the state and the university that was not taken for granted but had to be fought for and negotiated. Finally, I show how, in the case of North Carolina, latent informal networks of university alumni were activated to mobilize support among divided elites and how such networks of support seemed to be lacking in Tennessee.