Editors’ Notes: Looking for historical precedents to today’s “aggressive” alumni donors, John Thelin and Richard Trollinger wrote recently on HistPhil that “the aggressive alumnus as major donor and activist is a product of our own times.” Challenging this thesis, Joan Marie Johnson reminds us that “prominent white women philanthropists” in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States–such as Mary Elizabeth Garrett, Phoebe Apperson Hearst, and Katharine Dexter McCormick–were also coercive alumni donors. Johnson concludes: “Coercive giving to universities has long left administrators grappling with how to keep donors at arm’s length, even if their goals are aligned.”
In their recent Histphil post, John Thelin and Richard Trollinger offer insightful historical perspective for the recent activist alumni donors who have wielded their money (or the threat to withhold it) to influence their alma mater. In searching for historical precedents of alumni donors who used similarly aggressive tactics, the authors point out that many of the so-called captains of industry in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries who gave large donations to colleges and universities were not actually alumni. These men either founded new institutions or transformed smaller schools with their generous endowment gifts. They cite Joseph Wharton, William Randolph Hearst, and Herbert Hoover as examples of education donors who worked with administrators and gave generously, without aggressive tactics.
It may be more instructive to examine several prominent white women philanthropists for precedents of what Margaret Rossiter called “coercive philanthropy,” writing about Mary Elizabeth Garrett.[i] In my book, Funding Feminism: Monied Women, Philanthropy, and the Women’s Movement 1870-1967, I explore the ways in which donors Garrett, Phoebe Apperson Hearst, Katharine Dexter McCormick and other women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries U.S. wielded their giving to force universities to open their doors to women or to increase the number of women admitted by providing scholarships or erecting a women’s building or a dormitory.[ii] Garrett, the daughter of a former trustee of Johns Hopkins University (which was all-male at the time), Hearst, a member of the Board of Regents at the University of California, Berkeley, and McCormick, an alumna of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), were willing to make demands of the universities to which they gave large donations of approximately $350,000 to $5 million.[iii]
Mary Elizabeth Garrett’s donation to fund Johns Hopkins University (JHU) Medical School in the early 1890s was indeed coercive and extremely consequential. Founder Johns Hopkins bequeathed money to establish a university, a medical school, and a hospital. However, after opening the university and the hospital, the university president had to seek another donor for the funding necessary for the medical school. Garrett offered $100,000, but only on the condition that the new school admit women on an equal basis to men. She provided $50,000 herself and raised the other half by forming the Women’s Medical School Fund, 90% of whose donors were women. This involved an early form of the “media activism” that Thelin and Trollinger consider, as Garrett recruited prominent women to the committee, including the wives of politicians, and exerted pressure through newspaper coverage and articles in Century Magazine.
Reluctant to admit women, President Daniel Coit Gilman raised the ante and declared $500,000 was needed to build the medical school. Ultimately Garrett increased her own donation to approximately $350,000 to meet the $500,000 price tag. Gilman could no longer resist. He accepted the donation and the condition that the medical school admit women. Furthermore, despite additional resistance from JHU, Garrett also insisted that the medical school have a four-year course and that applicants had to have a bachelor’s degree, far more rigorous standards than medical schools had at the time. Thus, Garrett not only opened up the JHU medical school to women, she also transformed medical education.
Even when universities at the turn of the century admitted women, they often attended in small numbers due to a lack of residential facilities. The women who did attend were frequently made to feel unwelcome on campus, harassed or ignored by male students and professors. In the face of these inequities, Phoebe Apperson Hearst sought to make the University of California more welcoming to women, first by giving scholarships to women. Such women became known as “Phoebes”.
It was Phoebe, not her son William Randolph Hearst, who paid for the original women’s building in order to provide gymnasium, lunch, and social space for women students. When it burned down, he rebuilt it in her honor. She also was the one to build the Hearst Memorial Mining Building, cited by Thelin and Trollinger, as a tribute to her husband and she funded both the Phoebe Apperson Hearst International Architectural Competition to develop a master plan for the university and the museum of Anthropology, later named in her honor. By offering much larger gifts for the Mining Building and the architecture competition at the same time as the women’s building, she made the university unable to reject the latter. She earned herself an invitation to serve as the first female member of the board of regents. She wielded the power of her donations and her new position to open access to higher education for women of all classes, raising the percentage of women students from 30% to 46% in less than ten years after her initial donation.
Katharine Dexter McCormick graduated from MIT in 1904 with a biology degree. Although MIT had been coeducational since 1871, McCormick was chagrined to find that there were hardly more women on campus in the 1950s than there had been when she was a student. MIT did not have a residence hall for women, and therefore imposed a limit on the number of women admitted to the school.
After McCormick’s husband died and she inherited over $35 million, MIT president Karl Compton quickly reached out to her to solicit her support. She wanted MIT to admit more women in order to open access to careers in medicine and science. “I believe, if we can get [women] properly housed,” McCormick said, “that the best scientific education in our country will be open to them permanently. Then I can rest in peace.”[iv] She donated approximately $3 million to build and then expand a residence hall for women, negotiating every detail with MIT administrators in the long single-spaced letters she wrote to them.
McCormick’s example is particularly interesting, because she and MIT were indeed aligned on their goal, even though the architect resisted her interference in the building details. MIT had completed a study on women at the Institute in 1959 and decided that if they were going to continue to admit women, they had to make MIT more welcoming and enable women’s success.
McCormick also left $5 million in her will to Stanford Medical School, to encourage and assist women medical students, professors, and researchers. However, without McCormick alive to check on them, administrators decided to use the money to pay the salaries of nursing professors already on the faculty, which did little to fulfill McCormick’s goal to encourage and assist women in the medical profession. After a protest from women at the school, the school was forced to use the money for a new faculty position and a lecture series for women scientists. They also formed the Joint Committee on the Status and Tenure of Women, and finally accomplished gender parity in the student population, with women equaling, then outnumbering men for the first time in 1997.[v] Women protestors forced Stanford Medical School to fulfill the intent of donor McCormick.
Today we may applaud the goal of these feminist donors to force universities to open up access to higher education for women, as well as the foresight to strengthen standards for medical education. Coercive giving was an effective means of expanding opportunities for women at a time when their options for education, employment, and political power were limited. However, their determination to push their own agenda, and their willingness to tie their gifts to these demands, provides important context for considering the current desire of some alumni donors to influence their alma mater. Should universities cede power to alumni in exchange for financial contributions? Are these wealthy philanthropists advancing policies for populations with less power? How should institutions, and potentially policy makers and the public, determine whether their demands benefit the university or are for the public good? Coercive giving to universities has long left administrators grappling with how to keep donors at arm’s length, even if their goals are aligned.
-Joan Marie Johnson
Joan Marie Johnson, PhD, is a historian of women, gender and philanthropy, race, feminism, activism, and education. Her most recent book is The Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States, intended for use in college classrooms. She is also the author of Funding Feminism: Monied Women, Philanthropy, and the Women’s Movement, 1870-1967, as well as books on women’s higher education and black and white women’s clubs and numerous articles in women’s history. Johnson taught women’s history at Northeastern Illinois University, co-founded the Seminar on Women and Gender at the Newberry Library in Chicago, and now is the Director for Faculty in the Office of the Provost at Northwestern University. She received her PhD from UCLA and her AB from Duke University.
[i] Margaret Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940, (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press,1982).
[ii] Joan Marie Johnson, Funding Feminism: Monied Women, Philanthropy, and the Women’s Movement, 1870-1967 (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). While they fought for gender equity, none of the three sought to expand opportunities across race or religion or other identities.
[iii] Kathleen Sander, Mary Elizabeth Garrett: Society and Philanthropy in the Gilded Age (Baltimore, Mary.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Alexandra Nickliss, Phoebe Apperson Hearst: A Life of Power and Politics (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018) and Amy Sue Bix, Girls Coming to Tech! A History of American Engineering Education for Women (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2014).
[iv] http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/exhibits/mccormick/, accessed October 18, 2013.
[v] See the Dora Goldstein Papers, Stanford Medical School Archives, Stanford CA for details.
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