From ideas to institutions: Southern scholars and emerging universities in the South, circa 1920--195

The history of American universities is a national success story without much to say about the South. The university ideal of advanced studies, research and a complex institutional structure forever changed American perceptions of the purpose, quality, and scopes of higher education. Yet, seminal works in higher education history offer little information about southern scholars and the development of southern universities except that comparatively southern universities lagged behind their counterparts in other regions. Towards the purpose of connecting higher education history with southern history, this dissertation explored and reconstructed important discussions and debates among southern scholars about research, graduate education, and university excellence between 1920 and 1950.;Primary source document analysis and extensive literature review fueled the study which adopted the theoretical framework of the emerging university from Laurence Veysey (1965). This study concentrated on social science institutes originally funded by the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial at the Universities of North Carolina, Virginia, and Texas, and the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB), an interstate higher education planning agency. The study hypothesized that individuals and ideas attracted to and supported at the Rockefeller funded institutes were a fertile source of influence about the ideal university. Furthermore, the study proposed that southern universities gained national recognition and legitimacy largely because southern scholars combined their influence and efforts to create the SREB.;This historical analysis concluded that Rockefeller philanthropy sparked a dynamic scholarly debate about southern higher education among sociologist Howard Odum at the University of North Carolina and other southern social scientists. The discussion expanded to include the critical analysis of industrialization and national models of excellence of the agrarian writers and philosophers of Vanderbilt University. While Odum's models of regionalism, regional planning, and university excellence prevailed, persistent concerns about the quality of research and graduate education in the South's weaker universities resulted in the creation of the SREB. Rather than promote national recognition for southern universities, this analysis contends that the formation of the SREB and its early work signaled a capstone to scholarly participation in regional debate about southern higher education and created new directions for research and graduate study as tools for economic development.