ACADEMIC CHEMISTRY IN AMERICA, 1876-1976: DIVERSIFICATION, GROWTH, AND CHANGE

The size, diversity, age, and pervasiveness of American chemistry make it an ideal subject for studying how the natural sciences have evolved in the United States. This dissertation reconnoiters the institutional history of academic chemistry since the formation of the American Chemical Society.;Chapter 3 investigates how chemistry professors have used the demand for credentialled chemists as a stable base for establishing a discipline. Teaching needs have fixed the major subdisciplinary boundaries. The graduate research school has become the seat of the discipline and the site of greatest institution-building. Graduate programs have proliferated, yielding both an increasing diversity in type and several distinct eras in which one type has dominated. Chapter 3 also details how chemists continue to win a respectable, if diminished, share of college presidencies and other prestigious positions, and how chemistry graduates have increasingly followed non-chemical careers--a decoupling of education from occupation initiated in the 1920s.;Chapter 4 offers a narrative history of one important research school, the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois, and shows how the department grafted an emphasis upon research onto a Midwestern service tradition. The use of research and service ideals allowed Illinois to prosper, while excelling in the training of chemists for the nation's industrial research laboratories.;In Chapter 5, one other dimension of academic chemistry is explored. A prosopography of 754 foreign-born chemists reveals the changing demography of chemical immigration. This technique provides a baseline against which to assess the migration of the 1930s, and it uncovers a neglected stratum of promising young refugee academics who were forced to resettle in industrial careers in the 1940s and 1950s.;Two chapters provide statistical indicators of long-term developments. Chapter 2, concerning the transformation of American chemistry from occupation to profession and the concomitant establishment of the academic degree as the prime professional credential, reveals that the occupation of chemistry has diffused throughout the economy as chemical occupations have greatly diversified, and that the profession has become coterminous with the occupation.