Citizens or Cosmopolitans? Constructing Scientific Identity in the Early American College

Abstract

Modern American scientific identity has its roots in the colleges of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Using the botanical sciences as an example, this essay examines the conflicts between those who viewed scientists as cosmopolitan (or international) and those who viewed scientists as citizens (or servants) of the national state. Whereas today many American scientists claim a cosmopolitan identity, even as they decry steady declines in state aid, two centuries ago, they did just the opposite: to win public support, they quietly subsumed the ideals of cosmopolitanism within a commitment to national service, even as they deftly cultivated a new professional image rooted in a rhetoric of scientific internationalism. The construction of this new self-image was, I argue, a necessary precondition for the creation of the modern American research university—particularly the public research university—which sought to reconcile the competing ideals of scientific cosmopolitanism and citizenship.