James Angell

Introduction

James Rowland Angell (8 May 1869 – 4 March 1949) was an American psychologist and university president who gave the school of functionalism its clearest programmatic statement. He spent twenty-five years at the University of Chicago, where he directed the psychological laboratory, headed the psychology department and trained the psychologist who would found behaviorism, and he then served as president of Yale University from 1921 to 1937.

Angell's importance in the history of psychology rests on a small number of texts rather than on a body of experiments. His 1904 textbook and especially his 1907 paper "The Province of Functional Psychology," originally his 1906 presidential address to the American Psychological Association, defined functionalism against the structural psychology of Edward Titchener and set the terms of the first great methodological debate in American psychology. He never completed a doctorate, and his later career moved decisively away from research into university administration, philanthropy and national science policy.

Early Life and Education

Angell was born in Burlington, Vermont, into one of the most academically prominent families in nineteenth-century America. His father, James Burrill Angell, was president of the University of Vermont and then, from 1871, president of the University of Michigan, and the family moved to Ann Arbor when James Rowland was two. His maternal grandfather, Alexis Caswell, was a professor of mathematics and astronomy at Brown University and later its president. A cousin, Frank Angell, founded psychology laboratories at Cornell and Stanford.

He took his bachelor's degree at the University of Michigan in 1890 and a master's degree there in 1891, working closely with John Dewey, then went to Harvard for a second master's degree in 1892, where he studied with William James. He then continued in Germany, at Berlin and Halle, and wrote a dissertation on the treatment of freedom in Kant. The dissertation was accepted but required stylistic revision, which he never made, so he never formally received the doctorate. He is said to have received twenty-three honorary degrees instead, more than any other psychologist of his generation.

Academic and Professional Career

Angell began teaching as an instructor in philosophy at the University of Minnesota, and in the mid-1890s Dewey, who had moved to the University of Chicago, brought him to that university; accounts date the appointment to 1894 or 1895. The twenty-five years that followed made Chicago the centre of American functionalism. He served first as assistant professor and director of the psychological laboratory, was promoted to a professorship in experimental psychology in 1904, and became head of the newly created psychology department in 1905, the year after Dewey left for Columbia. He held the chair until he moved into university administration, handing the department to his former student Harvey Carr.

The year of his appointment as dean is reported differently by different sources, with 1908 and 1911 both given in standard references, and the discrepancy has not been settled. What is not in dispute is the sequence that followed. During the last year of the First World War he worked for the military on the classification of personnel in the army, under the Northwestern psychologist Walter Dill Scott, contributing to the large-scale mental testing program that the army adopted. In 1918 he returned to Chicago and served as acting president of the university in 1918 and 1919. It was not made a permanent appointment, reportedly because he was not a Baptist.

He left Chicago in 1919 to chair the National Research Council, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and in 1920 was elected president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. In 1921 he resigned from the Carnegie Corporation to become president of Yale University, succeeding Arthur Twining Hadley and breaking a two-century tradition of appointing Yale graduates to the office. He was president until his retirement in 1937 and then became educational counselor to the National Broadcasting Company. He died in Hamden, Connecticut, on 4 March 1949.

Two details of this career are frequently confused and worth stating plainly. Angell's acting presidency was at the University of Chicago; his Yale appointment was a full presidency of sixteen years. And although he left laboratory work behind, he kept formal ties to the discipline, editing Psychological Monographs from 1912 to 1922 and serving as the fifteenth and youngest president of the American Psychological Association in 1906.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The province of functional psychology

Angell's 1906 presidential address, published in the Psychological Review in 1907, remains the canonical statement of functionalism. He distinguished three senses of the position: functionalism as the psychology of mental operations rather than of mental elements, concerned with the how and why of consciousness rather than the what; functionalism as the study of the fundamental utilities of consciousness, that is, of mind as mediating between the environment and the needs of the organism; and functionalism as psychophysical psychology, insisting on the significance of the mind-body relation for any adequate account of mental life. The organizing idea is Darwinian: consciousness exists because it does work, and the way to understand it is to ask what it accomplishes for an organism adapting to its surroundings.

The argument with structuralism

Angell's case against Titchener was that structural description is impossible in the form structuralism demanded. He argued that the supposedly elementary contents recovered by trained introspection are artifacts of the training imposed on the observers, and that the structuralists committed what he called a special form of the psychologist's fallacy, attributing to mental states characteristics that later reflection supposes they must have had. More fundamentally, he held that any description of experience is already couched in functional language, in terms of the conditions that produced the quality, of other qualities it is compared with, or of the acts it led to. The structuralist project of first describing elements and only later asking their use therefore could not get started. Titchener replied that analysis of structure was the necessary anatomy preceding any physiology, and disparaged functional psychology as no more than an account of mind in use.

The 1904 textbook and the teaching of psychology

Angell's Psychology: An Introductory Study of the Structure and Function of Human Consciousness (1904) carried functionalism into the classroom and went through several editions. It stated plainly that the object of psychology is how the mind helps the organism adjust to its environment, and it treated habit, attention and the acquisition of skill as the central topics rather than the enumeration of conscious elements. A later, more elementary Introduction to Psychology reached a still wider student audience.

Institution building and the Chicago school

Angell's influence was institutional as much as theoretical. Under his direction the Chicago department produced a lineage that carried functionalism into the next generation, most obviously Harvey Carr, and it trained John B. Watson, who took the functionalist interest in adaptation and turned it, against Angell's own emphasis on consciousness, into behaviorism. Angell also wrote on the bearing of evolutionary theory on psychology, notably in "The Influence of Darwin on Psychology."

Applied psychology, testing and science policy

His war work on personnel classification, his chairmanship of the National Research Council and his direction of the Carnegie Corporation placed him at the intersection of psychology, philanthropy and government that shaped American research funding between the wars. At Yale he founded the Institute of Psychology in 1924, recruited the psychobiologist Robert Yerkes, and in 1929 launched the Institute of Human Relations with Rockefeller Foundation support, an ambitious attempt to bring medicine, law, psychology and the social sciences to bear on human conduct.

Major Publications

Psychology: An Introductory Study of the Structure and Function of Human Consciousness (1904).
"The Province of Functional Psychology," Psychological Review (1907).
"The Influence of Darwin on Psychology" (1909).
Chapters from Modern Psychology (1911).
An Introduction to Psychology (1918).
American Education (1937).

Impact and Legacy

Angell's legacy runs in two directions. Within psychology, functionalism won the argument with structuralism without ever producing a decisive experiment; its interest in adaptation, individual differences and practical application passed into applied, developmental, educational and comparative psychology, and its insistence that mind must be studied in relation to environment and action prepared the ground for behaviorism. Critics within the rising behaviorist movement, however, charged that functionalism was not grounded in controlled experiment and that its theories generated little prediction, an objection that carried increasing weight as psychology sought the status of a rigorous experimental science. Angell's own reply, in effect, was that a psychology restricted to the elements of adult human consciousness had already chosen the wrong question.

His administrative legacy at Yale was large: the residential college system and Sterling Memorial Library were completed under him, the School of Nursing was founded in 1923, the endowment multiplied, and the undergraduate curriculum was reorganized. But it carries a serious moral charge. Yale's own archival finding aid states plainly that Angell was a proponent of eugenics. His correspondence documents sustained interest in eugenic publications and appointments, particularly through the Institute of Human Relations, and he wrote the introduction to Leonard Darwin's What Is Eugenics?, praising its aims and writing that the problem of selecting the better and suppressing the poorer stocks must be given exhaustive study. Historians and student researchers at Yale have shown that the institute he created housed work on what its own bulletins called the problem of racial adjustment, with applications to immigration regulation and segregation.

The record is not simply condemnatory, and the nuance matters. The same archives show that Angell worked to limit the visibility of some eugenic programs and opposed establishing a professorial chair in eugenics at Yale, and privately he conceded that the eugenics movement had come to suffer, among the well educated, from a suspicion of sentimentality and scientific superficiality. Defenders of his presidency emphasize that he built the research infrastructure that later made Yale a centre of psychology, psychiatry and the social sciences. Critics respond that he provided institutional shelter for a research program whose premises were already being undermined by the genetics of his own day, and that his caution was about reputation rather than about the underlying aim.