Cubberley, Ellwood (1868–1941)

As head of Stanford University's Department of Education and, later, School of Education from 1898 to 1933, Ellwood Patterson Cubberley was a pioneering scholar of education. During a time when education was in its early stages as a university study, he helped to build the academic fields of education history and educational administration at Stanford and nationwide through his prolific textbook writing, research studies, and advising to school systems and education organizations. Cubberley helped to shape school administrative reform for a generation by training the first generation of university-educated school leaders and by producing new organizational models and professional practices that shaped the field.

Cubberley's efforts to build education as a program at Stanford and as an academic field of study were shaped by his earlier educational and professional experiences. Born June 6, 1868, in Antioch, Indiana, Cubberley chose to study physics at Indiana University rather than follow in his father's footsteps as a druggist. He entered teaching, first as a teacher in a one-room school in Rock Hill, Indiana, and then as a science professor at Ridgeville College and Vincennes University. At Vincennes, Cubberley moved into administration for the first time when he was promoted to president of the university in 1893. He left the university 3 years later, however, to accept a more prestigious position in administration: superintendent of the San Diego public schools. At the time, city superintendents were emerging as leaders in education, as many across the nation attempted to enhance the authority, professional status, and powers of the office as a way to modernize and reform urban schools. As one of these new modern superintendents, Cubberley developed a number of innovative practices to make school governance more efficient and centralize decision making in his office. He would later draw from this experience in designing his courses, instructional materials, and textbooks on school administration and pursue deeper study of education administration at the nation's premier graduate school of education, Teachers College, Columbia University, while on two leaves from Stanford (MA 1902, PhD 1905).

In 1898, David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford University, offered Cubberley a position as head of the three-man education department but warned that he had 3 years to make it academically respectable or it would be dismantled. Faculty at Stanford and many other universities were unconvinced that education was a subject worthy of collegiate-level study; many believed education was too underdeveloped as a field, too professional in orientation, and in general below the dignity of colleges. The first generation of university education professors, such as Cubberley, was thus faced with a dual challenge: to build education programs within institutions that would win colleagues' support and to develop research programs to establish education as a legitimate field of study. The two projects were linked, for the institutional development of education study [Page 245]required that these new professors create suitable courses and develop new instructional materials for use in these classes.

Cubberley was at the center of the academic development and maturation of education as a field of study, at Stanford and nationwide. At Stanford, Cubberley succeeded in expanding the size of the program, adding new students and faculty, and overseeing its transformation from a department to a full-fledged School of Education in 1917 where he remained dean until his retirement in 1933. He helped to produce the first generation of university-trained school administrators and personally advised and mentored hundreds of educators.

...