Andrew Dickson White (
November 7,
1832 –
November 4,
1918) was a
U.S. diplomat,
author, and
educator, best known as the co-founder of
Cornell University.
White was born in
Homer, New York. After spending one year at
Hobart College (then known as Geneva College), he transferred to
Yale University. At Yale, he was a classmate of
Daniel Coit Gilman, who would later serve as first president of
Johns Hopkins University. The two were members of the
Skull and Bones secret society, and would remain close friends. He was also a member of the
Alpha Sigma Phi fraternity, serving as editor of the fraternity publication,
The Tomahawk.
After graduating from Yale in 1853, White spent three years studying in
Europe before returning to the United States as a professor of history and English literature at the
University of Michigan.
In 1865, White and
Western Union tycoon
Ezra Cornell founded
Cornell University on Cornell's estate in
Ithaca, New York. White became the school's first president, and his farsighted leadership set the university on the path to becoming an elite educational institution, with particular excellence in
agricultural research and
engineering. He also served as a professor in the
Department of History. He commissioned Cornell's first
architecture student William Henry Miller to build his mansion on campus.
After 14 years at Cornell, White resigned to serve as the first U.S. Minister to
Germany (1879-1881), first president of the
American Historical Association (1884-1886), Minister to
Russia (1892-1894), and as the first U.S. Ambassador to Germany (1897-1902).
While serving in Russia, White—a noted
bibliophile—made the acquaintance of author
Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy's fascination with
Mormonism sparked a similar interest in White, who had previously regarded the Latter-Day Saints (LDS) as a dangerous, deviant
cult. Upon his return to the United States, White took advantage of Cornell's proximity to the original Mormon heartland near
Rochester to amass a collection of LDS memorabilia (including many original copies of the
Book of Mormon) unmatched by any other institution save the church itself and its university,
Brigham Young University.
In 1891,
Leland and Jane Stanford asked White to serve as the first president of the university they had founded in Palo Alto, CA,
Stanford University. Although he refused their offer, he did recommend his former student
David Starr Jordan.
White died in Ithaca and was interred in
Sage Chapel at Cornell.
Contribution to the conflict thesis At the time of Cornell's founding, White announced that it would be "an asylum for
Science—where truth shall be sought for truth's sake, not stretched or cut exactly to fit Revealed Religion" (Lindberg and Numbers 1986, pp. 2-3). Up to that time, America's private universities were exclusively religious institutions, and generally focused on the
liberal arts and religious training (though they were not explicitly antagonistic to science). In
1869 White gave a lecture on "The Battle-Fields of Science", arguing that history showed the negative outcomes resulting from any attempt on the part of
religion to interfere with the progress of
science. Over the next 30 years he refined his analysis, expanding his case studies to include nearly every field of science over the entire history of Christianity, but also narrowing his target from "religion" through "ecclesiasticism" to "dogmatic theology."
The final result was the two-volume
History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). Initially less popular than
John William Draper's
History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874), White's book became an extremely influential text on the
relationship between religion and science. The premise of the book—known as the
conflict thesis—was once prevalent, but since the 70s and 80s, many historians of science have reevaluated the history of science and religion, finding little evidence for White's claims of widespread conflict;
See Also Continuity thesis
Trivia
Political career
, where p is the probability of occurrence