James Rowland Angell - Background

Background

James Rowland Angell was born on May 8, 1869, in Burlington, Vermont. He was born into one of the stellar academic families in American history. His father, was the president of the University of Vermont. He was the youngest of three children, with an older brother and sister. When Angell was two years old, his family moved to Ann Arbor so that his father could take up the presidency of the University of Michigan. His maternal grandfather, Alexis Caswell, was a professor of Mathematics and Astronomy at, and later president of, Brown University. He was also a charter member of the National Academy of Sciences. His brother Alexis Caswell Angell became a professor of law of Michigan, and later a federal judge. His sister's husband, Andrew C. McLaughlin, was head of the history department at Michigan. His cousin, Frank Angell, founded psychology laboratories at Cornell and Stanford Universities.

Angell graduated from the University of Michigan with his Bachelor's Degree in 1890. He worked closely with John Dewey, earning a Master's degree under his supervision in 1891. At Michigan he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity (Omicron chapter). He then went to Harvard University where he received a second Master's Degree in 1892 in psychology. He studied for a doctorate in philosophy in Berlin and Halle. His dissertation on the treatment of freedom in Kant was accepted, but required stylistic changes, which he never completed. Instead, he decided to take up a post at the University of Minnesota He did, however, receive 23 honorary degrees during his lifetime. In 1895 he was offered position at the University of Chicago by John Dewey, who had moved from Michigan the year before. Almost immediately, he co-authored an article with his Chicago colleague Addison W. Moore that simultaneously settled a nasty dispute between Cornell psychologist Edward Bradford Titchener and Princeton psychologist James Mark Baldwin as well as laying the foundations for the school of Functionalism. Later, while still at Chicago, Angell published the textbook Psychology; An Introductory Study of the Structure and Functions of Human Consciousness in 1904, which became the major statement of the functionalist approach to psychology. Angell noted that the goal of psychology was to study how the mind helps the organism adjust to the environment and functionalism was a method in which to study consciousness and how it improves the organism relationship with the environment. In 1905 (the year after Dewey left Chicago for Columbia University), Angell became the head of the newly-created psychology department at Chicago. During this time he served as the 15th and youngest president of the American Psychological Association. He also supervised the young John B. Watson, who would later go on to found the behaviorist school of psychology. In 1908, Angell was raised to the level of Dean at Chicago, leaving the psychology department to another of his former students, Harvey Carr. During the last year of World War I Angell worked for the military under the supervision of Northwestern University psychologist Walter Dill Scott. The following year (1918), he returned to Chicago to serve as Acting President. The school would not make him president on a permanent basis, however, because he was not Baptist. In 1919 he left Chicago to head the National Research Council. In 1920, he headed the Carnegie Corporation of New York. In 1921 Angell took up the presidency of Yale University, the first non-Yale graduate to do so since the early 18th century. He remained president of Yale University his retirement in 1937, at which point he became educational counselor of the National Broadcasting Company. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1932.

In 1894, James married Marion Isabel Watrous from Des Moines, Iowa, a fellow graduate of the University of Michigan. He had two children with her, one boy and one girl, but then she died in 1931. He subsequently married Katharine Cramer Woodman, who brought great joy to his life because of the interest she took in his students and problems. James Angell died on March 4, 1949 in New Haven, Connecticut.