Institutional Research Turns 100-Years Old Next Year, Part I

Did you know that the “father” of sports psychology was also the first notable director of an institutional research office responsible for student success initiatives at a US college or university?

In 1938, Coleman R. Griffith provided a firsthand account for his efforts to develop the Bureau of Institutional Research at the University of Illinois for the Journal of Higher Education. Griffith was a psychologist by training who established one of the first research laboratories for sports psychology in the United States. From 1938 to 1940, he consulted the Chicago Cubs baseball team in what may have been “the first long-term interaction between a psychologist and a professional sport franchise in history.” The field of sports psychology regards him as a father of the field, as he predated the formal organization of the discipline by twenty years. Prior to his turn to professional baseball, Griffith worked as the director of the Bureau of Institutional Research, in which capacity he conducted a number of unprecedented studies for the University of Illinois. In 1944, he was promoted to provost at the university before joining the Oregon State Higher Education System to conclude his illustrious career.[i]

Although regarded as the first centralized bureau of institutional research in 1918, Griffith’s contributions to institutional research at the University of Illinois have been largely neglected by later generations of institutional researchers and scholars of higher education. According to Griffith, the University of Illinois had engaged in a wide range of institutional research projects prior to World War II. The university conducted research on academic program reviews and established benchmarks for the performance of programs, including longitudinal studies on the unit costs and student credit hour productivity of academic programs. The university studied faculty loads by rank and class level as well as the quality of teaching as measured by student learning outcomes. And his Bureau of Institutional Research performed analyses on resource utilization and allocations, including classroom space utilization and enrollment projections.[ii] His original contribution to the study of higher education captures the movement toward more rigorous standards for research about higher education first undertaken at the University of Illinois.

You can learn more about Coleman Griffith and other pioneers in the field of higher education research in my forthcoming work, Outsourcing Student Success. To learn more about the first independent historical work about this integral higher education profession in more than fifty years, visit Amazon.com for more details and its availability in December 2017.

[i]. Christopher Green, “Psychology Strikes Out: Coleman R. Griffith and the Chicago Cubs,” History of Psychology 6, no. 3 (2003): 267–283.

[ii]. Coleman R. Griffith, “Functions of a Bureau of Institutional Research,” The Journal of Higher Education 9, no. 5 (May 1938): 248–255. While Griffith does not provide the date the office was organized, Lasher fixes the year as 1918 in AIR, The First Fifty Years, 13.

Note: Originally posted on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/institutional-research-100-years-old-next-year-joseph-wycoff-phd/?trackingId=N4wDnZb9LXXbLrlo52r59Q%3D%3D