14650 individual mobility awards granted to 13633 beneficiaries who moved between 4203 different institutions and organisations in 153 countries and territories. Four different organisations funded by the Rockefeller family, with different award policies and areas of intervention, which existed over different periods of time and did not operate in the same geographical areas. And over a period of 66 years. Is it possible to write a short research note that encompasses all this?

There is no need to insist that the devil is in the detail, and that all these different places, moments, disciplines, domains deserve closer scrutiny. But for the sake of this research note, I will focus on how the different populations of our database are distributed, from a bird’s eye view.

Let’s start with the most obvious, the smallest population in the database, the various organisations that distributed and administered individual mobility awards (figure 1).

Figure 1: Percentage of awards by organization

Source: Content of Rockefeller Fellows database, May 2024, https://doi.org/10/gsc924.

The Rockefeller Foundation (RF) was by far the largest provider, but the International Education Board (GEB) and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial (LSRM) were important players, given that they only operated for 4-5 years in the 1920s. The General Education Board (GEB) is of particular interest because of its exclusive focus on recipients from the United States of America.

Let us now look at the individuals who populate the database, with a breakdown by gender (figure 2). Note that the overall overwhelmingly skewed distribution changes only slightly when the data are refined by domain and by granting organisation. The table only turns in two cases: at the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, where a large number of awards were made in the fields of child study and parenting, and in the field of nursing. In both cases, these were fields of work and expertise that had been demarcated as women’s territory.

Figure 2: Number of awards according to sex (1914-1970, all organizations)

Source: Content of Rockefeller Fellows database, May 2024, https://doi.org/10/gsc924.

This comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with the gendered structure of higher education and research in the 20th century. A Rockefeller Foundation official explained in 1946 that the organisation placed a premium on the personal qualifications of potential recipients of an individual mobility award as a guarantee of future impact. He added:

“… this affects our attitude toward women. We certainly have no prejudice against woment scientists. But an attractive and intelligent female candidate for a fellowship as a time expectancy of scientific activity which is perhaps hals as long as the expectancy of equally attractive and intelligent young men. That is to say, a sizable fraction of the women will work a few years and then marry and stop. Therefore -and because we are especially in training leaders for the future- a womand has to present a considerably stronger than average case to justify the extra risk”

Rockefeller Archive Center, Rockefeller Foundation records, administration, program and policy, SG 3.1 and SG 3.2, Warren Weaver, Natural Sciences Division notes on officers’ techniques, 1946.

This population can also be broken down by age, as we have collected or calculated the age at which people were appointed (figure 3).

Figure 3: Distribution of awards by age of appointments, in percentage (1914-1970, all organizations)

Source: Content of Rockefeller Fellows database, May 2024, https://doi.org/10/gsc924.

This distribution by age is an indication of the extent to which the awards were intended to build, strengthen or update intellectual and professional careers. Who is the ideal target? The young genius or the old hand, the postgraduate or the established researcher, the experienced or the emerging artist/writer? Bear in mind that the curve would no longer look like a bell curve if it were refined by funding organisations, benefiting countries of study.

Let’s now look at the population of awards and their distribution over time (figure 4). The curve shows the number of prizes according to the year in which they were awarded.

Figure 4: Number of awards by year (1914-1970, all organizations)

Source: Content of Rockefeller Fellows database, May 2024, https://doi.org/10/gsc924.

What is relevant for us today are the peaks and troughs of the curve. The peak in 1925 suggests that it was not the 1929 depression and its aftermath that reversed the upward curve. Note also the many accidents in the curve, and the fact that the 1954 trough is followed by a peak only four years later: this suggests that there was no established, planned or far-sighted policy regarding the role and importance of prizes in the overall scholarship activities of the Rockefeller-funded organisations, and that their importance could be adjusted quite quickly.

Now that we’ve got the awards out of the way, let’s turn our attention to something a little more difficult: the distribution of awards by area of activity (figure 5). Let’s face it: our team has tried several typologies and none of them is entirely satisfactory, if only because many recipients have worked in between domains. For this note, I am using a customised typology that aims to add elements beyond what we already know about the history of Rockefeller-funded organisations: the usual suspects can be named with eyes closed: public health, medicine, agriculture, life sciences, economics. This is accurate, yet…

Figure 5: Number of awards by domain (1914-1970, all organizations)

Source: Content of Rockefeller Fellows database, May 2024, https://doi.org/10/gsc924.

Our ad hoc typology suggests less familiar insights, so please take note:

• The high number of awards in the field of education (educational sciences + training of educators)
• The high number of awards in nursing, a field where many awards were made for initial training.
• The fact that economics and agriculture are widely covered by the four different organisations.
• The significant presence of unusual suspects: librarianship, mass media, performing and visual arts, or the various fields related to children on the one hand and to the human mind on the other.

Our next distribution outlines the spatial dimension of the international political economy of knowledge production and reproduction suggested by the awards in our database. To do this, we have mapped the home and host locations of the institutions and organisations that were the origins and destinations of each award. We did this at the level of place (a town, a village, a discrete geographical location). As a result, it shows dots and gaps that would not be visible if the data were aggregated at a national level.

The first map shows the ‘home’ locations of the awards (figure 6). This is the location of the institution/organisation to which the individual belonged at the time of the award.

Figure 6: Home institutions (1914-1970, all organizations)

Source: Content of Rockefeller Fellows database, May 2024, https://doi.org/10/gsc924.

This map shows the levels of distribution by country and within countries. The most striking feature is the dispersion of the places of origin (around 2100 different places). The map also highlights significant nodes of concentration, be they specific regions, large cities or smaller places with experimental stations or unique institutions. It is also possible to identify areas that contain few places of origin, or none: Africa is the most salient case, and a map by periods would underline that it was not covered by Rockefeller-endowed organizations before the 1950s¹.

The second map (figure 7) shows the ‘host’ locations of the fellows, i.e. the locations of the institutions where the fellows spent most of their time in order to receive training, conduct research or observe local situations. This map shows fewer than 500 different locations.

Figure 7: Host institutions (1914-1970, all organizations)

Source: Content of Rockefeller Fellows database, May 2024, https://doi.org/10/gsc924.

The contrast between the two maps is quite striking. The spatial coverage of the former is much greater than that of the latter, and the latter shows two overwhelmingly dominant regional cores in North America and Western Europe, and a super-centre in the Midwest/Great Lakes/Mid-Atlantic region of North America. However, different funding organisations and fields of study would have their own particular geography.

Our last two distributions reconnect the home and host geographies with the institutional landscape, i.e. the organisations and institutions from which the recipients came and to which they went. Note that in most cases we have linked awards to institutions by reconstructing sub-units to parent institutions: e.g. ‘Animal Breeding Research Department at the University of Edinburgh’ is identified in the database as ‘University of Edinburgh’. The reason for this choice is explained in our data documentation.

In terms of home institutions, the range is striking, with around 4,000 different institutions being the starting point for awards. Diversity is also high at the top (figure 8), with institutions from 7 different countries in the top 10. It should also be noted that concentration is limited. The top 5 home institutions account for only 5% of the total number of awards, and the number of awards originating from the University of Chicago (rank 10) is a third of that of the University of the Philippines (rank 1). Note the presence of 5 US institutions in the top 20.

Figure 8: The 20 first home institutions (1914-1970, all organizations)

Source: Content of Rockefeller Fellows database, May 2024, https://doi.org/10/gsc924.

A chart of host institutions shows a quite different landscape (figure 9).

Figure 9: The 36 first host institutions (1914-1970, all organizations)

Source: Content of Rockefeller Fellows database, May 2024, https://doi.org/10/gsc924.

It is a situation of sheer concentration in favour of a few institutions, in one region, of one country (30% of awards to 5 institutions). The first non north-American and non-European host institution is the University of Sao Paulo, with 22 hosts, at rank 93. The chart also shows significant jumps between the ranks: Number 1 Harvard University hosts six times more awards than number 10 University of Minnesota.

Such simple prelimnary distributions direct attention to patterns and situations where individual trajectories of recipients take place. When combining an analysis of these trajectories with those patterns and situations, a database of individual mobility awards can contribute to a history of an international order of knowledge production and reproduction, which Rockefeller-endowed organizations contributed to shape. To what degree ? More later…

1. Note that the dot in the middle of the Gulf of Guinea corresponds to the world centroid coordinates: fellowhips which location of origin could not be identified were assigned to this point. The same rule was adopted when fellowships could be assign to one country, or state/province, but not to a specific location [↩]

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