BRYAN, William Lowe (11 Nov. 1860-21 Nov. 1955), philosopher, psychologist, and educator, was born William Julian Bryan on a farm near Bloomington, Indiana, the son of John Bryan, a Presbyterian minister, and Eliza Jane Philips. In 1876 he entered the preparatory department of Indiana University in Bloomington, which served as the local high school, and the next year he matriculated as a university student. As an undergraduate he developed his skills in public speaking and helped to revive the Indiana Student newspaper in 1882. He became a member of the Specialists' Club organized by David Starr Jordan, professor of natural sciences, to encourage promising students to pursue research careers. Bryan graduated in 1884 with a bachelor's degree in ancient classics.

After graduation Bryan was hired as an English instructor in the preparatory department. Within a few months he received an unexpected opportunity to join the regular faculty when the president of the university, Baptist minister Lemuel Moss, and Katherine Graydon, the professor of Greek, were caught up in a romantic scandal and left the university. Bryan was hired as Graydon's replacement, and in early 1885 Jordan was appointed president. Jordan, a noted ichthyologist, placed science at the center of his ideas on educational reform and stressed that "the highest function of the real university is that of instruction by investigation." Working with limited financial support from the state he relied heavily on local talent to fill the ranks of the faculty.

Although Bryan earned a master's degree in philosophy at Indiana in 1886 with a thesis on ancient Greek logic, his interests shifted toward the "new psychology" that promised to revolutionize the study of human nature through laboratory experimentation and other empirical techniques. He went to Germany, the center of scientific psychology, in 1886-1887 to study at the University of Berlin; after returning he was promoted to full professor and granted $100 to purchase a Hipp chronoscope for experimental studies of human reaction times. In January 1888 Bryan opened the Indiana University Psychological laboratory, the second such facility established in the United States.

Bryan married Charlotte Augusta Lowe in 1889 and in her honor replaced his given middle name with her last name. His wife was a graduate of Indiana University, having earned a bachelor's degree (1888) and a master's degree (1889) in Greek. They collaborated on two books, Plato the Teacher: Selections from Plato (1897) and Studies in Plato's Republic for Teachers (1898). They had no children.

Bryan carried a heavy teaching load, and at first the psychological laboratory was used mainly for classroom demonstrations rather than original research. In 1891 he went to Clark University to pursue a doctorate under G. Stanley Hall, a prominent advocate of the new psychology. Bryan received his Ph.D. in psychology in 1892 for a dissertation on the development of voluntary motor abilities in children. He was also recruited by Hall to help organize the American Psychological Association, founded in July 1892, and became one of its twenty-six charter members.

After returning to Indiana University, Bryan expanded the psychological laboratory and was appointed vice president of the institution. He resisted repeated offers by Jordan, who had become president of Stanford University in 1891, to join the faculty of the California school. Bryan also became involved in the child-study movement, an effort to develop a scientific foundation for pedagogical techniques. He served as an officer in several national organizations, including the secretary of the National Association for the Study of Children (1893) and the president of the Child-Study Section of the National Educational Association (1894).

In the 1890s Bryan conducted pioneering psychological experiments. He investigated the process of learning to send and receive messages in Morse code on the telegraph. The research, published in the Psychological Review (1897, 1899), was among the first such studies to graphically represent its data in the form of "learning curves" and became a classic in the study of human learning. Because of Bryan's efforts, during this period Indiana University became an undergraduate training ground for notable future psychologists, including Edwin D. Starbuck, Ernest H. Lindley, and Lewis M. Terman.

In 1902 Bryan was appointed the tenth president of Indiana University. The next year he was elected president of the American Psychological Association and delivered his presidential address on the problem of "Theory and Practice" (repr., Psychological Review 11 [1904]: 71-82). His remark that "the scholar may at great price become a statesman" suggested his ambivalence about leaving the laboratory for administration.

Pious and scholarly, Bryan presided over the transformation of Indiana University from a small, traditional liberal arts college into a modern research university. He led the institution for thirty-five years and oversaw an era of enormous growth in student enrollments, physical facilities, and curricular offerings. He considered administration an exercise in practical psychology and viewed the university as a key institution for the transmission of cultural values as well as specialized knowledge. His most notable accomplishment was the expansion of graduate and professional training. During his administration, schools of medicine, education, nursing, business, music, and dentistry were established, along with many graduate programs and several satellite campuses around the state. By the time Bryan retired at the age of seventy-six, Indiana University had significantly broadened access to its programs and had dramatically increased the quality of graduate and professional education.

Bryan was known as a pithy orator, and his speeches were highly moralistic. His strong belief in the scientific study of human nature was tempered by an equally powerful conviction that it was not sufficient to provide moral and spiritual guidance. Hence he maintained an interest in ethics and metaphysics throughout his life. In 1940 Bryan published Wars of Families of Minds, a book that reflected on the consequences of different ways of knowing the world. A colleague once called him "a philosopher tamed by science"--a characterization that could have easily been applied to Bryan's intellectual hero, William James.

After retirement Bryan continued to live on campus in the president's house, and he remained a familiar sight walking along its wooded paths. He died in Bloomington. The institution he developed commemorated his work with many memorials, including the William Lowe Bryan Hall, the main administration building at Indiana University, and his hometown also named in his honor Bryan Park, a large municipal park.

* Bryan's papers are in the Indiana University Archives. On his university administration, see Thomas D. Clark, Indiana University: Midwestern Pioneer, vol. 2 (1973), and Burton Dorr Myers, History of Indiana University, 1902-1937, the Bryan Administration (1952). Bryan's career as a psychologist is described in Eliot Hearst and James H. Capshew, eds., Psychology at Indiana University: A Centennial Review and Compendium (1988), which also contains a comprehensive bibliography of his writings. Additional biographical material can be found in Manfred Wolfe Deputy, "The Philosophical Ideas and Related Achievements of William Lowe Bryan" (Ph.D. diss., Indiana Univ., 1947). Major obituaries are in the American Journal of Psychology 69 (1956): 325-27; Science 123 (1956): 214; and the New York Times, 22 Nov. 1955.

Written by James H. Capshew