Agnes Fay Morgan

It is not known whether the University of Illinois extended an offer to Morgan, but in any case, she interviewed for a faculty position at Berkeley in the Department of Home Economics. She had an interview scheduled with the college's dean, but he sent his wife and his teenage daughter to conduct it. She accepted the position, which paid $1,800; male faculty members at the university were paid $2,400 with a doctorate and $1,800 without one.[9] When Morgan arrived at Berkeley, she found that she had to teach courses in nutrition and dietetics. Despite her chemistry background, she characterized dietetics as "a subject I knew nothing about and nobody else knew much about at that time."[3] She said that she had to research the curriculum "mostly out of German medical journals."[3]

One of Morgan's stated interests was to lead a program of research into household practices; she did not want to teach traditional home economics principles if they could not be supported by science. This meant that her students were required to possess a science background that was more stringent than other U.S. home economics programs, and also that her graduates found themselves prepared for roles that had not usually been open to traditional home economics graduates, such as hospital nutrition management and teaching in the basic sciences.[1]

Even among women in academia, Morgan was unusual in that she came from an immigrant family of modest means. In many ways, Morgan was also atypical as a home economist. She disliked cooking and housekeeping, and her style of dress was generally described as "dowdy" for the first two decades of her time at Berkeley. Since women could not access most parts of the existing Berkeley Faculty Club, Morgan helped to establish the Women's Faculty Club on campus. It was used as a meeting place for lunches and dinners as well as a residence for female faculty members and campus visitors.[10]

Morgan's department always faced financial struggles in an era before much federal research funding was available. To raise funds, Morgan provided food service educational courses to teachers, nurses and other participants, but these classes ultimately weakened the department's standing within the school, as university officials viewed the training as vocational and considered it to be beneath the standards of the university. Because of this, Morgan was prohibited from accepting industry funding for research and the university provided her with very little space to conduct her research work. Adding to the difficulty of the situation was the fact that university officials had previously criticized Morgan for maintaining academic standards that were too high for a home economics program.[3]

The issue of offering vocational training was part of a larger challenge for Morgan in her first few years at the university. Because of the school's status as a land-grant university, the program was required to follow California State Department of Education directives to produce graduates trained as teachers, agricultural extension specialists and dietitians. However, Benjamin Ide Wheeler, president of the university in the early 20th century, saw those fields as vocations, and he encouraged Morgan to continue her focus on science.[11]

From 1916 through her retirement in 1954, Morgan was a department chair or co-chair.[1] Initially, the leadership of the Department of Home Economics was split between Morgan (as the head of the household science division) and Mary Patterson (as the head of the household arts division). Morgan was not fond of sharing a department with Patterson, who had a background in decorative arts and no inclination toward science. By 1920, Berkeley president David Prescott Barrows agreed to Morgan's request to separate the two divisions into distinct departments since they had different curricula, philosophies and faculty, and Morgan became the sole chair of the Department of Household Science.[12]

Morgan waited until her academic rank was secure before becoming pregnant. She had a son in 1923, the same year that she became a full professor. Colleagues were surprised when she had the baby, as she had not mentioned being pregnant and she hid the physical evidence of her pregnancy with her long laboratory jacket.[7] Morgan remembered the reaction of one male colleague when she told him the news; he said if she had five children as he did, she would have hardly noticed the new baby. Morgan's mother moved in with her and cared for the baby so that Morgan could work uninterrupted.[7]

In the mid-1920s, Morgan foresaw the eventual need for graduate education in nutrition. She said that dietitians would not be fully appreciated within the medical field without a strong grounding in science and an ability to implement the research findings of laboratory scientists. Wanting to establish dietetics as a profession rather than a service industry, Morgan emphasized the "cleavage of the dietitian to the physician's end of the hospital table, and away from the nurse's."[13] This statement itself had little effect at the time, however, as dietetics remained primarily concerned with the practical aspects of feeding people in the hospital.[13]

As a department chair, Morgan was known as a stern leader. Though she attracted top faculty members, Morgan was looked upon fearfully by many in home economics.[14] Some faculty members felt that Morgan always thought she was right. Ruth Okey, one of Morgan's colleagues, said,

"Some of her staff learned to suggest a change indirectly in such a way that Dr. Morgan was convinced that the idea was her own, otherwise her response was likely to be, 'Nonsense!' This characteristic was responsible for the brief stays of several very able staff appointees."[15]

Some of the most significant scientific research to emerge from Morgan's laboratory concerned the biochemistry of vitamins and the nutritional value of foods.[16] She became best known for her work examining the effects of pantothenic acid (vitamin B₅) on adrenal gland function. In her early research work, Morgan analyzed processed foods and characterized their vitamin composition. She was the first to establish that a preservative, sulfur dioxide, protected vitamin C but damaged thiamine.[3]

In 1938, the Department of Home Economics was moved under the College of Agriculture, and all of the faculty members became affiliated with the California Agricultural Experiment Station.[17] Late in her career, she was involved in an Agricultural Experiment Station project that examined nutrition among older people in San Mateo County. That work yielded two important conclusions: that bone density began to decline in women between the ages of 50 and 65, and that dietary fat intake led to increases in serum cholesterol.[3]

In another of her studies, Morgan worked with a fox breeder to study the effects of diets that contained low and normal amounts of B vitamins. The treatment group (the vitamin-restricted foxes) developed a fine, sparse gray coat that resembled the fashionable fur of the silver fox. Morgan found that the foxes with normal intake of B vitamins had shiny black fur. After the experiments, a fur stole was made out of fur from both the treatment and control groups. Morgan wore the stole on at least two important occasions – her presentation of the study data in 1939 and her Garvan Medal award ceremony ten years later.[3]

Morgan was sometimes sought to investigate public problems on behalf of federal or state governments. She examined the food quality at San Quentin Prison in 1939, and in the 1940s she was the founding chair of the California Nutrition War Committee and served on the Office of Scientific Research and Development. In 1960, Morgan was a member of a committee that looked at the toxicity of pesticides used in agriculture. She co-authored a textbook, Experimental Food Study, with Irene Sanborn Hall, and she wrote detailed histories of the Alpha Nu and Iota Sigma Pi honor societies.[2]