Columbia University back then had thirty-six thousand students. Today it has over sixty thousand. It was—and is—the largest university in the United States. Living up to the superlative the greatest in the world was an obsession not only for President Butler of Columbia, a former professor of philosophy at that same institution, but also for the whole of America.

In addition to the the four usual sections of a European university—letters, science, law, and medicine—Columbia also had economics, polytechnics, fine arts, music, and drama. It covered, in fact, all of higher education. The faculty was, of course, huge. It had one instructor for every twenty students.

At Columbia University, the experts in personality psychology were Gardner Murphy from the psychology department and Percival Symonds and Goodwin Watson from the Teachers College. The supreme authority on the psychology of education was Professor E. L. Thorndike. Professor Woodworth from the psychology department was about as well known. Also, of course, there was Professor John Dewey from the philosophy department, who was not only the greatest authority in American philosophy at that time but also a world authority in education, whose principles of social labor were applied all over the world.

Gardner Murphy, the same age as Allport, thirty-six, had published not only the best experimental social psychology in collaboration with his wife and with Newcomb, a young collaborator, but also Approaches to Personality, in which he very competently analyzed Freud's psychoanalysis, Jung's analytical psychology, Adler's individual psychology, Pierre Janet's behavioral psychology, Kretschmer's biotypology, and the psychobiology of Adolf Meyer and his students, Sullivan and Plant. He also studied in Europe, not for too long, but he was fluent in German and French, which was fairly rare in the United States. Symonds and Watson, for instance, used only English-language bibliography in their works, and they knew German and French psychology only from translations, which were very few. A few years after Allport's personality psychology, Murphy published his treatise as well, which was published in several editions. The treatise was a synthesis of American psychology, while Allport's was a synthesis of American and German psychology.