A People S History Of American Higher Education

This pathbreaking textbook addresses key issues which have often been condemned to exceptions and footnotes—if not ignored completely—in historical considerations of U.S. higher education; particularly race, ethnicity, gender, and class. Organized thematically, this book builds from the ground up, shedding light on the full, diverse range of institutions—including small liberal arts schools, junior and community colleges, black and white women’s colleges, black colleges, and state colleges—that have been instrumental in creating the higher education system we know today. A People’s History of American Higher Education surveys the varied characteristics of the diverse populations constituting or striving for the middle class through educational attainment, providing a narrative that unites often divergent historical fields. The author engages readers in a powerful, revised understanding of what institutions and participants beyond the oft-cited elite groups have done for American higher education. A People’s History of American Higher Education focuses on those participants who may not have been members of elite groups, yet who helped push elite institutions and the country as a whole. Hutcheson introduces readers to both social and intellectual history, providing invaluable perspectives and methodologies for graduate students and faculty members alike. This essential history of American higher education brings a fresh perspective to the field, challenging the accepted ways of thinking historically about colleges and universities.

Anyone studying the history of this institution in America must read Thelin's classic text, which has distinguished itself as the most wide-ranging and engaging account of the origins and evolution of America's institutions of higher learning.

The first volume in the Core Concepts of Higher Education series, The History of U.S. Higher Education: Methods for Understanding the Past is a unique research methods textbook that provides students with an understanding of the processes that historians use when conducting their own research. Written primarily for graduate students in higher education programs, this book explores critical methodological issues in the history of American higher education, including race, class, gender, and sexuality. Chapters include: Reflective Exercises that combine theory and practice Research Method Tips Further Reading Suggestions. Leading historians and those at the forefront of new research explain how historical literature is discovered and written, and provide readers with the methodological approaches to conduct historical higher education research of their own.

"America's constant push to make its colleges and universities more efficient and more accountable is not a new phenomenon. Indeed, in Other People's Colleges, Ethan Ris argues that the reform impulse is baked into American higher education. For well over one hundred years, elite reformers have called for sweeping changes in the sector and raised existential questions about its sustainability. Colleges and universities have responded with a combination of resistance and acquiescence. The end result is a sector that has learned to accept top-down reform as part of its existence. When that reform is beneficial (offering major rewards for minor changes), colleges and universities know how to assimilate it. When it is hostile (attacking autonomy or values), they know how to resist it. In the early twentieth century, the "academic engineers," a cadre of elite, external reformers from foundations, businesses, and government, worked to reshape and reorganize the vast base of the higher education pyramid. Their reform efforts were largely directed at the lower tiers of higher education, but their efforts fell short, despite their wealth and power, leaving a legacy of successful resistance that affects every college and university in the United States. Today, another coalition of business leaders, philanthropists, and politicians are again demanding efficiency, accountability, and utility from American higher education. But top-down design is not destiny. Today's reform agenda in higher education should not be viewed as a new existential threat. It is a longstanding fact of life to be assimilated, diverted, or subverted on an ongoing basis"--

This essential history of American higher education brings a fresh perspective to the field, challenging the accepted ways of thinking historically about colleges and universities. Organized thematically, this book builds from the ground up, shedding light on the full, diverse range of institutions—including small liberal arts schools, junior and community colleges, black and white women’s colleges, black colleges, and state colleges—that have been instrumental in creating the higher education system we know today. A People’s History of American Higher Education focuses on those participants who may not have been members of elite groups, yet who helped push elite institutions and the country as a whole. This pathbreaking textbook addresses key issues which have often been condemned to exceptions and footnotes—if not ignored completely—in historical considerations of U.S. higher education; particularly race, ethnicity, gender, and class. Hutcheson introduces readers to both social and intellectual history, providing invaluable perspectives and methodologies for graduate students and faculty members alike. A People’s History of American Higher Education surveys the varied characteristics of the diverse populations constituting or striving for the middle class through educational attainment, providing a narrative that unites often divergent historical fields. The author engages readers in a powerful, revised understanding of what institutions and participants beyond the oft-cited elite groups have done for American higher education.

Based on extensive research at eight universities - Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Chicago, Stanford, Michigan, and California at Berkeley - Reuben examines the aims of university reformers in the context of nineteenth-century ideas about truth. She argues that these educators tried to apply new scientific standards to moral education, but that their modernization efforts ultimately failed.

This book tells the compelling saga of American higher education from the founding of Harvard College in 1636 to the outbreak of World War II. The author traces how colleges and universities were shaped by the shifting influences of culture, the emergence of new career opportunities, and the unrelenting advancement of knowledge. He describes how colonial colleges developed a unified yet diverse educational tradition capable of weathering the social upheaval of the Revolution as well as the evangelical fervor of the Second Great Awakening. He shows how the character of college education in different regions diverged significantly in the years leading up to the Civil War - for example, the state universities of the antebellum South were dominated by the sons of planters and their culture - and how higher education was later revolutionized by the land-grant movement, the growth of academic professionalism, and the transformation of campus life by students. By the beginning of the Second World War, the standard American university had taken shape, setting the stage for the postwar education boom. The author moves through each era, exploring the growth of higher education.

The thoroughly updated second edition of this dynamic and thoughtful collection focuses on the issues that have shaped American higher education in the past decade. Essential Documents in the History of American Higher Education, designed to be used alongside John R. Thelin's A History of American Higher Education or on its own, presents a rich collection of primary sources that chart the social, intellectual, political, and cultural history of American colleges and universities from the seventeenth century to the present. The documents are organized in sections that parallel the chapters in A History both chronologically and thematically, and sections are introduced with brief headnotes establishing the context for each source. This updated edition of Essential Documents focuses on the issues that have shaped American higher education in the past decade, from congressional investigations into endowments and court cases about paying student-athletes to accounts of campus protests over racial discrimination and adjuncts struggling in the "gig economy." From the successful fund-raising campaigns of 2014 to the closing of campuses because of the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, the book also includes • a new tenth chapter, "Prominence and Problems: American Higher Education since 2010," and an updated introduction; • a number of landmark documents, including the charter for the College of Rhode Island (1764), the Morrill Land Grand Act (1862), the GI Bill (1944), and the Knight Commission Report on College Sports (2010); and • lively firsthand accounts by students and teachers that tell what it was like to be a Harvard student in the 1700s, to participate in the campus riots of the 1960s, to be a female college athlete in the 1970s, or to enroll at UCLA as an economically disadvantaged Latina in the 1990s. Thelin even stretches the usual bounds of documentary sources, incorporating popular pieces by Robert Benchley and James Thurber on their own college days as well as an excerpt from Groucho Marx's screwball film Horse Feathers. What emerges is a complex and nuanced collection that reflects the richness of more than three centuries of American higher education.