American Higher Education Since World War Ii

A masterful history of the postwar transformation of American higher education In the decades after World War II, as government and social support surged and enrollments exploded, the role of colleges and universities in American society changed dramatically. Roger Geiger provides an in-depth history of this remarkable transformation, taking readers from the GI Bill and the postwar expansion of higher education to the social upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s, desegregation and coeducation, and the ascendancy of the modern research university. He demonstrates how growth has been the defining feature of modern higher education, but how each generation since the war has pursued it for different reasons. Sweeping in scope and richly insightful, this groundbreaking book provides the context we need to understand the complex issues facing our colleges and universities today, from rising inequality and skyrocketing costs to deficiencies in student preparedness and lax educational standards.

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.

Forty years after Clark Kerr coined the term multiversity, the American research university has continued to evolve into a complex force for social and economic good. This volume provides a unique opportunity to explore the current state of the research university system. Charles M. Vest, one of the leading advocates for autonomy for American higher education, offers a multifaceted view of the university at the beginning of a new century. With a complex mission and funding structure, the university finds its international openness challenged by new security concerns and its ability to contribute to worldwide opportunity through sharing and collaboration dramatically expanded by the Internet. In particular, Vest addresses the need to nurture broad access to our universities and stay true to the fundamental mission of creating opportunity.

The rise of American research universities to international preeminence constitutes one of the most important episodes in the history of higher education. Research and Relevant Knowledge follows Geiger's earlier volume on American research universities from 1900 to 1940. This second work is the first study to trace this momentous development in the post-World War II period. It describes how the federal government first relied on university scientists during the war, and how the resulting relationship set the pattern for the postwar mushrooming of academic research.The first half of the book analyzes the development of the postwar system of academic research, exploring the contributions of foundations, defense agencies, and universities. The second half depicts the rise of the ""golden age"" of academic research in the years after Sputnik (1957) and its eventual dissolution at the end of the 1960s graduate education. When the federal patron soon reduced its largesse, university students took the lead in challenging the putative hegemony of academic research. The loss of consensus quickly brought the malaise of the 1970s--stagnation, frustration, and equivocation about the research role. The final chapter appraises the renaissance of the 1980s, based largely on a rapprochement with the private sector, and ends by evaluating the embattled status of research universities at the beginning of the 1990s.Research and Relevant Knowledge provides the first authoritative analytical account of American research universities during their most fateful half-century. It will be of critical importance to all those concerned with the future of higher education in the United States.

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.

In The Instrumental University, Ethan Schrum provides an illuminating genealogy of the educational environment in which administrators, professors, and students live and work today. After World War II, research universities in the United States underwent a profound mission change. The Instrumental University combines intellectual, institutional, and political history to reinterpret postwar American life through the changes in higher education. Acknowledging but rejecting the prevailing conception of the Cold War university largely dedicated to supporting national security, Schrum provides a more complete and contextualized account of the American research university between 1945 and 1970. Uncovering a pervasive instrumental understanding of higher education during that era, The Instrumental University shows that universities framed their mission around solving social problems and promoting economic development as central institutions in what would soon be called the knowledge economy. In so doing, these institutions took on more capitalistic and managerial tendencies and, as a result, marginalized founding ideals, such as pursuit of knowledge in academic disciplines and freedom of individual investigators. The technocratic turn eroded some practices that made the American university special. Yet, as Schrum suggests, the instrumental university was not yet the neoliberal university of the 1970s and onwards in which market considerations trumped all others. University of California president Clark Kerr and other innovators in higher education were driven by a progressive impulse that drew on an earlier tradition grounded in a concern for the common good and social welfare.

V. R. Cardozier provides a comprehensive and engaging look at the role played by colleges and universities in World War II, the contributions they made to the war effort, and the impact of the war on higher education institutions. He captures the wartime mood and spirit of the American people, something that is not easy to convey to younger readers who did not directly experience these times. During the war, American colleges and universities were dedicated to serving the needs of the military and all agencies of the government through training, research, and service. The Army, Navy, and Army Air Forces College Training Programs are discussed in separate chapters. Cardozier examines many adjustments colleges made: accelerating their calendars, adapting to losses in enrollment, and changing the curriculum. Military training programs on campuses and how they differed from college training programs are described, as well as the impact of the war on faculty: depletion of the teaching ranks, wartime research on campus, and faculty in the military and government service, especially in OSRD and OSS. The final chapter examines the overall impact of the war on higher education, such as financial problems due to loss of enrollment, issues of academic freedom, academic credit for military service, the GI Bill, and changes in curricula, teaching tools, and campus cultures.

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