The California Idea And American Higher Education

Throughout the twentieth century, public universities were established across the United States at a dizzying pace, transforming the scope and purpose of American higher education. Leading the way was California, with its internationally renowned network of public colleges and universities. This book is the first comprehensive history of California's pioneering efforts to create an expansive and high-quality system of public higher education. The author traces the social, political, and economic forces that established and funded an innovative, uniquely tiered, and geographically dispersed network of public campuses in California. This influential model for higher education, "The California Idea," created an organizational structure that combined the promise of broad access to public higher education with a desire to develop institutions of high academic quality. Following the story from early statehood through to the politics and economic forces that eventually resulted in the 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education, The California Idea and American Higher Education offers a carefully crafted history of public higher education.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. The Dream Is Over tells the extraordinary story of the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education in California, created by visionary University of California President Clark Kerr and his contemporaries. The Master Plan’s equality of opportunity policy brought college within reach of millions of American families for the first time and fashioned the world’s leading system of public research universities. The California idea became the leading model for higher education across the world and has had great influence in the rapid growth of universities in China and East Asia. Yet, remarkably, the political conditions supporting the California idea in California itself have evaporated. Universal access is faltering, public tuition is rising, the great research universities face new challenges, and educational participation in California, once the national leader, lags far behind. Can the social values embodied in Kerr’s vision be renewed?

A series of near-riots on campuses aimed at silencing guest speakers has exposed the fact that our universities are no longer devoted to the free exchange of ideas in pursuit of truth. But this hostility to free speech is only a symptom of a deeper problem, writes John Ellis. Having watched the deterioration of academia up close for the past fifty years, Ellis locates the core of the problem in a change in the composition of the faculty during this time, from mildly left-leaning to almost exclusively leftist. He explains how astonishing historical luck led to the success of a plan first devised by a small group of activists to use college campuses to promote radical politics, and why laws and regulations designed to prevent the politicizing of higher education proved insufficient. Ellis shows that political motivation is always destructive of higher learning. Even science and technology departments are not immune. The corruption of universities by radical politics also does wider damage: to primary and secondary education, to race relations, to preparation for the workplace, and to the political and social fabric of the nation. Commonly suggested remedies—new free-speech rules, or enforced right-of-center appointments—will fail because they don’t touch the core problem, a controlling faculty majority of political activists with no real interest in scholarship. This book proposes more drastic and effective reform measures. The first step is for Americans to recognize that vast sums of public money intended for education are being diverted to a political agenda, and to demand that this fraud be stopped.

The United States is the global leader in higher education, but this was not always the case and may not remain so. William Kirby examines sources of—and threats to—US higher education supremacy and charts the rise of Chinese competitors. Yet Chinese institutions also face problems, including a state that challenges the commitment to free inquiry.

This work provides a critical reexamination of the origin and development of America's land-grant colleges and universities, created by the most important piece of legislation in higher education. The story is divided into five parts that provide closer examinations of representative developments.Part I describes the connection between agricultural research and American colleges. Part II shows that the responsibility of defining and implementing the land-grant act fell to the states, which produced a variety of institutions in the nineteenth century. Part III details the first phase of the conflict during the latter decades of the nineteenth century about whether land colleges were intended to be agricultural colleges, or full academic institutions. Part IV focuses on the fact that full-fledged universities became dominant institutions of American higher education. The final part shows that the land-grant mission is alive and well in university colleges of agriculture and, in fact, is inherent to their identity.Including some of the best minds the field has to offer, this volume follows in the fine tradition of past books in Transaction's Perspectives on the History of Higher Education series.

Universities tend to be judged by the test scores of their incoming students and not on what students actually learn once they attend these institutions. While shared tests and surveys have been developed, most schools refuse to publish the results. Instead, they allow such publications as U.S. News & World Report to define educational quality. In order to raise their status in these rankings, institutions pour money into new facilities and extracurricular activities while underfunding their educational programs. In Why Public Higher Education Should Be Free, Robert Samuels argues that many institutions of higher education squander funds and mislead the public about such things as average class size, faculty-to-student ratios, number of faculty with PhDs, and other indicators of educational quality. Parents and students seem to have little knowledge of how colleges and universities have been restructured over the past thirty years. Samuels shows how research universities have begun to function as giant investment banks or hedge funds that spend money on athletics and administration while increasing tuition costs and actually lowering the quality of undergraduate education. In order to fight higher costs and lower quality, Samuels suggests, universities must reallocate these misused funds and concentrate on their core mission of instruction and related research. Throughout the book, Samuels argues that the future of our economy and democracy rests on our ability to train students to be thoughtful participants in the production and analysis of knowledge. If leading universities serve only to grant credentials and prestige, our society will suffer irrevocable harm. Presenting the problem of how universities make and spend money, Samuels provides solutions to make these important institutions less expensive and more vital. By using current resources in a more effective manner, we could even, he contends, make all public higher education free.

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.

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.