Twentieth Century Higher Education

Abstract:

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 tracks the dramatic outcomes of the federal government's growing involvement in higher education between World War I and the 1970s, and the conservative backlash against that involvement from the 1980s onward. Using cutting-edge analysis, Christopher Loss recovers higher education's central importance to the larger social and political history of the United States in the twentieth century, and chronicles its transformation into a key mediating institution between citizens and the state. Framed around the three major federal higher education policies of the twentieth century--the 1944 GI Bill, the 1958 National Defense Education Act, and the 1965 Higher Education Act--the book charts the federal government's various efforts to deploy education to ready citizens for the national, bureaucratized, and increasingly global world in which they lived. Loss details the myriad ways in which academic leaders and students shaped, and were shaped by, the state's shifting political agenda as it moved from a preoccupation with economic security during the Great Depression, to national security during World War II and the Cold War, to securing the rights of African Americans, women, and other previously marginalized groups during the 1960s and '70s. Along the way, Loss reappraises the origins of higher education's current-day diversity regime, the growth of identity group politics, and the privatization of citizenship at the close of the twentieth century. At a time when people's faith in government and higher education is being sorely tested, this book sheds new light on the close relations between American higher education and politics.

This first history of women's higher education in the 20th-century South examines national and regional influences that have made this educational experience unique.

Analysis of major trends in American collegiate and university education today.

College in the United States changed dramatically during the twentieth century, ushering in what we know today as the American university in all its diversity. Religion departments made their way into institutions in the 1930s to the 1960s, while significant shifts from college to university occurred. The college ideal was primarily shaping the few to enter the Protestant management class through the inculcation of values associated with a Western civilization that relied upon this training done residentially, primarily for young men. Protestant Christian leaders created religion departments as the college model was shifting to the university ideal, where a more democratized population, including women and non-Protestants, studied under professors trained in specialized disciplines to achieve professional careers in a more internationally connected and post-industrial class. Religion departments at mid-century were addressing the lack of an agreed-upon curricular center in the wake of changes such as the elective system, Carnegie credit-hour formulation, and numerous other shifts in disciplines spelling the end of the college ideal, though certainly continuing many of its traditions and structures. Religion departments were an attempt to provide a cultural and religious center that might hold, enhance existential and moral meaning for students, and strengthen an argument against the German research university ideals of naturalistic science whose so-called objectivity proved, at best, problematic and, at worst, inept given the political crisis in Europe. Colleges found they were losing sight of the college ideal and hoped religion as a taught subject could bring back much of what college had meant, from moral formation and curricular focus to personal piety and national unity. That hope was never realized, and what remained in its wake helped fuel the university model with its specialized religion departments seeking entirely different ends. In the shift from college to university, religion professors attempted to become creators of a legitimate academic subject quite apart from the chapel programs, attempts at moralizing, and centrality in the curriculum of Western Christian thought and history championed in the college model.

This book explores the changing patterns of higher education in England in the twentieth century, the types of institutions and the emergence of a 'system' of education. At the same time it traces the relationship between the writer-advocates of higher education and the changing world of higher education and its contexts. There is therefore an interrelated story of higher education, the writers, their messages, their backgrounds and ideologies, the audiences they intend to address, and the impacts of the state and other external forces. It is likely to appeal to higher education academics and administrators, politicians and other policy makers, staff and students on higher degree and professional programmes. It should be read by anyone who cares about English Universities and their future.

As we approach the end of the twentieth century and enter the twenty-first, the nation's system of colleges and universities, as well as higher education around the world, will face some enduring conflicts and contradictions—the basic challenges that must be confronted and solved again and again in every generation. These include nationalization versus internationalization in higher education, merit in academic pursuits versus equality of treatment, the preservation of the past versus improvement of the present or changes in the future, differentiation of functions among higher education institutions versus their homogenization in a world of mass access, and commitment to ethical conduct in the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge versus exploitation of the process for individual gain. This book outlines possible solutions to these dilemmas that will enable higher education to continue to serve its own imperatives as well as contribute to the quality of life around the world in the coming years and decades.