Higher Education in the American West: Regional History and State Contexts by Lester F. Goodchild etal., and: Public Policy Challenges Facing Higher Education in the American West by Lester F. Goodchild etal. (review)

The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2003. WICHE is a 15-member state compact, comprising Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. Higher Education in the American West: Regional State Contexts provides an overview of the history of colleges and universities in the fifteen WICHE states, comprising chapters by various educators, policy analysts, and WICHE administrators. As such, it is the first regional history of post-secondary education in the US. The value of such an historical overview becomes apparent when reading the companion volume, Public Policy Challenges Facing Higher Education in the American West, wherein the importance of regional and historical context looms large. The editors, Lester F. Goodchild, Richard W. Jonsen, Patty Limerick, and David Longanecker argue in the first volume that if citizens and policymakers knew of all the ways in which public higher education was a boon to the Western states in the past, the states’ current defunding campaigns would come to an end. Together, the two volumes make the case that public higher education has helped us in the past, and it can help us in the future.

There are many values of a regional focus. In the second volume, the editors argue that three issues are particularly challenging for the Western states today. These are changing demographics, changes in state financing commitments and capabilities, and rapidly increasing tuition. Although most readers will find these three issues challenging across the United States, the informative historical chapters of the first volume do help us understand the particular ways in which these issues intersect with Western history and state development. There are ways in which the West is different from the rest of the nation. For example, as a politically younger region, it was always more dependent on federal funding and support than other regions. Furthermore, public higher education plays a much larger role in the West than it does in other regions, with well-developed private collegiate alternatives. And surely most of us understand that the demographic changes that are confronting the nation as a whole are particularly strong in some parts of the West, notably California. How to educate new generations of students becomes an urgent mission in the second volume, which “explores major public policy directions needed to utilize this higher education enterprise to educate and train the West’s citizens for future careers to move the state economies forward” (p. xi).

The first of the two, Higher Education in the American West, is divided into two parts. The first part tells the story of Western post-secondary education prior to World War II. Authors Good-child and Wrobel each write separately on Western College expansion between 1818 and 1945, while Cohen discusses the evolution of Western institutions more generally. The stand out chapter, however, is Patty Limerick’s very fine and somewhat idiosyncratic history. She stresses Western innovation, showing us the “mixed bag of traditions” in the West that includes dependence on federal and state money, failure to maintain infrastructure, and “desperate presidents driven to their wits’ end by precarious funding” (p. 83). She also conveys how old all of our new problems really are, something that could be depressing but in her hands ends up as a reason for hope; “In the all-too-bright light of historical perspective, latter-day moral agonizing over funding from corporations and powerful private donors looks precious...