From Tumult to Benign Neglect: The Strange Career of the History of American Higher Education in the 1970’s

3 NEW INTERPRETATIONS AND NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE STUDY OF THE HISTORY OF HIGHER EDUCATION: THE 1970's INTO THE 1980's A REVIEW SYMPOSIUM This review symposium was organized by the "history group" and presented at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Higher Education on March 5, 1980, in Washington, D.C. The session was well attended and the presentations generated considerable discussion. The papers provide both summative and formative statements on the history of higher education as a field of study. The two review essays by Bruce Leslie and Arthur Engel are followed by comments from the session Chairperson, Joan Burstyn. FROM TUMULT TO BENIGN NEGLECT: THE STRANGE CAREER OF THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATION IN THE 1970’s W. Bruce Leslie State University of New York at Brockport The past decade has been a strange and somewhat disappointing one for historians of American higher education. Ten years ago the field was an aca­ demic dimension of an emotional social and political issue. Undergraduates crowded into courses on all aspects of higher education, academics debated educational issues, and scholars turned their attention to the subject, in­ cluding its historical dimension. I doubt that ten years ago many of us would have predicted that today historians of higher education would be prac­ titioners of a neglected field that induces somnolence in most students and colleagues. The few courses giving an historical analysis of higher educa­ tion are offered primarily as a service to educational administration pro­ grams. Over the last ten years scattered scholars have produced a slow accu­ mulation of useful work, although it is only a fraction of what a Rip Van Winkle rising from a 1970 trance would have expected. The most obvious deficiency of the past decade has been the failure to produce new syntheses, either as scholarly or teaching tools. The root of the problem has been the failure to develop interpretive constructs that transcend the fixation upon the evolution of colleges and universities. Ex­ cessive attention to formal institutions has also prevented historians of higher education from fully utilizing the insights of the "new" social his­ tory in contiguous fields of study. In particular, the implicit hesita­ tion to subject higher education to systematic class analysis will have to be overcome if the history of American higher education is finally going to be put into a meaningful social context. This paper will survey some of the more important research done in recent years and suggest ways in which this work may revise the prevailing interpretations of the history of American higher education. The continued reliance upon the syntheses of the 1950's and 1960's is striking. The works of Hofstadter and Metzger, Rudolph, Hofstadter and Smith, Rudy and Brubacher, and Veysey still dominate course reading lists and our dominant conception of higher education.^ These works are wellwritten , reasonable, and readily available, but surely we must ask whether the picture they paint is not in need of revision and reorientation in the light of recent scholarship. In particular we must question whether we can allow ourselves to continue to be confined by their narrow institutional focus. Several books of the 1970's provide models that suggest alternatives to an overly institutional emphasis. Lawrence Cremin's American Education 1607- 4 1783 defined education broadly and deals with schooling only to the extent that is appropriate; higher education is only a small part of this coverage. Historians of education have been giving lip-service to placing schooling within the context of education for nearly twenty years, but this is one of the few works that actually does so. In The Intelligence of a People, Daniel Calhoun provided another useful approach by examining the way Americans for­ mulated and tried to solve problems in the Early Republic. Mental patterns and higher learning in a broad sense provided the framework. In his examina­ tion of professionalism Burton Bledstein examined changes in higher education as a function of change in the class structure (i.e . , the development of the "new" middle class) rather than merely education inspired reforms.^ Each of these books provides a wide perspective within which to place the evolution of...