American College and University: A History

Rudolph Rediscovered: An Introductory Essay

R U D O L P H R E D I S C O V E R E D Absence does make the heart grow fonder. Since Frederick Rudolph's The American College and University: A History went out of print in 1986, higher education historians have suffered withdrawal pains. For over twenty-five years Rudolph's book had been at the heart of courses that introduced the heritage of the American campus. "Out of print" has meant "out of luck" for most professors who teach seminars in the history of education as they experienced the immediate panic of what to do about textbook orders for the forthcoming semester. During this period of "life without Rudolph" I have spent each summer making pilgrimages to numerous university bookstores around the country to scrounge for secondhand copies of the book, which I could then place on library reserve as readings for a new An abbreviated version of this essay was published as "Life after Rudolph,"part of a retrospective forum in the Review of Higher Education 13, no. 3 (Spring 1990): 411-15.1wish to thank L. Jackson Newell, editor of the Review of Higher Education, for permission to draw from that forum on Frederick Rudolph's The American College and University: A History. David Webster has kindly allowed me to paraphrase and respond to points he presented in his own perceptive essay review. Frederick Rudolph generously provided copies of correspondence and took time to recall eventsassociatedwith publication of his book. I am especially grateful for his cooperation without constraint. Rudolph Rediscovered x generation of graduate students. That the University of Georgia Press is reprinting the classic work is grounds for celebration. It is also cause for thoughtful reviewof two matters: the genesis of the book that has become central to our study of higher education ; and the scholarship in the history of higher education since The American College and University: A History was first published in 1962. A danger of celebration is that contemporary readersassume post hoc that a famous book was destined to be so. My reviewof the correspondence and negotiations from three decades ago suggests a different story for TheAmerican College and University. Celebrating success, for example,might gloss over the point that one major research foundationrejected Rudolph's grant request to work on the project; or, that in 1960 Rudolph endured sharp criticism from colleagues who thought his attention to intercollegiate sports wasinappropriate for serious historical scholarship . Even though the book has enjoyed favorable reviews and sustained sales in both hardback and paperback editions,Rudolph is an unassuming academic hero who retains the same modesty today as he did about the writing project he undertook in 1958. This reserve hints at another peculiar dimension of historical scholarship that festschrift tends to obscure: we often know little about how historians go about their work. Apart from L. P. Curtis's 1970 anthology, The Historian's Workshop, there are few glimpses into the historian's craft. C O N T E X T : H I G H E R E D U C A T I O N S C H O L A R S H I P C O M E S O F A G E Ironically, this successful book was almost not a book; and, it certainly was not originally intended to be a text. Editors at Yale University Press, which in 1956 had published Rudolph'shistorical study of the collegiate ideal at Williams College, Mark Hopkins and the Log, urged him to consider writing a book for general readers that would provide a broad context for the history of American colleges. Rudolph initially responded that he lacked the "macro" background for the proposed "general" his- xi Rudolph Rediscovered tory of higher education. After his research proposal dealing with the history of American higher education was turned down by one foundation, he eventually did gain the opportunity to acquire broad context for the study of colleges and universities in 1958 and 1959, when he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. While working in the Library of Congress on the research for the proposed book (in a study office made available by then Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy), Rudolph received an invitation from Dean Francis Keppel of the Harvard Graduate School of Education to develop and teach a course in the history of American higher education. Thus, what had been background research for a proposed book...