The History of American Higher Education: Learning and Culture from the Founding to World War II by Roger L. Geiger (review)

Since World War II, America has prided itself on the successes of its universities. But, upon reading Roger Geiger’s new study of the early history of American higher education, one cannot help but recognize how fragile this achievement was, how strong the forces against it were, and why the current efforts to reform universities could well succeed. “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk,” Hegel said, and we should be concerned to see it circling the research university.

Geiger’s book is synthetic, drawing on previous scholarship, including his own. He builds effectively on Laurence Veysey’s classic The Emergence of the American University (1965), which argued that the modern research university reflected competing interests held together in an institutional structure in which administrators, a divided faculty, and students could pursue separate agendas. Geiger agrees, but he covers a longer time period, places a great emphasis on institutional diversity, and is more attuned to cultural contexts. His analysis should be read alongside John Thelin’s important History of American Higher Education (2004). Whereas Geiger brings together social, cultural, and intellectual history to help us understand the conflicting aspirations of Americans over time, Thelin’s focus on institutional development and financing reminds readers that there has always been a large gap between rhetoric and reality. Read together, both authors teach us that how things were in the past is often quite different than how the past is invoked in the present.

Geiger organizes his history around what he considers higher education’s three historical purposes: “knowledge, careers, and culture.” In answering the questions “how, why, and where Americans went to college,” his interpretation emphasizes the conflicts between the three purposes from the seventeenth-century founding of Harvard College (ix).

The question at the heart of the book is: Why and how did American universities embrace knowledge as their aim, including raising academic standards and emphasizing research in the arts and sciences, and what stood in the way? For the most part, it turns out, we stood in the way. The problem was democracy, which favors mass opinion over educated ones and is responsive to the preferences of ordinary people over educated elites.

Starting in the 1820s, American policy makers started to question the value of liberal education. Despite the eloquence of the 1828 Yale Reports, as David Potts argues in his 2010 Liberal Education for a Land of Colleges, traditional classical education was on the defense. The Morrill Act promoted education in practical arts rather than liberal ones. As access to the practical arts expanded, the older colleges and East Coast universities had to respond. Unfortunately, they did so through their tacit acceptance of the “college experience.” Students developed a campus culture oriented around clubs, fraternities, parties, and extracurricular activities that, by the early 20^th century, defined going to college. The problem was that it was anti-intellectual. Students came for the experience, but not for academics. The anti-intellectual nature of the student body was reinforced by the emergence of mass education.

Faculty are the “real revolutionaries” because, inspired by German ideals of research and academic freedom, they developed the academic disciplines that modernized the curriculum (326). As they gained authority within universities, colleges and universities could focus more on knowledge. The faculty could not have done it alone. It took money, and Geiger demonstrates the important role of Carnegie and Rockefeller and also the federal government in promoting basic research in the natural and social sciences. To these patrons of knowledge, research was practical.

That left the problem of “culture.” Here, Geiger’s triumphant story of the rise of the research university falters as a moral tale for two reasons. First, he is unwilling to recognize the virtues of those, especially in the humanities, who...