Life after Rudolph

Webster and Thelin/ Rudolph Rediscovered 4-1 i Tyack, David. Review of The American College and University, by Frederick Rudolph. EducationalForum 31 (May 1967): 519-20. Walton, John. "A Land of Colleges." Saturday Review (18 August 1962): 59. Weaver,Glenn. "Concemsabout Colleges." HartfordCourant Maga­ zine (30 September 1962): 14. Life after Rudolph John R. Thelin In 1986 Random House announced that Frederick Rudolph's book, The American College and University: A History, was out of print. For most professors who teach graduate courses in the history ofhigher education, "outofprint" meant "out ofluck" and triggered an immediate panic over what to do about text book orders for the next semester (Thelin 1986). Since 1962 this classic work has been at the heart of courses that introduce higher education students to the heritage of the American campus. However, this immediate drought may yet bring a good harvest. It may force higher education scholars to examine the state of the art in their teaching and texts. We may hope that it will also ultimately stimulate new works. David Webster's retrospective essay signals a healthy debate about the past, present, and future of higher education scholar­ ship. I wish to provide a brief point-counterpoint response to his provocative analysis of Rudolph's classic work, in hopes that our companion essays open, rather than close, discussion. 1. Webster observes Rudolph's emphasis on the traditional campus. Rudolph's attraction to the idyllic, landscaped, residen­ tial historic American campus is in accord with most students' expectations—and with public sentiment. Henry Seidel Canby's Alma Mater notes that, at the turn of the century, "the younger colleges, whether they were 'state' or 'privately endowed' institu­ tions, modeled their life and aspirations upon the older colleges, which were usually in the East, and which drew heavily from the best schools and the wealthiest or most cultivated classes" (1936, xi). The urban institution, certainly important, faced an uphill battle in gaining acceptance as "the real thing" in the popular and student image of "college," illustrated by William Rainey Harper's 412 Spring 1990 Volume 13, No. 3 obsession with making the urban University of Chicago appear to "grow older" as it "became newer." And, to further test this social fact, consider the campaign John H. Finley waged as president of City College of New York from 1903 to 1910, trying to convince his students that their downtown commuter institution might some­ day "sparkle with true college life" (Gettleman 1970,427). When Dwight Eisenhower visited Dartmouth in 1953 he exclaimed, "Why this is how I always thought a college should look!"—an interesting perspective from one who had recently served as president of urban Columbia! His view was shared by parents of first-generation college students; for example, Philip Roth's fam­ ily was charmed by the Bucknell campus in the late 1940s and insisted that going to the landscaped campus was important (Roth 1987,44-45). IfRudolph is "wrong" in his fascination, he is in good company. An important historical footnote from the recent past is that about 70 percent of today's campus buildings have been con­ structed since 1965 (Williams 1985,14-16). The danger is that we fault Rudolph post hoc for not having envisioned in 1962 the now familiar monuments to neo-penal architecture that mark our campus, while we forget that the residential campus was the norm at the time he was writing his book. 2. Webster is correct in pointing out that Rudolph has little to say about engineering schools, community colleges, teacher col­ leges, Catholic colleges, and black colleges. That is more a result of focus than oversight, recalling Canby's earlier point that even these new, special-interest institutions shaped themselves in the image of established colleges or grafted themselves into a univer­ sity model. Another question helps answer why Rudolph had little discus­ sion of the community college: When Rudolph was writing his book, were there any first-rate generic histories of the American community college that he might have consulted as a secondary source? I do not believe so. The community college did not really blossom until the 1960s and 1970s; in fact, the terminology "junior...