Rhodes’s Way or the Highway: The Consequences of Politics and Ideology in Ohio Public Higher Education after World War II

The recent history of Ohio public higher education is a familiar one, played out in many states. Like most states east of the Mississippi River, Ohio is home to research universities that house dozens of graduate programs. Like most states in the Midwest, Ohio benefited from the Morrill Land Grant Acts, which created colleges for the benefit of agriculture and mechanical arts. And, like most states across the nation, Ohio had a baby boom population that came of age looking to enter higher education during the 1960s and early 1970s.

What distinguishes Ohio’s system of public higher education is not what state leaders initially accomplished but rather what they failed to do. It took Ohio’s leaders more than twenty years, from 1943 to 1966, to organize and implement a state policy to invest in public higher education. By 1966, a new governing body, the board of regents, had become responsible for development of Ohio’s higher education. The regents initially focused on creating a system that prioritized two competing but somewhat complimentary goals: open access at state-supported two-year branch campuses that emphasized general education for underclassmen, and the construction of research-based graduate programs in science and technology at state-supported four-year institutions where focus would be on upper-level education—a model they called the Master Plan for Ohio Higher Education. New two-year campuses would give the state much needed space for the massive wave of baby boomers looking to enter higher education, while the graduate programs and research facilities would provide an opportunity for economic development away from industrial manufacturing.

The regents’ plan seemed to be working quite well and enjoyed support from the General Assembly and Governor James A. Rhodes, who endorsed their model for public higher education. But in 1969, a mere three years into carrying out their master plan, Rhodes, who had been elected in 1962 as a pro–New Deal, Eisenhower Republican, began campaigning against this plan and turned Ohio’s campuses into his political punching bag in attempt to win over the burgeoning law-and-order Republicans who blamed the anti–Vietnam War, pro-speech, civil rights movement protests of the late 1960s on liberal campus culture. As a result, the push for graduate education and economic diversification through research and development was replaced with Rhodes’s desire for a state investment in two-year vocational training that meshed more with the growing working-class, anti-elitist mantra.¹

Behind the nearly thirty-year story of how Ohio’s leaders handled the development of public higher education after World War II is an important narrative that explains the state’s initial hesitance about investing in public higher education and Rhodes’s eventual distaste for graduate education: the deindustrialization of the American Midwest. There isn’t one singular piece of evidence that connects the economic phenomena of deindustrialization to Ohio policymakers’ decisions about public higher education, but there are enough clues to suggest that a good number of state leaders knew Ohio’s economic decisions regarding industrial manufacturing was not healthy for the state in the long term. As such, Ohio policymakers made their decisions about public higher education because of, and, in some cases, despite Ohio’s identity as an industrial manufacturing state. An overview of Ohio and the Midwest more broadly in the years immediately following World War II illustrates how Ohio’s economic identity influenced the way its policymakers viewed the purpose of public higher education and how, as the economy changed over the next three decades, so too did their views.²

This article has three interrelated goals. First, it establishes the economic and political conditions of Ohio in the years immediately preceding World War II and explains how those conditions were related to the socioeconomic culture of the entire Midwest before, during and after World War II. Second, it examines how the economic policies that benefited Ohio and the Midwest during World War II gave way to a new postwar economic order, in which...