American Higher Education Transformed, 1940–2005: Documenting the National Discourse

Preface

* Page xiiiPreface * Wilson Smith Thomas Bender The people who transformed American colleges and universities in the half-century after World War II pursued a variety of purposes. Their efforts, documented here, continue a story that, as late as the 1940s, was told in American Higher Education, A Documentary History, edited in 1961 by Richard Hofstadter and Wilson Smith. The scope and magnitude of the changes over the past half-century could easily fill several volumes. What we record in this collection is necessarily and happily selective. We emphasize a discourse that speaks to the national ways, means, and aims of higher learning. We exclude the social life of students, the business of intercollegiate athletics, and institutional budgets in favor of questions of access, the diversity of students, their studies, and their place in educational change. We stress the curriculum and the ideal of liberal learning in an age of mass education, the position and leadership of universities in society, the role of the federal government, including its courts, and academic life as a profession. Not only did the numbers of students and faculty expand at an unprecedented rate during this half-century, so also did the fields of inquiry and teaching with their challenges of disciplinary development. Coming to the fore was an unprecedented shift toward new studies of nature in the modern sciences underwritten by generous financing that overshadowed inquiries into the human condition historically central to the humanities disciplines. With it all, more than three thousand institutions of higher education in the United States themselves came to be marked by astonishing degrees of differentiation. The changes we document and the reflexive statements we reprint are part of a persistent national discourse that continues to ask: What is the role of higher learning in a democratic-industrial-technological society? Where can the inevitable tensions between equality and excellence be softened? How can universities meet their responsibility to lead the way toward both equality and excellence? The voices in the pages that follow do not shrink from these difficult issues in a society that aspires to equality in educational opportunities and a common enticement to learning without expecting uniform achievements. We hope the reader will bear in mind the theme for these endeavors that long ago was put simply by the father of American public higher education. Thomas Jefferson in 1807 wrote: “The field of knolege is the common property of all mankind.” This documentary account of transformation carries that belief. Note: Footnotes are omitted from most of the documents. When faced with many possible references, the bibliography in each headnote is meant to cite the most informative and relevant supplementary readings. Page xiv ...