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* The Terrain * Wilson Smith Thomas Bender context How far did the terrain of higher learning extend in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century? Educational leaders and policy-makers asked themselves the harder question of what it ought to encompass. What array of institutions and institutional forms would provide higher learning for a society professedly egalitarian but deeply divided by region, class, race, religion, and gender? They were motivated to understand this issue in a new way for the challenging era of global responsibility. What is the relation of higher learning to public purpose, to the making of informed citizens, to personal enrichment of American lives, and to the economic well-being of individuals and the society as a whole? The Harvard University Report, Education for a Free Society (1) and the Truman Commission’s Report on Higher Education (II, 1) both addressed these large issues and outlined the initial response of American higher education to the challenge of extending the ideal of liberal education into a greatly enlarged academic establishment. As late as 1940, the scholarly world had a strongly Christian aura; thereafter, one of the great transformations was the secularization of American intellectual life (6). Secular and ever more democratic definitions of the humanities and liberal learning were proposed (9, 10). The successful mobilization of science in World War II encouraged an ambitious investment in academic science and international studies during the Cold War (2–4; VIII, 2, 12). It also seemed to be important to increase the numbers and diversity of the college-educated. The President’s Commission insisted that neither race nor class (nor, eventually, gender) should limit access to higher learning (II, 1, 10–22). While accommodating these larger social and democratic agendas, academe was looking to maintain its historic liberal arts tradition (9–11, 14, 15). What, leaders asked, is the role and proper content of higher education in a democracy in a dangerous world—more dangerous than ever before, at least from an American perspective? The decades immediately after World War II brought the United States to unprecedented economic growth and public sector investments, including higher education. Public institutions especially experienced giddy growth. Clark Kerr of the University of California embraced the transformative impact of this growth and the new institutional scale it implied (I, 12). Others, however, feared that such a “multiversity,” as he called it, undermined the core values of the university (13). For many of those devoted to liberal learning, a sense of community—or connection—absent in the multiversity was fundamental (14, 15). Kerr himself, who had had such an experience as an undergraduate, came to recognize this, supporting the creation of cluster colleges at the new Santa Cruz campus in the 1960s. But in the end it found few imitators. By the final decade of the century, the designs of the 1940s and 1950s had been largely swept aside. Developments within academic culture and beyond academe undercut what had momentarily been a national consensus on the meaning of American academic life. At century’s end, different voices (18–23) alternately described and prescribed various presents and futures for American higher education. These visions ranged from postmodern critique (19) to civic hopefulness (22). If at the beginning of the half-century there was confidence that the American economy could support substantial public investments in higher education, such was not the case at the end of the twentieth century. Nor were either national leaders or the general public so convinced that higher education was the important public good it had seemed to them after the war. Page 14The Harvard Report on General Education 1. Harvard Committee, General Education in a Free Society, 1945 The dominant curricular statement of James Bryant Conant’s presidency of Harvard University (1933–53) was widely known, after the color of its cover, as the “Red Book.” Written at the request of their president by eleven eminent faculty members, the report was aimed at the nation and addressed the educational challenges of the postwar world. Conant (1893–1978) had been disturbed and by 1939 alarmed at the threat of totalitarian governments to liberal learning and liberal societies. Foreseeing a postwar surge in enrollments, he advised the committee in 1943 to point the undergraduate curriculum toward “the continuance of a liberal and humane tradition.” The committee’s chair was Paul H. Buck (History); its vice chair John H. Finley (Classics), joined by professors of biology, education, English, government, history, and philosophy. Although the...

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