Is higher education a right or a privilege? Who should go to college? What should they study there? These questions were hotly debated between the world wars, when an unprecedented boom in college enrollments forced Americans to struggle between their belief in the importance of educational opportunity and their desire to preserve the existing social structure. In The American College and the Culture of Aspiration, 1915–1940, David O. Levine offers the first in-depth history of higher education during this era, a period when colleges and universities became arbiters of social and economic mobility and a hierarchy of schools evolved to meet growing demands for occupational training and socialization.

The first in-depth history of higher education during the era in which colleges and universities became arbiters of social and economic mobility.

Anyone studying the history of this institution in America must read Thelin's classic text, which has distinguished itself as the most wide-ranging and engaging account of the origins and evolution of America's institutions of higher learning.

Explores the decline in religious influence in American universities, discussing why this transformation has occurred.

This book reinterprets the rise of the natural and social sciences as sources of political authority in modern America. Andrew Jewett demonstrates the remarkable persistence of a belief that the scientific enterprise carried with it a set of ethical values capable of grounding a democratic culture - a political function widely assigned to religion. The book traces the shifting formulations of this belief from the creation of the research universities in the Civil War era to the early Cold War years. It examines hundreds of leading scholars who viewed science not merely as a source of technical knowledge, but also as a resource for fostering cultural change. This vision generated surprisingly nuanced portraits of science in the years before the military-industrial complex and has much to teach us today about the relationship between science and democracy.

This volume supplements the acclaimed three volume set published in 1986 and consists of an annotated listing of American Studies monographs published between 1984 and 1988. There are more than 6,000 descriptive entries in a wide range of categories: anthropology and folklore, art and architecture, history, literature, music, political science, popular culture, psychology, religion, science and technology, and sociology.

An illuminating history of the reform agenda in higher education. For well over one hundred years, people have been attempting to make American colleges and universities more efficient and more accountable. Indeed, Ethan Ris argues in Other People’s Colleges, the reform impulse is baked into American higher education, the result of generations of elite reformers who have called for sweeping changes in the sector and raised existential questions about its sustainability. When that reform is beneficial, offering major rewards for minor changes, colleges and universities know how to assimilate it. When it is hostile, attacking autonomy or values, they know how to resist it. The result is a sector that has learned to accept top-down reform as part of its existence. In the early twentieth century, the “academic engineers,” a cadre of elite, external reformers from foundations, businesses, and government, worked to reshape and reorganize the vast base of the higher education pyramid. Their reform efforts were largely directed at the lower tiers of higher education, but those efforts fell short, despite the wealth and power of their backers, leaving a legacy of successful resistance that affects every college and university in the United States. Today, another coalition of business leaders, philanthropists, and politicians is again demanding efficiency, accountability, and utility from American higher education. But, as Ris argues, top-down design is not destiny. Drawing on extensive and original archival research, Other People’s Colleges offers an account of higher education that sheds light on today’s reform agenda.

There is much change underway in American higher education. New technologies are challenging the teaching practices of yesterday, distance learning is lauded, and private firms offer to certify the educational credentials that businesses and others will deem satisfactory. In this new environment, America's liberal arts colleges propound a quite different set of values. Their continuing faith in the liberal arts--not as the nineteenth century chose to define them but as the twenty-first century will be obliged to reconsider them--is being tested.Distinctively American examines the American liberal arts college as an institution, from its role in the lives of students, to its value as a form of education. It explores the threats faced by liberal arts colleges as well as the transformative role, both positive and negative, information technology will play in their future development and survival. In the preface introducing the volume, Stephen Graubard examines the history of the American liberal arts colleges, from their early disdained reputations in comparison to European schools, to their slow rise to becoming "world-class universities."This important volume explores the triumphs and challenges of one segment of the American higher educational universe. It also addresses a larger question: What ought this country be teaching its young, the many millions who now throng its colleges and universities? Distinctively American is essential reading for all concerned with the future of higher education.

Tracing the full history of traditionally white college fraternities in America from their days in antebellum all-male schools to the sprawling modern-day college campus, Nicholas Syrett reveals how fraternity brothers have defined masculinity over the course of their 180-year history. Based on extensive research at twelve different schools and analyzing at least twenty national fraternities, The Company He Keeps explores many factors--such as class, religiosity, race, sexuality, athleticism, intelligence, and recklessness--that have contributed to particular versions of fraternal masculinity at different times. Syrett demonstrates the ways that fraternity brothers' masculinity has had consequences for other students on campus as well, emphasizing the exclusion of different groups of classmates and the sexual exploitation of female college students.

The early twentieth century witnessed the rise of middle-class mass periodicals that, while offering readers congenial material, also conveyed new depictions of manliness, liberal education, and the image of business leaders. "Should Your Boy Go to College?" asked one magazine story; and for over two decades these middle-class magazines answered, in numerous permutations, with a collective "yes!" In the course of interpreting these themes they reshaped the vision of a college education, and created the ideal of a college-educated businessman.Volume 24 of the Perspectives on the History of Higher Education: 2005 provides historical studies touching on contemporary concerns--gender, high-ability students, academic freedom, and, in the case of the Barnes Foundation, the authority of donor intent. Daniel Clark discusses the nuanced changes that occurred to the image of college at the turn of the century. Michael David Cohen offers an important corrective to stereotypes about gender relations in nineteenth-century coeducational colleges. Jane Robbins traces how the young National Research Council embraced the cause of how to identify and encourage superior students as a vehicle for incorporating wartime advances in psychological testing. Susan R. Richardson considers the long Texas tradition of political interference in university affairs. Finally, Edward Epstein and Marybeth Gasman shed historical light on the recent controversy surrounding the Barnes Foundation.The volume also contains brief descriptions of twenty recent doctoral dissertations in the history of higher education. This serial publication will be of interest to historians, sociologists, and of course, educational policymakers.