Do Academics Know Their Own History?

This is not higher education’s golden age, but it is certainly the golden age of histories of higher education.

Whether we are speaking of sweeping surveys like Roger L. Geiger’s American Higher Education Since World War II (the sequel to his The History of American Higher Education: Learning and Culture From the Founding to World War II) and John Thelin’s A History of American Higher Education (now in its third edition) or novel interpretations like David Larabee’s Perfect Mess, or more focused studies, like Jonathan Zimmerman’s Amateur Hour and Matthew Johnson’s Undermining Racial Justice, these works reveal an analytical acuity, theoretical sophistication, topical and chronological range and breadth, and depth of research that matches or exceeds the very best studies of the past.

Which presents us with an irony of, shall we say, historic proportions: even as the history of higher education achieves new heights, the academy as a whole is awash in ignorance of its own history.

In the culture wars, history is often deployed as a weapon targeted at one’s adversaries -- resulting in oversimplification and sweeping overstatement. But a more nuanced understanding of history is of enormous value, providing insights that can be acquired in no other way.

When it comes to knowledge about higher education’s history, most academics are aware of a few historical landmarks: Harvard’s founding in 1636; the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890, establishing land-grant colleges; the establishment of the AAUP in 1915; and the 1944 GI Bill of Rights.

But most know remarkably little about key historical themes involving academic freedom, coeducation, racial integration and the development of tenure. Few, I suspect, realize that tenure only became near-universal at four-year institutions in the 1960s.

In 1935, fewer than half of a sample of 78 well-known universities had instituted formal tenure policies, and Rice University only did so in 1962. And few academics today realize that tenure was viewed by administrators largely as a fringe benefit that could strengthen faculty recruitment as well as a mechanism for weeding out unproductive faculty.

Thanks to works like Ellen Schrecker’s No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, faculty recognize that anti-Communist hysteria led Cold War administrators to demand that faculty sign loyalty oaths and fired and blacklisted those who refused.

But far fewer know about the gay purges during the 1940s at the Universities of Texas, Wisconsin and Missouri, resulting in Texas in the dismissal of 10 faculty members and 15 students and the forced resignation of the campus president for supposedly harboring a “nest of perversity.”

So what, then, might the history of American higher education tell us?

1. Today’s flashpoints -- over academic freedom, admissions policies, campus unrest, curricula, diversity and inclusion, pedagogical practice, a practical versus a liberal education, student learning and motivation, and town-gown relations -- have a long history.
2. Many of today’s most highly touted innovations -- including technology-enhanced learning; personalized, adaptive learning; and three-year degrees -- are simply updated versions of ideas promoted in the past.
3. Despite the superficial appearance of continuity -- a facade that colleges and universities have done their best to perpetuate in their architecture, ceremonies, discourse and regalia -- higher education has undergone recurrent shifts in mission, organization and operations order to adapt to altered circumstances.
4. Even though American colleges and universities received inspiration from foreign models, American higher education has, from the outset, been distinctive in many respects, and this distinctiveness -- above all, the quest for resources, students and reputation within a highly competitive marketplace -- helps explain both the system’s strengths and failings.
5. Precedents set in the distant past -- like the four-year degree, the three-credit-hour course and the deep disconnect between high school and college -- continue to resonate in the present.
6. Many of the challenges we face today -- including motivating students and providing for their welfare and well-being -- were familiar issues at American colleges from their inception.
7. Students have driven many of the most important transformations in the history of American higher education, not just the abolition of the policy of in loco parentis and parietal regulations, or the institution of course evaluations, but others, often unintentionally (like the imposition of letter grades) or indirectly (such as the development of electives).
8. Every generation’s reformers believe that they had the solution to higher education’s failings -- only to see their dreams of transformations dashed.

If any single overarching theme can be said to run through the recent histories of higher education, it is the ambiguities of progress.

Superficially, the history of American higher education looks like a textbook example of progress or, as it was put in the 1950s and '60s, modernization. This seemed to be evident in the democratization of access; the diversification of student bodies; the opening of doors to previously underrepresented racial, ethnic, religious and low-income groups; expanding opportunities for women; and the gradual broadening of the curriculum.

According to this Whiggish formulation, elitism and exclusivity gave way to democratic access; a narrow, rigid and dated curriculum to breadth and choice; regimentation, paternalism and expectations of deference to a recognition of student autonomy; and pedagogies emphasizing recitation and rote memorization to discussion, lab work and active learning.

Adding weight to this overly sanguine perspective are quantitative measures that underscore higher education’s success: the ongoing growth in the number of tenured and tenure-track professors and the increase in research expenditures, scholarly publication and research productivity.

But any fair-minded account reveals reverses as well as advances. Alongside the increase in postsecondary degree attainment, the growth in enrollments and endowments, and the remarkable success of colleges and universities in making a degree a prerequisite for a middle-class livelihood, and in extending their values and modes of thought across the culture, there are also well-founded concerns about American higher education’s cost, stratification, uncertain learning and employment outcomes, adjunctification, and, above all, inequities, which relegate far too many talented students from African American, Hispanic and low-income backgrounds to the least selective, most underresourced institutions.

Recent history also highlights the ambiguities of progress. The unhappy fact is that graduation rates at broad-access institutions haven’t budged in recent years, that enrollment of students from low-income and other unrepresented groups has stagnated, that the pipeline from a community college to a bachelor’s degree remains incredibly leaky.

Historic advances often come with a cost, and several examples underscore progress’s ambiguities. For example, the rapid growth of community college opened doors to higher education that had previously been closed, but the rise of the community college was also part of the emergence of a hierarchically differentiated higher education system, which intentionally diverted those deemed less qualified to separate institutions from which only a small minority ever succeed in earning a bachelor’s degree.

Another example: the professionalization of the faculty meant that students nationwide encountered bona fide subject matter experts, but as the professoriate professionalized, the faculty, as a whole, grew more distant and detached from students, with professional staff assuming many of the faculty’s earlier nonacademic functions.

A third example: the long-term decline in the number of the liberal arts college, the historic exemplars of a conception of higher education that emphasizes close faculty-student interaction, intensive mentoring, the development of the whole student and cultivation of well-rounded graduates, means that a spur, inspiration and model of what educational quality looks like is, alas, slowly disappearing.

As an alternate to excessively linear and teleological narratives of progress, we might instead view American higher education’s history through other lenses:

• As a series of distinct, transitional moments when institutions underwent change across multiple dimensions in response to a variety of pressures, including the needs of an evolving economy, drives for professionalism, demands for access, campus unrest and the success of journalists, novelists and Hollywood moviemakers in making college fashionable and prestigious and campus life alluring, but not for academic reasons.
• As a history of contestation and conflict, in which various stakeholders have continuously struggled over the purpose, curriculum, pedagogies, access and affordability of individual institutions and higher education as a whole -- a tussle that persists today over admissions policies, financial aid, requirements, online learning and, above all, how best to realize higher education’s democratic possibilities.
• A history that situates the evolution of higher education within the main currents of American history, including the shifts from an agricultural and mercantile economy to an industrial economy and to a service and knowledge economy, the development of large, complex, systematic bureaucratic organizations and the federal government’s ever-expanding reach.

Higher education is many things: a sorting mechanism; a contributor to human capital formation; a major source of basic and applied research; a driver of local and regional economic growth; a provider of employment, entertainment, health care and cultural enrichment; and, yes, an educational institution.

But we mustn’t forget higher ed’s primary purpose: human development (or what our predecessors called character formation). For the overwhelming majority of undergraduates, and not just those at residential campuses, college is, first and foremost, a coming-of-age experience and a rite of passage. It provides a controlled environment in which most young people separate from the natal home, experiment with more mature and intimate relationships, begin to define their adult identity, and, parents hope, embark on a vocational path.

At their best, colleges and universities do much more than build skills and knowledge; indeed, their primary value lies in exposing undergraduates to diversity, the rich realms of culture and the intellectual life. It also does something that some incorrectly confuse with political indoctrination: it gives students a vocabulary and intellectual framework with which to make sense of the world.

Concepts like intersectionality, implicit bias and stereotype threat are, in a sense, the successors to the ideas that earlier generations of college students drew from Freud or the Frankfurt School. Foucault is, in a sense, the successor to Herbert Marcuse, Edgar Z. Friedenberg, Michael Harrington and Theodore Roszak, whose impact on the baby boom generation was immense.

Sadly, knowledge of the past is itself becoming history.

Historical illiteracy is not a victimless crime. It has real-world consequences.

Scholars need to know why past efforts to technologize or personalize higher education generally failed; why, roughly every 20 years, activists have had to echo their predecessors’ calls for equity and inclusion; and why seemingly commonsensical innovations, like John Dewey’s proposals for more hands-on, authentic, civically engaged learning, have yet to be realized.

Knowing American higher education’s history can not only keep us from repeating past mistakes, it can lay bare the processes that transform the academy and reveal the deeply embedded assumptions that inhibit many well-intentioned reforms. Even more importantly, this history can remind us of the principles and values we need to sustain.

Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.