For the Common Good

A New History of Higher Education in America

Charles Dorn

• Editore: Cornell University Press
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501712609
• Argomento: Education
• Categoria: History of Education

Are colleges and universities in a period of unprecedented disruption? Is a bachelor's degree still worth the investment? Are the humanities coming to an end? What, exactly, is higher education good for?

In For the Common Good, Charles Dorn challenges the rhetoric of America's so-called crisis in higher education by investigating two centuries of college and university history. From the community college to the elite research university—in states from California to Maine—Dorn engages a fundamental question confronted by higher education institutions ever since the nation's founding: Do colleges and universities contribute to the common good?

Tracking changes in the prevailing social ethos between the late eighteenth and early twenty-first centuries, Dorn illustrates the ways in which civic-mindedness, practicality, commercialism, and affluence influenced higher education's dedication to the public good. Each ethos, long a part of American history and tradition, came to predominate over the others during one of the four chronological periods examined in the book, informing the character of institutional debates and telling the definitive story of its time. For the Common Good demonstrates how two hundred years of political, economic, and social change prompted transformation among colleges and universities—including the establishment of entirely new kinds of institutions—and refashioned higher education in the United States over time in essential and often vibrant ways.

Notes

PROLOGUE

1. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Aspiring Adults Adrift: Tentative Transitions of College Graduates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

2. Kevin Carey, The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere (New York: Riverhead Books, 2015).

3. “Bill to Establish a College at Columbia,” November 23, 1801, Journals of the House of Representatives, Archives of the Historical Commission of South Carolina. Reproduced in Edgar W. Knight, ed. A Documentary History of Education in the South before 1860, vol. 3 of 5 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952), 44–46.

4. “The Inaugural Address, Delivered in Brunswick, September 2, 1802, by the Rev. Joseph McKeen, A.M. & A.S.S.,” Box 1, Folder “Presidential Inauguration 1802,” Catalogue 1.2.1, Department of Special Collections, Bowdoin College Archives.

5. “Proposals for Establishing an Academy at George-town, Patowmack-River, Maryland,” Box 19, Folder 6, Georgetown College Varia (1791–1844) [56 Z1–5], Archives, Maryland Province, Society of Jesus, Special Collections Research Center, Georgetown University Library, Washington, DC.

6. See, for instance, Robert Church, “Conversation: Renegotiating the Historical Narrative: The Case of American Higher Education,” History of Education Quarterly 44, no. 4 (2004): 585–89.

7. Regarding the notion of a “social ethos,” I borrow from political scientist and philosopher Joshua Cohen, who writes that a social ethos is composed of “socially widespread preferences and attitudes about the kinds of rewards it is acceptable to insist on, and associated with those preferences and attitudes, a sense about the ways of life that are attractive, exciting, good, worthy of pursuit.” Joshua Cohen, “Taking People as They Are?,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 30, no. 4 (2002): 365.

8. See, for instance, Robert E. Shalhope, “Republicanism and Early American Historiography,” The William and Mary Quarterly 39, no. 2 (1982): 334–56.

9. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 53–65.

10. Barry Alan Shain, The Myth of American Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3, 47.

11. Kevin Carey, “Meet the Man Who Wrote the Greatest Book about American Higher Ed,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 29, 2015.

12. Laurence R. Veysey, The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965).

13. Julie A. Reuben, “Writing When Everything Has Been Said: The History of American Higher Education following Laurence Veysey’s Classic,” History of Education Quarterly 45, no. 3 (2005): 413.

14. Julie A. Reuben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 12.

15. See, for instance, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, “In the Wake of Laurence Veysey: Re-Examining the Liberal Arts College,” History of Education Quarterly 45, no. 3 (2005): 420–26; Hugh Hawkins, “The Making of the Liberal Arts College Identity,” Daedalus 128, no. 1 (1999): 1–25; W. Bruce Leslie, Gentlemen and Scholars: College and Community in the “Age of the University,” 1865–1917 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992); James Axtell, “The Death of the Liberal Arts College,” History of Education Quarterly 11, no. 4 (1971): 339–52.

16. Thomas D. Snyder, ed. 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait (Washington, DC: US Department of Education National Center for Education Statistics, 1993): Table 24, 77.

17. Steven Brint and Jerome Karabel, The Diverted Dream: Community Colleges and the Promise of Educational Opportunity in America, 1900–1985 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989): 83–84, 101.

18. Veysey, Emergence, 338.

19. Henry M. Levin, “Educating for a Commonwealth,” Educational Researcher 30, no. 6 (2001): 30.

20. Ibid.

21. Jack C. Lane, “Yale Report of 1828 and Liberal Education: A Neorepublican Manifesto,” History of Education Quarterly 27, no. 3 (1987): 329–30.

22. Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 5.

23. Stanford University: The Founding Grant with Amendments, Legislation and Court Decrees, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1971), 1.

24. John Kenneth Galbraith, “The Affluent Society,” in John Kenneth Galbraith: The Affluent Society and Other Writings, 1952–1967, ed. James K. Galbraith (New York: Library of America, 2010), 472.

25. See, for instance, Arthur M. Cohen, The Shaping of American Higher Education: Emergence and Growth of the Contemporary System (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998), 175; Marvin Lazerson, “The Disappointments of Success: Higher Education after World War II,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 559 (1998): 68.

26. Russell M. Cooper and Margaret B. Fisher, The Vision of a Contemporary University: A Case Study of Expansion and Development in American Higher Education, 1950–1975 (Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1982), 69; Mark I. Greenberg, Andrew T. Huse, and Marilyn Keltz Stephens, University of South Florida: The First Fifty Years, 1956–2006 (Tampa: University of South Florida, 2006), 79.

27. Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A History (New York: Knopf, 1962), 356.

1. “LITERARY INSTITUTIONS ARE FOUNDED AND ENDOWED FOR THE COMMON GOOD”

1. On the history of Bowdoin College, see Nehemiah Cleav...