The Scholarship of Engagement

The goals were rooted in practical reality and aimed toward useful ends. In the 1940s the GI Bill brought eight million veterans back to campus, which sparked in this country a revolution of rising expectations. May I whisper that professors were not at the forefront urging the GI Bill; this initiative came from Congress. Many academics, in fact, questioned the wisdom of inviting GIs to campus; after all, these men hadn't passed the SATs-they'd simply gone off to war, and what did they know except survival? The story gets even grimmer. I read some years ago that the dean of admissions at one of the wellknown institutions in the country opposed the GIs because, he argued, many of them would be married; they would bring baby carriages to campus, and even contaminate the young undergraduates with bad ideas at that pristine institution. I think he knew little about GIs and even less about the undergraduates at his own college. But putting that resistance aside, the point is largely made that the universities joined in an absolutely spectacular experiment, in a cultural commitment to rising expectationsand what was for the GIs a privilege became for their children and grandchildren an absolute right. And there's no turning back. Almost coincidentally, Secretary of State