Higher Education and the Public Good

Higher Education and the Public Good Roger L. Geiger (bio) Charles Dorn. For the Common Good: A New History of Higher Education in America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017. x + 308 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00. Henry Heller. The Capitalist University: The Transformation of Higher Education in the United States since 1945. London: Pluto Press, 2016. xv + 252 pp. Notes, bibliography and index. $39.00. David F. Labaree. A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. 222 pp. Notes, References, and Index. $25.00. The history of higher education is at best a small tributary of American history, and one with a disjointed relation to the mainstream. A few eminent American historians have, throughout their careers, mined material directly or indirectly involving colleges, universities, and their denizens—particularly David Hollinger, James Turner and James Axtell. The field has also benefited from the work of distinguished scholars from related fields who have undertaken thoroughly researched forays into important topics, such as Jerome Karabel's, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (2005), John Boyer's, The University of Chicago: A History (2015), and Nancy Weiss Malkiel's, "Keep the Damned Women Out": The Struggle for Coeducation (2016). However, the subfield is now largely sustained by scholars in colleges of education whose empirical contributions tend to be focused on explicating developments related to the growth and elaboration of institutions and their students. What has been largely lacking since Richard Hofstadter have been interpretive studies that relate developments in higher education to major themes of American history, and vice-versa. The absence of higher education in major narrative histories has been particularly unfortunate. American historians, when they have acknowledged higher education, have relied on interpretations formulated in Hofstadter's day, often based on even earlier empirical studies. Largely ignored have been monographic studies from the last four decades that have substantially reshaped understanding of such [End Page 97] key topics as the nineteenth-century colleges, the land-grant movement, and student cultures. This omission is understandable, since for long this specialized literature has not been synthesized into interpretations of the evolution of higher education and its relation to American society. The three books under review here each purport to provide an interpretive overview of some or most of higher education's development. Charles Dorn endeavors to provide a "comprehensive" analysis of "changes in higher education's orientation toward the nation's prevailing social ethos," specifically by examining the founding years of eleven diverse colleges and universities (pp. 5–6). David Labaree, an educational sociologist, takes an explicitly presentist approach to explain the "unlikely ascendancy of American higher education." He deliberately excludes "powerful contextual factors"—the staple of historians—in order to focus on "structural elements within the system of American higher education itself" (p. 4). In contrast, Henry Heller interprets the postwar ascendancy of American universities from an unadulterated Marxist perspective, in which higher education is conditioned by capitalism and the interests of "the American ruling class" (p. 17). The humanities and social sciences are the particular focus of the volume, especially as they have incorporated or opposed Marxism. Dorn's study takes its title and unifying theme from the question: "How does higher education contribute to the common good" (p. 2)? The author defines four eras in which the common good has been defined in relation to a different social "ethos": civic-mindedness, practicality, commercialism, and affluence. This is a decidedly simplistic framework, which is not defined or analyzed, but rather illustrated with descriptive material from the eleven case studies. In the early national period, civic-mindedness abounded in the early histories of Bowdoin, South Carolina, and Georgetown colleges. Founders and leaders of these institutions consistently enjoined students to employ their learning to further the common good. The inclusion of South Carolina is both appropriate and ironic. The most "civic"—or political—of antebellum colleges, South Carolina faculty and graduates took the common good to mean strenuously defending states' rights and slavery, the interests of the state's dominant planter class. The ethos of practicality is consigned to a truncated antebellum and Civil War era...