April 10, 2008
Interview with Thomas Bender about American Higher Education Transformed
Inside Higher Ed publishes a brief interview with the historian Thomas Bender, whose essay collection Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals In the United States (Johns Hopkins, 1992) impressed me greatly when I first read it several months ago. Now he has edited, with Wilson Smith, a collection of documents relating to American higher education (one of his academic specialties). The interview's introduction:
The history of American higher education since 1940 is full of dramatic changes — the growth of the modern scientific enterprise, desegregation, the impact of the GI bill, the campus unrest of the 60s, and so forth. Wilson Smith and Thomas Bender set out to tell that story with documents — from both establishment figures and their critics — in American Higher Education Transformed, 1940-2005, just published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. The book is a sequel to earlier work by Smith and Richard Hofstadter examining earlier periods in the history of American higher education. The new volume includes the Supreme Court decisions that upheld affirmative action and that dealt blows to faculty and graduate student unions; essays by Adrienne Rich and Lani Guinier; the Port Huron Statement; Allan Bloom and his critics; and the presidential report that led to the growth of community colleges.
And one of the questions:
Q: How did the tone of documents change during the period you studied?
A: This is an interesting question. I would say that there was a sense of anticipation at the beginning, looking forward to new challenges related to the position of the U.S. after the war. Their sense was that higher education would (and should) be moving to the center of American society. Hence it must be modernized, democratized, and expanded to meet that challenge. This is clear in both the curricular documents (“The Red Book”) and in the President’s Commission on Higher Education, which was concerned about exclusion based on race and class, or Vannevar Bush’s vision for science. Midway the complexity and tensions, contests and constraints produced a very different tone. There is little self-confidence toward the end of the story, the result of a sense of being displaced from the center.
(Link via Cliopatria)