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This book tracks the dramatic outcomes of the federal government's growing involvement in higher education between World War I and the 1970s, and the conservative backlash against that involvement from the 1980s onward. Using cutting-edge analysis, Christopher Loss recovers higher education's central importance to the larger social and political history of the United States in the twentieth century, and chronicles its transformation into a key mediating institution between citizens and the state. Framed around the three major federal higher education policies of the twentieth century--the 1944 GI Bill, the 1958 National Defense Education Act, and the 1965 Higher Education Act--the book charts the federal government's various efforts to deploy education to ready citizens for the national, bureaucratized, and increasingly global world in which they lived. Loss details the myriad ways in which academic leaders and students shaped, and were shaped by, the state's shifting political agenda as it moved from a preoccupation with economic security during the Great Depression, to national security during World War II and the Cold War, to securing the rights of African Americans, women, and other previously marginalized groups during the 1960s and '70s. Along the way, Loss reappraises the origins of higher education's current-day diversity regime, the growth of identity group politics, and the privatization of citizenship at the close of the twentieth century. At a time when people's faith in government and higher education is being sorely tested, this book sheds new light on the close relations between American higher education and politics.

James Q. Wilson (1931–2012) ranks among the most influential political scientists and policy intellectuals of the past fifty years. This new account of Wilson's journey from liberal to conservative highlights his time at Harvard University in the 1960s, during the height of liberal authority and the emergence of the New Left, and draws from archival materials and records at MIT, Harvard, and RAND, and from a range of Wilson's writings on administration, urban affairs, and crime. It situates Wilson in the organizational nexus in which he worked, analyzing his thinking as it shifted from a preoccupation with incentives and running organizations (“organizational maintenance”) to disincentives and punishing people (“order maintenance”). Wilson, the nation's leading institutionalist, formed his conservative ideas in the praxis of university administration—a venue typically ignored by scholars but one that influenced his understanding of organizations and crime.

America's sprawling system of colleges and universities has been built on the ruins of war. After the American Revolution the cash-strapped central government sold land grants to raise revenue and build colleges and schools in newly conquered lands. During the Civil War, the federal government built on this earlier precedent when it passed the 1862 Morrill Land-Grant College Act, which created the nation's system of publicly supported land-grant colleges. And during Reconstruction, the Freedmen's Bureau, operating under the auspices of the War Department, aided former slaves in creating thousands of schools to help protect their hard-fought freedoms. Not only do “wars make states,” as sociologist Charles Tilly claimed, but wars have also shaped the politics of knowledge in the modern university in powerful and lasting ways.

As challenges to graduate education mount, so too have calls for reevaluating the dissertation. This article argues that the dissertation is a critical institution by which knowledge production is disciplined; however, alternative models of credentialing expertise are warranted. We explore the “dissertation dilemma” by explaining that the modern university's legitimacy hinges on the expert authority that the dissertation confers and the social deference that it commands. Next, we discuss shortcomings of the dissertation process, namely that it is supposed to sift out amateurs from experts, which negatively impacts demographically underrepresented doctoral candidates while failing to prevent the overproduction of Ph.D.s. Lastly, we evaluate reform proposals that have emerged as awareness of the challenges with graduate education has grown. We argue that these reform efforts have raised important questions about the university's role in American society that demand serious reflection on the part of stakeholders in and beyond the academy.

This article traces the pluralist politics at the heart of Clark Kerr's book The Uses of the University to the present-day politics of diversity. Pluralism was the dominant theory of American politics at midcentury, and Kerr was among its most admired spokespersons. First as a labor economist and strike negotiator, then as chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, and later as president of the University of California system, Kerr relied on \"pluralistic decision-making\" to harmonize relations among the multiversity's mix of vested interests. Shortly after The Uses of the University was published in 1963, however, student protesters at Berkeley and at other multiversities like it let Kerr know that they had grown tired of the pluralist politics that he championed. Ironically, in their effort to upend the pluralist status quo and to make politics more participatory, campus insurgents sowed the seeds for the growth of a new brand of pluralist politics known as diversity. By uncovering the relationship between pluralism and diversity, this article reveals the enduring—and surprising—political legacy of Kerr's multiversity model 50 years after he unveiled it.

This article traces the pluralist politics at the heart of Clark Kerr's book The Uses of the University to the present-day politics of diversity. Pluralism was the dominant theory of American politics at midcentury, and Kerr was among its most admired spokespersons. First as a labor economist and strike negotiator, then as chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, and later as president of the University of California system, Kerr relied on \"pluralistic decision-making\" to harmonize relations among the multiversity's mix of vested interests. Shortly after The Uses of the University was published in 1963, however, student protesters at Berkeley and at other multiversities like it let Kerr know that they had grown tired of the pluralist politics that he championed. Ironically, in their effort to upend the pluralist status quo and to make politics more participatory, campus insurgents sowed the seeds for the growth of a new brand of pluralist politics known as diversity. By uncovering the relationship between pluralism and diversity, this article reveals the enduring -- and surprising -- political legacy of Kerr's multiversity model 50 years after he unveiled it. Adapted from the source document.

Loss examines the way American higher education contributed to nation building and new conceptions of democratic citizenship during World War II. Arguing that the 1944 G. I. Bill of Rights was far from novel, he explores the army's soldier education programs before the G. I. Bill. Those programs satisfied many soldiers' demands for self-improvement and access to social mobility. He concludes that the postwar expansion of higher education linked citizens' desire for a better life to the state's pursuit of political, economic, and emotionally stability.

During the twentieth century, political leaders and university officials turned to one another with increasing frequency in order to build an expansive national state and educational system. They abandoned their shared tradition of laissez-faire relations and forged a powerful partnership that transformed the country’s plural system of colleges and universities into a repository of expertise, a locus for administrative coordination in the federal government, and a mediator of democratic citizenship. Slowly during the interwar period, then rapidly after World War II, the state and higher education joined forces to fight economic depressions and poverty, to wage world wars hot and