Reviews in American History

"In our present age of enormous emphasis on skill," historian Laurence Veysey noted in his still-celebrated Emergence of the American University (1965), "the university may soon become as characteristic an institution as the church was three hundred years ago." His prediction was well timed. In the wake of the Second World War, there was a rapid expansion of campuses across the country, Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the landmark 1965 Higher Education Act into law in November that same year, Federal spending jumped from $1.4 to $3.7 billion between 1963 and 1966, and University of California (UC) President Clark Kerr had already built a national reputation proclaiming there to be many uses for modern American "multiversities," like those atop the Golden State's three-tiered system of public higher education.¹

Decades after Governor Ronald Reagan infamously pushed UC Regents to fire Kerr in 1967, historians and journalists have become far more attuned to the many ways campuses have been interwoven into modern American life. There have, of course, been piles of books written about the academy in general, about specific campuses, and about important educational policies, like the 1958 National Defense Education Act.² University presses have published official histories, which have included both detailed accounts of campus [End Page 324] growth³ and others designed to decorate coffee tables.⁴ Leading academics and university presidents, like Berkeley's Robert Oppenheimer and University of Chicago's Robert Hutchins, have also been the subject of major biographies written by historians and journalists alike.⁵ Students have been the subject of many pioneering histories of McCarthyism and the American Left as well as of the Civil Rights struggles that forced campuses finally to admit co-eds and students of color.⁶ "Prolific" also best describes the work of emeritus Pennsylvania State University historian Roger Geiger, whose tomes became far less celebratory of American higher education's meteoric twentieth-century growth as campuses increasingly sought to profit off of patents at the turn of the millennium.⁷

Critical assessments of the Ivory Tower have become far more common in recent decades. There were, of course, historians even better known than Veysey for highlighting the gilded nature of the academy's storied growth, including Merle Curti, Roderick Nash, Daniel Noble, and David Levine. Reevaluating the academy's past took on a new urgency at the millennium's turn.⁸ There was growing concern, even before the Great Recession, about government disinvestment in higher education, which made campuses, including state schools, more dependent on private donations and student fees. A lot of that work decrying the neoliberalization of campuses looked back on the mid-1960s, when Veysey and Kerr published their foundational works, as a golden age when tuition was much cheaper and more faculty had tenure.⁹ Such celebratory accounts were at odds with how campuses were portrayed in a lot of the post-1990s reassessments of recent American history. Historians noted that universities played a part in increasing inner-city poverty in African American neighborhoods as well as in the growth of research parks in wealthy white suburbs, which hinted at how important campuses had become even before Veysey's and Kerr's bold mid-1960s prognostications.¹⁰

More recent scholarship highlights that campuses' longstanding power can no longer be ignored. A lot of this post-2010 work has coincided with stepped-up efforts to unionize the students, instructors, and staff laboring to keep colleges running.¹¹ This research has built on...