Politics, Intellect, and the American University, 1945-1995 (Bender)

The American research university simultaneously adapted and actively furthered a dramatic expansion and significant diversification of its student body and faculty while its research and graduate training capacity was greatly strengthened. It was a remarkable tranformation, with both quantity and quality rising. (1)

There was a pattern of leveling up: by 1970 or so, research and training no longer dominated a select few institutions--Chicago and the Ivies. Distinction was as likely to be found in major public institutions (Berkeley, Ann Arbor, Madison) as private ones, though recent developments, since about 1985, threaten to reestablish this divide as major private institutions have gained resources relative to public ones. All areas of the country became home to major research institutions, and the number of institutions with stature as major research and graduate training campuses increased from about twenty to more than 125 in the half century. (1-2)

Moreover, the style of academic life had begun to change since the war. A genteel profession became more diverse and worldly. Postwar academics were less gentlemanly and more professionally ambitious, fired by aspirations to upward mobility. (4)

The faculty of elite institutions provided the vision for the Golden Age of the postwar university, and its priorities reflected their interests. Between 1940 and 1990, federal funds for higher education increased by a factor of twenty-five, enrollment by ten, and average teaching loads were reduced by half. (5)

The proper work of academics became disciplinary development and the training of students for the discipline. (7)

The postwar years were marked by an awareness of expanding resources and a level of abundance that would permit massive investment in the universities, especially the biggest and best ones. (8)

But it was not only applied knowledge nor international studies nor politically useful knowledge that was supported. Theoretical work in both the natural and social sciences was nourished, as was humanistic scholarship. (8)

But enrollment was driven by other forces as well: a new awareness of the value of college degrees and the prosperity to sustain the ambitions of an expanding middle class. The rate of the rise in college enrollment kept accelerating. Between 1960 and 1980 the number of college students tripled, the largest percentage increase since the period from 1875 to 1895, the first era of massive educational reform. (10

The growth of federal support, beginning with the establishment of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1950, led to the elevation of peer review to a sacred level. (13)

The unintended but distinct long-term effect of this reorientation of research authorized disciplinary (even sub disciplinary) autonomy and a certain distancing of academic work from society at large. By the 1990s this structure of self-governance by peers would be characterized in important sectors of the larger public as elitist and irresponsible, and it became the focus of attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts and, to a lesser extent, the National Endowment for the Humanities. (13)