American Higher Education Transformed, 1940-2005: Documenting the National Discourse

This long-awaited sequel to Richard Hofstadter and Wilson Smith's classic anthology American Higher Education: A Documentary History presents one hundred and seventy-two key edited documents that record the transformation of higher education over the past sixty years.

The volume includes such seminal documents as Vannevar Bush's 1945 report to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Science, the Endless Frontier; the U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Brown v. Board of Education and S weezy v. New Hampshire; and Adrienne Rich's challenging essay "Taking Women Students Seriously." The wide variety of readings underscores responses of higher education to a memorable, often tumultuous, half century. Colleges and universities faced a transformation of their educational goals, institutional structures and curricula, and admission policies; the ethnic and economic composition of student bodies; an expanding social and gender membership in the professoriate; their growing allegiance to and dependence on federal and foundation financial aids; and even the definitions and defenses of academic freedom.

Wilson Smith and Thomas Bender have assembled an essential reference for policymakers, administrators, and all those interested in the history and sociology of higher education.

This long-awaited sequel to Richard Hofstadter and Wilson Smith's classic anthology American Higher Education: A Documentary History presents one hundred and seventy-two key edited documents that record the transformation of higher education over the past sixty years.

The volume includes such seminal documents as Vannevar Bush's 1945 report to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Science, the Endless Frontier; the U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Brown v. Board of Education and Sweezy v. New Hampshire; and Adrienne Rich's challenging essay "Taking Women Students Seriously." The wide variety of readings underscores responses of higher education to a memorable, often tumultuous, half century. Colleges and universities faced a transformation of their educational goals, institutional structures and curricula, and admission policies; the ethnic and economic composition of student bodies; an expanding social and gender membership in the professoriate; their growing allegiance to and dependence on federal and foundation financial aids; and even the definitions and defenses of academic freedom.

Wilson Smith and Thomas Bender have assembled an essential reference for policymakers, administrators, and all those interested in the history and sociology of higher education.

Wilson Smith is professor emeritus of history at the University of California, Davis. Thomas Bender is University Professor of the Humanities and a professor of history at New York University. He is the author of Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century America, winner of the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize of the Organization of American Historians; New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time; Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States; and Community and Social Change in America; all published by Johns Hopkins.