Roger L. Geiger. The History of American Higher Education: Learning and Culture from the Founding to World War II. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. 584 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-691-14939-4.
Reviewed by Steven Diner
Published on H-Socialisms (January, 2015)
Commissioned by Gary Roth (Rutgers University - Newark)
A Historical Survey of American Higher Education
Writing a comprehensive history of American higher education from the earliest colonial colleges to World War II is a massive and challenging undertaking. Roger L. Geiger, one of the leading scholars of the subject, has done an impressive job. He has authored a lengthy, highly detailed, and very thoughtful chronological history highlighting change and continuity in American colleges, universities, and other higher education institutions.
The first two chapters describe the evolution of colleges in the colonial era, from 1636 to 1740 and from 1740 to 1780. The third chapter looks at colleges during the Revolution and immediately thereafter. Then three chapters examine two decades each of antebellum higher education. The next three chapters consider the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, with one chapter devoted to land grant colleges, another to the development of research universities, and a third to the “collegiate revolution” transforming undergraduate college life. Two chapters on World War I and the interwar years discuss the development of mass higher education and the role of philanthropic foundations in standardizing it. The concluding chapter shows how the development of American higher education by 1940 set the stage for its massive growth in size and importance from the end of World War II to the present.
Geiger states in his introduction that his book is about “how, why, and where Americans went to college over the course of three centuries, and particularly about the institutions they attended to realize their aspirations” (p. ix). His overall argument is that colleges sought to develop culture in their students, played a key role in career development, and pursued the expansion of knowledge. The pursuit of these goals, he explains, significantly influenced American society. A great deal of the narrative is about specific institutions and how they changed over time, and about regional differences. These include not only what today we would consider colleges or universities, but also various kinds of vocational schools, often proprietary, teaching medicine, law, engineering, and other occupations; normal schools for training teachers; and institutions that provided secondary schooling and some postsecondary courses as well. He also looks at the rise of disciplinary and professional associations, accrediting bodies, the National Research Council, and the College Entrance Examination Board, among others.
Geiger, himself the author of numerous books and articles on American higher education, relies heavily on the massive historical literature in this field. Given his focus on specific institutions, he makes heavy use of institutional histories and biographies of key actors who shaped or reshaped some of the colleges he highlights. He also uses primary sources, particularly statements by leaders articulating their goals and vision for their institutions or for higher education in general.
Notwithstanding his meticulous attention to the differences among various types of institutions, Geiger concludes that by 1940, the United States had developed a unique higher education system. In other countries, he says, government largely determined the status of institutions and therefore the nature of the system. “In the main,” he argues, “the American system of higher education was a fluid free market with multiple actors” which “achieved order, unity, and growth amidst a profusion of distinctive institutions” (pp. 537-538).
In a broad survey like this, inevitably readers can criticize the author for inadequate discussion of some subjects. Geiger devotes most of his narrative to elite and private institutions and a few of the most prominent state universities. He briefly discusses municipal universities in the chapter on mass higher education, with particular focus on City College of New York. In that chapter, he also considers the rise of junior colleges and Catholic universities. These institutions generally enrolled students of lower socioeconomic class than residential campuses, and immigrants and their children constituted a significant portion of enrollment in these commuter institutions. However, Geiger devotes relatively limited attention to the experience of commuter students. Given the growing focus of higher educators on the importance of campus community in preparing college students for civic leadership, examining the daily activities of commuter students could provide an important contrast to the residential institutions Geiger describes at length. So would a discussion of the way faculty and higher education leaders viewed commuter students, and how they tried to address the absence of campus community and residential life through programs on their campuses.
No history can consider everything. Geiger’s History of American Higher Education is an excellent survey of this complex topic. It is a very valuable addition to the historical literature on American higher education.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-socialisms.
Citation:
Steven Diner. Review of Geiger, Roger L., The History of American Higher Education: Learning and Culture from the Founding to World War II.
H-Socialisms, H-Net Reviews.
January, 2015.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=42729
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. |