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Sites, Students, Scholarship, and Structures: The Historiography of American Higher Education in the Post-Revisionist Era

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Rethinking the History of American Education

Abstract

As in the larger field of history of education, revisionism in the 1970s and into the early 1980s profoundly affected the historiography of higher education. The focus of higher education revisionist critique was traditional accounts of nineteenth-century colleges and universities, which Marilyn Tobias argued adhered to an “evolutionary, linear schema” and presented:

merely a descriptive chronicle of official actions, usually from the perspective of the college president. These studies suffer from a paucity of analysis. Their analysis is usually gratuitous as the process of change is neglected, and the relationship between the college and the larger community is ignored … Moreover, our knowledge and understanding of higher learning in nineteenth-century America have too frequently been the result of those who write from the perspective of the ascendancy of the university. These retrospective studies view change as inevitable, assume a uniform intellectual and social matrix, and see university “reformers” as the sole agents of change. Within the darkness-to-light framework of this historical type, nineteenth-century colleges have been used as foils to dramatize the directions of the new universities or have been dismissed as subjects for serious inquiry.

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Notes

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Ogren, C.A. (2008). Sites, Students, Scholarship, and Structures: The Historiography of American Higher Education in the Post-Revisionist Era. In: Reese, W.J., Rury, J.L. (eds) Rethinking the History of American Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230610460_8

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