Abstract
We turn now to two connected developments in the first half of the twentieth century that profoundly affected most aspects of public life in the United States: the movement of universities from a peripheral to a central place in the structure of public discourse, and the process by which higher education (especially public higher education) worked to democratize the public sphere. First, some statistics:
In 1882, 26 percent of the students enrolled in American colleges and universities attended public institutions. In 1900, the percentage was 38; in 1930, 48; in 1960, 59; and in 1970, after a spectacular increase in overall college enrollment, it stood at 75: three out of four students.1 Between about 1900 and the mid-1960s, total enrollment in American colleges and universities rose from 237,000 to 5.5 million—a factor of 23 times.2 During the same period, the total population of the United States increased by a factor of two and a half times. Thus, the proportion of the total population attending college by the mid-1960s was nearly ten times larger than it had been at the beginning of the century. The vast majority of the increase in that proportion was due to public institutions of higher education. Between the 1960s and the 1990s, college and university enrollments increased at an even greater rate than ever before. By 1991, total enrollment was estimated at 14.2 million students, of whom just under 80 percent were in public institutions.3 In the course of the twentieth century, the United States became a country in which, by any meaningful standard of comparison, a huge proportion of the population participated or had participated in higher education—vastly higher than in any other country in the world.4 Since that time, the growth of enrollment as against population has slowed, but numbers have increased (although irregularly), especially at the graduate level. The percentage of students in public institutions fell slightly, but only to about 75 percent of the total in the mid-2000s.5 What has fallen drastically has been state financial support for higher education. What has risen most impressively has been the cost of higher education to individual Americans.
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Notes
Seymour E. Harris, A Statistical Portrait of Higher Education (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), p. 945.
Christopher J. Lucas, American Higher Education: A History (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1994), p. 230.
In 1902, there were 530 colleges and universities in the United States, most of them private. (Harris, Statistical Portrait, p. 924.) Fewer than 40 percent of students attended public institutions. In 2004, there were about 4,200 colleges and universities–630 of them public four-year and graduate institutions and around 1,100 of them public two-year institutions. The public four-year and graduate institutions enrolled 6.2 million students; their private counterparts enrolled 3.2 million. The public two-year colleges enrolled about 6 million students; private two-year enrollments were small. Peter D. Eckel and Jacqueline E. Krier, An Overview of Higher Education in the United States: Diversity, Access, and the Role of the Marketplace (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 2004), pp. 1–2.
This process was particularly notable in medical education. See W. F. Bynum, “Sir George Newman and the American Way,” in Vivian Nutton and Roy Porter, eds., History of Medical Education in Britain (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1995), pp. 37–68,
William H. Schneider, ed., Rockefeller Philanthropy and Modern Biomedicine: International Initiatives from World War I to the Cold War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002).
Thomas Neville Bonner, Iconoclast: Abraham Flexner and a Life in Learning (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), pp. 69–90;
Barbara Barzansky and Norman Gevitz, eds., Beyond Flexner: Medical Education in the Twentieth Century (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1992).
See Mary Roth Walsh, Doctors Wanted: No Women Need Apply (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).
Robert Stevens, Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983).
See Peter Novick, That Noble Dream. The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Daniel Coit Gilman, University Problems in the United States (New York: Garrett Press, 1969; reprint of 1898 edition), pp. 153–62;
Daniel Coit Gilman, University Problems in the United States (New York: Garrett Press, 1969; reprint of 1898 edition), pp. 153–62; Mark R. Nemec, Ivory Towers and Nationalist Minds: Universities, Leadership, and the Development of the American State (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), pp. 77–108.
Schneider, ed., Rockefeller Philanthropy; E. Richard Brown, Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979);
Schneider, ed., Rockefeller Philanthropy; E. Richard Brown, Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Dwight Macdonald, The Ford Foundation: The Men and the Millions (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1989; orig. ed. 1956).
See Richard E. Abel and Lyman W. Newlin, eds., Scholarly Publishing: Books, Journals, Publishers and Libraries in the Twentieth Century (New York: Wiley, 2002).
A recent case was the dismissal of Ward Churchill from a tenured position at the University of Colorado—technically because of scholarly misconduct but clearly in response to public outcry against his statements about the events of September 11, 2001. See John Gravois, “Colo. Regents Vote to Fire Ward Churchill,” Chronicle of Higher Education 53, 48 (August 3, 2007): 1.
This is a central part of the argument for tenure given by James O. Freedman. I do not find it particularly compelling, and I suspect that much of the public at large would also find it less than convincing. See James O. Freedman, Liberal Education and the Public Interest (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003), pp. 40–43.
See Thomas Bender, New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City, from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time (New York: Knopf, 1987), pp. 176–91.
See, for example, Edwin L. Godkin, Unforeseen Tendencies of Democracy (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1971; reprint of 1898 edition).
On American Populism, see Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
This point is important to Jürgen Habermas’s account of what happened to the public sphere in the nineteenth century: Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), pp. 159–222.
William M. Armstrong, Godkin and Foreign Policy 1865–1900 (New York: Bookman Associates, 1957), p. 12.
Thomas Woody, History of Women’s Education in the United States (Lancaster, PA: Science Press, 1929), pp. 140–50.
Daryl G. Smith, “Women’s Colleges and Coed Colleges: Is There a Difference for Women?” Journal of Higher Education 61 (1990): 181–95.
See Anthony Giddens, The Third Way. The Renewal of Social Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998). Ultimately, as Giddens points out, social reality is composed of individuals and individual actions, but individuals must be placed in groups to be understood as social actors, and they must place themselves in groups in order to act.
Jean H. Baker, Sisters: The Lives of America’s Suffragists (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005);
Kathleen Barry, Susan B. Anthony: A Biography of a Singular Feminist (New York: New York University Press, 1988);
Harriet Sigerman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: The Right is Ours (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
For one who sought a wider audience through more sensational publicity, see Amanda Frisken, Victoria Woodhull’s Sexual Revolution: Political Theater and the Popular Press in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
Elizabeth Silverthorne, Sarah Orne Jewett: A Writer’s Life (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1993);
Josephine Donovan, Sarah Orne Jewett, rev. ed. (Christchurch, NZ: Cybereditions, 2001).
One of her novels, for example, was A Country Doctor (1884). The “country doctor” in question was a woman, and the book sympathetically portrayed the difficulties faced by women professionals. Sarah Orne Jewett, A Country Doctor (New York: Bantam, 1999).
Shari Benstock, No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton (New York: Scribner’s, 1994), pp. 3–48.
Louise W. Knight, Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 80–108.
Paula J. Giddings, Ida: A Sword among Lions. Ida B. Wells and the Campaign against Lynching (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), pp. 15–39.
James Woodress, Willa Cather: A Literary Life (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), pp. 64–88.
See Jan Whitt, Women in American Journalism: A New History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), for an overview of the subject with regard to journalists. The educational backgrounds of women journalists appear to have been quite varied, although as the twentieth century went on, college became standard.
Or perhaps more accurately, what Christopher Newfield calls the “mass middle class” and that he describes as being primarily a product of the public universities. Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-year Assault on the Middle Class (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 19–30.
David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. DuBois: Biography of a Race 1868–1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), pp. 261–73.
Christopher J. Lucas, American Higher Education: A History (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1994), pp. 207–8.
Raymond Arsenault, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 533–87. Arsenault did not calculate the numbers of university students or classify their schools. I arrived at those figures by going through all of the background material assembled by Arsenault in the appendix to his book.
David Halberstam, The Children (New York: Fawcett, 1998), pp. 63–66, 73–76, 150–53, 156–58.
Vanessa Murphree, The Selling of Civil Rights: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Use of Public Relations (New York: Routledge, 2006).
Joel M. Roitman, The Immigrants, the Progressives, and the Schools: Americanization and the Impact of the New Immigration upon Public Education in the United States (Stark, KS: De Young Press, 1996).
Richard A. Hogarty, Aundrea E. Kelley, and Robert C. Wood, Turnabout Time: Public Higher Education in the Commonwealth (Boston: McCormack Institute, University of Massachusetts Boston, 1995).
Sydney C. Van Nort, The City College of New York (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2007).
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© 2010 Woodruff D. Smith
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Smith, W.D. (2010). Public Universities and the Democratization of the Core Public Sphere. In: Public Universities and the Public Sphere. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230114708_6
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