Book contents
- The Attack on Higher Education
- Reviews
- The Attack on Higher Education
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Preface: The Idea of This Book
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Part I Background
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 The American University to 1968
- Chapter 3 The Retreat from 1968
- Part II Dissolution?
- Epilogue
- Appendix: Ten Steps for Restoring American Higher Education
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 2 - The American University to 1968
from Part I - Background
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2021
- The Attack on Higher Education
- Reviews
- The Attack on Higher Education
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Preface: The Idea of This Book
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Part I Background
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 The American University to 1968
- Chapter 3 The Retreat from 1968
- Part II Dissolution?
- Epilogue
- Appendix: Ten Steps for Restoring American Higher Education
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Chapter 2 will examine the origins and development of higher education in the United States in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from humanist colleges like Harvard, Yale, and William & Mary to the beginnings of the American university system in Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia and others. It will then discuss how Enlightenment traditions of higher education evolved in nineteenth-century Germany. Its basic components were the lecture hall, the advanced seminar, the research paper, and the monograph, all held together by a hierarchical system of professional training, appointment, and promotion. These were bolstered by professional societies with strict membership requirements and benefits, journals, conferences, honors, and their concomitant prestige and authority. By the late nineteenth century this system was being imported into North America. As American life in general became more industrialized and professionalized, this German model made gradual headway, resulting in the American university model of the twentieth century. This valued long apprenticeship, deep research, focused expertise, and the modes of authority that derived from them. This model was enshrined in Vannevar Bush’s 1945 report, Science, the Endless Frontier and in the 1964 report of the Commission on the Humanities.
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- The Attack on Higher EducationThe Dissolution of the American University, pp. 33 - 58Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022