¹ This work focuses on community colleges as a public two-year institution, and offers no examination of the private junior college. For an intriguing look at those institutions, see Townsend, Barbara (ed.), Community Colleges for Women and Minorities: Enabling Access to the Baccalaureate (New York: Garland Press, 1999). This essay uses the terms community college, junior college, and two-year college interchangeably. While this is generally inappropriate without historical specificity in each use of each term, it is seemingly appropriate for the purpose of a historiographical rather than historical examination.Google Scholar

² See Pedersen, Robert T. “Value Conflict on Community College Campus: An Examination of Its Historical Origins,“ Managing Community and Junior Colleges: Perspectives for the Next Century, ed. by Hoffman, Allan M. and Julius, Daniel J. (Washington, D.C.: College and University Personnel Association, 1993), and Pedersen, Robert “The St. Louis Conference: The Junior College Movement Reborn,” Community College Journal 65 (5) April-May 1995: 26–30; Katsinas, Steven G. “George C. Wallace and the Founding of Alabama's Public Two-Year Colleges,” Journal of Higher Education 65 (4) July/August 1994: 447–472; and Frye, John H. The Vision of the Public Junior College, 1900–1940: Professional Goals and Popular Aspirations (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1992). At times, Frye's historical treatment is awkward. See, for example, his arguments that college professors “passed” ministers in occupational status in the early 1900s because by that time there were more professors than ministers, p. 21. See Gallagher, Edward A. “The California Teachers Association: An Interest Group as Progressive Reformer,” Michigan Academician 29 (1997): 51–68; Gallagher, Edward A. “Revisionist Nonsense and the Junior College: Early California Development,” Michigan Academician 26 (1995): 215–228; Gallagher, Edward A. “Jordan and Lange: The California Junior College's Role as Protector of Teaching,” Michigan Academician 27 [vol. appears out of sequence] (1994): 1–12; Gallagher, Edward A. “Alexis Lange and the Origin of the Occupational Education Function in California Junior Colleges,” Michigan Academician 22 (1990): 241–257; Gallagher, Edward A. “Alexis Lange, Progressivism and Junior College Functions,” Michigan Academician 7 (1974): 111–122; Gallagher, Edward A. “A Potent Bacillus at Ann Arbor: Origin of the Junior College Idea,” Michigan Academician 6 (1974): 435–444. Other scholars have examined community colleges and raised historical questions; the search for this essay focused on those using some form of historical analysis to examine community colleges.Google Scholar

³ Veysey, Taurence, The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965).Google Scholar

⁴ Brint, Stephen and Karabel, Jerome, The Diverted Dream: Community Colleges and the Promise of Educational Opportunity in America, 1900–1985 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Brint and Karabel's pedigrees are solidly in the field of sociology, or more specifically, the sociology of education. Nevertheless, they list an impressive array of historians of education in their bibliography, including Brubacher, John and Rudy, Willis Cremin, Lawrence Kaestle, Carl and Vinovskis, Maris Lagemann, Ellen Ravitch, Diane Rudolph, Frederick Veysey, Lawrence Wechsler, Harold and Wiebe, Robert. As my arguments will evidence later in the essay, I am concerned that a sociological conception of history takes precedence for Brint and Karabel. Another possible work for this examination is Dougherty, Kevin J. The Contradictory College: The Conflicting Origins, Impacts, and Futures of the Community College (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). Dougherty accepts, however, the point of view of Brint and Karabel and the opposing positions that argue for the community college as an institution of opportunity, indicating that the origins question is whether the community college is a product of elite organizations (universities and businesses) or student and parent demand, p. 7. Furthermore, his examination of the origins of the community college focuses heavily on the 1960s and 1970s, pp. 119–188. Hence Brint and Karabel's attempt to cover the entire history of two-year colleges offers a better source of comparison and contrast for this essay.Google Scholar

⁵ Veysey, , The Emergence of the American University, p. 338, note 237.Google Scholar

⁶ In addition to Veysey, see also Rudolph, Frederick, The American College and University: A History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), p. 463. Brubacher, John S. and Rudy, Willis offer a more extensive treatment of the junior college, suggesting that it appeared to be an appropriate mechanism for handling the large influx of students in the 1900s; see Higher Education in Transition: An American History: 1636–1956 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), pp. 247–255. Finally, David O. Levine devotes a chapter to the same theme, “Junior College and the Differentiation of the Public Sector,” The American College and the Culture of Aspiration, 1915–1940 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 162–184.Google Scholar

⁷ Veysey is not, of course, for the casual reader, and a discussion of historiography and higher education deserves a consideration of Veysey as historian. At the beginning of the term when I teach the history of higher education, I try to give students a quick sense of what we will be doing in historical terms. I suggest that there are three ways of understanding history. The first I call the “Place-Name-Date” approach. They are relieved when I indicate that I have no patience for such history. The second I call “amateur history,” quickly explaining that the amateur nature is not meant to be disparaging. Rather, it is a distinction between volunteer and paid historical interests, a historical approach which values artifacts as much as documents. The third way of understanding history is the professional form, dominated by historians qua professors. Footnotes, searches in archives, biographical readings, translations, and critiques of others works are well within the domain of professional historical understanding. This method comes together so that we can, in the words of Jacques Barzun and Henry Graff, trust history. As they explain, our trust derives from documents that are critically tested, using judgement governed by probability, with an understanding that the notion of an absolute past is a delusion, with an objectivity based on “testing in all ways possible one's subjective impressions, so as to arrive at a knowledge of objects,” and finally, given that causes may be indeterminate, the historian analyzes only conditions and may organize them as a pattern. In this sense, Veysey is clearly a professional historian. See Barzun, Jacques and Graff, Henry F. The Modern Researcher (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., rev. ed. 1970), pp. 163–191.Google Scholar

⁸ Veysey, , The Emergence of the American University, pp. 61, 64, 65, 66, and 116–117.Google Scholar

⁹ Ibid., pp. 123, 136, and 138.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Ibid., pp. 184–85, 186, 188, 190, 207, and 215.Google Scholar

¹¹ Arguing for presentism of course only states that Veysey wrote of community colleges as he did, rather than explaining it. See Woodward, C. Vann, Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), pp. 36–37 for his evaluation of his own presentism, in which he suggests it is a subtle mechanism that shifts over time.Google Scholar

¹² This is not to argue that historians of higher education have been unable to revise Veysey. See, for example, Burke, Colin B., American Collegiate Populations: A Test of the Traditional View (New York: New York University Press, 1982); although Burke focuses his arguments on Hofstadter's portrayal of the Great Retrogression, his work also answers Veysey's arguments about discipline and piety. Also see Geiger, Roger L. “The Era of Multipurpose Colleges in American Higher Education, 1850–1890,” History of Higher Education Annual 15 (1995): 51–92. Finally, Veysey does not discuss different groups and their important contributions to higher education issues and debates in the late 1800s; see Solomon, Barbara Miller In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) and Eisenmann, Linda “Reconsidering a Classic: Assessing the History of Women's Higher Education a Dozen Years after Barbara Solomon,” Harvard Educational Review 67 (Winter 1997): 689–717. Still, it is very hard to dodge Veysey, as evidenced by Geiger's work on research universities. See Geiger, Roger L. To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of Research Universities, 1900–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) and Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research Universities since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). The importance of those institutions then and now is very much a part of the history of higher education. Finally, Veysey offers an enduring statement on structure in United States higher education and its pattern of utility, research, liberal education and religion, as this essay argues.Google Scholar

¹³ Brint, and Karabel, , The Diverted Dream, p. 9.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 25.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Yet early conceptions of the junior college specifically, even deliberately, focused on the internal arrangement. See Gallagher, Edward A. “A Potent Bacillus at Ann Arbor: Origin of the Junior College Idea,“ Michigan Academician 6 (1974): 435–444.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Brint, and Karabel, , The Diverted Dream, p. 146 on the governing board, pp. 151–152 on controlling presidents, p. 167 on presidential control of institutions.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Ibid., p. 17.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Brint, and Karabel, , The Diverted Dream, pp. 30–32 and 37–41 for the national movements in liberal arts and vocationalism, respectively. In the case of Massachusetts community colleges, see pp. 148–151.Google Scholar

¹⁹ In a personal conversation, Edward Gallagher has noted that the American Association of Junior College's leadership in the pre-World War II era was dominated by private junior college educators. Given the number of those institutions with denominational affiliations, it might be that a third area of Veysey's analysis, religion, had a strong presence as well. This history is not yet written. As for private junior colleges and denominations, see Hunt, Thomas C. and Carper, James C., Religious Higher Education in the United States: A Source Book (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996) for a number of denominations’ stories about their junior colleges.Google Scholar

²⁰ Thelin, John R. “Beyond Background Music: Historical Research on Admissions and Access in Higher Education,“ in Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research, ed. by Smart, John C. vol. 1 (New York: Agathon Press, 1985), p. 357.Google Scholar

²¹ Ibid. Thelin highlights how Ralph Turner's work, “Sponsored and Contest Mobility and the School System,” American Sociological Review 25 1960: 855–867 informed a great deal of work on higher education, including Harold Wechsler, The Qualified Student: A History of Selective College Admissions in America (New York: Wiley, 1977) and Synnott, Martha G. The Half-Opened Door: Discrimination and Admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, 1900–1970 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1979). For another discussion of the social sciences and their impact on historical study of higher education, see Goodchild, Lester F. and Huk, Irene Pancner “The American College History: A Survey of Its Historiographic Schools and Analytic Approaches from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present,” in Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research, ed. Smart, John C. vol. 6 (New York: Agathon Press, 1990), pp. 201–290.Google Scholar

²² Brint, and Karabel, , The Diverted Dream, p. 34.Google Scholar

²³ See Gallagher, , “Alexis Lange, Progressivism and Junior College Functions.“Google Scholar

²⁴ Levine, , The American College and the Culture of Aspiration, pp. 162–184.Google Scholar

²⁵ Brint and Karabel's discussion of government and institutional efforts to increase vocational offerings is clear, not so their discussion of student interests. See The Diverted Dream, pp. 66–83 on the period from the late 1930 to the early 1950s, pp. 191–202 on government and institutions, pp. 113–116 on the mass media.Google Scholar

²⁶ Brint, and Karabel, The Diverted Dream, pp. 32–42; Pedersen, , “The St. Louis Conference,” pp. 26–30. Pedersen has also developed this argument in “Value Conflict on Community College Campus.“Google Scholar

²⁷ Woodward, C. Vann, Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), pp. 68–70.Google Scholar

²⁸ See Hofstadter, Richard and Smith, Wilson eds., American Higher Education: A Documentary History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961). See Guralnick, Stanley M. Science and the Ante-bellum American College (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1975), pp. 28–33 for an argument that the Yale Report was more than a defence of the classical curriculum. Guralnick's examination focuses on the issues of science and the “modern university,” and he argues that the Yale faculty looked forward as well as backward.Google Scholar

²⁹ Hofstadter, and Smith, , American Higher Education, v. 1 pp. 277–291.Google Scholar

³⁰ For a discussion of the indistinct nature of academies and colleges in the nineteenth century, see Church, Robert L. and Sedlak, Michael W. “The Antebellum College and Academy,“ Education in the United States: An Interpretive History (New York: The Free Press, 1976), pp. 23–51. For an intriguing examination of three southern institutions that faced admission issues, see Buchanan, Linda R. “Not Harvard, Not Holyoke, Not Howard: A Study of the Life and Death of Three Small Colleges” (Ph.D. dissertation, Georgia State University, 1997). See also Johnson, Eldon L. “Misconceptions About the Early Land-Grant Colleges,” Journal of Higher Education 52 (4) 1981: 333–351. As he indicates (336–337), several land-grant colleges opened in western states that had few or even no secondary schools. Wisconsin offered instruction that began with the first year of secondary school; Arizona started without any secondary schools in the state, and the University of Nevada had only two. The interface between student preparation and postsecondary education in this country has never been neat and tidy, for all the efforts of such groups as the Committee of Ten.Google Scholar

³¹ For 1969 data, see Bayer, Alan E., College and University Faculty: A Statistical Description, v. 5 no. 5 (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1970). The data from 1989 are from the Carnegie 1989 “Survey Among College and University Faculty,” available from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut.Google Scholar

³² Higher Education for American Democracy: A Report of The President's Commission on Higher Education (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947), pp. 37–38.Google Scholar

³³ Clark, Burton “The ‘Cooling-Out’ Function in Higher Education,“ American Journal of Sociology 65 (1960): 569–576. Clark in fact specifically thanks a colleague for alerting him to the concept of “cooling out” as developed in the psychiatric work of Erving Goffman. See Clark, “The ‘Cooling-Out’ Function in Higher Education,” 569, Note 3. The issue of control over individuals is explicit in Clark's work.Google Scholar

³⁴ Koos, Leonard V., The Junior-College Movement (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1925) and Adelman, Clifford The Way We Are: The Community College as American Thermometer (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, February 1992).Google Scholar

³⁵ Certainly most historians of higher education, fledgling or senior, have experienced the problem of the archive at institutions other than major research universities (not that those archives are perfect repositories, despite the work of careful archivists). One of my students reported that in the midst of doing archival research at a local woman's college, where they simply gave her the key to the archives room, she found jewelry in a box. She is still trying to figure out how to place that event into her study of intercollegiate athletics at women's colleges; all I can do is assure her that major universities do not keep literal jewels in their archives.Google Scholar

³⁶ Burke, American Collegiate Populations; Geiger, Roger L., “The Era of Multipurpose Colleges in American Higher Education, 1850 to 1890“; Ogren, Christine A. “Where Coeds Were Coeducated: Normal Schools in Wisconsin, 1870–1920,” History of Education Quarterly 35 (1) Spring 1995: 1–26.Google Scholar

³⁷ Christie, Raymond L., “The Net Effects of Institutional Type on Baccalaureate Degree Attainment: A Study of the Sophomore Cohort of the 1980 National Center for Education Statistics High School and Beyond Data“ (Ph.D. dissertation, Georgia State University, 1998), 38.Google Scholar

³⁸ Brint and Karabel discuss student agency, framing it within Ralph Turner's arguments regarding contest and sponsored mobility. Nevertheless, for their analysis, institutional anticipatory subordination remains paramount. See The Diverted Dream, pp. 234–235, Note 7; on Ralph Turner's arguments, pp. 264–265, Note 5 on student agency and the importance of institutional policy. As a troubling indicator of community college student agency, see Lois Weis, Between Two Worlds: Black Students in an Urban Community College (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985). Weis argues, “Paradoxically, it is the culture which students produce within the college that helps to ensure the continued structural bases of their own ‘superex-ploitation,’” p. 2.Google Scholar

³⁹ Novick, Peter, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 573, 581–582.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Jencks, Christopher and Riesman, David, The Academic Revolution (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Anchor Books, 1969), Chapter XI, “The Anti-University Colleges: The Community College Movement, pp. 481–492; Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz Campus Life: Undergraduate Culture from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press edition, 1987).Google Scholar