This paper examines an “experimental” program in African American adult education that took place at the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library in the early 1930s. The program, called the Harlem Experiment, brought together a group of white funders (the Carnegie Corporation and the American Association for Adult Education)—who believed in the value of liberal adult education for democratic citizenship—and several prominent black reformers who led the program. I argue that the program represented a negotiation between these two groups over whether the black culture, politics, and protest that had developed in 1920s Harlem could be deradicalized and incorporated within the funder's “elite liberalism”—an approach to philanthropy that emphasized ideological neutrality, scholarly professionalism, and political gradualism. In his role as the official evaluator, African American philosopher Alain Locke insisted that it could, arguing that the program, and its occasionally Afrocentric curriculum, aligned with elite liberal ideals and demonstrated the capacity for a broader definition of (historically white) liberal citizenship. While the program was ultimately abandoned in the mid-1930s, the efforts of Locke and other black reformers helped pave the way for a future instantiation of racial incorporation: the intercultural education movement of the mid-twentieth century.

This article explores the role of university placement offices in shaping a twentieth-century corporate elite. While studies of the “corporatization” of the university focus on developments after the 1970s, the rise of the modern university and corporate economy were inextricably linked by the early twentieth century. Scholars of this period have described the circulation of scientific knowledge and the influx of college graduates into industry, but the specific ties that facilitated their employment remain underexplored. By examining the correspondence between placement officers and employers in Boston, I demonstrate how universities actively cultivated a new corporate class that not only had the right technical knowledge and social skills but the gender, racial, and class-based characteristics employers preferred. In so doing, universities helped incorporate these characteristics into the meaning of academic merit itself. The marriage of universities and corporate management legitimated a credential-based form of inequality that continues to structure the American political economy.

Established in 1911 as a simple owner-operated commercial school in Providence, Rhode Island, the Katharine Gibbs School expanded over the decades to acquire an international reputation for excellence in secretarial training. This essay examines the origin, development, and ultimate demise of the chain, placing it within the context of the expansion of office work and the growth of clerical education. In presenting a secretarial career as an attractive option for women, the school developed a gender-specific message that was very much in keeping with the vocationalism that became a major component of women's education in both public high schools and proprietary institutions. Promoting the career secretary as a desirable career path for women, Gibbs used class and gender-based marketing to separate itself from competitors. Thriving at a time when educated women had few opportunities, the school declined when the feminist upheavals of the 1960s sparked a new ethos of workplace egalitarianism and widening cultural definitions of self-fulfillment for women.

The black southern press was an entity dominated by male editors and entrepreneurs. The effort to equalize teacher pay, one of the core fights for rights in the South, and the principal effort at gendered race advocacy during the World War II era, was led in large measure by black women. While both the fight for salary equalization and the survival of the black press depended upon segregation to maintain their survival, those newspapers were entities dominated by men advocating for equal salaries in a profession dominated by women, and the gendered nature of their coverage shaped knowledge of the fight within the black community.

As it entered the ranks of the “modern” university in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the University of North Carolina (UNC), as did other universities of the time, embraced the development of manhood and self-improvement as part of its mission. But unlike the social and economic pressures on northern and eastern universities to emphasize a more aggressive model of manhood, UNC's southern context allowed for a more flexible approach. UNC's leaders encouraged students to find for themselves a healthy mix of the older, more restrained Victorian notion of manhood with elements of the newer one, physical fitness being one example. The school's emphasis on inquiry and investigation, and the student body's racial and gender exclusivity, combined to permit a degree of openness as to what constituted an appropriate model of manhood.