Colleges and universities are among the most cherished institutions in American society—and also among the most controversial. Yet affirmative action and skyrocketing tuition are only the most recent dissonant issues to emerge. Recounting the many crises and triumphs in the long history of American higher education, historian John Thelin provides welcome perspective on this influential aspect of American life. In A History of American Higher Education, The… More >>
“A History of American Higher Education” is a nice introduction into the topic of college history. However, it is most definately not definitive. Any reader would benefit from consulting other texts (which I will list at the end of this review). The book does focus heavily on the ivy league schools; but, for good reason because much of the early developing history of higher education happens at these schools (since they were the first schools).
This was one of the texts for a class I took and over the course of the course we (as a class) had some questions and were confused about some parts of the book so we emailed Thelin and he promptly answered our questions.
If you are interested in the history of higher education then I recommend the following texts to be read in conjunction with each other because none of the following are stand-alone and definitive texts in the subject matter.
“American College and University: A History” by Frederick Rudolph
“American Higher Education” by Christopher Lucas
“Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present” by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz
And, for a well-researched look into the history of admissions at three ivy league schools (Harvard, Yale, and Princeton) I recommend “The Chosen” by Jerome Karabel.
Finally, if you are interested in the history of co-operative living I highly recommend the following historical account about the University of Kansas: “Making Do and Getting Through” by Fred McElhenie (it is locally published for the University of Kansas by Oread Books).
Rating: 4 / 5
The book adds a few interesting and new insights to the history of higher education canon. Despite the author’s status as a full-time professor, the writing style is clear and concise. Also, the author should receive praise for making history relevant in contemporary policy debates and disspelling several myths about the history of higher education.
On the other hand, this book mainly covers the history of ivy league institutions and the 30 or so national selective public and private universities. Maybe the quest for a comprehensive history of higher education — one that truly covers all colleges and all students — is elusive and perhaps impossible, but I remain hopeful someone will someday pull it off.
Bottom line: a pretty decent introduction to the history of higher education.
Rating: 3 / 5
No question, this study will rank with Frederick Rudolph’s The American College and University and Laurence Veysey’s The Emergence of the American University as a classic in its field. The scholarship is profound and the narrative lively and original.
Rating: 5 / 5
It is evident that the Hopkins Press and Mr. Thelin recognized that Rudolph’s history was long-in-the-tooth, and that this created a market for a new textbook for the standard history of higher education course to which far too many graduate students are needlessly subjected. But more to the point, like others in the field, my time is valuable, and I find it extremely troubling when I read a new work in the field only to find that it offers little fresh information about America’s myriad of colleges and universities and nothing in the way of a new perspective on the inter-play of these institutions and the larger American culture and its economy. Most importantly, the work continues the regretable behavior of “educators” to treat their institutions — from the primary grades to the university — as essentially insulated from the larger culture upon which they depend for their very being. This serious flaw in the work is evident in its one sentence mention of the local conflict that arose from the decision to relocate Yale College to New Haven. To the vast majority of Americans, a college or university is important largely as a source of jobs, well-educated residents, and the addition of student tuition and fees into the local economy. To pass over this central dimension of the perceived value and meaning of a college or university to a substantial portion of American society is simply to write yet another INSTITUIONAL history, which merely passes on the author’s replication of some arbitrarily selected primary documents that can, in our electronic age, be done as easily by anyone who can ask the right question for a Google search. Interested in the early history of William and Mary (apparently a particular focus of Thelin, even though most of its historical records were lost in an horrific fire in the early 19th century)? Ask Google. But if a reader wants to better understand the complex interplay between higher education and American society (such as, for example, the relationship between Thayer’s reforms at West Point and the preparation of a generation of faculty prepared to instruct the nation’s first generation of college-educated mechanical engineers, something never intended by Congress when it authorized West Point in 1802), this work breaks no new ground. It is merely a well-timed work that takes advantage of Rudolph being so seriously dated, thereby ensuring its wide use, but which fails to provide historians with anything new with respect to our analysis of higher education’s place in the development of America’s culture, economy and political systems. Thelin reminds us that it is time to end the separate treatment of education’s history and integrate its study into the discipline from which it wrongly broke off.
Rating: 2 / 5
I can appreciate the work put into the book. I took the book for it’s writing style to give me a how to guide and what not to do. The book is so dense that it could not cover everything. The author was left to decide what was important and the information that is important to him is not important to me. The book was a requirement for a course so we could get background information of higher ed and I can definitely appreciate it’s purpose.
Rating: 3 / 5