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Background/Context Legal scholars often contrast the litigiousness of contemporary American higher education with a bygone era characterized by near-absolute respect for academic authority. According to this account, a doctrine of “academic deference” insulated colleges until the 1960s, when campus protests and new federal regulations dramatically heightened the intensity of legal oversight. This study tests that conventional wisdom, and its underlying assumption about the origins of student rights, by analyzing expulsion suits during the 100 years before 1960. Purpose Faculty and administrators tend to question if external legal pressure can play a constructive role in debates about higher education. This predisposition tempts us to invoke an earlier era of in loco parentis in order to portray institutional autonomy as a time-honored source of academic achievement. By highlighting overlooked state statutes (especially regarding public institutions) and contractual obligations (especially regarding private institutions), this study examines whether the power to discipline students in loco parentis actually triumphed prior to the 1960s. Research Design The study presents a historical analysis of the 44 college expulsion cases that were reported between 1860 and 1960. Examination of reported decisions was supplemented by archival research regarding landmark cases. Conclusions/Recommendations This study concludes that courts regularly reinstated expelled students during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These cases indicate that the power to act in loco parentis was limited by a countervailing tradition that emphasized college access and compelled institutions to provide due process prior to dismissal. This early strain of decisions laid the groundwork for the more expansive view of student rights that emerged during the 20th century. This finding encourages faculty and administrators to recognize the legal traditions and student dissenters that helped to enshrine accessibility as a defining feature of American higher education.

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In a recent issue of this journal, John Rury encouraged historians of education to forge stronger ties to the broader community of education researchers and practitioners. 1 John Aubrey Douglass's new work on the history of admissions policies at the University of California provides a model for historians who are interested in this relationship between the stories of the past and the challenges of the present. Douglass began his investigation of the development of UC admissions after being commissioned to draft a policy brief by the university's academic senate. Noting that the University of California Board of Regents has cited the system's "historic commitment'' to college access, Douglass suggests that this history can play a particularly powerful role in Scott Gelber is a Ph.D. Candidate in History of American Civilization at Harvard University. His dissertation is tentatively entitled "The Populist Revolt and American Public Higher Education, 1880-1905.

and the People chronicles the influence of Populisma powerful agrarian movementon public higher education in the late nineteenth century. Revisiting this pivotal era in the history of the American state university, Scott Gelber demonstrates that Populists expressed a surprising degree of enthusiasm for institutions of higher learning. More fundamentally, he argues that the mission of the state university, as we understand it today, evolved from a fractious but productive relationship between public demands and academic authority. Populists attacked a variety of elitesprofessionals, executives, scholarsand seemed to confirm academias fear of anti-intellectual public oversight. The movements vision of the state university highlighted deep tensions in American attitudes toward meritocracy and expertise. Yet Populists also promoted state-supported higher education, with the aims of educating the sons (and sometimes daughters) of ordinary citizens, blurring status distinctions, and promoting civic engagement. Accessibility, utilitarianism, and public service were the bywords of Populist journalists, legislators, trustees, and sympathetic professors. These academic populists encouraged state universities to reckon with egalitarian perspectives on admissions, financial aid, curricula, and research. And despite their critiques of college ivory towers, Populists supported the humanities and social sciences, tolerated a degree of ideological dissent, and lobbied for record-breaking appropriations for state institutions.