The Revolution of Markets and Management: Toward a History of American Higher Education since 1945

Abstract

Revolutions are a commonplace in studies of the history of American higher education. Every decade or so seems to bring upheaval of revolutionary proportions and a literature to analyze it. Significantly, Laurence Veysey began his study of the rise of the American university with some words from Noah Porter's 1871 inaugural address as president of Yale, “college and university education are not merely agitated by reforms; they are rather convulsed by a revolution.” Then Veysey proceeded with his own excellent account of Porter's revolution—the forces, events, and personalities in the struggle to create the new research university at the turn of the nineteenth century. Christopher Jencks and David Riesman described quite a different sort of revolution in The Academic Revolution, their study of the rise of college and university faculties to preeminent professional influence in the early 1960s. It was a short-lived triumph at best, for immediately followed the revolutionary upheavals of the late 1960s. At close range, but with considerable insight, Lewis B. Mayhew analyzed the causes and consequences of the troubled sixties, and more recently other studies of that revolution are beginning to appear.

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