Giorgio Wirawan

Thelin Reading Chapter 7:

• ●  Postwar Policies and Possibilities -3 P’s, Prosperity, Prestige, Popularity. Journalists, college administrators, and historians called this the “golden age.”
  -Postwar America is now the fertile ground for the popular for-profit higher education sector including vocational institutions and trade schools. – College enrollment rises. In 1939-1940, college enrollment was under 1.5 million. By 1949-1950, the total student enrollment almost reached 2.7 million. In 1960, the figure increased to around 3.6 million, and doubled again in 1970, reaching 7.9 million.
• ●  Accommodation and Access: The GI Bill
  -The last few years, we have been in a wartime economy. How do we adjust wartime production to a peacetime economy?
  -Returning servicemen were provided the funds for education, unemployment benefits, job finding assistance, and more.
  -College attendance jumped up exponentially.
  “According to Kiester, eleven thousand GIs enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, pushing the size of the student body from nine thousand to eighteen thousand. Rutgers went from seven thousand to sixteen thousand by 1948. Stanford’s enrollments increased more than twofold, from three thousand to seven thousand.” -Thelin (264). -Colleges are starting to increase the use of standardized tests for both admissions and placement decisions. -One consequence of the GI bills was to masculinize the postwar campus.
• ●  Access and Affordability: A Blueprint for Mass Higher Education -Truman established a commission on higher education to give all youth access to higher education.
  -Racial minorities made more gains in literacy and access to educational programs in the army rather than in public school.
• ●  The Federal Government as Research Patron: “Big Science” as the “Best Science” -The other major area of federal policy focused on prospects for elite, advanced research, and development in sciences.
  -Vannevar Bush recommended the prototype to the National Science Foundation. -Med schools gain benefits from the extension of prepaid medical health plans from employers as well as the growth of Medicare. Med school stood out as the most well-funded research institution by 1960.

• ●  Academic Freedom and Politics of Higher Education
  -The concern is that the American campus was a haven for dissidence and disloyalty. -Overt support of international cooperation and peace were seen as a sign of national disloyalty.
  -Many state university presidents subject their faculty to loyalty oaths and codes of conduct, proving that the presidents are more interested in defusing external scrutiny than defending the professor’s traditional rights of academic freedom.
• ●  The Appearance of the “Federal Grant University,” 1950 to 1060
  -The federal support has become a major factor in the performance of many universities, as in 1960, higher education institutions received about $1.5 billion from the federal government.
  -Because of the peer review by the external committee established by the federal agencies which prioritize a research team’s track record, the rich got richer with renewal of projects along with new awards to previous, proven recipients.
  -University’s pursuit of the external grant which looks like an “up” or “out” game. Universities started aiming to move towards the prestigious research ranks. The University of Pittsburgh example is that by focusing on the rapid expansion of advanced graduate programs, they neglected their traditional base of undergraduates.
• ●  The Expansion of Ph.D. and Graduate Degree Program
  -In 1939-1940, the enrollment in master’s and PH.D. programs totaled just under 106,000 students. But by adding new research and doctoral programs, the graduate enrollments more than doubled in1950 reaching 237,200.
  -There are internal problems that affect the allure of expansion and ambition such as professors demanding reduced teaching loads, increased library expenditures, and up-to-date laboratories, and faculty requests for more advanced courses.
  -To keep up with the size of the undergraduate student population, universities increase the reliance on teaching assistants. That way, universities can provide funding and apprentice work for doctoral students especially in fields that had little chance to obtain research grants.
  -The increased attention to Ph.D. programs caused the number of doctorates to rise from 6,420 in 1949-50 to 11,622 in 1960-61, and continues to rise to around 30,000 in 1969-70.
• ●  Philanthropy and the Prospect of External Funding
  -The entrance of the federal government into research at universities post-war changed the ecology of external relations.
  “First, the federal government supplemented and often surpassed private foundations as the major source of incentive funding that college and universities could seek. Second, the increase in federal research grants coincided with a relative decline and withdrawal of some historic foundations from sponsored projects.” Thelin, (282).

-For example, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching lost the leverage of having funds to distribute and withdrew temporarily, as by 1954, the foundations were able to resume an agenda of generous support for higher education. -Private foundations could devote themselves to strengthening a particular campus, which results in more institutions and more fields being able to partake in academic entrepreneurial pursuits.

-The Ford Foundation contributed to the transformation of American higher education, and the initiatives exposed how weak most institutions were in systematic development activities beyond perfunctory alumni giving.

• ●  From Capital to Campus: Coordination and Diffusion
  -Problem: Student population rises exponentially. How would the college deal with this rising number of students?
  -Colleges that are not able to accommodate the growing student population look for mutually beneficial alliances with other private colleges and universities within the state.
• ●  The Case of California, 1947 to 1970
  -The combination of aerospace, agriculture, shipbuilding, automobile manufacturing, electronics, military bases, and naval stations powers the engine of the state economy. -California became the major point of embarkation and return for military personnel. -The rationale of students gained more from large courses taught by the best scholars in the country, making the students viewed either as “swimming” or “sinking” as the undergraduates could not count on having close working relationships with the professors.
  -California has over one hundred junior colleges which are primarily subsidized through local property taxes.
• ●  The Massachusetts Model
  -California and Massachusetts are different when it comes to higher education as California relies on generous public funding while Massachusetts never approached the California commitment to public, tuition-free, higher education.
  -Massachusetts relied on its historic colleges and private institutions especially in the east coast.
  -Enrollments in private institutions increased as research activities and degrees conferred.
• ●  The “Plight” of Private College and Universities
  -Prior to WW2, private institutions enjoyed two advantages over public institutions such as a longer history which promotes strong alumni loyalty, and the autonomy to set tuition. -After WW2, the increase in generous state subsidies to public colleges and universities allowed them to keep their tuition low.

-Williams College annual budget before and after WW2 increased from around $911,000 in 1939-1940 up to $1,431,607 in 1948-1949. The national inflation rate that decade was 73 percent.
-Prestigious and prosperous colleges especially in the northeast and pacific coast announced policies of need-based financial aid and need-blind admissions, meaning that the applicants were assured that a decision about admission would be made without regard to their economic situation.

-The overall rush to go to ANY college evolved into a rush to go to a prestigious college as private institutions were made to be realistically affordable.

• ●  Undergraduate and Campus Life in the 1950s
  -Common theme “Joe College” and “Betty Co-ed” became the popular image for college life, where this “college man” is a full-time student who entered college immediately after graduating from high school, choosing a major field in his junior year, looking forward to marry his “college sweetheart” and sought a promising career in large corporations. -Although those image represented the percentage of undergraduates who succeed in their studies, it overlooked the attrition rate especially in the freshman and sophomore years.
  -Scandals when it comes to college athletes as the sanity code of student-athlete conduct campaign in 1948 succeeded. The goal was to ensure that the athletes were genuine students.
• ●  From Junior College to Community College
  -As enrollment in public two-year colleges increased up to 2.1 million students, one estimate is that in 1960, new public community campuses opened each week. Private two-year colleges declined.
  -Often, high-school diplomas are not required to take certain courses in community colleges.
• ●  Testing and Tracking: The Sophistication of Selective Admission
  -The advances in mass standardized testing allowed CEEB to develop the SAT to replace the traditional testing and grade it electronically.
  -SAT is used to find intellectually talented students from public high schools.
  -The ACT was developed to combine admissions decisions with informed decisions about the field of study and major.
• ●  Confronting Racial Segregation in Higher Education
  -Seventeen southern states legally segregated public educational systems.
  -Racial integration has been nominally achieved in all state flagship universities in the south, but black students are still segregated and excluded in dormitories, dining halls, and classroom seating arrangements.
  -”Separate but equal” has a flaw. How is it equal if the state’s black institution did not offer a particular field of study?
  -Ending racial segregation is a very small concern to private universities.

• ●  Mass Higher Education and Student Discontents
  -Minorities voice concerns over large lecture classes where they question the regulations imposed by deans of students.
  -Undergraduates and university administration clashed over who had control over student activities, including the daily student newspaper.
  -Students protest for changes in the conduct of campus affairs.
  -The disagreements that escalated between 1961 and 1965 were not about the university’s role in society but rather the appropriateness of that role. One example is the university being a home for research sponsored by the US military, linked to the growing political dissent about the army’s presence in Vietnam.
  -May 1970, the confrontation at Kent State University in Ohio and Jackson State University in Mississippi between student protesters and National Guard troops leads to the students getting shot and killed.
• ●  Professors and Prosperity
  -Income, power, prestige, protection in the 1945-1970 were accumulated by the faculty. -Arbitrary dismissal by the president or board of trustees are less likely.
• ●  Crises and Contradictions: Which Academic Revolution?
  -Campuses being used as a forum for dissent by the antiwar groups.
  -Sabotage, disruptions, fire-bombings, and other violent student acts only caused the government to shift their research site from the campus or lab to an independent institute. It didn’t force government officials to abandon their research agenda. -Politicians such as Ronald Reagan and James Rhodes used campus unrest as a convenient issue for their campaign. Loss Reading Chapter 5 Educating Global Citizens in the Cold War:
  -The American higher education served as a vital mediating institution between the citizens and states, and as a vital weapon in the worldwide struggle against communism.
  -McCarthy’s hysteria of the early 1950s. The question is that if the 21 captured US soldiers can turn communist, then who’s safe from the brainwash? P.S. How is Travis King doing?
  -Malvina Lindsay believed that “The average captured GI likely had little mental armor with which to resist communist indoctrination. Unlike youth under authoritarian rule, he had not been drilled from an early age in any catechism of political faith.” Loss (Chapter 5, 14-15). Further supporting the theory of who even is safe from the brainwash.
  -Average students show little interest in cold war political affairs.
  -Immigration of European scholars, scientists, and also German physicists brought prestige to those schools.
  -Higher education in the US grows in prestige after the war unlike in most Europe.

-According to a leading scholar, the Soviet Military Administration, assisted by student-led “action committees” sought to remake the eastern European universities into a Marxist-Leninist “party-schools.” Cultural revolution it is.
-By 1960, it was reported that fourteen thousand US students were studying abroad and twice of that travel overseas for non credit educational purposes. The US higher education spans the globe.
-NDEA introduced federal loans to US students and their families. It was estimated that 1.5 million students used NDEA loans to go to college between 1959 and 1969.