American Higher Education Transformed, 1940–2005: Documenting the National Discourse

This long-awaited sequel to Richard Hofstadter and Wilson Smith's classic anthology American Higher Education: A Documentary History presents one hundred and seventy-two key edited documents that record the transformation of higher education over the past sixty years.

The volume includes such seminal documents as Vannevar Bush's 1945 report to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Science, the Endless Frontier; the U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Brown v. Board of Education and Sweezy v. New Hampshire; and Adrienne Rich's challenging essay "Taking Women Students Seriously." The wide variety of readings underscores responses of higher education to a memorable, often tumultuous, half century. Colleges and universities faced a transformation of their educational goals, institutional structures and curricula, and admission policies; the ethnic and economic composition of student bodies; an expanding social and gender membership in the professoriate; their growing allegiance to and dependence on federal and foundation financial aids; and even the definitions and defenses of academic freedom.

Wilson Smith and Thomas Bender have assembled an essential reference for policymakers, administrators, and all those interested in the history and sociology of higher education.