What is the purpose of higher education? Depending on who answers the question, you may hear a variety of responses. Some people will say that the goal of higher education is to produce engaged citizens devoted to improving the larger society. Others may claim that higher education should impart knowledge and skills designed to help graduates be successful in certain jobs. Many business and political leaders may argue that higher education should contribute to the larger capitalist economy. And, similarly, a lot of students today enroll in higher education to ensure large paychecks in the future. In For the Common Good, Charles Dorn explores how each of these ethoses—civic mindedness, practicality, commercialism, and affluence—emerged and became dominant within higher education during a specific period. Dorn organizes his book into four distinct historical eras: (1) the early national period, (2) the antebellum and Civil War eras, (3) Reconstruction through World War II, and (4) the Cold War through the early twenty-first century. Dorn asserts that For the Common Good is “the first comprehensive historical analysis of higher education published since Laurence Veysey's The Emergence of the American University that is both thesis-driven and grounded in original archival research” (p. 5). In this well-organized and nicely written book, each chapter explores the development of an institution (or in the case of the last chapter, two institutions) that epitomizes each era's dominant social ethos.
For the early national period, Dorn writes three chapters about the formative decades of institutions educating white men around the turn of the nineteenth century: Bowdoin College, Georgetown College, and South Carolina College. As the regional diversity of these institutions suggests, each one differed drastically from the others. Many lower-income sons of farmers attended Bowdoin, a diverse set of students matriculated at Georgetown, and the white political elites in South Carolina provided generous public monies to educate their affluent sons at the state's first college. Despite such differences, these institutions each emphasized self-improvement and the importance of civic involvement. All three institutions combined a classical curriculum, a regimented daily schedule, and a long list of campus rules to develop informed and disciplined citizens. South Carolina offered some applied courses, such as engineering, and faculty there also struggled to get their wealthy students—used to a high degree of freedom at home—to follow the institution's regulations.
By the mid-nineteenth century, civic-mindedness began to wane—but never disappeared—as higher education institutions increasingly emphasized practicality. The Agricultural College of the State of Michigan was founded to provide a practical education using scientific and investigative principles that students could apply to real-world problems. The students learned about animal and vegetable physiology, entomology, and horticulture, while also performing physical labor, such as hunting, fishing, gathering berries, and chopping down trees. This institution, which eventually became Michigan State University, set the stage for land grant universities that would follow. In chapter 5, with a similar focus on practicality, Dorn profiles California State Normal School, which provided teacher training for those students who would not have otherwise received access to higher education. While both of these institutions instilled skills in students to prepare them for specific occupations, they contributed to the common good by “being pioneers of higher education for the people” (p. 111).
At the turn of the twentieth century, commercialism replaced practicality as the dominant social ethos influencing higher education. Although the founders of Stanford University, Smith College, and Howard University all envisioned that these institutions would promote the social good, students made decisions—influenced heavily by larger economic trends—to use their higher education to promote their advancement in the capitalist economy. In fact, Leland and Jane Stanford's founding grant establishing the university alluded to the rising influence of commercialism, stating “that the institution's central ‘object’ was ‘to qualify its students for personal success’” (p. 117). This was perhaps best evidenced by the early establishment of professional schools at Stanford. On the other side of the continent, the founders of Smith College wanted to provide a classical curriculum of higher education for white women, with the premise that they could contribute to the common good by being model mothers, wives, and citizens. However, many students often attended college to prepare for work outside of the home. Opening nearly a decade before Smith, Howard University was established by African American leaders and former white abolitionists, with the assistance of the Freedmen's Bureau. Howard's overarching goal was to improve African American communities in the United States, but by around 1900, many Howard students considered their own desires for career and financial success compatible with racial uplift. Lucy Diggs Slowe, a Howard alumna and its first dean of women, worked to improve the career prospects of students, especially African American women, who faced the dual social stigmas of sexism and racism.
Just as practicality had laid the foundation for commercialism a half century before, by the onset of the Cold War, commercialism gave way to affluence as higher education's dominant social ethos. In the age of commercialism, obtaining a degree reflected the desire of students to elevate their careers, while affluence reflected students’ desires to acquire wealth and participate in the consumerist culture. Dorn offers a fascinating account of the mission drift of the University of South Florida (USF) to demonstrate the influence of affluence on higher education. USF's first president wanted to emphasize the liberal arts to prepare undergraduates for citizenship; his director of institutional research warned the president, even before the institution opened, that the commuter students destined to enroll were mostly interested in preparing for well-paying careers. Over the next few decades, USF shifted its attention from educating nontraditional students to becoming a research university, chasing grant funding and partnering with industry. The last chapter of For the Common Good offers a history of two community colleges, one in Rhode Island and one in New Mexico. Both of these institutions came to be dominated by vocational education, signifying the importance of occupational training for two-year institutions and the desire for economic mobility among their students. At Santa Fe Community College in New Mexico the first section of the student handbook steered students toward the Career Development Center to explore future career goals.
Indeed, by the early twenty-first century, much of the importance of higher education had become associated with the pursuit of high incomes. As Dorn observes at the end of the book, “recent proposals to enroll all high-school graduates in some form of postsecondary education … is almost solely predicated upon higher education's claim to promote private gain” (p. 227). In teasing out the emergence of different social ethoses within higher education over time, Dorn has produced a book that offers insightful analysis on the past and important perspective to the present. He, like many readers of the History of Education Quarterly in general and these two reviewers in particular, would like to see a renewed emphasis on the civic rather than remunerative role of higher education. Ironically, as Dorn acknowledges, civic-mindedness dominated higher education when the fewest students enrolled, with virtually no women and minorities. And there is little evidence that higher education prepared these young white men to promote gender and racial equality. Now that enrollments are large and diverse, higher education may be poised as never before to have a positive influence on the larger society, but perhaps only if both the institutions and their students stop single-mindedly pursuing financial gain as the sole purpose of higher education.
