Paul Mattingly conceives of the history of American higher education as a series of “generational cultures” or sets of ideas and values that dominate higher education at different points in time. He begins his history in the eighteenth century, when evangelical and denominational values prevailed in colleges, and follows the history through six subsequent generational cultures, ending in the late twentieth century. Although he views university history in terms of generational cultures, Mattingly is quick to acknowledge that American higher education has never conformed to a single model. Indeed, one of the book's themes is the messiness of American higher education. Fittingly then, Mattingly applies the generational concept lightly: he explains it in the book's introduction and refers to it occasionally throughout the book, but he does not use it to provide a strong analytic structure for the material covered. Overall, Mattingly does not lead with analysis, but rather lets it emerge in the context of narration and description.

Mattingly aims to place higher education into the larger social and cultural history of the nation. His first chapter focuses on the First Great Awakening and its impact on colleges. The depth of what Mattingly covers in this chapter is truly impressive. One of my favorite parts of the book is Mattingly's exposition of Jonathan Edwards's theology and the ways in which it helped bridge the two factions that emerged in the context of the revivals. Next, he turns to Thomas Jefferson and his vision for republican higher education. He then discusses antebellum colleges and shows how they merged Christian higher education with Jefferson's republican aims. From there, Mattingly turns to alternative visions of higher education in the nineteenth century, focusing particularly on Francis Wayland. This brings him to the land-grant colleges. Instead of focusing on the usual suspects, here Mattingly features Frederick Law Olmsted and his ideas about campus design. Next, Mattingly turns to Charles Eliot and the reforms at Harvard in a chapter intriguingly titled “The Generic University.” Since generic is not the typical adjective used to describe Eliot's Harvard, I wish that Mattingly had developed this idea more explicitly.

After Eliot, Mattingly turns to women's higher education and the ways that the ideal of domesticity continually restrained women's education and career opportunities. Mattingly then returns to ideas about university reform in the nineteenth century and discusses the continued defense of the college into the end of the nineteenth century and the limits of the vision of university reformers. From there, he discusses the connections between universities and progressive reform, focusing particularly on the University of Chicago. This introduces a dominant theme of the second half of the book: the ways in which the history of American higher education in the twentieth century can be understood as a struggle between pragmatism and antipragmatism. The pragmatist orientation reigned through most of the century, as the universities oriented themselves to national interests. Mattingly describes how the world wars and the federal government's growing involvement strengthened this pragmatist orientation, and he devotes a full chapter to Clark Kerr, who is both the ultimate practitioner and theorist of the pragmatic view of universities. But Mattingly also attends to key “antipragmatist” figures, devoting a chapter to Catholic higher education and counter-reformers such as Robert Hutchins. He also has a chapter on European refugee scholars and their important impact on American scholarship. Mattingly views the 1960s campus protests as antipragmatist, devoting attention to the ideas of Students for a Democratic Society founder Tom Hayden. He ends the book by looking at the ways in which 1960s activism impacted several academic disciplines. I found this an abrupt end and would have appreciated a concluding chapter in which Mattingly ruminated more directly on the meaning of the two centuries of history he recounts.

This brief summary does not do justice to the depth of the book. It is rich with information, some covering topics a reader would expect in an overview of the history of American higher education and some addressing subjects that are unexpected, such as Olmsted. Mattingly's style is discursive and he moves easily from one topic to another. Occasionally, he digresses from the main subject in ways that I did not find valuable. For example, Mattingly takes a detour from his discussion of Kerr to offer an in-depth critique of Laurence Veysey's classic, The Emergence of the American University, which Mattingly interprets through the lens of Kerr's pragmatism. This is a book that historians of American higher education will want to read because of the interesting associations that Mattingly makes. It will not necessarily expand their knowledge of the history of American higher education (the book is mostly a synthesis of existing scholarship), but it will spark new ideas. I would recommend Mattingly's book to doctoral students focusing on the history of American higher education, but would not assign it to students studying the subject for the first time, who I suspect would get lost in Mattingly's rich and nuanced descriptions. This is a book by a deeply knowledgeable historian of education and it will be best appreciated among similarly expert readers.