Emergence of the Modern Research University: Harvard and M.I.T., 1945–1970

Harvard and M.I.T. were ideally positioned to exploit the advantageous possibilities for development that arose after World War II. Both did so, pursuing routes that reflected their different histories, stages of development, organizational characteristics, and current priorities. Both became, in the process, contrasting versions of a modern research university, together helping to define a new institutional model for the nation’s academic community. For most universities, World War II continued the difficult circumstances of the Depression, but the wartime role of academics also fostered hopes for recognition and growth in the postwar years. This optimism prompted organized planning for institutional development well before the end of the war. As Conant put it in 1943: “The period immediately following the cessation of hostilities ... will be a time when [Harvard’s] educational house can be put in order, when changes perhaps long overdue can be made most readily.” The leaders of M.I.T. anticipated even more dramatic gains. Referring in 1944 to the Institute’s contributions to the war effort, Compton observed that “the value, effectiveness and prestige of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have never been at so high a level; this is certainly a strategic vantage point from which to initiate the next advance.” The prewar years at Harvard had left little doubt about the “changes ... long overdue” on which Conant would focus. From the beginning of his presidency, he had insisted that Harvard’s goal should not be expansion but “intensification”: the raising of intellectual standards within established programs and the reducing of concern with the social, localistic values associated with Harvard’s Brahmin traditions. The two major expressions of these policies prior to 1940 had been the efforts to tighten scholarly standards for promotion in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and to attract more able undergraduates by recruiting in public and non-northeastern secondary schools. As Conant anticipated the postwar years, especially in the context of the veterans’ program, he was aware that the new popularity of higher education might support a level of growth that had not been possible during the Depression, but he continued to oppose expansion. If demand for admission increased, Conant argued in the mid-1940S, Harvard should raise standards, not increase in size.

Evolution of the College-centered University: Tufts and Brandeis, 1945–1970

Tufts College, traditionally focused on undergraduate education in the arts and sciences, responded to the opportunities of the postwar years with new emphases on research and doctoral-level programs. A new name, “Tufts University,” signified the change. The leaders of Tufts intended, however, to retain a primary emphasis on undergraduate work. During these same years, a new university, Brandeis, sponsored by a group of American Jews, joined the state’s academic community. Brandeis’s founders also conceived their institution as centrally concerned with undergraduate education, although they too intended to build a modest array of graduate programs, especially in the arts and sciences. In projecting their development during the 1950s and 1960s, Tufts and Brandeis set out to become different versions of a distinctive institutional idea: the college-centered university. By the early 1940s, President Leonard Carmichael of Tufts, like his counterparts at Harvard and M.I.T., had come to regard World War II as a time of opportunity, despite immediate, war-related problems of enrollment and finance. Carmichael’s wartime reports referred repeatedly to new possibilities arising from the military emergency. He welcomed a Navy R.O.T.C. unit to Medford as a chance for greater visibility as well as for public service. He speculated that increased awareness of international issues would benefit the Fletcher School. Most important of all, given Tufts’s history of straightened finances, was the possibility of new federal support. “It is ... not too early,” Carmichael told his trustees in the middle of the war, “for all of us to do what we can to see to it that the men who administer our postwar education [at the federal level]... have an appreciation of the importance to this nation of colleges and universities with varied objectives and varied bases of administration and support.” If federal funds were to become available, Carmichael wanted to be sure that private institutions got their share, and he assured his board that “every effort is being made to maintain our relationships with the armed services... so that Tufts’s peculiar qualities—a university-college in which teaching and research go forward together—may be maintained ...”

Introduction

This book began as an exploration of a paradox in the history of American universities. In the twenty-five years following World War II, the student population served by these institutions became more diverse and the societal purposes they served became more varied. Yet, during the same period, universities themselves became more alike. The contradictions were easy to observe. It was obvious that the academic and social backgrounds of students—and consequently their needs, skills, and interests—became more heterogeneous in the postwar years, yet the undergraduate curricula of universities increasingly stressed highly academic subjects, especially the arts and sciences. Similarly, universities pursued a well-documented trend toward greater involvement in practical affairs and social problem solving in the 1950s and 1960s, while also adhering to a narrowing focus on doctoral programs and research in the basic disciplines. I wanted to understand the forces, both internal and external to campuses, that promoted this puzzling conjunction of converging characteristics and expanding functions. I also wanted to assess the academic and social consequences of this pattern. The decline of institutional diversity was only the most startling of a number of apparently inconsistent developments associated with an era of historic growth among universities. Almost as curious was the fact that, while expansion occurred mostly to accommodate increased demand for college education, institutional attention to teaching diminished, as did concern about the undergraduate curriculum. Meanwhile, graduate programs, whose chief function was to train college teachers, tended to slight preparation for instructional work and to nurture research skills. Indeed, as growth intensified academia’s role in socializing the nation’s youth, universities dismantled the programs of general education that were the primary vehicles they had created for that purpose. More broadly, the active involvement of universities in the definition and resolution of social problems went hand in hand with the consolidation of an academic value system quite remote from most Americans. Even the increasing heterogeneity of the student population was not free of contradiction. Academic leaders claimed credit for making their institutions more democratic during the postwar years by reducing traditional barriers to admission—including those of income and race.

From State College to University System: The University of Massachusetts, 1945–1973

The conditions of the golden age liberated Massachusetts State College from the forces that had restricted its development since the nineteenth century. In spurts of growth linked to demographic and political cycles, M.S.C. mushroomed from a limited-purpose college into a comprehensive university and from a single campus in Amherst into a multicampus system, with units in Worcester and Boston and a statewide president’s office. By the end of the period, UMass seemed finally to have joined its counterparts in western states as a full-fledged public university in the land grant tradition, with strong programs of graduate education and research built on a large undergraduate base and linked to public service activities of applied research and nondegree instruction. The evolutionary process remained incomplete, however, and Massachusetts was still Massachusetts. The state’s nonelite private institutions watched the public expansion nervously and organized to protect their interests. Other components of the public system, including the state colleges and a new network of community colleges, vied for support from an intensely politicized government still unsure of its role in higher education. Though the effort during the 1930s to transform Massachusetts State College into a full public university had ended in failure when the General Court shelved the enabling legislation, the university movement had gained important ground. In particular, by the end of the prewar decade, the loose coalition of students, alumni/ae, and organized labor that had kept the movement alive had stirred public interest and won support from the college’s trustees as well as its president, Hugh Potter Baker. Baker himself, with his roots in the scientific-technical traditions of land grant education, had been slow to endorse a broadened conception of his institution but once converted had become an eloquent and persistent advocate. Believing, despite his disappointment over the legislature’s inaction, that World War II would foster increased interest in higher education and create new opportunities for M.S.C., Baker used his annual reports during the war to reiterate the central arguments of the university movement: that, in comparison with other states, Massachusetts was not providing adequate support for public higher education; that demand for places at the college far exceeded enrollment capacity; that the region’s private institutions were not prepared to respond to the need; and that large numbers of Massachusetts residents were being forced to attend public universities in other states.

The World Transformed: A Golden Age for American Universities, 1945–1970

In the years following World War II, academic leaders in Massachusetts participated in a national debate about the social role of higher education in the era that lay ahead. They also experienced the beginnings of a period of expansion for universities that would continue, more or less uninterrupted, for twenty-five years. Change in this postwar golden age involved an ongoing interaction between ideas and opportunities: the first concerning the public purposes of higher education; the second promising glory for institutions and advancement for academic interest groups. For most of the period, the dominant view—inside and outside of higher education—was that expansion was improving the academy as well as the country, but the turmoil of the late 1960s raised fundamental doubts about the character of postwar change. Although World War II entailed difficulties for universities, their extensive involvement in the military effort stirred a new awareness of the social importance of academic work. This habit of thought extended into the postwar period, as educators, exhilarated by wartime patriotism, looked for new ways to contribute to social problem solving. As they did so, they exhibited a further effect of their recent experience: a tendency to focus on national concerns—as distinct from regional or local ones—far more intensively than they had done before 1940. The country's agenda was long. The human costs of the war, and the even more-frightening possibility of atomic conflict, made the importance of maintaining peace evident. Europe had precipitated two wars in a generation and now lay in ruins. The United States, suddenly the preeminent power of the globe, would have to pioneer in shaping a stable world order. In some, the nation's new international prominence aroused a sense of urgency about discrimination and inequality at home. More broadly, world leadership implied a need to maintain military and economic power and the technological vitality on which they depended. Many educators believed they had important roles to play in all these contexts—through training leaders, forming attitudes, and advancing knowledge. As one college president put it: “Events... have shaken the complacency of many university communities and compelled educators to... make [their] maximum contribution to a decent, well-ordered, free and peaceful society.”

The Institutional Complex and Academic Adaptation, 1945–1980

Change among universities in Massachusetts during the golden age illustrated the pervasive tendency of academic institutions, linked as they were to historic social divisions, to seek higher status. With essential resources readily available, these campuses converged from disparate prewar positions toward the functions and values of the research university, the dominant model of excellence in the postwar period. The inclination to pursue common goals was circumscribed, however, because the circumstances of change were always specific and resources were never infinite. Local variations in competitive conditions combined with other elements of the institutional complex—academic ideas and organizational dynamics—to channel campus ambitions and preserve elements of diversity. The new conditions of the 1970s further demonstrated the relationship between competition and diversity while testing the durability of initiatives launched in years when growth was easy. With resources now more constrained, universities were compelled to craft their strategies of change more carefully and pay closer attention to their particular strengths and characteristics. Still, campus priorities in the decade following the golden age revealed the extent to which institutional ambitions tend to take precedence over educational ideas. Efforts to pursue the most important reform proposals of the late 1960s and early 1970s were repeatedly subordinated to the protection of institutional interests in the face of new and challenging competitive pressures. In the closing section of Chapter 2, we considered the forces that produced change among universities in the golden age as understood by commentators at the end of the period. These accounts stressed two phenomena: the increased demands of society for academic services and the enlarged power of the academic professions. In the face of these nonacademic and extrainstitutional pressures, it was widely argued, individual universities were largely reactive, more carried by currents they could not control than aggressive in shaping their own futures. The postwar histories of universities in Massachusetts, as we have encountered them in the last four chapters, demonstrated the importance of macrolevel causes of institutional change but also focused attention on the initiative exercised by campus leaders within an academic marketplace still dominated by interinstitutional competition.

Transformation of the Urban University: Boston University, Boston College, and Northeastern, 1945–1972

Boston’s three local, private, teaching and service-oriented, commuter universities—Boston University, Boston College, and Northeastern, classic urban universities in the years before World War II—undertook to change themselves in fundamental ways during the golden age. B.U., reaching back to its nineteenth-century origins, sought to re-create itself as a comprehensive regional and national university. Boston College, drawing on the ancient academic traditions of the Society of Jesus, worked to become the nation’s top Jesuit university and a leading force in Catholic intellectual and professional life. Northeastern, with its philosophical roots in service to the low-income population and business community of Boston, tried to balance its historic concerns with a new impulse toward national prominence in cooperative education. All three invested heavily in graduate education and research, and B.U. and B.C., in upgrading their undergraduate student bodies, shed their identities as local, service-oriented campuses. At the end of the period, only N.U. remained centrally committed to the functions of an urban university, though it, too, had taken steps to reduce its emphasis on local service. Boston’s three nonelite, private universities were hit hard by World War II, but campus leaders were conscious of predictions that the return of peace would bring a new period of expansion. By the middle of the war, Presidents Marsh of B.U. and Ell of Northeastern and the provincial Jesuit hierarchy that governed B.C., frustrated by fifteen difficult years, were turning their attention to postwar opportunities. Throughout the war, Marsh later wrote, “we kept getting ready” to “jump quickly” after the fighting stopped. Ell was equally eager. “When the war is over,” he wrote in 1943, “Northeastern will be prepared.” The senior president among the universities of Massachusetts, B.U.’s Marsh was in his middle sixties during World War II and was determined to make concrete progress toward his institutional goals in the short period in office remaining to him. Since his appointment in 1926, he had emphasized three aspects of B.U.: its religious heritage as a non-sectarian, Methodist university with a strong School of Theology; its public-service role as a diversified educational resource for the Boston area; and its academic possibilities as one of the nation’s largest universities with a full range of graduate and professional programs.

Academic Development and Social Change: Higher Education in Massachusetts before 1945

In October 1948, James B. Conant, president of Harvard, journeyed from Cambridge across the Charles River to address the fiftieth anniversary convocation of Northeastern University. Though the ceremonies on N.U.’s new Hungtington Avenue campus occurred only two miles from Conant’s offices in Harvard Yard, in academic terms the two settings could not have been separated by a greater distance. Harvard was the nation’s richest and most distinguished institution of higher education, the alma mater of generations of regional and national leaders in government, business, and academia. Northeastern, only recently cut loose from the Y.M.C.A., still struggling to obtain proper facilities, was an obscure, local school offering practical training to working-class students. Indeed, Conant’s appearance at Northeastern eloquently symbolized the variations that existed among institutions that called themselves “universities” in the United States at the end of World War II, and Harvard’s president made these differences the subject of his talk, which he titled “Diversity in American Education.” Conant’s speech was a hymn to institutional variety as an academic characteristic particularly appropriate for a democracy. “There would be a contradiction in terms,” Conant said, “if we had an American system,” in the sense of an organization “logically constructed, well-integrated ... and administered from the top down” like those of continental Europe. The opportunity of individuals from any background to better their positions in this country’s “fluid and free society” would be inhibited by centralization. For Conant, the colleges and universities of Massachusetts illustrated democratic higher education at its best. “We have here in this section of New England,” he observed,...a number of academic organizations designed to provide educational facilities for young men and women... These institutions are diverse in their history and their specific objectives and cover a wide spectrum of educational opportunity. Between us there are but few gaps in the type of advanced instruction we offer. We each have our own mission.. . Taken as a whole [we] represent as diversified a program of post-high school education as can be found in the United States. In celebrating the variability of the nation’s universities, Conant found an ideal way to narrow the embarrassing difference in status between himself and his hosts.