By the mid-eighteenth century, when the first university appeared in Russia, many European nations could boast of long and glorious university traditions. But Russia, with its poorly developed system of elementary and secondary education, lagged behind other European countries and seemed destined for a long spell of second-tier performance. Yet by…

When universities began in the Middle Ages, Pope Gregory IX described them as "wisdom's special workshop." He could not have foreseen how far these institutions would travel and develop. Tracing the eight-hundred-year evolution of the elite research university from its roots in medieval Europe to its remarkable incarnation today,…

This book tracks the dramatic outcomes of the federal government's growing involvement in higher education between World War I and the 1970s, and the conservative backlash against that involvement from the 1980s onward. Using cutting-edge analysis, Christopher Loss recovers higher education's central importance to the larger social and political…