This article traces the rise of anxiety among American high school and college students since the late 1950s, with particular focus on the decades before 2000. Evidence for rates of change comes from anxiety tests administered during the period, as well as a variety of psychological studies. The article also takes up the issue of causation,…

This article argues that the now-widespread US practice of residency-based tuition differentials for public higher education institutions is a twentieth-century form of higher education exceptionalism carved out in law and state policy, contradicting otherwise cherished and protected rights of free movement. This contradiction has been enabled in…

In this year's Presidential Address, historian Derrick P. Alridge discusses his current research project, Teachers in the Movement: Pedagogy, Activism, and Freedom. The project builds on recent literature about teachers as activists between 1950 and 1980 and explores how and what secondary and postsecondary teachers taught. Focusing on teachers in…

Historical analyses of 1960s university campus activism have focused on activities related to the civil rights movement, Free Speech Movement, and opposition to the Vietnam War. This study supplements the historiography of civil disobedience and political activity on college campuses during that tumultuous era with an account of the initiation of…

The college accreditation movement that arose at the turn of the twentieth century had an important antecedent in the Society for the Promotion of Collegiate and Theological Education at the West. Founded in 1843, this nondenominational philanthropy aspired to direct the development of higher education by dispersing eastern funds to Protestant…

This article focuses on historical admissions policies and offers a more nuanced and more substantial treatment of the relationship between Populism and higher education. Prior accounts of admissions in the late nineteenth century have sensibly focused upon the tension between secondary school leaders who were mindful of their multiple…

Numerous faculty members at the University of Michigan and institutions across the nation found themselves victims of hysteria and anti-German extremism during World War I. Through an examination of restrictions on speech before American entry into the war, investigations into the loyalty of more than a dozen educators, and considerations of the…

At the moment of its founding in 1911, Connecticut College for Women exhibited a curricular tension between an emphasis on the liberal arts, which mirrored the elite men's and women's colleges of the day, and vocational aspects, which made it a different type of women's college, one designed to prepare women for the kind of lives they would lead…

Were colleges obliged to address the dilemmas faced by the many first- and second-generation Americans who enrolled after World War I? No, replied many administrators who espoused exclusion or assimilation, or who expressed indifference. These attitudes meant that many students would never learn to navigate the turbulent waters of campus social…

Even before the legal integration of the Parisian faculties into the single entity of the "Universite de Paris" in 1896, the law faculty stood out as the most recalcitrant and resistant to the spirit of reform. In the years that followed, far from embodying republican ideals, it became known as a site of anti-republican ideological…