While educating international students is celebrated as a means of promoting mutual understanding among nations, American higher education has always been entangled with geopolitics. This essay focuses on Tang Tsou, the Chinese scholar who came to the United States as a student in 1941, eventually becoming the nation's leading China expert and…

Sidney Hook set the terms of debate on Communism, higher education, and academic freedom in the postwar United States. His view that Communists lacked the independence necessary for teaching and research--a view forged in the heated debates of New York City's radical left in the 1930s--provided the rationale for firing Communist professors across…

Christine Ladd-Franklin spent the first forty years of her life becoming one of the best-educated women in nineteenth-century America. She spent the rest of her life devising fellowship programs designed to enable educated women to have the same opportunities as men in their academic careers. The difficulty women had in becoming professors had a…

In August 1945, Imperial Japan surrendered to the Allied Powers. From September 1945 to April 1952, the United States occupied the defeated country. Douglas MacArthur, an American army general and the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), attempted to transform Japanese society from an authoritarian regime into a budding democracy.…

The author introduces William Barton Rogers, conceptual founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who pursued two interrelated careers in nineteenth-century America: one centered on his activities in science and the other on his higher educational reform efforts. This essay explores one theme in Rogers' scientific and educational…