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…

Of the classic documents addressing issues in higher education, few have provoked as much commentary as the Yale Report of 1828--and perhaps fewer still have been subject to such undeserved infamy. Today, the document requires a thorough new reading. Since the late 1960s historians of higher education have been trying to overturn the traditional…

In 1979, fourteen years after publishing his landmark work, "The Emergence of the American University," Laurence R. Veysey wrote a forward-looking article for the "American Quarterly" titled "The Autonomy of American History Reconsidered." In his article, Veysey suggested that the time had come to rewrite American…

In this paper, the author examines the content of Laurence Veysey's subsequent scholarship--centered upon his career-long fascination with the "price structure" of American society and institutions. Veysey's first scholarly volume after The Emergence of the American University was Law and Resistance: American Attitudes toward Authority (1970).…

This conversation begins with two observations: first, the professional organizations--conferences and journals--need to play more self-conscious, activist roles in shaping scholarly canons. Second, whatever canon now presides over American higher educational history is an extremely tolerant one. So much of current scholarship seems to arise out…