America's sprawling system of colleges and universities has been built on the ruins of war. After the American Revolution the cash-strapped central government sold land grants to raise revenue and build colleges and schools in newly conquered lands. During the Civil War, the federal government built on this earlier precedent when it passed the…

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…

The National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958 was the first federal investment in low-interest student loans and became a precedent for expansion of student loans in the Higher Education Act of 1965. In its controversial loyalty provisions, the NDEA required loan recipients to affirm loyalty to the U.S. government. Between 1958 and 1962,…

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…

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…

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…