This essay recontextualizes the Yale Report of 1828, arguing that the report's advocacy for classical liberal education should be understood alongside the racial concerns of its authors, some of whom were well-known colonizationists who viewed African American education as a threat to New Haven's social and economic stability. The Yale Report's…

While a number of recent studies highlight John Stuart Mill's role as a "teacher of the people," his reflections upon the political significance of higher education have received relatively little attention. I argue that Mill's 1867 St. Andrews Address was both a defense of liberal education against influential arguments for religion-…

This essay examines the history of what is commonly called the town-gown relationship in American college towns in the six decades after the Second World War. A time of considerable expansion of higher education enrollment and function, the period also marks an increasing detachment of higher education institutions from their local communities.…

Nearly 70 percent of American students enroll in postsecondary education immediately after graduating high school. Yet college and university completion rates remain highly disparate across social and economic groups. White students in the US are 20 percent more likely than Black and Latino students to graduate, and students from high-income…

As colleges and universities respond to the COVID-19 outbreak, many in the media call it "unprecedented." This is not the first time that institutions of higher education have had to respond to an epidemic, however. A historical review of college and university reactions to illnesses such as yellow fever and the 1918 influenza pandemic…

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…

The twenty-first century has seen a surge in scholarship on Latino educational history and a new nonbinary umbrella term, Latinx, that a younger generation prefers. Many of historian Victoria-María MacDonald's astute observations in 2001 presaged the growth of the field. Focus has increased on Spanish-surnamed teachers and discussions have grown…

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…