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 article argues that the "airlift" language often used to describe the eight hundred Kenyan students who attended US and Canadian universities between 1959 and 1963 is misleading. It assumes that the students were being plucked out of substandard education, yet these youth had received some of the most rigorous education in the…

As scholars of higher education regularly point out, American universities face a fundamental tension between access and exclusion. On the one hand, as publicly supported institutions operating in a democracy, they are charged with promoting social mobility and sharing knowledge that can improve society. On the other, they are tasked with…

This article explores the role of university placement offices in shaping a twentieth-century corporate elite. While studies of the "corporatization" of the university focus on developments after the 1970s, the rise of the modern university and corporate economy were inextricably linked by the early twentieth century. Scholars of this…