The Problems and Potential of Higher Education in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Urban America

The 1979 Academy Award–winning film Breaking Away depicts rising tensions between a group of recently graduated local high school boys and students attending Indiana University (IU) in Bloomington, Indiana. The university students refer to the locals throughout the movie, at times derisively, as “cutters,” a term derived from the main occupation of stonecutting for most of the men in town. During one pivotal scene, Dave Stohler (the main character played by Dennis Christopher) and his father Ray (portrayed by Paul Dooley) walk through IU’s main campus. Ray, who long ago left the limestone quarry to open a used-car sales lot, tells his son with a slight air of pride, “I cut the stone for this building.” “You did?” Dave asks somewhat incredulously. “Yup. I was one fine stone cutter; Mike’s dad, Moocher’s, Cyril’s, all of us,” Ray replies while referring to the fathers of Dave’s closest friends. Ray continues,

The thing of it was, I loved it. I was young, and slim, and strong. I was damn proud of my work. And the buildings went up. When they were finished, the damnedest thing happened. It was like the buildings was too good for us. Nobody told us that. It just felt uncomfortable, that’s all. Even now I’d like to be able to stroll through the campus and look at the limestone, but I’d just feel out of place. ¹

Ray Stohler’s sense of alienation borders on betrayal. He implies that the local institution of higher learning owed something not only to the community that surrounded it but most especially to the people who literally built it. The university, however, denied them access to its hallowed halls and treated them as second-class citizens.

But is Ray Stohler’s sense of betrayal justified? Are colleges and universities obliged to serve students and other residents of the towns and cities where they are located? In what ways should colleges and universities serve them? What kinds of relationships between colleges and universities and their surrounding communities should exist? And how should local residents respond to the universities in their midst when they feel marginalized by those institutions? The works under current consideration address these and related questions by charting the history of urban higher education to demonstrate the significant role colleges and universities have played in defining their relationships with local populations while simultaneously redefining the spatial organization of the towns and cities in which they reside. In sum, these works encompass the wide swathe of higher education, which includes public and private colleges and universities, religiously affiliated and nonsectarian institutions, two-year and four-year degree-granting schools, and historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and predominantly white institutions (PWIs) Some of these works take a long view of American higher education to encompass its connection to nineteenth-century history, while others particularly emphasize developments from the post–World War II era and into the twenty-first century. In general, these authors introduce readers to the leaders whose decisions fundamentally altered urban landscapes, public policy, and educational practice through their political maneuverings, economic persuasion, and social relationships.

These authors argue for the central role colleges and universities have played in the development of urban America by asking new questions of old sources in some cases and by asking old questions of new sources in others. In so doing, they continue the scholarly pursuits Fredrick Rudolph first initiated with the publication of The American College and University: A History in 1962. Rudolph was writing during the early years of educational history’s development as a serious and legitimate subject of historical research, writing within the emerging field of American educational history. From the outset, however, educational historians mainly focused their attention on K-through 12 public school systems as bureaucracies, highlighting limited geographical locales in narrow chorological eras, namely, New England and the eastern United States during the early republic and nineteenth century. ² As such, early histories of higher education did not fit easily into established modes of scholarly analysis of the history of American education. Rudolph and other contemporaries thus attempted to establish the “relevance of academia to the central political history of the society as the twentieth century advanced.” ³ In addition, these authors also meet the challenge educational historian John Thelin posed more recently. “The best way for people who analyze higher education . . . to acquire this sense of discovery and fascination with the complexities of their institutional past,” avers Thelin, “is to ‘get dirty with data,’ to work with unwieldy sources and disparate materials in archives and files [in order to potentially] show how historical analysis of higher education may be transferred from a passive spectator sport into an active intellectual pursuit.” ⁴ Finally, these authors offer historians and others new means for understanding how American cities grew and developed throughout the twentieth century, as well as provide new insights into the problems and potential their development presented to American towns and cities and the disparate communities that have surrounded them by examining urban history through the lens of colleges and universities. As such, these works complement the field of K-through-12 educational history in urban studies, which has been characterized by recurring themes, modes of analysis, and topics of study, but remains vibrant nonetheless as scholars provide new understandings of previously understudied topics through novel analytical frameworks and areas for exploration. ⁵

Steven J. Diner’s Universities and their Cities provides a useful overview of the issues all of the books under consideration examine to some degree or another. Diner offers a broad view of the history of higher education and its role in the shaping of urban America from the mid-nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, sweeping across the country to address the central questions of the relationships between higher education and the cities where they reside.

Diner, a University Professor at Rutgers University–Newark, has been exploring topics of this nature throughout his career and applied his research interests to his other professional endeavors, such as serving as chancellor at Rutgers–Newark from 2002 to 2011 and as a previous president of the Coalitions of Urban and Metropolitan Universities. In this current volume, Diner examines continuities and changes in the perceptions of the term “urban university” or “urban college.” In so doing, Diner assumes a multidimensional outlook on the concept of urban, stating, “This study is about universities located in cities and is not limited to institutions that meet some set of criteria to be defined as ‘urban’” (p. ix). As such, Diner situates his sweeping study across six chorological periods and includes private and public institutions, Catholic schools, local municipal colleges, and land grant colleges.

Diner’s broad perspective allows his analytical themes to emerge. The first is the tension between rural and city localities. Related to this are the class tensions demonstrated in the attitudes of elites that saw higher education as a civilizing endeavor. A third is the role of race within those tense relations as local community residents resisted university’s efforts to expand their physical presence in the name of educational and civic improvement.

The first chronological period of this history witnessed the evolution of “The Collegiate Ideal and Nineteenth-Century Cities” (Chapter 1). Urban and rural identities emerged at this time as not only fundamental characteristics but also stark contrasts. Leaders of both private and public colleges and universities believed that their institutions needed to be based in pastoral settings to offset the perceived corrupting influences of the cities, an idea that manifested in land grant colleges formed by the Morrill Act of 1862 and expanded by the Hatch Act of 1887. Over time, however, higher educational leaders reconceptualized their institutional missions and how to fulfill them, expanding the number of academic programs and degrees, particularly in the professions such as medicine and law. Almost simultaneously, nineteen-century cities developed as transformative economic engines. Educational and civic leaders recognized the mutual advantages of having colleges and universities located in urban settings. With the nineteenth-century collegiate ideal confronting changing urban contexts, higher educational institutions faced new realities at the start of the twentieth century (p. 17).

The “Urban Realty” that emerged from 1900 to 1945, which Diner explores in Chapter 2, was unavoidable for colleges and universities that increasingly sought to found new sites of higher learning closer to if not within the borders of America’s growing cities. Having ingratiated themselves into the urban landscape, colleges and universities adopted new functions and formed new identities as they served a greater number of students, particularly commuter students, from increasingly divergent backgrounds. Economic perceptions drove these changes as urban planners, reformers, and others “sought to decentralize cities rather than simply to restrict their growth. . . . And the growth of urban higher educational institutions began the process by which urbanization transformed all of American higher education” from the Progressive Era to the New Deal (p. 20).

Diner explores “Postwar Higher Education and the Needs of Cities” in Chapter 3 to reveal how the period from 1945 to 1963 saw continued diversification of student populations mingling with higher educational leaders’ anxieties to “define what it meant to be an urban university’ and how the mission of the urban institutions could transform both American higher education and American cities” (pp. 40, 44). Increasingly, this meant colleges and universities would leverage their myriad expertise and resources to address the growing problems of the cities. Urban studies programs emerged to contribute to urban renewal programs. Such initiative, however, translated mostly into spatial expansion of urban universities’ campus, often at the expense of long-time residents and financed by federal, state, and local municipalities’ investments augmented by private-foundation funding.

Diner treats the next period of his analysis across two chapters. “Response to the Urban Crisis” (Chapter 4) documents how earlier higher education leaders’ notion of colleges and universities as bulwarks against cities’ corrupting influence gave way to expanding populations composed of commuter students from immigrant families between 1964 and 1980. Open enrollment programs aimed to allow greater access to higher education for low-income and minority students, while leaders strove to improve their working relationships with diverse ethnic, racial, and religious populations—efforts criticized from within and from outside of higher education. “Although universities in cities had led the nation on democratization of higher education, the image of many urban public institutions declined due to racism and anti-urbanization, now focused on city slums and ghettos” (pp. 87, 91). Subsequently, universities between 1964 and 1980 worked ever closer with state and federal governments to expand their campuses as part of urban renewal and redevelopment programs, often at the expense of and despite the ever-increasing resistance from local, often poor and minority, communities displaced by urban renewal programs. Urban renewal efforts at the University of Pennsylvania, for example, fundamentally altered the racial and socioeconomic composition of the school’s West Philadelphia environs while transforming it into an elite research institution (p. 105).

Diner situates “The Legacy of the Urban Crisis and the Ever-Changing City” between 1981 and 2016 (Chapter 6). Continued community engagement (renamed “service learning” students conducted for course credit), scholarship and research about urban problems, efforts to improve community relations, government investment, and ongoing city improvements leading to gentrification all characterized this period. Despite higher educational leaders’ new enthusiasm for cities and engaged learning these initiatives demonstrated, the notion that to be an “urban university” meant enrolling low-income, minority, and commuter students persisted (p. 130).

Diner concludes that “The history of American higher education has been shaped by cities but also by the historical anti-urbanism of American society and its colleges and universities.” Meanwhile, higher educational institutions’ own history of anti-urbanization contrasts with their history of democratizing higher education in urban areas, democratization that has offered more students greater access to resources and more opportunities to engage in scholarship and service than other urban institutions or rural colleges and universities. “There is no question, however,” Diner declares, “that anti-urbanism profoundly shaped higher education in cities, and that higher education in cities profoundly shaped contemporary American higher education” (p. 136.)

LaDale C. Winling’s Building the Ivory Tower nicely complements Diner’s sweeping chronological and thematic survey of American higher education. Across five accessible chapters employing a case-study approach, as well as a clear and concise introduction and epilogue, Winling successfully demonstrates how “American universities were both actors and stages in twentieth-century urban transformations [and] became the prime movers of urban development in the second half of the twentieth century” (pp. 12, 13). Winling argues that higher education’s combined economic and spatial visions created reciprocal transformations; his five cases and the periods they represent are Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana during the Progressive Era which exemplified the patterns of urban economic development that higher education replicated in later times; the University of Texas at Austin that promoted metropolitan growth while reinforcing racial segregation during the New Deal era; the University of Chicago that spearheaded urban renewal during the World War II era; the University of California during the postwar era of higher educational expansion; and Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with each exploiting market forces in response to growing class tensions during the 1970s and 1980s.

Winling reveals how the interdependent relationships between these institutions and their environs deepened as both the institutions and their cities increasingly shared overlapping economic, political, and social interests. Whereas Diner suggests that the defining qualities of colleges and universities emerged from an urban-versus-rural tension, Winling demonstrates that the relationships between urban universities their surrounding communities—which were predominantly Black and working class—defined higher educational institutions of the late 1950s and beyond. “Universities were the classic American institution of the twentieth century,” Winling asserts, “As they imposed their spatial ideologies on their local settings, they became the prime movers of urban development in the second half of the twentieth century” (p. 13).

Whereas Diner’s exploration of the history of urban universities is broad and sweeping and Winling’s case study approach focuses on individual institutions’ approaches toward their relationships with their surrounding communities, John L Puckett and Mark Frazier Lloyd’s Becoming Penn provides readers an up-close-and-personal view of one urban university’s expansion during the last half of the twentieth century, constructing an image of a university more concerned about improving its marketplace advantage based on prestige and reputation than about fulfilling its core educational mission. In this way, the University of Pennsylvania embodies characteristics that Diner suggests all universities possess, shares the ambitions of the schools Winling analyzes, and utilizes all available means in fulfilling those ambitions.

Puckett and Lloyd argue that Penn’s history exemplifies the impact of postwar urban renewal not only in expanding urban universities but also its critical role in the remaking of postwar American cities as private and public institutions of higher education shared a history of “periodic economic entrenchment, campus labor conflicts, and more recently, corporatization” (p. 1). Indeed, anyone who has observed changes in higher education during the past forty years cannot help but be struck by the integration of ideas, jargon, and practices of private sector corporations into the practices of colleges and universities. Becoming Penn provides readers an intimate look into how one urban university’s hyper-corporatization transformed it from being a local higher education institution to a top-tiered research organization.

Despite being a member of the Ivy League, the University of Pennsylvania historically was not always considered among the nation’s elite institutions of higher learning. That changed during a decades-long process that Puckett and Lloyd have painstakingly researched and detailed. In addition to mining official institutional records, as one would expect from a study like this, Puckett and Lloyd also have extrapolated evidence from private documents like University President Sheldon Hackney’s diary, as well as internal publications aimed at particular university constituencies, such as the professional staff and faculty newsletter, The Almanac; the Penn Gazette, which serves not only as the alumni magazine but also a university newsmagazine; and the independently published student newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian. The result of this detailed research is a fascinating examination of the ever-expanding social, political, and economic capital of an urban higher educational institution.

Puckett and Lloyd structure their analysis around four of Penn’s past-presidents, characterizing each by the role he or she played in transforming Penn into the university it is today. Gaylord P. Harnwell, Penn’s fourth president from 1953 to 1970, was “The Builder.” Under Harnwell, “Penn entered a fierce, unprecedented competition for wealth, power, and prestige among the nation’s postwar research universities” (p. 25.) Harnwell’s early efforts aimed to separate the University from the negative characteristics associated with West Philadelphia, such as heavy street traffic, noisy public transit, and questionable business enterprises. Penn’s “Great Expansion” of its campus into western and northern areas was enabled by “the organizational structure of urban renewal in Philadelphia, the instruments of expansion made available to the University from city, state, and federal governments, and their applications in West Philadelphia” (pp. 25, 31).

By the 1960s, however, Penn’s expansionist ambitions drew protest from students, faculty, and community activists. While campus-based protests did not compare with some of the more colorful or violent events of the time on other campuses, a 1969 student sit-in of College Hall (home to the Office of the President) and other protest activities essentially halted Penn’s Great Expansion, which led to a decades-long period of quiescence in the physical growth and spatial integration of Penn’s campus.

Penn’s next phase of growth was not physical, but intellectual. Martin Meyerson, Penn’s president from 1970 to 1981, was “The Visionary,” who dreamed of “One University” that would replace Penn’s academic factionalism with an intellectually integrated institution that could join the ranks of the world’s top research organizations (p. 143). Traditional views of academics’ roles and functions, financial crises, and rising social tensions combined during this time, challenging Meyerson’s vision of Penn‘s future.

Puckett and Lloyd describe Sheldon Hackney’s presidency from 1981 to 1993 as “tumultuous.” Conflicts over race and gender issues, questions of free speech and academic freedom, and increasing crime in West Philadelphia and nearby neighborhoods marked the Hackney era. Yet, as “The Conciliator,” Hackney worked to improve Penn’s relationships with its surrounding communities, which had eroded since the University’s urban renewal programs of the 1950s and 1960s. Under a policy of reconciliation, Hackney established the Center for Community Partnerships (today’s Netter Center) as a mediating site to connect Penn faculty, students, and resources to West Philadelphia residents, community organizations, and, most especially, public schools. As such, Hackney moved Penn closer to Meyerson’s vision of One University and laid for his successors the groundwork for the next phase of growth of Penn becoming what it is today (pp. 177-178). Indeed, Puckett and Lloyd’s portrayal of Hackney cuts a an almost sympathetic figure as Hackney’s contributions to Penn are overshadowed by crises beyond his control and the subsequent responses to them—most notably, incidences of sexual assault, sexual harassment, and alcohol abuse and hazing in fraternities; the infamous “water buffalo” incident and other racial conflicts; and the theft of an entire run of The Daily Pennsylvanian raising questions of free speech protections on campus.

Judith Rodin, Hackney’s successor and Penn’s first female president, began her tenure in in 1993. She was “The Implementer,” whom Puckett and Lloyd characterize as

embody[ing] some of the strengths of her predecessors in College Hall—in a sense, she was a builder, a conciliator, and a visionary. On the one hand, her contributions in each of these domains built on established foundations and moved in directions charted by her predecessors, maintaining the continuity in the University’s history in the second half of the last century. On the other hand, her presidency effected a transformation of the Penn campus and its surroundings. By this we mean that Rodin greatly accelerated Penn’s evolution to the stature of a top-tier American university. (p. 250, original emphasis)

Given Penn’s standing as a private institution and its ranking among Ivy League schools, the story of its rise to becoming the elite and prestigious institution that it is today shares more with the University of Chicago and Harvard University than it does with Ball State University, UT Austin, or UC Berkeley as examined by Winling. Were it not for their public nature, state-supported higher education institutions might behave more like their privately run peers, virtually unfettered by public funding or oversight. Yet, given the combination of private foundation donations with political complicity, even public universities behaved more like private entities during the postwar era more than as institutions under public control. Perhaps the most significant lesson of the history of these schools is a strident argument for public involvement in higher education whenever and wherever possible.

While the authors under review here explore the policies that higher educational institutions pursued to advance their economic self-interest by expanding their spatial presence in local communities, which thus shaped twentieth-century urban development, other internal practices similarly altered the contours of American higher education with similarly detrimental outcomes for low-income and minority populations. Unwelcome Guests charts the history of colleges and universities’ admission policies and practices—challenges that they faced and changes that they made. Harold Wechsler (1946-2017) and Steven Diner appear as the volume’s co-authors. The book, however, represents the final manuscript Wechsler completed before his untimely passing. Diner explains in his brief “Preface” that Robert Wechsler, Harold’s brother, and Greg Britton of the John Hopkins University Press approached Diner to reorganize the massive original manuscript into a publishable single volume. The result is a very readable and accessible monograph of five chapters, each focusing on a particular student population or theme: African Americans, ethnic minorities, urban commuter students, minority students’ on-campus experiences, and changing admission policies and practices. Wechsler and Diner center their analysis on questions of how mainstream U.S. colleges and universities have viewed the race, religion, and ethnicity of prospective students since the nineteenth century and the ways in which those views affected students’ colleges experiences, asserting that such an examination “can help us recognize and understand the central role of race in the history of US higher education and how that history has brought about efforts today to use race as a means of overcoming the legacy of discrimination” (pp. 1-2).

Given the behaviors of colleges and universities in their dealings with low-income and minority communities in their immediate environs, no one should be surprised by the internal actions of those same institutions as they confronted ever-increasing local and national demands for access from those same communities that Unwelcome Guests exposes. Few colleges and universities, for example, admitted Black students during the mid-nineteenth century. Wechsler and Diner describe how schools like Oneida Institute, New York Central College, and Oberlin College did not share their peer institutions’ views of Black students and challenged the intolerance of their neighboring communities and institutional constituencies. School leaders often faced resistance to such practices, resistance that took a toll on their institutions’ financial footings. Nevertheless, their efforts inspired other institutions’ racial integration efforts (pp. 7, 12). After the Civil War and Reconstruction, national-level debates emerged over the virtues of racially coeducational schools versus all-Black colleges based in the fear that “[e]xcluding whites from Black colleges allowed white colleges to exclude Black people. . . . Donors’ insistence, not white attempts to enroll, led to most debates” (p. 22).

Conditions did not improve by the turn of the twentieth century as Black students attended segregated colleges in the south, a few Black institutions in the north, or predominately white northern colleges. This latter group, however, was small as most northern colleges tried to avoid offending southern students, particularly in the face of increased southern Black migration. Despite intensified “stay away” messages from the institutions themselves coupled with threats to Black students’ personal safety, “many Black students refused to self-select away from these schools” (p. 39).

The picture for ethnic Americans was only slightly better than for African American students. Relying on data from the 1907 Congressional Dillingham Commission’s report, “Children of Immigrants in Schools,” Wechsler and Diner reveal the conditions for first- and second-generation Czech, Irish, Italian, Polish, and Jewish students, showing the role of religion, location, and gender each played in student choice and school admission with anti-Catholic sentiment driving students to denominational schools, ethnic immigrants over-represented in urban colleges, and immigrant sons attending at higher rates than immigrant daughters (pp. 40-45). Jewish students faced both anti-Semitism in the admission process with only a few select schools admitting a handful of Jewish students and inter-community concerns that attending non-Jewish denominational schools or public state schools threatened their religious welfare and family life (pp. 45-47).

Hispanic and Asian American students receive treatment in this same chapter on “Ethnic Americans” rather than receiving dedicated chapters of their own. The authors acknowledge how ethnicity, national origin, and class subdivide, and thus complicate, the historical narratives of these students. As a result, Wechsler and Diner focus mainly on Cuban Americans in Florida and Mexican Americans in the Southwest, as well as Japanese and Chinese students in California, with only passing references to students of Korean or Filipino backgrounds. Wechsler and Diner conclude that all immigrant groups—European and non-European—experienced discrimination, particularly on campus, noting white Americans’ inability to distinguish between immigrants and U.S.-born non-whites, stating further, “When this misidentification occurred on campus, it both confounded and illuminated the experience of first- and second-generation Americans.” The result was stress and anger among ethnic students no matter their nativity. (p. 65).

Gesturing toward Diner’s other work considered here, Wechsler and Diner consider the “Streetcar College” as students’ racial and ethnic backgrounds at times mingled with their geographic locations in the minds of higher education leaders worried about the composition of their student bodies. “Until the end of World War II, most elites and higher education leaders viewed commuter institutions in cities skeptically not only because of their view that college education should occur in rural areas to build character in students,” they write, “but also because cities were increasingly populated by immigrants, Black people, and other ethnic and religious minorities” (pp. 66-67). By the early twentieth century, however, streetcar colleges mostly served first-and second-generation white Americans and African American students (p. 73). Indeed, the authors emphasize that half of all college students commuted in the years before World War II.

Wechsler and Diner discuss the growth of higher educational institutions in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey to demonstrate the ongoing challenges schools confronted. The University of Buffalo, New York University, Temple University, the University of Pittsburgh, and Rutgers University at Newark all strove to serve growing populations while trying to address financial concerns and accreditation demands. Debate at higher educational institutions like these stemmed from these schools’ focus on their student body compositions with officials arguing that streetcar colleges serve local communities and provide economic mobility to needy, albeit not the neediest, students. “[T]he real issue confronting urban colleges,” they conclude, “was their concern over the racial and ethnic makeup of their students” (p. 104).

Whether or not students from underrepresented racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds commuted or lived on campus at either urban or rural schools, they confronted varying degrees of hostility from faculty and other students upon arrival. While institutional leaders strove for social equity, faculties’ sentiments ranged from benign neglect of any racial problems to demonstrative hostility. “Picture what a minority student might have experienced in a 1920s classroom,” Wechsler and Diner write, “when psychologists taught theories of the inherent inferiority of African Americans and other races or when sociologists questioned whether different racial and ethnic groups could coexist” (pp. 105-106). Minority students encountered still greater opposition to their participation in extracurricular activities and student organizations, athletics, fraternities and sororities, and on-campus housing. Students responded by involving themselves with off-campus institutions like churches, participating in individual athletic activities instead of team sports, chartering new race- or religious-based fraternal organizations, challenging existing organizations’ discriminatory policies and practices, or simply enduring discriminatory housing practices.

Minority students’ on-campus experiences began to change during the post–World War II era, however, as increasing social pressures compelled institutions to lower barriers to minority students’ admission and led to legislative and judicial actions challenging segregation and other forms of discrimination. “Mea culpas began as laws changed, as alumni from minority groups gained influence, and as philanthropists took interest,” the authors observe, stating, “The confessions continue today” (p. 125).

The post–World War II era was one of intense debate about race and ethnic considerations in student admission practices and greater discussions about the benefits and liabilities over racially integrated colleges and universities. Wechsler and Diner examine three strategies that integrationists employed during this time: a focus on teaching “tolerance” at both the secondary and higher educational levels, challenging racial discrimination and segregation in the courts while lobbing for antidiscrimination and anti-segregation legislation at the state and federal levels, and students’ continued “campus-based direct action” (pp. 126-127). Such strategies took many forms or were otherwise complemented by other social and academic developments. The Halls of Ivy, a popular radio serial, addressed themes of tolerance among the student body, for example, while the impact of racial and ethnic inequalities in sociological studies like Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944) drew national attention. Academic studies also began playing roles to varying degrees in federal judicial decisions such as Westminster v. Mendez (1947) and the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board (1954) ruling. Renewed interest in ending discrimination and segregation in education gained further momentum also with the report of President Harry Truman’s Commission on Higher Education (1947) which noted numerous barriers to college access for women and ethnic and racial minorities, with some Commission members calling for greater access for these student population. Direct action efforts against segregation and discrimination on campus, meanwhile, often occurred alongside civil rights demonstrations against sites of public accommodation (pp. 127-137).

By the 1970s and 1980s, these strategies resulted in a lowering of the barriers to higher education that students from ethnic and racial minorities, students from religious minorities, and women faced throughout most of the twentieth century. The degree of success varied between public and private universities and between religious and non-sectarian institutions, and the effects of these different successes continue to reverberate for students and the schools they attend through our own time. As Wechsler and Diner observe, colleges and universities’ use of race and ethnicity in admission decisions throughout the twentieth century has raised legal challenges and ethical questions. Their responses to students’ and other constituencies’ demands for greater inclusion throughout the twentieth century and into our own time have been limited in their effect and results. Wechsler and Diner conclude that while the attention colleges and universities pay to minority students has changed over time, inequalities within higher education persist. “When and how,” they ask, “will the many former ‘outsiders,’ whose stories are told here attain equal seats at the table?” (pp. 159-160).

While the six authors considered so far provide scholars useful examinations of the economic, social, and political evolutions of individual urban universities and their cities, Lee Benson, Ira Harkavy, John Puckett, Mather Hartley, Rita A Hodges, Francis E Johnston, and Joann Weeks’s Knowledge for Social Change guide readers through the philosophical influences of higher education while demonstrating what those philosophies can accomplish when put into practice. In short, Benson et al. provide a blueprint for what research universities can achieve when implementing ideas beyond the economics and politics of higher education’s hyper-corporatization that is nothing short of inspiring.

Drawing upon the ideas of the two philosophers named in the book’s sub-title, Benson et al. boldly claim their goal

to help develop a neo-Baconian movement to produce the knowledge needed to implement John Dewey’s powerful theory that participatory democracy is the best form of human society—the “organic” form of society capable of realizing the “Good Life” for all human beings. (p. xii)

Colleges and universities can accomplish this through engaged neighborly relationships with their local community partners.

The authors of Knowledge for Social Change use their own past affiliations with the University of Pennsylvania’s Netter Center for Community Partnerships as a case study of the kinds of relationships they advocate. Benson et al. thus counterbalance both Diner and Winling’s arguments for colleges and universities’ roles in altering people and places, respectively, by positing that those same institutions can change society for the better and can improve the lives of people working alongside academics, who then can transform their own institutions (p. xiii).

Benson et al. organize their book into two parts. The first is an essential tour of the great thinkers and philosophies that have inspired the authors, beginning with Francis Bacon and ending with John Dewey. Along the way, readers meet Benjamin Franklin as an intellectual heir of Bacon who implemented Baconian ideals in his founding of the College of Philadelphia, the precursor to the University of Pennsylvania. Readers then meet Jane Adams and William Rainey Harper, whose work through Hull House and the University of Chicago, respectively, embodied Progressive-era ideals. Part I ends with a survey of “The Higher Education Civic and Community Engagement Movement,” which Benson et al. identify as “Realizing Bacon’s and Franklin’s Ideals.” This realization came in the form of universities’ early community engagement to attempt to solve existing social problems through a “blend of pragmatism and idealism” (p. 70). The Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862 represented such a blend as it “established land grant colleges and universities whose purpose was to advance the mechanical and agricultural sciences, expand access to higher education, and cultivate citizenship,” ideals later actualized in the Ohio and Wisconsin systems that found success in a “union of ‘soil and seminar’” (pp. 70-71).

Yet, this Baconian realization would not endure. World War I and a declining Progressive Movement led to a de-emphasis of social sciences and a restructuring of higher educational institutions favoring so-called “value-free” pursuits of study. The Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War also prompted colleges and universities to subordinate local community engagement to larger national interests and foreign affairs that represented a retreat toward conservatism through to the 1990s. The end of the Cold War and Clinton-era economic growth ushered in an era of renewed community engagement as higher educational institutions—especially those in urban areas—could no longer afford to ignore the social problems American cities confronted, giving rise to a new era of public and community service. Colleges and universities attempted to capitalize on these developments, implementing service learning curricula: incorporating community-based service into college students’ education, providing students the opportunities to apply what they learned to real-world problems.

Over time, however, the service learning movement would split as advocates of incorporating and emphasizing a discipline-based approach to service learning weakened civic ideals in favor of college-credit. “Service learning placements increasingly looked much like traditional internships,” the authors observe, “where the primary goal was connecting academic theory to practice rather than providing students with the opportunity to work alongside people in the community, reflect on that experience, and help contribute to positive change” (pp. 78-79).

The second part of Knowledge for Social Change introduces readers to the Netter Center for Community Partnerships at the University of Pennsylvania, with which several of the volume’s contributing authors have been affiliated since its founding in 1992. These affiliations provide important perspectives on putting educational civic theory into democratic practice. Readers learn about Penn’s intellectual foundations and how its Wharton School initially embodied Progressive-era sociological practices—resulting in works like W.E.B. DuBois’ The Philadelphia Negro—but would later abandon as Penn pursued it expansionist ambitions between the 1960s and 1990s. Benson and Harkavy eventually worked to reestablish the reform-minded ethos of the Progressive-era Wharton School, finding inspiration in the philosophers and educational leaders discussed in Part I, putting their ideas and ideals into practice to engage members of the local West Philadelphia neighborhood to solve problems, and eventually to engage communities on both national and international levels. The Netter Center thus put into practice the “One University” concept advocated by past-Penn-president, Martin Meyerson. Part II’s remaining chapters detail how the Netter Center accomplished this feat and how it maintains its community-based work through its academically based community service (ABCS) programs, providing the concrete example of the Agatston Urban Nutrition Initiative (AUNI) to combat rising obesity rates in West Philadelphia.

Knowledge for Social Change concludes with recommendations for colleges, universities, and research institutions to leverage their local, national, and international platforms of influence and vast resources to reinvigorate education for democracy and, by extension, the whole of society. This only can be accomplished, however, by an entire reconceptualization and radical restructuring of how higher educational institutions currently do business while also looking to the future. This necessitates a cultural shift away from economic self-interest and jockeying for marketplace advantages and toward promoting higher education as a public good (pp. 140-145). Benson et al. conclude

by calling on democratic-minded academics to create and sustain a global movement to radically transform research universities to realize Bacon’s goal of advancing knowledge for “the relief of man’s estate,” as well as Dewey’s vision of an organic “Great Community” composed of participatory, democratic, collaborative, and interdependent societies.

One does not necessarily need to contemplate too deeply to recognize what the alternatives look like in contemporary American society.

While the five volumes reviewed here may not address all of Ray Stohler’s concerns that he shares with his son Dave in Breaking Away, they begin to provide insights into possible solutions to the problems of the past that colleges and universities themselves played a role in creating. Individually, each of these books stands well on its own, presenting a solid history for anyone interested in American higher education. Collectively, they compose a comprehensive list of essential readings for anyone teaching a course or leading a seminar on the history of American higher education.