An Affair to Remember: America's Brief Fling with the University as a Public Good
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- American higher education rose to fame and fortune during the Cold War, when both student enrollments and funded research shot upward. Prior to World War II, the federal government showed little interest in universities and provided little support. The war spurred a large investment in defense-based scientific research in universities, and the emergence of the Cold War expanded federal investment exponentially. Unlike a hot war, the Cold War offered an extended period federally funded research public subsidy for expanding student enrollments. The result was the golden age of the American university. The good times continued for about 30 years and then began to go bad. The decline was triggered by the combination of a decline in the perceived Soviet threat and a taxpayer revolt against high public spending; both trends culminating with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. With no money and no enemy, the Cold War university fell as quickly as it arose. Instead of seeing the Cold War university as the norm, we need to think of it as the exception. What we are experiencing now in American higher education is a regression to the mean, in which, over the long haul, Americans have understood higher education to be a distinctly private good.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | 2015 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Labaree, David F. |
|---|
Subjects
| Subject | higher education |
|---|---|
| Subject | United States |
| Subject | Cold war |
| Subject | public good |
| Genre | Article |
Bibliographic information
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- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Labaree, David F. (2016). An affair to remember: America's brief fling with the university as a public good. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 50: 1, 20-36.
Collection
Graduate School of Education Open Archive
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- dlabaree@stanford.edu
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