Academic conceptions of a United States Peace Corps

Abstract

Contrary to popular understanding that the United States Peace Corps stemmed from a spontaneous idea generated on the campaign trail to appeal to young voters, John F. Kennedy’s celebrated proposal for a federally sponsored, overseas volunteer training programme was drawn from models and theories circulated by American academics. This article examines the mechanisms by which academics attained access to federal officials to lobby for the creation of a programme that would employ educators to train citizens to aid the developing world in the aftermath of the Second World War and in response to the Cold War. It further explores the ideologies that drove four influential academics to call upon their universities to redefine their internationalist role by training graduates to perform voluntary service overseas. These four were Maurice Albertson, Samuel Hayes, Albert Ray Olpin and Walt Rostow, and they came from Colorado State University, the University of Michigan, the University of Utah and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The contributions of academics to the foundation of the Peace Corps have largely been unrecognised. This article contributes to a deeper understanding of the modernising goals of the internationalisation project and the relationship between policy‐makers and professors in a critical phase of American educational history as examples of cultural transformation. The examination of intertwined narratives in primary documents from scholars informs this perspective on the private policy‐making and social‐scientific thought that became embodied in the federal Peace Corps agenda.