International and Historical Roots of American Higher Education

Abstract

tistics he goes to the popular English-language press rather than to indigenous reports of higher value; for anecdotes he goes to published general histories and biographies but seldom to primary sources. And it must be said that some of his facts and figures fail to meet even a threshold test of reliability and that some of his case materials fail to add anything new to twice-told tales. This does not mean that shoppers for useful information about this subject must leave these pages empty-handed. They may well be edified to learn, for example, that the key factor in determining whether a nation's universities would be turned into military encampments (Britain's and America's were twice so deformed, France's and Germany's were not) was its degree of prewar pacifism (a large standing army equipped with its own facilities gives the strongest assurance that it will not have to bivouac in academe when war occurs). They may be surprised to discover that there were more authenticated or at least more publicized violations of academic freedom in Wilson's America than in Wilhelm's Germany during World War I. Still, attentive readers will regret that this author did not have the space or appetite for complex explanations and thick descriptions. There is much to ask of this kind of inquiry. Did the substitute student bodies recruited in time of war to compensate for American army call-ups (women, persons under and over draft age, members of underrepresented ethnic groups) permanently alter the demography of college-going in this country and thus contribute to its exceptional rates of enrollment growth? Is there reason to believe that the privileged deferment of engineering students and students in other war-related programs had more to do with the dethronement of the liberal arts on this nation's campuses than most students of the academic curriculum have perceived? To what extent do national differences in the governance and financing of universities account for their differences in responding to war emergencies; to what extent are national differences in these responses a function of nonacademic factors, such as differences in battlefield fortunes or in the character of political regimes? The answers to questions such as these await, not a more ambitious outline (this is hardly imaginable) but a