Shaping Minds or Defending Democracy? How Scholars Have Interpreted Major Reports on Higher Education From the 1940s

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the 3 years prior to Harry Truman’s establishment of the President’s Commission on Higher Education in 1946, the Association of American Colleges (AAC), the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), and Harvard University all released reports on the relationship of general or liberal education to the political order. This historiographical essay assesses recent scholarship on these major reports of the 1940s by scholars including Jamie Cohen-Cole, Andrew Jewett, Bryan McAllister-Grande, George Marsden, and Louis Menand. The essay examines why intellectual historians have often given more attention to the Harvard “Redbook” than to the Truman report and why they have almost completely ignored the book-length ACLS report (the AAC report was much smaller but also gets little attention). I argue that intellectual historians’ greater attention to the Redbook is largely due to its singular focus on general education (as compared to the more wide-ranging Truman report) and to the greater ease of accessing archival records of the Harvard committee as compared to the Truman Commission. I also assert that some key interpreters have misunderstood the Harvard Redbook and its relationship to the Truman report. Correctly understanding the differences between the two helps us to see that distinct intellectual positions underpinned competing visions for undergraduate education in the United States after World War II.