The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s by Ellen Schrecker (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s by Ellen Schrecker Ivan D. Steen (bio) The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s By Ellen Schrecker. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. 621 pages, 23 b&w illus., 1 table. $35.00 cloth; $24.99 e-pub. The 1960s was a decade of turbulence for America. Mercifully, the efforts of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and others to find a Communist in every nook and cranny were drawing to a close, but the Civil Rights Movement and the war in Vietnam now dominated public attention. For America's colleges and universities, this decade began in a positive vein and with great hope for the future. There was substantial public and political support for higher education, and it was an era of considerable growth, especially for public institutions. Older schools were becoming larger in size and function, new campuses were being established, and enrollments were rising rapidly. This was especially notable in New York, where Gov. Nelson Rockefeller promoted the extensive expansion of the State University system. These developments led to substantial changes in the student population, both economically and socially. And the professoriate, too, was changing. Traditionally, college faculties had been composed primarily of men from backgrounds of wealth and privilege; now women and men of more diverse backgrounds were aspiring to careers in higher education. However, by the early 1970s support for colleges and universities had diminished, public institutions faced serious cuts to their budgets, and the "golden age" was over. Ellen Schrecker chronicles these developments in her extensively researched and well-written book, The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s. Schrecker attributes the decline in public and political support for universities to student unrest and protest and the participation of some faculty members who joined with them. The protests began with the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkely, but soon other issues dominated. Activist students and faculty were increasingly involved in the Civil Rights Movement and in protests against the war in Vietnam. Antiwar activities included protests against the military draft, the presence of ROTC programs [End Page 226] on campuses, and against government grants for defense-related research. For the most part, the earliest activities were nonviolent, but that began to change, and civil disobedience became more common. Disruptions of classes on campus and civil disobedience off campus not only diminished public respect for higher education but also caused serious rifts among faculty. While universities have never really recovered from the damage caused by this period of turbulence, there have been some positive achievements, especially the introduction of new areas of study and the ultimate acceptance of some of the scholarly contributions of radical academics. Those of us in higher education who lived through these times will find much in this book that is familiar, and it will evoke some unpleasant memories. While many nonradical faculty members agreed with many of the goals of the students and their radical colleagues, they did not condone the methods employed. Workdays could be very stressful. Many New Left faculty and graduate students, so convinced of their righteousness, had little tolerance for more moderate faculty and students, and so treated them with disdain. Schrecker seems to be more concerned with the difficulties encountered by the radical faculty than with those of the more moderate faculty who were trying to perform the tasks expected of their profession. Not only was working at the university trying, but so too was attending a professional association meeting. Schrecker indicates that radical scholars attempted to put their stamp on professional associations, but she downplays the tensions at the annual meetings of those organizations. She specifically mentions the 1969 meeting of the American Historical Association, where, she claims, despite fears of some leaders of the association, there were no disruptions at the business meeting. I am not sure what she would consider a disruption, but I attended that meeting, and I distinctly recall an altercation for possession of a floor microphone. While the prospects for higher education at the beginning of the 1960s indeed were quite bright, Schrecker sees it as more idyllic than it actually was. Certainly, there were more academic...