Promises Made: The Truman Commission Report at 75

Some anniversaries are moving targets. This issue could have been published 2 years ago, timed to President Harry Truman’s 1946 convening of the nation’s first blue-ribbon panel on higher education. Or it could have been in recognition of 1947, when the first two volumes of the Truman commission’s report, Higher Education for American Democracy, were first published—because these volumes were the most radical and most cited of all. Or it could have been tied to the 1948 publication of the report’s final four volumes, completing the panel’s work. This issue indeed commemorates 75 years since 1948 but for a different reason. That summer, the New York publishing giant Harper & Brothers issued its own edition of Higher Education for American Democracy (President’s Commission on Higher Education, 1948). The initial versions of the report had come from the Government Printing Office in Washington, where it shared company with texts like the 1947 treatise The Design and Methods of Construction of Welded Steel Merchant Vessels (U.S. Navy, 1948). But the acquisition by Harper & Brothers meant the report suddenly had a place in the storied publishing house that issued first editions of famed authors like Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Richard Wright. Harper & Brothers’ decision to sell a mass market version of the report, which became known as the Truman Commission Report, indicated a contemporary understanding about the text’s momentousness. One commentator wrote: “It seems a reasonable prophecy that the publication of the Report of the President’s Commission on Higher Education will mark a transitional period in American college and university development. . . . The American college can never be the same again” (Tead, 1949). Another implored, “Workers in, and thinkers for, higher educational institutions are under an obligation to read, to reflect, and to react” to the report (Elliott, 1948). The New York Times’ education editor argued that “these proposals are certain to have a profound effect on the future pattern of higher education in this country. . . . [The report is] of inestimable value to educators and laymen alike as a blueprint for the future development of our colleges and universities” (Fine, 1948). Higher Education for American Democracy is an astonishing text to read retrospectively. It called for full desegregation of all educational institutions 7 years before the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. It anticipated the crucial role that community colleges would play in the nation’s higher education infrastructure 13 years before the widely celebrated 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education established that concept as state law and a national model. It proposed federally funded need-based scholarships 17 years before the earliest version of what we now call Pell Grants. It decried “antifeminism in higher education” 25 years before the Title IX amendment to the Higher Education Act. It demanded that “leaders and institutions should take positive steps to overcome” educational inequity 30 years before the high point of affirmative action policies in higher education. It suggested that 49% of traditional-age students should be enrolled in college 41 years before the nation attained that percentage. And it called for the first 2 years of college to be made free for all students, without ability testing or means testing, 7 decades before that idea became a central plank of the current progressive political platform.