Between citizens and the state : the politics of American higher education in the 20th century /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:Loss, Christopher P., author.
Imprint:Princeton : Princeton University Press, ©2012.
Description:1 online resource (xiii, 320 pages) : illustrations
Language:English
Series:Politics and society in twentieth-cen\tury America
Politics and society in twentieth-century America.
Subject:
Format: E-Resource Book
URL for this record:http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/11300727
Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:9781400840052
1400840058
128333979X
9781283339797
0691148279
9780691148274
0691163340
9780691163345
Notes:Includes bibliographical references (pages 239-301) and index.
Print version record.
Summary:"This book tracks the dramatic outcomes of the federal government's growing involvement in higher education between World War I and the 1970s, and the conservative backlash against that involvement from the 1980s onward. Using cutting-edge analysis, Christopher Loss recovers higher education's central importance to the larger social and political history of the United States in the twentieth century, and chronicles its transformation into a key mediating institution between citizens and the state. Framed around the three major federal higher education policies of the twentieth century--the 1944 GI Bill, the 1958 National Defense Education Act, and the 1965 Higher Education Act--the book charts the federal government's various efforts to deploy education to ready citizens for the national, bureaucratized, and increasingly global world in which they lived. Loss details the myriad ways in which academic leaders and students shaped, and were shaped by, the state's shifting political agenda as it moved from a preoccupation with economic security during the Great Depression, to national security during World War II and the Cold War, to securing the rights of African Americans, women, and other previously marginalized groups during the 1960s and '70s. Along the way, Loss reappraises the origins of higher education's current-day diversity regime, the growth of identity group politics, and the privatization of citizenship at the close of the twentieth century. At a time when people's faith in government and higher education is being sorely tested, this book sheds new light on the close relations between American higher education and politics"--
Other form:Print version: Loss, Christopher P. Between citizens and the state. Princeton : Princeton University Press, ©2012 9780691148274
Standard no.:9786613339799
Review by Choice Review

Loss (public policy and higher education, Vanderbilt Univ.) offers a well-researched, important narrative of the escalating involvement of federal policy in US higher education from WW I through the 1970s and of the remarkable social outcomes or effects thereof. Incorporating E. E. Schattschneider's concept of policy feedback ("new policies create a new politics"), Loss's account really is that of latter-day American nation-building. Central to Loss's story are three key elements of federal policy: the Servicemen's Readjustment Act, i.e., the GI Bill (1944), the National Defense Education Act (1958), and the Higher Education Act (1965). Conservative reaction arose, perhaps inevitably, in the 1980s following the storm and stress of events of the 1960s and 1970s. By that time, federal policy involvement already had served crucial national security interests. It also had clearly enshrined higher education as one of the key intermediaries between citizens and the polity. Federal policy contributed substantially to the preparation of millions of Americans for effective lives in their increasingly complex and interconnected national and global communities. Loss's book merits a place on university library shelves as well on the reading lists of courses on public policy and on the history of American higher education. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. J. D. Gillespie College of Charleston

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review