The story the American higher education over the past century is a tale of increased access, influence, scope, and scale. Viewed at a macro level, American higher education has become central to the nation’s economy, power, and role in the world. How that happened is the focus of Christopher P. Loss’s Between Citizens and the State: The Politics of American Higher Education in the 20th Century. Loss, a historian of higher education at Vanderbilt University, has a provocative take on the big picture. Drawing on concepts, narratives, and big picture legislative achievements, he avoids a narrative based on budgets, funding formulas, or legislative horse-trading. His agenda is different. The argument is about broad trends between the state (the federal government) and higher education, a “para-state.”
Loss sees the “state” and “higher education” as relatively stable rational actors over time. Each has aims and priorities which they steadily pursue. They align, coming together at certain points in time and over certain issues. In other periods or with other issues, they are in conflict. Higher education, Loss asserts, is a key mediating influence between the public and the government. This underlying utility is a key way to understand the symbiotic growth of federal power and higher education. Through this perspective, Loss can advance broad and interesting claims about critical trends: the administrative state and higher education in the New Deal; the citizen-soldier agenda of World War II, the global citizens of the Cold War; and the rights revolution in higher education and government. Anchoring this is focus on three critical pieces of legislation: The GI Bill in 1944, the National Defense Education Act in 1958, and the Higher Education Act of 1965. Loss draws on much more than legislation. He pulls in the voices of faculty, staff, students, lobbyists, legislators, and the community, to advance his claims. Loss believes that at its very foundation, higher education has pursued a consistent mission to educate citizens for life in democracy.
Giving Between Citizens and the State an unexpected twist is Loss’s interest in the rise and influence of psychology. While the discipline has not received the federal funding of other major sciences, and it may occupy a somewhat less prestigious perch within the academy, psychology has functioned critically in the role of state-public mediation. Loss elevates unfamiliar pioneers in psychology and schools of psychology thought within his larger context. He argues that psychologists proposed new and influential ways about how we think about human interaction, how we attempt to control human behavior, and how we yoke the social sciences and the higher educational system in pursuit of broader economic, political, and social aims.
While I do not believe that Loss’s arguments necessarily offer the best or most persuasive lens to make sense of the longue duree of higher education and federal power, it does reframe and problematize communication and influence between citizen, state, and educational institution. Loss’s situation of higher education as a mediating influence between citizen and state carries with it assumptions about responsibility and accountability. I wonder, though, if we are now in an environment where state actors increasingly see themselves as mediating between citizen and higher educational institution. The shifting nature of financial aid and funding structures, for example, can complicate who is serving whose interest. The rising partisan politicization of what functions institutions of higher education call into question these foundational relationships.
Between Citizens and the State is a thought-provoking and informative take on American higher educational history.
David Potash
First, I should acknowledge that I haven’t read the book, and so my criticism of Loss is probably at least partly wrong.
Judging from your review, it sounds to me as if Loss rather misses a key element of both the purpose and the origin of the links between the state and the ‘para-state’ of higher education. American higher education was founded to serve the upper class by both developing them academically/spiritually, and providing them with an environment in which they can be thoroughly socialized by, and with, other élites. At the risk of sounding too Marxian, I would argue this is instrumental in the reproduction of the American upper class, and so drives their interest in the success of these institutions.
I suppose this role could be construed as supporting democracy, but only to the extent that Oxbridge’s historical role vis-a-vis Parliament could be construed as foundational to British democracy. (I always found it entertaining how Oxbridge’s role in the education of the future state leaders was sufficiently overt to justify Oxford and Cambridge–the university students and faculty, independent of the towns–being given their own Parliamentary constituency).
Most American politicians were historically from upper-class backgrounds. Today, this is not necessarily true, but those party members who aren’t from upper-class backgrounds have typically been inculcated with the prevailing values of the American upper class: tolerance, cosmopolitanism, and a polite late-Niebuhr capitalism. The responsibility of this inculcation now falls to universities, as breeding and family background are now no longer strictly necessary to enter politics. This furthers a mutualistic relationship between the para-state of élite higher ed institutions, and their alumni, who now comprise the upper rungs of the state.
However, I am presupposing some focus on élite institutions in the book. I am sure that Loss departs from them in discussion of the GI Bill etc. At any rate, it’s worth picking up a copy of the book to see if my suppositions are at all founded.