The story of American higher education, written with insight and humor, by an acclaimed educator.
“There’s no more important story to be told at this moment in America then why higher education matters. And there’s no more adept and engaging storyteller than Sol Gittleman.” —Larry Tye, New York Times bestselling author of Satchel and Demagogue
“Hardly a day passes without reference to some scandal, fraud, intellectual or moral failure, or other ill associated with American academic institutions,” writes Sol Gittleman in his bracing new book, An Accidental Triumph. “If American higher education is such a failure, why are students and scholars from all over the world still so eager to secure a place in one of these institutions? Is American higher education a disaster or the envy of the world?”
Gittleman confronts this contradiction in this dynamic mix of history, analysis, and personal reflection. An Accidental Triumph tells the engaging story of how American higher education evolved from a patchwork of seminaries in the early nineteenth century into the world’s leader in research by the middle of the twentieth. Gittleman links this fascinating story to his own fifty-year academic career, which coincided with an explosive rise in enrollment, spurred by the GI Bill, and an unparalleled postwar boom in faculty hiring, prompted by massive new federal support for academic research from organizations such as the National Science Foundation.
Writing with authority, frankness, and unfailing wry good humor, Gittleman surveys the triumphs, tragedies, and tensions of the history of American higher education. Despite the relentless criticism, Gittleman finds good reason to remain optimistic about the future of teaching and research at the college and university level in the United States.
In this study of the history of rhetoric education, Susan Kates focuses on the writing and speaking instruction developed at three academic institutions founded to serve three groups of students most often excluded from traditional institutions of higher education in late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century America: white middle-class women, African Americans, and members of the working class.
Kates provides a detailed look at the work of those students and teachers ostracized from rhetorical study at traditional colleges and universities. She explores the pedagogies of educators Mary Augusta Jordan of Smith College in Northhampton, Massachusetts; Hallie Quinn Brown of Wilberforce University in Wilberforce, Ohio; and Josephine Colby, Helen Norton, and Louise Budenz of Brookwood Labor College in Katonah, New York.
These teachers sought to enact forms of writing and speaking instruction incorporating social and political concerns in the very essence of their pedagogies. They designed rhetoric courses characterized by three important pedagogical features: a profound respect for and awareness of the relationship between language and identity and a desire to integrate this awareness into the curriculum; politicized writing and speaking assignments designed to help students interrogate their marginalized standing within the larger culture in terms of their gender, race, or social class; and an emphasis on service and social responsibility.
World War II brought an end to many aspects of American college life, and the exciting years that followed were marked by activity and growth, and sometimes by dissension and disorder. Nevertheless, this postwar quarter century can be considered, according to one of those deeply involved, “the most creative period in the history of higher education in the United States.”
Nathan M. Pusey is well qualified to speak of this period since, as President of Lawrence College from 1944 to 1953 and of Harvard University from 1953 to 1971, he participated in many of the decisions that transformed American universities. In this book he deals with such crucial changes in university education as its increasing availability to a far greater percentage of an enlarged population; the broadening of undergraduate curricula; and the burgeoning of graduate degree programs and research activity. He also shows how universities supplanted colleges as trendsetting institutions and how as the United States had to assume increased international responsibilities, some of them became the world's strongest agents for intellectual advance. Throughout, his book is enriched and enlivened by his own participation and belief in the institutions he describes.
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