LIBERAL EDUCATION AND THE AMERICAN DREAM: PUBLIC ATTITUDES AND THE EMERGENCE OF MASS HIGHER EDUCATION, 1920 - 1952

Between 1920 and 1950 higher education in America grew from an aspiration to a right. Although these years have been aptly termed a time of consolidation in American academic life, as institutions built upon foundations already laid by 1910, this period witnessed a revival of liberal education as the centerpiece of college and university education. Taken together, the rapid growth of higher education's numbers and prestige and the coincident promotion of the liberal arts ushered in an era when liberal education became a part of the American dream.;By the onset of American entry into World War II, higher education was increasingly defined as a social as well as an individual good. In addition to traditional roles, the liberal arts were now asked to educate for competence and cosmopolitanism. A democratic faith viewed widespread education as a bulwark against totalitarianism. As the G. I. Bill recorded a federal commitment to extend higher education widely, educators debated the recommendations of committees and commissions about the content and constituency of liberal education. By midcentury, the acceptance of an enhanced role for higher education shifted debate from questions of who should go to college to questions of who should pay the bills.;Four case studies illustrate the problems educators faced as they debated the merits of liberal education for the American citizenry. In contrast to majority sentiment in the 1920s, Alexander Meiklejohn conducted an Experimental College at the University of Wisconsin from 1927 to 1932 which argued that liberal education could be extended to ordinary students as well as superior ones. Shortly thereafter, educators at the University of Minnesota opened a similar venture, the General College, which redefined the goals of liberal education toward "life adjustment," and developed a program for the academically untalented.;During World War II, Harvard President James B. Conant appointed a committee to survey the place of liberal education for the whole society. The Harvard Report, General Education in a Free Society, called for a nationwide commitment to instruction in the liberal arts at all levels of education. Just as its report appeared, President Harry S. Truman appointed a national commission to examine the desirability and feasibility of broadened higher education. This commission's recommendations, in Higher Education for American Democracy, favored higher education as a right for all who could profit by it.;This dissertation traces the growth of the liberal education ideal between 1920 and 1950, concentrating primarily on the interplay among educators. Early in the period, college presidents and others advocated an upgrading of academic standards to assure the production of a leadership class of liberal arts graduates. Some of them sought to discourage the untalented from applying, while others adopted a variety of strategies to upgrade liberal arts practices at individual institutions. During the great depression, educators coped with the paradox that hard times brought increased enrollments and new missions for the college campus. A diverse and contradictory array of definitions of liberal education's proper meaning and clientele competed with each other and for public support.;As the place of higher education in American society enlarged, educators organized into networks representing varied perspectives. Limited freedom of maneuver at individual institutions, diversity, and differences among educators all precluded drastic change between 1920 and 1950. Debates about liberal education consistently revealed disagreement, but they also displayed the emergence by the 1950s of areas of agreement that would have been unthinkable in 1920. In the midst of an enduring pluralism of institutions and ideas, liberal education became a unifying force as an ideal, even though many professors and college presidents continued to argue about its meaning.