2 This conversation grew out of a Social Science History Association session (October 26, 2002, St. Louis, Missouri) as a part of that conference's “Education” unit.Google Scholar

3 Anderson, James D. is Educational Policy specialist at University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana and author of The Education of Blacks in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). Anderson's work was not only a sweeping integration of a large literature but a breakthrough study of philanthropy in higher education. Particularly novel in his analysis was the activist role of free slaves in reconstructing black schools; their activism has not only hitherto not registered in the scholarship but indeed their substantive financial contributions have masked the actual costs of Reconstruction. Higher education becomes here not an intramural story but involves new institutions—the general purpose foundation—and new players—blacks themselves.Google Scholar

4 For many years Church, Robert has served as the Vice-Provost at Michigan State University but also as a faculty member in that institution's Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Educational Policy. Church is perhaps best known for his synthesis, Education in the United States (New York: Free Press, 1976), which he prepared with Sedlak, Michael The book not only brings together many strands of existing scholarship; it is a thoughtful and provocative commentary on many issues, raising questions not actually found in the scholarship. But, in the “breakthrough” category, I would draw special attention to Church's contributions to Buck, Paul (ed.) Social Sciences at Harvard (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965). There Church's own essay on the Department of Economics demonstrated how the reconstruction of a single department could illuminate a profession-wide discourse. At the moment when Economics first becomes a self-contained discipline, how did Harvard's nascent economics department reflect or challenge the broader professional discourse? I thought surely there would be many followers of this model. It lent itself to local investigation but necessarily required the connection of a case to the larger landscape. Surprisingly the model had few imitators.Google Scholar

5 Curran, Emmett Professor of History at Georgetown University and author of Georgetown's Bicentennial History, From Academy to University, 1789–1889 (Washington: 1993), benefited from the celebratory impulse that often undermines Higher Education history. Curran's work did not result in a hagiographical treatment of the school. Rather, he studied not only the theology and politics of this University's founding in the nation's capital but, he demonstrated among other things how minorities survive and flourish in a Protestant culture. In this particular case, the college created an immediate student body that was one-quarter to one-third non-Catholic and developed a vigorous tradition committed to the separation of church and state. The statistics on students and how their sociological profile drove institutional policy and curriculum necessitated the study of a university approached from outside the walls, a break from the traditional approach.Google Scholar

6 Tobias, Marilyn is a public historian and independent scholar, who has many years of experience teaching history, political studies, and education. She is the author of Old Dartmouth on Trial: The Transformation of the Academic Community in Nineteenth-century America (New York: New York University Press, 1982) [2002 printing]), a revised and expanded version of her New York University Ph.D. dissertation. She has examined one of the (numerically) largest American institutions of higher education in the nineteenth century and found two parallel episodes, contesting presidential authority. Again, the issues of autonomy and public service went beyond the intramural rhetoric and became understandable only by statistical sampling of the adjacent community. Her introduction of organized alumni, based in New York City, also made clear that the college as an historical entity is always the center of much larger, expanding organizational network.Google Scholar

7 Boorstin, Daniel “Universities in the Republic of Letters,” Perspectives in American History, v.1, (1967) ed Fleming, Donald and Bailyn, Bernard 370, 371).Google Scholar

8 Tobias, Old Dartmouth On Trial, 4–5).Google Scholar

9 Eisenmann, Linda “Reconsidering a Classic: Assessing the History of Women's Higher Education a Dozen Years After Barbara Solomon,” Harvard Educational Review 16 (Winter 1997):689–717 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Smith, Wilson “Apologia pro Alma Matre; The College as Community in Ante-Bellum America,” in The Hofstadter Aegis, ed. Elkins, Stanley and McKitrick, Eric (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1974), 125–153.Google Scholar

11 Mattingly, Paul and Tobias, Marilyn “Race, Gender, and Equity Policy: The Case of the National Institute of Education,” History of Education Quarterly 39: 4 (Winter 1999): 397–426.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Thelin, John provides important insights in “Retrospective” History of Education Quarterly 27:4 (Winter 1987): 517–523.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Taylor, William R. “Toward a Definition of Orthodoxy: The Patrician South and the Common Schools,” Harvard Educational Review, 36 (Fall 1966): 412–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar