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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 December 2024
Fear for the future of democracy in the 1930s and 1940s led university educators to redefine the purpose of general education as preparation for democratic citizenship. This mobilized social scientists to engage in curricular reform and experiment with progressive pedagogical practices in new general education courses. These courses have been overlooked in the scholarship on general education, which focuses on Great Books courses and educators’ efforts to create a common culture linked to Europe. Uncovering these courses demonstrates that general education was an important part of higher education’s commitment to democracy. Mid-twentieth-century social science general education was an innovative form of political education aimed at preparing independent-minded, engaged citizens with democratic values.
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2 United States, Higher Education for American Democracy: A Report of the President’s Commission on Higher Education (Washington: US GPO, 1947).
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4 Geiger, Roger L., American Higher Education since World War II: A History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), Google Scholar. Geiger capitalizes “NOT” in his discussion of the Zook report to emphasize higher education’s rejection of the recommendations.
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6 This article is based on an extensive review of materials published from the mid-1930s through the mid-1950s, including books and collections of essays about general education, and education and social science journals. Most scholarship on general education relies on aspirational writings by well-known educators, such as Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, or a couple of iconic reports such as the “Harvard Redbook” (see note 18). While these works are part of the research base for this article, I also rely on descriptions of specific courses. These are more likely to reveal what was taught at colleges and universities than philosophical or aspirational writing. I found some of these descriptions in journals, but the most fruitful source is Earl, J. McGrath, ed., The Social Sciences in General Education (Dubuque, IA: W. C. Brown Co., 1948)Google Scholar. This is a collection of course descriptions from twenty-one institutions of various kinds. It is an underused resource that, according to Google Scholar, has only been cited once since 1970, in a 1987 dissertation: Joseph Leese, David, “The Pragmatic Vision: Columbia College and the Progressive Reorganization of the Liberal Core—the Formative Years, 1880-1941” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1987)Google Scholar.
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8 In the standard historical account, the social sciences in the US began with a strong reformist orientation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but in the 1920s, this orientation was challenged by a countercurrent focused on objectivity. The Depression revived the reformist stance for a while, but the Cold War cemented the focus on objectivity and value-free science. Theodore, M. Porter and Ross, Dorothy, eds., The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 7, The Modern Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Bannister, Robert C., Sociology and Scientism: The American Quest for Objectivity, 1880-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Smith, Mark C., Social Science in the Crucible: The American Debate over Objectivity and Purpose, 1918-1941 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Backhouse, Roger E. and Fontaine, Philippe, The History of the Social Sciences since 1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Isaac, Joel, Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Crowther-Heyck, Hunter, Age of System: Understanding the Development of Modern Social Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Solovey, Mark and Cravens, Hamilton, Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gunnell, John G., Imagining the American Polity: Political Science and the Discourse of Democracy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Bernstein, Michael A., A Perilous Progress: Economists and Public Purpose in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sociology in America: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Ross, Dorothy, “Whatever Happened to the Social in American Social Thought? Part 1,” Modern Intellectual History 18, no. 4 (Dec. 2021), CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ross, Dorothy, “Whatever Happened to the Social in American Social Thought? Part 2,” Modern Intellectual History 19, no. 1 (March 2022), CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I don’t dispute this overall account, but I do dispute that in the context of general education reform, it’s a mistake to read the eventual impact of the Cold War into the immediate postwar period. I think this mistake leads Andrew Jewett to conclude that the social sciences were excluded from general education program at Harvard (Science, Democracy, and the American University, 232–33). Schrum makes a similar point in “Shaping Minds or Defending Democracy?” While it is outside the scope of this article, I do think that the Cold War would eventually narrow the kinds of social science general education courses offered at American universities.
9 On the early survey courses, see Reuben, Julie A., The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), chap. Google Scholar.
10 The Columbia Contemporary Civilization course is detailed in a number of institutional histories, including Timothy Cross, An Oasis of Order: The Core Curriculum at Columbia College (New York: Columbia College, 1995); Columbia University, Columbia College Education: The Plan of the First Two Years (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939); Columbia College, A History of Columbia College on Morningside (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954); Bell, Daniel, The Reforming of General Education: The Columbia College Experience in Its National Setting (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1968)Google Scholar; and McCaughey, Robert A., Stand, Columbia: A History of Columbia University in the City of New York, 1754-2004 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.
11 Miller, The Meaning of General Education, chaps. 3-4.
12 On the conflict at University of Chicago, see Maynard Hutchins, Robert, The Higher Learning in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1936)Google Scholar; Gideonse, Harry D., The Higher Learning in a Democracy: A Reply to President Hutchins’ Critique of the American University (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1937)Google Scholar; Ann Dzuback, Mary, Robert Hutchins: Portrait of an Educator (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)Google Scholar; and Purcell, The Crisis of Democratic Theory.
13 Letter from R. G. Tyler to L. A. Pittenger, June 30, 1941, American Council on Education Papers, folder 2, box 121, Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Stanford, CA (hereafter ACE Papers); Cooperation in General Education: A Final Report of the Executive Committee of the Cooperative Study in General Education (Washington: American Council on Education, 1947). See also Lamar Johnson, B., What about Survey Courses?, American General Education Series (New York: H. Holt and Co., 1937)Google Scholar;and Shady Zayed, Kevin, “Cooperation without Consensus: National Discussions and Local Implementation in General Education Reform 1930-1960” (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2016), chap. Google Scholar.
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17 Maynard Hutchins, Robert, Education for Freedom (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1943)Google Scholar; Hook, Sidney, Education for Modern Man (New York: Dial Press, 1946)Google Scholar.
18 United States, Higher Education for American Democracy, 50-51; Harvard University Committee on the Objectives of General Education in a Free Society, General Education in a Free Society: Report of the Harvard Committee (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1945), 51.
19 “Minutes of the First Conference of the Cooperative Study in General Education,” ACE Papers, folder 1, box 115.
20 “Staff News Letter Cooperative Study in General Education,” Nov. 19, 1941, ACE Papers, folder 3, box 123.
21 Dressel, Paul L. and Mayhew, Lewis B., General Education: Explorations in Evaluation; the Final Report (Washington, DC: American Council on Education, 1954) 11–13Google Scholar; Johnson, Jack T., “Core Courses in Social Science at State University of Iowa,” in McGrath, The Social Sciences in General Education, 75 Google Scholar. On contributions of the natural sciences to citizenship training, see Miller, Rebecca B., “Natural Sciences 4 and the Shaping of Postwar America” (PhD. diss., Harvard Graduate School of Education, 2009)Google Scholar. On the humanities, see Dorn, Charles, “Promoting the ‘Public Welfare’ in Wartime: Stanford University during World War II,” American Journal of Education 112, no. 1 (Nov. 2005), CrossRefGoogle Scholar;and McAllister-Grande, “General Education for a Closed Mind.”
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24 Exact titles of courses, as well as course materials, varied from institution to institution. I am using these two names—“Western Civilization” and “Contemporary Social Problems”—as labels for a set of courses that followed a similar model. When discussing specific institutions, I use the names they used.
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49 Dressel and Mayhew, General Education, 41.
50 Carman and Hacker, “General Education,” in McGrath, Social Sciences and General Education, 25–26.
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57 Arthur Zilversmit, Changing Schools: Progressive Education Theory and Practice, 1930-1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Stuart J. Foster, Red Alert!: Educators Confront the Red Scare in American Public Schools, 1947-1954 (New York: P. Lang, 2000); Ellen Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
58 See note 8.
59 Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske, American Academic Culture in Transformation: Fifty Years, Four Disciplines (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).
60 Rebecca S. Lowen, Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Stuart W. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Ron Theodore Robin, The Making of the Cold War Enemy: Culture and Politics in the Military-Intellectual Complex (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Noam Chomsky, The Cold War & the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years (New York: The New Press, 1997); Christopher Simpson, Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences during the Cold War (New York: New Press, 1998); Ethan D. Schrum, The Instrumental University: Education in Service of the National Agenda after World War II (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019); Loss, Between Citizens and the State.
61 Julie Reuben, “Reforming the University: Student Protests and the Demand for a ‘Relevant’ Curriculum,” in Student Protest the Sixties and After, ed. Gerard J. DeGroot (London: Addison Wesley Longman, 1998), 153-68; Julie Reuben, “The Limits of Freedom: Student Activists and Educational Reform at Berkeley in the 1960s,” in The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s, ed. Robert Cohen and Reginald E. Zelnik (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 485–508.
62 On the history of these programs, see Fabio Rojas, From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Martha Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus (Berkeley: University of California Press 2012); Marilyn J. Boxer, When Women Ask the Questions: Creating Women’s Studies in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Mari Jo Buhle and Florence Howe, The Politics of Women’s Studies: Testimony from Thirty Founding Mothers (New York: Feminist Press, 2000).