Revolutions are a commonplace in studies of the history of American higher education. Every decade or so seems to bring upheaval of revolutionary proportions and a literature to analyze it. Significantly, Laurence Veysey began his study of the rise of the American university with some words from Noah Porter's 1871 inaugural address as president of Yale, “college and university education are not merely agitated by reforms; they are rather convulsed by a revolution.” Then Veysey proceeded with his own excellent account of Porter's revolution—the forces, events, and personalities in the struggle to create the new research university at the turn of the nineteenth century. Christopher Jencks and David Riesman described quite a different sort of revolution in The Academic Revolution, their study of the rise of college and university faculties to preeminent professional influence in the early 1960s. It was a short-lived triumph at best, for immediately followed the revolutionary upheavals of the late 1960s. At close range, but with considerable insight, Lewis B. Mayhew analyzed the causes and consequences of the troubled sixties, and more recently other studies of that revolution are beginning to appear.

One of the most interesting aspects of the German Reformation for us to ponder is that of the educational reconstruction attempted in all Lutheran states in the sixteenth century. Churchmen and politicians acted in close collaboration, first in response to the reformist zeal charging the Lutheran movement in its heroic years, later in meeting the procedural obligations laid down for officials in the established Reformation's institutional structure. They agreed on fundamental objectives and shared a coherent body of pedagogical suppositions. They had high hopes for the power of education to direct thought and mold behavior. In the new church-state symbiosis they recognized unprecedented opportunities for reform and were eager to act on them. For a time, religion and politics moved in unison toward the enactment of a program of schooling intended in its overall purpose to conform the young to approved patterns of evangelical and civic rectitude.

The rise of the modern American university between the Civil War and the Great Depression is a familiar story. In this relatively short span of time America acquired a host of universities that offered extensive graduate training, stressed research over teaching, and largely abandoned the prescribed common curriculum in favor of greater individual choice. Some of these new universities, like Chicago, Cornell, and Stanford, were created ex nihilo. Others, like Yale and Princeton, were gradually transformed from small, clerically directed, classically oriented denominational colleges into modern secular universities.

In The German Ideology, Marx articulates one of his most famous claims. Paraphrased, it reads in essence that “the ruling class will give its ideas the form of universality and represent them as the only rational universally valid ones.” While there have been interpreters of this point who have chosen to see this process as a conscious conspiracy, for Marx it was considerably more complicated. For him, out of the constitutive conflicts and contradictions of capitalism there were certain specific tendencies that were generated. Among these tendencies was the “natural” production of principles, ideas, and categories that support the unequal class relations of that social formation. These ideas were under constant threat, however. They needed constant attention because hegemonic control was not guaranteed. Because of the class conflicts also generated out of, and causing, changes in that mode of production, there always exists the possibility of different ideological tendencies which could subvert the dominant ones.