Higher Education Deals in Democracy: The Truman Commission Report as a Political Document

In Short

• The work of the first “blue-ribbon” panel on higher education could have easily turned out to be a call for reform in American higher education, as trends from both the prewar era and the present day would indicate.

• Instead, the authors of Higher Education for American Democracy approached their work with political savvy, using it to call for expansion, not retrenchment.

• By seizing the urgency of multiple crises, the authors effectively tied expanding higher education’s public purposes and physical footprint to the security of the United States and its interests around the world.

How do we read the Truman Commission report 75 years after its release? Why should we care about it? What is this thing, anyway?

The most compelling way to read Higher Education for American Democracy is as a visionary and progressive statement of the public purposes of American higher education. The commission declared that the work of colleges and universities could bring about “the solution of social problems,” “a fuller realization of democracy,” and “international understanding and cooperation.” To meet those goals, it called for a vast expansion of college access by eliminating all tuition and fees for the first 2 years of undergraduate study and building hundreds of new institutions across the nation. Those new opportunities would allow for the doubling of college enrollments by 1960, a breakneck annual increase of 6 percent.

And that’s not even the most progressive part. The commission, in the thick of Jim Crow and a full 7 years before the Brown v. Board of Education decision, demanded an end to segregation in higher education and the elimination of all barriers to college access based on “race, creed, color, sex, national origin, or ancestry” to be enforced by a “universal legal mandate” that would apply to both public and private institutions.

In so many ways, the report reads like a blueprint for the values and policies of today’s higher education system: multipurpose, globally relevant, socially and culturally responsive, nondiscriminatory, and broadly accessible. But to read it as such a blueprint is fundamentally teleological—bordering on the gravest historiographical sin, Whig history, in which events of the past are interpreted as deterministic steps on the road to a supposedly virtuous present. Doing so robs us of perhaps the most important thing about the Truman Commission: its function as a brilliantly crafted political document that helped set an immediate agenda for higher education policy in unexpected and innovative ways. Recognizing its authors not as prophets but as political agents operating in a specific historical context is the way to understand their project’s full meaning and ultimate consequences.

Why Not Reform?

It helps to start with a counterfactual. A close reading of President Harry Truman’s charge to the commission, which was prominently reprinted at the beginning of each of the report’s six volumes, indicates no call for a grand vision.

Instead, the U.S. president tasked the group with “solving these immediate problems,” brought about by the influx of World War II veterans who were, to just about everyone’s surprise, cashing in their educational benefits under the GI Bill in massive numbers. Truman’s language about the postsecondary sector’s lack of preparedness presaged Clark Kerr’s 1960 warning about a “tidal wave” of Baby Boomers about to flood California’s colleges, which necessitated immediate reforms. It also echoed earlier concerns that American higher education fundamentally represented a problem to be solved.

Postsecondary policy discourse during the first third of the 20th century had been dominated by top-down reform efforts. Powerful actors in government, philanthropy, and elite universities had attempted to systemize and stratify the nation’s vast population of postsecondary institutions in the name of “efficiency” and to make academic leaders everywhere accountable to supposedly expert new authorities in New York and Washington. Although most of their efforts were ultimately unsuccessful, their framing of problems (colleges and universities operating without standards or guardrails) and solutions (systems and incentives designed by policy elites) had lasting resonance.

It is important to note as well that the panel officially known as the President’s Commission on Higher Education was hardly the only “Truman Commission.” Truman was the first president to employ the “blue-ribbon” approach to studying issues of national importance, and he convened similar panels on civil rights, immigration, labor, health, the armed forces, and a half-dozen other questions. The objective of all of these was not to craft bold visions for the future, but to make practical recommendations for fixing problems of the present moment.

The authors of Higher Education for American Democracy understood the president’s directive; they could not issue a report that simply celebrated the national academy. Indeed, they nodded to reform in phrases calling for “improving the performance” of higher education’s “traditional tasks,” and they used strong reformist language to demand the racial desegregation of the sector. But overall, the commission managed to avoid calling on colleges and universities to change much of what they were doing. Prominently and primarily, it called on government to massively expand its support of higher education and supercharge the sector’s influence on American society.

Insider Baseball in the Shadow of War

To understand how the commission managed to go far beyond writing a reformist document, it is useful to consider who were the commissioners. Given contemporary experience with presidential blue-ribbon panels, we might expect this group to comprise a mix of business leaders, government officials, academics, and perhaps a representative or two of “the public.” But that was hardly the case. Instead, the Truman Commission included just one businessperson, matched by a member representing organized labor. There was one federal bureaucrat, two journalists, two clergymen, and two representatives of state education boards. The rest of the commission—19 others—were a professor or administrator at a college, university, or interinstitutional higher education association. The overwhelming majority of commissioners, in other words, were academics.

This was an inside job. If we need further evidence of that, the commission’s chair, and by all accounts the person who wrote most of the report, was himself a former college president and the current president of the American Council on Education (ACE), then and now the higher education sector’s primary lobbying agency in Washington. His name was George Zook, and he benefitted from an extraordinary contingency of personnel politics in the White House.

President Truman’s chief of staff, John R. Steelman, was a former college professor, as was J. Donald Kingsley, another of Truman’s top aides. These two were in charge of assembling the commission in the summer of 1946, likely with the participation of Zook and his DC-based ACE staff, and the president accepted their list without revision. Commission members were chosen with regard to diversity—not of occupation, but of institutional type, ensuring that public, private, Catholic, and geographically dispersed schools were represented, as well as a community college, a teacher’s college, a historically Black college, and two liberal arts schools. There is no evidence in the historical record that anyone questioned the predominance of professional academics in crafting a document for guiding the reform and improvement of the American academy.

Another pivotal contingency was timing. The commission was assembled just 10 months after the Japanese surrender that ended World War II. The unexpectedly high rates of veterans taking advantage of the GI Bill’s education benefit did indeed represent a crisis for colleges, but those matriculations were also helping to avert another problem: the risk that veterans would return from the front to a labor market that could not absorb them fast enough, as had happened after World War I, precipitating a stateside economic and political calamity. College was a means of both “readjusting” the troops, as the GI Bill had promised, and warehousing them until demobilization was complete and the nation’s industrial capacity had been retooled for peacetime consumption. This was hardly a time to ask higher education to reform itself; its first task was to grow its capacity.

And then there was the war itself. Historians rightly consider the Truman Commission’s invocation of democracy in the context of the emerging Cold War; Winston Churchill delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech—at an American liberal arts college—in March 1946. But democracy had also been very much at stake in the hot war just ended, as the report’s authors noted: “Democratic principles have been dangerously challenged by authoritarianism, and World War II did not by any means resolve the conflict. The issue of a free society versus totalitarianism is still very much with us.” Asking colleges and universities to become more accountable or more efficient would have elided what were then perceived as the more pressing issues of the day.

In short, the economic and ideological imperatives of 1946 created an opening for the commission’s academic insiders to make a grand case for higher education as a solution to problems, rather than a problem itself.

Dealing in Democracy

The panel ultimately pulled off two remarkable rhetorical feats. The first was taking the notion that higher education had to be more responsive to democracy and turning it into a case for the sector’s expansion. The second feat built on the first: taking the idea that higher education should be the object of democratic reform and turning it into the idea that higher education was in fact the agent through which the entire nation might be made more democratic.

The case for expansion entailed picking some low-hanging fruit. Truman himself had framed the commission around the urgent problem of accommodating war veterans on college campuses. That the commission called for the expansion of facilities and the building of new institutions is no surprise, nor is its suggestion that faculty ranks should be dramatically expanded (the latter is the topic of the entirety of the report’s fourth volume). What is remarkable is the scale of growth for which the commission called. Adding veterans meant an expansion of capacity, but the partisans on the Truman Commission were not going to use their golden opportunity to simply throw up Quonset huts as short-term housing. The influx of war veterans, after all, would not last more than a few years. The authors aimed far beyond concerns of immediate capacity, calling for a fundamental expansion of notions of who higher education was for. The GIs were a new type of student: older, often married, and still carrying the hardships of war. If college could be for them, then perhaps it could be for other kinds of Americans as well—perhaps even all Americans.

The report’s authors did lean in to at least one reform imperative: that access to colleges and universities should become less discriminatory by race, religion, and class. The entire second volume of the report was dedicated to advancing equal opportunity in higher education. The academic insiders on the panel berated themselves for denying Americans a college education based on demographics. They demanded “laws which place equal obligation upon every institution of higher learning to admit applicants only on the basis of publicly justifiable criteria.”

But beyond basic demographics, the commissioners also lamented the exclusion of the poor. “The decision as to who shall go to college is at present influenced far too much by economic considerations,” they concluded. “The democratic community cannot tolerate a society based upon education for the well-to-do alone. If college opportunities are restricted to those in the higher income brackets, the way is open to the creation and perpetuation of a class society which has no place in the American way of life.”

Adding economically disadvantaged students to the pool of collegians—much more than striking down quotas for African Americans, Jews, or even women—was the way in which enrollments would double by 1960. Categorizing them with other discriminated-against demographic groups meant that democracy itself called for a dramatic growth in the national student body. And from there, it followed that democracy itself demanded massive new public investments to make college affordable and to grow its footprint to accommodate millions of new students within a decade.

Portraying higher education as a discriminatory problem inhibiting democracy made for a powerful argument to expand capacity, but the Truman Commission managed to portray higher education as a solution to other antidemocratic problems as well. This also required a kind of reform. “Education for democratic living,” the report argued, should be “a primary aim of all classroom teaching and, more important still, of every phase of campus life.” The very present threat of totalitarianism could easily come to the United States, but higher education could serve as a bulwark against it, by teaching undergraduates how to be democrats: “our colleges are to graduate individuals who have learned how to be free.” The commissioners harped on the point that training for democracy was an essential part of all aspects of college, even social life, which prevented students from sinking into suspicion and fear of others: “Such a condition is appropriate to a Fascist state, which rests on the rule that no one can trust anyone else; it has no place in a democratic society.”

And then the sales pitch went a step further. Higher education expansion might also prevent a next world war fought with nuclear weapons: “In a real sense the future of our civilization depends on the direction education takes, not just in the distant future, but in the days immediately ahead.” Here again, a little self-blame opened the door to expansion of purpose: “the scientific knowledge and technical skills that have made atomic and bacteriological warfare possible are the products of education and research, and higher education must share proportionately in the task of forging social and political defenses against obliteration.” To meet that task, the commission called for “education directly and explicitly for international understanding and cooperation.” This meant entire new programs in what we now call area studies, heavy investments in interdisciplinary research, and the rollout of a ubiquitous general-education program that would teach every undergraduate “to recognize the interdependence of the different peoples of the world and one’s personal responsibility for fostering international understanding and peace.”

Thus, higher education was indispensable for the sustenance of democracy and perhaps the continued existence of the human race, and therefore it had an urgent need to expand its size and mission.

The Payoff: Funding and Autonomy

The commissioners did not let the implications of their deft framework remain self-evident. They closed the first volume of the report with a direct order: “We may be sure our democracy will not survive unless American schools and colleges are given the means for improvement and expansion. This is a primary call upon the Nation’s resources. We dare not disregard it.” They equated higher education funding to military expenditure; while defeating external enemies was in the national interest, so too was defeating “educational deficiencies and inequalities that are democracy’s enemies within.” And that was not even in the volume about funding. Volume five, which laid out the costs of the commission’s suggested agenda, opened with an admonition to ignore its price tag: “Expenditures for education cannot be regarded as costs in the usual accounting sense. These outlays are both investments in and insurance for the democratic future of a free people. Freedom is above price, and without knowledge there can be no freedom.”

For those who cared to look, however, the price of freedom turned out to be $1.85 billion in annual public subsidies ($23 billion in today’s dollars), plus another billion annually in scholarships that would reach at least 20 percent of nonveteran students. The commission’s plan called for shifting higher education financing away from student tuition and fees (although not eliminating them for juniors, seniors, and graduate students) and toward state and federal appropriations. Washington was especially admonished to find the money. The authors pointed out that federal dollars were already financing the postsecondary education portion of the GI Bill to the tune of a billion dollars annually; why not continue that spending after the GIs had graduated and top it up a bit?

The report included a three-page historical account of the federal government’s various ways of funding higher education, going back to the 1785 Northwest Ordinance and the 1862 Morrill Land-Grant Act. But the authors contrasted previous funds that paid for “a few specific needs and temporary action in times of crisis” with a new endless frontier of financing in the name of safeguarding democracy, even when war was distant, and the GIs had been readjusted: “The time has come when the Federal Government must concern itself with the total and long-time needs for higher education. These needs are ever present and ever increasing. Higher education is no less important to the Nation in calmer times than in periods of national crisis.”

The commission’s audacious request for vastly increased public funding (a jump of 1,400 percent from prewar levels) was matched by their equally audacious request that the government refrain from providing oversight. Higher Education for American Democracy disavowed top-down planning or regulation entirely. The report’s third volume, titled “Organizing Higher Education,” was in fact about not organizing higher education, at least as far as Washington, DC and the state capitals were concerned. “The principal function of government in the field of higher education is to facilitate the free exercise of initiative and self-direction by educational leaders and institutions under their own devices. Government, both Federal and State, can best safeguard the vast stake it has in the development and maintenance of the strongest possible system of education by exercising leadership rather than by authority.” Leadership meant cracking down on for-profit “diploma mills,” providing “advisory functions,” and connecting government research programs to universities. And, of course, signing the checks.

Yet again, democratic exigencies made for a powerful rhetorical weapon. The commission emphatically rejected the reformist logic of the prewar era, which had focused on the standardization of coursework and academic degrees: “The dominant character of educational organization in a democracy is flexibility, not rigidity. Uniformity, the fetish of totalitarianism, has no place in a democracy.” One way to forestall centralized control involved expansion—not just of campus capacities, but of the total number of campuses. “Our nation will need more, separate, 2-year and 4-year college and university units of small size … in addition to the recommended increase in community colleges. … The basic need is to assure decentralization.”

The authors did not reject the need for organization, only organization coming from the top. They offered better mechanisms for promoting order: “Voluntary agencies have been chiefly responsible for bringing about the system, the coordination, and the cooperation under which higher education operates. These agencies exemplify democracy in one of its most effective forms. They have made unnecessary the building up of governmental controls, either National or State.” Those voluntary agencies included the regional accreditation bodies and exclusive clubs like the AAU. The largest was the ACE, whose president just happened to be chairing the Truman Commission: in this game of insider’s baseball, a true home run.

The Importance of Agenda-Setting

For all my celebration of the commission’s brilliant rhetoric and political savvy, there is this: it had nothing to show for itself. Congress did not act on the report, and the president issued no related executive orders. But that is not where the story ends.

Yet another contingency blocked immediate action. In November 1946, as the commission was hard at work, Republicans crushed the Democrats in mid-term elections, taking back both houses of Congress and ending the New Deal era in Washington. Truman proposed a surge of federal education funding in his “Fair Deal” agenda, but like most of that program it went nowhere. Nevertheless, federal funding started to flow within a decade of the report’s publication. The 1958 National Defense Education Act (NDEA), a package of subsidized loans and direct aid passed in response to the Soviet launch of the Sputnik I satellite the year before, was a direct echo of the Truman Commission’s link between educational expansion and American security. The ratified language of the NDEA also echoed the Truman report’s emphasis on autonomy; its very first provision was titled “Federal Control of Education Prohibited.” The Higher Education Facilities Act of 1963 bankrolled campus expansions and the building of whole new institutions.

The peak of this surge of federal largesse was the Higher Education Act (HEA) of 1965, passed with nearly unanimous bipartisan support as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program. The HEA’s provisions for tuition grants and loans are mainstays of the national postsecondary financial system to this day, and Johnson’s words upon signing the bill offered another long-term reinforcement to the Truman Commission’s insistence on autonomy: “The federal government intends to be a partner and not a boss. … The federal government has neither the wish nor the power to dictate education.”

Amid that surge of federal support, other demands laid out in Higher Education for American Democracy were already being met. College enrollments did double, not quite by 1960, but by 1963, before even the oldest Boomers were enrolling in any significant numbers. Desegregation did happen, not by congressional law but by Supreme Court edict. Four years before Earl Warren famously engineered a unanimous decision in Brown, a unanimous pre-Warren court declared “separate but equal” unconstitutional in higher education, in the twin 1950 decisions Sweatt v. Painter and McLaurin v. Oklahoma.

And public funding had already started flowing even before the NDEA turned on the federal spigot, as nearly every U.S. state devoted redoubled resources to growing higher education’s footprint. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, state legislatures funded huge expansions of their community colleges, just as the Truman report had called for. At the same time, coalitions of ambitious legislators and businesspeople in California, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, and elsewhere collaborated to make spectacular public investments in research universities that would ultimately absorb the lion’s share of federal science funding. The best example of these two trends was in New York, where the State University of New York was launched just five months after the commission’s report came out, rapidly turning a poorly funded and desultory collection of institutions into a robust state system that ranged from small broad-access colleges to multiple research universities.

Dueling Narratives

Considered in retrospect, the great accomplishment of the Truman Commission lay in forcefully making the case that failure to massively invest in higher education posed an existential risk to the nation’s immediate security. Its timing, during the brief and anxious period between World War II and the U.S./Soviet Cold War, was incredibly important for its influence. Whether or not any readers fully bought into the report’s strident urgency, its case that massive public expenditure coupled with an assurance of autonomy in higher education was necessary for the project of American democracy certainly sank in.

Once more, it is useful to consider the counterfactual. A different presidential commission, dominated by critics rather than insiders, might have set a far more pessimistic tone about higher education, reaching the ears of President Truman (a man who famously did not go to college, after all) and convincing a newly conservative Congress that what colleges and universities needed was retrenchment and reform.

This need not be a hypothetical. In 2006, the second-most-famous federal panel on higher education, the Spellings Commission, issued a deeply critical report insisting that “U.S. higher education needs to improve in dramatic ways. … [It is] self-satisfied and unduly expensive.” The commission demanded greater accountability and attention to “quality.” “Without serious self-examination and reform,” the report warned, colleges and universities risked “seeing their market share substantially reduced and their services increasingly characterized by obsolescence.” This report came from a very different panel than the 1946 group, with far more representatives of business and members of academia who were notorious critics of their own peers, like Richard Vedder and Robert Mendenhall. The president of the ACE was once again named to the commission, but he pointedly refused to sign the final report.

The Spellings Commission’s criticism set the tone for the current accountability era in higher education policy, in which federal, state, and philanthropic support is not just dwindling but also increasingly tied to specific expectations and outcomes. Most of these are rooted in notions of efficiency that echo the reformist prewar era far more than the “golden age” of American higher education that began with the GI Bill and Truman Commission. Once more, higher education is today perceived as the problem and not the solution.

Can we change the narrative again? If we are to do so, the audaciously political work of a federal panel 75 years ago could be our guide. 

Additional information

Funding

National Academy of Education and Spencer Foundation

Notes on contributors

Ethan W. Ris

Ethan Ris is an Assistant Professor of educational leadership (higher education administration) at the University of Nevada, Reno. He is a historian of U.S. higher education with a focus on policy, reform, and governance.