A Good Crisis: Emergencies and the Reframing of American Higher Education, 1944–1965

ABSTRACT

The purported “Golden Age” of American higher education, typically associated with the two decades following World War II, was marked by increasingly generous federal support of the nation’s postsecondary institutions and their students. Unlike analyses that attribute this largesse to factors like geopolitics (i.e., a response to the Cold War) or demographics (i.e., expansion to accommodate the Baby Boom generation), this article argues that a deliberate strategy rooted in rhetoric enabled “higher education partisans” to successfully push generous higher education policy in Washington, DC. Specifically, the language of crisis and emergency enabled these advocates to frame college-going as a tool that could solve social and economic problems, defend the nation and its values, and chip away at prejudice and inequality. Their success is evident in a “policy cascade” initiated by the 1944 GI Bill and reaching its apex with the 1965 Higher Education Act. This article relies on new archival research and document analysis to examine the trajectories of six key pieces of federal policymaking, which together constituted “a sheep in wolf’s clothing” by couching funding for colleges and universities as a response to urgent, even existential, crises.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Ethan W. Ris

Ethan W. Ris is an Associate Professor of Higher Education Administration at the University of Nevada, Reno. His research is on postsecondary policy and reform in the United States over the course of the 20th century. He is the author of Other People’s Colleges: The Origins of American Higher Education Reform (University of Chicago Press, 2022), and has held research fellowships with the National Endowment for the Humanities, Spencer Foundation/National Academy of Education, and the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society.