“Laboratories of Inter-Race and Interfaith Fellowship”:Higher Education for American Democracy’s Vision for a More Democratic Academy and Country

In Short

• Higher Education for American Democracy showed awareness of how race, sex, class, and religious discrimination thwarted the talents and ambitions of citizens and immigrants to the detriment of the country’s democratic potential.

• The report laid out prescriptions for creating a more inclusive, financially supported academy in the name of making the country more democratic.

• The immediate hostile response to this report foretold the policy choices that would leave many campuses cash-strapped and students drowning in college debt.

T here was a lot of talk about both the fate of American democracy and American higher education in 2021, but not much consideration about how the two were deeply intertwined. Democrats were at war with each other over postsecondary education, a voting rights overhaul, and other incendiary topics that highlighted the inequities endemic to the almost 250-year-old Republic. Some progressives also pressured the Biden administration to cancel a sizeable portion of student debt that, as Massachusetts Representative Ayanna Pressley emphasized, “[d]isproportionately impacts Black and brown borrowers.” Washington Representative Premila Jayapal and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders also introduced legislation to guarantee higher education would be a “right for all, not a privilege for the few” by investing in community colleges, public 4-year institutions, and nonprofit campuses that served students of color.

They envisioned far more to ensure the country had a high standard of living and “the best educated workforce in the world” than the White House imagined for higher education. The administration included postsecondary schools in its sizeable spring 2021 infrastructure bill but even that pared-down proposal seemed destined to die alongside the John Lewis Voting Rights Act in a narrowly divided House and Senate.

Those two bills’ fates are a reminder of the 1947 Higher Education for American Democracy’s startling findings and warnings. Education experts have often focused on the Commission on Higher Education’s most well-known demands: building more community colleges, making the 13th and 14th grades free, and starting a national scholarship program to cover the costs of the final years of an undergraduate’s education. But that list of just some of the six-volume report’s suggestions have overlooked and undervalued the larger argument the commission was making about the importance of higher education. The report’s authors argued that far more was at stake than the country’s or individual citizens’ economic well-being. The very health, vitality, and future of American democracy hinged on a well-funded, genuinely inclusive academy.

The report was both representative and radical for its time. The analyses, goals, and solutions showed awareness of how race, sex, class, and religious discrimination thwarted the talents and ambitions of citizens and immigrants to the detriment of the country’s democratic potential, not just its economic might. It openly recognized the expense of a college education, highlighted nationwide discriminatory admissions practices, demanded an end to legally segregated schooling, called for investment in (what would eventually be called) historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), insisted on federal funding for city and state campuses, and tied such support to equal opportunities to enroll. Those and other suggestions were meant to build and sustain a genuinely affordable, accessible mass higher education that the commissioners argued would make the Republic more democratic.

The immediate response to the report foretold former Office of Education director George Zook’s fears of the kind of “patchwork and piecemeal legislation” that has left millions of Americans in debt from attending colleges that struggle to remain solvent even though they have been and remain on the frontlines of American democracy. A handful of President Harry Truman’s appointees to the commission wrote signed dissents to desegregation and federal funding suggestions, but many more academics decried recommendations that they considered a threat to academic freedom and institutional autonomy. Few openly engaged with the racism, religious intolerance, and elitism that the Zook report considered dangers to a democratic Republic. Local, state, national, and institutional policies would, over the next 75 years, disproportionately leave students and parents of color borrowing more for college and struggling to repay what they owed.

Before 1947: Democracy on the Mind and on the Line

Concerns about higher education and democracy did not suddenly appear via the commission and its members; they were raised before, during, and after World War II. The growing number of citizens and immigrants clamoring to enroll in the 1920s had done little to keep campuses open in the early years of the Great Depression, when many teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. Yet many leading academics, including Harvard’s James Conant, had no interest in a New Deal for higher education. They assumed federal aid would come at the expense of academic freedom and institutional autonomy.

The Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) administration never considered a broad collegiate bailout. White House officials cared more about the labor market and experimented with matching loans and grants for construction projects on public campuses as well as a work/study program that could be used at any nonprofit postsecondary school. Paying low-income students for the part-time work while in college kept young people in school, out of the labor market, off of unemployment, and away from radicals who might try to build the kind of youth organizations then roiling European politics.

Anticommunism and racism did a lot to hasten the demise of work/study and the National Youth Administration (NYA) overseeing it. NYA Director Aubrey Williams was not a communist, but the Alabaman was to the left of many New Dealers, few of whom openly challenged Jim Crow segregation. But Williams openly touted work/study to help African American youth, whom the white Southerner correctly recognized as being hardest hit and least helped during the Depression. His efforts to offer additional support for the colleges willing to admit them did nothing to endear him to Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans in Congress eager to protect white supremacy. Those powerful lawmakers waged a campaign against the New Deal’s youth programs as a part of their larger war against the Roosevelt administration—despite widespread public enthusiasm for both.

Conservative attacks continued during World War II when a growing number of liberals, union leaders, and academics had come to see higher education as important to bolstering both democracy and the economy. Work-study and the NYA still did not survive tense 1943 congressional budget battles even though both had become a vital part of building what FDR famously proclaimed to be an “Arsenal of Democracy,” capable of defeating the Axis Powers. Campuses across the country, not just those like Harvard, continued to contract with the military, including in the top-secret project to build an atom bomb. Those partnerships were important as young people served abroad or sought well-paying jobs in war production factories. This dismayed campus leaders, who needed them to enroll, and military officials worried about the supply of college-educated officers, doctors, and engineers.

Colleges and universities soon found themselves overwhelmed with GIs eager to use the benefits laid out in the 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act. The now celebrated GI Bill of Rights exposed just how ill-prepared campuses were to meet postwar demands and expectations, including lawmakers’ and White House officials’ hopes that schooling opportunities would ease pressure on the labor market as soldiers returned. Few in Washington predicted that many of them would want to enroll. Low estimates did not stop academics fighting legislation that University of Chicago president Robert Hutchins predicted would turn campuses into “hobo jungles.” Many more assumed veterans would have no interest in enrolling in campuses offering the high-minded programs of study for which only a small number of Americans allegedly had the smarts or inclination in which to succeed.

As it happened, former soldiers eagerly applied and excelled in ways unimaginable to the senators and representatives who had fought over that intentionally temporary list of benefits. Journalists lauded the veterans pursuing degrees. Reporters also drew attention to the African American GIs bravely trying to use their benefits at segregated institutions; quoted admissions personnel confessing that women struggled to gain entry; investigated the quota system keeping the academy the purview of white, Protestant men; interviewed the young families crowding into military surplus structures transformed into temporary dorms; and followed the veterans protesting the meager and often delayed “subsistence checks.” Even on-time payments did not stop poor and working-class GIs from seeking then hard-to-find part-time jobs, taking out loans, and even deciding they had to drop out. Such exposés really just scratched the surface of the systemic inequality that, researchers later uncovered, ensured that the GI Bill in general and its education provisions in particular, did by far the most for white, male, Protestant soldiers.

Stories of the GI Bill’s fitful rollout reached Truman, a man personally and politically interested in what higher education could do for all Americans, including civilians. Family obligations had forced him to abandon his studies as a young man, making him the last president without a college degree. He had been one of the Senate Democrats trying to save the NYA during the war’s early years. The Missourian also signed the legislation necessary to amend the GI Bill to improve its benefits, particularly those for schooling. As Ethan Ris explains in his article in this issue, Truman’s aides were predisposed to urge the president to demand a comprehensive study of American higher education and include American Council on Education president (and former Office of Education director) George Zook—the same man who had publicly warned of “patchwork and piecemeal legislation” in 1945.

The Report: Education in the Name of Democracy, not Defense

Zook and the 27 other appointees to the President’s Commission on Higher Education produced a 1947 report reflecting widespread discussions of systemic inequalities, which nevertheless startled journalists at the time and continues to intrigue academics for its prescriptions to safeguard democracy at home, not shore up defenses in the Cold War’s early years. As Ris’ article emphasizes, the 26 men and two women Truman named in 1946 were hardly radicals. Kansas State College president Milton Eisenhower (future President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s brother) was, for example, well known for politics far more conservative than Mark Starr, the International Ladies Garment Worker Union’s education director. They were joined by a philanthropist, reporter, social worker, career Office of Education bureaucrat, union leader, business magnate, and agriculturalist, as well as Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant religious leaders. Most members were administrators who represented the sheer breadth of American postsecondary institutions. Many worked in the Midwest. There was at least one representative from a small liberal arts college, state university, private university, junior college, teachers’ college, Catholic institution, women’s college, and what was then called a Negro college.

That sundry roster shaped the six-volume review’s bold arguments about higher education and democracy. The preface mentioned concerns about pressures on the country’s natural resources and its international responsibilities, especially after the dropping of two atomic bombs, but really focused on creating “dynamic unity” in “our free society.” The challenges of waging an All-American war effort and many African Americans’ hopes for a victory against racism at home and fascism abroad also loomed over the report’s warnings that “economic, cultural or religious tension” necessitated “democratic reconciliation” through a “continuous process of interpersonal, intervocational, and intercultural cooperation.” At least half the population, appointees agreed, would and should be able to complete the first 2 years of college, a far greater percentage than most New Dealers and academics had assumed before the work/study experiment.

Unlike the New Dealers who designed work/study or the lawmakers who fought over the GI Bill, the commission did not prioritize labor market needs. Instead, they emphasized higher education’s importance for “insur[ing] equal liberty and equal opportunity to differing individuals and groups” because they defined American democracy as “based on the principle of equal rights for all its members, regardless of race, faith, sex, occupation, or economic status.” Equal, free chances to learn subsequently would “enable the citizens to understand, appraise, and redirect forces, men, and events as these tend to strengthen or weaken their liberties.”

Those declarations helped the authors emphasize “the size of the job that remains to be done,” as their report put it. All six volumes reiterated how incomplete and unequal the American democratic experiment remained. The appointees strikingly refrained from using the term “class,” as tensions with the Soviet Union abroad and communist witch hunts at home escalated but concluded that enrollment “is at present influenced far too much by economic conditions.” The study laid out the real “economic barriers” to enrolling, studying, and finishing degrees, which included detailed explanations of how actual college costs, which might seem cheap now, far surpassed what most families, then netting less than $2,600 a year, could afford.

The report did not hesitate to label the challenges facing Jews, Catholics, and African Americans being branded “un-American” and “antidemocratic.” It only glossed over the “antifeminism” women faced but provided detailed descriptions of the widespread use of quotas and legally segregated schooling, which in many ways fit a moment when reporters covered the GIs’ protesting and even suing to use their temporary Bill of Rights. Commissioners boldly argued that these separate, clearly unequal institutions harmed both whites and African Americans.

The study nonetheless underscored that these problems were not unique to the Jim Crow South a decade before the de jure and de facto labels became commonly used. Far outside the District of Columbia and the 17 states with segregation laws, appointees noted, “[E]conomic and social discrimination of various sorts often operates to produce segregation in certain neighborhoods, which are frequently characterized by poorer school buildings, less equipment and less able teachers.” “Negroes, Jews, Catholics, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Latin Americans, Italians, and Orientals” were just some of the “diverse religious and racial groups,” who had daily reminders of how much the country, not just its campuses, failed to live up to the maxim that everyone, including women, were created equal.

The report’s recommendations were equally striking for their time. Appointees emphasized that the American academy would continue to “embody the principle of diversity in unity” with “each institution, State, or other agency … continu[ing] to make its own contribution in its own way.” Nevertheless, the report recommended substantial federal involvement, which the commission recognized many academics and politicians would consider unprecedented despite the 1787 Northwest Ordinance, 1862 and 1890 Morrill Acts, 1930s work/study program, and 1944 GI Bill. No state legislature, donor, or parent could allocate enough for the national overhaul of higher education laid out in the report. So, Congress would have to provide a far greater percentage of the country’s annual national income for just the most well-known suggestions: new community colleges to offer accessible local options for those unable to relocate, subsidizing the 13th and 14th grades to make them tuition-free, and scholarships for needy undergraduates’ junior and senior years.

Washington, DC lawmakers and bureaucrats also had an important role to play in building a more democratic, inclusive academy. It would require vastly improved high schools; better counseling programs; at least one well-paid faculty member for every 13 students, rigorous pedagogical trainings, more adult education options, grants to cover low-income students’ books and living expenses, fee reductions at public institutions to bring rates down to where they were in 1939, more graduate student fellowships, and substantial investments in African American colleges and universities to bolster them during what appointees predicted would be a long, fraught process of dismantling segregation. Thereafter, members recommended that federal support only go to public institutions that did not discriminate—almost 20 years before the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s passage.

The report deemed all these steps necessary to finally “make public education at all levels equally accessible to all, without regard to race, creed, sex or national origin.” Such revolutionary steps promised to prevent higher education from becoming “an instrument for creating the very inequalities it was designed to prevent.” “If the ladder of educational opportunity rises high at the doors of some youth and scarcely rises high at the doors of others,” the report warned, “education may become the means, not of eliminating race and class distinctions but of deepening and solidifying them.”

Dissent: Debating Democracy

Yet, as Ris underscores in his article for this issue, not much came from Higher Education for American Democracy, despite the many researchers who have proclaimed it prophetic. Those five volumes included two short dissents that hinted at the many obstacles to transforming campuses into “laboratories of inter-race and interfaith fellowship” and “pioneering agents of leadership against discrimination.” Washington University’s Arthur Compton, Richmond News Leader editor Douglas Freeman, the University of Arkansas’ Lewis Jones, and Emory president Goodrich White wrote a half-page footnote to object to the report’s demand for an end to segregated schooling. That rebuttal recognized the “gross inequality of opportunity” and expressed support for improved conditions “as rapidly as possible,” but insisted also that efforts “must, in the South, be made within the established patterns of social relationships, which require separate educational opportunities for whites and Negroes.” “Pronouncements such as those of the Commission,” they insisted, “impede progress, and threaten tragedy to the people of the South, both white and black.”

Those ardent segregationists, two of whom worked at private institutions, did not join the Catholic members objecting to public institutions’ exclusive eligibility for federal funds. Monsignor Frederick Hochwalt, then an educational consultant for the National Catholic Welfare Conference, and Catholic University of America dean Martin McGuire spent nearly three pages protesting the commission’s suggestion that federal funds only be used at public institutions. Private campuses “had long and distinguished records of serve to our Nation in peace and war,” they insisted, and should not be excluded from federal aid to expand and slash the fees at state schools. The main report had admitted such targeted support “may make it extremely difficult for many private institutions to survive.” Such institutions would have to compete on both cost and quality during the rapid expansion of the public wing of the academy that the report had deemed imperative.

Hochwalt and McGuire also stoked longstanding fears of government-controlled campuses and more contemporary fears of totalitarianism, which they insisted had “made the dictatorships of Germany, Italy, and Japan acceptable to an ever-increasing number of their populations.” Offering federal support to sustain the many private schools of “service to the public” but not under “public support” hence seemed a clear way to continue America’s tradition of checking and balancing power to protect democracy.

Very few reporters paid attention to these dissents. Instead, like subsequent generations of academics, they focused on the call to double enrollment by 1960, cover the first 2 years of college, build more community colleges, and provide federal scholarships. Not even the papers that noted the dissents emphasized the commissioners’ argument about equalizing educational opportunities in the name of democracy. For example, the Chicago Tribune ran a story featuring Hochwalt’s and McGuire’s objection and the report’s warning that private schools, like many of heavily Catholic Chicago’s private campuses, might close. The Chicago Defender, the south side’s African American daily, also ignored the report’s overarching claim about democracy in its coverage of making nondiscrimination a qualifier for federal support and the commission’s assertion that segregation harmed both whites and blacks. Washington Post reporters, in contrast, emphasized that the commission had highlighted how DC’s schooling laws were similar to Jim Crow laws in 17 other states. Those journalists did not name, as the Chicago Defender had, the authors “register[ing] dissent to the statements concerning … segregation, which was dealt with comparatively briefly in the report.”

Most academics did not squarely confront the report’s arguments about a healthy democracy’s need for equal educational opportunities in the otherwise fervent debates that raged in academic journals and spilled over into mainstream news outlets. Commentary was so voluminous that commission member James Harlow warned that a full list could not fit in his 1953 Journal of Higher Education retrospective, which appeared a year after Gail Kennedy’s 1952 Education for Democracy: The Debate over the Report of the President’s Commission on Higher Education. Academics fought over what institutions needed, how much campuses should grow, and who should fund those expansions, issues that spoke to the larger question of whether the country needed mass higher education.

Some administrators disliked being asked to make room for more young people on their campuses at a moment when they had barely been able to accommodate the GIs eager to enroll. Others doubted whether there needed to be a national mandate for universal access, since opportunities abounded for motivated citizens. Some, like the economist Seymour Harris, raised concerns about whether the labor market could absorb so many degree holders. He feared “an eventual revolutionary movement sparked by unemployed, frustrated, and downgraded college graduates” since economic data indicated it “may not pay to be educated” if alumni “receive on average less pay than manual workers.”

Many critics doubted the value of helping so many young people attend college. A number of academics rejected the commission’s assertion that half of the citizenry were capable of advanced learning. Some, including the University of Chicago’s President Hutchins, were open to an additional 2 years of schooling. He nonetheless insisted, well into the GI Bill’s rollout, that those without “ability and interest” to finish the 13th and 14th grades should not be forced to do so. Conant too wanted college reserved for the “intellectually gifted,” even though he worried that the country might soon have a “hereditary aristocracy.” That concern made Conant more open to robust support for public and private institutions even though he considered high schools and community colleges best suited to prepare most young people for labor market demands.

As it was during the Roosevelt Era, federal overreach remained a fear implicitly tied to the Republic’s reliance on a balance of powers. Those academics in favor of direct, robust support insisted that the national government and the academy had already become intertwined in multifaceted, profitable relationships that had not robbed faculty of their academic freedom or campuses of their autonomy, especially since so much support had been channeled through the student assistance that the commission wanted to substantially increase. Many scholars, especially those at private colleges, still shared Hochwalt’s and McGuire’s concerns that federal funding would make private campuses unable to compete with low-cost public options, particularly if that funding went only to public institutions.

Left-wing commentators’ concerns subsequently stood out during this debate about the need for federal funding and possibility of mass higher education amid the escalating Cold War abroad and push for civil rights at home. Sociologist Robert Lynd daringly asked if commissioners “actually believe that within a class-stratified society there is any possibility of meeting their pious goal?” The report, he insisted, failed to realize that “liberal democracy lives in unresolved conflict with capitalism.” Esteemed African American historian Carter Woodson, in contrast, praised the report for recognizing that a democracy could not be segregated by race or religion. He accordingly denounced “would-be-liberal-educators” “from the backward area [who] had not the courage to endorse the abolition of segregation.” Woodson considered their short footnote an affront to the democracy that the report promised to support.

The 20,000 copies that the White House distributed for free did not do much to reinforce the message that a democratic Republic needs inclusive, well-funded, and affordable colleges and universities for more than just national defense or global economic competitiveness. Liberal Democrats and Republicans spent the first decade after the report’s publication submitting bills for federal funding for higher education, which perpetually died over money going to segregated campuses and private institutions, especially those with ecclesiastical connections. Those same issues nearly thwarted passage of the 1958 National Defense Education Act. Congress and the White House spent almost a year fighting over intentionally temporary legislation that offered limited support for specific programs, small graduate-student scholarships, and an incredibly complicated loan program for which all accredited schools, including segregated and religious institutions, were eligible.

Segregation remained a concern after the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s passage. The Johnson administration and its congressional allies recognized that neither desegregation nor integration would happen instantaneously. The 1965 Higher Education Act (HEA) subsequently included additional help for “developing institutions,” which insiders later explained was a polite way to refer to the HBCUs that they predicted would continue to shoulder preponderant responsibility for educating applicants of color. HEA also included seemingly color-blind tuition assistance options for campus financial-aid officers to give out, including a new work/study option and the Guaranteed Student Loan Program. Concerns that women and applicants of color did not have equal access to that support were an important part of including both Title IX and the Pell Grant program to HEA’s 1972 reauthorization, changes that did a lot to bolster a then laggard student loan industry.

Revisiting the Zook Report 75 years later subsequently offers a reminder of what was once possible and what has been forgotten. Higher Education for Democracy reflected a moment when Americans could not ignore that the celebrated All-American war effort had defeated the Axis powers abroad but not guaranteed democracy at home. The commission subsequently offered prescriptions that highlighted how making higher education more accessible could help the country confront systemic racial, gender, and economic inequalities. But elitism, sexism, racism, and xenophobia thwarted efforts to pass the report’s most well-known reforms and contributed to many scholars overlooking the more innovative ideas that could have prevented today’s intertwined college financing and student debt crises.

Yet there are signs in the current millennium that more Americans are recognizing the link between an inclusive academy and a healthy democracy. Student debt protests have increasingly emphasized that borrowers of color, especially women, owe more. Many of those uprisings have taken place on college campuses, where staff, faculty, and graduate students have been on the frontlines of campaigns to bring democratic unionism to campuses where good jobs and academic freedom seem to be disappearing. Colleges and universities have also been caught in the war over voting rights for their efforts to both register young people and make it easier for them to vote.

Those local efforts and battles do far more to emphasize the link between higher education and democracy than either progressive Democrats’ demands for student debt cancellation and the College for All Act or the Biden administration’s desire to make community college free and provide more research support for HBCUs and other minority serving institutions. Both, like so many of the academics debating the Zook report after its release, put far too much emphasis on the specifics of higher education’s economic potential than realizing the academy’s larger importance to furthering and bettering the American democratic experiment. 

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Notes on contributors

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer is an Associate Professor of history at Loyola University Chicago, where she teaches courses on labor, capitalism, politics, and higher education. She has written about those topics in op-eds, academic articles, and scholarly books, including Indentured Students (2021), a history of student lending published under Harvard University Press’s Belknap Press imprint. She is currently finishing a book on the public/private character of American higher education, tentatively titled, The Business of Education.