Promises Made: The Truman Commission Report at 75

Some anniversaries are moving targets. This issue could have been published 2 years ago, timed to President Harry Truman’s 1946 convening of the nation’s first blue-ribbon panel on higher education. Or it could have been in recognition of 1947, when the first two volumes of the Truman commission’s report, Higher Education for American Democracy, were first published—because these volumes were the most radical and most cited of all. Or it could have been tied to the 1948 publication of the report’s final four volumes, completing the panel’s work.

This issue indeed commemorates 75 years since 1948 but for a different reason. That summer, the New York publishing giant Harper & Brothers issued its own edition of Higher Education for American Democracy (President’s Commission on Higher Education, 1948). The initial versions of the report had come from the Government Printing Office in Washington, where it shared company with texts like the 1947 treatise The Design and Methods of Construction of Welded Steel Merchant Vessels (U.S. Navy, 1948). But the acquisition by Harper & Brothers meant the report suddenly had a place in the storied publishing house that issued first editions of famed authors like Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Richard Wright.

Harper & Brothers’ decision to sell a mass market version of the report, which became known as the Truman Commission Report, indicated a contemporary understanding about the text’s momentousness. One commentator wrote: “It seems a reasonable prophecy that the publication of the Report of the President’s Commission on Higher Education will mark a transitional period in American college and university development. … The American college can never be the same again” (Tead, 1949). Another implored, “Workers in, and thinkers for, higher educational institutions are under an obligation to read, to reflect, and to react” to the report (Elliott, 1948). The New York Times’ education editor argued that “these proposals are certain to have a profound effect on the future pattern of higher education in this country. … [The report is] of inestimable value to educators and laymen alike as a blueprint for the future development of our colleges and universities” (Fine, 1948).

Higher Education for American Democracy is an astonishing text to read retrospectively. It called for full desegregation of all educational institutions 7 years before the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. It anticipated the crucial role that community colleges would play in the nation’s higher education infrastructure 13 years before the widely celebrated 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education established that concept as state law and a national model. It proposed federally funded need-based scholarships 17 years before the earliest version of what we now call Pell Grants. It decried “antifeminism in higher education” 25 years before the Title IX amendment to the Higher Education Act. It demanded that “leaders and institutions should take positive steps to overcome” educational inequity 30 years before the high point of affirmative action policies in higher education. It suggested that 49% of traditional-age students should be enrolled in college 41 years before the nation attained that percentage. And it called for the first 2 years of college to be made free for all students, without ability testing or means testing, 7 decades before that idea became a central plank of the current progressive political platform.

This “crystal ball” aspect of the Truman Commission Report is part of the reason that it has a place in the standard narrative of American higher education in the 20th century. But while its significance is not in question, contemporary scholars have different takes on how we should consider it.

Some view the report as a transformation in the philosophy of postsecondary education. For example, Philo Hutcheson (2007) recognizes it as a “vision of the future” of higher education, particularly in its “recognizing students as both students and human beings with cultural backgrounds,” while Geoffrey Galt Harpham (2017) describes it as spurring the resurrection of the liberal arts, which had been fading for decades.

Others understand it primarily as policy. Roger Geiger (2019) reads it as an anachronistic echo of New Deal liberalism; Ethan Ris (2022) argues that it is a politically savvy piece of agenda setting that bordered on outright lobbying by the higher education sector; Gilbert and Heller (2013) contend that it has been a major influence on postsecondary policy ever since its issuance, especially in its call for major investments in community colleges.

Still more scholars view the Truman commission’s work as a landmark in advancing educational opportunity and equity. Julie Reuben and Linda Perkins (2007) emphasize the report’s attack on segregation and its focus on “expand[ing] access while moderating stratification in higher education,” and Elizabeth Shermer (2022) highlights the report’s ambitious call to break down all barriers to postsecondary access—a call that was ultimately unheeded, particularly for students from low-income households.

The articles in this special issue both deepen our understanding of Higher Education for American Democracy and use it as a jumping-off point for further exploration. We do not propose to offer anything close to a declaration of what the report “is” or how it should be interpreted. Instead, we hope to use this anniversary to, once again, show the complexity and wide-ranging vision of the report and the individuals who created it. And we also hope that this issue will continue to problematize both the text itself and the notion of a “golden age” of higher education, often described as the two decades following the Allied victories in Germany and Japan. In many ways, the lofty ideals of 1948—and the subsequent memory of those ideals—were and are unfulfilled, disingenuous, or self-serving. That, too, is part of the Truman Commission’s legacy.

Our first article, coauthored by Nicholas Strohl and Ethan Ris, focuses on the report’s authors. Through an exploration of the backgrounds of 10 of the 28 Truman commission members, the article makes the case that the men and women called to service in 1946 were each deeply affected by their lived experiences. In particular, the cataclysm of World War I represented to them a fracture in the progress and stability of democracy and the world order. They also independently developed the belief that higher education could be a balm for a “changing, complex, and dangerous world,” but only if it was offered with universal access. The commission members, however, had disagreements about what “universal” meant and how it applied to racial and religious minorities. Ultimately, the report’s authors agreed that higher education would bolster democracy through opportunity, rather than equality; they “believed in the power of college-going not because it was the ‘great equalizer,’ but because it was the great unifier.”

In the issue’s second article, Allison Palmadessa asks how a document that so plainly called for equal access in fact “facilitated the exact opposite result of the advertised purpose of democratization of higher education.” Employing critical discourse analysis conducted through a critical realist lens, Palmadessa codes the words and phrases of Higher Education for American Democracy alongside more than 100 other public texts written or spoken by President Truman between 1945 and 1948. The article demonstrates that the rhetoric employed by Truman and the commission members undermined their stated purposes by centering the nascent Cold War and the desire for economic growth. In doing so, the report anticipated the defining features of the 1950s and early 1960s, but at a great cost. Palmadessa argues, “Democracy as a semblance of equality, justice, and order was replaced with indicators of security, control, defense, power, prosperity, and economic status.”

The third article also examines the use of rhetoric in the Truman report and other documents. Ethan Ris offers a political history of “a two-decade policy cascade that dramatically changed the federal role in shaping college-going,” including the report among five other pieces of federal policymaking beginning with the 1944 legislation known as the GI Bill and ending with the 1965 Higher Education Act. Ris argues that in the 1940s, the report’s authors and like-minded colleagues in White House staff offices and in Congress developed a highly effective and self-dealing strategy: “harness[ing] the language of emergency and exigency to make an urgent case for expanded funding.” These authors claimed that “American democracy” was in immediate danger due to threats ranging from racial injustice to nuclear annihilation—and in the same breath, claimed that the solution to these problems was sending more students to college at taxpayers’ expense. The article concludes that this rhetorical strategy was akin to “a sheep in wolf’s clothing,” that tied the once-neglected higher education sector to broad social and geopolitical challenges and, therefore, “normalized federal support of college-going.”

Joan Malcewski also uses Higher Education for American Democracy to understand higher education policy in subsequent decades. In our fourth article, she draws on original archival research to analyze the role of the American Council on Education (ACE) in shaping federal higher education policy. ACE president George Zook chaired the Truman commission, and Malcewski demonstrates the integral role of the DC-based organization in shaping both that document and higher education policy throughout the 1950s and 1960s. But even as the ACE effectively lobbied for increased funding for colleges and universities (which were its constituents), it failed to speak up for need-based student aid, in direct defiance of the commission’s recommendations. The federal government did not institute a broad grant program for students from low-income households until the creation of Pell Grants in 1972, which the ACE opposed. Choosing to privilege autonomy and growth over equity, the organization bowed to the interests of the institutions it represented, meaning that “interest group pluralism” became its chief purpose. “The result is a modern system that has expanded access, but perpetuated inequality.”

The final contribution to this issue is a theoretical essay by Ethan Schrum that asks why historians and other scholars have largely ignored Higher Education for American Democracy’s influence on the undergraduate curriculum. While many, including the other authors in this issue, have noted the report’s importance in policymaking, its calls for “general education” and the revival of a holistic ideal of higher education are typically overlooked in favor of other mid-century documents, such as the 1945 Harvard University report General Education in a Free Society, often known as the Harvard Redbook. Schrum criticizes these “awkward, incomplete, and perhaps misleading interpretations” that center the elitist and meritocratic ethos of the Redbook and neglect the Truman commission’s insistence that a liberal education could benefit all kinds of students, not just “future leaders.” The essay argues that scholars should refocus on the less-celebrated report, which sheds more light on the evolving role of general education across the entire American higher education sector, rather than a handful of elite institutions.

That juxtaposition of universal-versus-elite undergirds the ultimate significance of Higher Education for American Democracy. In many ways, the report failed to keep its promises—both the internal ones about the primacy of democracy and equity and the long-term external ones about making postsecondary access uniformly accessible and affordable. But the Truman commission did definitively shift the national conversation around higher education from an elite framework into a much bigger and more inclusive framework. After 1948, no one could responsibly consider America’s postsecondary system in terms of its most selective and well-funded institutions, and no one could responsibly think about American higher education as something that only belonged to “the best and the brightest” or to students born into racial and economic privilege. This landmark report did not produce democracy or equity in higher education, but it did birth a national mindset in which democracy and equity were imaginable goals.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

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.

Eddie R. Cole

Eddie R. Cole is an Associate Professor of Higher Education and History at UCLA and a Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellow. He is also the author of The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom (Princeton University Press, 2020). Professor Cole has received grants and fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, Spencer Foundation, the National Academy of Education, the University of Chicago, and Princeton University. He has published in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.