Recalling her experience as an exchange teacher in Birmingham, England, in 1938-39, in the midst of the Great Depression, Oregon teacher Mary Kelly, wrote:

This exploration of American women's post-World War II higher education begins with three stories. These narratives reflect issues women faced when, as educators, they tried to plan curricula and programs for female students, and when, as professionals, they tried to manage their own careers in an era that frequently sent mixed messages about women's roles and opportunities. They also reveal a quiet type of activism practiced by postwar women educators, an approach which often pales in comparison to the firmer efforts of postsuffrage and World War II activists, or to the lively and boisterous work of late-1960s feminists. However, I will argue that this more muted style, when combined with the era's predilection for individualized solutions to women's concerns, marks a particular postwar approach to advocacy that may be different from other eras but that suited the contextually complicated postwar period.

In the widely disseminated Harvard report General Education in a Free Society (1945), the authors of the section on science teaching in the schools made passing reference to the portrayal of the scientific method in the existing curriculum. Rather than simply noting its inadequacy in representing the process of scientific research, they could not resist the urge to deliver a more scathing commentary. “Nothing could be more stultifying, and, perhaps more important, nothing is further from the procedure of the scientist,” they insisted, “than a rigorous tabular progression through the supposed ‘steps' of the scientific method, with perhaps the further requirement that the student not only memorize but follow this sequence in his attempt to understand natural phenomena.” This indictment was followed in 1951 by similar comments from Harvard president James B. Conant in his book Science and Common Sense. Conant's criticism of what he called the “alleged scientific method,” seemed to resonate with interested readers of the time. The eminent wartime research director Vannevar Bush, writing in the Saturday Review, praised him for making it “crystal clear that there is no such thing as the scientific method.” “The elegant definition of the scientific method that we have read for years,” he noted approvingly, “comes in for the dissection it has long needed.” Another reviewer hailed Conant's “service to the community [in] briefing the busy citizen on the way in which science really works,” noting also that he had “effectively demolished] conventional twaddle about the scientific method.”

In the decade and a half after the Civil War, the American public school rose and fell as a central issue in national and state politics. After a relative calm on matters of education during and immediately after the War, the Republican Party and Catholic Church leaders in the late 1860s and early 1870s joined a bitter battle of words over the future of public education—who should control it, how should it be financed, and what should it teach about religion. These battles often reflected very different world views. Leading Protestant ministers and Republican politicians waved the threat of a rising antidemocratic “Catholic menace” as the new bloody shirt and championed their own educational ideal as a remedy—religiously neutral, ethnically and racially inclusive common schools. While Democrats tended to downplay school issues, Catholic Church leaders countered with their own screed: common schools were hardly common, embodying either inherently Protestant notions of religion or the atheism of no true religious creed at all. New York City became the epicenter of these cataclysmic debates, and the brilliant cartoonist Thomas Nast immortalized the Radical Republican side of the issue in the pages of Harper's Weekly.

William Barton Rogers, conceptual founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pursued two interrelated careers in nineteenth-century America: one centered on his activities in science and the other on his higher educational reform efforts. His scientific peers knew him as a geologist and natural philosopher, director of the first geological survey of Virginia, author of over one hundred publications in science, and promoter of professionalization. His colleagues in higher education, meanwhile, thought of him as the reform-minded professor at the College of William and Mary and the University of Virginia, who later left the South and established one of America's first technological institutes. Comparatively little has been written about either of these areas of Rogers's life and career. We know much more about the scientific and educational thought of such figures as Louis Agassiz at Harvard, Benjamin Silliman at Yale, Joseph Henry at Princeton, and Alexander Dallas Bache at the helm of the Coast Survey. The literature on Rogers, by comparison, has offered little insight into his life and even less about his relationship to broader developments in nineteenth-century science and higher learning.

Charles T. Loram was an important proponent of fashioning African education in ways that would best meet the needs of the colonial system. In the 1920s, Loram championed adapting the colonial curriculum away from “bookishness” towards a manual and agricultural orientation in order to meet the “needs” of rural Africans, as white settlers defined them. As his ideas on adaptation matured, Loram wrote an influential book, The Education of the South African Native in 1917, in which he stated: “On the necessity of industrial training for the Natives of South Africa there is remarkable unanimity. Government commissions and officials, missionaries and students of the Native Question, and the general public all agree that industrial training should be made the chief end of Native education.” What is interesting about this statement is the certainty with which Loram attributed consensus on the question of industrial training to all white colonial interest groups. Loram claimed “unanimity” in order to strengthen his argument for the particular form of industrial education that he favored. Yet, even though colonial actors ostensibly agreed on the need for “industrial education,” they lacked a common definition of “industrial education” which raises the question: were they agreeing to the same thing?

In the early twentieth century, many American educators pinned their hopes for a revitalized nation on the character education of “youth,” especially adolescent boys. Although the emphasis on student morality was far from novel—nineteenth-century common and secondary schools operated as bastions of Protestant republican virtue—new perceptions of moral decay, institutional failure, and general cultural anomie prompted a marked increase in urgency. Among the many agencies confronting this impending moral crisis, the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) had perhaps the most comprehensive program of regeneration for American youth, encompassing a carefully articulated system extending from boyhood to collegiate and employed young men. Despite this expansive role, historians have produced only cursory glimpses of this organization, neglecting in particular the YMCA's work in developing an extracurricular program of moral education in public high schools.

The Basque School, as well as a type of school, is an educational phenomenon that emerged and underwent most of its development during the twentieth century. Some initial confusion existed between the terms “Basque school,” “bilingual school” and “ikastola,” due to the undefined nature of the Basque model of schooling during this early period. These schools introduced a new model of education and pursued a common aim: to restore the Basque language and culture. Past research on ikastolas during the time of the Republic shows that the choice of term varied in Navarre according to the school's geographical location. Though there had been earlier initiatives, the Basque schools appeared in Navarra with the advent of Spain's Second Republic in 1931 and survived until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. During the Franco regime, Basques attempted to restart the educational project throughout the whole of Spanish Basque Country. Navarra's first ikastola of this new era was set up in 1963, giving rise to an educational movement that continues to maintain a strong impetus in the new millennium and has become a point of reference for both linguists and educationalists.

This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Laurence R. Veysey's The Emergence of the American University. Hailed by Frederick Rudolph at the time of its release as a “major contribution … tough-minded … [and] brilliant.” Veysey's work is still widely read, taught, and cited. Every scholar who wrestles with the historical development of the modern American university must at some point come to terms with the institution as Veysey so brashly conceived of it. All disciplinary subfields have their founding text—a singular work that defines an entire intellectual discourse and lays out the “rules of the game” for all those who follow. For historians interested in tracking the organization, production, and consumption of knowledge in the United States, The Emergence of the American University is and remains that text.

Larry Veysey was my colleague and friend at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) for almost twenty years. We shared a common fascination with Utopias past and present; we talked often; and we taught several graduate seminars together. Though Larry never aspired to be anyone's mentor, I learned much from him about intellectual history. He was a complex individual—a difficult and at times infuriating colleague but also a loyal and generous friend and a person of extraordinary intelligence and at times alarming bluntness. In faculty meetings he never failed to speak his mind, and he could rarely resist baiting and provoking colleagues with whom he disagreed. But he also remained a tireless, fair-minded, and thoroughly conscientious participant in search committees, for which he compiled detailed, carefully nuanced evaluations of the leading candidates, often with grades attached. He also graded sunsets arid dinners. He appeared to be intransigent and set in his ways, but he believed in change and relished risk-taking. He loved to walk near the edge of the cliff, pushing and testing himself.

At the beginning of the twentieth century about one in twenty American teenagers graduated from high school; by mid century over half of them did so; and today six of seven do. Along with this expansion in graduation, the experiences of high schooling became more significant. Though diversity existed at the school level, by the interwar period most high schools offered courses in “higher” academic subjects (literature, mathematics, and ancient and foreign languages), while they gave large numbers of students a chance to practice music, drama, and other fine arts. Business leaders and educators developed programs in technical-skill training. Courses in household economics, personal hygiene, and sex and reproduction appeared as well. A few schools operated with two shifts: day and night Many maximized their capacity by rotating students between newly constructed gymnasiums, stadiums, fields, swimming pools, showers, cafeterias, laundries, machine shops, laboratories, performance halls, and libraries. Some provided up-to-date diagnostic and preventative medical and psychological services. Others developed vocational guidance. Nearly all established relationships with juvenile justice and youth custody agencies. More than any other institution, the increasingly comprehensive high schools of the twentieth-century redefined the social lives of American youths through teams, clubs, bands, and groups engaged in a long list of contests, games, performances, and other events. Early in the century extracurricular activities began to rival formal class work as the primary focus of secondary schooling. Today there is a joke told from Ohio to Texas, funny for its sad truth. Q: How do you pass a school levy? A: Put football on the chopping-block.

All historians must grapple with the complexities of continuity and change. Yet those who study twentieth-century German history face greater difficulties than most, given the variety of political regimes Germany experienced in that era and their major differences in ideology, degree of stability, and relations with their neighbors. Some Germans, such as former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, born in 1913, and former East German leader Erich Honecker, born in 1912, experienced all the changes, from childhood under the Kaiser through World War I, the Weimar Republic, the Nazis' “Twelve-Year Reich” (in exile and prison, respectively), the occupation regimes, forty years of what Brandt called “two states in one nation,” and the (re)unification of 1990.

I wandered into the history of universities through a side door. I went to graduate school to study intellectual history. In my second year, I decided to write a seminar paper on changing ideas about the nature of religion but wanted to avoid the abstractness of traditional history of ideas. Looking for some more “concrete” way of documenting change in ideas than the analysis of individual thinkers allowed, I decided somewhat arbitrarily to “ground” my study in the history of universities. I do not recall even thinking about universities as related to the production of knowledge but rather viewed them as a convenient social institution in which one could find changing practices of religion.

At the end of World War II, German educational administrators in the Soviet occupied zone of their nation decided to implement coeducation; that is, the schooling of girls and boys in the same classroom. This policy represented a radical break with German educational traditions, as well as with the western German zones' continued practice of gender-segregated schools. The reason for this move was as simple as it was ambitious: educational reformers of the Soviet zone were committed to a new kind of school, one that would offer all children the same education in order to permit active and equal participation of all citizens, male and female, in the “new Germany.” Educators estimated that over 90 percent of school-aged children attended school in the postwar years, approximately 15 percent of the entire population. Major change in young people's education could thus potentially bring about major social reform. Yet coeducation did not resolve the so-called “woman's question” of structural inequality, a theory elaborated by the nineteenth-century socialist August Bebel and of grave concern to the “antifascist democratic, educators of the postwar years. The implementation of the coeducational classroom, although an important move towards erasing gross disparities in educational opportunities for girls, still allowed for and even perpetuated gender-specific educational lessons and experiences.

Angelo Petraglia, born in 1876 in the Salerno Province of Italy, the first child of Nicola and Carmela Petraglia, spent his first five years in Piaggine, a small mountain village, and in 1881 sailed to New York City with his mother, his uncle, and a younger sister. His father had preceded them to America to find work and a place to live. The family name was changed to Patri, perhaps by immigration authorities. The sister died shortly after their arrival in America, but three other sisters were born soon after.