This address concerns the initial integration of African American scholars into the American academy. It traces an interesting and unusual national campaign that first opened the doors of northern white universities to African American scholars. The primary focus is on what this campaign reveals about the interrelationship of race and meritocracy in mainstream American higher education during the immediate post-World War II period. It is also a story about a select pool of highly qualified African American scholars and their opportunities for employment at northern white universities. Finally, this is also a history of a particular process of institutional racism. One underlying purpose is to explore the usefulness of the social science concept of institutional racism for framing and explaining the formation and development of specific types of racial exclusion or discrimination in educational systems that operate with explicitly race-neutral or “color-blind” laws, procedures, and policies.

During the 1920s and 1930s Rutgers University restricted the number of Jewish students it admitted, a practice common at that time. This covert policy was resisted by the Jewish community, which pointed to the university's support by public funds. Despite having evolved from a small college to a university by means of public funds, Rutgers was still governed by private trustees. In the 1920s and 1930s these trustees continued to exercise virtually autonomous control, even though Rutgers was accepting increasing amounts of public money. But the state of New Jersey was beginning to challenge this exclusive control. This challenge and the related issue of funding forced Rutgers authorities to participate in an internal struggle over the nature, identity, and role of the institution. The history of Rutgers during these two decades illuminates the connection between the anti-Semitic admissions policy and the debate over the university's role. It was not until after the Second World War—when Rutgers became the true State University of New Jersey—that discriminatory admissions policies were ended and the question of the university's role was settled.

The spread and adoption of German educator Friedrich Froebel's kindergarten idea in Japan occurred early in the history of the international kindergarten movement. Kindergartens were introduced as one among the vast array of Western educational ideas that flowed into Japan from Europe and the United States between 1868 and 1880. The years after 1880, however, were marked by increased governmental efforts to centralize authority, a strong shift in attitude away from Western learning, and government efforts to strengthen its control of education in Japan's movement toward modernization. During the Meiji Era (1868–1912), a period of profound transformations in Japan, the conditions that paved the way for kindergartens to become a permanent part of the educational landscape also transformed the kindergarten from a Western into a Japanese institution.

In her published 1990 presidential address to the American History of Education Society, Maxine Schwartz Seller contends that much research on the history of education in the United States, including the history of women's education, “treats the nation as though its boundaries were impenetrable walls.” She poses the question: “What happens to the history of education in the United States—women's education in this case—when we see the United States not as a self-contained unit, but as part of an interconnecting, interacting North Atlantic, or Western hemisphere, or Pacific rim community of nations?”

On 4 October 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world's first satellite, into orbit. In the weeks that followed, Americans questioned why the Soviet Union, a country with only a fraction of the material prosperity of the United States, was able to surpass the world's wealthiest and most powerful nation in the race to outer space. In the minds of many university scholars and members of the public alike, the fault seemed to lie with a flabby American high school curriculum that was no match for the Soviet Union's merciless regimen of math and science for its brightest students. Quickly, the race to beat the Soviets in space became a race to outdo them in the classroom as well, with many educators and university scientists seeing physics as needing the most sweeping overhaul among all subjects within the high school curriculum, in order for America to produce the scientists and engineers needed to compete with the Soviets.

The question of whether high school students should follow a uniform academic program or choose from options in a differentiated curriculum has reemerged in the 1980s as one of the most crucial issues facing American public education. In its latest incarnation, brought to life by the publication of A Nation at Risk and subsequent proposals and manifestos, the debate has been framed as one between educational excellence, on the one hand, and equality of educational opportunity, on the other. In response to increasing demands for excellence throughout the 1980s, many states and local districts adopted minimum academic competency exams for high school graduation or for passing from the eighth grade into high school, and set or raised the minimum level of academic performance required for participating in extracurricular activities. Yet many of these efforts were met with a chorus of criticism from educators, liberal politicians, and minority leaders who argued that such changes would have a disproportionate effect on black and Hispanic youths, blocking their participation in athletics and other activities, raising their already high dropout rates, and in countless other ways stunting their aspirations for entry into the academic mainstream. These criticisms echoed a very old idea in American education, a definition of equal educational opportunity, which we believe has done immeasurable damage over the years to the educational experience of American youth in general, and African American youth in particular.

The English-only effort was an integral part of the Americanization crusade that swept the nation during and after World War I. Underlying the crusade was the doctrine of Anglo-Saxon superiority—the conviction that American traits derived from the English, and that the future of American democracy depended upon the survival of the English language and the dominance of the Anglo-Saxon “race.”

This essay addresses a gap in our understanding of the social forces promoting female literacy in New England between 1750 and 1820. Historians generally agree that a rapid expansion of female literacy occurred during that century. Measuring literacy by the ability to sign one's name, studies have shown that in many communities only half as many women as men were literate in 1750. An example of this differential is the case of Elbridge Gerry, who courted but did not marry a young woman who, though she was the daughter of a Harvard graduate and state legislator, could neither read nor answer his letters to her from the Continental Congress. Yet by 1850 when the first federal census measured literacy by gender, both white women and men in New England were almost universally literate. Since older women were also universally literate, the change appears to have been complete among girls by 1820. After Kenneth Lockridge first pointed out the discrepancy between male and female literacy rates in colonial New England, scholars have amended many of his findings, but they have not yet found a way to explain the rapid increase in female literacy that occurred in New England after 1750.

When United States soldiers began fighting World War I in Europe, Americans suddenly waged war among themselves at home. Overly zealous patriots demanded public displays of loyalty from all citizens. Any American who did not purchase sufficient numbers of liberty bonds or verbally support the Allies' cause was automatically suspected of disloyalty. And in the hysteria brought on by war, disloyalty became tantamount to treason. Few suffered more under the scourge of the super-patriots than immigrants and radicals. Universities became a favorite target for zealots, who were anxious to believe that faculties harbored political liberals and radicals. Professors at several universities were dismissed on account of their perceived lack of support for America and the Allies in World War I.

Age-specific patterns today help shape social roles for United States citizens. People living in this country generally attend school by age six, have their first jobs by their early twenties, and retire from full-time work by age seventy or seventy-five. These experiences create, and, in turn, reflect, expectations about the timing and progression of human experiences. People who fail to meet these expectations, or norms, often encounter unwanted advice, bewilderment, or outright hostility. One example of this set of expectations is related to dropping out of school. Those without high school degrees today face a severe disadvantage when they apply for jobs. Even the most menial positions require a high school diploma. Those without degrees are essentially left without desirable economic options.

The publication of An Educational War on Poverty: American and British Policy-making, 1960-1980 (Cambridge University Press, 1991), by Harold and Pamela Silver, offers educational historians a rare opportunity: to debate the potential of comparative study, to assess the origins and impact of recent wars on poverty on both sides of the Atlantic, and to revisit policy questions that continue to fascinate many scholars. Like previous symposia published in the HEQ, this scholarly exchange aims to enliven discussions about history, policy, and scholarship.

We are grateful to Harold and Pamela Silver, of Oxford, England, and their distinguished critics. They are Dennis Dean of the Institute of Education, University of London, Clyde Chitty of the University of Birmingham, Robert Lowe of the National-Louis University, and Hugh Davis Graham of Vanderbilt University.

Burton Bledstein classed his book The Culture of Professionalism with the work of the giants in American academic history. He suggested that his theory of the culture of professionalism ranked in significance with Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, Charles A. Beard's industrialization theories, and Perry Miller's analysis of Puritanism. Bledstein's fresh historical perspective on higher education and his skepticism regarding professional authority no doubt were shaped by his experiences at elite public and private institutions, the University of California at Los Angeles (B.A., 1959) and Princeton (Ph.D., 1967). He has spent his whole professional life at one public institution, the University of Illinois at Chicago, with brief interludes provided by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1972–73) and the University of Chicago (1977–78), the latter in recognition of his book.

“Civilized nations have long since been convinced,” Emma Willard declared to the New York legislature in 1818, “that education with respect to males, will not, like trade, regulate itself.” Thus Willard introduced her famous argument for state support of female education by observing the limits of market principles for promoting good schools.

The future historian John Lothrop Motley, aged ten in 1824, wrote to his father from boarding school outside Boston: “I want to see you very much. I suppose you remember that it is my turn to come home on Saturday next? This is Thursday, the day on which we speak. I was third best…. My nose has bled very often lately, but I believe it will not bleed much more. I have had a pain in my side once or twice.” Motley's education involved intensive training in languages as part of a curriculum consisting of linguistic drill and a bit of math and science, which did not satisfy his growing thirst for reading. “In the morning, from half-past five to seven, I study French,” Motley wrote his mother a year later, “after breakfast I study Spanish, from nine to half past ten, when we go out and stay about ten or fifteen minutes; and when we come in, I study Greek until twelve, when we are dismissed; and in the afternoon I study Cicero and recite to Dr. Beck, a German.” Two years later Motley complained about the lack of reading material, asking his father for books and announcing the organization of a reading room by one of the masters. But the reading room failed to satisfy him, Motley explained to his brother, because no one contributed books and the few newspapers there were all “a hundred years old” and all mutilated within an hour of being deposited. “Reading is not to be thought of, as there are no books in school.”