The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s

By Ellen Schrecker

The Lost Promise is a magisterial examination of the turmoil that rocked American universities in the 1960s, with a unique focus on the complex roles played by professors as well as students.

The 1950s through the early 1970s are widely seen as American academia’s golden age, when universities—well-funded and viewed as essential for national security, economic growth, and social mobility—embraced an egalitarian mission. Swelling in size, schools attracted new types of students and professors, including radicals who challenged their institutions’ calcified traditions. But that halcyon moment soon came to a painful and confusing end, with consequences that still afflict the halls of ivy. In The Lost Promise, Ellen Schrecker—our foremost historian of both the McCarthy era and the modern American university—delivers a far-reaching examination of how and why it happened.

Schrecker illuminates how US universities’ explosive growth intersected with the turmoil of the 1960s, fomenting an unprecedented crisis where dissent over racial inequality and the Vietnam War erupted into direct action. Torn by internal power struggles and demonized by conservative voices, higher education never fully recovered, resulting in decades of underfunding and today’s woefully inequitable system. As Schrecker’s magisterial history makes blazingly clear, the complex blend of troubles that disrupted the university in that pivotal period haunts the ivory tower to this day.
 
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Dec 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9780226200996

Book preview

Cover Page for The Lost Promise

The Lost Promise

The Lost Promise

American Universities in the 1960s

Ellen Schrecker

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

© 2021 by Ellen Schrecker

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America

30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-20085-9 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-20099-6 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226200996.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Schrecker, Ellen, author.

Title: The lost promise : American universities in the 1960s / Ellen Schrecker.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021027259 | ISBN 9780226200859 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226200996 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Education, Higher—United States—History. | Universities and colleges—United States—History. | College students—Political activity—United States. | Nineteen sixties.

Classification: LCC LA227.3 .S37 2021 | DDC 378.73—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021027259

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For April and Mark

Contents

Introduction: Universities in the Long Sixties

Part 1: Expansion and Its Discontents

1: Good Times for Scholars

The Golden Age of American Higher Education

2: Memory of an Earlier Age

Remnants of McCarthyism in the Academic Community

3: The Pre-Sixties

The Liberal Moment on Campus

4: The Berkeley Invention

The Student Movement Begins

Part 2: Responding to Vietnam

5: Not Only Politically Disastrous but Intrinsically Wrong

Early Opposition to American Intervention in Cuba and Vietnam

6: The Most Worthwhile All-Nighter

Teach-Ins and the Antiwar Movement’s Pedagogical Moment

7: To Take a Stand

The Academic Community Wrestles with the War, 1965–67

8: Everything Felt Illegal

Academics and Direct Action

9: An Inescapable Responsibility

Universities and the War Machine

10: To Confront Campus Militarism

Opposing the War Machine

Part 3: Handling Student Unrest

11: We Have No Power

What the Students Wanted

12: Disorderly Behavior

Students Disrupt the Academy

13: Intellectuals Falling Apart

Divided Faculties Confront the Students

Part 4: The Academic Left and Right Confront the Sixties

14: The Struggle for a Democratic University

Radicals Challenge the Disciplines

15: The Field Is to Some Extent Ours

Radicals Rethink the Disciplines

16: Cause for Concern

Violations of Academic Freedom during the Late Sixties and Early Seventies

17: Revolt of the Rationally Committed

Intellectuals and the Media Construct a Scenario of Student Unrest

Epilogue: Academic Reform and Political Backlash

Researching the Academy in the Long Sixties: A Bibliographic Essay

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Footnotes

Introduction

Universities in the Long Sixties

The trouble with this college, the trouble with every college in this country, is that we really are at the center. All the slogans about the colleges being the future of America, the poor bastards don’t know how right they are. . . . It was true. We were at the center of American consciousness. Our fantasies had finally caught up with us.¹

Once upon a time in the not-so-distant past, American higher education got a lot of respect. From the mid-1950s through to the early 1970s, colleges and universities were at the center of American life. Even as many campuses were wracked by turmoil, they were also experiencing what has come to be seen as a golden age—at least for white men.² Faculty positions were considered prestigious, and the academic community as a whole—faculty, students (both graduate and undergraduate), researchers, administrators, and intellectual hangers-on—seemed to be engaged in an exciting collective endeavor to improve their institutions and perhaps even make the world a better place.

But it didn’t last. The contradictions within the academic community ultimately brought that halcyon moment to a painful and confusing end—with consequences that haunt us to this day. By the mid-1970s, colleges and universities no longer had the universal approval they once possessed. How and why that happened is the subject of this book.

It is a chronicle of declension, a sobering story of how a seemingly indispensable social institution attained a position of power and approbation—and then lost it. While today’s colleges and universities, undermined by decades of disinvestment and disrespect, now struggle simply to survive, during the early 1960s the academy’s influence extended far beyond its campuses. Especially after Sputnik, higher education emerged from the anti-intellectualism of the McCarthy era, where professors were scorned as eggheads (if not subversives) and students engaged in panty raids not politics. Many in the academic community believed that they and their institutions were not only crucial to America’s national security, but also central to economic progress. Showered with money by foundations and governments at every level, universities entered an era of unprecedented expansion.

The period I’m calling the long sixties was also when the academy became the repository of the American dream, not only of upward mobility, but also for many of a more egalitarian society that would challenge the racial and gender intolerance and inequality that had for so long impeded human progress.³ As the quintessential liberal institution during the heyday of American liberalism, higher education attracted idealistic people—students and faculty alike—many of whom still trusted the authorities and their promises. Others, however, sought to shake up their campuses and disciplines. Gravitating into what was to become the New Left, radicals and left-liberals wanted higher education to become a force for liberation available to all comers. Believing in the power of ideas, they felt that their intellectual efforts could influence the powers that be and move both the university and perhaps even the whole country toward justice and true democracy.

That did not happen, of course. In retrospect, it’s clear that the university never had as much power and autonomy as its members and critics assumed. Its enormous expansion and its accompanying optimism, as well as the pervasiveness of its own ivory tower myth, blinded the academic community—left, right, and center—to its own limitations. As institutions doubled and tripled in size, they were transformed, attracting the academically ambitious and often the unconventional, while putting a new emphasis on research instead of teaching. The ensuing cultural conflicts and turf battles, not to mention the growing political disagreements over Vietnam, race, and other divisive issues, made it impossible for the academic community to develop a coherent response to the challenges it faced—from women, African Americans, and its own radicals as well as from conservative politicians and an increasingly hostile public. The situation was completely unprecedented. As in a recurring bad dream, the academic community was facing the final exam without having taken the course.

Even today American universities are still, by some measures, number one in the world.⁴ It is a ranking built on misconceptions, or perhaps the realization that higher education elsewhere also has its defects. Even before COVID-19, the academic community was suffering. With the traditional liberal arts in decline, and underpaid and exploited part-time and temporary instructors supplying 75 percent of the teaching staff, only a handful of colleges and universities provided their graduates with much beyond technical training and considerable debt. But it didn’t need to be that way.

I admit to overstating my case. Still, it was hard to lose a dream and to do so suddenly. At some point around 1965, the bright promise of an expansive and liberating system of mass higher education darkened. The war in Southeast Asia and the failure of the political establishment to grant real equality to its citizens of color disabused and radicalized an entire generation of students and professors. Although most of the problems of racism, sexism, the Cold War, and economic inequality could not have been solved by educational reforms, left-wing critics deemed the university complicit in them. As a result, when some academic leaders could not or would not satisfy the radicals’ mostly reasonable demands, their campuses seemed to spin out of control, destroying much of the public’s previous confidence in higher education. The university was soon hollowed out and assaulted by the right-wing enemies of liberal culture, and it never recovered.

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* * * *

There are two interrelated strands to this story—growth and turbulence. In the sixties, colleges and universities expanded so exponentially that their traditional folkways simply imploded. Many institutions would have been disrupted even if the rest of the United States had been calm. But it was not. Despite—or perhaps because of—the country’s relative affluence, the struggle to fulfill the democratic promise of higher education in the face of racism, sexism, and US warmongering ensured turbulence.

It is impossible to stress enough how thoroughly the Vietnam War permeated the waking lives of student and faculty dissidents during the long sixties. It was distressing to find out from newspapers every morning that our country had killed hundreds or perhaps thousands of men, women, and children the day before. Our shame, our anger, and ultimately our inability to stop the horror destroyed our trust in the liberal order. That disillusionment marked an entire generation. Whether it was biologists discovering that the US Army was using their research to destroy crops in Southeast Asia or professors refusing to flunk students who might then be drafted—the war ultimately forced faculty members of all political persuasions to face unwelcome, but unavoidable, moral choices.

The university’s long sixties occurred in several phases, beginning in the mid-1950s when the academic community emerged from its encounter with McCarthyism to enter a decade of optimism and expansion. By the middle of the sixties, events off campus—the Vietnam War and the struggle for racial equality, in particular—were to politicize higher education, even as its explosive growth was creating unforeseen tensions. For the next five to ten years, confrontations took place at many, though by no means all, institutions. Finally, after one last burst of conflict, the unrest ended in the early 1970s as the war wound down and the buoyant economic expansion of the previous decade sputtered to an end, inaugurating a new era of austerity.⁵

But because so much change occurred so quickly during those years, there is no coherent narrative, no single story that traces how one thing led to another. Everything seemed to be happening at once. Though petering out, the trauma endured. The events of the long sixties hung over higher education for the next half century, while the backlash they incurred spilled over into the rest of society—poisoning its political discourse and paving the way for decades of neoliberal policies designed to shrink the public sector—its institutions of higher learning, in particular.

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* * * *

My protagonists are the men, women, and institutions of the academic community. Across the approximately twenty-five hundred colleges and universities that flourished during the long sixties, that community comprised a congeries of students, professors, administrators, and ideologies sharing institutional connections—even if fragmented and all too often at odds.⁶ The key component was the faculty: the men (they were overwhelmingly men) who planned and taught the courses, did the research, and constructed academic careers. Undergraduates cycled through this world in four-year cohorts of varying self-awareness, while a smaller population of graduate students—as allies and intermediaries—bridged their world and that of their teachers. Many administrators were also faculty members, who saw their service as temporary, even as their duties increasingly pulled them away from their original mindset and allegiances. Academia also housed public intellectuals and consultants, much of whose work life occurred off campus; clergy, including some of a radical bent; and such hangers-on as faculty wives, political activists, writers, and artists-in-residence.

The book begins with a quick survey of the institutional expansion that began in the 1950s and the changes that accompanied it, particularly the uneven sloughing off of the political repression of the McCarthy era that had so completely marginalized the Left. As seeds of political activity began to sprout, the academy’s newly energized radicals became involved with the vibrant civil rights movement of the early 1960s. Initiated by students at the Black colleges and universities in the South, it offered the prospect of genuine social change.

Soon students demanding political freedom shook up the University of California, Berkeley. As faculty members and administrators struggled to deal with the protests, political divisions emerged. Berkeley’s experience presaged a pattern. Almost all of the subsequent waves of student unrest broke out first at major universities and big-city campuses. Not only did those institutions attract politically engaged students and professors, but because of their size, they were able to produce a critical mass of activists who forced the academic community to respond—and the media to pay attention. These large urban and elite institutions were where the action was, at least until the end of the 1960s: UC Berkeley, the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, the University of Wisconsin, CCNY, Columbia, Cornell, San Francisco State, and other major universities. Protests may have occurred later at lesser-known and smaller institutions, but the issues were the same as at the top-tier ones.

The Vietnam War, of course: radical and left-liberal professors and graduate students came to the issue first. The teach-ins they organized actually jump-started the antiwar movement. Although a minority at the time, their analyses of what was happening in Southeast Asia created the scenario about the conflict that most of their students and colleagues—as well as growing numbers of political leaders and ordinary Americans—were eventually to embrace. Later on, as both student and faculty radicals raised new questions about their institutions’ collaboration with the national security state, the protests intensified. Frustrated by their failure to end the war, some increasingly desperate activists even turned to civil disobedience.

Today, after all the years of rhetoric about tenured radicals and Marxist professors, it might be a surprise to learn that the overwhelming majority of faculty members in the long sixties, even the liberal ones, opposed the student disruptions. Most academics were essentially apolitical—moderates who wanted nothing more than for everything to calm down. They definitely did not appreciate having to make what the political theorist Michael Walzer called the harsh choices the 1960s forced upon them.⁷ Unfortunately, however, the university was confronting such polarizing issues that its members could not avoid taking sides, forming factions that split the community. Confusion reigned. Neither faculties nor administrations seemed able to offer coherent responses to their troubles—an unfortunate situation that could only encourage hostile outsiders to intervene.

Radical academics did not dominate the nation’s faculties, but they did have an impact. They created their own organizations, appealed to audiences on and off campus, and, in many cases, worked with local and national left-wing peace and social justice groups. Though often marginalized and even repressed, they did bring new perspectives and somewhat more democratic practices into the university. That almost all of them were men certainly deserves mention. Although second-wave feminism got much of its early energy from within the academic community, it did not come into its own until the long sixties was near its end.

As political activism tapered off in the early 1970s, a financial crunch hit the academic community, forcing even the wealthiest Ivy League institutions to dip into their endowments for operating expenses and to admit women students to keep their enrollments up.⁸ The fiscal plight of public institutions was even more alarming. Increasingly upset by the student unrest, the politicians who had so generously supported state colleges and universities reversed course. By the late 1960s, although enrollments continued to grow, the democratic vision of universal mass higher education evaporated. Within a few years, as tuitions rose rapidly and ballooning debt began to subvert the life chances of students, tenure-track jobs melted away, transforming most prospective faculty members into permanent temp workers without either economic security or academic freedom.

Obviously, the university’s turmoil during the long sixties did not cause all these problems directly. Nonetheless, the inability of the academic community to meet the reasonable demands of its constituents for a more democratic campus meant that its members lacked the solidarity that an effective defense against the conservative onslaught required. If nothing else, the academic community’s past problems should alert its current members to the urgent need for unity in the face of existential challenges.

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* * * *

This is a big book. It could have been three times as long. I had to force myself to keep it within limits and did so by eliminating dozens of fascinating case studies. Every chapter, sometimes every paragraph, deals with subjects that deserve entire volumes of their own, some of which have already been written. I do not, for example, pay much attention to the development and activities of the student movement since many others have already done so. Nor do I give as much consideration as they deserve to events toward the end of the long sixties, like the early women’s movement, the academy’s structural reforms and pedagogical experiments, and the details of the backlash.

The book consists of four sections. The first deals with the massive expansion of higher education as well as the nascent political activities of academics during the early part of the long sixties. The second covers the growth of the antiwar movement and the development of opposition to war-related research. The third looks at the student unrest as well as at the ways in which faculties and administrators struggled to handle it. The final section deals with the radical academics, tracing their political work as well as their scholarship and, of course, the opposition they encountered.

My biggest challenge has been shaping all this into a coherent whole. It was not only an intellectual challenge, but a political one. I found my opinions about the events I had lived through complicated by having to rethink, if not necessarily revise, my original assessments. It’s my fervent hope that, in light of the current threats to the university (and perhaps even to the American democratic system as a whole), I will not be alone in looking again at the long sixties and figuring out what lessons it can teach us.

Part 1

Expansion and Its Discontents

1

Good Times for Scholars

The Golden Age of American Higher Education

When E. Alden Dunham, Princeton’s former director of admissions, visited the State University of New York at Brockport on a fact-finding mission for the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education in the late 1960s, he was both awed and horrified. Muddy, barren, and cluttered with cranes, the school seemed to be one huge construction site, an instant campus that Dunham considered architecturally unimpressive . . . largely because the buildings look alike and are crowded together. Of course, aesthetics was hardly at issue for Brockport’s ambitious leaders as they struggled to accommodate their school’s exploding student body and growing faculty.¹

Founded in 1835 by a group of Baptists as the Brockport Collegiate Institute to offer what amounted to a high school education with some teacher training on the side, it became the Brockport State Normal School in 1867, and then, in the early 1940s, the Brockport State Teachers College with a campus consisting of one building, a few hundred students, and less than fifty professors and administrators. After joining the State University of New York (SUNY) in 1948, Brockport really began to grow. By the mid-1960s, it had become the State University College of Arts and Sciences at Brockport with 2,500 students and 200 faculty and staff members. By the end of the decade, it was up to 5,500 students and 350 faculty members. The physical campus expanded as well, adding residence halls, a college union, library, and all the other buildings that Dunham had found so unappealing. The school’s mission had also changed; SUNY Brockport was now the largest public institution of higher education in the Rochester area, offering both undergraduate and master’s degree programs in education and the liberal arts.²

An Expanding Sector

Dunham saw the same transformation at most of the fourteen other mid-level state institutions of higher learning he visited. From Chico State in California to Western Michigan University to Ball State in Indiana to Missouri Southern State University, construction was booming, educational offerings were proliferating, and the schools were expanding in every way. Had he gone to Tampa, he would have seen the brand-new University of South Florida springing up on the site of a World War II bombing range. A similar sight would have greeted him in Bellingham, Washington, where a teacher’s college was turning into the four-year Western Washington University. Everywhere, the same transformation—new residence halls, libraries, student centers, and ever-larger parking lots.

Public higher education expanded most extensively. As late as 1950, state colleges and universities accounted for less than 50 percent of the nation’s college students; twenty years later, they were educating 75 percent of them.³ This growth was most dramatic at the second-tier state schools like SUNY Brockport. The already large urban campuses like San Francisco State and the City College of New York (CCNY) were also growing—and running out of space. At City College, one faculty member recalled, the school now resembled a subway rush hour that lasted from 8 a.m. until 4 p.m. Facilities had to be upgraded as well.⁴ Similar transformations were taking place at flagship state universities like Berkeley and Wisconsin, and even at private schools. Stanford’s enrollment surged from 3,000 students in 1945 to 11,500 twenty-five years later as the school morphed from a somewhat provincial home for well-heeled California playboys into a national academic powerhouse.⁵

Figure 1.1. SUNY Brockport under construction, 1965. © Drake Memorial Library, College Archives, SUNY Brockport, Brockport, NY 14420.

Though we tend to associate the sixties on campus with student protest—with images of Mario Savio atop a police car in the middle of the Berkeley campus or the gun-toting members of Cornell’s Afro-American Society exiting the student center after a day and a half of occupation—a more authentic portrayal might well show countless building cranes. For we simply cannot understand what happened to the academic community during the 1960s and early 1970s unless we realize that it was growing exponentially.

Numbers tell the story. Between 1959 and 1969, enrollments in higher education went from more than 3.6 million students to roughly 8 million, while the number of institutions also increased—from 2,004 to 2,525 during the 1960s and to 3,152 by 1979—and the size of those schools tripled.⁶ California’s grew first, fastest, and largest. The state’s famous Master Plan for Higher Education of 1960 specified that its institutions would expand by 350 percent between 1958 and 1975.⁷ Before World War II, its State College system consisted of seven schools with 13,000 students; by the late 1960s, it comprised twenty institutions and 170,000 students with more than 200,000 in 1970. The University of California system expanded as well—from seven campuses with 43,600 students in 1948 to eight with over 100,000 (and growing) in 1965.⁸ And its community colleges also grew—massively. The younger SUNY system grew from 34,000 students in 1960 to 117,000 in 1970 with some twenty-eight separate units.⁹ In New York City, the City University of New York (CUNY) system debuted in 1962 with nearly 100,000 students and increased to 160,000 by 1975.¹⁰

Individual schools grew as well—if they hadn’t started from scratch. In the year that CCNY’s open-admissions program began, its freshman class rose from 1,752 to 2,742.¹¹ UCLA, which already had 10,000 students before World War II, doubled by the end of the 1950s.¹² San Francisco State, established in 1956, had 18,000 students by the end of the 1960s. Private schools were also booming. During the 1960s, Hofstra, a commuter college servicing Long Island, grew from nearly 8,400 students to some 12,000, including a much higher percentage of students living on campus.¹³ Even Harvard increased its freshman class from 1,000 to 1,500 in 1965.¹⁴

Significantly, Harvard raised the size of its graduate schools even more, as did most of the nation’s other top universities. In the academic year 1949–50, American universities awarded 6,420 PhDs; ten years later, they granted 11,622; and in 1973, the peak year, they produced 34,790.¹⁵ Two-thirds of Stanford’s growth during the 1960s occurred in its graduate divisions.¹⁶ At Berkeley by the end of the decade, two-fifths of its students were at the graduate level. Because the Master Plan had capped enrollment at 25,000, quite a few professors were talking about divesting the university of its responsibility for the first two years of college to allow for even more expansion at the graduate level.¹⁷ Even many second- and third-tier schools developed vocational MA programs and other post-graduate courses of study. And the more ambitious regional universities began to offer PhDs.¹⁸

Expansion for What?

The best explanation for this enormous expansion is the simplest. American higher education’s mission—or rather, missions—changed. The academy became newly central to the nation’s economic growth and social stability. Until the 1940s the scholarship, research, and the civilizing polish of college were essentially peripheral for most Americans. Higher education was an elite phenomenon, required perhaps by those who pursued teaching, medicine, or the ministry, but indulged in otherwise by late adolescents of the leisure class while forging future business or marital connections. For most middle-class Americans, economic success did not require a bachelor’s degree.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, however, the academy embraced a new democratic mission. It opened its doors to a much broader segment of the population. This was driven in part by the so-called GI Bill, which brought more than 2 million veterans right onto campus.¹⁹ Originally designed to keep them out of the job market to avoid a postwar depression, the program provided unprecedented social mobility for working- and lower-middle-class men (again, there were few women). It also benefited the institutions. Faculty members were thrilled by the influx of so many serious students, while administrators rejoiced in larger enrollments.²⁰

These positive experiences encouraged the academy to shed its upper-class identity and, in theory, welcome anyone with the ability to take advantage of its offerings. In the process, colleges and universities became the nation’s main vehicle for economic mobility, certifying their graduates for positions within an increasingly bureaucratized and technologically complex society. Just as the frontier had supposedly provided a social safety valve for nineteenth-century America, so did higher education by the mid-twentieth century. A bachelor’s degree, in other words, reinforced the American dream; it had become the passport to the middle class.²¹

But only for some. Not only have economic considerations priced a college education beyond the reach of many otherwise qualified students, but the stratification of institutions within the academic world has reinforced, if not aggravated, the social and economic inequities that higher education was supposed to alleviate. It has, in other words, propped up the traditional status quo. Built-in discrimination in the name of meritocracy has kept people of color and other marginalized groups from taking advantage of the networking and automatic status that accrue to graduates of selective institutions.²² So, while the university did become more inclusive after the war, it did not overcome the barriers to social mobility that it supposedly had promised to do.

At the same time, universities took on another role: chief supplier of scientific research and technological advancement, supplanting individual entrepreneurs, private corporations, and government laboratories. Although some research had always taken place on some campuses, it did not become central to most until the 1940s. With the advent of World War II and then the Cold War, the military establishment required massive inputs of scientific expertise. As a result, by the time the Korean War broke out in 1950, federal funding had become a significant percentage of the budgets of the major research universities. As MIT’s president James Killian put it, Those were memorable and exciting times when government, industry, and the universities felt themselves in a symbiotic relationship and achieved a powerful creative collaboration.²³

Working for Washington brought funding and prestige to individual academics, too. Specialized laboratories and research centers sprang up. Institutions like Stanford, Berkeley, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology also coordinated their hiring and research agendas with private corporations. Stanford developed office parks to house defense industries, while MIT did so much Pentagon work that, one outside physicist quipped, it was hard to tell whether it is a university with many government research laboratories appended to it or a cluster of government research laboratories with a very good educational institution attached to it.²⁴

Especially for those professors who prized political influence, the late 1950s and early 1960s were heady, indeed. Scientists in particular got entrée to the White House and the highest levels of the defense establishment.²⁵ Sputnik brought those people closer to power. Within a month of its launch, Eisenhower had created the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC), whose eighteen members were the elite of the elite: Nobel laureates and senior professors at the top research universities.²⁶ They and their colleagues who served as high-level consultants for the national security state were very much of an in-group. A third of the early PSAC’s members, including its first three leaders—James Killian, George Kistiakowsky, and Jerome Wiesner—came from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Actually, we all know each other, the MIT physicist Jerrold Zacharias explained. People always think that because the United States has a population of one hundred seventy million and there are a lot of people in the Pentagon, it all has to be very impersonal. Science isn’t. It’s just us boys.²⁷

But it was not only those boys who got unprecedented access to the president. Prominent scholars in economics, political science, and area studies also gravitated to Washington, DC, especially in the early 1960s when the dean of Harvard’s faculty, McGeorge Bundy, became the national security adviser and the Kennedy administration ostentatiously lured dozens of high-profile academics there. Whether it was the Ivy League and Big Ten economists on the Council of Economic Advisers or the Harvard historian and American ambassador to Japan, Edwin O. Reischauer, Kennedy’s New Frontier gave these faculty members an often heady taste of power—or at least the sense that they had access to it.²⁸ And as the once-scorned eggheads of the McCarthy era became desirable political commodities, professors everywhere began to gain a new measure of respect and self-confidence.

Significantly, the increased affluence and status of the academy’s elites motivated the denizens of less well-endowed institutions. Ambitious administrators and professors everywhere began to emphasize faculty publications and discoveries. As a result, research became de rigueur at almost every type of school. Publish or perish became a mantra that spread from the sciences to the humanities and social sciences, defining careers even as the profession enjoyed new levels of prestige and economic security.

As higher education adapted to its new missions, it embraced a new set of competitive values. The demographic explosion we call the baby boom had obviated Depression-era concerns about financial survival. Instead, the academic community became increasingly ambitious. Community colleges began to offer liberal arts courses; teachers colleges morphed into full-scale colleges; four-year schools provided graduate programs; and regional institutions strained to develop national reputations. That massive growth combined with these new pressures for status created considerable stress, as the institutions that University of California president Clark Kerr called the multiversity took on an ever-increasing load of missions.²⁹

There was one surprising consequence of the competition for prestige. A group of aspiring private research universities in the South—Duke, Vanderbilt, Emory, and Tulane—found themselves under pressure to experiment with desegregation in order to get the federal grants, foundation support, and high-powered faculty members that signified the big time. As Duke’s frustrated provost explained, The inability to admit the small number of duly qualified Negroes has created barriers to the fullest development of Duke University and has resulted in a decline in its prestige. Sometimes, however, their ambitions brought professors and administrators at such schools into conflict with conservative trustees and politicians for whom maintaining the racial status quo was paramount. Even so, ambitious leaders of public institutions in the South—though even more vulnerable to such pressures from segregationist politicians—could sometimes prevail.³⁰

Yet for all the problems that the expansion of higher education created, the 1950s and 1960s were, economically at least, a golden age.³¹ The democratization of the academy coupled with the prestige of scientific research made business and political leaders more than willing to provide funding. And no group received as many benefits from this rising tide as the professoriate.³² No surprise that its members took those opportunities—and then some.

A New Professoriate

Just as the boxy modernist structures of the 1950s and 1960s began to crowd out the ivy-covered Victorian buildings on the bulging campuses, so, too, a new cohort of academics poured onto those campuses. Faculties grew as exponentially as enrollments. In 1949, there were 246,722 faculty members; by 1969, there were 450,000, with 675,000 by the end of the 1970s.³³ At UCLA, the faculty grew from 200 members before the war to more than 900 by the early 1960s.³⁴ Stanford’s almost doubled from 619 to 1,200 during the sixties, Hofstra’s from a bit over 330 to more than 700.³⁵ As a result, by the mid-1960s, the majority of faculty members on thousands of campuses were newcomers. At SUNY Albany, 75 percent of its 950 faculty members in 1969 had arrived within the past eight years, 50 percent within the past three.³⁶

Figure 1.2. Clark Kerr, president of the University of California and propagandist for the multiversity, at a press conference during the Free Speech Movement crisis at Berkeley, 1964. © The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Not only were there many more of those professors, but they came from different backgrounds, followed different career paths, and pursued different intellectual agendas than their predecessors. It would be a gross exaggeration to claim that the profession was completely transformed. Even among the new hires, many probably had no desire for change and would have wanted only to be left alone to handle their classes and scholarship in the traditionally unhurried way, leaving plenty of time for gardening, cocktails, and the occasional round of golf. But they were a diminishing proportion of the professoriate.³⁷ And, like their new students, many were not upper- and upper-middle-class WASPs. The most noticeable were the Jews who previously had been kept un- or under-employed by genteel anti-Semitism, ensuring their ghettoization in a few institutions like CCNY or, as a number of émigré scholars who fled Hitler discovered, in the historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).³⁸

Some fields discriminated more than others. Humanities departments were considered particularly unwelcoming. It was a major event among the New York Intellectuals in 1939 when Columbia University’s English department tenured its first Jew, the literary critic Lionel Trilling. Historians were equally bigoted. You better go to law school, an aristocratic lecturer at Harvard told the future Yale historian John Blum in the late 1940s. Hebrews can’t make it in history.³⁹ The labor historian Herbert Gutman similarly recalled a mentor warning him that being an historian was an Anglo-Saxon profession. . . . He urged that I do the safe thing and become an economist.⁴⁰ Not that economists were much better. In 1953, Cornell’s economics department hired Douglas Dowd despite his radical politics rather than give the job to a brilliant candidate from Yale who was Jewish.⁴¹ Scientists had an easier time, no doubt because the criteria for employment were less subjective. Blum, who taught at MIT in the early 1950s, recalls many more Jews on its faculty than at Harvard.⁴²

By the mid-1950s, however, as anti-Semitism waned within society and the demand for college teachers increased, Jews were no longer barred from positions even at the top institutions. Nonetheless, a few vestiges of anti-Semitism lingered, mainly among the old guard. Perhaps its last gasp occurred during the Brown historian Carl Bridenbaugh’s presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1962—what his former Berkeley colleague Carl Schorske called that terrible speech. Bemoaning the inability of younger historians to recapture enough of a sense of the past to enable them to feel and understand it, Bridenbaugh ascribed that deficit to the fact that many of the younger practitioners of our craft, and those who are still apprentices, are products of lower middle-class or foreign origins, and their emotions not infrequently get in the way of historical reconstructions.⁴³ It was a sign of the times that this speech caused Bridenbaugh considerable embarrassment and a general drop in his reputation.⁴⁴

Despite its postwar expansion, the academic community did not welcome everyone. Women, African Americans, and other people of color missed out on the party. Racial segregation ruled, in both the North and South. No matter what their qualifications, African American academics, including the major scholars with major-league credentials who had created the field of Black studies, were marginalized until the 1960s. Essentially barred from teaching in majority-white institutions, they could not publish in mainstream journals, get grants, or attend the meetings of the main professional organizations in their fields. Sometimes they couldn’t even get access to the research materials they needed unless they found a friendly Black janitor to sneak them into the archives. The economically strapped HBCUs where they worked not only paid badly and lacked decent libraries, but, because they were under the control of white supremacists, had no academic freedom either. And, unlike their white colleagues, the HBCUs’ Black teachers could not leave the South.⁴⁵ The discrimination against African Americans was so pervasive at majority-white institutions in the North that it hit the front page of the New York Times when Brooklyn College hired John Hope Franklin to chair its history department in 1956, the first such appointment in the country.⁴⁶

Women were equally marginalized. Worse yet, the golden age marked a decline in their professional status. They had been pushed out of their previous niches at women’s colleges and former teachers colleges when those schools bought into the postwar race for prestige. Upgrading their faculties apparently required hiring men. Women (who, it was assumed, were psychologically, if not intellectually, unfit for academic life) were supposed to marry, raise children, and stay at home—a disqualification that they all too often internalized. Female scientists who did find work rarely made it onto the tenure track or else were shunted off into minor fields and inferior positions. This discrimination was so pervasive that it was not even recognized. Accepted as natural, in the words of historian Margaret Rossiter, it was just the way it was. The chill of McCarthyism kept those women who did understand why their careers were blighted from speaking out. It was not until late in the long sixties, with the advent of second-wave feminism, that academic women began to press for change.⁴⁷

Women’s research and scholarship was similarly sidelined. Denied grants and access to the networks of knowledge and power within their disciplines, their work was not taken seriously or was simply ignored. The eminent women’s historian Gerda Lerner recalled being told, when she complained about the inability of female scholars to publish in the main journals in their fields, that it was a sad ‘fact’ that no good articles by women were being submitted.⁴⁸ Time and again, well-qualified women would discover that they would be passed over for jobs or grants in favor of male colleagues with inferior records. Married women had the additional disadvantage of the nepotism rules that would not allow both spouses to be hired at the same place.⁴⁹ This discrimination was so widely accepted that even the most politically sensitive men seemed unaware of its existence. It took place, Carl Schorske recalled, within a totally male-dominated profession and we simply didn’t question it. Whenever a colleague suggested hiring a woman, he explained, usually, somebody else would say, ‘she’s a young woman, she’s going to get married, she’ll never play a role. Why waste the time?’ That real deep-seated male chauvinism was regnant in the entire society.⁵⁰

Professors in the Making

But for young white men of an intellectual bent, the ivory tower was more than welcoming. Many saw the academy as the ideal career. Even weak students considered becoming professors. One study in 1964 found that 87 percent of the college seniors in the top 20 percent of their class wanted to attend graduate school. But so, too, did 71 percent of those in the bottom half who did not think their mediocre grades an obstacle.⁵¹ And, in fact, they may not have been. Graduate schools were expanding so extravagantly that they accepted almost anyone. The money was there; and departments gained status, it was believed, the more graduate students they enrolled.⁵²

Outside support was crucial. In the late 1940s, many observers feared that the United States was not producing enough qualified faculty members to handle the projected tsunami of baby boomers.⁵³ The federal government and foundations like Ford with its Woodrow Wilson Fellowship program poured so much money into PhD programs that by the 1950s most full-time graduate students were fully supported. The federal government was especially generous to young scientists, not only the military, but also the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health and Public Health Service. This patronage increased enormously after Sputnik when Congress rushed through the National Defense Education Act (NDEA). By 1966–67, the federal government was awarding sixty thousand graduate fellowships—four times as many as only five years before. Scientists and people in area studies got the most support, but graduate students in other fields profited as well.⁵⁴ The demand for future faculty was so prodigious that even women were recruited, even if they were not encouraged once they matriculated.⁵⁵

My own decision to go to graduate school is illustrative. I had not thought about getting a PhD. As a thoroughly unenlightened pre-feminist, I was going to become a high school teacher and had lined up a student teaching position in a Boston suburb. Then, midway through my final semester at Radcliffe in the spring of 1960, my undergraduate thesis adviser nominated me for a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. Since I loved history, I completed the application with the attitude that if the fellowship came through, I’d go to graduate school. It did and I did, even though I hadn’t applied anywhere. Harvard took me in. Wilson money, it seemed, brought automatic admission.

Most of my academic cohort had similar experiences. We enjoyed school; we were good at it; and the academy courted us. A slightly earlier generation of students had also meandered into graduate school. Martin Oppenheimer took an MA in sociology at Columbia in the early 1950s, recalling, I just sort of arrived. He had good letters of recommendation, tuition was cheap, and he got a day job. Drafted just as the Korean War ended, he served two years and then got a PhD at the University of Pennsylvania under the GI Bill.⁵⁶ I couldn’t imagine doing anything else, the Columbia sociologist Allan Silver explained. He enrolled in graduate school at the University of Michigan as soon as he got out of the army in 1953.⁵⁷

By the late 1950s and early 1960s, with seemingly unlimited money available, graduate school became even more appealing. What else would one do? the economist William Tabb remembered. For me, being a professor is like being a student. You get paid to do what you want. The sociologist Thomas Mayer also knew that he wanted to be an academic, but not in what field. Ultimately, he decided on sociology and Stanford recruited me. Kate Ellis recalled her academic career as extremely accidental. . . . In the sixties if you were a woman you didn’t think of creating a path for yourself. . . . I drifted around. Then somebody suggested I major in English and then somebody suggested I go to graduate school.⁵⁸ The Berkeley sociologist Troy Duster had a similar experience. He had so impressed his undergraduate professors at Northwestern that

all of the sudden I’m being asked to be a teaching assistant. . . . And within about a week I get an invitation from UCLA to come out and be a graduate student. It was a different world. It wasn’t about applications; it was about networks. It was about senior professors being able to write a letter or pick up a phone and say, I have a student. I think you ought to take this student seriously. And then, . . . out of the blue, I get this note saying You’ve been accepted.⁵⁹

Money was not a problem.⁶⁰ Those were good times for scholars, the historian Renate Bridenthal recalled; money was raining down. After her Wilson funding ran out, she got a fellowship from Columbia as well as support for research in Germany. When Carl Riskin started graduate school in economics at Berkeley, he was offered even more money if he studied Chinese. The government was trying to recruit a cadre of China experts, the NYU sinologist Moss Roberts explained. What with Columbia’s then-low tuition, NDEA and Ford Foundation grants, his graduate training was completely covered.⁶¹ The biologist Saul Slapikoff was recruited from Brooklyn College by the PhD program at Tufts Medical School that paid him the then-munificent sum of $4,000–5,000 a year during the next three and a half years.⁶²

And graduate students didn’t need much money in those days. William Chace, the future president of Emory, remembered arriving at Berkeley’s English department along with 120 other graduate students in the fall of 1961. With his $1,200 Wilson stipend, tuition an affordable $250 for an out-of-state student (reduced to $136.50 after a year in residence), and $60 a month for rent, it was possible to get by—especially if one adopted, as many did, a bohemian lifestyle.⁶³ In the college towns of the Midwest where living expenses and tuitions were also low, a graduate student in English at a school like Indiana University could support herself on a teaching assistantship.⁶⁴ Madison, Chicago’s Hyde Park, Columbia’s Morningside Heights, Ann Arbor—the graduate ghettos of America’s leading research universities swarmed with thousands of future faculty members living on peanut butter and canned tuna.

Not all of them made it through. Berkeley’s English department, according to Chace, had 412 graduate students in the fall of 1961 and 374 the following spring.⁶⁵ A special faculty committee chaired by English professor Charles Muscatine that was investigating the attrition rate decried the hurdles that were erected to compensate for inadequate admissions procedures. Except in the sciences, these measures, Muscatine’s report concluded, harass the student with endless examinations whose primary purpose is to settle the question of competence which ought to have been decided earlier, and to compel him to arrange his course of study for the primary objective of passing exams.⁶⁶

Ambitious departments at major research universities recruited indiscriminately. They then relied on such exigencies as language requirements, qualifying examinations, and dissertations to weed out the ranks. As a result, large numbers dropped out. As many as 75 percent of all PhD candidates in the humanities and 70 percent in the social sciences never finished their degrees. The figure in the natural sciences was a more manageable 40 percent. Some schools did have better records; at Princeton, with smaller, more intimate departments, 71 percent of graduate students made it through.⁶⁷ But, especially in large departments, personal attention was hard to come by. The graduate school here was so big, the Harvard historian John Womack recalled. Somebody like [H. Stuart] Hughes had fifty or sixty students doing theses. How could you possibly deal with that?⁶⁸ Still, financial problems probably caused more dropouts than academic failure or the impersonality of large departments. After the first few years of graduate work, many students scrambled for new sources of income, often taking teaching jobs before they began their theses. And, as Muscatine’s report noted, they could never quite manage to carry a heavy teaching load, raise a family, and finish a dissertation far from encouragement, supervision, and the resources of a university library.⁶⁹

A Sellers’ Market

Nonetheless, because of what seemed like an insatiable demand for professors, one did not need a PhD in hand to get a job at a four-year college or university. Moreover, because jobs were so plentiful, horizontal mobility was also common. According to one study from the mid-1960s, not only were 97 percent of all college teachers interested in other positions, but the turnover rate for all faculty was about 20 percent.⁷⁰ The market for qualified academics was so voracious that even people who had lost their jobs for political reasons could find new ones—something that would never have happened during the McCarthy era. All they needed were connections.⁷¹

This was because, until the end of the 1960s, the job market, expansive as it was, relied almost exclusively on personal contacts rather than open competitions. In 1965, according to one study, friends and colleagues were behind the awarding of 65 percent of all academic positions. These informal methods were especially important at high-end schools. If we go shopping for faculty, Schorske recalled from his stint at Berkeley in the 1960s, either we go for finished books or through the old-boy network.⁷² The editor of a volume of Yale historian C. Vann Woodward’s letters described how one of the most powerful of those old boys operated:

Academic jobs for a student, for example, might be secured by Woodward picking up a telephone, calling the chair of a department, and saying the right word in the right ear, with no bother about search committees, affirmative action, and whether graduate students approved of a candidate. His correspondence is full of letters from chairmen—then, invariably, men—who would say, We are looking for a young married man in the field of American History with a secondary field in the Far East or Western Civilization, and promptly hire whomever Woodward suggested. Or someone from a Southern university in the late 1960s would ask if he knew of a presentable young Negro, who might cause no trouble, a man who is level-headed, objective, and who, hopefully, could disregard somewhat the matter of race, as his colleagues are trying to do . . . [someone who would] not allow himself to be ‘captured’ by extremists of any color.⁷³

Almost every white male I interviewed, if he hadn’t alienated his thesis adviser, remarked on the ease of getting a job. Many, in fact, had several offers. When Jules Chametzky was finishing his degree in American studies at Minnesota in 1955, he didn’t even consider going to the boondocks and so turned down offers from the Universities of Florida, Nebraska, and Texas to teach in the humanities program at Boston University. He finished his dissertation three years later and went back on the job market, ending up at the rapidly expanding University of Massachusetts. The following year he helped his department hire eight people.⁷⁴ So intense was the competition that, as the former president of Princeton William Bowen recalled, at meetings of many professional associations in the fifties and sixties, department chairmen literally stood in line to interview job candidates.⁷⁵ Moreover, there was so much pressure on departments to make a quick commitment, Christopher Jencks and David Riesman noted, that in many cases a preoccupied department chairman hires a man he has never seen in action or only heard read a ten-minute paper to an audience at a professional meeting.⁷⁶

With the appropriate credentials, people could often write their own tickets. When, for example, the historian Staughton Lynd decided he wanted to teach at a historically Black institution, all it took for him to get a job at Spelman College was for one of his professors to introduce him to his former student Howard Zinn.⁷⁷ Similarly, Bill Zimmerman opted for a position at Brooklyn College over a more prestigious institution because he preferred its political climate.⁷⁸ When my ex-husband was denied tenure at Princeton and went on to the job market in the early 1970s, he limited his search to either Boston or New York—and received two good offers from each city. Thomas Mayer also got several attractive propositions after the University of Michigan refused to tenure him. I was very interested in mountaineering and skiing, he recalled, so he went to the University of Colorado Boulder.⁷⁹ In 1968, William Chace rejected offers from Virginia, Yale, and MIT to take a position at Stanford, where his wife could teach as well.⁸⁰

Research, Prestige, and Privilege

While professors enjoyed their teaching, their students, their colleagues, their summer vacations, and their ability to control their own work, prestige remained important.⁸¹ Most of the men and women who entered the academic world between 1960 and 1975 sought positions that would enhance their status. It was the prospect of acclaim that kept faculty members in their labs or the library long after they had finished teaching for the day. For some, the intellectual pleasure of research was its own reward; for others, however, it also had a competitive and somewhat coercive component. They were expected to produce—and were compensated accordingly. The attention their work received enhanced their careers, of course, but it also benefited their colleges and universities.

By the 1960s, despite the enormous diversity of institutions, more and more of them were prioritizing research and graduate training. At the top of the pyramid were the major universities like Harvard, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and the University of Michigan, as well as what Christopher Jencks and David Riesman called the university colleges, wealthy, selective private schools like Swarthmore, Wellesley, and Williams. These were the schools that trained the new breed of faculty members who were driving the competitive culture of academic research. They valued research over teaching, graduate education over undergraduate, and the liberal arts over vocational training. They also featured selective admissions policies and residential student bodies.⁸²

Whenever they could, schools tried to raise the supposed quality of their students—a less than egalitarian measure that later conflicted with their ostensible desire to recruit students of color.⁸³ When Stanford became more selective after World War II, applications to the former party school soared. The same thing happened at the University of Pennsylvania. When it started to recruit more academically inclined undergraduates, Penn’s culture changed. Its fraternities no longer ruled the campus.⁸⁴ But even public institutions, especially the space-starved urban schools, raised their admissions standards. In 1940, New York City high school graduates had to have an eighty average to get into City College; by 1969, it was eighty-six.⁸⁵ The same situation prevailed in California, where the Master Plan mandated that the state college system admit only the top 30 percent of each high school class. Even Trenton State College in New Jersey had to be selective; in 1968, it took only 1,500 of the 5,400 people who applied.⁸⁶

But, above all, the key to an institution’s prestige was its high-powered professors. As early as the 1930s, Harvard’s president James Bryant Conant had stressed the centrality of the faculty to reputation.⁸⁷ Accordingly, as Jencks and Riesman observed, the typical president’s greatest ambition for the future is usually to ‘strengthen’ his institution, and operationally this usually turns out to mean assembling scholars of even greater competence and reputation.⁸⁸ If they could afford them, ambitious administrators sought academic stars. But, except perhaps for Nobel laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners, not even the most talented administrators could assess the quality of professors in the dozens of disciplines their institutions covered. They had to rely on more subtle indicators of reputation, trusting their own faculty members to hire status-raising scholars and scientists.

The process therefore empowered individual departments to become the arbiters of value. Brand names mattered. It was tempting for ambitious chairmen and selection committees to recruit ABDs (all but dissertation) from the most prestigious schools rather than people with degrees from second- or third-tier institutions.⁸⁹ Senior professors at major universities, professional organizations, university presses—all helped to create the reputational system that structured the increasingly hierarchical academy.⁹⁰

The rewards for the men at the top of the system were considerable—especially in hot scientific fields. Their ability to win research grants as well as their unlimited mobility gave them the power to negotiate the higher salaries, reduced teaching loads, and better facilities that would increase their productivity and, thus, add to their own as well as their universities’ stature.⁹¹ From the institutional perspective, however, as the University of California president Clark Kerr noted in 1963, there was a downside. These high-flying researchers tended to shift their identification and loyalty from their university to the agency in Washington that provided their research grants and to abandon their concern with the general welfare of the university. . . . [T]hey become tenants rather than owners, taking their grants with them as they change their institutional lodgings.⁹² Their presence also created serious imbalances, skewing the academic reward system away from fields that brought in little cash. Physicists and electrical engineers could attract big money; classicists and French professors could not.

Still, Kerr was not about to abandon the rat race. Berkeley was, after all, a major contender, flaunting its reputation as the number one public university. It ran some of the most important research laboratories—and to this day designates coveted parking spaces for Nobel laureates. It did not abandon the quest for more and more distinguished scholars and scientists; nor did it, as it once had done, automatically promote most of its junior faculty. As early as the 1930s, Conant had upgraded Harvard’s faculty by making tenure increasingly difficult to attain.⁹³ Kerr followed suit, rejecting 20 percent of the candidates his faculty had approved—and not just in science. Every department, he insisted, had to be ranked among the top six in the country.⁹⁴ By the late 1950s, administrators elsewhere were following that example.⁹⁵

The University of Pennsylvania jettisoned its local orientation. After raising the quality of its undergraduates, in the 1960s it built new facilities and recruited faculty nationally.⁹⁶ MIT pulled off a similar upgrade. Already a leading engineering school, after the war it transformed itself into a more diverse university whose faculty consisted of scientists with PhDs instead of engineers with MAs. It even began to expand into the social sciences and humanities.⁹⁷ Some recently established institutions also aimed high. In the early 1960s, the University of California’s new campus at San Diego recruited particularly promising biologists.⁹⁸ It also sought out established stars, like the Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, and the historian H. Stuart Hughes, who, for one reason or another, were unable or unwilling to stay at their current institutions.⁹⁹

But no school pushed for preeminence as self-consciously—and as successfully—as Stanford. Even before the end of the war, Frederick Terman, the school’s future provost, believed that Stanford had the opportunity to achieve a position in the West somewhat analogous to that of Harvard in the East. He presciently steered faculty members toward areas that would attract corporate, foundation, and, especially, military funding, which would allow him to hire more people in those fields, attract more graduate students, and win even more grants.¹⁰⁰ Terman believed that his opportunistic approach—constructing what he called steeples of excellence—improved the institution’s academic quality. He ruthlessly imposed his vision on the entire faculty, refusing to approve one-third of the tenure candidates that departments recommended. Those who resisted, Terman believed, were simply inferior. Actually, only a few resisted. As the author of the most insightful study of Stanford’s ascent noted, Terman and his followers may best be understood not simply as academic entrepreneurs but as administrators consciously working to make entrepreneurship the normative behavior of university professors.¹⁰¹

Martin Meyerson was another academic impresario. A city planner who had briefly served as Berkeley’s chancellor in the aftermath of the 1964 Free Speech Movement, he was lured to the expanding campus of SUNY Buffalo by what Warren Bennis, its future provost, described as "the romance of taking a mediocre up-state university and creating—well—the Berkeley of the East."¹⁰² With Governor Nelson Rockefeller pouring money into the SUNY system, this vision was not totally unrealistic. Each of its four major universities had a specialty. Stony Brook was the science