The 1960s was the most transformative decade in the history of American higher education-but not for the reasons you might think. Picture going to college in the sixties: the protests and marches, the teach-ins and sit-ins, the drugs, sex, and rock 'n' roll-hip, electric, psychedelic. Not so fast, says bestselling historian John R. Thelin. Even at radicalized campuses, volatile student demonstrations coexisted with the "business as usual" of a flagship state university: athletics, fraternities and sororities, and student government. In Going to College in the Sixties, Thelin reinterprets the campus world shaped during one of the most dramatic decades in American history. Reconstructing all phases of the college experience, Thelin explores how students competed for admission, paid for college in an era before Pell Grants, dealt with crowded classes and dormitories, voiced concerns about the curriculum, grappled with new tensions in big-time college sports, and overcame discrimination. Thelin augments his anecdotal experience with a survey of landmark state and federal policies and programs shaping higher education, a chronological look at media coverage of college campuses over the course of the decade, and an account of institutional changes in terms of curricula and administration. Combining student memoirs, campus publications, oral histories, and newsreels, along with archival sources and institutional records, the book goes beyond facile stereotypes about going to school in the sixties. Grounded in social and political history, with a scope that will appeal both to a new generation of scholars and to alumni of the era, this engaging book allows readers to consider "going to college" in both the past and the present.
John R. Thelin, who went to college in the 1960s, is a University Research Professor and a member of the Educational Policy Studies Department at the University of Kentucky. He is the author of Essential Documents in the History of American Higher Education, A History of American Higher Education, and Games Colleges Play: Scandal and Reform in Intercollegiate Athletics.
List of Illustrations Foreword by Michael A. Olivas Preface Acknowledgements 1. Rediscovering American Higher Education in the 1960s 2. College Prep 3. "The Knowledge Industry" 4. Student Activities and Activism 5. Colleges and Curriculum 6. College Sports 7. Conclusion Index About the Author
The 1960s was the most transformative decade in the history of American higher education-but not for the reasons you might think.
John Thelin tells this story of rising enrollments and growing administrations in his new book, Going to College in the Sixties. In doing so, he joins an ever-expanding list of historians who urge us to abjure the hippie nostalgia that so often still defines the 1960s. He lifts campus protest out of its purple haze and relocates it amid the emerging trends of shifting undergraduate demographics and the data-driven expansion of university bureaucracy. This approach makes sense of our present far better than the more familiar tale of a student revolution that failed. Instead, he shows that '60s students of all political stripes and demographic backgrounds participated in a historical shift that replaced one set of contradictions with another. * LA Review of Books * In order to cover an entire decade of student experience, Thelin impressively draws upon oral histories, national and local newspapers, campus publications, student memoirs, and institutional archives. Going to College in the Sixties thus offers some unique insights and breaks ground in the proposal that the decade was not all that it has been made out to be. * History of Education Quarterly *
