Review of *American Academic Cultures*

Paul Mattingly’s American Academic Culture’s: A History of American Higher Education offers a strikingly new and unique way of examining the history of higher education in the United States. Mattingly begins by asserting that over the last several years, writing the history of American higher education has become increasingly problematic. A primary difficulty affecting historical accounts of American higher education, he argues, is the tendency to overemphasize continuities within the history of American higher education. Mattingly’s work reflects his experience over several decades in teaching the history of American colleges and universities in the Graduate Program in Higher Education at NYU. As a historian teaching in a professional program, Mattingly acknowledges the expectation that history should provide a useful framework for analyzing contemporary problems and assisting in conceptualization of alternatives within higher education. Yet he finds that much contemporary critical writing on American higher education loses its power for comparative analysis through the simplified assumption of “linear progress” in the development of American colleges and universities. The assumption behind the “linear progress” model is that higher education is a single continuous institution undergoing a series of gradual and progressive changes. He proposes instead that American higher education be seen not as a single continuous institution but rather as a procession of loosely related institutional forms shaped by successive “generational cultures.”

Mattingly identifies seven “generational cultures” that have defined American higher education: (1) evangelical, (2) Jeffersonian, (3) republican/non-denominational, (4) industrially-driven postgraduate/professional, (5) Progressive (urban-driven) pragmatism, (6) an international academic culture shaped largely by 1930s émigré intellectuals, and finally (7) a federally driven set of initiatives that activated both pro- and antipragmatic stances.

Starting by analyzing the first generation of American higher education defined by the Great Awakening, Mattingly explores both the ideas that drove the Great Awakening and the cluster of colleges fostered through its influence. The colonies had witnessed the emergence of three precursor colleges, Harvard, Yale, and William and Mary, from 1636 to 1702. But these original colleges, Mattingly argues, did not produce a distinctive culture. The first identifiable culture emerged instead from the group of colonial colleges developed by competing evangelical denominations during the high point of the first Great Awakening from 1745 to1780. These colleges of the Great Awakening included the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University), King’s College (later Columbia University), Rhode Island Baptist College (later Brown University), Queen’s College (later Rutgers University), and the College of Philadelphia (later University of Pennsylvania). The ideas of Jonathan Edwards exercised their greatest influence in shaping the identities and intellectual orientations of the colleges of the Great Awakening. In particular, the influence of Edwards on the colleges can be seen in the shift of theological preoccupation with the nature and ways of God toward an intellectual focus on man and examination of human behavior and the nature of the physical world as part of God’s creation. The colleges of the Great Awakening also underwent profound social transformation stemming largely from their origins as institutions founded by competing denominations. As no college could exist by enrolling only students of its founding denomination, each of the colleges was forced to become more like the others, such that a general collegiate model – or in Mattingly’s words, collegiate culture – emerged that defined the entire group of Great Awakening colleges. By operating as a part of a general shared culture, each of the colleges could compete for students of all denominations and thus effectively coexist within a market-driven system of collegiate choice.

The strength of Mattingly’s exploration of the “generational culture” of the Great Awakening lies in his equal emphases on intellectual and institutional history. Mattingly deploys this combined view in his examination of each of the successive collegiate generations he describes. In doing so, he offers a nuanced and original analysis of the shift in the mid-19^th century from the denominational antebellum college to the science-driven, non-denominational colleges that served as precursors of the late 19^th century generic university.  He couples that analysis with an examination of the social, political, and economic forces that drove development in the decades following the Civil War.

Most innovative in Mattingly’s treatment of the history of American higher education, though, is his examination of the development of the American university following World War II. In the last three chapters of the book, he depicts the growth of what Clark Kerr came to term the “multiversity.” Stimulated first by the impact of the GI Bill then by massive postwar government defense research investment, American universities in the 1950s and early 1960s grew quickly into institutions dedicated to educating a rapidly expanding collegiate population and, more important, solving social and technical problems. The problem-solving enterprise reflected the ethos of American pragmatism, specifically in its dedication to privileging results over abstraction. The pragmatic approach directly supported the concept of problem-solving universities operating as value-free enterprises. The notion of value-free inquiry operated largely unchallenged until the mid-1960s, when the scientific and engineering research agendas of American universities came under fire for their deep connections with the defense industry and the prosecution of the Vietnam War. The challenge of the war brought the issue of value-free inquiry to the fore on campuses and drove a deep and lasting divide between both professors and students over the purpose of university research. The debate over university purpose raised the realization among both those for and against the university as lead societal problem-solver that the university had given over much of its independence, particularly over decisions regarding teaching and research priorities, to the primary source of research and institutional funding, the federal government. Mattingly sees the university today still struggling with challenges that first emerged in the 1960s over social and academic purpose, funding, and autonomy.

While Mattingly’s American Academic Cultures succeeds brilliantly in presenting a unique and powerful lens built around his notion of generational cultures as the defining matrix for successive institutional formations within American higher education, his analysis does reflect some notable admissions. Clearly lacking in his analysis is a consideration of the profoundly, and many would say regrettably, important role of sports in shaping not only the structure and function of the university but also the financing and public support for higher education. Also receiving little mention in what is otherwise a remarkably in-depth analysis are discussions of the roles and experiences of students and administrators.

Yet despite these small quibbles, Mattingly has written a masterful analysis of the history of higher education in America that deserves to be read broadly. His use of the notion generational cultures allows for a richer approach to periodization in telling the story of the development of higher education, one that is far suppler than the more conventional institutionally-focused approach. Most valuable is his weaving together of the intellectual history that defined each period or generational culture with the institutional developments produced by these cultures. Mattingly clearly shows us colleges and universities as more than buildings and presidents, rather as distinct idea-generating spaces that have largely defined and led our national intellectual life.