For the Common Good

A New History of Higher Education in America

By: Charles Dorn

Narrated by: Doug McDonald

In For the Common Good, Charles Dorn challenges the rhetoric of America’s so-called crisis in higher education by investigating two centuries of college and university history. From the community college to the elite research university - in states from California to Maine - Dorn engages a fundamental question confronted by higher education institutions ever since the nation’s founding: Do colleges and universities contribute to the common good?

Tracking changes in the prevailing social ethos between the late 18th and early 21st centuries, Dorn illustrates the ways in which civic-mindedness, practicality, commercialism, and affluence influenced higher education’s dedication to the public good. Each ethos, long a part of American history and tradition, came to predominate over the others during one of the four chronological periods examined in the audiobook, informing the character of institutional debates and telling the definitive story of its time. For the Common Good demonstrates how 200 years of political, economic, and social change prompted transformation among colleges and universities - including the establishment of entirely new kinds of institutions - and refashioned higher education in the United States over time in essential and often vibrant ways.

The book is published by Cornell University Press. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks.

©2017 Cornell University (P)2019 Redwood Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"Dorn's refreshing analysis is persuasive in showing that higher education for the common good is both central and complex." (John R. Thelin, author of A History of American Higher Education)

"Dorn offers compelling new insights into more than two centuries of higher education...." (Christine A. Ogren, author of The American State Normal School)

"Dorn has produced a book that offers insightful analysis on the past and important perspective to the present." (History of Education Quarterly)

A good overview, with one thing missing

This was an informative overview of the history of higher education in America. It explained how we arrived from where we were two centuries ago as a nation in formation, building educational institutions as a communitarian reflection of our desire to build America into a better society. The book shows how this evolved during the Reconstruction following the Civil War and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution into institutions that enable the advancement of careers and the lucrative opportunities that arise from that, in a context of greater involvement of women and the descendants of slaves, and the influx of poorer Americans living in rural societies into the cities.

My interest in the book was my curiosity about how we evolved into what I perceive higher education to be today, largely Progressive in ideology and inured to the rigorous debate needed to negotiate how we move forward together through agreement rather than orthodoxy. It's an inversion of what universities started out as two centuries ago in America, and the utilization of education for personal advancement has shed even the fig leaf that it needed to be demonstrably conservative of the broad society's values. Today, universities are no longer a source of the ideas that enable the negotiation of common ground, and once, this was one of their primary purposes.

What I'd have liked to see in this book was more attention given to this, but it was as it promised to be largely a historical perspective. The position the book takes is that education today is the result of the commercialization it came to be beginning in the 1950's and 60's. Today, students are treated as consumers who expect to be paying for their A's. Universities are becoming diminished as the guardians of professional competence.

The role of government funding and regulation, itself the result of a belief that higher education is a "right", undergirds this approach. I heard little, however, about the flipside of this observation, which is that universities are not just chasing the demand but are rather creating it. The institutions of education and the administrations and unions that maintain them are marketing higher education to ensure their survival and the interests of the universities and their employees rather than the nation that accredits the institution. It could be claimed that this change has turned some universities and programs into pensions in search of a cause, rather than the nation's betterment.

The outcome of this is that the guardians of these universities encourage students to see them as purveyors of stability for universities, convinced that their ivory tower orthodoxies ought to remain without challenge. To ensure this access to speech, ideas, and even governance are curtailed and oppositional perspectives are discouraged. This is the obverse of what higher education once was.

The book is quite good at tracing the development up until the 1970's, and I'd like to have seen more effort given to the non-commercial aspects from then til now.

I have received this book for no cost on condition that I provide my unbiased opinion of it.

Back to School

This is a great academic look at the history of colleges and universities in America. Being an academic work it isn't for the casual reader. But if you want to truly understand why American higher education is at a crossroads, this is the book for you.

This book was given to me for free at my request and I provided this review voluntarily.