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.
 
 

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Education, American History, Audiobook, The United States Of America

616 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2021

About the author

Ellen Wolf Schrecker is an American professor emerita of American history at Yeshiva University. She has received the Frederick Ewen Academic Freedom Fellowship at the Tamiment Library at NYU. She is known primarily for her work in the history of McCarthyism.

Reviews

[Craig Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Valuable overview of the tumultuous 1960s in American universities, moving from the early challenges of growth to the later conflicts over campus disorder and university governance. Schrecker concentrates on prestige universities, which reflects source availability. Would have liked more on "second-tier" schools and schools outside the coasts and upper midwest (basically the Big Ten and University of Chicago). There's good work such as Beth Bailey's on the University of Kansas that would have deepened the impact. It's largely a story of the universities' failure to respond adequately to challenges that may have been impossibly complex.

[Michael Hutchison · Rating 4 out of 5]

I listened to this book on Audible. It brought back memories of the late 60s and early 70s. I was surprised at the things I forgot and how much I didn't know. The loyalty oaths teachers were forced to take or lose their job. The Feinberg law in New York that directed the university regents to deny subversives the privilege of teaching in New York. The basis for this law is that employment as a teacher place limits on freedom of thought and expression. Wow. I was still in high school when the news would carry reports of the free speech movement and Mario Savio at Berkeley. Nationwide as the war dragged on it was just amazing the mobilization of the population to resist. Of course, not all. We had the hawks on the other side. I was not aware of Howard Zins involvement. and that Noam Chomsky was arrested multiple times supporting the left antiwar position. Also, what I forgot or did not know was the amount of violence. All the ROTC offices that were bombed. They even kidnapped university faculty. Draft boards would reclassify the draft status of a student for not maintaining a particular scholastic level. Teachers were falsifying grades or refusing to give grades because they didn't want to be responsible for sending a student to Viet Nam. I had my own personal battle going on with the draft and the war, which of course is not in the book. LOL. Anyway, the book is really good with lots of info on those years of the mid 50's to the mid 70's. The book validated my feeling of deja vu when it comes to what is happening today. Especially those McCarthy type hearings at congress with the university presidents.

[Larry Graves · Rating 3 out of 5]

My 3 star rating is soley based on the book dropping a lot of names with the expectation that the reader should know about them and their cause. There is a lot to unpack, so be prepared to do additional reading to gain a fuller appreciation of what was going on these campuses.

[Elías Haig · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's hard to understate how much I needed to read a book like this right now