The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s

Historian Schrecker (No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities) offers a detailed analysis of American higher education during the “long Sixties,” stretching from about 1955 to 1975. She focuses on faculty activism and its evolution to militancy, spurred by shifting causes: in the late 1950s, anti-communist loyalty oaths and free speech; in the 1960s, concern about U.S. policy in Cuba, the slow progress of the civil rights movement, and the intensifying war in Vietnam. Schrecker describes how faculty wrote letters and manifestos, organized rallies, created teach-ins, and pressured their administrations and national leaders. Faculty often sympathized with student demonstrations in favor of free speech and against the draft and the U.S. bombing of Vietnam and Cambodia, Schrecker writes, but many professors also derided violent protests and student efforts to shut down university operations. She makes the case that faculties were divided and usually unable to influence policy or prevent growing public distrust of universities. Schrecker presents a clear picture of a tumultuous decade, synthesizing her vast research in the era’s newspapers and journals and extensive interviews.