The History of U.S. Higher Education - Methods for Understanding the Past

Marybeth Gasman, Marybeth Gasman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136976537
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

The first volume in the Core Concepts of Higher Education series, The History of U.S. Higher Education: Methods for Understanding the Past is a unique research methods textbook that provides students with an understanding of the processes that historians use when conducting their own research. Written primarily for graduate students in higher education programs, this book explores critical methodological issues in the history of American higher education, including race, class, gender, and sexuality. Chapters include:

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• Reflective Exercises that combine theory and practice
• Research Method Tips
• Further Reading Suggestions.

Leading historians and those at the forefront of new research explain how historical literature is discovered and written, and provide readers with the methodological approaches to conduct historical higher education research of their own.

Section III
Critical Examinations of Special Issues

10
“Poor” Research

Historiographical Challenges When Socio-Economic Status is
the Unit of Analysis

Jana Nidiffer

Historians of higher education approach their discipline from numerous perspectives. The extant literature contains a great deal of information about how various institutions were founded, funded, or managed. Historians have also concentrated on how the curriculum evolved and the religious and intellectual foment in which colleges and universities worked. Another long-standing tradition in the field is the study of the life and work of central actors in the enterprise such as faculty members or presidents and other key administrators. Perhaps more recently, scholarship has centered on the symbiosis of higher education and the larger society, especially with regard to higher education’s role in what I might label the “military-industrial-academic complex,” to paraphrase President Eisenhower. Of equal significance, albeit with a much shorter tradition, is the question of who had access to colleges and universities and the concomitant implications for the social and economic status of those groups admitted.

The “who had access?” question has produced an explosion of research in the last 25 years or so. Particular attention has been paid to access based on race, especially the struggle of African Americans for integration, parity, and social justice in higher education. The issue of gender and the experience of women have also received considerable scholarly notice. In addition, historians have studied access based on religious affiliations other than Protestant and, to a lesser extent, access based on a student’s ability to pay.

All of the above groups are important historically and remain significant in contemporary society. In fact, the President’s Commission on Higher Education (the “Truman Report”) of 1947 identified five significant deterrents to completing a college degree: race; gender; religion; geography; and socio-economic background.¹ Religious beliefs and geography no longer present substantial barriers to access to the same degree as observed by scholars on the Commission. Race, gender, and socio-economic status (SES) still remain significant.

Gender and race as categories of analysis have interesting parallels: both women and people of color were implicitly and explicitly denied access from the earliest forms of US higher education; both groups began their struggle in the 19th century by fighting for admission to existing institutions and simultaneously founding colleges to serve their group exclusively; both suffered from deeply held prejudices that asserted that neither women nor African Americans were intellectually capable of a college education; both groups won legal and policy battles for admission, but must deal with the lingering manifestations of prejudice in the form of sexism and racism in contemporary academia; and both groups have made extraordinary strides. They enter the 21st century with a level of access and accomplishment that the earliest pioneers could scarcely have dreamed. Women undergraduates, for example, outnumber their male peers and, as of this writing, women serve as presidents of half of the prestigious “Ivy League” universities. This is not to say that gender inequity no longer exists. In most roles in academe—for example tenured, full professors—women’s experience can still be described as “the higher, the fewer,” but the gains of the last three decades are undeniable.

The situation of access based on socio-economic status (SES) is a very different story. Today, SES is the best predictor of who will not go to college.² Ironically, “the poor” were the one demographic group that American higher education pledged to serve from the founding of Harvard in 1636. In a missive entitled Harvard’s First Fruits, written to entice backers in England to support fledging Harvard College by sending money, goods, or their sons, the writers declared their mission to educate “the poor, but hopeful scholars whose parents are not able to comfortably maintain them.”³ Perhaps because reaching out to the poor was one of the original purposes of higher education, such a commitment has taken on almost a mythical quality, integrally tied to notions of American democracy. This correlation was made obvious by some of the titles of early histories of higher education such as: Democracy’s College; Colleges for Our Land and Time: The Land-Grant Idea in American Education; and The State Universities and Democracy.⁴

Thus, it is important for scholars to place an analytical lens on how this story unfolded; from pledging to serve the poor, to barely reaching the poor. This essay concentrates on answering this question specifically for the 19th through early 20th centuries because it was during this period of growth that the myth of American higher education serving the poor was born and then later extolled by historians. It is also during this long era that archival and demographic records are the least precise and require the most detective efforts to interpret.

The Scholarship on Higher Education and the Poor

In a 1999 History of Education Quarterly article, I suggested the extant literature on higher education and the poor could be described by a typology analogous to Peggy McIntosh’s method of categorizing scholarship on women.⁵ Organizing the literature in this manner continues to be a useful heuristic. Only scholarship in the latter categories deals with the two primary historiographic challenges and the principal contribution of this work: defining what is meant by “poor” and then identifying which students can be described as “poor.” The significance of the work is the exploration of what access denied based on a student’s poverty means to the larger social commitment of higher education.

I labeled the five categories of my typology: Traditional/Omission; Increased Inclusion; Center of Analysis; Issue Specific; and Broader Social Analysis.⁶ These categories do not follow a rigid linear progression, although there is a sense of sequence with the Traditional/ Omission works frequently being the oldest and the more recent histories reflecting the latter categories.

Scholarship that falls in the Traditional group often provides an almost romanticized view of the topic where, for example, the Morrill Act colleges of the latter 19th century are ballyhooed as “Democracy’s Colleges” because they served the poor. Such an example is Frederick Rudolph’s The American Colleges and University: A History. As the label implies, work in the Omission category fails to address the topic at all.

Work in the second category, More Inclusion, incorporates some analysis of the higher education of poor although it is not the primary theme. Such literature follows Geraldine Clifford’s exhortation to include the people overlooked in previous educational histor-ies.⁷ Clifford was speaking to the experiences of women, but the historical inclusion of those from the lower classes follows the same logic. In Joseph Kett’s The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties: From Self-Improvement to Adult Education in America, 1750–1990, the subject is various forms of “non-traditional” education (meaning outside of established institutions and not for purposes of a degree). Within his discussion are educational pursuits by those who could not afford to attend traditional colleges, but such people were not the primary focus of the book.

Scholarship where SES is at the Center of Analysis begins to define what is meant by “poor” or the various synonyms that appear in primary documents such as “paupers,” “working classes,” “lower classes” or even “laborers.” Issue Specific studies comprise the multiple, in-depth, focused, and even narrow micro-studies that form the building blocks necessary to fashion a comprehensive historical treatment of higher education and the poor. For example, studies of low SES students in land-grant colleges, historically Black colleges and universities, urban universities that serve recent immigrants, and even some prestigious institutions begin to paint a larger portrait of those students’ experiences nationally. In Paupers and Scholars: The Transformation of Student Life in Nineteenth-Century New England, David Allmendinger begins to describe what he meant by “paupers” although his definitions have been subsequently challenged. Sherry Gorelick’s City College and the Jewish Poor: Education in New York, 1880–1924 takes a very specific look at the immigrant poor during a defined time period.

Finally, literature that provides a Broader Social Analysis moves toward a “critical theory” or “class analysis” approach. Such work is analogous to studies by feminist scholars who have moved beyond reconstructing women’s experiences merely as “add-ons” to the main narrative and instead write history where women and, perhaps more significantly, the construction of gender (and how the male higher education establishment responded to both) were viewed as a dynamic force for change, not a by-product or incidental occurrence. Two such examples are David O. Levine’s The American College and the Culture of Aspiration, 1915–1940 and Clyde W. Barrow’s Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education, 1894–1928. Barrow’s work is especially interesting with respect to his discussion of the connections between higher education and the labor market.

The Historiographical Challenges of Studying
the Poor

The most significant challenge to studying the experiences of low SES students in higher education is defining the word “poor” and its various synonyms. The second issue is identifying students who fall into the category of “poor” once the definition is determined.

What Is Meant by “Poor”?

An important consideration in this work is to proceed with caution if relying on the language of most primary documents, especially those of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Two conditions make such documents difficult to interpret. The first is the interchangeable use of possibly related terms such as “poor,” “industrial classes,” and even “sons of farmers” without any precision whatsoever. The second concern is “poor” compared to whom?

The “poor compared to whom?” question is difficult to answer because the frame of reference of the speaker (in the primary document under analysis) is difficult to deduce. In other words, was the speaker noting that students at his (the speakers were usually male) college were “poor” compared to his own economic circumstances? Or, were students poor compared to actual or perceived impressions of “rich” students at, typically, the elite institutions of the East Coast? Or to national or regional estimates of “average” income? The speakers in these documents were commenting on the SES of students in the absence of any official standard of what constituted poverty. In fact, it was not until the 1960s that the federal government established poverty thresholds (later the poverty line) and all who fell below were considered poor. The 19th century had no such benchmark.

Because there were no federal guidelines on what was meant by “poor,” the work of a handful of late 19th-century social scientists provides some insight into 19th-century attitudes and perceptions. Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, published in England in 1849 but equally influential in the U.S., was one of the first books on poverty from a sociological, data-driven, and less judgmental perspective.⁸ This was a dramatic change from theologically inspired texts that discussed the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor—ideas brought to the Colonies based on Elizabethan Poor Laws.⁹ Mayhew’s work was followed by other sociologically based work that consisted of documenting the conditions of extreme poverty, which has been credited with being the intellectual foundation of modern social work.¹⁰ A notable American example is Jacob Riis’ study of New York City, How the Other Half Lives, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1890. In 1891–1893 Scribner’s Magazine also published exposés of New York and other major cities.¹¹ Most of these publications concentrated on White and ethnic/ immigrant groups, primarily of Western and Eastern European backgrounds. There was very little attention paid to African Americans living in poverty in Northern urban or Southern rural areas. The early work of W.E.B. Du Bois provided one of the first examples when he documented African American poverty in Philadelphia at the turn of the 20th century.¹²

What Mayhew, Riis, Du Bois, and others had in common was the tendency to concentrate on the “very poor.” In 1889, Charles Booth, author of Life and Labour of the People in London, formally divided the poor into two sub-groups. He described those below the aristocracy and peerage as the “comfortable” class; below them were the “poor” and the “very poor.” Robert Hunter then published Poverty in 1904 with an explicit mission of defining the term.¹³ For Hunter, working men (and families who had at least one wage earner) were poor or just “getting by,” and always precariously on the brink of pauperism. But, the “poor” were not yet in need of relief. Being “very poor” was equivalent to pauperism—people living in almshouses, the destitute, the ill, the disabled, and the socially unwanted for whom accepting charity and relief was necessary.

Modern social scientists have corroborated the observations of Booth and Hunter. In the 1990s, Economist Gordon M. Fisher systematically researched 19th-century efforts in the U.S. and abroad to define poverty and establish a “poverty threshold” or “poverty line” as discussed earlier. Like ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor Introduction
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Section I Methodological Approaches
• Section II Using a New Historical Lens
• Section III Critical Examinations of Special Issues
• Epilogue
• List of Contributors
• Index