I decided to study the history of American higher education shortly after May 1, 1968. Early that morning, over a thousand New York City police officers had cleared the Columbia University campus of demonstrators and the occupants of five university buildings. Upwards of 800 were arrested; perhaps the same number of students, faculty, and police needed medical attention. The next afternoon, the leaders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) gathered on the balcony of the Columbia Law School building, looking at over a thousand demonstrators protesting the police action. The images of the police action initiated by the Columbia administration still haunt me. But so does the triumph of “manipulatory democracy” practiced by SDS members.

The University of Illinois, a land-grant college, opened in 1868 and developed slowly for a quarter of a century. In 1894 the trustees, determined to give the institution greater recognition, appointed Andrew S. Draper as president. Draper had made a reputation in New York State and in Cleveland as a school administrator, but he had never attended a college or university and did not understand the transformation of higher education then taking place in the United States. During his ten-year tenure the University gained the shape of a university by establishing various professional schools, but it lacked the spirit of a university.

Judge Justine Wise Polier

In 1935 Justine Wise Polier (1903–87), an intense young labor lawyer serving on New York City's Committee on Unemployment Relief, was pressuring Mayor Fiorello La Guardia to expand the city's welfare benefits. Thinking he would mollify her, La Guardia promoted Polier to the bench of the city's children's court, making her the first woman to rise above the position of magistrate in New York State.

The headlines “Who's Trying to Ruin Our Schools?” and “Danger's Ahead in the Public Schools” grabbed the attention of the American public during the early 1950s as mainstream publications reacted to efforts by right-wing organizations to influence the curricula of America's elementary and secondary schools. “A bewildering disease that threatens to reach epidemic proportions has infected the public schools of America,” warned John Bainbridge in a two-part series for McCall's in September and October 1952. “The disease does not attack the body but, rather, the mind and the spirit. It produces unreasoning fear and hysteria.” Bainbridge was writing of efforts of some men, women, and their organizations to censor textbooks; to standardize the curriculum; to eliminate teaching about communism, the United Nations and the workings of governments outside of the United States; and to discredit teaching methods used in both public K-12 schools and in the nation's colleges. These activists also sought to ban those who did not subscribe to a specific way of thinking from speaking before students and at educational conferences and gatherings. As a consequence, in the late 1940s and early 1950s a number of American communities were in an uproar over what the country's youth were being taught, and who was doing the teaching.