Keywords

Four years after publishing his now classic The American College and University—and amid a time of increasing unrest on college campuses—Frederick Rudolph (1966) wrote “Neglect of Students as Historical Tradition.” In this essay, he argued that college students had been doubly overlooked. First, since the beginning of American higher education , college students ’ needs and desires went unfulfilled by presidents and faculty members. Students responded to this neglect throughout history by pulling off ingenious pranks, fomenting rebellions, and creating long-lasting—and not always desirable—features of campus life. Second, historians of higher education had focused on presidents, faculty , curricula, and endowments, leaving “students … [to] flow rather aimlessly in and out of our picture of the past” (p. 47). “This picture was both unfair and inaccurate,” Rudolph asserted, “for unquestionably the most creative and imaginative force in the shaping of the American college and university has been the students ” (p. 47).

Rudolph used this essay to call for educators to research college students and their activities, both in the past and in the present, and to develop a more purposeful relationship with students . Such a scholarly focus would tell educators “what is going on, what requires attention, what may or may not happen unless conscious responsible direction is asserted” (pp. 53–54). The alternative would be a continued reactive rather than proactive role for administrators and faculty in responding to students ’ behaviors and activities. Recalling that literary societies predated fraternities and athletics, Rudolph told readers, “if boys insist on playing ball and getting drunk, administrators should remember that even before it occurred to us—they wanted to read books” (p. 55).

Although college students had captured some attention in histories since the nineteenth century, Rudolph’s essay nonetheless captured the prevailing exclusion of college students in contemporary historical research. Of the three eventual classic books on the history of higher education published between 1955 and 1965, only Rudolph’s (1962) meaningfully incorporated students (Hofstader & Metzger, 1955; Rudolph, 1962; Veysey, 1965). In the decade following Rudolph’s call for greater scholarly attention to college students , historians offered a notable increase in books related to earlier generations of college students , though these works were as much a response to the campus unrest of the 1960s and early 1970s as to his essay. These historians often focused on specific populations of college students over short periods of time in which they had rebelled against college officials, participated in activism off campus as part of larger political movements, and captured the nation’s attention. Collectively, these studies provided useful perspective to Americans that the recent discord on campus was not an aberration that signaled a drastic and permanent change in higher education but rather one of its enduring, if itinerant, features. Another decade would pass, however, before a scholar—Helen Horowitz —offered a history that explored college students from diverse backgrounds at a variety of institutions over a long period of time.

In 1987, just 3 years after her detailed history about the formative years of the “Seven Sisters”—elite, northeastern women’s colleges —Helen Horowitz published Campus Life . First offered in hardback by the prestigious and popular publisher Alfred A. Knopf and kept in print in paperback by the University of Chicago Press, Campus Life paid particular attention to how college students ’ gender, race, ethnicity, religion, and socioeconomic status shaped their experiences over time. Synthesizing existing historical research and incorporating many memoirs written by alumni, Horowitz argued that there had been four “distinct ways of being an undergraduate”: (1) college men, (2) outsiders, (3) rebels, and (4) college women (Horowitz, 1987, p. x). Despite the approach of its 30th anniversary, and a steady stream of historical research on college students that followed it, Campus Life continues to be a popular entry point into the history of college students for the interested public and many graduate students , in no small part because of its focus on students with diverse identities over a long period and its accessible prose. Historians writing in the wake of Campus Life have largely eschewed Horowitz’s emphasis on breadth for depth, delving deep into the experiences of specific groups of students over shorter periods.

This chapter explores the historiography of college students in the United States, using Campus Life as a scholarly divider. It begins by surveying the literature that existed prior to Campus Life, stretching back to before the Civil War. After considering Horowitz’s rationale for Campus Life and its contributions, the remainder of the chapter focuses on the historical scholarship published in the subsequent three decades. Though recent historians writing about college students seldom situated their research in relation to Campus Life—that is, how their study confirms, contradicts, or nuances the four categories of college students —they have provided a burgeoning body of knowledge that, similar to Horowitz, has considered how students ’ salient identities have shaped their experiences. The chapter concludes by noting historical studies related to student organizations and student behaviors and suggesting avenues for future research.

In emphasizing breadth and incorporating students from a variety of backgrounds, this chapter cannot claim to engage every relevant publication. Rather, it emphasizes books written primarily about students in higher education . As it moves on to consider student groups traditionally excluded from both higher education and its historiography, the chapter increasingly incorporates articles and chapters. Largely excluded are histories of individual colleges or universities published after the 1950s, biographies that devote significant attention to their subject’s college years (e.g., Caro, 1982; Davis, 1971/2003), and the large literature on college athletics. The burgeoning body of scholarship on students since Campus Life was published is representative of a steady scholarly progression, for even though Rudolph claimed that historians had neglected college students , they had devoted some—if not proportional—attention to college students for nearly a century by the 1960s. Enough attention, as Rudolph well knew, to draw a meaningful analyses of college students and campus life over time.

Early Historiography of College Students

Rudolph (1966) was right to express concern about the inattention provided to understanding college students , given the contemporary prominence of student activism on campus and the fact that recent histories of higher education had largely excluded the experiences of these most numerous members of the academic community. At the same time, publications focused on college students and their history had been around for well over a century by 1966. Several of these would prove to be useful sources for later historians studying college students and campus life in the future.

As early as the 1840s, White men, as either upperclassmen or recent alumni, began publishing books about their alma mater. Geiger and Bubolz (2000) surveyed many of these publications , classifying them as “descriptive accounts … of … everyday curricular and especially extracurricular experiences” (p. 80). Both Belden’s (1843) Sketches of Yale College and Wells and Davis’s (1847) Sketches of Williams College—the latter modeled after the former—opened with a brief history of the institution, a contemporary description, and ended with student -focused chapters, “Day in College” and “College Life” respectively. Mitchell (1847) looked back on his undergraduate days at Yale that transpired a quarter century earlier. He wanted to demonstrate how religious young men could take advantage of a college education without succumbing to vices present on campus. Antebellum alumni would continue to write memoirs and reminiscences of their college years into the twentieth century (e.g., Wall, 1914).

Some works in this genre revealed an especially lively and intimate view of campus life. In 1851, Harvard senior Benjamin Hall (1856) published A Collection of College Words and Customs. The book was mostly a glossary of antebellum vernacular at college, but Hall also included anecdotes “to explain the character of student life, and afford a little amusement to the student himself” (p. iv). Readers learned that students used “sprung” to describe the jovial effects of alcohol: “The positive of which tight is the comparative and drunk the superlative” (p. 291). If Hall’s 319 pages tested readers’ patience, they would be thoroughly exhausted by Lyman Bagg’s (1871) 713–page opus Four Years at Yale. This book provided a quintessential example of the emphasis—or lack thereof—wealthy White men placed on their studies. After a 50-page opening devoted to Yale’s history, Bagg wrote the next 500 pages about campus life. Less than 25 pages focused explicitly on the curriculum , and less than 100 pages on academics in total. Bagg’s account of student life eventually became a popular source among historians hoping to reconstruct the experience at men’s colleges directly after the Civil War (e.g., Horowitz, 1987; Thelin, 2011). Before either Hall or Bagg, two Princeton seniors wrote College As It Is or, the Collegian’s Manual in 1853 (Henry & Scharff, 1853/1996). If not quite as exhaustive as Four Years at Yale, the book’s 18 chapters provided a rich, lively, and more manageable account of the student experience at Princeton, but nearly 150 years passed before the manual was published by Princeton University Libraries. Geiger and Bubolz (2000) noted that the pleasant tone and fond remembrances of these “descriptive accounts” marked a significant change in the relationship between college students and their institutions of higher education . A generation earlier, students had regularly rebelled and rioted on campus.

More official histories of White college men and campus life emerged over time, though many continued to be written by alumni. Several focused on specific features of the extracurriculum while others concentrated on the larger student experience. Cutting (1871) provided a thorough account of the extracurriculum at Amherst College. He focused primarily on the history and current activities of the literary societies, before moving on to other organizations and campus honors. Sheldon (1901) offered a longer history, starting with student life and customs at medieval universities. He divided American higher education into four specific eras , writing about class activities, debating societies, fraternities, athletics, student government, and religious organizations in each era. Three decades later, Shedd (1934) wrote a 200-year history of Christian religious activities on campus. Patton and Field (1927) and Canby (1936) offered broader histories that emphasized the student experience. In Eight O’Clock Chapel, Patton and Field considered New England colleges in the 1880s. While they devoted chapters to the curriculum , especially the elective system and prominent faculty and administrators, the last half of the book focused on students , including their organizations, religious activities, and athletics. Canby, drawing largely on his personal experience as a student and professor at Yale, provided a nostalgic portrait of men’s colleges in the 1890s.

College students also began to be highlighted in institutional histories in the first half of the twentieth century. Samuel Eliot Morison (1935, 1936a) devoted several chapters to students in the volumes he prepared in advance of Harvard’s 300th anniversary, which he synthesized into the lively chapter “Good Old Colony Times” in his more accessible Three Centuries of Harvard (Morison, 1936b). Institutional histories generally relegated student experiences to one or two chapters, but they nonetheless could provide compelling analysis about student life, at least on an individual campus. Wertenbaker (1946) wrote that the relaxing of strict discipline in the 1830s and 1840s at Princeton resulted in improved student -faculty relations. In addition, institutional histories could collectively provide insights into national developments among college students and campus life. In fact, Rudolph (1962) relied heavily on institutional histories, particularly for his chapters about students , including histories of Amherst College (Fuess, 1935), Miami University (Havinghurst, 1958/1984), Ohio University (Hoover, 1954), and the University of Wisconsin (Curti & Carstensen, 1949).

A handful of histories of institutions provided a more holistic historical perspective, bordering on social histories that would emerge in the 1960s and 1970s, written by professional historians. Merton Coulter’s (1928) College Life in the Old South inaugurated this genre. Coulter focused on the University of Georgia because of its extensive archival record, though he believed that “[t]here were no differences in what happened at the University of Georgia” and other southern colleges and universities (p. xii). Chapters covered the discipline system, student life, literary societies, commencement, religious tensions, and student rebellions. A quarter century later, Tankersley (1951) published the similarly named College Life at Old Oglethorpe. Oglethorpe, founded by Presbyterians and in operation from 1838 to 1862 and then mostly defunct until reopening in 1913, was one of several denominational colleges that enrolled a majority of Georgia college men from the 1840s until the Civil War. Just 6 years before publishing The American College and University: A History, Frederick Rudolph (1956) produced a history of his alma mater and employer. In Mark Hopkins and the Log, Rudolph illustrated that college students had been “extraordinarily vital” “in giving shape and purpose to” Williams College in the nineteenth century (pp. vii–viii). Thomas Le Duc’s (1946) Piety and Intellect at Amherst College, was more an intellectual than a social history. Le Duc demonstrated how a college created for religious ends and to train clergy became, over the course of the nineteenth century, devoted to a more scientific curriculum . Students helped facilitate this change, and Le Duc illustrated how athletics, literary societies, and fraternities influenced this evolution.

Historical research about women’s higher education began to emerge in the early twentieth century. Blandin (1909) explored women’s higher education in the South before the Civil War. In contrast to prevailing perceptions, Blandin compared favorably the educational situation in the South to the North. She claimed that southern leaders (men ) established schools for girls before northern leaders did so, leading to a more substantial higher education system in the South for both genders. By the start of the Civil War, Blandin cited evidence that the South, while having less than half as many White residents as the North, had more colleges, more professors, and more students . Southerners opposed coeducation, but “[a]t a very early period schools, seminaries, and institutes—the last two colleges in all but name—were established especially for” White girls and young women (p. 18). Blandin asserted that these institutions offered women a higher education :

The criticism is sometimes made that these schools sink into insignificance when compared with the colleges for women of the present day. The same might be said of the schools for men—the high schools and colleges of the present day are far in advance of any colleges fifty years ago. However, the principal difference between colleges for men and women fifty years ago was a substitution of French for Greek and the addition of music and art to the curriculum of the colleges for women. (p. 18)

In his important two-volume treatise on women’s education published 20 years later, Woody (1929a, 1929b) cited Blandin on education in the South and academies and seminaries, but he did not consider these institutions as offering higher education . Woody based this conclusion largely by comparing the study of Greek and Latin at these institutions to those of contemporaneous men’s colleges. Nonetheless, Woody cited the significance of the academies and seminaries “that rose to prominence and exercised a large influence on women’s education were designed and operated for, and frequently by, women” (Woody, 1929a, p. 329). He admitted that they “offered girls a more liberal education than they had received before” (Woody, 1929b, p. 138). Woody (1929b) also offered chapters about women’s colleges , coeducation, coordinate colleges, and women’s graduate and professional education. From Woody’s perspective, one of the first women’s institutions that provided “education equal in value and leading to a degree equal to men” was Elmira Female College in New York, which awarded its first degrees in 1859.

As the title of Mabel Newcomer’s (1959) book made clear—A Century of Higher Education for American Women—she largely agreed with Woody in terms of dating women’s higher education. Newcomer demonstrated that, over time, the liberal arts remained dominant at women’s colleges , as the institutions—and their students —resisted reforms aimed to give the curriculum an overt vocational or domestic focus. An economist and emerita Vassar professor, Newcomer included rich quantitative data. By the time she published, there were an equal number of separate men’s colleges and women’s colleges , but an overwhelming percentage of all institutions were coeducational (13 % each vs. 74 %). Newcomer found that a majority of graduates who worked outside the home were teachers, and married women were increasingly working for pay. She also pointed to troubling trends during the 1950s: the percentage of women earning graduate degrees had fallen 30 % since the 1920s; during the same period, the proportion of women to men undergraduates had change from almost one-to-one to one-to-two. Despite Newcomer’s analysis, these concerns would remain on the back burner until the women’s movement of the late-1960s and 1970s, when they would become one of several flare-ups on campus that in turned sparked a surge in the scholarship related to the history of college students .

The Post-1960s Boom

Responding more to developments on contemporary campuses than to Rudolph’s (1966) essay, historians paid increasing attention to college students by the late-1960s. As record numbers of young Americans attended college, as many of those students demanded change on campus and in the world, and as two historically underrepresented groups—White women and African Americans—accessed higher education in greater proportions while also engaging in activism, historians offered studies that provided perspective on each of these developments. The result was a boom in scholarship related to the history of college students beginning in the early-1970s that persisted up until the publication of Helen Horowitz ’s (1987) Campus Life

Mass Higher Education

As the children of the GI Bill generation began graduating from high school in the late-1960s, higher education enrollments swelled, both in absolute numbers and the proportion of young people going to college: by 1970, 8.5 million students enrolled in over 2500 institutions and over a million earned bachelor’s degrees each year (Thelin, 2011). As more young people became college students , diversity increased and the campus increasingly became the focus of national attention. Historians during this era captured important markers along America’s rocky and uneven path toward mass higher education .

James Axtell and David Allmendinger explored the earliest form of diversity in American higher education . Limited numbers of White men from poor families had long attended college in North America, though some institutions accommodated these students better over time. Axtell (1974) provided a rich and lively account of the higher education of White colonial college men , especially at Harvard. The main form of diversity at colonial colleges was socioeconomic—often represented by students over the age of 20—and this was meager at best. According to Axtell, “when the college was transplanted to New England, it carried roots that had long fed on inequality” (p. 207). Colonists made some room through scholarships for the most academically talented and determined young men from poorer families. Yet class rankings were determined by a family’s social prominence rather than a student ’s academic performance for most of this era, reflecting the limited social mobility offered by colonial higher education . The role of higher education then “was less to make these young men eligible for membership in the elite than to complete and confirm their qualification, right, and obligation to govern that already existed” (Axtell, 1974, p. 208). These young men received favoritism from their government that would, in some wavering forms, persist over the centuries, including release from military service and tax breaks.

Allmendinger (1975) considered a new group of institutions, New England’s “hilltop colleges,” that developed in the early nineteenth century and better served students from meager backgrounds. With family farms no longer large enough to be split among offspring, many young men faced the choice of moving West to farm and probably never seeing their families again, or entering a profession. To do the latter, they attended college, especially religious young men who aimed to become ministers. Allmendinger documented an increasingly complex, though ultimately failed, private system of financial aid in the antebellum era. It started with pastors and congregations supporting talented but poor local youths and ended with the American Education Society supporting thousands of similar students . Allmendinger also explored how poverty influenced the experiences of young men. They made major sacrifices to attend college, including walking great distances from home to school, working on campus, leaving campus intermittently to teach school, and foraging in nearby orchards and woods to supplement their meager meals. Even though these institutions largely accommodated the needs of low-income youth, this diversity fractured community on campus: wealthier students expected greater amenities, and poorer students demanded flexibility so that they could work and take advantage of the cheapest accommodations for housing and meals.

For higher education to approach mass popularity, it had to be embraced by more than the rich and the poor; it had to become popular among the middle class. Burton Bledstein’s (1976) The Culture of Professionalism connected the development of professional careers, the emergent middle-class identity, the creation of research universities, and the increased popularity of attending college in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. While Bledstein devoted more pages to a cadre of progressive presidents at the nation’s first research universities, he credited students as the first members of the academic community to create a culture that “reflected the attitudes and ambitions of the new middle class” (p. 248). These students shared similar identities to the institutional presidents—White , male, and at influential institutions. And they accomplished this cultural transformation through establishing literary societies, fraternities, athletics, and the YMCA at least a decade before presidents and professors began reforms in response to middle-class expectations.

The embrace of higher education by young Americans captured national attention in the 1920s, as they set new cultural standards in behavior and fashion, which Paula Fass (1977) documented in The Damned and the Beautiful. She focused on those native-born, White , middle- and upper-class students attending elite and major state universities who became increasingly depicted in popular culture. Fass argued that these students were both the products and the creators of social change, helping to establish modern culture in the United States. These young people grew up in families with more attentive and nurturing parents and fewer siblings than earlier generations. At college, this translated into a peer culture that embraced greater freedoms toward drinking among men, smoking among women, and fashion, and sexuality among both. Yet, as the peer culture at college largely eviscerated Victorian ideals, it nonetheless emphasized conformity toward the new values, and a cloud of conservatism hung over campus life. Increasingly in the 1920s, many young men went to college to become businessmen and many women to marry future businessmen.

But mass higher education depended on more than enrollments of wealthy White Protestants. Several historians explored the relationship of Jews and higher education . Both Wechsler (1977) and Synnott (1979) located the development of selective admissions at elite institutions to efforts, at least in part, to exclude or limit the numbers of Jewish students . Gorelick (1981) demonstrated how Jewish students attended and navigated the Protestant-controlled City College of New York to promote their social mobility around the turn of the twentieth century. Oren (1985) centered on a more prestigious institution, exploring anti-Semitism and Jewish students ’ experiences at Yale between the 1870s and 1970s. Evans (1980) illustrated how Catholic leaders and students made higher education more hospitable for their community through the “Newman Movement.” He explored the motivations of “Catholic students , campus officials, and clergymen to supply pastoral care and religious education in non-Catholic colleges and universities” (p. xiv). Although Catholic colleges increased in great numbers after the Civil War, the majority of Catholic students would always be educated in non-Catholic, mostly secular institutions, and Evans showed how developments within the larger society could interact to shape underrepresented students ’ collegiate experiences.

David Levine’s (1986) The American College and the Culture of Aspiration was a strong study of the expansion of higher education in the U.S. Centering on developments between 1915 and 1940, Levine highlighted the creation of features that led to higher education ’s mass appeal: curriculum that increasingly focused on students ’ careers in general and the study of business in particular; establishment of junior and community colleges ; and the ability of higher education to serve the nation in times of war and economic crisis. Importantly, Levine acknowledged a hypocrisy that coincided with mass higher education : American leaders, both on campus and off, touted the democratic ideals of higher education —that it was available to all and promoted the success of all—but there was actually little democratic about it. According to Levine, “The American college of the 1920s and 1930s promised young people a chance to pursue the American dream, but it was a dream first and foremost, though not exclusively, for the male children of those who already enjoyed its economic and social benefits” (p. 114). America was on the cusp of mass higher education when Levine ended his book, but it was far from offering equal experiences to the masses.

By the mid-1980s, historians had documented how earlier generations of low-income students have afforded college, the middle class had come to embrace higher education , affluent college students had influenced the larger culture, aspirational immigrant populations had experienced higher education , and higher education continuously rewarded the advantaged. But if diversification and growth helped to transfix Americans on higher education in the 1960s and 1970s, they may not have been the most important reasons. That likely belonged to the activism and unrest on many campuses.

Activism and Unrest

For many Americans by the late 1960s, the activism and unrest on college campuses—which ranged from lawsuits to strikes as students demanded change both at their institutions and in the larger society—seemed a historical aberration. Americans worried that higher education was forever changed. Yet historians soon highlighted earlier eras when campus unrest and activism were prominent. They concentrated on two periods—the turn of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth—to explore how earlier generations of students responded to times of social unrest. A main difference between the two eras was the focus of student activists: the earlier generation, while influenced by larger social forces, focused primarily on internal, institutional change ; the later generation focused on external, societal change.

Several historians, including those who explored socioeconomic diversity at the nation’s oldest institutions, revealed the preponderance of student unrest around the American Revolution. “Although many were legal adults”—over the age of eighteen—colonial “college students were always regarded as children” (Axtell, 1974, p. 230). In fact, in the colonial period, White college men represented society’s only adolescents, and faculty members treated them as children, subject to strict discipline codes. Their non-college-going peers enjoyed the rights and obligations of adulthood long before college students , even though the latter were expected—and expecting to—quite literally rule over them in the future. This created friction between students and college leaders, especially as the rhetoric of democracy and liberty heated up in the years before the Revolution. Harvard students sued faculty and petitioned the governing board to stop corporal punishments (Axtell, 1974, pp. 235–236). Though the college was usually victorious in court, negative publicity and costly defenses led Harvard to gradually eliminate the practice. With no formal influence over the institution, colonial college students responded by petitioning for redress, riots, attacking faculty , and threatening to kill presidents. Parents, too, complained when college leaders fined their children in amounts that hurt family finances. By the end of the colonial period, institutions treated students more like adults. For many Americans reading School Upon a Hill in the mid-1970s, college students making demands for institutional change —through the courts, riots, and public opinion—not to mention many parents siding with their children instead of educators—were familiar if frustrating features of higher education .

Allmendinger (1975) explored activism and disorder in the decades after the American Revolution. Older, poorer students were more likely to support the era’s major social reforms, temperance and abolition. Since some southerners attended these institutions, and wealthier students often enjoyed drinking, this activism “brought conflict to the college” (p. 102). As the college community fractured between poorer and richer students , and as students increasingly dispersed into town, instances of theft, assault, general disturbances, and sexual activity increased. Many of these campuses also experienced intermittent rebellions from 1760 to 1860. Though Allmendinger attributed these rebellions largely to changes brought by poorer students , little evidence suggested that these students , anxious as they were to use their education to improve career prospects, were the main antagonists against college authorities. The fact that authorities used religious revivals and parental involvement to stem the tide of disorder would largely seem to exonerate older, religious students .

Steven Novak’s (1977) Rights of Youth more convincingly placed the blame for the era’s campus revolts on younger, wealthy students . Novak studied student revolts between 1798 and 1815. By including conflicts at the University of North Carolina, University of Virginia, and William and Mary alongside those at Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth and Yale, Novak provided national consideration of the era’s activism. If, as Axtell (1974) suggested, colonial college students increasingly resisted strict rules as ideas about liberty and democracy circulated through society, then young White men who attended college after independence expressed greater frustration toward dictatorial tendencies of faculty and presidents. To Novak, these “Sons of the Founders” who, having lost out on a chance to fight for their nation’s independence against an unrepresentative government, took up the cause of fighting an unrepresentative faculty . To stem these revolts, college leaders created blacklists of student agitators that prevented them from enrolling elsewhere, tightened discipline, stifled curriculum reforms, and, as Allmendinger (1975) acknowledged, embraced religious revivals. Novak showed that students could create profound institutional change , though not always in the direction in which they agitated.

If the revolts described by Axtell (1974), Allmendinger (1975), and Novak (1977) highlighted adverse interaction of politics and higher education , other scholars illustrated more positive possibilities of this mixture. Robson (1985) argued that politicization of the colonial colleges from 1750 to 1800 provided intellectual justification to support American independence. Faculty members first developed a political consciousness open to independence. In turn, they developed “a curriculum designed for preparation for state service,” which led many colonial college students to embrace arguments for republican government (p. 58). These young men used debating societies and public speaking to test their own arguments about political issues. By the 1770s, students were increasingly militant about independence. After the Revolution, James McLachlan (1974) illustrated that young White antebellum college men designed literary societies to engage the pressing issues of the day and prepare for life after college.

While one group of historians after the 1960s uncovered the unrest and activism among college students during the nation’s founding, another focused on a more recent era with closer similarities to contemporary issues. Horn (1979) offered a history of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society (ISS) from the group’s founding in 1905 until its transformation in 1921 as “the first nationally organized student group that had a distinct political and ideological orientation” and the organizational antecedent of a prominent college activist groups of the 1960s (p. xii). The more than 100 ISS chapters faced obstacles from campus administrators opposed to explorations of socialism, yet ISS encouraged intellectual curiosity during a time when many students were uninterested in the classroom. ISS members planned vigorous debates, invited controversial speakers, advocated for academic freedom, and explored contemporary social issues through the curriculum . The socialist movement in the U.S. splintered in the wake of World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and the more conservative political climate of the 1920s. ISS itself transformed into the Student League for Industrial Democracy, a name it held until 1959 when it became Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The main difference between ISS and SDS, from Horn’s perspective, was that the earlier group embraced democracy, believing that socialism could only be successful if brought about by popular means, whereas when the latter “adopted the tactics of confrontation, it broke apart and ended in anarchy and random violence” (p. 191).

Any agitation organized by ISS in the 1900s and 1910s paled in comparison to that of the student activism of the 1930s, the decade in American history that, as two historians demonstrated, most resembled the tumultuous 1960s. Both Ralph Brax (1981) and Eileen Eagan (1981) explored student activism during the Great Depression, which represented the first national “movement” among college students . Despite the economically troubled times, most 1930s student activists focused on international political issues, especially the peace movement. Brax identified an important source of activism, the liberalization of college students ’ attitudes in the late-1920s and early-1930s. Activist leaders garnered increased support among average students by advocating for world peace, vilifying fraternities and ROTC, and planning anti-war strikes. The movement reached its pinnacle when somewhere between 350,000 and 500,000 students —30–50 % of the total college population—participated in the 1936 strike. Thousands of students signed the Oxford Pledge, an oath of refusal to serve in any future wars. From this peak, the student movement was stymied by internal strife and the nation’s involvement in World War II. Neither Brax nor Eagan provided a definitive account of student activism in the 1930s, but they nonetheless documented a time—not too far from the 1960s—when college students interrupted the operation of their institutions to advocate for social change. These scholars largely left unexplored how students ’ identities influenced their activism; other historians, however, paid increasing attention to two groups of college students —White women and African Americans—who represented important populations within mass higher education and previous campus activism.

White Women

As women in the 1960s and 1970s argued for parity with men in terms of career opportunities, family responsibilities, and sexual freedom, historians began to document the longstanding nature of their inequities on campus, both at coeducational universities and women’s colleges . In particular, scholars explored the tension between the prevailing social importance placed on domesticity and higher education . Concentrating their attention on two coeducational research universities and northeastern women’s colleges from the end of the Civil War into the early-twentieth century, these scholars focused on White women, who represented the majority of female enrollments at these institutions.

McGuigan (1970) and Conable (1977) explored women’s experiences at two of the country’s oldest and most prestigious coeducational institutions, the University of Michigan and Cornell University respectively, which opened their doors to women in the 1870s. While both authors briefly provided some consideration of women students ’ later experiences, they focused on the first five decades of coeducation. McGuigan detailed the many arguments women endured against their higher education . First, women were supposedly not smart enough for college. When the earliest women at Michigan proved that wrong in the classroom, the second argument—spread by the misogyny couched as medical expertise of Dr. Edward Clarke’s (1874) Sex in Education—maintained that higher education taxed women’s bodies, especially their reproductive system. Higher education leaders demonstrated that women students and graduates in fact were healthier than their less-educated contemporaries. The harder argument to refute was that higher education “damaged the breeding function of American women,” for alumnae did marry later and had fewer children in an era when the large size of immigrant families caused anxiety among social leaders (McGuigan, 1970, p. 101). Coeducation continued to be controversial in large part because of women’s success at college, with 53 % of bachelor of arts degrees awarded to women in 1899 at the University of Michigan. McGuigan focused on Michigan while touching on other campuses, referencing efforts to segregate men and women into separate classes and admission quotas on women at the turn of the twentieth century.

Similar events occurred at Cornell. In the first decade of coeducation, women experienced little discrimination (Conable, 1977). But as their numbers grew, alongside the concerns of parents as to their daughters’ safety and honor at college, university leaders erected an impressive residence hall, Sage College, in which “Cornell women were sheltered in splendor” for decades (p. 82). By the early twentieth century, Cornell restricted the admission of women. Even by 1925 the newly constructed student union had a front entrance for men and a side entrance for women.

Such experiments with coeducation were only partially adopted. After 1870, most new public institutions in the Midwest and West opened as coeducational (McGuigan, 1970). But for men’s institutions in the East, few followed the examples of Cornell and Michigan. After several women’s coordinate colleges were established alongside prestigious men’s institutions, including Radcliffe (Harvard) in 1882, Barnard (Columbia) in 1889, and Pembroke (Brown) in 1891, eastern men’s institutions—the most prestigious in the country—remained single-sex until the 1950s (McGuigan, 1970).

Other historians focused on the experiences of students at women’s colleges . Frankfort (1977) offered an interesting, though at times too simplistic, history of how the early women presidents of Wellesley and Bryn Mawr influenced the lives and careers of alumnae. Wellesley president Alice Freeman’s resignation to marry a Harvard professor, Frankfort suggested, reflected the tendency of Wellesley alumnae to embrace a domestic role and remain outside the paid labor force. In contrast, at Bryn Mawr, which was led by scholarly and career -minded M. Carey Thomas for nearly 30 years, over 60 % of alumnae earned graduate degrees and less than 50 % married—compared to almost 90 % of women among the larger populace—between 1889 and 1908.

Helen Horowitz ’s (1984) Alma Mater provided a broader and more sophisticated history of all the “Seven Sisters” women’s colleges —Mount Holyoke, Vassar, Smith, Radcliffe, and Barnard, in addition to Wellesley and Bryn Mawr—plus Sarah Lawrence, Bennington, and Scripps, three elite women’s colleges established in the early twentieth century. Horowitz illustrated how the architectural designs of these institutions, usually planned by male leaders, addressed domesticity-related concerns about college women. These plans ranged from the large, self-contained, almost convent-like original buildings of Mount Holyoke, Vassar, and Wellesley, which were designed to protect women students from potentially nefarious influences, to the cottage-like living at Smith, designed to “keep” women students “symbolically at home” (Horowitz, 1984, p. 75).

The historical scholarship about women’s higher education in response to Second Wave feminism crested in 1985 with the publication of Barbara Miller Solomon’s In the Company of Educated Women. Solomon offered the first synthesis of women’s higher education since Newcomer (1959). In comparison to both Newcomer and subsequent historians, Solomon offered a more comprehensive consideration, exploring a longer amount of time, a greater variety of institutions, and emphasizing diversity among students . Building in part off the work of Blandin (1909), Solomon acknowledged the importance of antebellum academies and seminaries in women’s higher education , long before the opening of coeducational universities and women’s colleges . While White , Protestant, middle- and upper-class women received most of her attention, Solomon, more so than any other historian of women’s higher education of her era, worked to incorporate the experiences of low-income, Catholic, Jewish, and African American students , a diversity that subsequent generations of historians would explore in coming decades.

All of these authors explored the relationship between women’s higher education and their subsequent careers. Collectively, they demonstrated that alumnae’s post-college opportunities constricted over time as hostility to women’s higher education persisted and more women who embraced traditional roles attended college. The earliest women’s college founders considered a primary purpose of their institutions the preparation for careers, especially teaching , of women from modest backgrounds (Horowitz, 1984). The first women at coeducational institutions also viewed higher education as a vehicle for economic prosperity. For example, before 1900 the most popular post-graduation plans for Michigan alumnae were teaching and medicine and many graduates regularly found employment as faculty at women’s colleges (McGuigan, 1970).

But the early success of alumnae using higher education to prepare for careers in traditionally male fields did not persist. The percent of women earning medical degrees at Michigan fell from 25 % in 1890 to under 5 % in 1910 (McGuigan, 1970). By 1908, Bryn Mawr alumnae became increasingly similar to Wellesley’s, more likely to marry and less likely to pursue careers or graduate school (Frankfort, 1977). The percentage of women faculty members remained remarkably stable from 1920 to 1980, hovering around 25 % (Solomon, 1985). Partially, this was a result of higher education becoming popular among women who did not desire paid employment . “By the 1890s,” Horowitz (1984) wrote, “the women’s colleges attracted a new clientele—young, well-educated women of the wealthy strata who had no thought of a career after college” (p. 147). Partially, this was as a result of the rise of new, “feminine” fields. By applying the social and natural sciences to issues with domestic overtones, the emerging fields of social work and home economics provided women with socially acceptable career opportunities and faculty positions within coeducational universities (Conable, 1977; McGuigan, 1970). However, this approach simultaneously “served the purposes of academic men” who wanted to segregate women from men in the classroom (Frankfort, 1977, p. xvii). Ironically, then, as higher education became more popular among women, they used it less often to pursue careers and, when they did, they were increasingly less likely to work in traditionally male-dominated careers such as medicine and law.

Foreshadowing Campus Life , Horowitz (1984) provided the most attention to campus life of women students . White women at elite women’s colleges never enjoyed the same freedoms and frivolity as did their contemporaries at the nation’s most elite men’s colleges, but, starting from a disadvantaged position, they worked hard to catch up. Vassar was the first women’s college to have a robust campus life, including literary societies and campus pranks modeled after men’s. By the turn of the twentieth century, athletics, theater, spreads and teas, and all-female dances competed with academics for undergraduates’ attention. The handfuls of Catholic, Jewish, or African American students were almost always excluded from campus life, whereas well-off White women transformed existing egalitarian literary societies and other clubs into “socially exclusive sororities in all but name” (p. 152). These same students spent most of the 1920s fighting ultimately successful battles with campus authorities to relax rules about smoking and dating men.

Women’s college students ’ new interest in men frustrated campus authorities in the 1920s, but what had long proved troubling was their interest in each other. Both Horowitz (1984) and Sahli (1979) examined “smashing”—intense, romantic relationships—among White women students . On campus, this often translated into pairing a newer student with an older student . College officials might reassign rooms in order to squelch the feelings of two students living together or near one another. As the nineteenth century came to a close, and as independent women threatened the patriarchal structure of American society, the vilification of intense same-sex relationships became another means of social control over women (Sahli, 1979). That women students largely abandoned their romantic relationships with each other relieved leaders at women’s colleges ; that they replaced them with an increased sexuality toward men did not.

Spurred on in no small part by the Second Wave women’s movement itself, historians provided perspective on both the concerns and behavior of women student activists. Most significantly, they uncovered higher education ’s bifurcated contribution to the social status of women: advancing economic success and perpetuating sexism. Earning college degrees had improved women’s career prospects, though the accomplishments of the first generation of college women largely dissipated as subsequent generations married or entered more stereotypically feminine fields. By the 1960s and 1970s, women from middle- and upper-class backgrounds were far better represented in the paid labor force than when coeducational and women’s institutions opened a century earlier. However, they remained unpaid for their domestic responsibilities, underrepresented in comparison to men in the workforce , funneled into lower paid positions, and woefully absent in the most influential business, professional, and political positions. To some extent this reflected women’s desires and goals; to a significant extent this reflected prevailing sexism within society; and to a great but hard to measure extent this reflected a combination of the two. And while wealthy white women students ’ activism for the freedom to date men and smoke did lessen gender discrimination in higher education , there was another group of college students waging more significant struggles against power structures on campus and off.

African American Activists

African American students ’ involvement in the civil rights movement provided the foundation of the activism and unrest related to a variety of causes on college campuses throughout the 1960s and early-1970s. The scholarship of two historians illustrated that African American student activism stretched back decades while also documenting their involvement in the tumultuous 1960s.

Raymond Wolters’ (1975) The New Negro on Campus reminded readers that African American activism was not novel to the 1960s and early-1970s by tracing it on college campuses in the 1920s. Then, African American students protested against all-White boards of trustees, White presidents of Black institutions, vocational curricula, the absence of Black studies, mandatory military exercises, and draconian discipline codes. Wolters told this story through case studies, mostly through chapters focused on a single representative campus: Black liberal arts colleges, Black land grant universities, Black vocational institutions, predominately White institutions in the North, and the nation’s only Black research institution, Howard University. Nearly every campus that African American students attended was coeducational, and while both women and men participated in activism, the public leaders appear to have been men.

The New Negro on Campus was an engaging and well-researched narrative history with little analysis in the body of the text. Wolters reserved interpretation mainly for the Introduction where, after sketching the development of Black higher education up to the 1920s, he illustrated W.E.B. DuBois’s influence on Black college activism in that decade, and to his Conclusion where he compared African American student activists over time. “The thrust of the black college rebellions of the 1920s was chiefly integrationist,” Wolters wrote. “The dissident students and alumni of that time wanted to escape from the backwaters of American life and join the mainstream” (Wolters, 1975, p. 341). Wolters connected this approach to that of African American student activists in the Civil Rights Era, finding that “most black college protests of the late 1960s and 1970s [that] had a decidedly separatist thrust.” This separatism was “based on the belief that blacks could not make real progress until they renounced their cultural and psychological allegiance to middle-class Euro-American values and developed a unique national consciousness” (p. 344).

But Wolters’ narrative suggested more complexity than his neat conclusion implied. To the extent that Black students in the 1920s demanded a liberal arts (as opposed to vocational) curriculum , the right to join fraternities and sororities, and less strict discipline and dress codes, they were claiming features of higher education readily available to the era’s middle- and upper-class White students . If this suggested a desire for integration, the same students often worked to replace White presidents with Black ones and create Black studies, which did not. If Wolters had spread his analysis throughout the book, his integrationist argument might have become clearer, or a more nuanced interpretation might have emerged. At the same time, as someone who would go on to articulate troubling racial views in future books (e.g., O’Brien, 2010; Wolters, 2008)—and such views can be read into this critique of the Black Power activists—Wolters’ narrative approach in the main chapters helped the book maintain a usefulness that might not have endured if he had forced his analysis in the case studies.

While Wolters recovered early Black student activism , Carson (1981) explored a more recent incarnation in a history of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Carson was especially attuned to “the evolution of SNCC’s radicalism” through three distinct phases (p. 2). In the first, civil rights activists used SNCC to create a sense of community among those pursing racial justice. Southern Black college students established SNCC in April 1960 to expand upon the momentum of their successful sit-ins at segregated lunch counters. SNCC’s interests expanded from desegregation to larger political rights, most notably helping to coordinate the Freedom Rides, in which northern White students and southern Black students traveled through the South to challenge segregation. Black activists welcomed White involvement in SNCC during this first phase.

SNCC’s failure to replace the all-White delegation from Mississippi to the Democratic National Committee in August 1964 started the organization’s second phase. This was the most introspective phase, as SNCC leaders questioned whether working alongside White liberals and the federal government could result in the significant social changes they desired. Yet during this stage, SNCC helped train college student activists—often White liberals—for other activist movements, including those involved in the Free Speech Movement, Vietnam War protests, and Second Wave feminism. At the same time, Black members increasingly viewed White SNCC members with circumspection.

The third stage began in May 1966, with the election of Stokely Carmichael as SNCC chairman. Carmichael articulated and helped popularize Black Power ideology—the separatist thrust that Wolters (1975) criticized—though this approach failed to unify Black Americans. Internal strife and external racism took a toll on the organization, which was largely moribund by 1968. Similar to the 1920s activism, women were members of SNCC but rarely held leadership positions; many considered SNCC to be rife with sexism. Yet from 1960 to 1968, SNCC had accomplished much. Adding SNCC to the larger history of Black activism of the 1960s, Carson argued, adjusted the perception of the period from one of leader-centered efforts, most notably by Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcom X, to “a mass movement” that demonstrated “people without resources and specialized skills can play decisive roles in bringing about social change” (p. 4).

By the mid-1980s, then, historians had created a well-developed body of knowledge regarding how college students had garnered national attention, rioted, and participated in larger social movements in earlier eras. Indeed, books devoted to the history of college students and their extracurriculum multiplied several fold over the course of a few short years. Higher education leaders committed to learning the history of student unrest and activism could have used the lessons from history to inform their interactions with contemporary students . They could have seen that students had long wanted to be treated as adults—even if they did not always act like them; that students had long been good barometers of social change—they represented, after all, the attitudes of the most influential Americans of the future; and that while presidents and faculty members had long squelched campus skirmishes by punishing the most rebellious collegians, students had won nearly every war, if for no other reason that they could influence institutional policies by voting with their feet and tuition dollars. Yet by the time this body of scholarship had developed, the prevailing attitudes and actions of college students underwent a near complete reversal. College students were no longer challenging the established order of American society. They were trying to succeed within it. And Helen Horowitz was not necessarily happy about this change.

Helen Horowitz ’s Campus Life

Three years after the publication of Alma Mater, Helen Horowitz (1987) published Campus Life , which provided a longer and broader history of college students and their experiences on campus. Horowitz was not just addressing missing pieces in a larger historiographical puzzle, but trying to better understand the present, asking “How did we get where we are now?” (p. ix). In particular, Horowitz wanted to figure out the source of attitudes and actions of contemporary students that she found troubling, telling readers that “about three years ago I got angry, angry enough to write this book” (p. xi). From her perspective, students were not having fun at college, not exploring the larger purpose of life, and not engaging with ideas. Instead, they were working obsessively in career -oriented majors or earning grades high enough to assure acceptance into prestigious law and medical schools. For Horowitz, a historian, understanding the present lay in understanding the past.

Horowitz’s perspective was informed by her own history in higher education , which she outlined in her book. Upon entering Wellesley in 1959, she was “initially attracted by college life,” or the organized extracurriculum (p. x). But while in college she “was pulled in another direction by a growing interest in the life of the mind and the questions rebellious contemporaries were raising about personal goals, discrimination, and foreign policy ” (p. x). As the 1960s wore on and she completed a doctorate and started her faculty career , Horowitz became “troubled both by the policies which evoked protest and by the protests themselves” (p. x). In the mid-1980s, shifting her focus to a systematic study of college life over time, she realized “that the past has shaped the present … in the sharper, more direct sense that some students in the past created undergraduate subcultures that have been passed down to successive generations and that continue to shape how students work and play in college” (p. x).

Horowitz identified four distinct and enduring ways—or categories—of being an undergraduate: college men, outsiders, rebels, and college women. An additional hybrid category emerged in the 1970s. These subcultures represented “ideal types” of students and not necessarily any one student , who might have attributes across categories over the course of their college career (p. xiii).

According to Horowitz, the undergraduate cultures influencing the 1980s first developed nearly two centuries earlier, around 1800. Horowitz’s first category—college men—emerged in the wake of campus revolts that followed the Revolution. When college faculty squelched every rebellion, the most advantaged students —white, Protestant men from wealthy families—who led these revolts, moved underground. These students often “saw themselves at war against their faculty and their fellow students ,” at least with the studious ones who sided with campus elders. College men’s main weapon was the fraternity. Secretive and selective, fraternities facilitated friendships and the circumvention of campus rules, including their own prohibition. Fraternities replaced the egalitarian and intellectual literary societies as the dominant feature of the extracurriculum by the 1850s. Thus, by refusing the freedoms and respect demanded through student revolts, college authorities helped to create an often undesirable feature of campus life that proved almost impossible to eliminate. College men embraced violent forms of masculinity, leading in part to football, and they pursued drinking, card playing, and profanity. They disparaged hard work on academics, endorsed cheating, and had “no interest in getting to know the faculty in or outside of class” (p. 34). And, as coeducation took hold on many campuses after the Civil War, college men ignored women students and ostracized them from campus life, finding marriage partners after graduation and seldom from the ranks of college alumnae.

College men believed that dominating campus life prepared them to conquer the real world after graduation. Instead of celebrating classroom accomplishments, college men “rewarded leadership won in the competitive trials of undergraduate life,” so they established a plethora of teams, publications , and societies to give themselves plenty of opportunities to win. That they somewhat rigged the system with a high proportion of opportunities said much about campus life (p. 39). College men perceived campus life to be emblematic of the larger democracy in which they lived. To a certain extent they were right. The extracurriculum provided a mostly even playing field for those who could afford it, but rarely could even a majority of students on a given campus afford to play.

Those left out of this “democracy”—college men’s first antagonists and Horowitz’s second category—were the outsiders. Although outsiders could comprise a majority of students at a given institution, Horowitz chose this label “because they stood outside the select circle of college men,” both within and across institutions (p. 62). The first outsiders were those economically humble and religiously devout White Protestant men who flocked to New England colleges in the first half of the nineteenth century. They emulated the faculty , in large part because they wanted to become them, at least as ministers and perhaps as professors. College men had nothing but disdain for these students , viewing them as younger offshoots of their nemesis, the faculty . College men often anticipated careers in business—they were more likely to have family businesses to run, after all—and viewed the curriculum secondary to the personal contacts and social skills provided through the extracurriculum. In contrast, outsiders used the curriculum to prepare for “professions that offered to aspiring young men with little capital the chance for upward mobility: law, medicine, dentistry, engineering, education, and journalism” (p. 62). New types of institutions with more varied curricular offerings increased the usefulness of college to diverse populations throughout the nineteenth century. Land grant colleges, military academies, polytechnic institutions, research universities, and the elective system all resulted in a curriculum more explicitly tied to specific career paths than the classical liberal arts.

As time went on and other groups accessed higher education , more than social class could create an outsider. College men immediately rejected the first women students , automatically making them outsiders. Jewish students were tolerated in small numbers, but they faced severe ostracism on campus once they became a sizable population. The first substantial group of Catholic students were outsiders clustered in less than 100 Catholic colleges. They experienced close “religious and ethnic ties between faculty and students and the mission to train future clergy intensified student seriousness” (p. 59). Outsiders were comprised of diverse subgroups, but they all shared an emphasis on study as the path for social mobility.

Horowitz’s third category—rebels—emerged in the early twentieth century. Unlike college men, who were only focused on the internal dynamics of campus, rebels were interested in the political and economic world beyond the college yard; unlike outsiders, who used the curriculum for career advancement, rebels were interested in the larger ideas presented in their classes rather than their potential for material gain. Rebel men often had the financial means to be college men, but either their identities, especially being Jewish, or their attitudes precluded their inclusion. Instead, they wrestled with college men for control of campus political offices and publications, wanting to use these avenues to advocate on campus for views percolating in the larger society. Moreover, the rebel as a way of being an undergraduate was open to both men and women, largely on equal footing. Ironically, rebels “rejected parental ways” at the same time as they were raised by “the most sensitive, child-conscious … middle class” parents (pp. 94–95).

Given the presence of three types of male students on campus at the turn of the twentieth century—college men who eschewed study, so confident were they in their future economic security; outsiders who strived in the classroom, so focused were they on their future economic security; and rebels who wanted to use the curriculum to improve campus and community, so uninterested were they in future economic security—higher education leaders decided to devote their attention to college men. A variety of educational reforms at some of the nation’s most prestigious institutions ensued, including the establishment of the elective system. On the whole, these efforts did little to create more studious college men, but did result in admissions policies that discriminated against Jewish students , the development of the student affairs field to supervise campus life, and the “full acceptance of the Greek system” (pp. 111, 119). College presidents and faculty members found athletics a useful channel for student enthusiasm—far better than revolts and riots—and for producing generous alumni.

The last of Horowitz’s categories was closely related to the first: college women. Horowitz classified most early women students as outsiders—studious, career -oriented—or occasionally as rebels. But, as higher education became more popular among affluent women by the early twentieth century, the pleasures and pastimes they experienced on campus came to closely mirror those of college men. A robust extracurriculum developed first at elite women’s colleges where “undergraduates played aggressive team sports, organized meetings, politicked among classmates, handled budgets, solicited advertisements” (Horowitz, 1987, p. 197). At coeducational institutions, as college men increasingly became romantically and sexually interested in the most advantaged women students —in terms of looks, race, and wealth—they acquiesced and included them in campus life, though not on equal footing. Just as college men used fraternities to facilitate their involvement in campus life, college women relied upon sororities. By the 1920s, college women enjoyed relaxed fashions, hairstyles, campus rules, and notions of sexual decorum, though this did not rise to approval of intercourse. But college women’s acceptance into campus life came at a cost. For even as Victorian-era notions of decorum fell, young women still faced heightened scrutiny over their behavior in relation to young men. In order to safeguard their newfound freedom, Horowitz found college women became “far more prejudiced than any other group on campus” by the 1920s, and sorority members faced “considerable pressure … to choose conservatively and to conform” well into the mid-twentieth century (pp. 204, 211).

The earlier three ways of being an undergraduate continued to develop as college women emerged on campus. The “most dramatic transformation” on campus in the early twentieth century was college men’s romantic and sexual interest in the most socially desirable college women students (p. 123). Fraternity and sorority members dated and drank more than other students . In the 1920s and 1930s, somewhere around 30 % of students belonged to fraternities and sororities, a close approximation of the proportion of college men and women on campus, though their control of campus life belied their technical status as a minority. They were more likely to report “having a ‘very good’ time” at college, even as they “put small stock in academic work” (pp. 138, 140). By the late 1950s, even college men began to realize that good grades correlated to post-college success , but “the old pressure not to be a ‘grind’ remained part of the canon of the college man” (p. 142).

The group of college students most prone to study had a brief flash of dominance over campus culture at mid-century. The most prominent outsiders of all were the veterans who returned home from World War II and took advantage of the GI Bill in the late 1940s. Their interest in college was not related to hazing, attending football games, and joining fraternities, but rather “for the vocational and academic rewards” (p. 185). Like all outsiders, veterans were good students intent on career success . But outsiders overall did not recede into the background after the veterans graduated. By the 1950s, many college students were “openly responding to higher education ’s insistence that it had a critical connection to future success ” (p. 187). In fact, higher grades in college did correlate to higher earnings in careers attractive to outsiders, notably law, medicine, and government. High marks did not correlate with high pay in business, the college man’s career of choice. This contributed to a college environment, especially at the largest public universities, in which “an intense grade consciousness was emerging” by 1960 (p. 191).

College rebels became more prominent on campus—though never a majority of students —as the twentieth century progressed. Their growing ranks gave them the courage—and sometimes the success —to challenge college men for control of student government and the campus newspaper. While some rebels contemplated alternatives to capitalism through the Intercollegiate Socialist Society in the 1920s, their numbers reached an apex in the 1930s when many outsiders joined rebels in the student peace movement. The irony of the 1930s was that as the proportion of outsiders grew because fewer students could afford the costs of campus life, and these outsiders increasingly aligned with rebels, rebels focused on foreign policy rather than the domestic economy.

The 1930s peace movement proved rather unpersuasive in the face of Japanese and German aggression and fascism. Many who had signed the Oxford Pledge joined the armed forces, and rebels largely receded into the campus background in the 1940s and 1950s. Yet, however staid campuses seemed in the 1950s, there remained rebels, sometimes behind the editor’s desk of the student newspaper, who rallied against higher education ’s close ties to industry or the racism that plagued the country.

The political-oriented rebel was not the only renegade on campus. A decade before the rebels ranks increased in the 1930s, another form of rebel materialized. Rather than politically motivated, they artistically and aesthetically challenged the prevailing social order. By the late 1950s, folk singers and Beat writers—themselves having emerged earlier in the decade as Columbia and Barnard students —influenced a growing segment of students to experiment with music and literature, as well as with drugs and sex. In fact, women rebels had long been the only female students open to sexual freedom, rejecting the social prohibition against intercourse before marriage and even attachment to sexual partners. Thus, contrary to what the larger public perceived as conformity on campus in the 1950s, beneath the surface percolated the possibilities of political and personal revolutions that rose to prominence in the next decade.

To Horowitz, the 1960s were formative in the establishment of contemporary undergraduate culture, years in which traditional college life proved especially unattractive. Differing coalitions of college students took up various causes—beginning with civil rights and eventually incorporating free speech, anti-war, and feminism—sometimes coordinated through national organizations such as the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), to create a larger entity referred to as “the Movement” (p. 229). Many college students were so incensed by U.S. policy at the height of the Vietnam War that nearly half of all campuses had a major anti-war demonstration. What distinguished the 1960s from its closet corollary—the peace activism of the 1930s—was that swelling rebel ranks in the 1960s included many students who might otherwise have become college men and women, rather than the outsiders who aligned with rebels in the 1930s. Over the course of the decade, college student radicals replaced their optimism for creating a better society with anger at the lack of social change. The unrest of the 1960s culminated in May 1970 when National Guard troops and law enforcement officers shot and killed unarmed student protesters at Kent State University and Jackson State University.

In the aftermath of these shootings, many colleges ended their terms early; although the students who returned the following fall were accustomed to a level of activism unconceivable a decade earlier, life on campus seemed forever changed. Having failed to transform American society, politics , or economy in the 1960s, college students largely decided to focus on succeeding within the existing system. Outsiders “triumphed in the 1970s,” Horowitz explained, not only as a majority—which they had long been—but also by dominating the culture on campus—which they had rarely done (p. 245). As America approached mass higher education , most of the new students —especially those who were the first in their families to attend college—came from lower income, minority backgrounds that had long populated outsider ranks. In fact, by the 1970s nearly as many college students lived with their parents or other family members as lived on campus. In addition, many women students “read feminism’s message as a call to enter the traditional professions,” which first required classroom success (p. 253). But probably what most contributed to the dominance of outsiders in the 1970s was the addition of affluent students . Whereas in the 1930s the ranks of outsiders had grown because fewer students could afford the trappings of college life, in the 1970s students from affluent backgrounds became outsiders in an effort to shore up their future economic security.

Horowitz labeled these affluent students at elite institutions as “new outsiders.” In them she found the main source of her frustration with contemporary college students . The swollen ranks of the new outsiders coupled with their influence on the overall campus culture meant that 1970s and 1980s college students , for the first time in history, “were more alike … than different” (p. 264). New outsiders obsessed over grades as the route into professional schools and subsequent career success , but they lacked “the sparks of intellectual life that were the saving grace of many earlier outsiders” (p. 268). From Horowitz’s perspective, these students unfortunately “seemed distinctively selfish,” who “unhesitatingly expressed their overriding interest in their own careers and the desire to make money” (p. 251). From interviews with contemporary students , Horowitz reported their concerns about money, downward social mobility, and a strong dependence—both financially and psychologically—on their parents. This attachment helped Horowitz see value in the past world of college men and women: “As limiting as it was, traditional college life did create a time and place away from home where young men and women could try to define themselves” (p. 271).

It is difficult to assess the validity of Horowitz’s description of and despair toward the new outsiders—the 1980s when she wrote are only now far enough in the past to benefit from historical study—but her enduring categories in Campus Life seem more compelling than her criticism of contemporary college students . First, these students lived within a challenging economic era in which a college degree no longer guaranteed success . Even at Princeton, nearly half of graduates looking for work remained unemployed 6 months after commencement in the early 1980s. At the beginning of Campus Life Horowitz asserted that earlier “generations of students confronted in college the harsh challenges of an unfriendly future and yet allowed themselves the pleasures and pains of an intense college world,” but she found little evidence of students from affluent backgrounds facing downward social mobility in previous eras (p. 4).

Studying harder, if unenthusiastically, does not seem to be an egregious reaction to the loss of economic security facing advantaged students in the 1980s. Indeed, the fact that students from affluent families then had to worry for their futures may have suggested that the meritocratic ideals of American society in general and higher education in particular were becoming more realized. Regardless of the validity of her critique of contemporary students , Horowitz had well documented the presence of college men, college women, outsiders and rebels in the past, and these categories made—and continue to make—sense for most observers of and actors within higher education .

Post-Horowitz Historiography

Helen Horowitz (1987) provided useful categories to consider college students in both the past and the present, but she hinted that there was more to learn about students historically. “The world of outsiders,” she noted toward the end of her book, “contains many subgroups” (p. 292). Since the publication of Campus Life , historians have increased their attention to college students . Yet, in contrast to Horowitz, they have shied away from broad syntheses of the overall student population. Instead, they have usually focused on a subgroup of students during a shorter period of time, and often at a specific type of institution. This section considers recent historical research on a variety of college student populations before offering a brief survey of the historiography of college student organizations and behaviors . Many scholars have considered the intersections of socioeconomic class and higher education : considering the class backgrounds of students , career paths of alumni, and the role of college in shaping larger socioeconomic class identity.

White College Men

In Campus Life , Horowitz (1987) devoted significant attention to White men. In the three decades since, historians have continued to explore these students , often at types of institutions or in specific regions. The resulting scholarship has expanded our understanding of White college men during four distinct eras: colonial, antebellum, postbellum, and mid-twentieth century. Across the years White college men often used higher education for self-improvement.

Colonial Era

Horowitz (1987) skipped the colonial period in Campus Life , and in the ensuing years historians have continued to largely look past the experiences of colonial college students . However, two scholars have provided fresh insights into the earliest college students in what would become the United States, reminding readers that colonial students were the most homogenous, advantaged group of collegians to ever access higher education and demonstrating that higher education helped prepare these young men for adulthood.

In 2002, Hoeveler offered, surprisingly enough, “the first synthetic examination of the nine colonial colleges” (p. x). He explored the political and intellectual role of these institutions by focusing on presidents and faculty members, but his coverage of college students nonetheless provided insight into this early period. Hoeveler described the regimented daily schedule and rules that transcended the colonial colleges and connected the college experiences of several alumni to their later influential political careers. But the most compelling aspect of was Hoeveler’s consideration of the evangelical revivals that swept campuses and flummoxed more-traditionalist presidents and professors. Colonial academic leaders denounced evangelical theologians and barred them from campus, which led affected students to label their scholarly elders as heretics. This offered a nuanced historical understandings of religious college students , as earlier research had found religious students closely aligned with faculty members (e.g., Allmendinger, 1975; Horowitz, 1987). In fact, subsequent generations of college leaders encouraged revival fervor among students in an effort to prevent rebellions and instill discipline.

Conrad Wright (2005) analyzed the lifespan of Harvard’s “revolutionary generation,” the 204 members of the Classes of 1771 through 1774, noting, “We know more about the men who attended colonial Harvard than we do about any other larger group of American men, women, and children before the Revolution” (p. ix). Wright used data drawn from Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, a reference series published between 1873 and 1999 by the Massachusetts Historical Society that contains biographies of every Harvard graduate from the colonial period—to describe eight developmental stages in the lives of these alumni, beginning with “early childhood” and ending with “late old age.” Wright provided a lively description of Harvard and its students on the eve of revolution, detailing housing arrangements, financial aid for the sons of clergy, an extracurriculum that included several secret societies and dramatic and musical performances, and a 95-percent graduation rate. The principal goal of a colonial Harvard education, he explained, was to transform “students into refined and educated gentlemen” (p. 38).

Wright’s (2005) subjects spent the “late childhood” stage as undergraduates, when they began “a never-ending commitment to personal improvement and social order” (pp. 37, 223). This consisted of development in three areas: intellect, which was achieved by meeting Harvard’s minimum academic expectations; character, which focused on honesty and reliability, two traits colonists insisted on in their leaders; and maturity, which incorporated refinement, knowledge, and independence, including beginning to court young women and establishing an evolved relationship with parents. Beyond highlighting the role of Harvard in facilitating the developmental milestones of its students , Wright made a major contribution through his appendix. There, 34 tables provided rich information about the lives of colonial Harvard alumni, from their birthplaces, occupations, number of children, and age of death. This data supported Wright’s argument that the Revolution “radically” influenced the lives of Harvard’s most recent alumni, increasing by 40 % the median number of years between graduation and marriage and stalling the establishment of careers.

Antebellum Era

Similar to Allmendinger’s (1975) focus on New England’s hilltop colleges before the Civil War, recent scholars of White college men in the antebellum period have centered their attention on specific regions, especially the South, and on specific institutions within those regions. In the process, historians have connected attitudes and activities among White college men to larger national developments. Indeed, by focusing on the socioeconomic backgrounds and aspirations of students , this scholarship combined to provide a national portrait of antebellum college men and their campus life.

Over the course of 11 years, Robert Pace (2004), Jennifer Green (2008), and Timothy Williams (2015) published books that provided rich and detailed insights into antebellum southern college students . Relying on a large collection of student diaries and letters from 21 colleges in 11 states, Pace (2004) explored “the culture of being a college student in the Old South” (p. 4). He argued that this culture was largely shaped by “a collision of two major forces: the southern code of honor and natural adolescent development” (p. 4). Pace devoted chapters to academics, campus environment, student pastimes, and rebellion. Fraternities developed later and took longer to gain dominance on southern campuses because the student body was so advantaged that there was little need to distinguish between insiders and outsiders. However, a hierarchy of prestige existed across southern colleges and universities, with the wealthiest students enrolling at state universities and less affluent students attending religious colleges, where they were more likely to prepare “to enter the ministry or the professions” (p. 4). Pace’s book was a lively and intimate portrait of antebellum student life, a true heir to Coulter (1928) while covering far more institutions, even if the analysis occasionally seemed forced. For instance, features of southern higher education were attributed to southern honor that had close corollaries at northern institutions, and contemporary psychological understandings of adolescence do not easily transfer to antebellum America.

Green (2008) examined the role of higher education for the southern middle class by focusing on a distinct institutional type: military schools. Prior to the Civil War, there were 12 state-supported military schools, such as the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) and the Citadel, and more than 70 private ones in the South, representing nearly 90 % of these institutions in the nation. Military schools offered a version of “higher learning ” somewhat below that available at southern colleges, even though cadets perceived themselves as college students . Sons from middle-class families flocked to these schools because public subsidies reduced the costs of higher education —though not enough to make attendance affordable to sons of the working poor—and because of their professionally-oriented curriculum in the 1840s and 1850s. Rigid military discipline governed these students , who were less rowdy and rebellious than wealthy students at the South’s proper colleges; such self-discipline was a trait highly valued by the middle class across the country.

Attendance at military schools had almost no correlation to subsequent military service. Nearly 95 % of alumni worked outside the military, mostly as “nonagricultural professionals,” such as doctors, businessmen, and teachers (p. 2). These careers provided economic security in the South outside of owning slaves. Green (2008) detailed how military schools promoted middle-class values that transcended the nation while also producing graduates who blended into southern society, “valuing community, hierarchy, and honor, and favoring slavery” (p. 12). In the end, military schools both developed and reinforced middle-class values, contributed to the professionalization of several vocations, and facilitated social mobility in the antebellum South.

In ways reminiscent of and divergent from Coulter (1928) and Pace (2004), Timothy Williams’ (2015) Intellectual Manhood focused on the intellectual culture of White college men at the University of North Carolina (UNC). Across the antebellum years, students used the curriculum and designed their campus life to promote intellectual manhood, which entailed self-awareness, mental acuity, informed actions, and persuasive speaking. Moreover, as UNC grew over the antebellum years, Williams found that the student body included more middle-class students than previously understood, and that the campus was not dominated by planters’ sons with little worry about their careers, but rather by upwardly mobile youths who planned to enter the professions. Similar to Green’s (2008) demonstration that military school alumni both reflected national middle-class values and southern beliefs about society, Williams explored how UNC students ’ emphasis on self-improvement reflected national upper-middle-class values “as well as how those values mingled with traditional values of the southern elite, such as honor” (p. 5).

Each of these three books concluded by considering the influence of the Civil War on higher education in the South. According to Pace (2004), the war ended genteel student life at southern colleges. Fraternities replaced literary societies as the dominant campus organizations after the war, reflecting the wider socioeconomic backgrounds among male students , and the realities of enrollment, tuition, and state funding required many campuses to become coeducational. Military schools fared better over the course of the war, viewed by Confederate leaders as essential to victory (Green, 2008). Alumni who had largely avoided military careers enlisted in great numbers, with over 10,000 fighting in the Civil War, overwhelmingly for the South. Yet enrolling at a military school provided one of few socially acceptable options for southern young men who wanted to avoid fighting. Afterwards, stalwarts like VMI and the Citadel persisted into the twentieth century, but most military schools disappeared or evolved into colleges. Alumni from the region’s more elite institutions also flocked to enlist, with nearly 60 % of recent University of North Carolina alumni fighting in the war (Williams, 2015). After the Civil War, UNC leaders advocated a more practical curriculum to meet the needs of the New South.

Kenneth Wheeler (2011) shifted attention from the South to the Midwest, considering how the educational experiences at small denominational colleges “both reflected and shaped a developing” regional culture (p. 3). In comparison to their northeastern and southern peers, midwestern collegians were older, less wealthy, more religious, embraced literary societies longer, and attended some of the country’s first coeducational institutions, all of which combined to produce a different college experience. Perhaps this was best represented by the complete absence of riots at Midwest colleges during the otherwise rambunctious antebellum period. Instead of riots, upset students might “negotiate with college leaders” or stage a strike or “mass withdrawal” (p. 75). Midwesterners embraced manual labor programs as an avenue for students to “learn a trade and stay healthy” (p. 31). Responsibilities usually divided along gender lines, with women working indoors cleaning, cooking, and doing laundry as men worked outside chopping wood, tending livestock, and building roads and campus buildings. Despite the preponderance of coeducation, the students Wheeler profiled were overwhelmingly male with seemingly no socioeconomic distinctions. Claiming that alumni “carried many values of the colleges with them” into adulthood and careers, Wheeler highlighted the involvement of many midwestern alumni in Progressive Era causes and scientific advancement.

More recently, Sumner (2014) deviated from a specific regional antebellum focus. She centered her study on “college families”—“presidents, trustees, faculty , graduates” and, importantly, the female members of these families (wives, daughters) along with the servants and slaves of the college—from 1782 to 1860 at what might be considered frontier colleges in several geographic regions, including Bowdoin, Dickinson, Union, Washington (now Washington and Lee), and Williams. In an era known for emphasis on personal enrichment, college families emphasized establishing virtue—embodied by restraint, self-control, and sacrificing personal gain to promote the common good—in students who would go on to lead the young republic. Students were oddly not incorporated into the “college family” until their graduation. But in writing about White women in college families and African Americans who labored as servants and slaves, Sumner illustrated that institutions that only enrolled White men were not all-male, all-White spaces and provided important insights into men’s college experience. The presence of “college ladies” helped dissuade bawdier pursuits among college men and encourage social skills and self-restraint; the presence of servants and slaves on campus, however unsettling to modern readers, provided White college men with opportunities to practice leadership before graduation.

Postbellum and Progressive Eras

In the years after the Civil War, White college men helped create many of the features and characteristics of the college experience that are familiar today. Historians have studied their contributions to the expansion of organized campus life, socioeconomic and gender dynamics on campus, and the growing popularity of higher education among larger swathes of White men. Indeed, higher education ’s importance was increasingly apparent, so much so that even by the end of the Civil War there were concerted efforts by state governments and individual institutions to encourage veterans to enroll.

Of all the historical works about White college men published since Campus Life , Bruce Leslie’s (1992) Gentlemen and Scholars may come closest to a classic. He critiqued the disproportionate focus of historians on the rise of the research university between the end of the Civil War and the start of World War I. Leslie helped provide historiographical balance by studying these years at Franklin and Marshall, Bucknell, Princeton, and Swarthmore. Today, these campuses represent the epitome of the collegiate ideal—smaller campuses where young 18-year-olds move away from home and live residentially for 4 years—which was exactly Leslie’s point. Despite the rise of the research university, “the lives of undergraduates in universities remained ‘collegiate’ in many senses of the word” (p. 2). In fact, he argued, they became increasingly collegiate as research universities developed. Initially, the colleges’ enrollments were under 300, their students often studied at the high-school level, their graduation rates hovered between 40 and 60 %, and allegiance to their founding denominations remained strong.

Soon, however, these campuses shifted from serving their local and religious communities to “the urban Protestant upper and upper-middle classes,” who in turn helped bolster endowments and engrain the collegiate way (p. 1). While ostensibly holding onto the liberal arts, pre-medicine, pre-law, engineering and business became incorporated into the curriculum as careers that ensured economic security. During these years, White college men institutionalized many features of campus life now synonymous with the college experience: fraternities, dramatic and musical groups, intercollegiate athletics, and even campus religious groups. The student culture “became remarkably standardized and pervasive across the four campuses” by 1890 (p. 189); these White college men valued conformity over individuality.

The students at these institutions were so similar that when the U.S. entered World War I, enrollments at all four plummeted. Just as the students rushed to protect the democracies of Great Britain and France, the rhetoric of their campus life extolled democracy. While it was true at these campuses, as it had been for Horowitz’s college men, that success in campus life “could offset parental wealth in establishing student prestige,” “collegiate democracy existed within institutions that did not reflect the ethnoreligious, racial, gender, or class heterogeneity of American society” (p. 203). At the same time, two of these institutions were coeducational by 1885, though Leslie largely left unexplored the campus experiences of women on these campuses and the influence of socioeconomic differences among students .

Four years later, Kim Townsend (1996) considered the gendered influence of higher education on the lives of wealthy young men in Manhood at Harvard. He explored how a variety of Harvard educators “taught” students a new idealized form of masculinity during Charles Eliot’s long presidency (1869–1909). This version of manhood emphasized competition, athleticism, patriotism, perseverance , and responsibility, perhaps best represented by the undergraduate and political career of Theodore Roosevelt, Harvard Class of 1880. Manhood was taught in the classroom, by the examples of educators and alumni, through campus life, and, often, by the intersection of all three. This manhood was also based on excluding women and racial minorities. But despite these most advantaged young men in America being taught by the most advantaged men in academia, this manhood was fragile. When the first female seniors of Radcliffe were set to graduate, they were discouraged by influential Cambridge women from wearing academic regalia for fear that that donning attire heretofore worn only by Harvard men could “attract unfavorable attention” (p. 220).

To a certain extent, this masculinizing effort was necessary because critics of higher education had long held that it emasculated students . Daniel Clark (2010) explored how the White middle class came to fully embrace higher education for their sons as the most appropriate path for future economic success between 1890 and 1915. Throughout the nineteenth century, many Americans who aimed for success in business but did not inherit family wealth perceived the classical curriculum as irrelevant and believed that the extravagances of campus life created dandies instead of virile men. But both the influx of immigrant men and women into the labor force and technological advances threatened the place of middle-class White men in business. One way to reserve their special status was to make college attendance indispensable for career success . Clark demonstrated how depictions of higher education in the era’s four most popular magazines transformed its perception among the sons of America’s White middle class. Business success and manliness became intertwined as the liberal arts coupled with the emerging scientific and professional courses provided the ideal training for both business leaders and influential citizens.

The foundation for this future diversity was explored by Cohen (2012), who focused on higher education during the Civil War and Reconstruction (1861–1877). Expanding upon the scholarship about antebellum southern higher education , Cohen argued that the Civil War fundamentally altered American higher education in two ways. First, the federal government began an involvement in higher education that would gradually increase over the next century. Second, southern higher education , which had mostly educated wealthy women and men in separate institutions before the War, began to reflect the more diverse northern higher education , which educated a wider socioeconomic spectrum and provided limited higher education for African Americans.

Cohen (2012) largely focused on access rather than campus life, but he did cover an important and previously overlooked aspect of White college men. Cohen highlighted how state and institutional financial aid programs facilitated the higher education of veterans and their orphaned children. Although some of these benefits were available to African American soldiers and daughters of veterans, this financial aid largely benefited White men—the group who comprised the majority of veterans and already most prevalent in higher education —a situation that would repeat itself in subsequent governmental aid programs.

Great Depression and World War II Era

Historians have focused less on White college men after the turn of the twentieth century, but a body of scholarship about federal government programs that helped students enroll and persist during the 1930s and 1940s has provided important information about the approach of mass higher education in the United States. Ostensibly available to men and women and to Whites and racial minorities, these programs mostly benefited White men.

In a history of the National Youth Administration, a New Deal agency charged with addressing the needs of youth during the Great Depression, Reiman (1992) explored the creation of a federal aid program for college students . In the 1930s a majority of students who left college did so for financial reasons, and they placed an additional burden on an already weak economy and threatened to close colleges. College presidents lobbied hard for federal aid, and some New Deal leaders, worried about the increased popularity of socialist and communist student organizations that argued for federal aid to students , unveiled a plan that provided millions to pay students at risk for withdrawing to work and stay in school. This program was designed to be decentralized, with college officials assigning and creating jobs. College students worked mostly at maintaining and improving the physical plant, “labor of value more to the institutions than to the students ” who planned on careers beyond grounds keeping (p. 71). New Deal leaders encouraged institutions to lower tuition for students receiving the aid and wanted at least a quarter of recipients to be students who had not previously attended college. But many institutions could not, or chose not, to reduce their charges, and the program managed to stabilize enrollments more than increase them. Reiman left unexplored the demographics of participating students , but its stabilizing effect suggested that it benefited White men fortunate enough, however fragilely, to access higher education .

A better-remembered college aid program modeled after the 1930s NYA program was the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, more commonly known as the GI Bill of Rights. The law provided generous funds, based on length of service, for veterans to further their education, often in colleges and universities. The GI Bill long enjoyed a historical reputation for democratizing higher education , as millions of veterans who otherwise would have been unable to attend colleges and universities enrolled and because institutions relaxed strict admissions to attract the federal largesse. Mettler (2005) largely agreed with this perception. With a specific focus on how the law influenced the citizenship of its recipients, Mettler argued “that the G.I. Bill’s education and training provisions had an overwhelmingly positive effect on male veterans’ civic involvement,” taking some umbrage at scholars who attacked its democratizing reputation (p. 9). Mettler demonstrated that the longer veterans took advantage of the educational benefits, the more involved they became in their community.

But other scholars have recently questioned the democratizing effect of the legislation (Altschuler & Blumin, 2009; Cohen, 2003; Frydl, 2009; Serow, 2004). To be sure, the GI Bill was popular among Americans, and more veterans took advantage of the educational benefits than policymakers anticipated. In important ways, the law was also forward thinking. When the armed services were still racially segregated, the law made no distinctions between races; when women were banned from combat roles, it made no distinctions between genders. Yet, the law’s progressive influence may have been stronger in memory than in reality. Serow (2004) estimated that 80 % of veterans who used the GI Bill would have attended college without the aid, suggesting that the law funneled tax dollars to many Americans who were already economically secure. Institutions could accept governmental funds from White veterans while refusing to admit African Americans. In addition, women made up only 2 % of veterans, and the law did not extend to those involved in the war economy outside of the armed services; in other words, Rosie the Riveter did not get tuition benefits. Even Mettler (2005) pointed out that although the G.I. Bill was supposed to extend to all veterans regardless of discharge status (so long as it was not dishonorable), the Veterans Administration excluded benefits for service members who had received “blue discharges”—which were not dishonorable—for suspected or admitted homosexuality.

Perhaps the most important influence in democratizing higher education occurred in minds of Americans rather than the registration lines on campus. Daniel Clark (1998) studied how veterans in higher education appeared in popular publications and advertisements, arguing that “the GI Bill indeed changed the way Americans thought of a college education” (pp. 167–168). Before World War II, these publications associated college with the aristocratic upper and upper-middle class. Afterward, depictions of the “veteran-everyman attending elite institutions” demanding a practical curriculum and challenging aristocratic campus traditions connected college to social mobility and aligned it with a more average middle-class culture (p. 174). But even in the pages of popular magazines, the GI Bill was not completely democratic. For men, depictions conveyed college “as an economic as well as a social opportunity”; for women, they “emphasized her polished sensibilities rather than her intellectual achievement or career potential” (p. 188). Women were learning how to marry and be a wife to G.I. Joe.

Most evidence suggests that, despite progressive aspects of the law, the GI Bill eased the costs of higher education for the group already most prominent on campus—White men. At the same time, it helped a rising generation of Americans, more diverse than the current enrollments on college campuses, perceive higher education as accessible. But the fact that at mid-twentieth century, the GI Bill, both in reality and in popular culture, poorly served one-half of the population suggested that women continued to endure significant obstacles toward higher education . Many scholars have explored women’s navigation of these obstacles, especially White women students .

White College Women

Benefitting from the development of women’s history, research on the experiences of White women in higher education has increased significantly in the last 30 years. Historians have explored the types of institutions open to women, the curriculum they learned, their campus experiences, and how higher education influenced their lives as alumnae. These studies are best grouped into three chronological periods: early republic and antebellum eras, postbellum and progressive eras, and the twentieth century. In addition, historical research about White women in higher education has proceeded along two additional scholarly lines that, while beyond the scope of this chapter, deserve acknowledgment. First, scholars have continued to consider women’s experiences at individual colleges and universities, including Alfred University (Strong, 2008), Brown University (Kaufman, 1991), the University of California, Berkeley, (Clifford, 1995), and the University of Delaware (Hoffecker, 1994). Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s (2004) edited volume Yards and Gates applied a gendered analysis to both Radcliffe women’s and Harvard men’s experiences. Other historians have connected women’s higher education to larger intellectual developments on campus and in society, such as connecting college writing courses to women’s abilities to engage with controversial topics (Gold & Hobbs, 2013) or to their careers as writers (Adams, 2001). Rosalind Rosenberg (2004) bridged these two lines by illustrating how women at Barnard and Columbia challenged ideas about biological determinism of sex and restrictive sexuality.

Early Republic and Antebellum Eras

In the wake of the student and women’s rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, scholars writing about the establishment of women’s higher education overwhelmingly located its development in women’s colleges in the Northeast and coeducational universities in the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest after the Civil War (e.g., Conable, 1977; Horowitz, 1984; McGuigan, 1970). They perceived institutions that admitted women before the Civil War as offering education and experiences inferior to those available to men at antebellum colleges and to women at either women’s colleges or coeducational universities after the war. Since the publication of Campus Life , however, several historians have challenged this perception.

In 1994, Christie Anne Farnham’s The Education of the Southern Belle reinvigorated research into the higher education of women before the Civil War. Her overarching historiographical contribution was that higher education in the South—long derided by historians for having “always lagged behind those in the rest of the nation”—was more prevalent and more accepted for women than in the North before the Civil War (p. 13). Moreover, “the differences between the antebellum female colleges [in the South] and their postbellum counterparts” in the North were “not as large as generally believed” (p. 28). Farnham traced the evolution of a variety of institutions that increasingly offered women a higher education , beginning with French schools, which focused on French language, etiquette, conversation skills, and “ornamentals” such as penmanship, drawing, and dancing; then academies and seminaries, which held on to “ornamentals” while offering more academic courses such as “history, geography , and English grammar” (p. 49); and eventually to colleges, or the less radical-sounding “female institutes” or “collegiate institutes,” which combined ornamentals, academic subjects, and some instruction in Greek and Latin. The first women’s college was Georgia Female College, established in 1839. In exploring curricular offerings, Farnham found that young women generally learned less Greek and Latin than men, more modern languages (French, German, and Spanish), more fine arts, and about the same mathematics and natural sciences. Farnham equated the curriculum at the best women’s institutions to what would be “offered to freshmen and sophomores at men’s colleges,” or the equivalent of a “junior college” education in 1994 (p. 12). Southern women had access to higher education , just not the highest education.

Farnharm (1994) also explored campus life. Most students who learned advanced subjects were wealthy, as less affluent students stopped their studies earlier. This wealthy clientele may have been the main reason for higher education ’s popularity in the South. By educating elite women who did not plan to work outside the home, higher education proved less threatening to the overarching social order. Some southern youth were raised to depend on unpaid labor to such an extent that, by the time they left home, they knew neither how to tie their shoes nor comb their hair, making the presence of slaves at school a necessity from their perspective. Women, like college men, were governed by a lengthy list of rules, though they were more closely supervised.

But there was much fun on campus, if for no other reason than that educators who “depended on tuition … understood the importance of making student life a happy time” (p. 129). The most important goal, at least for the young women, was to use both the formal and informal curriculum to learn how to be “fascinating.” “Fascination was the essence of the Southern belle,” wrote Farnham, and, while “it defied definition, young women tried to achieve it by developing a lively, fun-loving, and vivacious personality” (p. 127).

By studying women’s experiences before the Civil War, Farnham (1994) advanced insightful arguments that subsequent scholars have explored further. Nash (2005) “sought to understand” academies and seminaries throughout the nation that admitted women between 1780 and 1840 “in their own right, reflections of the social, cultural, and intellectual mores of their time” (p. 4). She analyzed catalogs and advertisements of over 120 institutions in 19 states. While historians had long asserted that most Americans believed women intellectually inferior to men before the Civil War, Nash demonstrated that the sexes were often perceived as intellectual equals. “As a result, women’s and men’s advanced education was more similar than it was different” (p. 54). The sexist attacks on women’s intelligence emerged as a reaction to the growth of women attending colleges and universities in the late-nineteenth century, not during its earlier, formative years.

Nash argued that higher education for women at academies and seminaries was an important way in which the emerging middle class “sought to distinguish themselves from those of both lower and higher socioeconomic status” (p. 53). The middle class developed a variety of justifications for why a woman should pursue higher education , including: to instill self-improvement and self-control, to become a better mother and household manager, to impart a Christian and moral influence over society, to meet the need for teachers in the common school system, and to develop vocational skills in case she did not marry or became a widow.

Mary Kelley’s (2006) Learning to Stand and Speak concentrated on how women used academies and seminaries to facilitate their involvement in the public sphere before the Civil War. Agreeing with Nash that women’s intellectual capabilities were considered on par with men’s by most contemporaries, Kelley demonstrated that White women from middle- or upper-class backgrounds increasingly became teachers, writers, historians, and social reformers—all positions that could shape public opinion—between the Revolution and Civil War. Academy and seminary alumnae formed a “large majority of women who claimed these careers and who led the movement of women into the world beyond their households” (p. 2). Educated women performed a complicated balancing act in which they increasingly influenced society while mostly choosing “not to challenge a social and political system that still rendered them subordinate to men” (p. 277). While affluent African American women might form literary societies in their communities, they were denied admission at the schools. Kelley connected the public influence of antebellum seminary alumnae to the social reform and political activism of postbellum college alumnae through women clubs, epitomized by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Young Women’s Christian Association.

In a broader study of affluent young White women in the antebellum South, Jabour (2007) argued that at these “woman-centered, woman-controlled” academies and seminaries, White affluent women learned the knowledge and skills to cope with and resist a patriarchal society. An academy education was expensive, which meant that students hailed from the more advantaged ranks, but families from more middle-class backgrounds nonetheless undertook financial hardships to send their daughters to school. Unlike the prevailing image of affluent antebellum White college men who eschewed study, antagonized professors, and emphasized success in the extracurriculum, academy women “valued academic achievement,” “made academic competition a central aspect of student subculture,” and developed close relationships with their teachers (Jabour, p. 57).

More recent scholars have focused on the academy and seminary curriculum , nuancing Farnham’s conclusion by finding that, in general, women had the possibility to learn something above the equivalent of a “junior college education.” Rigor increased over time; by the 1830s, women were learning English (writing and speaking), mathematics, geography , history (ancient, modern, and U.S.), and the natural sciences. Some academies and seminaries offered Greek and Latin; at the same time, many men’s colleges were moving away from Greek and Latin and incorporating subjects long taught at academies and seminaries. According to Nash (2005), the difference between colleges and academies was access, not curriculum : “academies were open to women whereas colleges were not. Beyond, that, however, distinctions between academies and colleges were not clear” (p. 35). Moreover, about the same numbers of students attended academies and seminaries as colleges (Kelley, 2006).

Historians had long argued that academies and seminaries offered a lower level of education than men’s colleges because of their emphasis on ornamentals. But ornamentals instilled skills women needed to succeed in middle- and upper-class culture (Jabour, 2007; Kelley, 2006; Nash, 2005). Moreover, as Nash (2005, 2013) demonstrated, so-called ornamentals represented real vocational possibilities for women during an era in which their career options were severely limited. Women could take courses in needlework, singing, drawing and playing musical instruments and transfer those skills to paid labor as seamstresses, developing textiles, performing music in churches or at concerts, or teaching fine arts.

Women’s student life at academies and seminaries was also similar to that available to young men. In particular, Jabour (2007) painted a vivid portrait of their campus life. By the 1830s, in order to attend an academy, young southern women moved away from home and lived and ate in dormitories alongside other scholars and teachers, separated from the outside world by tall fences, suggesting that these institutions represented a more successful implementation of the Oxford-Cambridge model than most men’s colleges. Like antebellum college men, academy women faced a slew of campus rules that, if not officially erased, relaxed in enforcement over time. While women’s violations of curfew, quiet hours, and midnight meals paled in comparison to the violence and rebellions of college men, Jabour argued that, in resisting the lights-out policy , antebellum women students were resisting prescribed and rigid gender roles. Kelley (2006) also drew larger implications from campus life. The title of her book, Learning to Stand and Speak, referred to the skills women developed as members of literary societies that they used to later influence public opinion.

Another feature of student life at academies and seminaries were “romantic friendships” between southern women students , revealing that the “smashes” detailed by Horowitz (1984) and Sahli (1979) after the Civil War at elite women’s colleges had a long—and non-northeastern—history. Young women often partnered off, exchanging gifts of flowers and candy—not to mention kisses—and sharing desks and beds (Farnham, 1994; Jabour, 2007). These relationships were “highly romantic, if not downright erotic,” but they were socially acceptable because society considered White women “nonsexual” (Jabour, pp. 73–74). Farnham noted that it was rare for antebellum same-sex relationships to be “maintained at a high level of intensity throughout life” (p. 160); however, Jabour’s research suggested that this might not be a conscious choice of affluent southern women, but rather due to their isolation from other upper-class women who lived on secluded plantations. Regardless, romantic friendships provided women opportunities to experience more equitable relationships: “Unlike heterosexual marriage,” which required women to subordinate their desires and serve their husbands, homosocial relationships … involved few trade-offs” (Jabour, 2007, p. 76). Farnham considered the extent to which these relationships represented lesbianism, an analysis complicated by the fact that the label (and vilification) of lesbianism did not emerge until the turn of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the collective research about romantic friendships and smashing suggested that higher education has long expanded the possibilities of companionate relationships, however briefly, for women beyond traditional heterosexuality.

In the end, recent scholars have demonstrated that women experienced higher education , though rarely at institutions called colleges, long before Horowitz’s placed the “first” women students in her outsider category after the Civil War.

Postbellum and Progressive Eras

If Bruce Leslie’s (1992) Gentlemen and Scholars became a classic post-Horowitz account of White college men, Lynn Gordon’s (1990) Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era deserves the same label for White college women. Gordon made at least three major historiographic contributions: moving beyond the first generation of college women (1870–1890); moving beyond women’s colleges to coeducational universities; and moving beyond the Northeast to include institutions in the Midwest, South, and West. Gordon considered the experiences of second-generation college women (1890–1910) through case studies of Agnes Scott College, Sophie Newcomb College, University of California (Berkeley), University of Chicago, and Vassar College—three women’s colleges and two coeducational universities.

Gordon (1990) used her first case study, the University of California, to detail the ostracism women students could experience at coeducational institutions. Berkeley’s campus life was dominated by rowdy and boisterous activities—especially football and rushes—and men dressed in distinctive fashions by class year, while women dressed generically from their freshman to sophomore years. Women were segregated to their own section at football games, and college men derided their looks and voting decisions, believing that they only voted for the best looking male candidates. In response, college women established a successful student government of their own. At the University of Chicago, with its urban setting and powerful dean of women Marion Talbot in charge of all student life, women students fared better. But even there, when academic men perceived women students as too numerous and successful, they tried to segregate women from classes with men. White college women, of course, controlled the campus life at women’s colleges . But Vassar students excluded Jewish women from participating, and the institution excluded African American women from even matriculating. The southern women’s colleges of Agnes Scott and Sophie Newcomb were no different, and the handful of African American women to attend the University of California “found no place in the [White ] women’s community” (p. 69). Second generation college women demonstrated more interest in men and marriage and less interest in working outside the home than their predecessors, though they used their curriculum and campus life to learn about and participate in civic activism and social reform.

Gordon asserted that her focus on coeducation was especially important because, as early as the 1880s, a majority of women were taught alongside men. By the 1960s, nearly 90 % of women were educated at coeducational institutions. But Gordon ended her book with a blistering critique of coeducation, informed by the past but applied to her present:

Unquestionably, women’s colleges provided a superior social and educational atmosphere…. [C]oeducational institutions, then and now, have largely failed to respond to women’s needs by providing mechanisms to ensure gender equality…. After one hundred years of educating both sexes, coeducational colleges and universities remain bastions of inequality and male-dominated culture. (pp. 192–193)

This criticism, well-informed by experiences at California and Chicago, helped set the stage for other scholars to explore women’s experiences during the formative decades of coeducation.

Christine Ogren’s (2005) The American State Normal School and Andrea Radke-Moss’s (2008) Bright Epoch helped to nuance Gordon’s assertions about coeducation. These books studied coeducational normal schools and land grant colleges respectively, but devoted most of their attention to women’s experience. In Ogren’s history of the nearly 200 state normal schools—institutions designed to train future teachers—this focus was a natural outgrowth of the enrollment on campus: women students were a majority, often overwhelmingly so. Historians had earlier either disparaged normal schools for their low levels of education or ignored them altogether. Yet Ogren showed that normal schools were “revolutionary” institutions of higher education in that they provided many students from backgrounds extremely underrepresented in higher education access to a robust curriculum and campus life for four decades following 1870 (p. 5). Normal students were overwhelmingly women, older, with work experience (often as teachers), and generally came from families with low social, economic, and cultural capital. While a majority of normal school students were White , many southern states opened normal schools for African Americans, and, given the relatively disadvantaged background of the average normal student , racial minorities and recent immigrants were less likely to be ostracized from campus life. In short, normal schools served the first sizable numbers of “nontraditional” students (Ogren, 2003, 2005).

Most normal schools offered an initial required curriculum that, while a lower level than the entering courses at colleges and universities, nonetheless stretched their students and provided a foundation for further study (Ogren, 2005). In fact, many normal schools implemented multiple courses of study, such as a two-year and a four-year program, and some even taught Latin, the hallmark of men’s classical curriculum . There was little gender segregation in the classroom, and women comprised a majority of the faculty at many normal schools. As their curriculum increased in rigor and breadth, normal schools began adopting loftier names, first normal colleges, then teachers colleges, before finally morphing into regional comprehensive colleges and universities.

Campus life at normal schools was even more similar than the curriculum to that of more prestigious institutions, and perhaps served a more vaulted purpose by advancing the cultural capital of their students (Ogren, 2005). Students could join literary or academic societies, participate in intercollegiate forensic competitions, act in plays, and participate in athletics. Given the meager resources of most normal students , fraternities and sororities did not develop until the early-twentieth century. Of course, all of the curriculum and most of campus life was designed to help normal students become successful teachers. The opportunities to practice teaching in courses, at model schools on campus, and at schools in the community largely set their student experience apart from that at colleges and universities.

Whereas White women comprised a majority of students at normal schools, they were a minority at land-grant colleges. Radke-Moss (2008) studied “the practices of coeducation” at four western land-grant institutions in Iowa, Nebraska, Oregon, and Utah (p. 1). Earlier historians had disparaged coeducation at land grants, finding women siphoned into home economics programs and excluded from the male-controlled campus life, but Radke-Moss demonstrated that “women students took a much more proactive role regarding their own inclusion on these campuses” (p. 1). Concerns about men and women students interacting with each other permeated these campuses, and “a culture of separation” emerged to keep them apart in classes, at social events, and even while walking across campus. Radke-Moss (2008) considered how land-grant women often challenged and sometimes embraced these efforts at separation, resulting in greater inclusion and promoting their success on campus. One of the chief arguments in favor of coeducation was that it would facilitate more companionate marriages, and, despite strict regulations that relaxed over time, land-grant women fostered heterosexual relationships. At the same time, close relationships that verged on the “romantic friendships” at women’s institutions were not uncommon at land grants. In terms of study, while women were encouraged to take domestic science, the science part was emphasized, which in the end expanded their career possibilities.

Johnson (2008) returned scholarly attention to the Seven Sisters, but this time with a regional focus. She offered “a collective biography” “of a small but influential group of over one thousand white southern women who went north to the Seven Sisters colleges” around the turn of the twentieth century (p. 2). Southern students , who hailed from some of their region’s most prominent and wealthy families, were attracted to the strong liberal arts curriculum of northern women’s colleges . But southern students struggled to acclimate to the fast-paced northern life and the rigorous academic programs at these elite colleges. Those who stuck around—southern women’s graduation rates were not much different than northern women’s, hovering between 50 and 70 %—saw extreme homesickness develop into strong independence, an uncommon trait among most women in the South. Most alumnae returned home after graduation where their Seven Sisters diploma was a “more significant indicator of achievement than a local degree” (p. 3).

Mining collections of student correspondence, mostly between daughters and their parents, Johnson provided rich details of students ’ experiences; some of the most interesting centered on interactions with African Americans on campus. While some southern women credited exposure to African Americans in the North to subsequent beliefs in racial equality and civil rights activism, most brought their region’s prevailing racism with them to campus. They might refuse to eat dinner at the same table with African American students . In fact, Vassar leaders refused to admit African Americans, ostensibly justifying their decision in order to not alienate their southern clientele. For instance, the racist behavior of a Virginian at Wellesley in the 1870s prompted the African American cook to spill “soup on her” (p. 95).

The most interesting theme connecting these histories is the presence of feminism on campus and in the lives of alumnae. Johnson (2008) connected exposure to feminist professors and progressive ideas to the southern Seven Sisters alumnae’s activism. These alumnae often worked as educators to raise the South’s curricular standards. The equality that women at normal schools experienced in the classroom and campus life may have best approached the feminist ideal (Ogren, 2005); that it occurred at some of the nation’s least prestigious institutions did not. Normal school women rarely expressed explicit feminist stances, but in promoting individual autonomy, embracing paid careers, delaying or eschewing marriage, and advocating for suffrage, they embraced them nonetheless. Likewise, early land-grant women not only made their campuses more welcoming of women, but also the world (Radke-Moss, 2008). They often won campus elections, though rarely to the highest offices, and learned to work with men “together for a cause” (p. 253). Writing for the campus newspaper and debating in literary societies prepared these women to continue advocacy after graduation. Gordon (1990) found the presence of feminism at the campuses in her study bleak, and wondered if “greater feminist consciousness … would have averted or mitigated the troubles of women students ” (p. 194). However, educators worried that a reputation of creating feminists would alienate prospective students , or at least their parents.

Gordon (1990) also compared the attitudes of second-generation college women to those who enrolled after the Second Wave feminist movement, the current cadre of students when her book went to press. College women in the 1980s, not unlike those in 1900s, planned to have rewarding professional and personal lives, but few vocally supported or participated in feminist causes. Gordon speculated that the rationale for these attitudes spanned the generations: these women had not struggled to access educational and professional opportunities, had not yet experienced discrimination in hiring or the workplace, and had not yet juggled work and family. In addition, she speculated that romantic relationships with men proved more “compelling than feminist causes,” and many women students “then and now, equate feminists with unattractive ‘man-haters’ ” (p. 195).

Yet, these observations suggested that the historical path between the second generation of college women and themselves had not been a smooth march of progression. Indeed, Gordon (1990) documented that women as a proportion of undergraduates peaked at almost half in 1920 but had fallen below a third by 1980. Several historians writing after Gordon explored the successes and setbacks of White college women in the twentieth century.

Twentieth Century

Three books have provided excellent insights into the complexity facing White college women in the twentieth century. McCandless (1999) offered the longest history, considering women’s experiences in the South over the entire century. That region entered the century markedly different from the rest of the nation—more rural, poorer, more economically dependent on agriculture, home to more African Americans, more Protestant—and ended the century largely representative as urbanization increased, economies diversified, population swelled, and legal segregation ended. In 1900, higher education in the South also diverged from national patterns—racially-segregated institutions, strict gender segregation among Whites (Black institutions were almost always coeducational), more emphasis on agricultural and technical education. By the end of the century, higher education in the South also resembled the larger nation, with traditionally White institutions having desegregated and coeducation becoming the norm.

With the evolution of the South and its colleges serving as bookends, McCandless (1999) devoted her book to women’s experiences across the century. Compared to most authors, McCandless came close to providing even attention to White and African American experiences. McCandless persuasively demonstrated the paradoxes of women’s higher education in the South. Wealthy White women learned the most prestigious curriculum —the liberal arts—at private women’s colleges in the first half of the century, though the goal of this education was to prepare them to be housewives and mothers. Lower-income White women and African American women learned a more vocationally oriented curriculum at Black institutions and White normal and technical schools. This prepared them for careers outside the home, mostly as teachers, that fostered their social mobility, albeit rarely into the ranks of the elite. Sorority members, both African American and White , were active in community service as students and involved in social reform as alumnae, but membership was reserved for the more affluent members of both races. While most southern White students were “staunch segregationists,” some White women risked social ostracism to advocate for racial equality (p. 221). African American college women, in contrast, helped lead the Civil Rights Movement, often being the first students to desegregate White institutions. Here was the rub: an education designed to keep well-off White women in the home and less privileged women working in subservient positions produced graduates who fostered social change.

Other scholars focused on women’s higher education at the middle of the century. Linda Eisenmann’s (2006) Higher Education for Women in Postwar America, 1945–1965, explored concerns about and efforts to improve the experiences of women students . Eisenmann identified four ideologies—patriotic, economic, cultural, and psychological—that influenced women’s decisions to pursue higher education after World War II. For example, women had to decide what was best for the nation, for them to stay at home or become trained to work in an underserved field? If the former, did college help them be better housewives and mothers? While historians had long pointed out that the proportion of women among college students fell after 1920, gradually picking back up from a nadir of 30 % in 1949, Eisenmann reminded readers that the sheer number of women students never fell, rising from 585,000 in 1942 to 2.3 million in 1965. By 1980, women would comprise a majority of college students . Despite this growth, male academic leaders rarely paid attention to the needs of women (Eisenmann, 2006). To address this void, several governmental and professional organizations considered the needs of women students . Often led by female educators, these groups “supported research on women, focused attention on their issues and needs, disseminated findings about new scholarship and good practice, and supported networks of like-minded advocates” (p. 5). Such efforts helped lay the foundation for more explicit feminist activity on campus later and a more equitable educational experience for women students .

Faehmel (2012) studied the experiences of affluent White college women, mostly at the Seven Sisters, between 1940 and 1960. She sought to nuance the conclusions of Betty Friedan’s (1963) The Feminine Mystique, which was largely based on a survey of her 1942 Smith College classmates at their 15-year reunion. Friedan found most of her respondents despondent over their lives as housewives, having wasted their college education by failing to pursue a career . In the mid-twentieth century, 60 % of women did leave college before graduating, often to marry. Faehmel argued that these alumnae had demonstrated more agency in establishing their life situations than Friedan acknowledged. Marrying young actually had addressed women’s sexual frustrations while simultaneously satisfying both suitors and parents. White women’s decision to not chase a career could be quite calculated. As new college students , young women might imagine rewarding professional careers, whereas juniors and seniors often concluded the best path would be to marry well and start a family. Many college women realized that only the most talented and driven women could have successful careers, a “realistic” conclusion “considering the extent to which sexism limited professional and academic opportunities” (p. 180). Thus, both decisions—marrying young and becoming a housewife—could represent informed choices arrived at through critical thinking skills instilled by higher education . The limited opportunities available to White college women in the mid-twentieth century were magnified for many students from less advantaged backgrounds.

African American College Students

Historical research about African American students has significantly increased in the decades since the publication of Campus Life . Historians have considered African Americans’ earliest opportunities to access higher education , how their access simultaneously expanded and restricted following the Civil War, how higher education influenced the lives of alumni and their larger community, and the role of college students in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. This scholarship almost evenly divides into a long period–the pre-Civil Rights Era—and a few decades—the Civil Rights and Black Power Eras.

Pre-civil Rights Era

Historians have produced many new studies that consider the formative years of African American higher education . In a larger study of African American education in the antebellum period—when few high schools or academies, let alone colleges, admitted African Americans—Hilary Moss (2009) noted that handfuls of the best-prepared African Americans enrolled in New England colleges in the 1820s, but she focused primarily on the 1831 effort of African American and White abolitionists to build the nation’s first Black college. They envisioned an institution that blended the classical curriculum with “manual labor instruction,” the latter of which would allow students from lower incomes to enroll, learn useful vocational skills, protect students ’ health, and prevent men students from “becoming effete” (p. 49). These interracial abolitionists hoped “the college would help create a black professional class,” refute White claims of Black intellectual inferiority, and dampen efforts to recolonize African Americans to Africa (p. 49). They chose New Haven as the location of the institution, considering it the most racially progressive city in the country. In part because of the proposal’s unfortunate timing with the Nat Turner slave rebellion in Virginia, the White population of New Haven vehemently opposed the institution. They believed the school would attract more African Americans to their town, devalue the college degrees of White men, and result in Whites doing the least desirable work performed heretofore by African Americans. Voting 700 to 4 against the proposal, White New Haven men went on to vandalize local White abolitionists’ property and several Black businesses.

Waite (2002) provided an example of how the environment for African American higher education became more hostile, showing how the nation’s first institution of higher education to embrace admitting students “irrespective of color” later came to adopt segregation (pp. xi-xii). When Oberlin College adopted its open policy in 1834, just 1 year after it opened as the first coeducational college for White students , it was illegal in the South to teach African Americans to read or write and they had little access to public education in the North. Oberlin College, supported by a “perfectionist” band of evangelical Christians who embraced an emancipatory theology, provided African Americans an “extraordinarily important”—and rare—collegiate opportunity over the next half-century. After Reconstruction, Oberlin’s White students and presidents came from backgrounds beyond the college’s founding religious mindset, which made the institution more susceptible to a period of increased northern racism. White students refused to sit with African Americans in the dining hall, allow them to join their literary societies and athletic teams, or live with them in the same dormitory. The African American students who continued to attend Oberlin found most of their community in local Black churches rather than on campus. Perhaps the saddest result of the segregation at Oberlin was that there remained no example for the nation of a racially integrated community, which the college and town had provided for 50 years. As Waite noted in her Epilogue, Oberlin College leaders spent much of the twentieth century trying to make their institution as attractive and hospitable to African Americans as it had been before the 1880s.

The years in which Oberlin became increasingly segregated nonetheless saw new opportunities for African American higher education . In the last chapter of his influential The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935, James Anderson (1988) demonstrated that, after the Civil War, African Americans quickly established institutions of higher education . They were assisted by two groups of influential White northerners, missionaries and industrialists. White missionary societies and African American churches founded over 100 private historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs ) across the South. These institutions offered a liberal arts education to help graduates “achieve racial equality in civil and political life” (p. 240). Small and with few financial resources, these colleges continued to enroll 75 % of collegiate African Americans until the late 1920s. As northern missionaries’ involvement in the South began to wane around the turn of the twentieth century, northern industrialists assumed a more dominant role. They had deeper pockets but also held different beliefs about African American higher education . Rather than using higher education to promote racial equality, industrialists often believed in the inherent inferiority of African Americans, and favored, despite African Americans’ objections, consolidating over 100 private colleges into fewer than 10 and providing a vocational rather than a liberal education. However, the need to supply African American teachers for segregated schools ensured that many students learned the liberal arts.

Linda Perkins (1997) shifted attention northward, highlighting the approximately 500 African American women who graduated from the Seven Sister women’s colleges between 1880 and 1960. Wellesley, Radcliffe, and Smith were the first to enroll African Americans. Barnard, Vassar, and Bryn Mawr were the least hospitable campuses, Perkins showed, though it was rare for any institution to have “more than one or two” African Americans “per class until the 1950s” and even the most welcoming often segregated campus housing (p. 720). African American women at the Seven Sisters were minorities not only on campus but also in the larger African American community, most hailing from wealthy and educated enclaves of northern cities. Still, unlike many White alumnae, most African Americans worked after graduation, “contributing their talents to both the Black community and the larger society” as teachers, professors, lawyers, doctors, and scientists (p. 719). Despite the success of these alumnae, leaders at the Seven Sisters did not start “actively recruiting Black women” until the 1960s (p. 720).

Evans (2007) offered a more expansive history of African American women’s higher education in terms of both regions and institutional types, beginning with Oberlin awarding the first college degree to an African American woman in 1850 and ending with the Brown v. Board decision in 1954. The geographical center of African American women’s higher education changed over time, beginning in Ohio (and to a lesser extent, Michigan and Pennsylvania) before the Civil War, shifting to the South afterwards, and then relocating to the North as urban universities began to provide access to graduate education by the 1930s. African American women, regardless of background, felt “a sense of isolation and wariness … most of the time” at predominantly White institutions, whereas “skin color, family status, economic class, [and] gender” shaped their experiences at HBCUs . On the whole, the first generations of African American college women relished their “access to higher education ” even as they expressed “frustration at the social limitations they continued to face” on and off campus (p. 104). But most African American were not successful at college if success was measured by graduation rates. Evans argued that higher education “crushed thousands of black women” and “[m]any … left without their diploma” (pp. 102–103); however, she also highlighted the successful careers and philosophies of several prominent African American alumnae who became influential educators.

Education was a common career path for African American alumni, but so was the military. Just as Green (2008) demonstrated that attending a military school promoted the social mobility of antebellum southern White men, Cox (2013) showed how military training at HBCUs helped African Americans “move from the underclass of the rural south to black middle-class status” in the century following the Civil War (p. 171). Military training and ROTC programs formed an important educational feature at many HBCUs . Unlike their White predecessors, however, African Americans’ social mobility was often facilitated by joining the military after graduation. In fact, many African Americans viewed a career in the military, similar to teaching , as providing a steady and reliable income in an economic system that undervalued their labor. Focusing mostly on Southern University in Louisiana, Cox made connections to the larger system of HBCUs , highlighting, for example, how ROTC programs helped stabilize the finances and enrollments in the tumultuous 1950s and 1960s. The African American community continued to perceive a military career —pursued mostly by men, although women regularly accounted for 30 % of ROTC cadets on some campuses—as respectable until the 1970s, when the Nixon presidency, Vietnam War, and Black Power Movement converged to lead many “to resist serving in the armed forces or to view compulsory military training as an oppressive form of control” (p. 168).

Several historians writing broader histories noted the importance of higher education in the South for African Americans in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Higginbotham (1993) studied how educated African American women—“the Female Talented Tenth”—used their churches to improve African American communities (p. 20). These women worked to instill national middle-class values in middle- and lower-class African Americans, which they learned while attending church-sponsored colleges. At Spelman, the institution sponsored a “missionary program” that trained college women to “live among their people in the most destitute areas” to “impart … knowledge of the Bible, personal hygiene, temperance, family and household duties, and habits of punctuality, thrift, and hard work” (p. 35). In Gender and Jim Crow, Gilmore (1996) demonstrated that, after White political leaders had stripped African American men of voting rights following Reconstruction, educated African American women often emerged as political leaders. They used clubs and organizations to create “social and civic structures that wrested some recognition and meager services from the expanding welfare state,” skills they first learned through the education and campus organizations at Black “normal schools, seminaries, and colleges” (pp. xxi, 31). Higher education was no less significant to African American men. Summers (2004) connected the activism at Fisk and Howard Universities in the 1920s to the “shift from Victorian manliness to modern masculinity.” African American men students rejected policies that constricted their behaviors on campus, wanting the “ability to control their own bodies, the freedom to consume and experience bodily pleasure without fear of being punished” (p. 244). Combined, these histories highlighted the importance of higher education in advancing racial equality long before the more visible Civil Rights Era.

Civil Rights and Black Power Eras

Historians have produced many studies that consider the experiences of African American college students —often focusing on their activism—during the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Hogan (2007) offered a detailed history of SNCC’s most active and successful years in the early-1960s. While some historians had argued that SNCC implemented tactics from SDS, Hogan demonstrated that this was at least a reciprocal relationship, with SDS members learning as much if not more from SNCC. Hogan located the origins of SNCC to a group of “ten to twenty students from Fisk University, Vanderbilt University, Meharry Medical College, and American Baptist College” who met weekly in a Black church in Nashville to discuss the tactics of religious and spiritual leaders “and the Europeans who resisted Nazi aggression,” “trying to figure out how to act on their ideas” (p. 8). They soon began engaging in activism and building a larger organization. Facing resistance from the powerful White men—police, judges, and politicians—SNCC members “imagined and put into practice fresh modes of resistance” (p. 3).

These included lunch counter sit-ins in 1960 to desegregate public spaces in the South, the Freedom Rides in 1961 to desegregate southern public transportation, the Freedom Vote in 1963 to demonstrate the desire to vote among disenfranchised African Americans, and, also that year, helping to plan and lead the March on Washington (Hogan, 2007). Perhaps SNCC’s most innovative effort occurred when it created and attempted to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, a group that included African Americans who had tried to register to vote but had been refused by White political leaders, at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. SNCC captured national attention but failed to get their delegates seated. In the aftermath, SNCC leaders gathered on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and tried to implement a more structured and hierarchical organization. This disillusioned many rank-and-file members, and, along with divisions about the role of Whites within the organization and the usefulness of nonviolence, resulted in an end to SNCC’s most influential years. Yet other social movements and organizations, including Black Power, women’s rights, and antiwar, learned lessons and borrowed tactics from SNCC to advance their own causes.

Rogers (2012) and Biondi (2012) considered the larger activist movement of African American college students in the 1960s and 1970s. In many ways, their books nicely complemented each other. Rogers offered an impressive and seemingly exhaustive list of African American student activism across the nation, but he seldom provided deep coverage of any one campus or event. Rogers recovered from historical obscurity accounts of student deaths as a result of law enforcement actions at South Carolina State University in 1968 and North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in 1969, a year before the better remembered shootings at Jackson State and Kent State. Biondi delved deeper into events at fewer campuses, sensitive to geographical and institutional diversity . She demonstrated that activists at HBCUs mobilized to promote Black consciousness, investments in academic programs and facilities, and student involvement in shared governance ; at two CUNY colleges, African American and Puerto Rican student activists insisted on more inclusive admissions policies that helped produce the first significant professional class in New York City from these communities. Biondi also focused on gender, highlighting tensions between men and women activists. Both Rogers and Biondi connected the activism of African American students to the establishment of Black Studies. This field comprised much of what African American students had demanded—representation in the curriculum and on the faculty —but once it became institutionalized, many students became frustrated that it did little to serve the African American community and it became susceptible to disinvestment from White administrators.

Historians have also considered African American activism at individual campuses, dividing their attention between North and South. Studying events at Rutgers University, McCormick (1990) reinvigorated research into African American student activism by bringing a historian’s eye, after the initial books written by participants and journalists. He demonstrated how case studies of single institutions could reveal the interactions of African American students and White university officials. In Black Power on Campus, Joy Williamson (2003) provided a scholarly exemplar of this genre, focusing on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (p. 3). African American students , usually hailing from the same Chicago communities, used the Black Students Association to advance “Black Power principles” on campus (p. 3). University leaders had to balance demands of African American students and expectations of (mostly White ) political leaders and influential citizens who disliked disruptions. Eventually, African American activists helped institutionalize reform efforts, including recruiting diverse students and serving on campus committees. Brady (2012) provided the only account of African American activism on a northern liberal arts campus, exploring the College of Holy Cross’s effort to enroll African Americans in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. The first cohort of African American men to attend Holy Cross confronted both tacit and overt racism, and staged a walkout in 1969; after their graduation in 1972, many went on to impressive careers, including a Supreme Court justice (Clarence Thomas). Other scholars have considered developments at Columbia (Bradley, 2009), Cornell (Downs, 1999), and the University of Pennsylvania (Glasker, 2002).

In works focusing on the South, scholars have divided their attention between desegregation and student activism, though of course desegregation was a particularly bold form of activism. Historians have offered accounts of the desegregation—and sometimes the corresponding violence—of individual institutions in the South, including the United States Naval Academy (Schneller, 2005), University of Alabama (Clark, 1993), University of Georgia (Pratt, 2002), and University of Mississippi (Eagles, 2009). Eagles provided a minute-by-minute account of the negotiations between President Kennedy and Governor Ross Barnett over the admission of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi and the resulting riots between U.S. marshals and White Mississippians that ended in two deaths. Yet Wallenstein’s (1999) article critiqued the perception of desegregation, on the whole, as marked by violence. Most colleges and universities desegregated quietly and peacefully, though often only after a legal challenge. Moreover, violence occurred toward the end—at the institutions and in states most resistant—not the beginning of desegregation. Wallenstein’s article later appeared in an edited book that offered additional perspectives into southern desegregation (Wallenstein, 2008).

Some works focused on southern African American student activism at individual campuses. For example, Lefever (2005) argued that both Spelman College faculty and students had “made major contributions to the civil rights movement” between 1957 and 1967, despite the conservatism that pervaded the campus (p. 252). Shifting her attention from the University of Illinois to the entire state of Mississippi, Williamson (2008) focused on the role of HBCU students in the civil rights movement. Williamson reminded readers that HBCU students could be expelled, suspended, or otherwise punished for their activism. Other writers analyzed specific events, such as the sit-in by a Tougaloo College professor and students at Woolworth lunch counter in Jackson Mississippi in 1963 (O’Brien, 2013) or the shooting at Jackson State University that killed two students and injured twelve more (Spofford, 1988). The bravery, visibility, and success of African American college students —both in the South and North—helped influence the activism of other students long excluded from higher education .

Asian American College Students

Beyond research about White women and African Americans, historically underrepresented groups in higher education have received more limited attention from historians. Research about Asian Americans, for example, spans a long period of time but remains rather sparse. First, historians have noted that before there were significant numbers of Asian Americans enrolled in higher education , there were students from Asia attending American colleges and universities. Leibovitz and Miller (2011) uncovered a program created by the first Chinese graduate of an American university—Yung Wing, Yale Class of 1854—to send Chinese male youths to the United States to study and return home to modernize China. Between 1872 and 1881, over 120 students made the trek, usually at around age 12 and staying through college, enrolling in colleges in the Northeast. These youths were treated far better than Chinese laborers on the West Coast, and they often became involved in campus life and athletics. Fast-forwarding four decades, Lawsin (1996) demonstrated the sometimes blurry distinctions between students from Asia and Asian American students . She studied the experiences of students from the Philippines attending American colleges and universities between 1922 and 1939, years in which the Philippines was a U.S. territory and upwards of 2000 Filipinos enrolled in college annually. Most students self-financed their higher education , but around 500 were sponsored by the colonial government in the Philippines under the condition that they return home and provide an equal length of service to their homeland. By analyzing editions of the Filipino Student Bulletin, which was circulated nationally to Filipino students , Lawsin identified three types of students : cultural missionaries, who resisted acculturation to American life; neocolonialists, who embraced American statehood for the Philippines; and nationalists, who demanded independence and sovereignty for the Philippines. In a troubling twist, the nationalists got their wish but paid a high price: the law that granted Philippine independence revoked citizenship rights of Filipinos studying in the U.S. and restricted future immigration from the islands. In the end, fewer than 60 % of Filipino students returned home, suggesting that many who started their college careers as international students ended as domestic students .

Historians have also provided a chilling reminder that one of the first sizable cohorts of Asian American college students was found in the Japanese internment camps of World War II—more than 4000 interred Japanese youths attended over 600 colleges and universities. Okihiro (1999) focused on the experiences of second-generation Japanese Americans students who, long concentrated within communities in California and to a lesser extent Oregon and Washington, attended college in the Midwest and East Coast. Some of these students faced discrimination and prejudice on campus, and were discouraged from socializing with each other for fear of creating racist backlash. But, on the whole, these students had positive experiences. Austin (2004) focused heavily on the organization—the National Japanese American Student Relocation Council—that facilitated the transfer of young Japanese from the internment campus to colleges and universities. The group navigated a variety of stakeholders, including governmental officials, military leaders, college administrators, philanthropic foundations, and students and their parents, in an effort to release one of the first sizable groups from the internment camps. The council expected Japanese students to “become ambassadors of goodwill” on campus, as well as hoping that higher education for interred Japanese youth would improve the perception of American democracy tarnished by the camps (p. 3). Japanese students overwhelmingly held up their end of the bargain, being well behaved and studious at college, helping to create the perception that Asian Americans thrived within educational and economic systems designed by—and largely benefitting—White Americans, an approach which would later lead to Asian Americans receiving the label of the “model minority.”

Resistance to this label formed another line of research about Asian American college students , which focused on the Asian American Movement. Umemoto (1989) provided a history “of the longest student strike in American history” (p. 3). From November 1968 through April 1969, students at San Francisco State College from a variety of historically oppressed racial groups—including African Americans, Asian Americans, Chicanos, Latinos, and Native Americans—demanded less strict admissions standards and better representation in courses taught and among faculty doing the teaching . The strike may have been most powerful for Asian American students , many of whom embraced activism and rejected acquiescence for the first time. The strike resulted in the establishment of the institution’s School of Ethnic Studies, the first in the nation. Taking a broader and longer approach, Louie and Omatsu (2001) edited a volume that included historical analysis, first-hand accounts, and primary documents of the Asian American Movement from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. That volume could be most useful as a source for subsequent historians, as Nguyen and Gasman (2015a, b) demonstrated in their work on the influence of the movement on college students in late-1960s California and among Vietnamese students at the University of California, Irvine in the 1980s. Asian American college students “drew energy from Black Power ideology” as they pushed to improve their communities’ experiences in higher education and challenge the model minority myth (p. 341). The label was first applied in a 1966 New York Times article that noted Asian Americans’ “achievement in education and employment ” despite “the barriers produced by racial discrimination” (Nguyen & Gasman, 2015a, p. 342). Yet this designation obscured differences within the diverse Asian American community, minimized the struggles of Asian Americans, and pitted them against other racial minorities. Still, as the long strike in San Francisco suggested, one of the main goals of the Asian American Movement was to establish the field of Asian Studies. Some Asian American students resisted the movement, given their desire to advance within the existing social structure, though the Vietnam War helped generate enthusiasm for activism. The late-1960s and early-1970s were formative years for another underrepresented group with a longer history of higher education in North America but a similar limited representation in historical scholarship.

Latino College Students

Latino college student enrollments have increased dramatically in recent decades (Thelin, 2011), but they remained largely absent from the historiography of higher education . College students appeared several times in Victoria-Maria MacDonald’s (2004) “narrated history” of Latino education in North America. Four years before the first normal school in the U.S. was established in Massachusetts, the federal government of Mexico declared in 1833 that normal schools should be established in its territories, including parts of the modern United States. Dozens of Latinos attended the preparatory department of the University of California, Berkeley in the early-1870s, but when the institution closed the department later that decade it effectively shut out enrollments of Latinos until the 1970s. More welcoming was Santa Clara College, where “almost four hundred Hispanic surnamed students ” studied “[b]etween 1851 and 1876” (p. 73). In fact, when Latinos accessed higher education in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, they were usually from wealthy families and usually attended Catholic colleges, which offered “a smooth continuity and accommodation with the Spanish language and religion” (p. 73). Philanthropy, community outreach, and the GI Bill helped more middle-class Latinos attend college in the mid-twentieth century. The federal government provided millions of dollars in financial aid for Cuban refugees to attend college between 1962 and 1976.

By the late 1960s, Latino college students were becoming increasingly visible and active in improving campus climate and their communities (MacDonald, 2004; Muñoz, 1989). “The fall of 1967 witnessed the birth of several Mexican American student organizations” in California and Texas (MacDonald, 2004, p. 224). In 1969, students from several California institutions gathered at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where they agreed to adopt a common name for their campus organizations, Movimeniento Esudiantil Chicano de Aztlán, or MEChA. MEChA’s purpose was threefold: to develop mutually beneficial relationships with supportive students and their organizations; to improve the representation of Latinos within college curriculum and among the student body; and to serve the needs of local Latino communities. Just 2 years later, Puerto Rican students chastised Yale leaders for their paltry enrollment numbers despite the university’s close location to several Puerto Rican population centers. They listed 15 recommendations to improve representation, including having Puerto Rican students accompany admission counsellors on visits to New York City’s Catholic schools. MacDonald and her colleagues (2007) advanced a 5-stage chronology of “the struggle for Latino higher education ” in which student activism was the distinguishing feature of the second stage—self-determination—in the early 1970s. Chicano and Puerto Rican youth activists began demanding “meaningful access to higher education ,” representation in the curriculum and among the faculty , “Hispanic cultural and research centers, and the financial means to realize these goals” in the 1960s and 1970s (p. 476).

Native American College Students

Native American students did not appear in Campus Life , but more recent historians have worked to uncover their experiences in higher education . Wright (1988) offered a provocative history of the role of Native Americans in the establishment and operation of Harvard, William and Mary, and Dartmouth. In order to gain charters for these institutions, their leaders used the pretense of educating and converting to Christianity the Native Americans in the colonies. Leaders also used this rationale to raise money from religiously devout Britons who were uninterested in educating the youth of those who had abandoned their country for the New World but could be persuaded to help with converting those who were there first. Although Native American enrollments beyond a handful never materialized, both Harvard and William and Mary used money earmarked for Native Americans to build large buildings on their campuses, benefitting the sons of colonists. Many generations passed after the Revolution before elite institutions made meaningful efforts to educate Native Americans, though Henry Roe Cloud, a member of the Winnebago Tribe and the first full-blood Native American to graduate from Yale (B.A. 1910, M.A. 1914), proved a notable exception. Pfister (2009) connected Roe Cloud’s undergraduate experiences to his later advocacy for Native Americans. On campus, Roe Cloud demonstrated impressive oratory skills and was tapped for membership to one of Yale’s selective senior societies. He became an influential educator and worked with the federal government to improve Native American communities.

Scholars have also focused on higher education for Native Americans outside of the former colonial colleges. Carney (1999) provided a brief but sweeping history, dividing Native American higher education into three periods: colonial, federal, and self-determination. The longest—the federal period, which stretched from the end of the Revolution until 1960—proved to be the worst, as the federal government refused to cede any control over education to Native Americans. After 1960, Native American activism, the establishment of tribal colleges, foundation grants, and federal funds combined to improve the opportunities for Native American higher education . By the 1990s, over 25,000 students attended 31 tribal colleges.

Other scholars have explored the experiences of Native American students at individual institutions. Lindsey (1995) studied Native American students at Hampton Institute, an HBCU in Virginia. Native Americans, often from reservations in the West, began enrolling in 1878; almost 1400 traveled to Hampton over the next 50 years. Complicated race relations ensued, as White institutional leaders, African American faculty and students , and Native American students navigated the campus. Mihesuah (1993) and Neuman (2014) each considered institutions in Oklahoma. The Cherokee Female Seminary opened in 1851 (Mihesuah 1993), and would eventually become Northeastern State University. Modeled after Mount Holyoke, it offered students a liberal arts curriculum , though it primarily served the most advantaged members of the community—students with educated parents, only partial native bloodlines, and, thus, lighter complexions. Neuman offered a longer history of nearby Bacone College. Members of several tribes attended Bacone, and Neuman explored the extent to which these students shared an overarching identity as Native Americans. Bacone students were savvy about challenging Native American stereotypes while taking advantage of many White Americans’ interest in Native American culture, creating a vibrant campus experience in the process. For example, as affluent White women became “collectors” of Native American art in the first half of the twentieth century, Bacone leaders and students helped supply this demand and invested the proceeds into strengthening the institution’s study of Native American culture and art.

College Students with Disabilities

In Campus Life , Horowitz (1987) noted that the exclusion experienced by Earl Miers, who had cerebral palsy, upon his entrance to Rutgers in 1929 led to his becoming a campus rebel. In the years since both Miers entered Rutgers and Horowitz published her book, students with disabilities have become increasingly present on college campuses. However, they remain largely excluded from the historiography of higher education . Several historians have focused on efforts to improve the campus for students with physical disabilities. Brown (2008) highlighted how Tim Nugent, a 24-year-old graduate student and disabled veteran, developed the Disability Resources and Educational Services at the University of Illinois after World War II. University leaders had originally implemented the program at the behest of prominent veterans, but soon became “wary of the possibility that the” institution “would become known more for its disabled students than for other activities” (p. 171). Nugent and students with disabilities protested threats to close the program, and pressure from the Department of Veterans Affairs kept it in operation. With the program secure, Nugent went on to create opportunities for students with disabilities to participate in athletics, physical therapy, and community service. The program also helped university leaders commit in the early-1950s to the accessibility of all future buildings, decades before the federal mandate. Similarly, Klink (2014) explored how Betty Nelson, an assistant dean of women, helped implement the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 at Purdue University. She invited students with disabilities to serve as consultants to campus construction projects.

Christiansen and Barnartt (1995) explored the activism of students with disabilities by studying the Deaf President Now protests at Gallaudet University in 1988. The protests began when the Gallaudet board selected the only hearing person out of three finalists for the presidency on March 6. In the ensuing week, students blocked the gates to campus, burned effigies, and marched on Capitol Hill, achieving their four demands: selection of a deaf president, the resignation of the board of trustees’ chairwoman, majority representation on the board by deaf people, and no retaliation against protesters. The protest may have been especially successful because of the coalition who supported the students , including young Gallaudet alumni, sympathetic Gallaudet faculty , and many in the larger deaf community.

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) College Students

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) college students became increasingly visible on campus in the last half of the twentieth century. Their experiences have become increasingly represented in the historiography of higher education in the early twenty-first century, though, along the LGBT spectrum, studies have focused on the experiences of gay men. Patrick Dilley (2002b) interviewed almost 60 “non-heterosexual” men who attended college between 1957 and 2000. To a large degree, Dilley offered a historical student identity theory, developing a typology and situating them within specific time periods: homosexual (1940s–1960s, men acknowledge attractions but maintained a high level of privacy); gay (late 1960s–2000s, men publicly announced attractions and worked within “institutional systems to create change”); and queer (late 1980s–2000s, men “very publicly deployed identity and tried to change social systems”) (p. 5). Shand-Tucci (2003) connected the lives of many gay or bisexual (sometimes broadly defined) Harvard faculty , alumni, and students to larger developments in American culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Historians have also studied administrators’ persecution of gay college men and LGBT student activism through their student organizations. Dilley (2002a) considered the ways that higher education leaders had attempted to “control” gay college men across the twentieth century. From the 1940s through the 1960s, administrators expelled gay students —or even students perceived to be gay or those who associated with gay people. Administrators went so far as to conduct sting operations with local law enforcement to catch gay students , and noted the rationale for expulsions on transcripts and letters of recommendations, effectively preventing expelled students from transferring to other institutions and forestalling promising careers. Such expulsions could come days before graduation and even lead those punished to commit suicide. From the 1950s through the 1970s, administrators increasingly sent gay students to counseling, with the goal of eradicating homosexual desires. They also refused to recognize and support gay student organizations for two decades beginning in the early 1970s, forcing gay college students to sue their alma mater to claim their Constitutional rights. Other scholars have focused on purges of gay students —or those perceived to be gay—at specific campuses in the first half of the twentieth century, including Dartmouth (Syrett, 2007), Harvard (W. Wright, 2005), and the Universities of Missouri, Texas, and Wisconsin (Nash & Silverman, 2015).

Against this backdrop of aggressive homophobia, the first gay student organizations were established. Beemyn (2003) offered a history of the first two LGBT college student organizations, demonstrating that these groups predated the Stonewall Inn riots of 1969, generally considered the beginning of the gay rights movement. The Student Homophile League (SHL) was founded at Columbia in 1967, before branching out to Cornell a year later. At both campuses, gay students encountered hostility from administrators in registering their organizations, relied on sympathetic straight students to join their group and circumvent administrative roadblocks, and were advised by liberal campus religious leaders rather than student affairs administrators. Cornell’s SHL was rife with internal divisions. Heterosexual members wanted to focus on education, the most openly gay members wanted to build a gay culture rather than fit into the existing straight one, and more closeted gay members wanted to meet similar students without being outed to the larger public. Influenced by student radicals in other movements—antiwar, women’s rights, Black Power, and SDS—SHL leaders decided to stop appeasing their “more closeted members” and adopt a more visible and activist approach. This proved largely successful, leading to the establishment of over 175 student organizations on college campuses just 4 years after the first at Columbia.

Some of these organizations soon materialized in states like Kansas (Bailey, 1999) and Florida (Clawson, 2013, 2014) long inhospitable to sexual minorities (e.g., Graves, 2009). Clawson (2013) first focused on Hiram Ruiz, a Cuban who started the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) at Florida State University in 1970. “There was nothing even close” to a gay rights organization in the South in 1970, Clawson noted, writing that “[t]he significance” of Ruiz’s efforts “should not be understated” (p. 144). The student body president and leaders in the women’s rights and Black Power movements supported the GLF, though the university “banned the group from using campus facilities” (p. 145). Within the organization, GLF members struggled with how to respond and support a transgender student . The GLF also helped establish a gay student group at the University of Florida (UF), which fought over the first half of the 1970s to gain recognition (Clawson, 2014). Clawson demonstrated that the increasing visibility of the organization simultaneously helped students struggling with their sexuality while at the same time risked members’ safety. During the most important event of the year for the UF gay student organization, members of the Kappa Alpha Fraternity “set up a table and asked passersby to sight a petition ‘calling for the execution of homosexuals’ ” (p. 224). As Dilley’s (2002a) article noted, some gay student organizations had to sue institutions to receive recognition and resources (Bailey, 1999; Reichard, 2010). Reichard (2010) argued that a successful lawsuit at Sacramento State College led to a “golden age” of gay activism, resulting in changes in the curriculum , week-long events, and more students coming out. Similarly, Beemyn (2003) and Clawson both argued that gay student organizations served formative roles in the establishment of a visible and activist gay rights movement in the larger society.

College Student Activities and Behaviors

In the post-Horowitz era, many historians have focused on specific groups of students and their experiences in higher education . Others have produced scholarship about college students that largely falls into two categories: student organizations and student behavior . In terms of student organizations, Current (1990) provided a history of one of the oldest in the country, Phi Beta Kappa. Founded in 1776 at William and Mary as an organization that blended literary society and fraternity, it became the most prestigious honorary organization in the United States. Morelock (2008) demonstrated the importance of literary societies and dramatic clubs to both college students and the larger community in Lexington, Kentucky around the turn of the twentieth century. Historians have written several histories of Christian student organizations (Evans, 2003; Setran, 2007; Turner, 2008). Setran (2007) reminded readers that just as higher education began to shed its sectarian nature, almost 30 % of college men joined the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). Dorothy Finnegan and her colleagues have devoted significant attention to the YMCA (Alleman & Finnegan, 2009; Finnegan, 2005, 2006; Finnegan & Alleman, 2013; Finnegan & Cullaty, 2001), often demonstrating that the organization and its leaders inaugurated programs and educational practices that served as the foundation for the student affairs field (e.g., Hevel, 2016).

Historians have paid particular attention to fraternities and sororities, focusing on specific types—including historically Black (Giddings, 1988; Ross, 2000; Whaley, 2010), Jewish (Sanua, 2003), and traditionally White (Syrett, 2009; Turk, 2004; Wilkie, 2010). Syrett offered the longest and most interpretive history, arguing that members of White men’s fraternities represented the dominant form of masculinity on campus from their inception at the beginning of the nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth. What constituted dominant masculinity changed over time, with debating skills in the antebellum period replaced by drinking skills in the twentieth century. Wilkie explored masculinity within a single White fraternity at the University of California, Berkeley, drawing on evidence from an archaeological excavation of two of the fraternity’s old chapter houses. Whaley explored the history of Alpha Kappa Alpha, the oldest historically Black sorority, demonstrating the organization’s complicated role over time—sometimes promoting feminism while other times promoting femininity, sometimes emphasizing social life and other times working for social change.

Beyond formal organizations, historians have also studied the more elusive behaviors of college students . Pranks pulled and traditions started by college students have been the subject of several well-written if not overly analytical books (Bronner, 2012; Peterson, 2003; Steinberg, 1992). Beth Bailey (1988, 1999) has written two of the most sophisticated histories of student behavior . In From Front Porch to Back Seat, Bailey chronicled the change in courtship practices among American youth from “calling” to “dating” that occurred between 1920 and 1965. This shifted courtship from private to public spaces, and young women lost power in this transition.

Sex in the Heartland picked up where Bailey’s first book left off, exploring how the sexual revolution influenced the community and college students in Lawrence, Kansas. The permissiveness of the 1960s was a far cry from the restrictive sexuality of earlier eras, as Nelson (2003) demonstrated with a history of a “scandal” that rocked the University of Missouri when students (including 1000 women) answered a survey about sex administered by two faculty members in the 1920s. Lowe (2003) demonstrated that the bodies of women college students had long been a concern of educators and the larger public. Before World War I, college women embraced food and hearty appetites as signs of good health; afterwards, college women succumbed to the flapper style, which idealized thinness, exposed skin, and revealing dresses.

Two things college women—and college men—did with their bodies was to sing and to wear clothes. Winstead (2013) traced the history of college singing from colonial Harvard into the twentieth century, focusing on what students sang, their songs about college, and their informal and formal musical groups. Technological changes across the twentieth century, including the rise of the automobile, film, and portable music players all contributed to changing most college students from active singers into passive listeners. Clemente (2014) demonstrated that the styles that dominate contemporary Americans’ wardrobes—short-sleeved shirts, sweaters, shorts, and khakis—became popularized on college campuses beginning in the early twentieth century. College students valued clothes that were comfortable and durable. They established these styles as social customs and campus rules about their attire relaxed, although students at historically Black colleges, especially African American women, were subject to strict dress codes into the 1960s. Clemente’s book deviated from much historical scholarship by showing how college students influenced the larger society rather than society’s influence on students .

Activism on campus has been another way college students have influenced the larger society. As the previously-cited activism of historically underrepresented groups suggests, historians have devoted a significant amount of attention to college students ’ efforts to enact social change. Cohen (1993) offered a particularly strong and comprehensive history of college student activism in the 1930s, but historians have overwhelmingly privileged the 1960s and early 1970s. Historians have focused on specific aspects, such as SDS (Barber, 2008), the Peace Movement (Heineman, 1993), and the Free Speech Movement (Cohen & Zelnik, 2002), including the effect of campus bans on Communist speakers (Billingsley, 1999). Several books considered the relationships between African American activists and White activists—and sometimes antagonists—in the South (Cohen & Snyder, 2013; Michel, 2004; Turner, 2010). Others have focused on more precise locations, studying activism among students in states such as Arkansas (Wallach & Kirk, 2011) and Mississippi (Marshall, 2013) or on specific campuses such as Berkelely (Rorabaugh, 1989) and Stanford (Lyman, 2009). A particularly interesting line of research has centered on how conservative students experienced the 1960s and how that decade influenced conservative political ideology for the remainder of the twentieth century (Andrew, 1997; Klatch, 1999; Rosenfeld, 2012; Schneider, 1999). Rosenfeld, using records obtained after a 30-year legal battle with the FBI, demonstrated how the FBI and Ronald Reagan colluded to fire administrators and circumvent student activists, all of which helped lead to Reagan’s increasing conservatism and popularity. Horowitz’s rebels—at least the 1960s variety—have garnered significant historical attention over the last 30 years.

Specificity and Synthesis

Although Frederick Rudolph could rightly criticize his contemporaries in 1966 for neglecting college students , today there may be no subject better represented in the historiography of higher education . With students being the most numerous members of the academic community, this attention is certainly warranted. But while historians have increased the study of college students since the publication of Campus Life , few have followed Helen Horowitz ’s lead in offering a synthesis of college students from different backgrounds over long periods of time. Mostly, recent historical scholarship has centered on a particular group of students , often at a specific type of institution over several decades. These studies have made the historiography of higher education much more inclusive, better reflecting the various pasts of the diverse students who attend college today. At the same time, the historiography of students has become more dispersed, making it challenging to understand changes and continuities over time.

Moving forward, historians could well serve higher education stakeholders by continuing to explore specific groups of students but also synthesizing what we know about previous generations. Most importantly, historians must continue to study the past of historically underrepresented students , including African American, Asian American, Latino, and LGBT students . And there are other subjects beyond specific student groups that deserve study. Ogren (2005) provided detailed insights into students at normal schools in the late-nineteenth century, but we know little about students at the subsequent teachers colleges and comprehensive universities that normal schools evolved into. Even the colonial period, the least diverse era of higher education , seems poised for more scholarly attention, whether by identifying previously unused sources or reanalyzing those that earlier historians relied upon. That is always the challenge of researching the history of college students : What sources exist to aid the reconstruction and interpretation of students ’ experiences? Usually the more excluded a group was from higher education in the past, the fewer the sources that survive in the present. Historians must identify creative ways to overcome this obstacle.

At the same time, historians must consider synthesizing existing research to explore developments across long periods of time and across student populations. Yet, writing another book like Horowitz’s—a long history that aimed to include most groups, however unevenly—may be less feasible today, given the sheer diversity of experiences historians have covered since the late-1980s. Syntheses of specific collegiate populations may be more manageable projects, both for historians and readers. The existing research about White women’s higher education from the antebellum era to the mid-twentieth century seems especially ripe for such an undertaking, which could focus on the types of institutions women accessed, what they learned, what they did outside the classroom, and how their education influenced their adults lives, all while acknowledging change over time and deviations among regions and students ’ socioeconomic backgrounds; including the experiences of women from oppressed racial backgrounds would make such work even stronger. Synthesizing works on twentieth-century student activism —paying careful attention to similarities and differences across historically unrepresented students —would also offer much in terms of understanding the past.

Campus Life endures not because it represents the most sophisticated understanding of the history of college students today—no 30-year-old book could—but because it provides a useful way of thinking about college students across generations. Historians can provide updated scholarship that accomplishes the same task, even if it might not be accomplished in one book. A healthy balance between synthesizing existing scholarship and new studies of specific student groups would be a particularly useful approach for historians of higher education to take over the next 30 years.