Allison L. Palmadessa

Since the first American colonial colleges, higher education has served the nation as an arbiter of knowledge, conduit of democratic idealism, and producer of leaders, workers, and innovation. As the nation changed alongside world events and technological advancement, postsecondary institutions supported growth, met demands from the public and private sectors as well as states and the federal government, heeding a call to perpetuate the US’s position among nations as the undisputed world leader. This was most evident in the immediate post World War II era, with roots established much earlier. Each chapter in this work focuses on a moment of crisis in American history that involves the relationship of higher education to national goals. This work aims to fill a gap in the history of higher education and further our understanding of how an institution so appreciated in times of greatness can be rebranded by critics as negligent and harmful to national goals.

This book traces the full history of the Higher Education Act of 1965 in its entirety, to the present. The fifty-six-year history of this landmark legislation is analyzed as a genealogical phenomenon through multiple methodological and theoretical frameworks. This allows the researcher to study the Act not in a linear or single approach, rather the blend of lenses and methods creates a means to study policy-making as a site of ideological reproduction and results in the exposure of power dynamics that obfuscate the hidden agenda by those in positions of power.

This book traces the full history of the Higher Education Act of 1965 in its entirety, to the present. The fifty-six-year history of this landmark legislation is analyzed as a genealogical phenomenon through multiple methodological and theoretical frameworks. This allows the researcher to study the Act not in a linear or single approach, rather the blend of lenses and methods creates a means to study policy-making as a site of ideological reproduction and results in the exposure of power dynamics that obfuscate the hidden agenda by those in positions of power.

This book critically considers how tertiary institutions of higher education in the United States are charged with the duty of preserving democracy, teaching citizenship literacy, and contributing to economic stability. The author offers a comparative analysis of how presidential and national policy agendas shape these social institutions’ re-creation and re-constitution of ideological identities that influence the social position of the participants in the institution types, creating a divide in the realization of national identity across institutional and class lines. In fulfilling this role, four- and two-year institutions become representations of the social class divisions in the United States as the institutions and their students experience American national identity differently. By answering a call to serve the American public and presidential agendas, institutions of higher education reinforce the economic and social divisions in American society, resulting in varied understandings of American national identity.

This book critically considers how tertiary institutions of higher education in the United States are charged with the duty of preserving democracy, teaching citizenship literacy, and contributing to economic stability. The author offers a comparative analysis of how presidential and national policy agendas shape these social institutions’ re-creation and re-constitution of ideological identities that influence the social position of the participants in the institution types, creating a divide in the realization of national identity across institutional and class lines. In fulfilling this role, four- and two-year institutions become representations of the social class divisions in the United States as the institutions and their students experience American national identity differently. By answering a call to serve the American public and presidential agendas, institutions of higher education reinforce the economic and social divisions in American society, resulting in varied understandings of American national identity.

This volume examines the role of higher education in producing and reproducing American cultural identity from 1862 to 2015 and considers whether changes in federal policy regarding higher education result in paradigm shifts that directly impact the purpose of higher education. American institutions of higher education have served as a beacon of American idealism and identity since the foundation of the earliest universities. As the nation developed, higher education matured and maintained a position of importance in the future of the nation. While the university has perpetuated American national cultural identity, the nation-state has resourced and legitimated the university, inextricably linking national identity and higher education. In this historical analysis, the relationship between national identity, federal legislation, and higher education is established, and an identity of superiority, defined in economic terms, reinforced by higher education, is revealed.