Eminent historian Roger L. Geiger offers in this volume a comprehensive institutional history of the modern university system, forged in the aftermath of World War II as the United States’ economy rapidly expanded and restructured around the achievement of American political and cultural dominance in world affairs. Geiger agrees with most recent cultural historians that in the prosperous years after the war “a powerful consensus formed that venerated the ‘American way of life,’” stressing “an idealization of family, church, and nation” while fostering “complacency and blindness toward those not sharing [the] benefits” of a rising standard of living (x).

Yet at the same time, as Geiger makes clear, that way of life was contested, especially in the growing educational economy, so that as prosperity fostered a conservative temperament, it also provided the groundwork for what Geiger, following others, identifies as “the Liberal Hour,” a period of extraordinary reform running from the end of the 1950s through the early 1970s. That burst of reform included a newly favorable public opinion of academic life and institutions that contributed to an “academic revolution” (107). Though it began in the wake of World War II with the GI Bill and the federal response to sputnik in 1958, Geiger argues that the “great inflation” (96) of academe, involving massive increases in funding, building and enrollment, was spurred not only by state and federal policy (for instance, the expansion of the National Institutes of Health and the creation of the National Institute of Science in 1960), but also by corporate nonprofit agencies like the Ford Foundation, which followed new educational technocrats like University of California's Glenn Seaborg and Clark Kerr in boosting the national commitment to the natural and social sciences.

And while he acknowledges the more critical assessments of this great transformation, which emphasize the corporate, military and bureaucratic character of emerging higher education, Geiger comes down firmly on the side of the “quest for knowledge” (116) as the source of that revolution, at the core of which stood “the explosion of graduate study, the proliferation of research, and the hegemony of the professoriate” (108). In this sense Geiger is a firm advocate of arguments like Daniel Bell's that the American economy, having passed into a “postindustrial” age, became increasingly driven by knowledge production, with academic institutions at the center.

Geiger is at his best when tying this academic expansion to other dimensions of the economy, notably the labor market, connecting its “functional reactions” in both private and public sectors to increased production of college graduates, including profound adjustments in standards of employment. In this new economy, a “new model of society” emerged in which “the university constituted a central institution, education and individual development were basic human rights for all, and expanded human capital contributed to a more rationally managed society” (133–34). The academic revolution, then, was substantially market-driven, the “Liberal Hour” and concerted state intervention notwithstanding, and it was on the wave of market demand that the United States became “the first society to achieve mass higher education” (137).

Key to this history is the underlying pressure to render higher education more egalitarian. As the baby boom produced a wave of new high-school graduates in the mid-1960s, earlier resistance to educational expansion based on elitist assumptions that most Americans lacked the intellectual capacity for the higher learning, and that the economy would not produce jobs for the growing number of college graduates, gradually receded. Public universities, state colleges and community colleges especially, and the liberal core education they promoted, helped advance the goals of 1960s social movements. Yet, while Geiger credits postwar higher education with opening new routes to social, racial and gender equality, he follows a number of other historians in harshly criticizing American colleges and universities for simultaneously fostering new forms of educational stratification, beginning in the 1970s, as conventional and traditional privilege was replaced by a system in which debt and a “selectivity sweepstakes” (333) among more prestigious and heavily funded colleges and research universities created new forms of economic and social inequality.

Unfortunately, after masterfully recounting the economic and institutional evolution of the American university and college system through the 1970s, Geiger offers only a sketchy account of the impact of affirmative action on American campuses. There is nothing in this volume, moreover, on campus sexual assault and its profoundly discriminatory impact on women's access to higher education. Instead, Geiger subjects his readers to a screed against “political correctness,” as if student anger about comportment and speech during the last two decades came out of nowhere. And while acknowledging the profound inequalities of prewar colleges, with their open forms of discrimination and bigotry, and while showing quite clearly how many of them (the admission of legacies, for instance) continue into the twenty-first century in new form, Geiger oddly finds complaints by students of color and women about racism and sexism somehow out of place in a persistently inegalitarian system. Readers will also be disappointed to find little on the advent of shared governance and tenure rights, a rather short treatment of sectoral union organizing that slights graduate students and non-teaching staff, a tiny segment on restructuring around contingent labor, and very limited coverage of issues of academic freedom, despite an early chapter on McCarthyism.

But this book is still a fine achievement, based on a comprehensive survey of secondary literature, government studies and university and college self-studies, and for that reason alone it deserves a thorough reading by historians of postwar higher education, college and university administrators, state and federal policymakers, college faculty, graduate students, and anyone expecting to pass through the halls of higher learning, which as Geiger points out has since the turn of the twenty-first century included a majority of young Americans.