I failed the higher education section of my comprehensive exam in my doctoral program at Teachers College in the late 1980s. My writing on the section was simply awful, and I knew it, but I didn't really care because I had not liked any of the books I had read for that section. Thankfully, my academic career was salvaged by a brilliant pedagogical move by Professor Larry Cremin who, during my orals, allowed me to turn my cranky resistance to the history of higher education into a historiographical analysis when he asked me why I thought I did so poorly on that section. Because the writing on the history of higher education was so boring, I said. Why was it boring? he asked. And off I went, explaining how the history of higher education was largely institutional and policy history and there was little social history about student life. Helen Horowitz's recently published Campus Life was one exception, as were a few new studies of women's colleges. But, I complained, that research was narrowly focused on a select grouping of elite institutions. Not interesting. Why aren't historians examining the great variety of higher institutions and all the wild things that students do in them?

Thirty years later, much has changed, and this terrific collection pulls together the best of that new research, offering both new social history content on diverse types of student life and new historiographical arguments.

The coeditors use Horowitz's 1987 book—essentially the first book about student life in higher education—as a frame for the essays that explore students’ role in shaping college culture. The reference to Horowitz is simultaneously respectful and critical: in her broad study of over two hundred years of student life and culture, Horowitz identified three distinct ways of being an undergraduate: college men, outsiders, and rebels. Largely focused on elite northeastern institutions, she rarely considered gender, race, class, or sexuality in her analysis. Both the editors and the authors of this collection identify these limitations, and then move on: the point of the volume is not to critique old history but to showcase new history and to offer new historiographical insights and recommendations. As many of the authors note, Horowitz herself recognized the limitations of her initial foray into a broad history of student life. Her oft-quoted comment is that her study is like a photograph taken at a distance that offers only the “broadest features of the landscape” and that does not capture specific “hills and valleys.”Footnote ¹

The volume begins with a dynamic historiographical essay by Michael Hevel and Heidi Jaeckle that zeros in on the extent and nature of historical research on college student populations, organizations, and behaviors. The essay sets the stage for the subsequent chapters: the concentrated focus on higher education student life and the nature of the research on this topic since the 1990s that offers “a more complete and complex” portrait of higher education in the United States (p. 30).

And off we go. The following ten original research essays each contribute to a new complete and complex view of the history of higher education. The most obvious contribution is the diversity of institutions under study: community colleges, state colleges, predominantly black colleges in the South, evangelical colleges, and normal schools are all locations for studies of student life. Even more powerful is the diversity of student cultures under study, including the history of gender-fluid drag culture; student engagement with labor, black, Mexican American, and evangelical Christian student activists; and new perspectives on fraternity and sorority life.

The definition of “student activism” itself comes under question and broadens the definition far beyond the typically identified 1960s and 1970s leftist political movements. Tim Cain's study of student activists and organized labor charts the activism of students working both for and against labor. Christopher Tudico uncovers an organized Mexican American Movement that both predated and set the stage for the more popularly known Chicano student activist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Marc VanOverbeke argues that students who organized to promote a football team at a California state college did so in part to make their college culture more “legitimate” by replicating more established colleges and by expanding access and inclusion of underrepresented students. Was there student activism at evangelical Christian colleges in the 1960s and 1970s? Yes, says Adam Laats, in a fascinating study of such students’ unique responses to in loco parentis guidelines. And Joy Williamson-Lott makes a powerful case for the study of black student activists on predominantly black college campuses, arguing that historians’ tendency to study black activist students in their off-campus engagements with white civil rights activists has obscured the recognition of black students’ activism and agency as students on their own campuses.

Another fascinating theme is that of students’ search for “legitimacy,” which itself critiques Horowitz's conflation of elite northeastern colleges as the dominant model of higher education. Nicholas Strohl's excellent essay on community colleges turns Horowitz's frame inside out: at nonelite, nonresidential, and non-four-year community colleges, where the “nontraditional” student is the typical student, and where it's not always clear whether community colleges even count as higher education, historical studies have tended to focus on what community colleges were not, thus ignoring the student life that did exist there. How students sought to gain the recognition and legitimacy of traditional higher education, while still maintaining their unique student culture is also a topic of the essays on state colleges and normal schools. The story of student life in these institutions is offered not as an exception to the rule but as a culture with its own shape and life.

The book title, Rethinking Campus Life, is both specific and referential. The essays offer a literal rethinking of traditionally told tales of college student life and offer a revision and refresher to Helen Horowitz's original book of the same name. Bookended by a powerful introduction and conclusion by the two coeditors, the volume is both a rethinking of an older frame from the past and an introduction to new work in the future. It is a comprehensive and forward-thinking volume.