With the publication of Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research Universities since World War II (1993), Roger L. Geiger emerged as a leading scholar of the American research university. His subsequent work, most notably, Knowledge and Money: Research Universities and the Paradox of the Marketplace (2004), helped to deepen our understanding of the university and its relationship to American capitalism. His latest project has been a two-volume history of American higher education, whose final volume, American Higher Education since World War II, is a deeply researched work of historical synthesis that brilliantly illuminates many of the central trends in the history of American higher education.
Armed with a wealth of data, Geiger convincingly traces the trajectory of American higher education, connecting the rise of mass higher education access and the vast expansion of the university's research function to economic growth, the emergence of a postindustrial economy, and the eager support of the federal government. Yet Geiger also shows that soon after this era of growth (and the university's heady realization of itself as a central institution in the knowledge economy and information age) came the grim era of retrenchment initiated by the economic dislocations and recession of the 1970s. Geiger narrates the roller coaster ride that followed, with universities responding to declining government support via tuition hikes, privatization, and scientific collaborations with high-tech corporations, all of which aided in a return to growth, while raising a host of ethical problems that the author probes carefully. The book is especially revealing on the issue of stratification and the troubling equity issues raised by the gap between elite and nonelite higher educational institutions and the “selectivity sweepstakes” in admissions.
Admirable as institutional history, Geiger's book falters in the realms of intellectual and political history. This is especially so in his last chapter, as he assesses the culture wars that racked America's campuses in the twenty-first century. To his credit, Geiger notes at the start of this chapter that writing such recent history is problematic, that “historians should approach [writing about] the present with trepidation” (p. 313). He thinks this is so only because it is “difficult to explain “why things happen and “even more conjectural” to be sure of “what their significance might be” (p. 313). But he misses the deeper problem: being immersed in the events of his (and our) own time requires you to work especially hard to correct for your own biases. This lack of self-awareness leads to a biased narrative of the culture wars, with Geiger choosing sides rather than offering a fair-minded account. The most dubious sources—from the exaggerated reports on free speech violations from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) to FIRE president Greg Lukianoff's and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt's crude stereotyping of an entire college generation as “coddled”—are used to support Geiger's antiradical caricature of the twenty-first-century student Left. And the faculty Left fares no better, with Geiger uncritically quoting a polemical foe of political correctness who slandered radical American historians by claiming they had “developed a hatred of America so visceral that it makes one wonder why they bother studying America at all” (p. 353). Geiger himself asserts that “academic historians have cohered around disidentification with America and its past. Topics of wide general interest—the Founding Fathers, the Civil War, and political history generally—have been ceded to nonacademic writers (to their profit)” (p. 353). If this were true—and it most certainly is not—it would come as news to the eminent historians who publish prize-winning books on all these topics and the many other historians who regularly break new ground on them in such leading journals of the historical profession as Civil War History, Journal of the Early Republic, William and Mary Quarterly, Journal of American history, Journal of Southern History, and many others.
A related problem occurs in Geiger's chapter covering the student movement of the 1960s, where his antiradicalism gives us an almost unrelentingly negative depiction of student antiwar and Black Power activists. On his pages, the antiwar movement seemed more motivated by the unreasoning hypermilitancy of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) than by the war itself. Geiger tells of student blockades against Dow Chemical recruiters without describing the horrifying impact that napalm bombs, the chemical weapon Dow helped the US military construct, had on Vietnamese civilians, including children—failing to relay the urgency protesters felt about stopping such war criminality. Only by ignoring protests over campus assistance to the Selective Service—where universities offered testing and grade information that Washington used to draft students fated to serve in Vietnam—can Geiger dismiss it as “quasi-religious fanaticism” when protesters denounced “university complicity” with the war machine (p. 206). Geiger's loathing of SDS militants is so strong that he fails to notice that most student activists were nonviolent or that the largest student protests in American history, in the wake of the Kent State and Jackson State massacres, occurred after SDS had imploded.
Geiger's political framework for understanding the 1960s antiwar movement and the politics of that era is the old and melodramatic declension argument positing a late 1960s liberal and New Left collapse caused by foolish radical confrontationalism and violence (an argument put forth by historian Allen Matusow back in 1984 in his book The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s), which historians of social protest have long since dismissed as simplistic. Narrating violent late 1960s campus conflicts at Columbia, Cornell, San Francisco State, and SUNY Buffalo, Geiger terms the 1968–1970 era as “Academic Armageddon” (p. 190), failing to note that nonviolent campus movements for gay rights, women's rights, racial diversity, and environmentalism were just hitting their stride in these years (Geiger mentions in his 1970s chapter the City College of New York strike for open admissions and gains in women's studies and other feminist goals without exploring their roots in that same late 1960s era he had just dismissed as nihilistic).
Although Geiger makes real efforts to broaden his focus beyond research universities, his primary area of expertise, they still occupy center stage too often. While he does offer valuable statistics on community colleges, we never hear from their students or faculty. A similar problem occurs in his handling of historically black colleges and universities. From his one paragraph on the anti-Jim Crow sit-in movement of 1960–1961 (p. 156), one would never know that black campuses across the South became the base for the first mass student movement of the decade, or have a clue as to how it was possible for these socially conservative campuses (some of which expelled their nonviolent student activists) to play this role in revolutionizing race relations in the nation's most conservative region.
These problems are unfortunate but do not negate Geiger's larger accomplishment, which is explaining the rise and shifting fortunes of American higher educational institutions over the past seven decades with great clarity and verve. Even though one must look elsewhere for a more fair-minded and convincing account of the academic Left, Geiger's book offers a sweeping narrative of higher education that richly rewards readers seeking to understand how these educational institutions became so central to American life and yet have been so often mired in a love-hate relationship with the public.
