Episode 078—The Lost Promise of Higher Ed (feat. Dr. Ellen Schrecker)

Is this a podcast potluck because our guest Dr. Ellen Schrecker brought us a buffet of tasty historical treats this week. Join us as we discuss her explore how America's unjust involvement in Vietnam and the Black Power and Civil Rights Movement forever changed the landscape and trajectory of the American higher education system. Then learn even more in her recent book: The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s. (Get her book here)

Lewis Powell Memo
Vietnam War Teach Ins at University of Michigan
Bernard Fall on street with VN soldiers
Bulletin started by asian studies scholars to educate/protest US involvement in Vietnam
Faculty with armbands in front of low library at Columbia University
Bakke decision protests
SFSU protests
SFSU faculty strikers

More on Ellen
Ellen Schrecker is an American historian and author who has written extensively about McCarthyism and American higher education. Her latest book, The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s (University of Chicago Press, 2021) provides the first comprehensive analysis of American higher education’s most turbulent decade.

Her previous books include No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (1986), The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents (3d ed. 2017), Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (1998), and The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the University (2010).

Besides publishing articles in The Nation, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere, she edited Academe, the American Association of University Professors’ magazine. She also wrote a Chinese cookbook. She is a retired professor of history at Yeshiva University and lives in New York City.

Website: https://www.ellenschrecker.com/

SOURCES:

Robert Cohen and Reginald Zelnick, The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s

Jerry L. Avorn, et al., Up Against the Ivy Wall: A History of the Columbia Crisis 

Immanuel Wallerstein and Paul Starr, The University Crisis Reader 

Sarah Bridger, Scientists at War: The Ethics of Cold War Weapons Research

Martha Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus

Confrontation: The Student Rebellion and the Universities, ed., Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol 

Radical Sociologist and the Movement: Experiences, Lessons, and Legacies, ed., Martin Oppenhigherk Martin J. Murray, and Rhonda F. Levine

CREDITS: Original Theme: Garreth Spinn
Original Art: Sarah Cruz
Animations: The Banditry Co.

SPONSORS: This season of Shared History is sponsored by RAYGUN, Herbiery Brewing & The Banditry Co.