For the Common Good - (American Institutions and Society) by Charles Dorn (Hardcover)

About the Book

Are colleges and universities in a period of unprecedented disruption? Is a bachelor's degree still worth the investment? Are the humanities coming to an end? What, exactly, is higher education good for?In For the Common Good, Charles Dorn challenges the rhetoric of America's so-called crisis in higher education by investigating two centuries...

Book Synopsis

Are colleges and universities in a period of unprecedented disruption? Is a bachelor's degree still worth the investment? Are the humanities coming to an end? What, exactly, is higher education good for?

In For the Common Good, Charles Dorn challenges the rhetoric of America's so-called crisis in higher education by investigating two centuries of college and university history. From the community college to the elite research university--in states from California to Maine--Dorn engages a fundamental question confronted by higher education institutions ever since the nation's founding: Do colleges and universities contribute to the common good?

Tracking changes in the prevailing social ethos between the late eighteenth and early twenty-first centuries, Dorn illustrates the ways in which civic-mindedness, practicality, commercialism, and affluence influenced higher education's dedication to the public good. Each ethos, long a part of American history and tradition, came to predominate over the others during one of the four chronological periods examined in the book, informing the character of institutional debates and telling the definitive story of its time. For the Common Good demonstrates how two hundred years of political, economic, and social change prompted transformation among colleges and universities--including the establishment of entirely new kinds of institutions--and refashioned higher education in the United States over time in essential and often vibrant ways.

Review Quotes

For the Common Good makes a strong contribution to the scholarship on American higher education through its close analysis of how the concept of civic-mindedness has continued to play out at so many different types of institutions in many different times and places. For the Common Good will make you think about both the historic and present role of higher education in the United States, and that is high praise.

-- "New England Quarterly"

Charles Dorn has written an excellent historical overview of American higher education that diverges from other histories of the institution in several advantageous ways. Dorn's book is a gift to us. It is a model for combining analytical breadth and complexity and of using the particular to illuminate the general. It is now the best single-volume history of American higher education available.

-- "Journal of American History"

In teasing out the emergence of different social ethoses within higher education over time, Dorn has produced a book that offers insightful analysis on the past and important perspective to the present.

-- "History of Education Quarterly"

About the Author

Charles Dorn is Professor of Education and Chair of the Education Department at Bowdoin College. He is the author of American Education, Democracy, and the Second World War.