To acquire and use the skills and habits involved in critical and constructive thinking

By prescribing these outcomes the Truman Commission sought to formalize the human development aspect of higher education. Besides subject matter mastery, the becoming of a more able adult person, a better adapted human being was for the Commission the purpose of college education:

“General education, therefore, will concentrate, not on the mastery of specific information, but on the fullest possible development of the motives, attitudes, and habits

that will enable the student to inform himself and think for himself throughout life. It will stress

(1) the importance of being informed, of basing decisions, actions, and opinions on accurate facts;

(2) knowledge of where and how to acquire information;

(3) ability to appraise, relate, and integrate facts in order to form valid judgments.”87

Many of the Commission’s contemporaries were inclined already to impute this human development function to liberal arts education, and took issue with the Commission report’s apparent reduction of the college education experience to an unconnected welter of memorized facts, as connoted by the Commission’s observation at the conclusion of its list of objectives that,

“Higher education…has stressed the absorption of as many facts about as many things as possible.

“More to the purpose and of much more lasting effect would be emphasis on the student’s acquiring familiarity with the processes of inquiry and discovery….”88

If this philosophical cant of the Commission’s report dismayed some, the report’s concrete recommendations were still more controversial, as we shall see. The deep, wide transformation in higher education that the Commission was undertaking would change the game for everyone. Not everyone, or even many, by the Commission’s own reckoning, would be candidates for the full four-year college course of study that presumably led to mastery of a subject. But half of the country was judged to be able to benefit from postsecondary general education. Moreover, all of the country needed that half of the population to attain this general education if democratic society would prevail, so went the Commission’s argument. So, how to get college-level general education to the masses who were distributed throughout a huge land mass, at that time largely characterized by widespread small settlements and comparatively few urban centers?

The vehicle for this was ready to hand in the form of the nation’s many two-year colleges. With a little tweaking, reasoned the Commission, these institutions could be adapted to purpose, broadly disseminating general education throughout the nation and at the same time better accommodating the spectrum of academic ability in the population. As it turned out, the

program they initiated would ultimately accomplish much more. The newly fashioned two-year institution envisioned by the Commission would shift its educational mission, from what the Commission perhaps inaccurately perceived to be chiefly preparation for transfer to

baccalaureate institutions, to terminally-oriented programs both academic and vocational. Thereby the Truman Commission put into action federal policy and programs that by their intent would not only acknowledge but also formalize and reinforce the institutional stratification of public education. To the aspirations and doctrine advanced earlier by Harper and Lange of the universities and Koos and Eells of the AAJC was attached the budgetary and organizational apparatus that had just successfully prosecuted the greatest feat in human history, the Second World War.

Perhaps unwittingly, given the equally well acknowledged positive correlation between educational attainment and upward social mobility, the Commission would thereby effect the reinforcement of social class stratification as well. No longer to be an effect of happenstance, the management of ambition had come of age.

In the section of the Commission’s report titled “EDUCATION ADJUSTED TO NEEDS,” lays out its case for better organizing the stratification of public education,

“To make sure of its own health and strength a democratic society must provide free and equal access to education for its youth, and at the same time it must recognize their differences in capacity and purpose. Higher education in America should include a variety of institutional forms and educational programs, so that at whatever point any student leaves school, he will be fitted, within the limits of his mental capacity and educational level, for an abundant and productive life as a person, as a worker, and as a citizen.”89

The first ensuing subsection is headed, “THE COMMUNITY COLLEGE,” and it opens: “As one means of achieving the expansion of educational opportunity and the diversification of educational offerings it considers necessary, this Commission recommends that the number of community colleges be increased and that their activities be multiplied.”

As we saw earlier, industry leaders had already been pushing a growth agenda that called for an expansion of the two-year institution’s mission, or more accurately, an undertaking of new, additional missions. The Truman Commission codified this agenda, proposing a reorientation of the two-year college away from the longitudinal, “vertical” function of preparing presumptive candidates for the bachelor’s degree for their transfer to distant senior receiving institutions to a localized concern with generally educating, with civilizing young people whose destinies were presumed to lie in their home towns. The Commission conceived of a complementarity in the role the community college was to play in this. If the young person generally educated or

vocationally trained by the community college was supposed to stay in his or her community, the community college was also charged with making that community a better place to stay in. Terming the new institution the “Community Center of Learning,” the Commission spelled out the complementarity in its conjunction of “community” and “college,”

“Post-high school education for youth is only one of the functions to be performed by the community college…

“The community college seeks to become a center of learning for the entire community, with or without the restrictions that surround formal course work in

traditional institutions of higher education. It gears its programs and services to the needs and wishes of the people it serves, and its offerings may range from workshops in

painting or singing or play writing for fun to refresher courses in journalism or child psychology…

“Whatever form the community college takes, its purpose is educational service to its entire community, and this purpose requires of it a variety of functions and programs. It will provide college education for the youth of the community certainly, so as to remove geographic and economic barriers to educational

opportunity and discover and develop individual talents at low cost and easy access. But in addition, the community college will serve as an active center of adult

education. It will attempt to meet the total post-high school needs of its community.”90

The “college education for the youth of the community” was to be terminal, what the

be largely met by the first two years of college if those courses of study were “complete and rounded in themselves,” the Commission recommended:

“[T]hat the community college emphasize programs of terminal education. “These terminal programs should include both general education and vocational training. They should be designed both for young people who want to secure as good a general education as possible by the end of the fourteenth grade and for those who wish to fit themselves for semi-professional occupations.”91

Citing employment statistics the Commission pointed to specific rapidly expanding industries such as medical secretaries, hotel and restaurant managers, aviators, salesmen, photographers, and automotive, electrical, medical, dental, and other clinical and laboratory technicians to offer evidence that most of the demand for skilled workers could be met with two years of college- level training. The Commission estimated that there were five jobs requiring two years of postsecondary preparation for every one job requiring four years of college.

With that feint toward a continued vocational role for the new community college, the Commission returned to its central theme and take-home points, the social aims of higher education and general education in particular:

“If the semiprofessional curriculum is to accomplish its purpose, however, it must not be crowded with vocational and technical courses to the exclusion of general education. It must aim at developing a combination of social understanding and technical competence. Semiprofessional education should mix a goodly amount of general education for personal and social development with technical education that is intensive, accurate, and comprehensive enough to give the student command of marketable abilities.”92

General education was, for the leaders of American education at the end of World War II, the education that Jefferson, Franklin, Lincoln, Dewey and others recognized as the necessary condition for democracy, for a society of free self-governing citizens. What the Commission members required for the preservation of the civilization that their contemporaries had just fought the greatest war in history to defend, what the foremost political and educational leaders in the land demanded of public educational institutions, was not vocational training or

preparation for the professions.

Modern free civilization, they understood, is impossible unless that civilization is

characterized to a high degree by learned persons. Not skillful persons, although highly skilled members are as useful to a civilized society as they are to a populace in eclipse; not industrious persons, although even highly civilized societies cannot weather times of hardship nor prosper relative to others without wide and high productivity from their members.

Rather, the Truman Commission believed American civilization required learned persons. By the middle of the 20th _{century it had been painfully, even horribly demonstrated that the}

democracies of the time could not take their propagation or even survival for granted, that they owed their narrow escape to the combination of all these traits (highly skilled, highly productive members) with a “critical mass” of intellectual megawattage and erudition (an important portion

of which had fled totalitarian societies) in both civilian and military deployment, and a

transcendent ideal and way of life which these members were utterly committed to preserving for their descendants.

A half-century most characterized by the advent of global warfare and tremendous scientific and technological advance had erased the former world, a world of island states and local alliances. The new world dawned, the world we now recognize around us. The dismantling of colonialism was begun, although colonialism’s residual problems and casualties are still very much with us. If not today’s leading global powers besides the United States (e.g., China, Japan and East Asia generally, a trans-national unifying State of Europe, a more slowly and fitfully coalescing pan-African polity), then the intense and sustained cultivation of the ground from which these modern powers have grown was well underway. Everyone, in “undeveloped” and “developed” societies alike throughout the world, understood the portents of atomic power and sophisticated rocket engineering, of electronic communication, of computing machines, of whole civilizations erected upon the consumption (and destined to witness someday, the exhaustion) of fossil fuels as well as the instrumentalities that brought forth all of this, and they called to mind with special poignancy the durability in all cultures of variations of the legends of The Fall, Prometheus, Doctor Faustus.

A new world indeed. With it came utterly novel challenges to individuals and their societies alike. America’s top echelon of political and educational leaders understood this perfectly well, and in answer urged upon the nation a novel and massive coordinated expansion of public education at public expense.

“American colleges and universities must envision a much larger role for higher education in the national life. They can no longer consider themselves merely the instrument for producing an intellectual elite; they must become the means by which every citizen, youth, and adult is enabled and encouraged to carry his education, formal and informal, as far as his native capacities permit.

“This conception is the inevitable consequence of the democratic faith; universal education is indispensible to the full and living realization of the democratic ideal. No society can long remain free unless its members are freemen, and men are not free when ignorance prevails… Education that liberates and ennobles must be made equally available to all. Justice to the individual demands this; the safety and progress of the Nation depend upon it.”93

The leaders of this country and “the free world” intended for the chief vehicle of this program to preserve democratic civilization to be the community college.

The period between the end of World War II and the onset of the Cold War marked the high point in the status of general education in the two-year college. Even Leland Medsker, one of the leading proponents of the community college vocationalization program and secretary of the AAJC’s Commission on Terminal Education, came to believe that general education must be promoted in order to defend the country against external aggression.94 _{More and more junior}

college officials spoke out against what they characterized as narrow skills training on the grounds that it was inimical to democratic principles.95 _{At the 1950 national convention of the}

AAJC, three different formal reports called for the emphasizing of general education in order to "minister to the common needs of human beings in contemporary Democratic society."96

However, even at that time the proponents of vocationalization continued to occupy the most influential positions in the two-year college industry. Perhaps foremost among these was Jesse Bogue, who in 1946 succeeded Eells as executive secretary of the AAJC. Bogue promoted a vision of the two-year institution which folded general education into the vocational curriculum, forcefully arguing that only by this approach could the community college answer the duty to educate for a democratic society and continue to grow the domestic workforce. In particular, Bogue opposed using “terminal” to characterize vocational programs, preferring the terms “technical” and “semi-professional,” complaining that "students rebel against God that they are entering blind alleys.”97

As fear of national annihilation by the members of the Communist bloc somewhat abated by the mid-1950s, proponents of a dominant curricular role for general education lost influence within the national organization or were reconverted to the cause of vocationalization. Thus took root the doctrine of general education’s service role to career programs that became the archetype of today’s comprehensive community college mission.98

The meritocratic and stratifying purposes of higher education that became more overt ingredients in national policy with the Truman Commission report got a significant boost along with an important strategic shift during the Eisenhower administration. The 1957 Eisenhower Committee on Education Beyond the High School and a report by the Education Policies Commission of the National Education Association, Higher Education in a Decade of Decision, called for policies that not only assured equal opportunity of access to higher education but also assigned students to designated levels of schooling, using criteria for selection on the basis of ability and motivation.

The Eisenhower Committee report deserves special attention alongside the Truman Commission because the Eisenhower report, coincident with the launch of the first man-made space object, Sputnik, by the Soviet Union, led directly to federal legislation that actually committed federal monies that the Truman Commission had advocated. While the Eisenhower Committee itself took a cautious approach to federal expenditures for higher education

scholarships, preferring to see if private-sector sources would suffice, lawmakers seized the opportunity presented by the administration’s report and Sputnik’s stunning evidence of Soviet technical might to push breakthrough legislation that established the federal grants and

scholarships we’ve come to view as an innate feature of the national higher education landscape. The rhetoric of national security appeared again in the debates and legislative measures attending the Eisenhower Committee report.

Other prominent voices of the time, especially Harvard president James B. Conant and U.S. Navy Admiral Hyman Rickover, urged this approach on the theme of national security.

However, these and other authorities allied with them departed from the Truman Commission in one important manner. The Truman Commission had argued for a unification of and coherence within general education across all higher education institutions, whereas these Cold War-era proponents pushed for differentiated curricula between types of institutions, curricula that were connected to specific occupations and the levels of intelligence supposed to be required for them.99

Conant was one of the earliest and foremost architects of this doctrine of meritocracy, grounding it in what he saw as the need to identify and best prepare the ablest, most talented candidates for education. Echoing the sentiments of Carnegie and Jefferson before him, Conant decried the “ruthless and greedy exploitation of both natural and human resources” occurring with the rise of modern industrialism and warned that the conquest of frontier lands “has hardened the social strata and threatens to provide explosive material beneath.”100 _Potentially

aggravating the situation in his mind was the oversupply of college graduates he envisioned coming from the Truman Commission’s expansion of the higher education industry: “I doubt if society can make a greater mistake than to provide advanced higher education of a specialized nature for men and women who are unable to subsequently use this training…the existence of any large number of highly educated individuals whose ambitions have been frustrated is unhealthy for any nation….[citing the Weimar Republic of the 1920s as a] warning against the perils lying in wait for a nation which trains a greater number of professional men than society can employ.”101

Conant quoted Jefferson’s 1813 letter to John Adams, prescribing public education “for the more general diffusion of learning…Worth and genius would thus have been sought out from every condition of life, and completely prepared by education for defeating the competition of wealth and birth for public trusts.”102 _{Conant agreed with Jefferson that the massive}

redistribution of educational opportunity required to achieve this natural, “classless” aristocracy did not entail an undifferentiated redistribution of access to all levels of education, however.

Conant suggested that the quantitative expansion of openings to higher education would be best accomplished by subsidizing the education of the intellectual elite—the top 10%—at universities and the rest of the student demand be met by the two-year colleges. Presaging the Truman Commission by nearly a decade, Conant proposed that “a two-year course of the junior