An Accidental Triumph: The Improbable History of American Higher Education

October 7, 2023

Sol Gittleman

 

Hardly a day passes without criticism of American higher education.  Supreme Court decisions on admissions and student debt, ideological attacks on faculty and curriculum, anxiety about the cost of college, and the fake athletic admissions scandals have all taken their toll. But there’s another side to this story.  America has created, mostly by accident, a higher education enterprise unlike any in the world with a $36 BILLION trade surplus.  In the years after WW II, American faculty have dominated in Nobel Prizes, while millions of international students attend American universities.  We have become—and continue to be—the envy of the world despite recent hostility in our own country. How did this happen?

 

Sol Gittleman is a Tufts Professor Emeritus, past Provost, and prolific author of 6 books, including Reynolds, Raschi and Lopat: New York’s Big Three and the Great Yankee Dynasty of 1949-1953 and From Shtetl to Suburbia: The Family in Jewish Literary Imagination

 

Recorded Video is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4fuvU1ocQ0