Description
Book SynopsisThe 1960s was the most transformative decade in the history of American higher educationbut not for the reasons you might think. Picture going to college in the sixties: the protests and marches, the teach-ins and sit-ins, the drugs, sex, and rock 'n' rollhip, electric, psychedelic. Not so fast, says bestselling historian John R. Thelin. Even at radicalized campuses, volatile student demonstrations coexisted with the business as usual of a flagship state university: athletics, fraternities and sororities, and student government. In Going to College in the Sixties, Thelin reinterprets the campus world shaped during one of the most dramatic decades in American history. Reconstructing all phases of the college experience, Thelin explores how students competed for admission, paid for college in an era before Pell Grants, dealt with crowded classes and dormitories, voiced concerns about the curriculum, grappled with new tensions in big-time college sports, and overcame discrimination. T
Trade ReviewJohn Thelin tells this story of rising enrollments and growing administrations in his new book,
Going to College in the Sixties. In doing so, he joins an ever-expanding list of historians who urge us to abjure the hippie nostalgia that so often still defines the 1960s. He lifts campus protest out of its purple haze and relocates it amid the emerging trends of shifting undergraduate demographics and the data-driven expansion of university bureaucracy. This approach makes sense of our present far better than the more familiar tale of a student revolution that failed. Instead, he shows that '60s students of all political stripes and demographic backgrounds participated in a historical shift that replaced one set of contradictions with another.
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LA Review of BooksIn order to cover an entire decade of student experience, Thelin impressively draws upon oral histories, national and local newspapers, campus publications, student memoirs, and institutional archives.
Going to College in the Sixties thus offers some unique insights and breaks ground in the proposal that the decade was not all that it has been made out to be.
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History of Education QuarterlyTable of ContentsList of Illustrations
Foreword by Michael A. Olivas
Preface
Acknowledgements
1. Rediscovering American Higher Education in the 1960s
2. College Prep
3. "The Knowledge Industry"
4. Student Activities and Activism
5. Colleges and Curriculum
6. College Sports
7. Conclusion
Index
About the Author
