Once upon a time in the not-so-distant past, American higher education got a lot of respect. From the mid-1950s through to the early 1970s, colleges and universities were at the center of American life. Even as many campuses were wracked by turmoil, they were also experiencing what has come to be seen as a golden age— at least for white men. Faculty positions were considered prestigious, and the academic community as a whole— faculty, students (both graduate and undergraduate), researchers, administrators, and intellectual hangers-on— seemed to be engaged in an exciting collective endeavor to improve their institutions and perhaps even make the world a better place.

But it didn’t last. The contradictions within the academic community ultimately brought that halcyon moment to a painful and confusing end— with consequences that haunt us to this day. By the mid-1970s, colleges and universities no longer had the universal approval they once possessed. How and why that happened is the subject of this book.

It is a chronicle of declension, a sobering story of how a seemingly indispensable social institution attained a position of power and approbation— and then lost it. While today’s colleges and universities, undermined by decades of disinvestment and disrespect, now struggle simply to survive, during the early 1960s the academy’s influence extended far beyond its campuses. Especially after Sputnik, higher education emerged from the anti-intellectualism of the McCarthy era, where professors were scorned as eggheads (if not subversives) and students engaged in panty raids not politics. Many in the academic community believed that they and their institutions were not only crucial to America’s national security, but also central to economic progress. Showered with money by foundations and governments at every level, universities entered an era of unprecedented expansion.

The period I’m calling the long sixties was also when the academy became the repository of the American dream, not only of upward mobility, but also for many of a more egalitarian society that would challenge the racial and gender intolerance and inequality that had for so long impeded human progress. As the quintessential liberal institution during the heyday of American liberalism, higher education attracted idealistic people— students and faculty alike— many of whom still trusted the authorities and their promises. Others, however, sought to shake up their campuses and disciplines. Gravitating into what was to become the New Left, radicals and left-liberals wanted higher education to become a force for liberation available to all comers. Believing in the power of ideas, they felt that their intellectual efforts could influence the powers that be and move both the university and perhaps even the whole country toward justice and true democracy.

That did not happen, of course. In retrospect, it’s clear that the university never had as much power and autonomy as its members and critics assumed. Its enormous expansion and its accompanying optimism, as well as the pervasiveness of its own ivory tower myth, blinded the academic community— left , right, and center— to its own limitations. As institutions doubled and tripled in size, they were transformed, attracting the academically ambitious and often the unconventional, while putting a new emphasis on research instead of teaching. The ensuing cultural conflicts and turf battles, not to mention the growing political disagreements over Vietnam, race, and other divisive issues, made it impossible for the academic community to develop a coherent response to the challenges it faced—from women, African Americans, and its own radicals as well as from conservative politicians and an increasingly hostile public. The situation was completely unprecedented. As in a recurring bad dream, the academic community was facing the final exam without having taken the course.

Even today American universities are still, by some measures, number one in the world. It is a ranking built on misconceptions, or perhaps the realization that higher education elsewhere also has its defects. Even before COVID- 19, the academic community was suffering. With the traditional liberal arts in decline, and underpaid and exploited part-time and temporary instructors supplying 75 percent of the teaching staff, only a handful of colleges and universities provided their graduates with much beyond technical training and considerable debt. But it didn’t need to be that way.

I admit to overstating my case. Still, it was hard to lose a dream and to do so suddenly. At some point around 1965, the bright promise of an expansive and liberating system of mass higher education darkened. The war in Southeast Asia and the failure of the political establishment to grant real equality to its citizens of color disabused and radicalized an entire generation of students and professors. Although most of the problems of racism, sexism, the Cold War, and economic inequality could not have been solved by educational reforms, left-wing critics deemed the university complicit in them. As a result, when some academic leaders could not or would not satisfy the radicals’ mostly reasonable demands, their campuses seemed to spin out of control, destroying much of the public’s previous confidence in higher education. The university was soon hollowed out and assaulted by the right-wing enemies of liberal culture, and it never recovered.

There are two interrelated strands to this story— growth and turbulence. In the sixties, colleges and universities expanded so exponentially that their traditional folkways simply imploded. Many institutions would have been disrupted even if the rest of the United States had been calm. But it was not. Despite— or perhaps because of— the country’s relative affluence, the struggle to fulfill the democratic promise of higher education in the face of racism, sexism, and US warmongering ensured turbulence.

It is impossible to stress enough how thoroughly the Vietnam War permeated the waking lives of student and faculty dissidents during the long sixties. It was distressing to find out from newspapers every morning that our country had killed hundreds or perhaps thousands of men, women, and children the day before. Our shame, our anger, and ultimately our inability to stop the horror destroyed our trust in the liberal order. That disillusionment marked an entire generation. Whether it was biologists discovering that the US Army was using their research to destroy crops in Southeast Asia or professors refusing to flunk students who might then be drafted— the war ultimately forced faculty members of all political persuasions to face unwelcome, but unavoidable, moral choices.

The university’s long sixties occurred in several phases, beginning in the mid-1950s when the academic community emerged from its encounter with McCarthyism to enter a decade of optimism and expansion. By the middle of the sixties, events off campus— the Vietnam War and the struggle for racial equality, in particular— were to politicize higher education, even as its explosive growth was creating unforeseen tensions. For the next five to ten years, confrontations took place at many, though by no means all, institutions. Finally, after one last burst of conflict, the unrest ended in the early 1970s as the war wound down and the buoyant economic expansion of the previous decade sputtered to an end, inaugurating a new era of austerity.

But because so much change occurred so quickly during those years, there is no coherent narrative, no single story that traces how one thing led to another. Everything seemed to be happening at once. Though petering out, the trauma endured. The events of the long sixties hung over higher education for the next half century, while the backlash they incurred spilled over into the rest of society— poisoning its political discourse and paving the way for decades of neoliberal policies designed to shrink the public sector—its institutions of higher learning, in particular.