MoMent

Rather than couching its
arguments in the purely
economic terms that
characterize the dominant
blueprints for higher education
today, the Truman Commission
foregrounded democracy…
(see fig. 5)
with the Morrill Act of 1862, many colleges and universities for African
Americans were founded, and a score of women’s colleges were created.
But perhaps the crucible moment most relevant to today’s situation
occurred after World War II, when President Truman established the
President’s Commission on Higher Education, chaired by American
Council on Education President George F. Zook. The commission included
twenty-eight members, primarily college and university presidents along
with a handful of public citizens. At that historic juncture, the economy
was recovering from the Great Depression, the world was exhausted by the
slaughter of war, unequal access to higher education undercut the nation’s
claim to democratic commitments, and the grisly horror of bigotry and hatred
as state policy was visible for all to see.
The commission’s primary achievement was a six-volume report,
revealingly titled Higher Education for American Democracy, that remapped
federal and state policies, redrew the contours of higher education,
recommended the establishment of an expansive and free community
college system, and set a bold vision for the nation. Rather than couching
its arguments in the purely economic terms that characterize the dominant
blueprints for higher education today, the Truman Commission foregrounded
democracy as the force for driving higher education’s transformation and
leadership, and with it, the nation’s course toward justice for all (see fig.
5). The commission ended its first volume with the very clarion call that A
Crucible Moment picks up nearly seven decades later: “The first and most
essential charge upon higher education is that at all levels and in all its fields of
specialization, it shall be the carrier of democratic values, ideals, and process”
(President’s Commission on Higher Education 1947a, 102).
This was not a naive rhetorical statement then, nor should it be today.
The commission admitted with clear-eyed honesty how higher education had
failed democracy by denying most citizens the opportunity to go to college.
They also understood what was at stake: “Only an informed, thoughtful,
tolerant people can maintain and develop a free society” (1947b, 3).
From the 1940s on, the heretofore isolationist United States found itself in
a new global role as the leader of the “free” world. The boundaries of the global
map had been redrawn, and the United States was at the center of the redesign.
It could no longer retreat behind its borders. The commission thus embraced
democracy’s principles in a newly global context: “E Pluribus Unum—From many
persons one nation, and from many peoples one world—indivisible, with liberty and
justice for all” (italics in the original; 1947a, 102). As history of education scholar
Philo Hutcheson observed, “Policymakers, especially but hardly exclusively
those in education, argued that all levels of education were critical components
in creating both a better nation and a better world” (2007, 4).
Because the commission described discrimination as “an undemocratic
practice” (1947b, 25), its report challenged higher education to become a
means to address the largest threat to the nation’s new role as leader of the
free world: the racial discrimination and subjugation that were hallmarks
of the country in 1947. In that year, all but a handful of the nation’s colleges
and universities were racially segregated—by law in one geographic region,
and by practice in other parts of the country. “No more in mind than body,”
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