What’s Future Is Epilogue: The Uses of Higher Education History

Abstract

Higher education cannot escape history. If you don’t believeme, ask Clark Kerr, one of the foremost thinkers on the subject, who published a book by that name in 1994. His point was that the “contradictions and conflicts tormenting higher education” were rooted in the preconditions of the past, and that they would inevitably shape the sector’s future (Kerr 1994, xv). But the title can also be interpreted more benignly: when we talk about higher education, we almost always do so longitudinally. It is hard to find a book about American higher education that does not reference history in some form. That stands in contrast to the scholarly literature on K–12 education, which sometimes reads as though American schools were created with the passage of NoChild Left Behind. (Of course that, in turn, stands in contrast to the popular criticism of all sectors of education, which suggests that they do have a history but that it stopped around 1920.) Part of the ubiquity is because age is uniquely linked to status in higher education, with older institutions almost always consideredmore prestigious.Witness the perpetual debate