One hundred and three years ago, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner made his famous elegiac announcement that America no longer had a frontier. Turner was interested in the frontier less as a place than as a sociological phenomenon. "The West was another name for opportunity," he wrote; to his mind it had been the means by which the nation delivered on its promise of a chance of advancement for all citizens. It was the possible loss of this, not of open range, that worried him.
What is not so well known about Turner is what he thought the replacement for the frontier would be: state universities. They could take on the mystical duties for democracy that free land had once performed--with, of course, an academic twist. "The test tube and the microscope are needed, rather than the ax and rifle, in this new ideal of conquest," he wrote.
Turner's dream of making state universities the main avenue of opportunity in America was hardly unique to him. Hints of the concept can be found in the writings of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin (founders of the universities of Virginia and Pennsylvania), and of Abraham Lincoln, who signed into law one of this country's first landmark pieces of national social legislation, the Morrill Act of 1862, which provided "land grants" for the establishment of colleges of agriculture and engineering.
During the golden era of American higher education, the middle decades of the 20th century, the democratic potential of public universities seemed endless. James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard, wrote an article in the Atlantic Monthly in 1943 calling for a new social type, the American radical. "He will favor public education, truly universal educational opportunity at every level. He will be little concerned with the future of private education," Conant wrote--this from the head of the country's most prominent private university. READ MORE . . .
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