[Lezen] [Kindle] For the Common Good: A New History of
Higher Education in America
By Charles Dorn
Are colleges and universities in a period of unprecedented disruption? Is a
bachelor's degree still worth the investment? Are the humanities coming to an
end? What, exactly, is higher education good for?In For the Common Good,
Charles Dorn challenges the rhetoric of America's so-called crisis in higher
education by investigating two centuries of college and university history. From
the community college to the elite research university?in states from California
to Maine?Dorn engages a fundamental question confronted by higher education
institutions ever since the nation's founding: Do colleges and universities
contribute to the common good?Tracking changes in the prevailing social ethos
between the late eighteenth and early twenty-first centuries, Dorn illustrates the
ways in which civic-mindedness, practicality, commercialism, and affluence
influenced higher education's dedication to the public good. Each ethos, long a
part of American history and tradition, came to predominate over
