Listener Calls

*Note: this transcript is from the original show broadcast. There may be slight differences from the rebroadcast.

BRIAN: This is BackStory. I’m Brian Balogh.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

PETER: And I’m Peter Onuf. Today on the show, a history of higher education. We’ve reached the point on our show where we turn to listeners who have reached out to us about today’s topic at backstoryradio.org or on Facebook. We’ve got a call from Oakton, Virginia, and it’s from Nancy. Nancy, welcome to BackStory.

NANCY: Well, thank you. The question that I had for you– I was looking at colleges myself in the Dark Ages. I was doing my college search in 1967. And at that time, the top tier colleges were almost universally male on the east coast. Amherst College, the small liberal arts colleges were male, Harvard, Yale, Princeton. I ended up applying to University of Pennsylvania, and that’s where I graduated from, because they had a women’s college.

I guess my question is, why did it take so long for the east coast establishment universities, the big name universities, to admit women? For example, Stanford University, when it was created I guess in the late 1800s, was absolute. We were going to take women from the get go. And the first coed school in the country, I guess, was Oberlin in the Midwest. Why the Midwest and the West? Why were they so much more progressive and accepting women as undergraduates?

ED: Nancy, that’s a really good question, which, in all honesty, I’ve not really considered in this light before. Certainly it’s amazing that women are not admitted to those schools until the late ’60s, early ’70s. But there’s certainly a tendency the farther west you go for it to be more integrated.

Now, it’s interesting. I’d be curious what my colleagues have to say about the similarity between that and the greater likelihood that women could vote in the west. Does this just suggest a more democratic spirit, or some other explanation, Brian?

BRIAN: Well, I think you’ve put your finger on it, Ed. I think just to be clear, women were able to vote in state elections almost from the beginning in most of these territories that became states in the West long before the national right to vote in 1920. And I think women were admitted to colleges for the same reasons out there, which is, there were a dearth of women. It was hard to attract women out to the west.

And these were new institutions and new states, and they tended to be much more democratic both in allowing women to vote and in admitting women. Now, it wasn’t always easy for the women who were admitted. They were not treated equally– let me put it that way– inside the classroom. But certainly they were there, and that made a big difference.

ED: And we wouldn’t want to overlook a different kind of tradition, Nancy. I know you’re asking about coeducation, but there were many colleges for women, of course, in the east, and would have been more, then, in the West. And I wouldn’t be surprised if actually there wasn’t a higher percentage of women in college in the east than in the west.

BRIAN: I find one of the most remarkable statistics is the fact that in the 1920s, the percentage of those enrolled in higher education– the percentage of women– was almost even with men.

NANCY: Really?

BRIAN: We often think of history as this kind of steady march, and certainly, the percentages of women had been climbing ever since they kept statistics on this up through the 1920s. But in the 1920s, women had almost achieved parity, and then the numbers started slipping. They slipped because of the Great Depression, and then they slipped because of the GI Bill in the Second World War, and all the men returning from the war.

To go back to some of the explanations as to why it took elite eastern universities so long to admit women, I certainly– now, I graduated in 1975 from a so-called elite university, and they had recently gone co-ed. But one of the reasons that administrators cited for not having admitted women was they were convinced that women would not succeed in the business world, which was, I guess, a fair estimate, given the kind of discrimination that existed at the time, and that those women would not to go on to make gazillions of dollars and donate back to the university.

NANCY: But do you really think that was the reason? I mean, how is it that a place like Stanford University, and yes, the wealthy family driven by a very strong willed woman, Mrs. Stanford, that they not only produced women, but they produced doctors, successful women who did great things. And it took, what, 70? Almost 70 years for the east coast establishment to see the kinds of wonderful things that Stanford and other coeducational institutions across the country that were peers– or maybe they didn’t think they had any peers in the rest of the country. I don’t know.

ED: I do think it would have been a long time before Harvard would have considered Stamford in their league.

NANCY: Probably.

ED: It’s hard for us to recognize, but a lot of the young men at his colleges did not want women there. Now, that seems, as they say, counterintuitive to us, because we’d assume young men are always looking for young women. But at University of Virginia, for example, there were a lot of resistance to women coming there and, ironically, distracting young men from their studies.

NANCY: That’s what I thought you were going to say all along, right there. Because I heard that.

ED: Well, good. Let’s just pretend that I said it at the beginning, then.

BRIAN: Yeah, and Nancy, I’m going to get in a lot of trouble for this, but I think a lot of the Eastern Ivy League universities were just very self satisfied.

NANCY: Well, does that go for the University of Virginia?

BRIAN: Yes, especially on the University of Virginia because, frankly, it was not a top university before it admitted African Americans.

NANCY: And women.

BRIAN: And women.

PETER: Yeah. Well, we have, as we like to say– and we wish we could say it about more things– come a long way. It’s a new world, and it’s got to be better, right guys?

BRIAN: That’s right, Peter. Thank you very much, Nancy.

NANCY: Thank you very much. That was really interesting.

PETER: Thanks, Nancy. Bye bye.

BRIAN: Bye bye.

PETER: We’ve got a call from Lisa in Washington, DC. Lisa, welcome to the show.

LISA: Hi. How are you? I was just wondering how you think the purposes of education have shifted, I guess across the 20th century. I remember going to the university and the focus being on how I would participate as a citizen, and being literate in media studies, and all sorts of liberal arts sorts of subject matter. And now I sense that the focus is more on our students becoming global marketplace players, getting jobs, a very utilitarian sort of approach to education.

PETER: Right. Well, we liberal arts types have always been fearful of creeping vocationalism. That goes way back, these concerns, wouldn’t you say, guys?

ED: Well, you know, I think, Peter, if you think about it, college was designed not to be vocational. I mean, it was very aggressively– listen, if you’re one of the 1% or 2% who are actually going to college, unless you’re getting ready to be a preacher, the whole idea is that you don’t have to do this. So I don’t think we want to have the idea that in the 19th century, it was anything other than a path for people whose families had largely made it to keep making it.

PETER: Well, I want to complicate things a little bit, because I think that the attraction to what seems like the useless knowledge has been a powerful one in America, and it is a driver of social mobility. That is, if you can acquire that kind of liberal arts education, the veneer of gentility, then you’re going to be a player. So I wouldn’t want to say that people studied Latin because they just had a love of ancient languages. It was always in some sense instrumental.

BRIAN: Yeah.

PETER: So Lisa, let’s have you, when you talk about your own motivations to get something more than a vocational education, to really get a genuinely liberal education, what do you think were your motivations?

LISA: Well, I think I went into it, like probably a lot of young people, I went into the university just excited to get away from my mom and my parents and live independently. And then when I got into these classes with these great professors, I feel like the whole world opened up to me through Political Geography and through my sociology of ed classes, where I’d have a professor say, well, what’s the matter with cheating? What is cheating, anyway?

Just working with these big ideas and thinking, wow, I’ve never really thought about what cheating means. Just those sorts of ideas. And I wonder about why when we think of skills, we always hear about technology skills, but we don’t hear about, well, we need to really focus on people being able to decipher what the media is selling them. You know what I mean? It’s always a particular type of skill.

ED: I’d like to give kind of a slightly more optimistic interpretation of all this. The fact is that as large a percentage of college students major in the humanities as they have, except for the early ’70s. What has changed is that we’ve more than doubled the number of students going to college. We’ve doubled the percentage of women going to college. This is since 1970. We’ve doubled the students of color going to college.

And a lot of those folks are first generation. And as a result, they are studying more vocationally based subjects, especially business. And I guess it seems to me that if you are the first in your family to get a shot at college, studying something where there seems to be a guaranteed return on your investment seems like a rational choice. So I think that one way to think about this is that a broadening, a democratizing of the student body, leads to a vocationalizing, if I may, of majors.

And it’s also the case that kids who are in college today had as a formative experience the downturn, while they were in high school, of the great recession. So I think that we’re seeing, just as we think of kids in the ’50s being conservative, kids in the ’60s being radical or whatever, that their formative experience is, boy, you better be careful, because the world is a fragile place economically.

PETER: But I love people like Lisa, the kind of person I really enjoy having in a classroom, people who are there for what you have to offer– that transaction between teacher and student. And I think that’s what we in the liberal arts worry about especially is the quality of those transactions, those conversations, those connections.

I don’t think it’s a new problem. In some ways, it’s a perennial problem. That is, how you make the magic that makes college worthwhile that you can look back on it the way Lisa looks back on her college years.

ED: I’d say through the magic of radio.

PETER: Thanks, Lisa.

LISA: All right, thanks.

PETER: Hey guys, we got a call from Toronto, Canada. And it’s Boyd. Boyd, we’re doing a show on higher ed. What have you got for us?

BOYD: Yeah. I’m wondering about professors. Who have they been? What has been their background? And in particular, how has that background shaped higher education in America and who has access to it?

PETER: Yeah, OK. So I’ll just kick it off, guys. I’ll just say where did we used to come from in the old days? Since most higher third level education was for the training of preachers in the colonial period, often, students, and then, as a result, professors who always have to start somewhere, came from relatively modest backgrounds. I think that’s maybe the golden age of American higher education, if you’re worried about class and status issues.

ED: You know, I think, Peter, that that’s right. I think that as they became increasingly professionalized in the 19th century, and you certainly think about the Ivy League, I do believe that a considerably high status was almost a prerequisite to being a professor at Yale or Harvard. What do you think, Brian?

BRIAN: Yeah, I think that’s right. I think that certainly began to change in the 20th century when salaries went up for professors, for one thing, and a disproportionate number of professors came from the middle class. So the good news is they weren’t just the 1%. The bad news is they’re really not the 25% of lower middle class or poor people.

PETER: I have a slightly different image, and that is, I think, you haven’t mentioned the GI Bill. I think many of our professors when we went to graduate school– and we’re all pretty old– had benefited from the GI Bill, and that was actually probably the first generation of professors that could claim to be middle class.

BRIAN: Yeah, I think that’s right. The real disjuncture occurred, really, in the 1960s, I would argue. That is when we really opened the doors to many more impoverished Americans, or Americans who came from poverty. But the professorate did not change that much. It remained primarily middle class in origins.

BOYD: Well, and that was a large part of what I was wondering. Because I’m a first generation– I’m actually a first generation high school graduate, a first generation university graduate, and the first one of my family ever to contemplate pursuing a graduate degree. And now I’m a professor of US history at a university here in Toronto, York University.

But my experience was largely in graduate school that most people there were the children of professors, right? Lawyers beget lawyers, doctors beget doctors.

PETER: Don’t get personal about this just because I’m third generation, OK? It’s upsetting to me.

ED: They’re sensitive, Boyd.

BRIAN: Yeah, but Ed and I offset Peter, because my parents didn’t go to college. And when I went to graduate school at Johns Hopkins University, my dad used to write me letters. But he would address them to Brians Baloghs at Johns Hopkins, because he kept saying, what kind of name is Johns? What kind of place are you going to, anyway?

ED: What I tell you is that I’m a university president, Boyd, and it seems that I’m meeting people all the time who are proud that they are the first in their family who went to college. And for them, academic life was a great vehicle of upward mobility.

BRIAN: Well, I think the data are on Boyd’s side on this one.

BOYD: I actually I have a little bit of data. And you know, the numbers are quite shocking. Only 8% of Ph.D.s or something like this– you know, it’s very single digits of the numbers who are actually first generation college graduates who go on to pursue Ph.D.s.

BRIAN: Boyd, I know we have to wrap up this call, but I do have one question for you, which is, did you experience any kind of discrimination or culture shock coming from a working class background as you made your way through the hallowed halls of academia?

BOYD: I think that I did, but that it was really these kind of structural discriminations, right, that are much harder to identify and to quantify and to name, right? One of the memories I have that was strongest is actually between high school and going to college when I was filling out my FAFSA forms for federal aid. I remember there was a problem with it, and I ended up, for a brief period– about 48 hours– being told that I was going to have no financial aid to go to college.

And I just remember not having anyone to turn to, and being completely alone in the sense that I can’t navigate this. This is beyond my skill, and I have no one that I can turn to to help me navigate through this thing. So it’s those kind of moments that winnow the field, right? That make it so that so many people don’t even consider the professorate as a career.

ED: And so many studies confirm what you’re saying is that that moment right there is when we lose so many people. So I hope BackStory– those of you of ambition out there who might not know how to fill out the FAFSA form, we want to help.

PETER: Yeah, we’re here for you.

BRIAN: Yes, call Peter Onuf. He’s available 24/7. Thank you very much, Boyd.

BOYD: Thanks so much.

ED: Bye bye.

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BRIAN: That’s all the time we’ve got for today. As always, you can find more on today’s topic at backstoryradio.org. All of our shows are posted there, along with a link to our free podcast.

PETER: Again, that’s backstoryradio.org. We’re also on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. Don’t be a stranger.

ED: Today’s episode of BackStory was produced by Tony Field, Jess Engebretson, Nina Earnest, Andrew Parsons, and Jesse Dukes. Emily Charnock is our research and web coordinator, and Jamal Millner is our engineer. BackStory’s executive producer is Andrew Wyndham. Special thanks this week to Scott [INAUDIBLE] and Milton Greenberg.

BRIAN: Major support for BackStory is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the University of Virginia, Weinstein Properties, an anonymous donor, and the History Channel. History made every day.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Peter Onuf is Professor of History Emeritus at UVA, and senior research fellow at Monticello. Ed Ayers is President and Professor of History at the University of Richmond. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

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