Currently Promoting: The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s

About the book:

The Lost Promise is a magisterial examination of the turmoil that rocked American universities in the 1960s, with a unique focus on the complex roles played by professors as well as students.

The 1950s through the early 1970s are widely seen as American academia’s golden age, when universities—well funded and viewed as essential for national security, economic growth, and social mobility—embraced an egalitarian mission. Swelling in size, schools attracted new types of students and professors, including radicals who challenged their institutions’ calcified traditions. But that halcyon moment soon came to a painful and confusing end, with consequences that still afflict the halls of ivy. In The Lost Promise, Ellen Schrecker—our foremost historian of both the McCarthy era and the modern American university—delivers a far-reaching examination of how and why it happened.

Schrecker illuminates how US universities’ explosive growth intersected with the turmoil of the 1960s, fomenting an unprecedented crisis where dissent over racial inequality and the Vietnam War erupted into direct action. Torn by internal power struggles and demonized by conservative voices, higher education never fully recovered, resulting in decades of underfunding and today’s woefully inequitable system. As Schrecker’s magisterial history makes blazingly clear, the complex blend of troubles that disrupted the university in that pivotal period haunts the ivory tower to this day.

About the author:

Ellen Schrecker is an American historian and author who has written extensively about McCarthyism and American higher education.

Her latest book, The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s, to be published by the University of Chicago Press in December 2021, provides the first comprehensive analysis of American higher education’s most turbulent decade.

Her previous books include No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (1986), The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents (3d ed. 2017), Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (1998), and The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the University (The New Press, 2010). She has also written for such publications as The Nation and the Chronicle of Higher Education and edited Academe, the American Association of University Professors’ magazine, as well as two collections of essays. And she wrote a Chinese cookbook.

She holds a Ph.D. from Harvard, taught there and at NYU and Princeton, before ending up at Yeshiva University from which she retired as a full professor.