466 Undergraduate Education
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1824). At the University
of Virginia,
Jefferson’s eight schools—ancient languages, modern languages,
mathematics, natural philosophy, natural history, anatomy and
medicine, moral philosophy, and law—plus the three schools of
commerce, manufacture, and diplomacy, which were missing
only because of lack of funds—constituted a design for a univer-
sity at a time when the country had not yet come to grips with what
a college was. (Rudolph, 1977, p. 81)Such innovation was counterbalanced by staunch efforts to
maintain a uniform, classical course of study as espoused in
the Yale Report of 1828. In the post-Jacksonian era, higher
education languished with declining enrollments; the Civil
War brought some of the oldest and most distinguished insti-
tutions (e.g., The College of William and Mary) to the brink
of economic bankruptcy. Then, as Rudolph’s analysis sug-
gests, complex external forces in American society produced
positive internal effects on the institutions.
Veysey (1973) described the period from 1870 to 1910 as
the most revolutionary time for American higher education,
the fruit of which was the establishment of almost all of the
principles and processes that remain today. He attributed
change to three catalytic, often competing forces: the utilitar-
ian needs of American society “to educate a democracy of
talents and a democracy of vocations” (as cited in Rudolph,
1977, p. 111), the advent of science and an increasing respect
for empirical evidence in the construction and applications of
knowledge, and a widespread belief in the virtues of liberal
education in creating a responsible citizenry. The first force
was exemplified in the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862 and
its effect on creating state universities and a broader under-
standing of the academic curriculum. The second force was
illustrated in the acceptance of the German university as a
model for the American research university with its emphasis
on graduate training and increased specialization in under-
graduate education. The third force was embodied in the
1904 Wisconsin Idea, which linked universities to their state
and local communities through extension education and what
could be described as distance learning programs before the
advent of technology.
Inside institutions, undergraduate programs included com-
mon general-education courses and the selection of special-
ized concentrations of study (the Johns Hopkins 1877–1878
catalog used the termmajorfor the first time). For faculty, an
increased emphasis on research fostered professional associa-
tions through which scholars shared their findings and built
the theoretical and methodological knowledge bases of new
intellectual fields (disciplines); inside the institution, common
intellectual pursuits led to administrative units (departments)
organized around the disciplines. Established in 1892, the
American Psychological Association (APA) was “one of
seven learned societies founded at the turn of the twentieth
century (Modern Language Association in 1883; American
Historical Association in 1884; American Economics Associa-
tion in 1884; American Philosophical Association in 1901;
American Political Science Association in 1904; and Ameri-
can Sociological Society in 1905)” (McGovern, 1992a, p. 14).
During this period, higher education was in transition, and
psychology was both a beneficiary of and a catalyst for change.
After World War II, another period of change from 1945 to
1975 was prompted by variations of the same three forces
operating from 1870 to 1910. The GI Bill of Rights was a
utilitarian initiative that brought a whole new generation of
students into higher education and prompted further expan-
sion of the curriculum. The American political response to
Sputnikin 1957 and the pervasive fear of Soviet technologi-
cal advantage resulted in increases in research funding for
science that affected graduate and undergraduate education.
Finally, student protests of the 1960s questioned the nature,
forms, and relevance of a liberal education to solve complex
social problems. Once again, psychology was a principal
beneficiary of these changes taking place on the broader
American higher education landscape, as we will describe in
the next section on curricular expansion.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the public became increasingly
critical of the academy. Numerous blue-ribbon committees of
faculty and administrators highlighted the loss of clear pur-
pose in general education, lowered student expectations and
involvement in learning (Study Group on the Conditions of
Excellence in American Higher Education, 1984), the lack
of coherence in the curriculum (Project on Liberal Learning,
Study-in-Depth, and the Arts and Sciences Major, 1991a,
1991b, 1992; Project on Redefining the Meaning and Purpose
of Baccalaureate Degrees, 1985; Zemsky, 1989), and the
challenges of integrating new knowledge and new voices into
the curriculum (Schmitz, 1992). State legislatures questioned
the spiraling costs of higher education and what they per-
ceived as the lower productivity of faculty, especially a
decreased commitment to undergraduate teaching. Some
states called for major changes in faculty personnel contracts,
including the elimination of academic tenure. Internally,
Boyer’s (1990) Scholarship Reconsideredprompted broad
discussion of the relationships among faculty teaching, re-
search, and service activities. Moreover, the utilitarian
demands of society at large again provoked conversations
about technology, distance learning, and even the value to
employers and society of the baccalaureate degree.
In the next sections, we describe how psychologists
responded to these external forces affecting the public’s
perceptions of higher education, as well as the forces within
the discipline that motivated evolving definitions of the