Innovator Vol. 37 No. 1 - Fall 06: Legacy of Leadership
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The University of Michigan’s Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education is both a reflection and a major strand of the history of American higher education.
Until well into the 20th century, most American colleges and universities drew their administrators from the ranks of faculty who had only on the job and usually limited experience. The increasing complexity of the job made it clear that more specialized preparation was necessary. This process accelerated after World War II, as the GI Bill profoundly altered the higher education landscape.
GI Bill Sparks Transformation
The GI Bill, combined with the 1950 recommendation by the Truman Commission on Higher Education that higher education should be made available to all secondarygraduates, led to the extensive postwar growth both in the numbers of students and of institutions. After 1950 there was a virtual higher education tsunami that would continue for the next two decades.
The other sea change in the wake of the war was universities’ increasing dependence on federal funds for research, with their complex reporting requirements. All of these pressures spurred an urgent need for trained administrators, as well as a rethinking of the purposes and policies of higher education. Thus, in 1957, the Carnegie Corporation of New York funded the establishment of three centers for the study of higher education, one of them at the University of Michigan intended to prepare leaders for the new playing field and find ways to create a more scholarly, structured and professionalized approach to higher education: in effect, to found a discipline.
Training Higher Education Scholars and Executives
The first director of the Center for the Study of Higher Education (“Postsecondary” was added in 1982) was Algo Henderson, an experienced higher education president and national policy leader, who served until his retirement in 1966. Although Henderson’s primary emphasis was on “executive training” for postdoctoral fellows who would move quickly into executive positions in the rapidly expanding institutions, he also expanded a nascent doctoral program, encouraged the faculty’s formulation of higher education as a field of study, and used a Kellogg Foundation grant to establish a leadership program specifically for the rapidly emerging community college sector.
Henderson insisted that the Center’s program have a strong scholarly component, a commitment to excellence, and that it shoulder social responsibilities beyond the requirements of its mandate. The seeds of the future had been sown.
The field of higher education grew, in large measure due to the Center’s influence, and its mission grew as well. By the mid 1960s, the focus was shifting from post-doctoral to doctoral education. Under the leadership of James L. Miller, who directed the Center from 1966-1970, and Joseph Cosand, who directed from 1971-1976, the Center’s program gave greater emphasis to external and governmental affairs—both state and national level, to the changing nature of higher education, and to fostering faculty research projects.
Miller, who had been in a policy leadership role as director of the Kentucky Higher Education Committee, brought a strong emphasis on state politics and engaged students in trips to and studies with state level leaders. Cosand had been the founding president of the St. Louis Community College system, and was the first community college president to be elected president of the American Council on Education. “ He had a constant parade of national leaders on campus, and always involved faculty and students with them,” recalls Marvin Peterson, who succeeded Cosand when he left to become Assistant Secretary for Postsecondary Education in the Ford Administration. “He made the Center the locus of discussion about national issues on campus, in the state, and on the national scene. He valued good research and pressed faculty to make their scholarly activities meaningful in the real world. I benefited greatly from his assistance and guidance.”
Getting Strategic About Research
Shortly after he took the Center’s reins in 1976, Peterson began a discussion among faculty, staff and alumni to strategize its future direction. “We concluded that one of the Center’s past strengths in executive development and professional in-service training should be de-emphasized in favor of greater emphasis on more rigorous graduate training for degree students (especially at the doctoral level) and of more concern for research and conceptual development in the field,” he says. “We also concluded that our highest priorities should be strengthening the academic and scholarly nature of the PhD program, expanding a nascent masters program and obtaining research funding.”
In the first 19 years of its existence, the Center received 12 grants, many quite large, but 11 of them were training and development grants. In the five years between 1976 and 1980, its seven core faculty received 18 grants from four different government agencies and five different foundations. All were either research-oriented or supported doctoral students. The emphasis on research to match the Center’s high quality doctoral program and training was now being fully realized.
“There have been some key points in time when the Center has kind of reinvented itself,” says Janet Lawrence, director from 1996 to 2000, “not in the sense of a complete metamorphosis but in making some very critical changes which have kept it on the cutting edge of centers of our type in the nation. For example, when Joan Stark [who had been dean of the School of Education from 1978 to 1983] returned to the Center, she led in the development of a large scale, longterm grant proposal. In 1985, the Center won the federal government competition and established the National Center for Research and Improvement on Postsecondary Teaching and Learning, a government funded research and development center focused on teaching and learning in higher education.”
Opening Doors to Diverse Learners While it may not have been a “reinvention,” a study directed by Peterson shortly before he became director was certainly a harbinger of what has become one of the Center’s principal foci. Just as the aftermath of World War II had reshaped higher education, so did the civil rights movement of the 1960s, with its insistence that, among other goals, the academy become more inclusive of those who had been historically underrepresented therein. Its most spectacular manifestation at Michigan was the Black Action Movement strike in the spring of 1970, which shut down the University for four days.
In 1974, Peterson and two colleagues, Zelda Gamson and Robert Blackburn, received a National Institute of Mental Health grant to study the universities’ response to these pressures. “It was an attempt to understand what happened when predominantly white campuses significantly increased their African-American student enrollments, which many had done in the early 1970s,” says Peterson. The study eventually resulted in numerous dissertations and articles, as well as an influential book, Black Students on White Campuses: The Impacts of Increased Black Enrollment. The study set a tone. In the years that followed, minority students and faculty became part of the Center community, courses that focused on this area were added and research that addressed it would continue.
Almost 30 years later, the research of Associate Professor Eric Dey, Sylvia Hurtado and other university colleagues on the educational value of diversity was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court when it upheld the use of affirmative action in college admissions. “Basically we found that we can nearly universally demonstrate that students in diverse learning environments have better cognitive development. They become more interested in solving social problems and they become more prepared for what we assume will be a continuing increase in diversity in democratic society,” Dey says.
“The really astounding part is the pervasive effects that diverse learning environments have on just about every outcome that we looked at,” Dey adds, “and that they also extend beyond college. It’s really almost lifechanging.”
He gladly acknowledges the effects on his own work of both Peterson and others’ early research and the climate at Michigan, which, he says, “ has long been interested in trying to open the doors to people who have been unable traditionally to pass through the front gates.”
Positive, life-changing outcomes, spread as widely and deeply as possible, are the ultimate and finest fruits of the Center’s many enterprises, and the breadth and depth of its ever-expanding influence in the higher education field cannot be exaggerated. The Center has been consistently ranked as the top program in higher education in the country. Higher education in America — indeed, in the world — would look much different today had the Center never been invented.
Addressing Emerging Social Problems
Its graduate programs, research efforts and professional development activities have served as models for the many fine programs and centers founded at other universities. Its faculty members have helped shape new professional associations in the field, and taken leadership roles in several other higher education associations and been influential in research and training that addressed many of higher education’s most vexing issues. Its graduates have provided leadership as administrators in higher education institutions, as policy makers in governmental and policy agencies dealing with higher education, as heads of professional associations, as researchers exploring new issues and challenges to higher education, and as faculty shaping new programs.
Its boundaries, in all forms, have continued to expand. The scope of its interests as well as the makeup of its population are far more diverse than they were half a century ago. Its doctoral students not only become administrators themselves, but also enrich the body of scholarship available to administrators and other practitioners. And in the last decade it has become an increasingly global institution: several of its faculty are engaged in training administrators and helping to reform institutions and national systems in over a dozen countries, most recently China, where higher education is growing as dramatically as it did in the U.S. during the post-World War II era.
It has, in short, helped define the study of higher education, even as it continues to define itself.
“The Center was founded in order to address emerging social problems,” says Professor Patricia King, director from 2003 to spring 2006. “That’s where we started. Where we are now is trying to find ways to improve and strengthen those contributions.”
