Historian Ellen Schrecker’s new book, The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s, tells the story of how the US system of mass higher education took shape and then fell out of favor with the public as political events, above all the Vietnam War, pulled it apart from within — all in the span of a decade. The “promise” of her title refers to the idea that universal higher education was within reach, and that it would midwife “a more egalitarian society that would challenge the racial and gender intolerance and inequality that had for so long impeded human progress.” This vision obviously did not come to pass — in no small part, she argues, because the response of left-wing faculty and students to the Vietnam War damaged the university at its most prestigious moment. Weakened by the Left, it was eventually “hollowed out and assaulted by the right-wing enemies of liberal culture, and it never recovered” — a tragic fate that mirrors the dwindling fortunes of the New Deal order more generally, given the university’s status as “the quintessential liberal institution during the heyday of American liberalism.”

Schrecker narrates this story in impressive detail. Her subjects are not only students (the typical focus of studies of the university in the 1960s) but the overall “academic community,” a broad category that primarily includes faculty, along with administrators and staff. With more than 130 pages of notes, she has conducted a tremendous amount of research, visiting numerous archives, conducting dozens of oral history interviews, and occasionally contributing her own anecdotes. The result is a rich and highly readable book that sheds new light on familiar moments like the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the Vietnam War teach-ins, and the Columbia student strike, weaving them into an original narrative about the American university and the 1960s that is certain to interest nonspecialists.

This is also very much a book about the history of the Left. Schrecker — a veteran historian of McCarthyism, higher education, and academic freedom — traces the development of an intimate and complex relationship between the Left and the university in the course of the 1960s, showing that while radicals criticized the liberal university’s role in perpetuating many injustices, they also made the college campus their home base. Nothing about this was inevitable. For much of its history, the American left had regarded the university, an unabashedly elite institution, with skepticism. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Jerome Davis, and other critics portrayed the university as a bulwark of conservatism, subservient to corporate and military interests and committed to stifling independent thought.¹ The silencing of antiwar professors during World War I and the assault on leftists during the long Second Red Scare (which began as early as the late 1930s) only confirmed these charges. Certainly, in the quiet years of the 1950s, it would have seemed strange to imagine the American college campus transforming into a seedbed of left-wing activism and thinking. And yet that is exactly what happened. By the end of the 1960s, the Left established itself in the university, where, by and large, it has remained ever since.