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The era following World War II led to a great expansion of American higher education, which directly and indirectly drove the economy, led to new inventions and innovations, and helped export American culture and ideas.
But in the decade before the war, colleges had to pass through the Great Depression. The stark economic losses of the past few weeks have people comparing our time to the era that started with Black Tuesday. And in the current battle against the “enemy” virus, World War II has been repeatedly invoked, with talk of victory gardens, mass (im)mobilization of people in the fight, and a warlike response to the invader.
How did colleges weather those events? What could they learn from the past? Could they reinvigorate on the other side?
John R. Thelin, a professor in the College of Education at the University of Kentucky and the author of A History of American Higher Education, explained this week to The Chronicle how higher education suffered and sustained itself during the Depression — and why Covid-19 renders the sustaining strategies ineffective today. But the history of that era also indicates that world-shaking events have a way of producing unexpected results. Thelin offered his thoughts about how life was transformed back then, and what might unfold after the coronavirus.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What happened to higher education during the Great Depression?
There was actually a slow but cumulative impact. Initially, institutions tried to maintain business as usual. [President Herbert] Hoover would say, “Prosperity is just around the corner.” By about 1933 or ’34, enough regular American families were hurt, either by losses in the stock market or loss of jobs. There were some predictions that colleges would be hard hit. But because they were in an era before medical centers, research centers, and all kinds of complexities, they ended up running a kind of barter economy, where essentially the institutions would not collect tuition bills and other student fees, and a number of colleges stopped paying their faculty and staff, giving them IOUs.
There really were no jobs available. And so if you were a professor or an administrator, what were you going to do? There were no external options. So they kind of settled into this very interesting closed economy, where they made do. What they figured was that a campus is actually not a bad place to be, particularly if you had nowhere else to go.
How did this barter economy work?
Campuses were far more local at that time. It was an era when you didn’t have so many national conferences, with people jetting off. Students would go hungry, and same with the faculty. But they actually maintained a semblance of very good teaching and learning. In 1929 the Carnegie Foundation put out a report on the abuses of big-time college sports, and after the start of the Depression, football attendance also declined dramatically at colleges. It was almost like the campus went into a semi-hibernation, conserving its energy but maintaining its vital functions.
When we come out of this, this is going to be really very wrenching.
But among most colleges at the time, you would find a fair amount of construction and public art supported by the Works Progress Administration. On many college and university campuses, you’d find still standing some of these really remarkable buildings and incredible murals that the colleges probably would not have been able to afford without those federal programs.
It was of no expense to the colleges, and it gave jobs to architects, craftsmen, and artists. That was kind of an unexpected silver lining. I taught at the College of William & Mary, which had this beautiful neo-Georgian football stadium built by the WPA. In order to qualify for funding, the project had to relate to instruction. They finessed it by telling the government that the football stadium would be used for agricultural demonstrations and displays.
Were colleges hammered again when World War II came around, with the 18- to 22-year-olds sent off to the service?
They were hammered in the sense that their primarily male enrollments were reduced drastically. But it actually ended up being a good resolution: Campuses became the site for providing housing and facilities, for all kinds of instructional programs, for officer training, for flight schools, for very advanced three-month courses, primarily for officers. And meanwhile, the enrollment of female students increased during World War II. By the start of World War II, war production saved the economy, but people didn’t have anything to spend it on. You could buy a tank, but you couldn’t buy a Chevrolet. So colleges did OK.
Colleges and universities were very good partners with the military and the federal government, and for the first time, the federal government looked to academic professors to do war-related research. There is a legendary photograph of the deserted University of Chicago football stadium. Chicago dropped football in 1939, but the locker rooms underneath the stadium became labs for the Manhattan Project. You had these physicists, chemists, mathematicians, all in the secret lab.
A lot of esoteric fields suddenly were in demand. For example, a professor of Asian languages in the 1930s probably had a handful of students. But suddenly, with World War II, the military needed people who could speak and translate Japanese.
The military and the federal bureaucracy were just amazed at how responsive and resourceful the scientists and other professors were. After colleges provided valuable space and services to the war effort, the gratitude of Congress and the military for that academic work led to the creation of the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. The logic was, if university researchers can do this well in terms of solving wartime problems, why not harness them in terms of the domestic economy and then the Cold War? It was a very compelling rationale.
Looking forward, do you think we’re in a similar situation compared to that era? Could this economic downturn and “war” against infectious disease lead to a renaissance for higher education?
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
There’s one very important difference: During the Great Depression, you weren’t required for health reasons to vacate the campus. Now universities are stalled. They have no constituency. They’re scrambling with internet courses. Their research labs are idle. So I think this is a much more problematic situation than the 1930s.
Usually, I’m pretty optimistic. But a few years ago I expressed some concerns about where higher education is headed, before the pandemic. The dilemma I see is that higher education since about 2010 has kind of been on top of the world, like it’s on steroids — a whole lot of money, a lot of activity, but in some ways overextended.
This adjustment is going to be very tough, because we’ve already had in place this incredible research infrastructure, either on campus or with related institutes, like the Centers for Disease Control. It’s not going from nothing to a whole new thing. When we come out of this, this is going to be really very wrenching.
Colleges today — particularly smaller institutions — are already facing a number of challenges, even aside from the pandemic: rising tuition, deferred maintenance, the high costs of doing business. Then there are a number of colleges that are growing fast, with big endowments and major research infrastructure. Leading up to the Great Depression or World War II, did the higher-ed landscape look similar?
Until the 1940s, particularly after World War II, you never had many campuses with a large research infrastructure or Big Science. Almost all colleges — whether they were fragile financially or one of the stronger ones — were all tuition dependent and tended to be largely undergraduate.
The interesting thing today is that in some ways the mature, established research universities are very dependent on a continual flow of federal research dollars. They’ve got a huge investment in the physical plant, labs, and everything. Although there’s a lot of money there, they depend on a flow of cash. What if federal funding were diminished during a pandemic, or people can’t get into their labs to work?
It sounds like the farm crisis of the 1980s. In the 1970s the government and high food prices encouraged farmers to “get big or get out,” so they accumulated debt while buying more land and bigger tractors. When food prices fell, many went bankrupt because they couldn’t support their girth.
Yes. Colleges have an insatiable appetite for resources. Certainly, you and I would agree that your small, church-related colleges, with very small endowments, are going to be at risk. But the big, seemingly strong institutions also have their own vulnerabilities.
You would hope that after years of anti-intellectualism, the defunding of public institutions, and the fallout from that, people would want to rediscover a public purpose in higher education amid this crisis.
Some people predict that with colleges going online, that would lessen the demand for the traditional campus. I think students, faculty, staff, and alumni are going to miss the traditional campus and feel a real void. If anything, there will be a rediscovery of how really special the traditional campus is: spectator sports, Greek life, dormitories, and campus cafes, and just interacting with your colleagues. I miss our custodians. I would talk to them every day. And now I feel this real emptiness.