Meet the Man Who Wrote the Greatest Book About American Higher Ed

The old man sat naked and alone, the Pacific Ocean a few feet away. His skin was nut-brown, covered with diamond-shaped tattoos running down his left arm, shoulder, and torso. His nipples were pierced, long white beard a tangle, legs and feet caked with dirt. At the moment the camera shutter snapped, he smiled and remembered a Thomas Eakins portrait of Walt Whitman, another American wild and unafraid.

He owned a single piece of clothing, a filthy pair of denim shorts, which he wore reluctantly when he did his shopping at the Safeway or stopped at a roadside stand for rum-raisin ice cream. He would occasionally walk to the Instant Printing Company to send other train enthusiasts copies of a long, meticulously detailed catalog he had compiled of VHS videotapes featuring vintage streetcars. Most days he could be found on a flat pile of rocks a short hike from town, among the sugar-cane fields at the foot of the West Maui Forest Reserve, reading Victorian novels and baking nude in the sun.

To the locals in the Hawaiian town of Lahaina, Larry Veysey was just another eccentric washed up in paradise, good for a smile and nod but not much conversation. Visitors came occasionally to his condominium by the beach, fellow nudists mostly, or a few friends from another time. Nobody knew that this resting place was the end of a journey that had begun with death and tragedy in a different sort of utopia, gone east to rare heights of scholarship in the Ivy League, and returned to the redwood forests of California, where he was liberated, or driven mad, or both, by the cultural convulsions of the 20th century.

Or that 50 years ago, he produced what is arguably the greatest book ever written about the American university.

Laurence Russ Veysey (pronounced Vee-zee) was born in Los Angeles on August 12, 1932. His parents, Robert and Betty, moved from place to place with their only child until 1936, when they became deeply committed to the inward-focused mysticism espoused by a minor Hindu guru named Keskar. Robert bought an acre in the valley town of Ojai, northwest of Los Angeles, in preparation for his role as Keskar’s John the Baptist, and began recording his own poems, visions, and thoughts in a series of journals that grew to 27 volumes.

For a time, the family was happy. But Robert’s obsessions with astrology, numerology, and reincarnation grew increasingly deep. One day he sent Betty and Laurence out of the house with strict instructions to sit under a nearby oak tree. For hours mother and son watched smoke rise from the chimney. Robert was burning all his earthly possessions. Then the smoke stopped, and there was nothing for a long while, until the chimney produced one more lone puff. Finally, Betty rushed inside. Robert Veysey, age 36, was dead. He had fallen into the embers and his hair had caught fire, creating that final wisp.

The circumstances of Robert’s death were murky. There was no suicide note, and a coroner’s inquest was inconclusive. Decades later, Robert’s half-sister Constance confided, after much drink, her suspicion that Betty had murdered her husband. But Laurence discounted them, assuming that his father had suffered from the same debilitating heart condition that would cut short his own life.

Betty tried to stay on in Ojai, but life was hard for a widow at the end of the Great Depression. In 1939 she and Laurence moved back to Los Angeles into a home owned by her mother. With no men to support them, the two women went to work in factories as the nation armed for war.

The transition was hard for Laurence. Schooling in Ojai had been intermittent, and he had taught himself to read and write. He was restless, socially awkward, indifferent to authority. He had recurring dreams about running barefoot and was prone to nightmares and preoccupation. Betty took him to a doctor, who measured his I.Q. at 174. Laurence later recalled that, at age 6, he told the doctor that “he remembers what he tries to forget and forgets what he tries to remember.”

At night, Laurence would lie in bed listening as the No. 9 train came rumbling down the middle of Griffin Avenue toward his house, veering at the last moment around the bend in the road, on its way downtown. He thrilled at the train’s energy and sleek design. Thus began his lifelong passion for streetcars. As he grew older, he split his time between school and a small band of enthusiasts who rode the rails even as the city’s clean, progressive transportation network was being steadily dismantled and replaced by freeways choked with cars.

Eventually the family moved to one of the postwar tract homes of La Crescenta. It was supposed to be a suburban idyll, but Larry struggled to make friends. He also got lucky. At the time, Yale University and several other Ivies were struggling with the problem of too many highly qualified New York City Jews in applicant pools that had expanded in the wake of World War II. Their solution was to add qualifications like “character” and “geographic diversity.” Every year, Yale gave a full scholarship to the best student from Glendale High. In 1949, that was Larry Veysey.

Yale’s student culture was less intellectual at the time, still dominated by the hard-partying sons of the East Coast aristocracy, and Larry didn’t fit in. He threw himself into his work, taping together three pieces of paper and typing out a meticulous class, study, and eating schedule for each day of the week, color-coded and broken into five-minute increments.

As a junior, Larry joined a 12-man group of “intensive” history majors who were taught in a seminar led by the eminent intellectual historian Leonard Krieger. One of the other students, Peter Stansky, recalls Veysey as a “dedicated and somewhat obsessed scholar” who famously wrote his senior thesis about the streetcars of Los Angeles, “a vivid and memorable personality, odd but intriguing, but not someone I knew well, and I suspect few if any did.” Larry kept a handful photographs of his Yale years. He is alone in all of them, unsmiling in jacket and tie. He graduated 10th out of 863 students in the Yale Class of 1953.

The Korean War was still grinding on that summer, and there were no academic deferments. Larry enlisted in the United States Army Security Agency, hoping to learn new languages. Instead he was assigned to a base in Indianapolis and started training in shorthand to be a general’s secretary in Japan. He’d lie awake in the tightly packed barracks, night after night. Finally, overcome by sleep deprivation, he started screaming uncontrollably in the middle of class. The Army sent him to a mental ward in Fort Bragg, N.C., before granting him an honorable discharge in 1954.

Set on becoming a historian, Larry was also broke and unemployed. So he worked for the next two years as a secretary at a Los Angeles machine-tool company, taking shorthand by day and riding streetcars in his free time. He found himself intensely attracted to a co-worker, whom he invited home for dinner. Larry tried to express his feelings, but the man’s reaction was immediate and cruel. Larry was overcome with shame.

In 1956 he began graduate work at the University of Chicago, but he transferred to the University of California at Berkeley after a year. He was 25 years old and had spent nearly all his life in a lonely struggle with the expectations and circumstances of the world around him. Every new place had disappointed; every good thing seemed on the brink of ruin.

But at Berkeley, he was to find, for a time, something like contentment. It began with his adviser and mentor, Henry F. May, who was on his way to becoming a giant in the field of American religious and intellectual history. May pushed Veysey to expand his narrow interest in the history of theosophy, an esoteric philosophy with followers in Ojai, into a far wider survey of the crucial, formative decades of modern American higher education because “Ford money was available for fellowships in the history of higher education,” Veysey later said. “Henry steered me away from anything reflecting my narrow California origins, and I am sure this was the right thing to do.”

After his Ph.D. orals in the summer of 1959, Veysey dove into the research for what would become a classic history of organizational genesis: The Emergence of the American University.

He rented a second-floor room in a brown-shingle house on Hillegass Avenue, for a year to do nothing but read, working six days a week from morning to night. In late 1960, he visited the archives at Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Columbia, Yale, Clark, Harvard, and Cornell Universities, then headed back west through the universities in Chicago, Wisconsin, and Michigan, hopping on doomed streetcar lines along the way. He returned to Berkeley at Christmas, having just received a three-year appointment as a junior instructor at Harvard, beginning the following fall. That meant he had nine months to write his thesis.

Still in print and widely assigned in graduate courses in history, education, and sociology, The Emergence of the American University is 505 pages long. It is the short version of Veysey’s thesis, which runs 1,169 pages, plus 119 pages of bibliography. Both are divided into two main parts: The first, most well-known, covering the period from the end of the Civil War to 1890, is an intellectual history of a battle among three ideas vying for the soul of academe.

Veysey began by sketching the alien, moribund world of antebellum colleges ruled by piety and discipline. Clergymen dominated the ranks of administration while professors received little status or pay. Both groups believed that suffering benefited the mind as well as the soul, and students built their mental faculties through painful recitation of long passages in ancient Greek.

But in Veysey’s telling, those faltering, marginal institutions were soon overcome by the demands of surging industrialization. Scholars began returning from Europe with tales of Humboldtian research universities in which the independent, credentialed professor reigned supreme. At the same time, land-grant universities were expanding and pursuing a utilitarian mission of mechanical arts and practical education. The third vision was liberal education, which the English theologian John Henry Newman had described as teaching students to understand “the great outlines of knowledge, the principles on which it rests, the scale of its parts, its lights and shades, its great points and its little …"

College administrators were less polite back then, and Veysey had a knack for finding the telling quotation. David Starr Jordan, the founding president of Stanford University, mistrusted the “doctors of philosophy turned out in such numbers from the great hothouses of university culture.” After listening to a speech from the president of Yale about 13th-century European higher education, President Charles Eliot of Harvard was said to have stood up and declared: “The American university has nothing to learn from medieval universities, nor yet from those still in the medieval period.”

Despite its length, Veysey’s original thesis is, in many ways, an easier read than The Emergence of the American University, which can grow heavy with concentrated ideas and information, while whole sections about 19th-century student life were cut from the final manuscript. Apparently “one highly unpopular Yale tutor had both his living chambers and his recitation room shattered by bombs. A group of Harvard students blew up an entire building in 1870.” Who knew?

Today, Veysey’s war-of-three-ideas framework remains vital to understanding the origins of modern higher education. Yet it represents only the first half of his dissertation and the book that would follow. The second is about what came next: Instead of choosing a single vision, universities adopted elements of all three organizational missions within a single institution, creating complicated — and often contradictory — organizations that endure to this day.

Veysey always saw the university as an enclave and a shelter for people like him, and he never stopped believing in the possibility of better worlds. But he also had a merciless intelligence and a steadfast unwillingness to sugarcoat the truth. The incoherence of the emergent university shocked him.

Few within higher education were satisfied with how the parts functioned together. Daniel Coit Gilman, first president of America’s first research university, Johns Hopkins, worried that the university might forget that its commitment was not just to knowledge but also to developing character. A society of “men who have cultivated to the extreme a single power, without simultaneously developing the various faculties of the mind,” he said, “would be a miserable society of impractical pessimists, it would resemble a community of boys who can paint portraits with their toes …" The philosopher R.M. Wenley described the scholar as a “cyclops of sorts who perceives nothing but waste outside of his own Lilliputian grand duchy.” Nonetheless, the isolation and specialization of research came to dominate faculty life in the new hybrid universities.

Yet the real power was quickly consolidated among university administrators, who gathered ever-larger amounts of money and social prestige for their institutions — and themselves. “Bureaucratic organization was the structural device which made possible the new epoch of institutional empire-building without recourse to specific shared values,” wrote Veysey. “Thus while unity of purpose disintegrated, a uniformity of standard practices was coming into being.” Veysey’s critique steadily increased in intensity:

The success of the American university, despite its internal incoherence, is best explained as the product of a working combination of interests, only one of which (the faculty’s) was inescapably linked to the values which the university could uniquely promise to realize. The combination of interests worked, it might be further hazarded, because the various participants were sufficiently unaware of the logic of the total situation in which they found themselves. The fact that students were frequently pawns of their parents’ ambitions was meliorated by the romantically gregarious tone of undergraduate life. The fact that professors were rarely taken as seriously by others as they took themselves was hidden by their rationalistic belief in the power of intellectual persuasion, direct or eventual, and was further concealed by all the barriers to frank dialogue which are stylized into courtesy. Those at the top, in their turn, were shielded by a hypnotic mode of ritualistic idealism. … Tacitly obeying the need to fail to communicate, each academic group normally refrained from too rude or brutal an unmasking of the rest. And in this manner, without major economic incentives and without a genuine sharing of ideals, men labored together in what became a diverse but fundamentally stable institution.

The university throve, as it were, on ignorance. Or, if this way of stating it seems unnecessarily paradoxical, the university throve on the patterned isolation of its component parts, and this isolation required that people continually talk past each other, failing to listen to what others were actually saying. This lack of comprehension, which safeguards one’s privacy and one’s illusions, doubtless occurs in many groups, but it may be of special importance in explaining the otherwise unfathomable behavior of a society’s most intelligent members.

Most of the American university’s recent struggles — rampant status competition, runaway costs and prices, declining academic standards, administrators and professors at war — can be traced back to the deep structural incoherence Veysey described. Determined to be many things at once and animated by the ambitions of the administrative class, universities sprawled ever upward and outward, driven by a bottomless appetite for new functions and expenses. At the same time, the educational mission was steadily subordinated to the demands of reputation and research, what Clark Kerr described as the “cruel paradox that a superior faculty results in an inferior concern for undergraduate teaching.”

But Veysey was writing in the early 1960s, when the federal government was pouring billions of research dollars into the academy even as millions of new students were arriving from the burgeoning middle class. The tidal wave of resources was more than enough to sustain the academic enterprise, however illogical it might be.

In the meantime, having looked deep into the fractured heart of the modern university, Veysey set about making it is his professional home.

He turned in his thesis and left for Cambridge, Mass., to teach the lower-division Western Civ and political-philosophy courses that established Harvard faculty wanted to avoid. The pay was $6,500 per year, with no hope of tenure. Veysey couldn’t have been happier. He had public transportation and plenty of time to immerse himself in the books he taught his students. In the summer of 1962, he decided to rent a house in Ojai, less than a mile from where his father had died, to pare down his thesis into book form.

In 1965, The Emergence of the American University was published by the University of Chicago Press to immediate, stellar reviews. “Brilliant” and “a major contribution” said The Journal of American History. “A superb volume of historical analysis and narrative,” raved Social Studies. “One of the most important and stimulating books published in American intellectual and cultural history within the last decade,” declared the Journal of Higher Education. The book became the starting point for further discussion. When Christopher Jencks and David Riesman published their influential and widely read The Academic Revolution (Doubleday), in 1968, they began by citing Veysey’s “brilliant” book in the introduction and quoting its intellectual framing at length.

As Veysey returned to Berkeley to teach the summer session, he was credentialed, unencumbered, and a rising academic star. He was also, at age 32, a virgin. His shell of obsessive purpose was buffeted by other scholars forming families all around him. He ached for normalcy, and marriage to a woman was considered normal. A red-haired, blue-eyed British woman named Sheila struck up a conversation during a summer concert at Hertz Hall. Six weeks later, they were married at a friend’s house in Sausalito.

The book opened new opportunities, and the University of California at Los Angeles came calling. But that would have put Veysey too near his mother, whom he had grown to resent. Instead he accepted an offer from a brand-new, experimental institution: the University of California at Santa Cruz. UCSC was organized in a system of small, semi-autonomous residential colleges, with no formal academic departments or letter grades for students. Built in a redwood grove above the bay, it was gorgeous and unearthly, a collection of mid-century-modern buildings, in glass and concrete, connected by elevated wooden bridges crisscrossing an elven forest from Middle Earth. Larry and Sheila settled onto campus. John, their only child, was born in 1967. Veysey went about doing what young professors do: teach, travel, and publish.

One of the students accepted into the first class at Santa Cruz was a young man named John R. Thelin. He went to Brown University instead and then to Berkeley, working closely with Henry May. Thelin is now a professor at the University of Kentucky and author of A History of American Higher Education (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), which sits alongside Veysey’s book on the small shelf of standard texts on the subject. Looking back in the late 1980s on The Emergence of the American University, he described it as a “monumental work which endures in its influence and as a model of historical interpretation.” He pointed out that “Veysey and his masterpiece have been claimed, respectively, for the history of education, for the history of ideas, for the history of institutions, and for social history. With the adulation and affection usually reserved for football heroes and prom queens, the various history factions vied for Veysey’s affiliation.”

Thelin recalls a meeting of the History of Education Society at which a well-known Columbia historian gave a presentation that included numbers tracking a trend in higher education over time. “Veysey had never seen the numbers before,” says Thelin. “He got up and showed how to reassemble the numbers a little bit differently, creating a completely different impression of what they meant. It completely knocked the legs out from under the argument. I’ve never seen such devastation. Veysey looked like he had no qualms about it. He gave no quarter, and he was a brilliant guy.”

But as time went on, normalcy became harder for Veysey to maintain. His incompatibility with Sheila worsened, and he couldn’t help commenting on — when asked, and otherwise — the inadequacies and disappointments of the original utopian vision at Santa Cruz. Too many of the students and professors, he felt, were intellectually wanting, dilettantes and layabouts not committed to serious scholarship.

At the same time, he was living near the center of the dizzying cultural upheaval of Northern California in the late 1960s. The jacket-and-tie days of Yale just 15 years earlier had been replaced by anarchism, drugs, free love, and nudity. The latter in particular began to exert a powerful hold on Larry’s imagination. Intellectually, he believed in objectivity, complexity, and a pessimistic view of human nature. As his friend and another Santa Cruz historian Jonathan Beecher would later write, “The truth for him was never simple and rarely uplifting.” But personally, he was drawn to the promise of radical social transformation and the acceptance it might bring.

These disparate impulses ultimately converged in Veysey’s second and last major book, published in 1973 by Harper & Row: The Communal Experience: Anarchist and Mystical Counter-Cultures in America.

The book was Veysey’s attempt to place the radical ideas of his time and place in the context of American intellectual and social history, and, unavoidably, his personal history. The bulk comprises case studies of four utopian communities, two early 20th century and two modern, built around the distinct ideas of anarchism and religious mysticism. To research one, he spent five weeks living on a New Mexico commune led by a man to whom Veysey gave the pseudonym “Ezra.” Veysey was attracted to the anarchist communal principles of personal choice and tolerance for sexual difference. He thought they might offer him a home.

But Ezra turned out to be a garden-variety cult leader, exerting psychological control over his followers through lengthy proselytizing, random berating, loyalty tests, and shame. Beecher came to visit. “It was clear that Larry was at war,” he says. “He was trying very seriously to be a participant-observer and keep his mouth shut, but in fact he was at war with the guy who was running this place, who was really a space person. It was purportedly this anarchist commune, but in fact it was authoritarian.” Ezra’s real name was John P. Allen, a self-styled metallurgist, businessman, scientist, Mars pioneer, poet, playwright, and savant who is best known as the creator of Biosphere 2. That controversial, possibly fraudulent, and failed experiment in wholly self-contained living under a glass dome in the Arizona desert was later reborn as a scientific research institute associated with Columbia University and now at the University of Arizona — and spoofed by the actor Pauly Shore in Bio-Dome.

Veysey’s conclusions in his book were pessimistic. In America, he wrote, “radicalism is of little present value in helping the external forms of the social order to become more just or humane. The mainstream is simply too numerous, too powerful and too self-assured in its pursuit of the time-honored goals of accumulation and prestige.” The only comfort he could find in the brief flowering and inevitable spoiling of the small communal places he described was their persistence through history. “If it is an illusion,” he wrote, “it is at least a recurring one.”

Veysey knew that The Communal Experience would end his chances of moving to a more prestigious university. The subject matter was too strange and unscholarly. Critical reaction was mixed, although the book was nominated for the National Book Award. In private correspondence, Henry May wrote to Veysey, “I think the book has its faults, and am not quite sure that it hangs together. Yet I think it is an important book, brave, innovating, and stimulating. … I wonder whether you didn’t expect, beginning the book, to come out less negative? This is part of what I mean about the book’s courage and originality. It is not, thank God, constructed to fit a thesis, or, worse, to refute somebody else’s thesis.”

Larry and Sheila divorced in 1976. Veysey made only two real friends at UCSC: Beecher and a historian of Russia and Eastern Europe named Peter Kenez. When Kenez and his wife, Penelope, would have him over for dinner, Larry would give the meal a letter grade on an unforgiving scale. He liked to do the same with sunsets. He was, Penelope says, “arrogant and purposefully abrasive when he thought he was dealing with people who were either stupid or acting stupidly, which was, from his perspective, 98 or 99 percent of humankind. But he was also ready to be impressed, and he didn’t care about your politics or your education. He was a strange and troubled man, but we liked him. He was our friend.”

Veysey began work on a book about the decline of religion in the 20th century, but never finished it. Instead, he spent years writing and rewriting a gay pornographic novel. Santa Cruz abandoned the innovative small-college model, an inevitable surrender to uniformity that Veysey had studied in The Emergence of the American University. He drank, sometimes to excess, and the sharp edge of his interactions with fellow faculty grew increasingly barbed. With students, he would sometimes cross the line into cruelty.

He also became obsessed with nudism, looking for opportunities to stay naked for days at a time. His first sexual encounter with a man didn’t happen until 1981. A new world opened up to him, which he began to explore eagerly. Then it was almost immediately transformed by the AIDS pandemic.

Veysey continued to teach and occasionally publish, but his academic ambition had all but vanished. In a 1981 essay, he looked back fondly on The Emergence of the American University. He readily acknowledged flaws that had been identified by later scholars, especially his inattention to the growing role of women in higher education and the book’s lack of contextual comparison to education systems in other countries. At the same time, he derided subsequent writers who portrayed the history of higher learning in overly congratulatory and simplistic terms.

He had a small heart attack in 1983 and then a major episode in 1986. Physically unable to handle a full course load and mentally distant from academe, he took early retirement at age 53. He was, he told Beecher, glad to give up history-department meetings. “It seemed I was always arguing for standards no one else believed in,” he wrote, “and I could see why.”

Giving away most of his possessions, he left his personal papers to the Santa Cruz archives, along with the unpublished pornographic novel. He included a cover note advising library personnel not to look at the latter. As a work of fiction, it is all but unreadable, more an exercise in exploring the limits of the author’s considerable transgressive imagination than a book meant for anyone else. The plot involves a man who stumbles upon an anarchist gay nudist commune hidden in the California valleys, where he lives for a time in bliss before the authorities destroy everything. It concludes with one character lying on a rock overlooking the Pacific Ocean, until he dies of exposure, naked to the last. Above that passage, in the margins, Larry wrote, “The last pages of this novel are so sad I have to force myself to write them.”

With his pension and a small inheritance, he bought the condominium in Lahaina where he lived out his remaining days. His last published work appeared in 1996, in the magazine Nude & Natural. It was titled “Wearing Nothing and Doing Nothing in Lahaina.” He included a photographic self-portrait, sitting nude in the style of Whitman.

“I realize that all this evolution in the final part of my life can be seen from more than one point of view,” he had written a few months after his 1986 heart attack. “From an academic, mainstream perspective, I gradually succumbed to the California environment, especially as it was in the 1960s and 1970s, till I threw away a career and gave into my ‘zany’ side, till I finally died in obscurity. I ended up nothing more than an eccentric or a crackpot. From the viewpoint I myself increasingly adopted, the academic years had been full of pedantry and sublimation, and I had finally found fulfillment in a version of the physical life, after a youth when I had tried to deny those needs.”

When Peter Kenez visited his old friend in Lahaina, he saw a lonely man, someone who had searched for and thought about communities all his life, only to end up by himself most hours of the day, wandering, far from family and friends. But writing in 1996, Veysey expressed no regrets. “I can’t wait for the dawn to get out in the street in my bare feet, feeling my long, wild hair flapping on my bare shoulders. I now know what the ideal recipe for life is, at least for me.”

His idyll was not to last. Weakened by further heart problems and strokes, Larry Veysey died on February 22, 2004, at Maui Memorial Medical Center. His obituary lists his only survivors as his son and a local caretaker. There was no service.

The Emergence of the American University, however, lives on. It is strange to say for a book immediately hailed as a classic, but it was decades ahead of its time. The full implications of Veysey’s critique were masked by the newness and prosperity of the modern university. Now, as institutions settled in century-old foundations struggle with faculty-administration rancor and intractable financial problems, Veysey’s analysis of their “unfathomable behavior” seems evermore acute. The book has been “dominant,” in Thelin’s view, to the point of almost paralyzing the following generations of scholars. “Perhaps the biggest disappointment of The Emergence of the American University,” wrote Thelin, “is that it did not inspire any monumental rivals … overwhelming in its research conception and execution, it persisted relatively unchallenged.”

Fifty years later, the ideas Veysey developed in two years of white-hot scholarly intensity continue to shape our basic understanding of academe. In that brief window of contentment, the closest he ever came to finding utopia, he marked himself upon the world.

Kevin Carey is director of the education-policy program at New America. His most recent book is The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere (Riverhead Books).