Periodically the Communications Team reaches out to members of the Department of English faculty and graduate program and asks them to elaborate on a current research or creative project they are working on or have recently completed. For this spotlight, we talked with Professor Frank Donoghue about his new book War and College (to be published next year).
How would you explain your book to someone who isn’t familiar with your field?
War and College looks at how America’s wars have shaped the country’s higher education. This may seem like an unlikely connection to make, but key legislation and policy adopted when the US was at war have led to profound effects on the country’s universities.
How would you describe your project to a colleague in your field?
The pillars of this book are four key points during America’s wars that impacted the country’s college and university system in ways that are still felt today and that will reach into the future. A clear military thread ties together each of these cases, and the book addresses a challenging problem: how to account for change in higher education. Universities seem timeless, but they change over time, usually almost imperceptibly. Harvard was founded in 1636, but it’s clearly a very different institution than it was four centuries ago. War, by contrast, is sudden and drastic, and I believe the nature of war can help clarify how universities change.
Would you be able to summarize those four key points?
The first of these pillars was the Morrill Act, which funded the first land grant universities. Lincoln signed the bill into law in July 1862, when the Union was at a critical point in the Civil War. Leading generals for the Confederacy were either West Point graduates or graduates from the country’s best military colleges, all located in the South. One provision of the Morrill Act was that military tactics would be taught at the colleges it financed, as a way of counteracting the Southern leadership that was crucial to the Confederacy’s early victories. Land grant universities today form the backbone of American higher education.
As the United States prepared to enter World War I, it once again suffered from a shortage of well-trained officers. A group of psychologists hoped to remedy this problem by administering IQ tests to everyone who enlisted or was drafted, a total of 1.75 million men. The highest scorers were sent to officer training school. Just eight years after the war ended, the same psychologists refined the Army IQ test and introduced it as SAT. That test, of course, eventually became a standard item in the college admissions process. Twenty million high schoolers took it in 2020.
Near the end of World War II, America faced a different problem: how to how to reintegrate the 16 million veterans into society once they came home. One of the provisions of the GI Bill, as the legislation was called, paid full college tuition and a living stipend to any veteran who wanted to enroll. Though flawed in many ways, the GI Bill reflected the idea that college education was a public good to which all veterans were entitled, free of charge. This transformed the country’s understanding of higher education. As many as 60 percent of those who took advantage of the provision would not otherwise have been able to afford college. That generation, in turn, expected their children to attend college as well. Today, 18 million people are now enrolled.
The dropping of atomic bombs on Japan changed war forever. The military’s job now became not winning wars but averting them. This meant that the United States and its archrival, the Soviet Union, began spending enormous amounts of money on surveillance and intelligence gathering, and also on scientific research. The consequences for American higher education are clearly visible today: an increased curricular focus on STEM subjects and the invention of the internet— originally a military project, ARPANET. Perhaps the most important educational development that resulted from the military’s invention of the internet has been the emergence and increasing popularity of online learning. The convenience and accessibility of online courses is, I believe, destined to shape the future of America’s colleges and universities.
Are you working with any colleagues or collaborators? Are there any organizations supporting or funding this project that you would like to acknowledge?
Parts of this book were funded by the Department of English and by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Since the book is nearly complete, how do you see this research developing in the future?
I keep broadening my perspective on American higher education. I went from being a professor who studies literature, to writing about the job of being a professor, to looking at how universities intersect with the country’s military history. I’m still very interested in how our understanding of higher education changes over time, so I’m sure I’ll speculate about how the country’s universities will function in the future. Exactly what form those speculations will take I’m not sure.