Higher Education after World War II
Standing before the University of Wisconsin’s graduating class of 1948, General Omar Bradley, hero of World War II and a key player in the 1944 invasion of Normandy, spoke with a determined gravity. That summer, there were many reasons to be pessimistic about the future, and the events that had shaken the world over the past several months and years hung heavy in Bradley’s words: “The great powers have joined in a struggle for the hearts and minds of people,” Bradley said, “calling on them to choose between a free and captive life. This struggle must eventually resolve itself either in peaceful settlement of fundamental differences or it must erupt eventually in the violence and convulsion of war.”1
On that warm afternoon, everyone knew the struggle to which Bradley referred. Usually a time for celebration, the joy of graduation was tempered by the knowledge that Wisconsin’s graduates, and indeed all Americans, faced a world that was burdened by the developing Cold War. Thoughts about jobs and families intermingled with the reality of a worldwide struggle with an indefinite horizon, of the Cold War and the onset of the atomic age. Peace, as Bradley declared, required vigilance and strength: “Peace is a fragile and fugitive blessing for which millions have given their lives. But it cannot be easily fashioned from the wreckage of this last war. It must be constructed by sacrifice, by courage, by patience, among people who value it highly enough to defend it. It demands moral leadership, adherence to principle, and the willingness of nations to sustain it with such strength as it shall need for enforcement.” Calling on the graduates before him to bring faith to a “tired world,” Bradley reminded them that they could not ignore the events taking place in the world around them. They were confronted by a choice: either forge an equitable and sustainable peace or risk chaos and disaster. Sitting on the sidelines was no longer an option. “You are implicated in the destiny of a world from which you cannot escape,” Bradley concluded. “Either you work for peace and prosper with it. Or you abandon the world to aggression and perish.”2
Bradley’s speech depicted a particularly stark future for Wisconsin’s young graduating class, reflecting as it did the mood of the nation during that harrowing summer. In raising the Cold War as a fundamental issue in young people’s lives, however, it was much less remarkable. Ever since the end of World War II and for many years after General Bradley spoke, the Cold War was a powerful reality for students. Sometimes in ways that were clearly identifiable, such as the looming of the draft or the regular threats to political discourse, and sometimes in ways that were less noticeable, like the creep of Cold War militarization into students’ daily lives and the deepening relationship between the federal government and the university, the Cold War was much more than a struggle in some faraway place. The domestic battle against communism was a social, cultural, and political struggle for the home front, one that influenced the lives of all Americans.
Even as the Cold War affected the lives of students, it also left an indelible mark on universities themselves. The two decades following the end of World War II witnessed the phenomenal growth of scientific research on university campuses, a shift in higher education toward technical training, and a massive increase in enrollments, all within the context of a rapidly developing relationship between the federal government and the academic world. Though emerging for a variety of reasons and affecting the nation’s universities unevenly, the general trends, as well as their intimate relationship to the Cold War, are unmistakable. At Wisconsin, the unprecedented flow of Cold War–related funds in the postwar years underwrote significant changes, and the university became embroiled in the nation’s struggle in a way that altered the principle of “service” that had been part of the university’s proud tradition since the turn of the century. Wisconsin, like many institutions of higher education, became a “Cold War university.” Increasingly supported by the federal government, it played an increasingly crucial role in the broad and multifaceted struggle with the Soviet Union.
This transformation would also, however, reveal tensions in Cold War–era higher education. Even as universities became more important to the nation’s politics, culture, and even its defense, the incredible expansion of universities, underwritten in large part by the federal government, would have unintended consequences. The federal government invested in universities because of their role in producing scientific knowledge as well as a highly trained workforce, but as enrollments swelled and universities became centers of Cold War dissent, the partnership between the federal government and higher education would provoke increasing scrutiny. While the framework for this partnership was constructed in the late 1940s and 1950s, it would not be until the 1960s that the effects of the Cold War on the university would be fully realized; these effects would help lay the foundation for the powerful protest movement that dominated the era.
The city of Madison, home to the University of Wisconsin, was first settled in the early nineteenth century, as Americans began to move into south central Wisconsin, an area that had long been home to a number of Native American tribes. The first Europeans to enter Wisconsin were French, in the seventeenth century, but their main interest was the fur trade, and they established few settlements, preferring to trade with the Native Americans instead. The territory was ceded to the British after the Seven Years’ War and then to the United States after the American Revolution; it was a few decades later that James Doty, a judge in the Michigan Territory, which included Wisconsin at the time, established the city. With land in the Madison area going on sale at the federal land office in Green Bay in 1835, significant settlement began within just a few years, the population increasing to more than six thousand by the time of the Civil War. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the city’s original settlers had mixed with mostly German and Norwegian immigrants, along with small communities of Irish, Jews, Italians, African Americans, and others.3
Nestled on an isthmus between two lakes, Madison was a picturesque spot, but it was selected first as territorial capital and then as state capital because of its central location between the cities and shipping routes that lay on the state’s eastern edge, along Lake Michigan, and the mining industry in the southwest part of the state. It developed some manufacturing over the remainder of the nineteenth century, including the factories of Norwegian immigrant John Anders Johnson on the east side of the city, but it was never dominated by any particular industry, sustained instead by the business of the state capital and, beginning in 1848, the University of Wisconsin. A century later, in 1948, Life magazine rated Madison the best city in America, a standout for its natural beauty, prosperous economy, and abundant cultural opportunities.4
The establishment of the University of Wisconsin in 1848 coincided with Wisconsin’s transition from territory to state the same year, with citizens agreeing that a prominent public university was a requisite for a great state. The first university class met in February 1849 under the direction of mathematics professor John Sterling, while the campus’s first building, North Hall, was completed in 1851, resting near the top of a hill on what was then the far western edge of the city. The building had a beautiful view of Madison, the surrounding land, and nearby Lake Mendota; significantly, it was only about a mile away from the state capitol, this proximity perhaps influencing the sometimes stormy relationship between the state government and some segments of the campus. North Hall was complete with living as well as classroom space and still remains in use as a campus building, along with South Hall, University Hall (the first building meant solely for instruction and later renamed Bascom Hall), and other early buildings. The first female students were admitted in 1863, during the Civil War, and the university graduated its first PhD, future university president Charles Van Hise, in 1892, the same year that the Daily Cardinal, the student newspaper still in circulation today, started publication.5
Wisconsin continued to develop into one of the nation’s leading universities during the first half of the twentieth century. It was one of three public universities that helped found the Association of American Universities in 1900, an organization dedicated to graduate-level research as well as undergraduate teaching (the other two were the University of Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley), and it became especially famous for the “Wisconsin Idea” during the early 1900s Progressive Era. Professors at Wisconsin pioneered a close collaboration between the university and the state government for the purpose of improving government and solving public problems, and their model became well known around the country, often captured in the expression that “the boundaries of the university are the boundaries of the state.” Meanwhile, 1916 saw the completion of a new campus building, named after the university’s first professor, mathematician John Sterling. Sterling Hall originally housed the departments of physics and political economy; more than fifty years later, when it was also home to the Army Mathematics Research Center, it would be the site of one of the nation’s worst bombings, a key marker in sixties upheaval.
Madison was also at the center of administrative changes in the state’s system of higher education, changes that reflected the growth of higher education and its increasing importance in American society. The University of Wisconsin had initially included just the Madison campus, but it had expanded over the years to include the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (added in 1956), UW–Green Bay (1968), UW–Parkside (1968), as well as several freshman and sophomore centers. And while the UW president had previously been in charge of the Madison campus as well as other operations throughout the state, President Fred Harvey Harrington split these responsibilities in 1963, creating the position of provost and, a few years later, chancellor to oversee daily operations in Madison. In 1971, an even larger merger would take place, combining the several institutions within the UW with a number of campuses that had been organized previously as Wisconsin State Universities. The resulting University of Wisconsin System would eventually include twenty-six campuses throughout the state and be governed by a single Board of Regents, with most of its members appointed by the governor and serving nine-year terms.6
In Madison, these administrative changes were matched with the tumult of World War II and the years that followed. While the end of the war might have suggested a return to normalcy at Wisconsin and elsewhere in higher education, the reality was a continued rush of changes. The crush of returning GIs in particular stretched the university’s resources to their limits. Compared with the prewar peak enrollment of about twelve thousand students in the late 1930s and significantly lower numbers during much of the war, 1946 enrollment jumped past eighteen thousand, about half of them veterans. To accommodate all these students, courses began at 7:45 a.m. on weekday mornings and were scheduled on Saturday mornings as well; even with the use of Quonset huts and other temporary buildings, some classes had to be held off campus. The housing shortage was just as daunting, especially since a good number of returning GIs were married and had children. Many faculty and Madison residents opened their homes, dorms were crammed full, and the university set up a trailer park near the football stadium, Camp Randall, for veterans and their families. Even so, the university was never able to adequately accommodate the crush of students.
The developing Cold War also loomed over the campus at midcentury, though student and campus life at the University of Wisconsin seemed little affected in some ways. Social life on campus centered on dating and beer, much as it had for many years. In addition to the prom, house formals, and even skating and toboggan parties, beer suppers were popular, and Madison had bars that served beer to students eighteen and older, including the German-themed Rathskeller in the campus’s Memorial Union. A cursory look at the Daily Cardinal, the student paper, indicates that despite a good deal of attention to issues like racial discrimination and academic freedom in the postwar years, more mundane issues were often prominent. The paper covered national and international news (how much seems to have depended on the interest of the paper’s staff and the resources available at any given time), but the paper’s usual eight or twelve pages reveal a particular emphasis on local campus happenings, society news, upcoming events, and campus sports.
Telling is the criticism of campus apathy that regularly came from the newspaper’s editors, as are the generally pedestrian concerns that took up most of the efforts of the university’s student government. In the published platforms of students running for Wisconsin Student Association office in fall 1955, for example, campus issues were paramount. Several hopefuls were especially concerned about recent attempts to raise the drinking age, while almost every platform mentioned the need to raise the minimum wage for student workers and included plans to push for more student parking. Two of the twelve students running for the Student Senate mentioned their support for an end to discrimination on campus, an issue that had emerged because of publicity surrounding two university-approved women’s houses that continued to ask for racial and religious information on their applications.7
Many students might have preferred to ignore the events taking place outside of their relatively isolated midwestern city, but even if most of them did not discuss foreign policy in the dorm hallways or fret daily over the dangers of nuclear destruction, the Cold War impacted their lives in a number of ways. In particular, though it lacked the same intensity that had come with World War II, the militarization of campus life, the continued mobilization and preparation for future wars, was one of the long-lasting consequences of the Cold War. The need to maintain a high level of preparedness meant that compulsory ROTC for male students and civil defense became a normal part of university life, and except for parts of 1947 and 1948, students were susceptible to the draft throughout the postwar years. More broadly, the world instability that marked the Cold War permeated life at the university in less obvious ways as well, infiltrating humor and even reshaping the language of the era, reminding students that they lived in a world constantly threatened with war.
The continuation of compulsory Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) courses after the end of World War II was perhaps the most obvious sign of mobilization for the Cold War. A land grant institution, Wisconsin was required under the 1862 Morrill Act to offer courses in military tactics, but these had been voluntary for most of the university’s history. Indeed, Wisconsin had been the first university in the nation to challenge the compulsory system that had started during World War I, when ROTC was established; yet after World War II, when ROTC once again became compulsory for all male students, the state legislature declined to return to a voluntary system. The continued mobilization of the Cold War meant the need for a steady stream of officers, and all male students were required to take ROTC courses in their first and second years, with successive coursework being optional. Many Americans justified compulsory ROTC as crucial to the national defense and as a sign of patriotism, while broader arguments for the program included the benefits of military and civilian interaction. Like Wisconsin, about two-thirds of land grant institutions and one-half of other colleges required ROTC in the 1950s.8
Although the mere existence of ROTC on campus would become a key target of student activists in the 1960s, as perhaps the most visible connection between the military and higher education, the debate during the early years of the Cold War remained focused on the compulsory nature of the program. Debate over the issue came up in the pages of the Cardinal almost every year in the late 1940s and 1950s, and while some students defended compulsory ROTC because of the continued need for preparedness and many others made their opinion known by continuing in the voluntary program during their junior and senior years, many opposed the requirement as intrusive and militarily unnecessary. A 1949 campus survey indicated that, two to one, students favored making ROTC voluntary (though the survey did not ask about abolishing ROTC altogether, a question that had been rejected by 80 percent of students in a 1927 poll), while ROTC’s annual spring review was the focus of two rare student protests, first in 1950 and again in 1957. Summarizing student opinion during much of the postwar period, the Cardinal editorialized in 1957 that compulsory ROTC was a waste of taxpayer money and student time; a voluntary program, the paper suggested, would be more effective for those students who wanted to participate.9
Though not as intrusive as ROTC, at least for male students, the Cold War–inspired threat of nuclear war also meant the creation of a program for civil defense at the UW. With the emergence of the Soviet Union as an atomic power in 1949, Wisconsin followed the federal government’s lead in turning its attention to planning for a nuclear attack, forming a Committee on Civil Defense in 1950 to coordinate the university’s efforts. Charged with working with city and county authorities and drawing up plans in case of a nuclear emergency, the Committee on Civil Defense was concerned with an attack on Madison but also gave attention to a possible attack on Chicago or Milwaukee and the role that Madison could play as an evacuation center. The committee catalogued the campus’s human and physical resources that might be put to use in case of an emergency and attempted to maintain campus readiness, which included preparing students for the possibility of an attack. The committee posted information throughout campus, and in a 1951 memo to leaders of campus residences, ominously declared “The consequences of an ATOMIC BOMB dropped in Wisconsin may directly affect you.”10
One of the most pressing issues for male students, of course, was the draft. Discontinued in 1947 under the pressure to demobilize, the reprieve did not last long, as the worsening international situation, combined with a lack of volunteers, led to its return in June 1948. Under that draft law, college students were allowed to postpone induction until the end of the academic year, and Congress also placed increasing emphasis on maintaining the nation’s scientific manpower, which meant that many students were able to get deferments and avoid service. In actuality, draft calls were relatively light, except during the Korean War, and even then deferments were available for many students. A UW report found that most students were exempt from the draft either because of their age, physical disqualifications, or deferments as students or ROTC cadets: in 1952, only 8 percent of students were classified as I-A, eligible for immediate induction. In a twist that would be repeated during Vietnam, at least some students protested their own deferments, arguing that the deferment program was a form of economic discrimination against those who could not afford to attend college. This echoed a concern among some policymakers that the selectivity of the draft threatened the ideals of universal service and shared sacrifice.11
One suggestion for sharing the burden of military service, proposed by President Truman after World War II and raised periodically into the 1950s, was universal military training (UMT). Plans varied, but most consisted of a short period of training, perhaps six months, for all young men, which would create a manpower reserve in case of a national emergency. But despite what some called the “democratic” element of UMT, at least some students at the UW were not persuaded. A debate raged in the pages of the Cardinal in the spring of 1948, and while the Cardinal editors claimed that UMT was necessary in light of the international situation, at least some students disagreed, contending that UMT was inconsistent with America’s heritage. Drawing on their experience as soldiers, members of the campus chapter of the American Veterans Committee, a liberal alternative to the more conservative American Legion, voiced their own opposition to UMT. Writing on behalf of the group, one veteran suggested that the real need was to work for peace, not preparation for more wars. Besides, he said, anyone who argued that UMT would be good moral or educational training, two of the arguments sometimes made for the program, had never been anywhere near an army or navy base.12
In addition to discussion of the draft and the possibility of UMT, a steady stream of global events also interrupted normal university life, reminding students that the world remained a dangerous place. Students were occasionally confronted with newspaper headlines like the one in the October 15, 1948, Cardinal: “War Imminent and Expected, According to State Dept. Statements,” and the spring 1948 communist coup in Czechoslovakia, in particular, raised a good deal of anxiety on campus, including concern over potential changes to the draft. More than 150 students attended a panel discussion on “postwar blues” in early March of that year, expressing concern over the failure of the United Nations and the potential for another war, and crowds of students gathered in the Memorial Union to listen to President Harry Truman’s March 17 speech before Congress regarding the situation in Czechoslovakia Along with general support for Truman, the Cardinal reported what it called campus “jitters.” As the paper put it, the Czech crisis raised a number of questions about America’s part in the developing Cold War, questions that had no firm answers: “Americans are wondering just how far Soviet influence will extend on the European continent. They are wondering just how far we can and should go to halt its advances. They are wondering—in light of new developments—just how far Harry Truman would like to lead us and in what direction.”13
If the Czech crisis prompted “jitters,” the coming of war in Korea raised a more general alarm. A month after the beginning of the war in 1950, a forum on Korea attracted a large and lively audience, while many on campus again worried about the impact of war. As one student, Janet Rosenblum, put it in 1951, normal life was hard to imagine in light of the possibility of another world war; it was difficult to concentrate on studying “when the implications of the atomic bomb and full scale war constantly invade our thoughts.” Fraternities, which had been hit hard by the drain on male students during World War II, began planning for more rough times, and ROTC enrollments hit new highs. The war also affected course work, as some year-long courses were offered in a single semester so students who faced the draft could complete their studies more quickly; those facing possible induction were also given the option to substitute classes relevant to military service and defer other requirements. 14
More generally, the power of the atom and the potential for war seeped into the student consciousness. Of the generation that came of age in the 1950s, and especially for those who would later join the New Left, sixties activist and chronicler Todd Gitlin writes that “the Bomb” was perhaps the most pervasive fear. Though some appreciated the bomb’s role in ending World War II, this generation was the first to fear the end of days: “Rather than feel grateful for the Bomb,” Gitlin writes, “we felt menaced. The Bomb was the shadow hanging over all human endeavor. It threatened all the prizes.” Just as Janet Rosenblum had expressed her fear of the implications of atomic war, another student, William Heinz, expressed his trepidation about the arms race. Winning the arms race will be “no enviable victory,” he wrote in 1950, “because it cannot be decided until a major war breaks out. All indications are that in such an event there will be few or none left who know or care who won the race.” A few years later, the editors of the Daily Cardinal opined more broadly that students lacked a sense of normalcy. Students in the fifties had been “weaned on blitzkrieg, genocide, mass annihilation, peaceful coexistence, posture of patience, and all the isms that have been hurled at us since the turn of the century.” “It’s true we have all the facilities and opportunities at our disposal for living the so-called good life,” the editors concluded, “but how can we enjoy it when someone is always ominously warning us about the dangers of alphabet bombs and increased draft calls?”15
Discussion of the bomb regularly invaded the campus. In 1948, the university scheduled an “Atomic Energy Week” to promote discussion of the consequences of the atomic age. A panel discussion titled “Will Atomic Energy Serve or Destroy Mankind?” highlighted the week, but even though it included UW chemistry professor Farrington Daniels, who had worked on developing nuclear energy during World War II and remained a proponent of its peaceful uses, the discussion was dominated by mostly pessimistic views of atomic energy. Another UW chemistry professor, Joseph Hirschfelder, gave a particularly sobering account of the potential of the atomic age just a couple of years later. At a 1950 roundtable meeting of some of the nation’s leading atomic scientists in Madison, he acknowledged that it was highly improbable that Madison would be the target of a nuclear attack, but he estimated that an atomic blast over Bascom Hall, near the center of campus, could kill ten thousand students. Asked which buildings on campus would be the safest in the event of an attack, he responded that none would be safe: most of the campus would be leveled. Chemistry professor Aaron Ihde’s report for the faculty and student civil defense committees on what to do in the event of a nuclear attack, described in a front-page Cardinal article, warned students to protect themselves in ways such as “Close your eyes and cover with arm,” “Wait for heat and shock waves to pass (two minutes),” and “Avoid panic. Don’t start rumors.”16
Campus speakers also kept the Cold War in front of students. Just as General Bradley had painted a dark picture of the world for UW graduates in 1948, a succession of speakers during the late 1940s and 1950s raised the specter of the Cold War for Wisconsin audiences. Norwegian ambassador Wilhelm Morgenstierne, at a gathering of the UW International Club in March 1948, told the students that Norwegians “will die on our feet rather than live on our knees.” And in a February 1950 speech on the need for a bipartisan foreign policy, Oregon senator Wayne Morse declared that “it is most likely that our generation will witness the sunrise or sunset of peace” (Morse, a Madison native and UW graduate, would later become famous as one of only two senators to vote against the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which authorized President Lyndon Johnson to escalate American involvement in Vietnam). Students also contributed to the regular warnings about the Cold War, with senior Dan Reich stating at the university’s 1952 Honors Convocation that “the single, overpowering fact of our times is the hostility between the Soviet Union and the United States. … The permanence of Western Civilization and its ideals—our ideals—depends on the ability of Western man—of us—in meeting this challenge.”17
Another commencement speech, by UW President E. B. Fred in 1951, points to the spread of Cold War militarization into the very language of the era. “Upon every citizen rests the obligation to serve his fellow men in civil life as the soldier serves his country in war,” Fred declared. “This is the age of the draft. In the final analysis, no one is exempted. For one reason or another, some may be exempt from military service. But none of us is exempt from sacrificial service to those traditions and institutions which are the lifeblood and framework of democracy. The military draft may be selective, but the moral draft operates inexorably upon all of us.” While the essence of his message had very little to do with actual military service, Fred’s decision to draw on military language in order to connect with his audience highlights the deep infiltration of this language into everyday use and understanding.18
References to the Cold War popped up in a variety of other contexts as well. Conservative student Alan McCone wrote a regular column for the Daily Cardinal titled “Atom Age Campus” in the mid-1950s, while a 1951 dorm blood drive referenced the sacrifice of Americans in Korea to encourage donation. A few years earlier, another plea to support the Red Cross had used a particularly grisly image to make its point. A full-page advertisement in the Cardinal pictured a crowd of people, led by a mother carrying her baby, fleeing from a burning city. It was expected that readers would implicitly understand the message; all that was needed below the picture was the straightforward pitch: “Donate to Your Campus Red Cross Drive.”19
And lest anyone think that the Cold War could not be funny, the campus humor magazine, the Octopus, regularly lampooned the Cold War and drew on it as a popular reference in its jokes. A 1948 article, “Fun with Atoms,” encouraged the purchase of “atom-cracking kits” for home use: leftover radioactive material had lots of fun uses, like putting it in the salt and pepper shakers and watching everyone in the family glow in the dark. Drawing on Cold War language a few years later, the magazine welcomed new students as “inductees first class,” while it also mocked the loyalty oath that students had to take as a part of ROTC. The mock oath printed in the magazine included directions to “Sign! Do not read! Follow Orders! Shoot if You Must! This Grey Old Head!” while students had to declare that they did not have even the “teensiest knowledge” of such potentially subversive groups as the Friends of the Kremlin, Boy Scouts of America, the Lutheran Church, Nephews of the Haymarket Rebellion, and so on. In 1955, an entire issue was devoted to making fun of ROTC, a popular pastime if not especially appreciated by many on campus. The issue mocked ROTC as well as militarism more generally, promoting a book by J.D. Salacious, The Catcher in the ROTC, and including a full-page cartoon of a fallout shelter and a man in uniform leaning over a woman with a tight-fitting dress, his hand on her leg. “Sergeant,” the caption read, “you don’t mean to say that to be absolutely safe from fall-out we’ll have to stay here for another 5 days!”20
Writers in the Octopus were having fun with some of the cultural references of their day, but the regularity of these references, and the ease with which they became a part of students’ consciousness in the decades after World War II, highlight the broad social and cultural impact of the Cold War in Americans’ lives. Students felt the impact of Cold War militarization through mandatory ROTC and the draft even as they were reminded of the dangers in the world outside Madison by such events as the Korean War and, later, the 1956 Hungarian revolt and the Soviet Union’s 1957 launching of Sputnik. Sociologist and future New Left hero C. Wright Mills (himself a UW PhD, class of 1941) was among those who put voice to these changes, commenting in 1956 on the militarization of American life. As Mills put it, Americans were living “in a nation whose elites and whose underlying population have accepted what can only be called a military definition of reality.”21
Just as student life was profoundly affected by the Cold War, the university itself underwent a deep transformation, a development that would resonate into the sixties and would focus many of the greatest clashes of that era. The battle against the Soviet Union highlighted the need for a nation united behind American values, and it also meant a marshalling of American resources for an indefinite struggle. Higher education was already important to the nation’s political and cultural life, but the Cold War brought a deepening relationship between the federal government and universities, a relationship that included higher education’s emerging role in providing a skilled population for the Cold War struggle but that was most explicit in the area of scientific research. With laboratory facilities, faculty scientists, and a qualified workforce of graduate students, universities offered the resources to conduct research that many believed necessary to win the Cold War, and both the federal government and many university leaders worked to cement a bond in the postwar years. In unprecedented fashion, many universities became integrated into the nation’s efforts to maintain scientific and technological leadership throughout the world and, as a result, became “Cold War universities,” a central component of America’s national security apparatus.
Federal government support for universities had been limited before World War II, often targeted to programs like agricultural development, but the crisis brought on by the attack at Pearl Harbor signaled a new direction. Transformed relatively quickly to provide a variety of support roles for the American war effort, universities served as specialized training centers for troops, and war research was funded to the tune of $325 million from the federal government’s Office of Scientific Research and Development between 1941 and 1945. The Manhattan Project in particular highlighted the potential for a new model of federal government and university collaboration: much of the research was conducted at American universities, while the crucial Los Alamos lab in New Mexico, where the first atomic bombs were built, also remained heavily dependent on university scientists. Los Alamos National Laboratory was organized by the U.S. Department of Energy, but it was run by the University of California, Berkeley; Berkeley physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the lab’s chief administrator, recruited top scientists and engineers from the nation’s universities to work on the project.22
In Madison, the university’s contributions to the war extended across the campus. In addition to hosting programs that provided specialized training for more than ten thousand soldiers during the war, UW contributions came from such professors as chemist Farrington Daniels, who served as the scientific administrator at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago, a key Manhattan Project site. Like Daniels, more than a hundred faculty members were working on national defense programs by November 1942, either in UW labs or in government labs while on leave from the university. Future university president E. B. Fred (then dean of the graduate school) and vice-president Ira Baldwin (then chair of the bacteriology department) both conducted secret government research on biological warfare, and Baldwin served as the lead scientist and administrator of the Biological Warfare Project under the War Department. A group of university scientists worked on developing new strains of penicillin for the War Production Board, and UW President Clarence Dykstra served as the first head of the Selective Service when the draft was reinstated in 1940.23
By 1945, this wartime experience offered an important model and a transition in the development of a much fuller relationship between universities and the federal government. While many in the federal government favored continued cooperation with universities, including then–Army Chief of Staff Dwight Eisenhower, who understood that the army had become dependent on civilian scientists, one of the foremost advocates was Vannevar Bush, head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during the war. Bush had been in charge of coordinating the government’s scientific efforts during the war, and he authored a 1945 report for President Truman that called for increasing cooperation in the postwar period between the federal government and universities on scientific and technological developments. Highlighting the importance of universities for the national defense and the many ways in which university research had helped secure victory in World War II, he argued that the nation’s universities and colleges were best positioned to carry out basic research. They were “wellsprings of knowledge and understanding,” he argued, where scientists could pursue the truth and develop knowledge that could be applied by both government and industry.24
Even as the federal government viewed universities as a resource for fighting the Cold War, so too did many in higher education. Motivated partly by practical concerns—federal dollars brought prestige, while a failure to acquire these dollars meant that reputations and top faculty might slip away—universities were also spurred forward by the self-conscious belief that they had a significant role to play in America’s Cold War effort. Crucial context for this belief was the growing number of university administrators who had served in some part of the federal government, many of them during World War II. Historian Kenneth Heineman’s research shows that while the presidents of many elite private universities had often worked with the federal government in some capacity before World War II, this wasn’t true of the majority of public university presidents until the 1940s and 1950s. Where none of the twenty-five public university presidents Heineman surveyed had done work for a government agency involved in national security issues in 1933, 40 percent had this kind of experience in 1950, most commonly at the State Department or the Department of Defense. The number was even higher when adding in work for the federal government in areas not related to national security, and some administrators also worked for foreign-policy foundations or corporations involved in defense work.25
Administrators at the University of Wisconsin were among the many who recognized the importance of higher education in fighting the Cold War. For President Fred, the university’s traditional goal of developing competent citizens blended easily with the nation’s Cold War struggle. “I believe that four years of attendance at the University of Wisconsin,” President Fred told a visiting group in 1951, “makes our young people better men and women, better citizens, and better defenders of the American way of life. … American education is the rock against which the wave of Communism shall inevitably break and ebb away. Such an open door to life and liberty as American education represents, no iron curtain and no bamboo curtain can long keep barred.” Moreover, while Fred had worked on research for the federal government during World War II, he continued a close cooperation after the war was over. He served as the inaugural vice-chairman of the National Science Board at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1950 and also worked in the Departments of Agriculture; State; and Health, Education, and Welfare. Conrad Elvehjem, a biochemistry professor who would succeed Fred as UW president in 1958, worked on an important NSF committee on government-university relations in the early 1950s.26
Like many other leaders in higher education, Fred was reluctant to commit universities wholly to the Cold War struggle, but he also believed that universities did not and could not exist outside of that struggle. In a speech during the early days of the Korean War, while the university was busy enumerating its war-related resources and corresponding with the federal government regarding its role in the war effort, Fred ventured even further than his well-tread emphasis on training an educated citizenry. He rejected the idea of turning over the university entirely to military purposes, but he declared in stark military language that universities were “one of the basic arsenals of democracy … As a community of scholars, equipped to carry on instruction and investigation in broad areas of knowledge, a university is a stockpile of specialized and highly useful manpower, information, plans, and equipment.” Several months later, he expressed similar sentiments in a meeting of department chairmen. While he called for the university to continue to “carry on our unique and essential function of providing learning for the future,” the national emergency raised by the Korean War meant the need to “render maximum service to the state and the nation now.” Moreover, he singled out scientific research as a service the university could readily offer.27
There was also agreement at the other end of State Street, the mile-long avenue connecting the university and the state capitol. State officials played a crucial role in shaping the public university’s budget, and as early as 1948, Governor Oscar Rennebohm was quick to remark on the relationship between education and the national defense. Not just for business or social prestige, he said, “the proper education of all the people of the United States in this hour is our best and most effective national defense against the enemies of our way of life at home and abroad.” Several years later, in 1955, the legislature’s University Policies Committee stressed the need for high-quality university education in these terms: “The State of Wisconsin cannot afford to cheapen the quality of the education which she offers to her sons and daughters. This would certainly be false economy. Rather, Wisconsin must meet the competition of other states, and the United States must meet the competition of foreign nations.” In the report’s section on university research, the committee was even more candid, declaring that scholarly research was vital to “our survival as a nation.”28
Still, the increasingly close ties between universities and the federal government did not go without some scrutiny. UW business manager Alfred Walter (A. W.) Peterson had expressed concern over “long-distance management” by the federal government as early as 1935, and this fear was echoed in the immediate postwar years by a number of university as well as government officials. Even Vannevar Bush, a key advocate of cooperation between universities and the federal government, was cautious; a Republican, he was especially concerned about the size of government and the effects of politics on research. In 1950, Time magazine reported on the worries among many in higher education about the “federalization” of universities and the possibility for imbalance between research and teaching and between the sciences and humanities, imbalances already present on some campuses. Others worried about the shift from basic to applied research and the preponderance of money that was coming from military agencies in particular. At Wisconsin, UW administrators told a committee of the state legislature in 1954 that they remained cautious in their approach to federal funding. Concerned about possible federal control, they were also worried about depending too much on a source of funds that might dry up if Congress decided to reduce research appropriations.29
Despite these misgivings, however, federal government appropriations for university-based research, as a central component of the relationship between the federal government and higher education, increased quickly. Just as the Depression had convinced many Americans of the need for federal government involvement in the nation’s economic policies, the twin crises of World War II and the Cold War led many in government and in higher education to recognize the increased importance of scientific research and the need for a federal government role in funding and directing that research. The process was often decentralized and haphazard, which helped it avoid the attention of those who might have made more of an effort to halt it, but the trend itself was unmistakable. Government support flowed through a number of agencies and created such a complicated web of relationships that one historian has labeled the result the “federal research economy.” Some government agencies funding campus research were closely tied to military interests, like the Department of Defense, the Office of Naval Research (established 1946), the Atomic Energy Commission (1946), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (1958), while such agencies as the National Institutes for Health (1887) and the National Science Foundation (1950) reflected a broader interest in scientific research that sometimes, but not always, correlated with the Cold War.30
Following the dollars highlights the rapid growth of government-funded research in the postwar years. In the 1950s, federal agencies doled out hundreds of millions annually, and by the early 1960s, the federal government was spending about $1 billion a year on university-based research (this was in addition to the billions more spent on research and development outside of higher education). The National Science Foundation’s budget, for example, grew from a modest $100,000 in 1950, its first year in operation, to $100 million just ten years later, most of it flowing to universities and university-based research centers. By the late 1960s, the numbers were even more dramatic, with universities spending $3 billion on research in 1968, 70 percent of it funded by the federal government and much of that coming from defense-related agencies.31
Research funding was spread among many universities, but it was concentrated especially in the nation’s leading schools. At Michigan, for example, university president Harlan Hatcher emphasized the need for continued research to stay ahead of the Soviets and supported close Cold War ties with the federal government, with the university increasing its federal government contracts from $4 million in 1951 to $10 million in 1957. Several years later, in 1966, Michigan was the nation’s largest recipient of federal dollars (research contracts and other funds), receiving more than $65 million from the federal government in just that one year. Like Hatcher, University of California president Clark Kerr was also a booster of a close partnership between the federal government and higher education. Berkeley’s Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, named after physics professor Ernest Lawrence and established in the 1930s, helped stake out Berkeley’s position as a leader in the field, and the laboratory and a number of Berkeley physicists, including J. Robert Oppenheimer, played a crucial role in the Manhattan Project during World War II. The Atomic Energy Commission worked closely with the Radiation Lab after the war, and Berkeley, benefiting as well from California’s growing industry and population, became a leading destination for federal funds.32
Wisconsin, meanwhile, was also active in seeking federal dollars during these years. The university’s Board of Regents approved a campus expansion and construction plan in 1946 based partly on the expectation of continued funds from the federal government, and the three presidents who guided the university from 1945 until 1970 were all avid promoters of university-government cooperation (as were the presidents that followed). With its large size and its prominent faculty, it quickly became a leading destination for federal dollars, its federally funded research jumping from $661,000 in 1950 to $8,872,000 in 1960, a thirteenfold increase. Seen from another perspective, the percentage of the university’s overall research budget that was supported by federal government dollars grew from about 15 percent to more than 45 percent over the same period. Moreover, most of these funds came from a small number of government agencies. Between 1950 and 1960, for example, funds from the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) grew from $181,000 to $904,000; funding from National Institutes of Health (NIH) jumped even further, from $222,000 in 1950 to more than $4 million in 1960; and the National Science Foundation (NSF), which had only come into being in 1950, was funneling $2.6 million to the university only ten years later. In all, the university had 957 government contracts and grants in 1960, thirty-three of them bringing in over $50,000 annually and thirteen calling for more than $100,000. Some of the largest projects included the university’s Nuclear Engineering and Nuclear Physics Program (AEC), its Primate Center (NIH), and the Geophysics Research Program (NSF).33
Federal dollars directed to university research were already increasingly rapidly in the 1950s, but they gained even more speed after the Soviet Union’s October 1957 launch of Sputnik, the first human-made satellite to orbit the earth. President Eisenhower tried to downplay Sputnik as a crisis of the Cold War, hoping to minimize the political fallout from the event, but for many, the fact that the Soviets had beaten the United States into space was a blow to American notions of technological superiority. As the news hit the front pages of the country’s newspapers, it immediately crystallized already growing concerns that American education was lagging behind the Soviets. Sputnik’s influence on higher education would extend beyond scientific research, but the rapid increase in research dollars is particularly clear, with total federal spending on academic research increasing from $456 million in 1958 to more than $1.2 billion in 1964. Funds from the Department of Defense (DOD) and AEC more than doubled, while funds from the NSF rose from $16 million to $126 million, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which was created in 1958 to lead America’s space program, would spend $44 million to fund academic research just six years later.34
With the newly available funds, the numbers at Wisconsin were even more remarkable in the 1960s. Overall federal research spending increased from $8.4 million in 1960 to $20.6 million in 1964, and by 1970, the federal government was sending more than $30 million in research dollars to Wisconsin, well more than half of the university’s entire research budget. NIH and NSF provided the most funds, while other significant agencies included the State Department, the Department of Housing, Education, and Welfare, NASA, and the DOD. Compared to other universities, Wisconsin ranked eleventh in 1965 in federal research and development spending; a few years later, it had moved up to seventh as a destination for federal research funds.35
Signs of the changes brought by this flood of federal money were evident throughout the campus. Research dollars reverberated broadly and helped spur graduate school enrollment, which doubled between 1955 and 1963, underwrite new construction, and, in some cases, fund the dramatic growth of entire departments. The expansion of Wisconsin’s meteorology department, for example, was fueled largely by Cold War research funds. Starting in 1948 with two faculty and a $9,500 equipment grant from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, federal grants and contracts funded changes that were so rapid that by 1970, just over two decades after the department was established, it employed nineteen faculty members and its graduate program was considered one of the best in the nation. By that time, it was receiving more than a million dollars a year in research grants, the bulk coming from NSF, NASA, the U.S. Army, Office of Naval Research (ONR), and the Weather Bureau. In the late 1960s, it moved into a new fifteen-story Meteorology and Space Science Building, courtesy of grants from NSF, NASA, and the state of Wisconsin.36
Within this complex web of contracts, perhaps the most prominent of the many links between Wisconsin and the Cold War was the university’s Army Mathematics Research Center (AMRC). Most research in higher education before World War II had been closely related to universities’ basic teaching mission, with researchers carrying on normal teaching duties, but the Cold War saw a proliferation of institutes, labs, centers, and other campus units that operated with varying degrees of autonomy. Some of the most famous examples include the California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Lab, Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, Johns Hopkins’s Applied Physics Lab, and Berkeley’s Radiation Lab; each of these, like the AMRC, stood at the nexus of the government-higher education relationship, sites where federal government and university funding, staff, and interests overlapped. At Wisconsin, some of the researchers at the AMRC were regular faculty members and were affiliated with other departments on campus, while some were visiting researchers who were on campus for a semester or a year and had no connection with other parts of the university.37
Both the U.S. Army and the university recognized the defense-related significance of the AMRC. President Fred saw the center’s establishment in 1956 as both an opportunity and a responsibility for the university, “an opportunity to make Wisconsin one of the great mathematical centers of America, a responsibility to do so in the interest of our national strength both military and scientific,” while the center published a brochure in 1959 that testified to the army’s interest in high-level mathematics. “In its day-to-day operations,” the brochure explained, “the Army leans upon mathematics as a ubiquitously necessary tool for the design of weapons and structures, for the compilation of maps and tables, for the organization and analysis of systems of communication, transportation, logistics, etc.” The AMRC, then, was intended as a general source of research in mathematics as well as a resource for the army’s specific mathematics-related issues; it was a mix of basic research that had no direct application to the immediate concerns of the army and applied research that possessed a more explicit link to current national security issues. The work of faculty members at the center was not classified, and most of the research was done at the discretion of the faculty and not the army, yet many members still maintained security clearances so they could consult with the army on issues relating to national security.38
The existence of AMRC testified to the U.S. military’s reliance on scientific knowledge for the nation’s defenses as well as the university’s willingness, perhaps even eagerness, to deepen its ties with the federal government. From its inception in 1956, the center brought the university prestige, a steady stream of visiting researchers, and a budget—about $1.3 million a year by the late sixties—that was funded almost entirely by the U.S. Army. For the army, the center provided an important foundation of mathematics knowledge as well as easy access to highly skilled scientists. From the vantage point of the late sixties, it is remarkable that the center’s arrival on campus in the mid-1950s occasioned no protest; even at the time of the draft sit-in in 1966, the center received little notice. Within just a few years, however, as the pace of student protest quickened and the issue of the university’s relationship with the federal government and the Cold War moved to the center of radical concerns, the AMRC would come to symbolize one of the worst excesses of university-government cooperation. In 1970, it would become the site of one of the most notorious events in the university’s history.39
Although Cold War–related scientific research at Wisconsin and other major American universities provides perhaps the most direct link in the relationship between government and higher education, leaving as it did a particularly clear trail in the form of billions of dollars that were shifted from government to university budgets, it was only part of the federal government’s wide investment in Cold War universities. As the United States engaged in what was much more than a struggle for battlefield supremacy, universities contributed on a wide variety of fronts. Famously put by University of California president Clark Kerr in his 1963 lectures at Harvard, universities—”multiversities,” he called them—had become producers of knowledge, crucial to the development of a modern nation. That same year, UW president Fred Harvey Harrington argued that universities can, and often do, change the world. “The University is a central unit in our modern culture,” Harrington wrote. “It is the gate to life and leadership in this country.”40
Many others concurred that universities provided a broad foundation for America’s future, including its success in the Cold War. President Eisenhower’s Committee on Education Beyond the High School issued a report in August 1957 (before the Soviet Union launched Sputnik) that remarked on the “dramatic strides” in higher education in the Soviet Union. “[America] would be inexcusably blind,” the report read, “if she failed to see that the challenge for the next twenty years will require leaders not only in science and engineering, but in government and politics, in foreign affairs and diplomacy, in education and civic affairs.” Likewise, Dean of Students LeRoy Luberg, in assessing the relationship between the University of Wisconsin and the federal government for an administration report issued in 1964, commented that “the growing partnership between the federal government and higher education has become a major social, educational, economic, governmental, and military phenomenon of America’s twentieth century.” Noting that the relationship had developed mostly ad hoc, he concluded with a nod to the benefits of a strong partnership. While the education of undergraduate and graduate students at the nation’s universities would “require the help of our federal government,” such a partnership would also help the nation “meet its demands for defense and welfare.” Universities, then, were important not just to scientific development, but to development in all areas. Producing teachers, businesspeople, technicians—these had long been essential functions of universities, yet the expansion and shifts in higher education during the Cold War, and often because of the Cold War, meant a significant transformation of universities that went well beyond the swell in research budgets.41
A significant milestone in the federal government’s broad support of higher education was the 1958 National Defense Education Act (NDEA). The 1944 GI Bill had provided the means for millions of war veterans to attend college, but the NDEA, a reaction to the success of the Soviet Union’s space program and their launch of Sputnik a year earlier, was a specific outgrowth of the Cold War. The legislation’s title directly linked education and the nation’s defense, and it included a number of provisions to boost all levels of education. Among others, it created a loan fund to help students specializing in science, math, and foreign languages, provided matching funds for the purchase of equipment related to those same fields, funded graduate fellowships, and set aside money for the development of area studies programs.42
Money from the federal government flowed throughout the University of Wisconsin in these years and helped to underwrite its dramatic expansion. Almost two thousand UW students benefited from more than a million dollars of NDEA loans in the program’s first several years, and while research contracts remained a key funding tool, other kinds of support also widened. In 1960, for example, research funds accounted for nearly $9 million of support, while other federal government funds totaled nearly $5 million, helping to subsidize a variety of academic programs, faculty salaries, and building construction. And while funds were certainly concentrated in select parts of the university, their effect was felt much more broadly: in 1961, more than $11 million were distributed to the physical sciences (49 percent), medical sciences (26 percent), biological sciences (13 percent), and the social sciences (10 percent). Seventy-seven of the university’s ninety departments were participating in one or more programs funded by federal government dollars.43
Among the many parts of the university affected by the Cold War and NDEA funding, one of the most significant was international studies. As the Cold War spread into the third world, area studies programs developed quickly in the late 1950s and early 1960s in order to fill the need for American knowledge of languages and cultures around the world, with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) just one group that saw area studies as a crucial means for gathering intelligence related to the Cold War. Historian Fred Harvey Harrington was perhaps the key proponent of area studies in Madison, and by the time of his resignation from the presidency in 1970—he had joined the university’s administration in 1955 as a special assistant to President Fred—the university was offering instruction in fifty-four languages, most of them added to the curriculum since World War II. One of Harrington’s first moves was the creation of a Center for Luso-Brazilian Studies in 1959, which qualified for one of the first NDEA area studies grants, while NDEA grants also supported an Indian Studies Program established in 1960 and an African Studies Program established a few years later. Some of the funds for these and other area studies programs also came from large foundations, like the Ford Foundation and Carnegie Corporation, though these foundations often worked closely with the federal government and were deeply involved in America’s Cold War effort as well.44
Finally, business education at the university expanded rapidly in the early years of the Cold War, the result of increasing specialization in the business world as well as the importance of economic growth to the Cold War (not to mention the massive Cold War–related government spending that fueled the American economy in the 1950s and 1960s). Economic growth had always been a national priority, but it too took on new meaning and urgency in the postwar years. Which system, American or Soviet, could produce more goods and a better life for its citizens? While influential journalist Walter Lippmann warned in 1960 that “the prevailing picture of the Soviet economy as primitive and grossly inefficient was false,” Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev often took to posturing about the strength of Soviet production. The Soviets would “soon catch up to the U.S. level of per capita output of meat, milk, and butter,” Khrushchev pontificated in May 1957. “Then, we shall have shot a highly powerful torpedo at the underpinnings of capitalism. … Growth of industrial and agricultural production is the battering ram with which we shall smash the capitalist system.” Of course, economic productivity was also at stake during Nixon and Khrushchev’s famous Kitchen Debate in 1959. Even liberals who had criticized monopoly at the beginning of the century and had railed against “economic royalists” during the New Deal understood that criticism of capitalism was no longer tenable during the Cold War. Led by economist Leon Keyserling of Americans for Democratic Action, liberals helped make economic growth, which held the promise of lifting all boats, part of America’s Cold War faith.45
While business education expanded across the country, the postwar mood at the University of Wisconsin was in sharp contrast to the mistrust of capital that had held sway for much of the early twentieth century Progressive Era and the years between the world wars. The School of Commerce initiated an MBA program in 1945 and offered a PhD beginning in 1947, while the school really came of age with the opening of the Commerce Building in 1956, the first time the entire department had been housed in one building. Ties with the corporate world also expanded, with corporations contributing more than one million dollars to the university’s research budget in 1960. In essence, the Cold War contributed to changes already underway in the business world, supporting the effort to educate a skilled workforce and helping to cement the relationship between government, higher education, and the corporate world. It was certainly no coincidence that the Commerce Building, which provided a physical symbol of this development, would be the scene of some of the most violent eruptions of student protest in the sixties. The 1967 protests against representatives of Dow Chemical Company, on campus to conduct job interviews, struck at the heart of these changes in the university and forever established the Commerce Building’s place in Wisconsin lore.46
Confirming the transformation of the university during the early years of the Cold War were the variety of efforts to maintain academic balance as some parts of the university benefited more than others from Cold War priorities. In 1955, for example, President Fred appointed history professor Fred Harvey Harrington a special assistant to seek research funds in areas outside the natural sciences, while the administration also tried to convince the university’s Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, a group that funded research in the natural sciences, to broaden its support to the humanities and social sciences as well. In 1958, the UW system’s Coordinating Committee for Higher Education issued a “Blueprint for Educational Planning in Wisconsin” that called for more attention to research in the humanities and social sciences and insisted on the importance of educating the “complete man”; a few years later, a Board of Regents report came to many of the same conclusions, noting a serious imbalance between the scholarly opportunities available in the physical and biological sciences versus other fields. As universities across the nation grappled with the effects of federal government involvement on academic research, the regents decried the trend toward research with practical application, rather than basic knowledge, that characterized many government grants.47
One of the most distinguished voices that rose in opposition to the shift in the university’s underlying direction was that of historian Merle Curti. A Pulitzer Prize winner and president of the American Historical Association in 1954, Curti dissented from the congratulatory tone at the 1958 opening of the Wisconsin Center, a new building that would house the university’s extension division. Contrasting the state of the social sciences at Wisconsin with the university’s proud tradition in the field, Curti argued that Wisconsin had lost ground. At the turn of the century, Wisconsin’s social sciences had been among the best in the nation, led by such figures as John Commons, Edward Ross, and Richard Ely, but no longer. As Curti noted, it was the natural sciences that had benefited most from the leadership of E. B. Fred, who had then been president of the university for more than a decade. And yet, Curti argued, it was the humanities and the social sciences that were most necessary in order to navigate the complexities of the emerging world order.48
Despite the misgivings of Curti and others during these years, a fundamental shift was underway, and the emergence of Cold War universities at Wisconsin and elsewhere across the nation was unmistakable. As universities became increasingly crucial institutions in the nation’s struggle with communism, Cold War militarization crept into students’ lives, and universities undertook significant changes in direction and mission. Some of these changes were the result of the federal government’s unprecedented financial investment in higher education, and some changes developed more organically from administrators, faculty, and even students who believed in the role that higher education could play in the fight with the Soviet Union. The concerns that accompanied these changes, however, would not disappear. Expressed sporadically in the fifties, they would grow in number and intensity in the sixties. The expansion of higher education was a Cold War imperative, crucial to economic growth, scientific manpower, and the production of knowledge, but that same expansion, when mixed with increasing unease about the direction of higher education and discontent over the policies of the federal government, especially the escalating war in Vietnam, would be explosive.
A crucial piece of the transformation of universities in the Cold War era, and one that would have enormous consequences for the New Left in the 1960s, was the massive expansion of student enrollment at colleges and universities throughout the nation. There were many reasons for this growth, which began in the early and middle 1950s and lasted into the early 1970s, but at least one key cause was the Cold War. Indeed, it is one of the great ironies of the era that as Cold War universities expanded in size to match their increased importance to American society, culture, and defense, these swollen institutions would became centers of opposition to the very forces that built them. As the Vietnam War exposed the cracks in Cold War orthodoxy in the middle and late 1960s, this contradiction of Cold War–era higher education would have dramatic consequences for the New Left and its ability to present a serious challenge to America’s institutions.
Enrollment at institutions of higher education has increased throughout much of American history, as the overall population has grown and a university education has become an increasingly important stepping stone to prosperity, yet the expansion of enrollment in the two decades between the early 1950s and early 1970s was nonetheless remarkable. University enrollment in the United States fluctuated in the years immediately following World War II, as the flow of veterans going to college on the GI Bill came and went, but after hitting a national low of 2.1 million in 1951, enrollment increased every year into the early 1970s. By 1959, enrollment was more than 3.6 million; by 1963, more than 4.7 million. Just a few years later, in the fall of 1966, as the Vietnam War was escalating rapidly and the number of American troops on the ground there surpassed three hundred thousand, college enrollment had tripled from its 1951 low and was now nearly 6.4 million. It continued to grow even then, reaching nearly 8.6 million by 1970.49
The story at the University of Wisconsin and at comparable universities like Michigan and Berkeley mirrored the national trends. At Michigan, enrollment grew from seventeen thousand in the fall of 1952 to more than thirty-six thousand in the fall of 1966, while Berkeley saw growth from less than nineteen thousand students in 1960 to almost twenty-six thousand in 1966. At Wisconsin, after spiking in the immediate postwar years and then hitting a postwar low of 13,346 students in 1953, enrollment began to grow rapidly, increasing every year between 1954 and 1969, when it hit a high of 35,549. The College of Letters and Sciences and the university’s Graduate School, which were two of the largest parts of the university to begin with, experienced especially strong growth. While the university’s overall student population doubled from 1953 to 1965, for example, enrollment in the College of Letters and Sciences increased 150 percent during these years; the number of students in the Graduate School increased 190 percent.50
There are many reasons for the rise in university enrollments starting in the early 1950s. The 1944 GI Bill, which had offered education benefits to millions of World War II veterans (later GI Bills would provide similar benefit programs for veterans of future conflicts), had mostly run its course by the time enrollments started their two decade climb, but it had raised expectations for future generations of young men who might not otherwise have anticipated a college education. Women, too, saw increased educational opportunities in the post-war years, with women’s enrollment in higher education rising at a faster rate than men’s during much of this period. More broadly, workers in the postwar years needed more technical training than they had in the past, the result of a rapidly expanding economy and increasing specialization in the business world—”needed today are college-trained men,” Fortune writer Herrymon Maurer wrote of the shortage in business workers in 1953—and this increased demand certainly influenced supply. Finally, the baby boom, the rise in birth rates that is generally recognized as starting in 1946 and ending in 1964, helped propel university enrollment, though not until the middle and later sixties when the first children of the baby boom began to reach college age.51
Despite these various factors, none of them, or even all of them together, fully make sense of the expansion of enrollment that started in the early 1950s and lasted for almost twenty years. There were a variety of reasons that more and more young Americans wanted to go to college, even before the baby boom meant that there were simply many more men and women of college age, but the Cold War cannot be discounted as a key factor. The NDEA embodied the federal government’s interest in supporting higher education, while the federal government’s role is especially evident in the hundreds of millions of dollars it distributed annually to universities and colleges across the nation. It supported student scholarships, underwrote a variety of programs, and contributed a steadily increasing amount of research dollars, all in the context of the escalating importance of higher education to the nation’s security. The growth in the graduate school is especially linked to federal dollars, as the federal government was providing almost 50 percent of the university’s research budget by 1960 while the number of graduate students tripled in size by 1966, before the first of the baby boom generation even finished their undergraduate education. Seen from another perspective, federal dollars helped underwrite much of the staff and physical plant expansion—classrooms, dormitories, labs, faculty, staff, and so on—that simply did not exist in 1945 but that would be necessary in order to educate the number of students who would enter higher education in the following decades.52
Though there was some concern over the rapid expansion of the university and its effect on education—concerns that emerged as early as the late 1940s, when one student commented in the Daily Cardinal on the militarization of the campus and of American life more generally—most leaders at Wisconsin were proponents of a large university. These leaders embraced the university’s lucrative relationship with the federal government, believing that universities served an important function and that the great centers of American higher education were those that attracted ever-growing numbers of faculty and students as well as federal dollars. In the middle 1950s, a few years after the expansion had begun, President Fred made explicit his support for growth, suggesting that higher enrollments offered a number of advantages, including stronger national defense. “The increased number of college and university graduates,” he wrote in the university’s alumni magazine in 1955, “will provide a large reservoir of talent in the arts, sciences, and professions—thus adding to our nation’s cultural, economic, and, if you please, military strength.” Nor was Fred alone, as his view closely echoed that of the National Manpower Council (founded at Columbia University in 1951 and supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation). “Great care must be taken to insure that the universities can continue to meet their major responsibilities of discovering new knowledge and training tomorrow’s scientists and scholars,” the council declared in 1953. “Only if this is done will the nation be able to reap the full benefits of science and technology for defense and for its expanding welfare.”53
By the end of the 1950s and into the 1960s, with federal dollars reaching into all parts of the university and subsidizing the incredible expansion in enrollment that had started in the early 1950s, the University of Wisconsin, like many other universities throughout the nation, had become a Cold War university. As the nation’s university population ballooned from a little more than two million in 1951 to more than six million in 1966, however, neither the federal government nor universities could foresee the unintended consequences of their deepening partnership. The relatively isolated voices that had questioned the shifts in higher education would become much more powerful in the coming years, as the contradictions of Cold War–era higher education would be laid bare. As young people in the sixties because disillusioned with the society around them, especially with the Cold War both at home and abroad, universities would become centers of dissent, often even targets of dissent, and would provide a growing base for the New Left. The 1966 draft sit-in was the first major confrontation over the partnership between the federal government and the University of Wisconsin, but it would not be the last.