The 1960s was the most transformative decade in the history of
American higher education--but not for the reasons you might think.
Picture going to college in the sixties: the protests and marches, the
teach-ins and sit-ins, the drugs, sex, and rock 'n' roll--hip, electric,
psychedelic. Not so fast, says bestselling historian John R. Thelin.
Even at radicalized campuses, volatile student demonstrations coexisted
with the "business as usual" of a flagship state university: athletics,
fraternities and sororities, and student government.
In Going to College in the Sixties, Thelin reinterprets the campus
world shaped during one of the most dramatic decades in American
history. Reconstructing all phases of the college experience, Thelin
explores how students competed for admission, paid for college in an era
before Pell Grants, dealt with crowded classes and dormitories, voiced
concerns about the curriculum, grappled with new tensions in big-time
college sports, and overcame discrimination. Thelin augments his
anecdotal experience with a survey of landmark state and federal
policies and programs shaping higher education, a chronological look at
media coverage of college campuses over the course of the decade, and an
account of institutional changes in terms of curricula and
administration.
Combining student memoirs, campus publications, oral histories, and
newsreels, along with archival sources and institutional records, the
book goes beyond facile stereotypes about going to school in the
sixties. Grounded in social and political history, with a scope that
will appeal both to a new generation of scholars and to alumni of the
era, this engaging book allows readers to consider "going to college" in
both the past and the present.
