Loss, C. P. Between citizens and the state: The politics of American higher education in the 20th century. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2012. ISBN: 978-0-691-14827-4. Pages: 344.

This book offers insight into the history of higher education politics in the United States, and sheds new light on higher education's central importance to the larger social and political history of this country in the last century. Specifically, this publication explores the role of higher education in state building from different overlapping institutional and conceptual perspectives. Framed around three major federal higher education policies of the twentieth century – the 1944 GI Bill, the 1958 National Defense Education Act and the 1965 Higher Education Act – the book chronicles the efforts of the US federal government to deploy education as a means to prepare citizens for key challenges facing the nation. The author captures the complexity of the relationship between the state and higher education in the lives of students, faculty and administrators on American campuses during the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War and other important 20th century milestones in the United States.

Princeton University Press