Professor of Education Chuck Dorn recently gave a keynote address on his research into U.S. universities and colleges for the New England Association of Schools and Colleges’s annual conference in Boston. His lecture was broadcast by C-SPAN.
“There seems to be no area of higher education in the present that is not in crisis,” Dorn says close to the start of his talk. This crisis, he goes on, encompasses worries about high tuition costs, oppressive academic censorship, technological disruption, and more.
“I would like to share an alternative interpretation, a historical interpretation of the so-called contemporary crisis in American higher education today,” he added. “And how we might think of the issues that colleges and universities confront not as signs of decline but as historically predicted indicators of growth and of transformation.”
Dorn has recently published the book, For the Common Good: A New History of Higher Education in the United States. His next book, Patriotic Education in a Global Age, will come out this spring.