Professor of Education Charles Dorn researched 200 years of higher education history to gain a unique perspective on some of the most vexing issues facing the field today.

In his new book, For the Common Good: A New History of Higher Education in America, Dorn argues that we can’t understand what’s going on with colleges and universities today until we examine where they have come from, why they were founded, and how society has viewed their function at different points in time.