Alma Mater/Spring 2014
Study Guide for Final Exam
1:00 PM, Thursday, May 15, 2014
Covers the period 1940 to the Present
Academic Notables:
Sonia Santomayor Thurgood Marshall Jack Greenberg
William Buckley, Jr. McGeorge Bundy Ellen V. Futter
Clark Kerr Linda LeClair David Truman
Mario Savio Mark Rudd Henry Coleman
Martha Peterson William J. McGill Jacqueline Mattfeld
Michael Sovern Norman Podhoretz Jeanne Kirkpatrick
Allan Bloom Dinesh D’Souza Daniel Horowitz
Caroline Heilbrun Kate Millet Grayson Kirk
Academic Events/Pronouncements: [should be able to place them chronologically, by their context, locale and author/perpetrator/participant (s), as appropriate]
Institute for Defense Analysis “Founders Day Speech,” University of California
Ad Hoc Faculty Group Science: The Endless Frontier
National Science Foundation God & Man at Yale
Brown v. Topeka School Board “Title IX”
Mathematics Hall The Closing of the American Mind
Schuette v. CDAA [“Michigan Case”] “Academics for Nixon”
California Board of Regents v. Bakke National Defense Education Act
“Affirmative Action” Gratz v. Bollinger
“Port Huron Statement” “Political Correctness”
Free Speech Movement Proposition 209
Students for a Democratic Society Fisher v. University of Texas, Austin
American Studies Association Boycott Servicemen’s Readjustment Act
Major Issues [the stuff of essays]:
1. What are the bases for characterizing the 15-20 years following World War II as
“The Golden Age of the American University”?
Who were its principal beneficiaries?
Who were notably left out of this “golden age”?
How does this period differ from that which followed it?
2. What were the causes/factors that brought on Columbia ’68?
How many particular to Columbia?
How many were the product of human calculation/human error by the principal players?
What was/has been the long-term fallout?
3. What accounts for the rise of a conservative critique of the late-20th-century liberal university?
What are its principal complaints?
Who are the folks voicing them?
Do they have merit?
4. Has the place of women on campus changed significantly since 1970?
If so, how so? And why?
And if not, how not and why not
5. Has the place [and definition] of minorities on campus changed since 1970?
If so, how so? And why?
6. What is the current case for and against “affirmative action” in college and
professional school admissions?
Which do you believe has more merit?
Still More “Scopey” Matters
7. What say ye to the proposition that the history of American higher education since WW II can largely be written from the decennial census reports – that practically everything that has happened or changed on American campuses can be accounted for with reference to demographic data?
8. What say ye to the proposition that access for students and faculty to those institutions at the upper end of American higher education is today more meritocratic — more determined by what Jefferson called “talent and virtue — than at any time in its history?
9. What say ye to the proposition that American higher education – top to bottom – is today being so rapidly and comprehensively transformed by digital technology that campuses a generation from now will be unrecognizable to those familiar with those of the 20th century? That practically nothing that we now think of as traditional /enduring aspects of college-going will be in place?
Last updated: May 2, 2014
ram31@columbia.edu