American University System without WWs

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TFSmith121

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About 20, IIRC, that would be regarded as such today

Oh god, I would imagine the UK was abysmally behind from the little I've read (which is admittedly very little.) Is it true there were only 10-20 unies in the entire country by 1900?

You mentioned accreditation and that's a big example of something that only really came about because of federal spending on servicemembers. While the concept existed before WWI, associations were miniscule, as were the benefits of the practice.

Directly as a result of giving the first education stipends to exiting servicemembers, the federal government decided they wouldn't just hand the money to any fly-by-night school; there would have to be standards.

I think the real deficit we're dancing around here between the US and other countries is the difficulty of convincing the US government that ANYTHING is a public good, or more importantly, a public necessity. That's been our struggle since the First Continental Congress, at the latest. The 20th century granted a large measure of relief from that burden, and that's largely thanks to the two World Wars.

Meanwhile European countries don't seem to have this problem. Whether it's egalitarian brotherhood or controlling paternalism, everyone seems to agree that the people must be taken care of.

About 20, IIRC, that would be regarded as such today, including the ancients (Oxford, Cambridge, etc), those chartered in the Nineteenth (London, Wales, etc.) and those in the early part of the Twentieth (the "Redbrick" universities).

The thing is, I'd have to do some reading, but I'm not convinced the situation regarding "public" funding for higher education was all that different in Germany or France, either.

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The German tradition was well-regarded and influential in the US, but that predated the Twenthieth Century; the "no world wars" concept is not going to influence it, one way or the other, in terms of organization.

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Yeah, it was broadly championed by the Progressives, which led to its domination as the model of choice. I'm inclined to believe that would still be the case even without the wars, that the Progressives will still get their way. There's still the matter of time, and of scale as well. If federal spending doesn't have a reason to expand thanks to two massive wars and the American defense hegemony that followed, who's going to push, and how hard can the push be?
 

TFSmith121

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Same holds true for the Europeans, of course;

Yeah, it was broadly championed by the Progressives, which led to its domination as the model of choice. I'm inclined to believe that would still be the case even without the wars, that the Progressives will still get their way. There's still the matter of time, and of scale as well. If federal spending doesn't have a reason to expand thanks to two massive wars and the American defense hegemony that followed, who's going to push, and how hard can the push be?

Same holds true for the Europeans, of course; it's not like "Big Science" was a peacetime phenomenon there, either.

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Same holds true for the Europeans, of course; it's not like "Big Science" was a peacetime phenomenon there, either.

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True, but I was thinking more about effective, widespread university education, not just big science. The dull work of slowly improving lives through increasingly effective government. I'm swimming into murky waters now, but that's my understanding of the European trajectory from Vienna onwards.

Whereas the idea of what the United States would be was much more contentious and uncertain.
 

TFSmith121

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Perhaps, but there's also the impact of the US states as

True, but I was thinking more about effective, widespread university education, not just big science. The dull work of slowly improving lives through increasingly effective government. I'm swimming into murky waters now, but that's my understanding of the European trajectory from Vienna onwards.

Whereas the idea of what the United States would be was much more contentious and uncertain.

Perhaps, but there's also the impact of the US states as laboratories, and the tremendous regional differences; the committment to free public education for all was markedly different in the north and west than it was in the South, for example, and the committment to public support of higher education was equally divergent between the north and west and the south.

Especially considering that some US states, even by 1913, were the size (in terms of population and wealth) of more than a few European nations. Not the big 3, of course, but still - NY state had almost 5 milllion people in 1910; the entire Kingdom of the Netherlands had a little less than 6 million, and other than defense and foreign policy, I'd bet the NY state budget probably came close to that of the Netherlands.

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