Throughout the twentieth century, public universities were established across the United States at a dizzying pace, transforming the scope and purpose of American higher education. Leading the way was California, with its internationally renowned network of public colleges and universities. This book is the first comprehensive history of California's pioneering efforts to create an expansive and high-quality system of public higher education. The author traces the social, political, and economic forces that established and funded an innovative, uniquely tiered, and geographically dispersed network of public campuses in California. This influential model for higher education, "The California Idea," created an organizational structure that combined the promise of broad access to public higher education with a desire to develop institutions of high academic quality. Following the story from early statehood through to the politics and economic forces that eventually resulted in the 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education, The California Idea and American Higher Education offers a carefully crafted history of public higher education.

Wilson Smith and Thomas Bender have assembled an essential reference for policymakers, administrators, and all those interested in the history and sociology of higher education.

precise, appeared until the recent crisis - to many Americans from the East of America's America, as the whole of America seemed to Europeans of a century ago: extreme and strange, full of violent contrasts, contradictory, over-advanced, neo primitive and savage, a land where everything is possible, the hippies and the religious-political fundamentalism of the Orange County, Marcuse, Angela Davis and Norman Brown, Esalen, the new consciousness. Alan Watts and Carlos Castaneda, as well as Patricia Hearst and the Sym bionese Liberation Army, Richard Nixon and his men, the Satan religion, outrageous crimes such as that of the Manson "family" and incredibly scan dalous business deals. For better or worse, California appears as a sort of preview of the European society of the future: the land of the Western World with the greatest immigration and population growth, with enormous cities which in the textbooks of your childhood were hardly even mentioned, e.g. Los Angeles, or were not mentioned at all, as in the case of San Diego and San Jose, a considerable urban development which has taken place almost overnight.