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The Storm Over Grove City College: Civil Rights Regulation, Higher Education, and the Reagan Administration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Hugh Davis Graham
Hugh Davis Graham*
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University
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Extract

During the Reagan presidency a storm arose over the refusal of a small Presbyterian college to be regulated by the United States Department of Education. Arguably, not since the Dartmouth College case of 1818, when the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshall prevented a public takeover of Dartmouth's charter, had national policymaking centered so intensively and symbolically on a private collegiate institution. By preserving private autonomy, Dartmouth College v. Woodward fostered a pluralistic and competitive system of higher education that in the post-World War I I era made American universities the envy of the world. The batde over Grove City College, still in recent memory, is significant less for its immediate outcome than for the light it sheds on the deepening entanglement of American higher education in the web of the expanding regulatory state.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 38 , Issue 4 , Winter 1998 , pp. 407 - 429
Copyright
Copyright © 1998 by New York University 

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References

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