This article examines the history of learning disabilities (LDs) on college campuses, from the introduction of the concept in the early 1960s to its spread throughout American higher education during the 1990s. At first, colleges offered relatively little assistance and urged students to compensate for their LDs by working harder and adopting recommended study strategies. After legal and institutional pressures compelled faculty members to provide accommodations for greater numbers of students, many professors worried about the legitimacy of the diagnosis and the possible threat to academic standards. While casting a somewhat sympathetic light on these concerns, the article concludes that many elements of this early set of accommodations were eventually regarded as pillars of competent instruction. This history illuminates the complex tension between institutional support and student responsibilities and the murky distinction between individual accommodations and universally-effective teaching.

The Highlander Nursery School, run by the Highlander Folk School from 1938 to 1953, provided no-cost early care and learning to the white working-class children of Summerfield, Tennessee. While Highlander is best known as a democratic education and movement-building hub that builds adults’ capacity to shape labor and racial justice in their communities, it has also facilitated programs for young people, including a nursery school. The Highlander Nursery School functioned as a cooperative institution that relied on the material and conceptual support of local residents, serving as a depoliticized entry point for families who might otherwise have been antagonistic toward Highlander’s pro-union and pro-civil rights agenda. This article aims to understand how the complexity of Highlander’s political vision for grassroots leadership, cooperation, and radical social change was expressed in and through the nursery school, an institution that teachers, local children, and their families worked together to sustain.

This article describes the multifaceted origins and dynamics of pedagogic progressive educational ideas among Mormon educators in the Utah Territory during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We propose four principal avenues through which progressive educational ideas reached these Mormon educators. These include the exigencies of desert frontier living that predisposed early Utah Mormons to progressivism’s focus on practical education; the arrival of denominational schools sponsored by the New West Education Commission (NWEC), which sparked educative improvement within Mormon communities; the Pestalozzian teachings of Karl Maeser via the Brigham Young Academy’s Normal School; and the visits of eastern progressive educationalists through Benjamin Cluff’s leadership at the BYA Summer Institutes. We additionally situate nineteenth-century national perceptions of Mormon educational ideas within this more nuanced backdrop of the migration of progressive ideas to Utah. We describe unique dimensions of Mormon educational progressivism that might set it apart from educational progressivisms elsewhere, including tensions within Utah’s Mormon educative community.

For decades, transnational knowledge circulation in relation to schooling in Ireland has been a neglected area of study among historians. This paper provides new insights through a transnational lens on primary, secondary, and vocational curriculum developments in the first decade following the advent of national independence in the country in 1922. During this period, key policy-makers largely rejected progressive educational ideas circulating internationally and promoted curricula and pedagogy in primary and secondary schools that reflected the new nation’s deeply conservative Catholic nature and nationalist ethos. While initial signs indicated that developments in vocational education might head in a different direction, ultimately, more progressive educational ideas circulating internationally were excluded from that sector as well. At all levels of the education system, the hegemony of the Catholic Church and other contextual factors resulted in traditional and conservative curricula that underpinned policy and practice until the 1960s.

What’s the point of going to college? Does it matter where you go? And is it worth the cost? As more Americans and people around the globe enroll in higher education, such questions are being asked with increasing frequency. Scholars have answers, yet those answers depend a great deal on the methods being used to explore the questions. Economists, for instance, bring a particular set of tools to the task, as well as a general set of assumptions and beliefs. Historians, too, come armed with the instruments of disciplinary inquiry and can end up with quite different conclusions. So what would happen if we brought them together to talk through research questions of interest to their respective academic “tribes”?

For this Policy Dialogue, the HEQ editors asked historian Bruce Kimball and economist Rob Toutkoushian to reflect on disciplinary traditions, debates over higher education finance, and what makes college worthwhile. Kimball has taught at the University of Houston, Yale University, and the University of Rochester and is a professor emeritus at Ohio State University. He has published several books on the history of liberal education and professional education, particularly legal education. His latest book, co-authored with Sarah Iler, is Wealth, Cost, and Price in American Higher Education (John Hopkins University Press, 2023). Toutkoushian is a professor of higher education at the University of Georgia specializing in economic theories and quantitative methods. He has served as executive director of the Office of Policy Analysis in the University System of New Hampshire and as editor of Research in Higher Education. As a scholar, Toutkoushian has published more than sixty peer-reviewed publications on such topics as higher education finance, compensation, demand, and policy analysis.

HEQ Policy Dialogues are, by design, intended to promote a casual, free exchange of ideas between scholars. At the end of the exchange, we offer a list of references for readers who wish to follow up on sources relevant to the discussion.