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This chapter explores how students' private concerns came to occupy the center of campus and national politics in the 1960s and in so doing thrust higher education into the thick of the nascent rights revolution. Students' rights-based reconstruction of the educated citizen marked a departure from the older reciprocal-based formulation that had been decisive in the creation of past higher education policy. From the 1930s through the 1950s, the state provided citizens with educational opportunities in order to repay them for their sacrifices during the Great Depression and the brutal war years that followed. But the gradual expansion of educational access and of federal involvement in higher education set in motion a sequence of unexpected social and political reactions that prepared the way for the shift from a reciprocal to a rights-based conception of the educated citizen founded on the principle of diversity.

This chapter discusses deliberations and predispositions that were made before the final approval of the establishment of the Arts and Humanities Research Council/Board. After the second reading of the Higher Education Bill, the AHRB and the Bill was subjected to a more detailed review. Between February and March, fifteen sittings of the Standing Committee H were conducted to examine the proposal and the legislation clause by clause. Whilst the head of the committee, Alan Johnson declared a seemingly unanimous support for the Bill as no demonstrations against the arts and humanities aspect of the Bill occurred. Many of the members of the committee averted that they needed time to consider and scrutinize every aspect of the bill. In the House of Lords the Bill was warmly welcomed. However, as with the House of Commons and the Standing Committee, some of the aspects of the Bill were met by antagonism. The most serious opposition against the Bill was against Part 1 of the Higher Education Bill which expressed that devolved administrations can perform arts and humanities research on their own. After much deliberation and considerations, on the evening of July 1, 2004, the Higher Education Bill received Royal Assent and was considered as the Higher Education Act.

Chapter 4 considers how lawmakers used the Higher Education Act (HEA) of 1965 to further entrench higher education programming in the fabric of US social policy and to amplify individual-level aid for college students. The HEA provides a valuable example of how “targeting within universalism” can help to generate broad political support for a social policy. Moreover, its creation provides a powerful example of the role that path dependency has played in the development of higher education policy. In addition to illustrating the significance of policy design to the political viability of social policy reforms, this case study highlights the pivotal role that executive leadership has played in the development of US higher education policy. Taken together, these forces were central to lawmakers’ ability to reinforce and build upon the gender-egalitarian higher education policy that had emerged during the late 1950s.

Colleges and universities are influenced in many ways from the outside, including federal and state governments, court decisions, and accreditors. Trustees must possess a deep understanding of the regulatory environment in which academic institutions operate.

At the end of World War II, a sense of expectancy pervaded America’s colleges and universities. Enrollments had dropped during the war years, and many institutions looked forward to the return of millions of veterans. These veterans were themselves eager to get ahead in civilian life after the hardships of war, and the nation was eager to reward them for the sacrifices that they had made. Already in 1944, as the war was coming to a close, the prestigious Education Policies Commission of the National Education Association and the American Association for School Administrators came out with a report entitled Education for All American Youth. Though focused more on secondary than higher education, the report sounded some themes that were to shape thinking about education for veterans as well. Perhaps the most powerful of these themes was the belief that the war had called on all of the American people to make sacrifices and that efforts must be made to see that no segment of the population would be excluded from the rewards of American society. For higher education, in particular, this meant that new measures would be required to realize the traditional American dream of equality of opportunity. Alongside the idealistic impulse to extend to veterans unprecedented educational opportunities, there was also the fear that the nation’s economy would be unable to provide work for the millions of returning soldiers. The massive unemployment of the Great Depression had, after all, been relieved only by the boost that war production had given the economy. The end of the war therefore threatened—or so it was widely believed at the time—to send the economy back into a terrible slump. With so many soldiers returning home, the possibility of such a downturn frightened policy elites and the public alike, for it was almost certain to revive the bitter social and political conflicts of the 1930s. Together with more idealistic factors, this concern with the effects of the returning veterans on domestic stability led to one of the major higher education acts in American history: the G.I. Bill of 1944.