“The American campus is pretty spectacular,” Thelin says, “but it’s really just a stage set. Thelin is calling his last lecture “Academic Procession,” and he says it will combine his interest in college campuses and architecture with accounts of how professors, students, university presidents, and others created liveliness, culture, and lasting traditions at these iconic places, which also influenced society as a whole.
Or how Jesse Owens became a hero for representing the United States at 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany, but the track star could not live on campus at Ohio State University, where he was a student. Or how female professors at the University of California at Berkeley climbed through a bathroom window to get into the all-male faculty club and participate in a faculty meeting. Thelin promises that his last lecture will be full of such stories: How the University of Chicago, for example, mothballed its football stadium after losing to Harvard, then later used the abandoned locker rooms as a secret location for the Manhattan Project.
He is the author of Going to College in the Sixties, Essential Documents in the History of American Higher Education and A History of American Higher Education (Johns Hopkins University Press), now in its third edition, a book that shows that colleges have long struggled with the financial and cultural pressures commonly discussed today.īut for Thelin, the most compelling aspects of that history lie in the people on campus, and how campus life interacted with broader historical events off-campus. A university research professor in higher education and public policy at the University of Kentucky, Thelin is one of the best-known scholars of colleges and universities.
Thelin will give his last academic lecture, a Zoom presentation scheduled for Thursday evening. It’s a way, he says, to not only counter some of the blander official narratives promulgated by college presidents and others, but also to find a connection to major events in American history, reflected in the lives of students and other groups on campus. Thelin, one of the best-known historians of American higher education, likes to pay attention to the detailed human stories that have happened over decades on college campuses.
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