The U.S. Military and Higher Education: A Brief History

From almost unnoticed beginnings in the Morrill Land-Grant College Act of 1862, the military-university relationship has, since 1940, become a major feature of American society. Putting higher education to the service of public priorities has longer and stronger roots in the American tradition than does the ideal of the university as a sanctuary for independent, critical scholarship and disinterested pursuit of learning for its own sake. Ironically, the university gained its principal claim to eminence in the American mainstream only in the early twentieth century when much of the nation's elite came to respect the ideal of autonomous, disinterested research and teaching within an academic sanctuary. Although the ideal continued to be honored as worthy, its approximation to reality faded egregiously after 1940. Its very importance for the achievement of public priorities, most conspicuously for national defense, led the university to accept inducements and constraints that pulled it notably away from its briefly assumed mission as a protected refuge for the dispassionate and critical study of science and society.