Perspectives on the History of Higher Education: Volume 24, 2005

Volume 24 of the Perspectives on the History of Higher Education: 2005 provides historical studies touching on contemporary concerns -gender, high-ability students, academic freedom, and, in the case of the Barnes Foundation, the authority of donor intent. A group of well-respected contributors discuss the nuanced changes that occurred to the image of college at the turn of the century, an important corrective to stereotypes about gender relations in nineteenth-century coeducational colleges, how the young National Research Council embraced the cause of how to identify and encourage superior students as a vehicle for incorporating wartime advances in psychological testing, the long Texas tradition of political interference in university affairs, and shed historical light on the recent controversy surrounding the Barnes Foundation. The volume also contains brief descriptions of twenty recent doctoral dissertations in the history of higher education.