In the years following World War II, academic leaders in Massachusetts participated in a national debate about the social role of higher education in the era that lay ahead. They also experienced the beginnings of a period of expansion for universities that would continue, more or less uninterrupted, for twenty-five years. Change in this postwar golden age involved an ongoing interaction between ideas and opportunities: the first concerning the public purposes of higher education; the second promising glory for institutions and advancement for academic interest groups. For most of the period, the dominant view—inside and outside of higher education—was that expansion was improving the academy as well as the country, but the turmoil of the late 1960s raised fundamental doubts about the character of postwar change. Although World War II entailed difficulties for universities, their extensive involvement in the military effort stirred a new awareness of the social importance of academic work. This habit of thought extended into the postwar period, as educators, exhilarated by wartime patriotism, looked for new ways to contribute to social problem solving. As they did so, they exhibited a further effect of their recent experience: a tendency to focus on national concerns—as distinct from regional or local ones—far more intensively than they had done before 1940. The country's agenda was long. The human costs of the war, and the even more-frightening possibility of atomic conflict, made the importance of maintaining peace evident. Europe had precipitated two wars in a generation and now lay in ruins. The United States, suddenly the preeminent power of the globe, would have to pioneer in shaping a stable world order. In some, the nation's new international prominence aroused a sense of urgency about discrimination and inequality at home. More broadly, world leadership implied a need to maintain military and economic power and the technological vitality on which they depended. Many educators believed they had important roles to play in all these contexts—through training leaders, forming attitudes, and advancing knowledge. As one college president put it: “Events... have shaken the complacency of many university communities and compelled educators to... make [their] maximum contribution to a decent, well-ordered, free and peaceful society.”

This book examines the evolution of American universities during the years following World War II. Emphasizing the importance of change at the campus level, the book combines a general consideration of national trends with a close study of eight diverse universities in Massachusetts. The eight are Harvard, M.I.T., Tufts, Brandeis, Boston University, Boston College, Northeastern and the University of Massachusetts. Broad analytic chapters examine major developments like expansion, the rise of graduate education and research, the professionalization of the faculty, and the decline of general education. These chapters also review criticisms of academia that arose in the late 1960s and the fate of various reform proposals during the 1970s. Additional chapters focus on the eight campuses to illustrate the forces that drove different kinds of institutions--research universities, college-centered universities, urban private universities and public universities--in responding to the circumstances of the postwar years.

This article examines how American Muslims' lives may be affected by legal decisions in the areas of religious freedom, employment discrimination, prisoners' rights and the cultural defence. By looking at the experience of Muslims in the public sphere we can illustrate claims by second-generation Muslims and converts that their civil liberties are being infringed. To establish some context, and to help interpret the substantive law in a meaningful way, it begins with a history of Muslim presence in North America.

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Boston’s three local, private, teaching and service-oriented, commuter universities—Boston University, Boston College, and Northeastern, classic urban universities in the years before World War II—undertook to change themselves in fundamental ways during the golden age. B.U., reaching back to its nineteenth-century origins, sought to re-create itself as a comprehensive regional and national university. Boston College, drawing on the ancient academic traditions of the Society of Jesus, worked to become the nation’s top Jesuit university and a leading force in Catholic intellectual and professional life. Northeastern, with its philosophical roots in service to the low-income population and business community of Boston, tried to balance its historic concerns with a new impulse toward national prominence in cooperative education. All three invested heavily in graduate education and research, and B.U. and B.C., in upgrading their undergraduate student bodies, shed their identities as local, service-oriented campuses. At the end of the period, only N.U. remained centrally committed to the functions of an urban university, though it, too, had taken steps to reduce its emphasis on local service. Boston’s three nonelite, private universities were hit hard by World War II, but campus leaders were conscious of predictions that the return of peace would bring a new period of expansion. By the middle of the war, Presidents Marsh of B.U. and Ell of Northeastern and the provincial Jesuit hierarchy that governed B.C., frustrated by fifteen difficult years, were turning their attention to postwar opportunities. Throughout the war, Marsh later wrote, “we kept getting ready” to “jump quickly” after the fighting stopped. Ell was equally eager. “When the war is over,” he wrote in 1943, “Northeastern will be prepared.” The senior president among the universities of Massachusetts, B.U.’s Marsh was in his middle sixties during World War II and was determined to make concrete progress toward his institutional goals in the short period in office remaining to him. Since his appointment in 1926, he had emphasized three aspects of B.U.: its religious heritage as a non-sectarian, Methodist university with a strong School of Theology; its public-service role as a diversified educational resource for the Boston area; and its academic possibilities as one of the nation’s largest universities with a full range of graduate and professional programs.