UNE’s Tangier Campus to host lecture on “American Higher Education and the Common Good”

As Americans established colleges and universities over the course of two centuries, they stridently declared higher education’s commitment to advancing the common good. As distinguishing a characteristic as this has been, however, we know surprisingly little about how and why institutions of higher education adopted this noble goal.

In a lecture titled “American Higher Education and the Common Good” at the University of New England’s campus in Tangier, Morocco, Bowdoin College Professor Charles Dorn will examine the founding decades of ten colleges and universities to help attendees better understand the origins and realities of their ambitions. Presented through UNE’s Tangier Forum for Global Studies, the lecture will take place Monday, November 30 at 7 p.m. local time (2 p.m. EST) in the auditorium of UNE’s Tangier Campus. The event will include a public reception in the Academic Lounge immediately following the lecture.

Dorn will address such questions as: Why, historically, the leaders of American colleges and universities extolled promoting the public good as higher education’s central purpose? What forces, on campus and off, influenced this principle’s adoption? How did students respond to assertions that they were obliged to use their education to benefit the public good rather than simply to pursue their own private advantage? And, perhaps most importantly, what challenges have colleges and universities confronted in maintaining a commitment to the common good over time?

Dorn is associate professor and chair of the Education Department at Bowdoin College. His scholarship has appeared in the American Journal of Education, Diplomatic History, Teachers College Record, and History of Education Quarterly, and he is the author of the book American Education, Democracy, and the Second World War. His lecture at UNE will draw from research conducted for his current book project: For Common Ends and for the Common Good: A New History of Higher Education in America.