Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Timothy R Cain

@timcain.bsky.social

510 followers 130 following 500 posts

I teach about and study faculty, academic freedom, campus unions, student activism, and the history of higher education. I don't post about my amazing kid because it is their story to tell some day.

Posts Replies Media Videos

Timothy R Cain

@timcain.bsky.social

Read this in the archives today. It is from the resignation letter of a dean in the early 60s after the governor ordered a faculty member fired for political reasons and the board agreed. The president fought back but the professor was still formally reprimanded and denied a raise. Seems relevant.

Students and faculty alike must be given definite assurance that the University will regain its traditional position of independence. No faculty member can teach or engage in scholarly endeavor, no student can learn, and no administrator can serve education if he lives within an environment in which an atmosphere of political intervention is all-pervasive. If the College has not been fully effective as a place of learning and scholarship this year, it is, in large part, because adverse influence – some real, some imagined -have been ever present.

September 19, 2025 at 12:18 AM

Timothy R Cain

@timcain.bsky.social

In the archives researching the McCarthy era Sweezy Case and this sentence from a 1954 article in The Nation seems relevant...

With public attention distracted by federal legislation and the antics of Congressional committees undermining civil and political liberties, there is a tendency to ignore measures and actions by the states which are even more repressive.

June 2, 2025 at 4:12 PM

Timothy R Cain

@timcain.bsky.social

Reading Charles Dorn's excellent "A Women's World" about women at Berkeley before and during WWII for class tomorrow. This 1943 quote from the Mary Ogg, editor-in-chief of the Daily Californian, jumps out (it was about the American Legion's vehement support for internment but applies more broadly):

It has often been said that if Fascism comes to the United States, it will be called Americanism. Newspaper reports of the San Francisco convention reveal that this militant,well-organized, politically and economically influential, and purportedly 100 per cent American organization contains the seeds of Fascism.

April 14, 2025 at 12:28 AM

Timothy R Cain

@timcain.bsky.social

Enjoyed teaching about race, gender, and diversity at the turn of the 19th into the 20th century this afternoon. We discussed works by Jim Anderson, Cally Waite, Harold Wechsler, and other amazing scholars.

Primary Source: Excerpt from Clarke's Sex in Education

Thelin: Chapter 5

Gordon, Lynn D. "From Seminary to University: An Overview of Women's Higher Education, 1870-1920." In Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era, 13-51. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1990.

Wechsler, Harold S. "An Academic Gresham's Law: Group Repulsion as a Theme in American Higher Education." Teachers College Record 82, no. 4 (1981): 567-588.

MacDonald, Victoria-María, and Teresa García. "Historical Perspectives on Latino Access to Higher Education, 1848-1990." In The Majority in the Minority: Expanding the Representation of Latina/o Faculty, Administrators and Students in Higher Education, edited by Jeanette
Castellanos and Lee Jones, 15-43. Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2003.

Anderson, James D. "Training the Apostles of Liberal Culture." In The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935, 238-278. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Waite, Cally L. "Segregation of Black Students at Oberlin after Reconstruction." History of Education Quarterly 41, no. 3 (2001): 344-364.

Read (at least) one of the readings below (as assigned):

Soares, Leigh. ""Tuskegee is Her Monument': Gender and Leadership in Early Black Public Colleges." History of Education Quarterly 63, no. 3 (2023): 357-377.

Brazell, Johnetta Cross. "Bricks without Straw: Missionary Sponsored Black Higher Education in the Post-Emancipation Era," Journal of Higher Education 63, no. 1 (1992): 26-49.

March 25, 2025 at 1:23 AM

Timothy R Cain

@timcain.bsky.social

Working on a side project on the Sweezy v. New Hampshire case (the first time the Supreme Court recognized academic freedom). People usually point to Frankfurter's comment on the "four essential freedoms of the university" (taken from a South African Open U statement) but this jumps out at me more:

These pages need not be burdened with proof, based on the testimony of a cloud of impressive witnesses, of the dependence of a free society on free universities. This means the exclusion of governmental intervention in the intellectual life of a university. It matters little whether such intervention occurs avowedly or through action that inevitably tends to check the ardor and fearlessness of scholars, qualities at once so fragile and so indispensable for fruitful academic labor.

February 25, 2025 at 3:27 AM

Timothy R Cain

@timcain.bsky.social

The required readings for tomorrow's session of the history of higher ed in the US:

February 10, Meeting 5: Antebellum (ish) Higher Education, part 2

Primary Sources: Excerpts from the Yale Report

Farnham, Christie Anne. “What’s in a Name? Antebellum Female Colleges.” In The Education of the Southern Belle: Higher Education and Student Socialization in the Antebellum South, 11–32. New York: New York University Press, 1994.

Moss, Hillary J. “Interracial Activism and African American Higher Education.” In Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Antebellum America, 44–62. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Perkins, Linda M. “The Impact of the ‘Cult of True Womanhood’ on the Education of Black Women.” Journal of Social Issues 39, no. 3 (1983): 17–28.

Rury, John, and Glenn Harper. “The Trouble with Coeducation: Mann and Women at Antioch, 1853–1860.” History of Education Quarterly 26, no. 4 (1986): 481–502.

Read (at least) one of the three readings below (as assigned):

Lane, Jack C. “The Yale Report of 1828 and Liberal Education: A Neorepublican Manifesto.” History of Education Quarterly 27, no. 3 (1987): 325–338.

Pak, Michael S. “The Yale Report of 1828: A New Reading and New Implications.” History of Education Quarterly 48, no. 1 (2008): 30–57.

Todorinova, Lily. “Race and the Yale Report.” History of Education Quarterly 64, no. 1 (2024): 3–23.

February 10, 2025 at 5:48 AM

Timothy R Cain

@timcain.bsky.social

This week in my history of US higher ed class is the first of two sessions on antebellum higher ed. We deal with the problematic historiography, some correctives, and the Dartmouth College Case. (Next week is race and gender and the Yale Report).

February 3, Meeting 4: Antebellum Higher Education

Primary Source: Alonzo Church’s 1840 “Report of the Trustees & Faculty” and an excerpt from Daniel Webster’s argument in Dartmouth v. Woodward.

Thelin: Remainder of Chapter 2

Hofstadter, Richard. “The Great Retrogression.” In Academic Freedom in the Age of the College, 209–222. New York: Columbia University Press, 1955.

Potts, David B. “‘College Enthusiasm!’ as Public Response, 1800–1860.” Harvard Educational Review 47, no. 1 (1977): 28–42.

Phillips, Christopher J. “An Officer and a Scholar: Nineteenth–Century West Point and the Invention of the Blackboard.” History of Education Quarterly 55, no. 1 (2015): 82–108.

Whitehead, John S., and Jurgen Herbst. “How to Think about the Dartmouth Case.” History of Education Quarterly 26, no. 3 (1986): 333–349.

Read (at least) one of the two readings below (as assigned):

Green, Jane Fiegen. “An Opinion of Our Own”: Education, Politics, and the Struggle for Adulthood at Dartmouth College, 1814–1819.” History of Education Quarterly 52, no. 2 (2012): 173–195.

Johnson, Eldon L. “The Dartmouth College Case: The Neglected Educational Meaning.” Journal of the Early Republic 3, no. 1 (1983): 45–67.

Recommended:

Novak, Steven J. “The College in the Dartmouth College Case: A Reinterpretation.” New England Quarterly 47, no. 4 (1974): 550–563.

February 3, 2025 at 2:52 AM

Timothy R Cain

@timcain.bsky.social

After two weeks of framing, tomorrow's session of my history of US higher ed class focuses on colonial and early republican higher ed. Here are the readings, in case anyone is interested:

The list of readings for Jan 27: Colonial and Early Republican Higher Education.

Primary Source: An excerpt from New England’s First Fruits, 23–32.

Thelin: Ch. 1 and p. 41–51.

Moore, Kathryn. “The War with the Tutors: Student-Faculty Conflict at Harvard and Yale, 1745–1771.” History of Education Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1978): 115–127.

Wright, Bobby. “‘For the Children of the Infidels’?: American Indian Education in the Colonial Colleges.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 12, no. 3 (1988): 1–14.

Vine, Phyllis. “The Social Function of 18th Century Higher Education.” History of Education Quarterly 16, no. 4 (1976): 409–424.

Jackson, Leon. “The Rights of Man and the Rites of Youth: Fraternity and Riot at Eighteenth–Century Harvard.” In The American College in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Roger L. Geiger, 183–195. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000.

Wilder, Craig Steven. “‘Sons from the Southward & Some from the West Indies’: The Academy and Slavery in Revolutionary America.” In Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies, edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, & Alfred L. Brophy. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2019.

Nelson, Adam R. “The Perceived Dangers of Study Abroad, 1780–1800: Nationalism, Internationalism, and the Origins of the American University.” In The Founding Fathers, Education, and “The Great Contest”: The American Philosophical Society Prize of 1797, edited by Benjamin Justice, 175–197. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

January 27, 2025 at 4:11 AM

Timothy R Cain

@timcain.bsky.social

This landed on my office window sill today and pecked at the window. I am wondering what carrion it was looking for. My career? The book project I just reengaged with? Higher ed as a career? The world as we know it?