Book Review: Geiger, Roger L. 2015. The History of American Higher Education: Learning and Culture from the Founding to World War II, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 584 pp. $35.00 (cloth)

In The History of American Higher Education: Learning and Culture from the Founding to World War II, Roger L. Geiger, Distinguished Professor of Higher Education at Pennsylvania State University and one of today’s foremost historians of American higher education, has applied his widely acknowledged expertise in historical scholarship to develop a comprehensive exposition of the evolution of higher education in America beginning with the formation of Harvard College in 1636 and culminating at the onset of US involvement in World War II when what Geiger terms the “standard American university” (479) was established. Similar to the conceptualization adopted in one of the books Geiger found most useful to his understanding of higher education history—Laurence Veysey’s authoritative The Emergence of the American University that framed the development of American universities in terms of four rival conceptions of higher learning: discipline and piety, utility, research, and liberal culture—Geiger frames his own analysis in comparable terms: careers, knowledge, and culture.