Book Review: A Comparative Review of Between Citizens and the State: The Politics of American Higher Education in the 20th Century by C. P. Loss and More Than Science and Sputnik: The National Defense Education Act of 1958 by W. J. Urban

Wayne J. Urban and Christopher P. Loss have chosen to illuminate the impact of federal politics on higher education in the twentieth century. While both authors have made significant contributions to the study of twentieth century higher education and political history through their respective works, each came to the task with a distinctive set of theoretical, ideological, and experiential perspectives, which informed their approach to the subject.

Acknowledging the contribution of Barbara Barksdale Clowse’s comprehensive history of the impact of the Soviet satellite, Sputnik, on American politics, Brainpower for the Cold War (1981), Wayne Urban distinguishes his own study by providing in his introduction what he calls “NDEA essentials,” or a brief description of each of the ten titles of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA). Following a discussion of what lay “behind the essentials” of the NDEA, Urban positions his study in the literature through a discussion of More Than Science and Sputnik in relation to a few other well-respected studies on the NDEA, concluding that the act had greater and more durable effects on education than other studies suggest.