David F. Labaree

I am a retired professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University who writes about the history and sociology of American education. Twice a week I post on my blog at https://davidlabaree.com/ about schooling, history, and writing. Follow me on Twitter at @Dlabaree. I have written about the evolution of high schools (“The Making of an American High School,” 1988), the growing role of consumerism in education (“How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning,” 1997), the origins and character of schools of education in American universities (“The Trouble With Ed Schools,” 2004), and the peculiar nature of the American system of schooling ("Someone Has to Fail," 2010). Along the way I also published a collection of essays (“Education, Markets, and the Public Good,” 2007). My most recent book is "Being a Scholar: Reflections on Doctoral Study, Scholarly Writing, and Academic Life." It is the product of 40 years of teaching. For most of this time, I was working with graduate students in education at Michigan State and Stanford, an experience that gave me a great opportunity to reflect on what it means to be a scholar and to work toward becoming a scholar. The eleven essays I’m presenting here are the product of that reflection. I wrote them over the last decade and published them in a variety of nonacademic venues, such as Inside Higher Ed, Aeon, and my blog. My hope is that this book can serve as a useful guide for students entering into doctoral study and for scholars early in their careers in the academy. Its particular focus is on scholarship in the social sciences, but much of it may be relevant to people in other fields as well. My previous book, “A Perfect Mess,” is an essay about the nature of the American system of higher education. From the perspective of 19th century visitors to the U.S., the American system of higher education was a joke. It wasn’t even a system. Underfunded, underwhelming in its dedication to learning, dispersed to the hinterlands, and lacking a compelling social function, the system seemed destined for deserved obscurity. But by the second half of the 20th century, the system had assumed a dominant position in the world market in higher education. It had the largest endowments, produced the most scholarship, earned the most Nobel prizes, attracted the most esteemed students and scholars, and thoroughly dominated the rankings of world universities. The question is how this happened. The answer is that the characteristics of the system that seemed disadvantages in the 19th century turned out to be advantages in the 20th century. Its modest state funding, dependence on student tuition and alumni donations, and independence from the church gave it a much greater degree of autonomy than institutions elsewhere in the world, which were largely dependent on the state. Operating as independent enterprises, American public and private colleges and universities learned to be highly entrepreneurial in seeking out sources of financial support and pursuing new opportunities. By making themselves accessible to educational consumers and useful in meeting social needs and in fulfilling individual ambitions, they developed a broad base of political support. This broad political and financial base, grounded in large and academically undemanding undergraduate programs, in turn provided support for cutting-edge research and advanced graduate study at the system’s pinnacle. As a result, American higher education managed to combine a unique mix of the populist, the practical, and the elite in a single complex system. For more information, see my blog site https://davidlabaree.com/.