Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book summarizes the intense exchanges immediately after the war over who should go to college and what they should be expected to learn there. American higher education was inherently expansive in the Postwar Era. The teachers colleges that were incorporated into the State University of New York (SUNY) were representative of nearly 200 like institutions that made an eventual transition to full state colleges and often regional universities. The book shows how Brockport State Teachers College provided students of limited means and mobility access to both a quasi-liberal education and teaching careers. It provides a chronology of the radicalization of the New Left during the 1960s and describes the most egregious campus rebellions. The book interprets the main current of campus rebellion led principally by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).