Higher Education for the Many: the Realization and Abridgment of Extended Educational Access, in Detroit and At Wayne University, 1917-1961. (Volumes I and II).

This study completes the history of a major, midwestern, publically-supported urban university. It concerns the period between the World Wars when Wayne University, in Detroit, was an open enrollment institution. In an urbanized America, where colleges and universities are serving an increasingly heterogeneous student population, the implications of this study have significance for educators concerned with future college enrollments. This study suggests that much of the responsibility for the development of inclusive higher education in Detroit lies within its unique nineteenth century population. Beginning with a mix of parlor-cultured French Canadians and enlightenment-seeking "Bostonians," Detroit was enriched by waves of emigrant groups who found survival and satisfactions there, and who took, via its developing institutions, their first steps toward cultural assimilation. Wayne University began in Detroit's Central High School about 1910 when Principal David Mackenzie opened a post-degree department. This evolved into the Detroit Junior College, in 1917, and , in 1923, into the College of the City of Detroit. A university was formed about this college in 1933, taking the name Wayne University in 1934. Wayne operated under the Detroit Board of Education until 1956. This study suggests that Wayne owes its existence, character, and major controversy to public school Superintendents Dr. Charles A. Chadsey, who most probably inspired its formation, and Mr. Frank Cody, who most certainly secured it from dissolution during the depression 1930's. But David Mackenzie was its pioneer. He infused it with a Detroiter's energy and curiosity, and with an inclusive ideal of educational opportunity. Yet unwittingly, Mackenzie sowed seeds of controversy as well. After his death in 1926, David Mackenzie's inclusivity ideal came to be institutionalized within an unofficial "non-matric" (after non-matriculated) program. Opposition to inclusivity grew out of several sources, including an emulation of the University of Michigan and a conflict between the Liberal Arts and Education faculties, and it matured along with Wayne's post-World War II independence from the Detroit Public Schools. Opponents included faculty who were brought to Wayne following Mackenzie's death, who became powerful twenty years later in Wayne's first independent administration. They were not supporters of Mackenzie's ideal of educational inclusivity, as this study demonstrates with words and actions recorded in the proceedings of the University Council where, in the 1950's, the fate of the non-matric program was debated. They advocated another ideal of educational opportunity, one that would provide the greatest opportunity to the few most qualified to pursue it. The contrast between these conflicting conceptions of educational opportunity is focuses in this study, and remains an issue in higher education during this last quarter of the twentieth century. Open enrollment at Wayne University was sustained for some years as an economic and political expedient, as well as an educational ideal. It was no longer an economic expedient in the post-war days of G.I. Bill-swollen enrollments. Yet its closing awaited Wayne's transition from civic to state control, and was accompanied by the seeding of community colleges in the Detroit suburban community. Under its new ideal of opportunity, Wayne would continue to serve at the center of a metro-wide public educational enterprise, but would now serve as its pinnacle as well. While much could be expected from this, something of Wayne's earlier character would be lost. This study illuminates that which was lost, and it offers a lesson to those educators who will ponder, tomorrow, the limits to be placed on access to public colleges and universities.Ph.D.Education historyUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/158216/1/8116198.pd