Did American Higher Education Have a "Golden Age"?

Or is that a historical fallacy?

I had to submit grades this week for a course that ended in mid-semester, so I haven’t had time to finish my next chapter in College for Christians. We’ll turn to the theme of discerning one’s calling in college next week; today, a paid post thinking about how we tend to evaluate the history of higher ed.

The other day I got a kindly-meant email that used the phrase “golden years of higher education.” While the author used the phrase to acknowledge that our present moment is certainly not “golden,” it got me wondering — as a college professor who moonlights as a historian of higher ed — just which years were. Or if any era in higher ed deserves that adjective.

Historians, after all, tend to be highly attuned to what’s called the “golden age fallacy” — the wistful but wasteful longing for a bygone time when things were supposed to have been better. A scene in a Woody Allen movie, of all things, puts it pretty well:

Michael Sheen’s character in Midnight in Paris turns out to be a less than reliable historian, but he’s not entirely wrong in reaching his uncharitable conclusion: yearning for a golden age is “a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present.”

Nevertheless, as a history professor struggling to cope with a present in which the most powerful man in the world is seemingly at war with educational institutions that were already headed over a demographic cliff, indulge me some romantic imagining.

If there was ever such a thing, what was the golden age in higher education?