Access, Equity, and the Social Contract of Public Universities

CSHE > Research > The Research University > Access, Equity, and the Social Contract of Public Universities

This project is developing a comprehensive historical study of the admission policies and practices of public universities in the United States, linking their evolving "social contract" with contemporary debates over affirmative action, standardized tests, changing definitions of merit, the emerging influences of privatization and globalization, and the very purpose and future of these important institutions.

At its essence, that social contract included the profoundly progressive idea that any citizen who met a prescribed set of largely academic conditions would gain entrance to their state university — a sharp contrast to most private institutions that, throughout most of their history, proactively used sectarian and racial, and sometimes social caste, criteria to exclude groups. Further, public universities sought to proactively mitigate barriers to access. How that social contract was formed, how it grew and has changed, its successes and failures, and the accompanying political battles, both past and present, over its meaning are the subject of this study and the pending book, The Conditions for Admission: Access, Equity, and the Social Contract of Public Universities (Stanford University Press, forthcoming Spring 2007).

Principal Investigator: John Aubrey Douglass