Truman Commission, 1947: Higher Education Must Promote Democracy and Global Cooperation

For refreshing reminder of why we really want more people to seek higher education, let’s turn to the President’s Commission on Higher Education—President Harry S Truman’s Commission, convened in 1946, reporting in 1947, and remarkable not just because it called for universal tuition-free public education through the fourteenth grade fourteen years before Barack Obama was born, but because the commission said higher education was vital to preparing Americans to unite and save humanity in the atomic age:

This tendency of the American people to seek higher education in ever greater numbers has grown concurrently with an increasingly critical need for such education. To this need several developments have contributed:

(a) Science and invention have diversified natural resources, have multiplied new devices and techniques of production. These have altered in radical ways the interpersonal and intergroup relations of Americans in their work, in their play, and in their duties as citizens. As a consequence, new skills and greater maturity are required of youth as they enter upon their adult roles. And the increasing complexity that technological progress has brought to our society has made a broader understanding of social processes and problems essential for effective living.

(b) The people of America are drawn from the peoples of the entire world. They live in contrasting regions. They are of different occupations, diverse faiths, divergent cultural backgrounds, and varied interests. The American Nation is not only a union of 48 different States; it is also a union of an indefinite number of diverse groups of varying size. Of and among these diversities our free society seeks to create a dynamic unity. Where there is economic, cultural, or religious tension, we undertake to effect democratic reconciliation, so as to make of the national life one continuous process of interpersonal, intervocational, and intercultural cooperation.

(c) With World War II and its conclusion has come a fundamental shift in the orientation of American foreign policy. Owing to the inescapable pressure of events, the Nation’s traditional isolationism has been displaced by a new sense of responsibility in world affairs. The need for maintaining our democracy at peace with the rest of the world has compelled our initiative in the formation of the United Nations, and America’s role in this and other agencies of international cooperation requires of our citizens a knowledge of other peoples — of their political and economic systems, their social and cultural institutions — such as has not hitherto been so urgent.

(d) The coming of the atomic age, with its ambivalent promise of tremendous good or tremendous evil for mankind, has intensified the uncertainties of the future. It has deepened and broadened the responsibilities of higher education for anticipating and preparing
for the social and economic changes that will come with the application of atomic energy to industrial uses. At the same time it has underscored the need for education and research for the self-protection of our democracy, for demonstrating the merits of our way of life to other peoples [President’s Commission on Higher Education, Higher Education for American Democracy, 1947].

The Truman Commission charged higher education with preparing workers who could plug themselves into the technologizing workplace. But it saw keenly that adulthood also required understanding technology as one of many social forces that every citizen, not just the technocrats, must understand and navigate as we collectively exemplify American values to the world.

Commission chairman George Zook and his fellow Presidential appointees looked at the aftermath of World War Two—destruction on a massive scale started by hateful, murderous demagogues and ended by two American nuclear bombs—and identified three principal goals for higher education:

Education for a fuller realization of democracy in every phase of living.

Education directly and explicitly for international understanding and cooperation.

Education for the application of creative imagination and trained intelligence to the solution of social problems and to the administration of public affairs [President’s Commission, 1947].

Then as now, the greatest challenge for our public institutions of higher education was not to produce more welders. The greatest challenge was to prepare citizens to take on more democratic responsibility, to take the management of an ever more complex and diverse society more and more into their own hands, and help people around the world realize the same democratic ideal.

Welding metal is a useful skill, but we need every college graduate to weld the world so it can hold against fear, ignorance, violence, and totalitarianism.

In the aftermath of World War Two, the Truman Commission called higher education to a higher mission than job training. That mission of expanding democracy, global understanding, and problem-solving creativity and intelligence is as relevant and worthy today as it was 72 years ago.