The American Educational Research Association (AERA) presented its 2013 Outstanding Book Award to Vanderbilt University professor Christopher Loss for Between Citizens and the State: The Politics of American Higher Education in the 20th Century (Princeton University Press, 2012) in April.
Loss’s book tracks the dramatic results of the federal government’s growing involvement in higher education between World War I and the 1970s and the conservative backlash against that involvement from the 1980s onward. Major events of the twentieth century serve as the backdrop against which Loss follows higher education’s significant transformation.
“The book details the myriad ways in which academic leaders and students shaped – and were shaped by – the federal government’s shifting political agenda as it moved from a preoccupation with economic security during the Great Depression, to national security during World War II and the Cold War, to securing the rights of African Americans, women and other marginalized groups during the 1960s and 1970s,” said Loss, assistant professor of public policy and higher education in the Department of Leadership, Policy and Organizations.