In For the Common Good, Charles Dorn challenges the rhetoric of America’s so-called crisis in higher education by investigating two centuries of college and university history. From the community college to the elite research university - in states from California to Maine - Dorn engages a fundamental question confronted by higher education institutions ever since the nation’s founding: Do colleges and universities contribute to the common good?

Tracking changes in the prevailing social ethos between the late 18th and early 21st centuries, Dorn illustrates the ways in which civic-mindedness, practicality, commercialism, and affluence influenced higher education’s dedication to the public good. Each ethos, long a part of American history and tradition, came to predominate over the others during one of the four chronological periods examined in the audiobook, informing the character of institutional debates and telling the definitive story of its time. For the Common Good demonstrates how 200 years of political, economic, and social change prompted transformation among colleges and universities - including the establishment of entirely new kinds of institutions - and refashioned higher education in the United States over time in essential and often vibrant ways.

The book is published by Cornell University Press. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks.