Abstract
As the institution faced struggles alongside the nation through the Great Depression and ideological adversaries abroad, higher education did not lose its reputation as a supporter of national interests. The focus was on how citizens should be educated to be contributors to the nation in its time of peril. Although nation lost its domestic economic stability, the identity of superiority was still supported by presidential discourse. This discourse represented the nation as morally and culturally superior, a nation of people who supported one another and their nation’s growth and endeavor to return to economic superiority, thus maintaining American superiority more broadly. Higher education was still considered as capable of contributing to the production of citizen-leaders to make this recovery a reality for the nation-state.
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Palmadessa, A.L. (2017). A Failing Nation, a Struggling Institution: Higher Education in the Inter-War Period. In: American National Identity, Policy Paradigms, and Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59935-3_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59935-3_4
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