The History of Education Quarterly is celebrating its sixtieth year of publication in 2020. During that time, it has published over 1,500 articles and extended reviews. An examination of these articles reveals several enduring themes that have shaped the field and that will likely continue to do so as HEQ moves into its seventh decade. Given this, the editors have asked scholars to envision that future. Using select articles from the past as starting points, Volume 60 features a series of forums in which historians of education consider future avenues of research related to designated themes.

As someone whose training is in political science and who writes about the history of my own discipline, I admit to some hesitation in recommending future avenues of research for historians of education. For that reason, the following thoughts are directed toward disciplinary history broadly and social science history specifically. Moreover, the three articles that contributors to this forum were asked to use as inspiration suggest that any future I would recommend has been under way in one form or another for a while. For those reasons, I want to reframe my contribution as a reflection on a particular mode of analysis all three authors employed and how it may be particularly useful for exploring the questions of power, exclusion, and race- and gender-making in the academy that are present in all three articles and that explicitly animate two of them.

America's sprawling system of colleges and universities has been built on the ruins of war. After the American Revolution the cash-strapped central government sold land grants to raise revenue and build colleges and schools in newly conquered lands. During the Civil War, the federal government built on this earlier precedent when it passed the 1862 Morrill Land-Grant College Act, which created the nation's system of publicly supported land-grant colleges. And during Reconstruction, the Freedmen's Bureau, operating under the auspices of the War Department, aided former slaves in creating thousands of schools to help protect their hard-fought freedoms. Not only do “wars make states,” as sociologist Charles Tilly claimed, but wars have also shaped the politics of knowledge in the modern university in powerful and lasting ways.

Historically, education has often varied by curriculum, access, and stature based on location, race, gender, economic status, religion, and time period. In addition, many educational institutions and much scholarly research have been significantly impacted by private foundation support. This essay discusses the politics of knowledge as it relates to gender and race as well as the impact of philanthropy on the production of knowledge with these groups. While many aspects of these themes have changed in the past sixty years, many of them remain highly contested.

As scholars of higher education regularly point out, American universities face a fundamental tension between access and exclusion. On the one hand, as publicly supported institutions operating in a democracy, they are charged with promoting social mobility and sharing knowledge that can improve society. On the other, they are tasked with identifying and supporting elites—those talented, ambitious, and hardworking individuals who deserve the most money and accolades. In his 1993 History of Education Society presidential address, “Race, Meritocracy, and the American Academy during the Immediate Post-World War II Era,” historian James Anderson describes one way in which northern white colleges and universities coped with this tension after World War II. During this time, Fred Wale, director of education for the Julius Rosenwald Fund, compiled a list of 150 outstanding black scholars with degrees from schools like the University of Chicago, Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Michigan; extensive teaching experience at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs); and highly regarded publication records. Wale sent his list to hundreds of university presidents, encouraging them to consider these qualified candidates for faculty appointments. His efforts made minimal impact: between 1945 and 1947, only twenty-three of the scholars on Wale's list were offered permanent faculty positions at northern white universities.