The title of this essay, as fans of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle will recognize, comes from the Sherlock Holmes mystery entitled “Silver Blaze.” In that story, a prize race horse disappears shortly before an important race and its trainer is subsequently found bludgeoned to death out on the moor. The most important clue, for Holmes, is the “curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” When Dr. Watson, in his inimitable way, tells Holmes that the dog guarding the stables did nothing, Holmes proudly asserts, “That was the curious incident.” That the dog did not bark proves that the theft was an inside job by the trainer himself, who, having placed a large bet on an opposing horse, took Silver Blaze out on the moor in order to hobble him partially. Holmes concludes that the trainer was kicked to death by the stallion and finds the “murderer” safe at a neighboring farm with his blaze painted over.

Rose Freistater was twenty-six years old when the New York City Board of Examiners denied her a teaching license. She had been teaching at James Monroe High School, first as a student teacher and then as a substitute teacher for five years, and her work was characterized by the chairman of the biology department in which she taught as “difficult to overstate in its excellence.” But in 1931, Rose stood five feet and two inches and weighed 182 pounds. When she applied for her teaching license that year, she weighed thirty pounds more than the maximum weight allowed by the Board for her height. She was given six months to lose thirty pounds; when she lost only twenty in that time, she was rejected by the Board altogether. Although a number of overweight and underweight teachers were rejected by the Board of Education in the ten years that the standards had existed, Rose was the first to appeal to the state that the qualifications were unfair. When her case reached the State Commissioner of Education in 1935, it was rejected again, and the city board issued a statement claiming, “Other things being normal, a person of abnormal weight is likely to have more absences because of ill health and be less efficient as a teacher than a person of average weight.” Furthermore, it added, “Teachers must climb stairs, take part in fire drills, and be able to handle all real school emergencies. Overweight teachers are less likely to stand the strain of teaching…. Teachers should [be]… acceptable hygienic models for their pupils in the manner of weight.” Finally, overweight teachers, who represented greater health risks than others, “constitute[d] a drain on the teachers' pension fund.” In response, the Freistater family contended that Rose walked the five flights of steps to their apartment several times a day, but her case was closed.

Higher education scholars are familiar with the close relationship between American higher education and the federal government after World War II. The G.I. Bill and Cold War concerns for maintaining the nation's technological advantage made the federal government the major benefactor of postsecondary growth. The seismic shifts of that era, though, tend to overshadow earlier developing ties between the federal government and the colleges and, more specifically, the roots of direct federal aid to college students. This article seeks to redress that problem by exploring the subtle ways that federal aid became integrated into the visions and plans of the leaders of American higher education in the years prior to World War II. By examining New Deal Era college aid at a variety of institutions of higher education in the state of Ohio, we can uncover how the earlier courtship between the federal government and the colleges helped clear the way for later, more profound changes.

In the Netherlands the first girl admitted to a qualifying secondary education and the first female university student were sisters, Frederika and Aletta Jacobs. These girls, twelve- and seventeen-years old, entered the respective institutions in 1871 after the father and Aletta had made successful requests. In each case the admission brought an end to a long-standing male privilege. And in each case contemporaries conceived of these ambitious girls as exceptional and therefore raised hardly any objections. In reality however, the arrival of the Jacobs sisters initiated what amounted to a revolution in girls' education, as Dutch girls and women began to follow their examples in unexpected numbers.

Trends in the Psychological Index indicated a change in resources directed toward education between the early 1910s and late 1920s. By 1930, “educational” studies accounted for the highest percentage—about 25 percent—of 25, 472 articles in psychology, with studies in “abnormal” and “social” psychology accounting for respectively 21 percent and 19 percent. This trend, evident in the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature as well, reflected an increasing popularity of psychotherapeutic knowledge and products in clinics, courts, hospitals, prisons, and schools. As a growth market, education offered resources and was viewed as the most promising institution in the United States for regulating normality. By the late 1910s, “educational psychology” was central to institutions of teacher training. Certainly, for psychologists, psychology was the “the source of fundamental assumptions” for guiding educational practice. Teachers' views were similar. In one survey in the mid 1920s, teachers recognized educational psychology as the most intrinsically valuable course in their university programs. In other words, within institutions like The Ohio State University (OSU), requirements in teacher training provided psychologists with a mechanism for demonstrating the uses of psychotherapeutic knowledge, products, and procedures. These trends beg a simple question: What was educational psychology?

Today eight Schools of Arts and Crafts are the largest source of engineers in France but they originated from a single school established by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1803. At the time many French were concerned that their industries lagged behind the British. What better way to modernize industry than to train boys and young men in a more rational approach to production and send them out to lead industrial change? Historians have left a pessimistic view of the school's first quarter century, but my reading of the evidence, including the archives on school shops and commerce, has led me to nearly the opposite conclusion—the school of Châlons was, from 1807 to 1830, one of the most innovative and unusual schools of all time.

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and their students played a pivotal part in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and early 1960s. Private HBCUs, in particular, provided foot soldiers, intellectual leadership, and safe places to meet and plan civil disobedience. Their economic and political autonomy from the state enabled the institutions and their students to participate in activism without the constant fear of legislative retribution. Their private status did not shield them completely from the state's wrath, however, particularly when college aims collided with state interests. Some constituents argued that HBCUs should agitate for constitutionally protected freedoms; others maintained that HBCUs should shun politics and focus on purely educational concerns. Debates over the role of HBCUs raged on and off campuses. Those with the greatest degree of commitment to the movement faced severe penalties.

In 1951 three brief commentaries in the Journal of Negro Education drew public attention to the potentially tenuous job security of African-American educators in the South, Black professionals whose employment status was being called into question as southern educational institutions faced the prospect of desegregation. The specific incident which occasioned these commentaries was a December 1950 vote by the Board of Trustees of the University of Louisville to close the segregated, all-Black Louisville Municipal College, which it had administered since that college was founded in 1931, and to integrate the two institutions' student bodies. Fourteen African-American faculty and staff at Louisville Municipal College were informed that, despite tenure or contract status, they would be given two months' severance pay and summarily dismissed. With United States Supreme Court legal precedents from the 1938 Gaines case through the 1950 Sweatt and McLauren decisions already dramatically affecting the policy context of southern higher education, and with what would become known as the “Brown Decision” looming on the horizon, what might be the consequences for all Black educators throughout the South—if the high court overturned the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision as National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) lawyers urged?

In a 1981 interview, civil rights leader Andrew Young commented, “If you look at the black elected officials and the people who are political leaders across the South now, it's full of people who had their first involvement in civil rights in the Citizenship Training Program.” Informally known as Citizenship Schools, this adult education program began in 1958 under the sponsorship of Tennessee's Highlander Folk School, which handed it over to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1961. By the time the project ended in 1970, approximately 2500 African Americans had taught these basic literacy and political education classes for tens of thousands of their neighbors. The program never had a high profile, but civil rights leaders and scholars assert that it helped to bring many people into the movement, cultivated grassroots leaders, and increased black participation in voting and other civic activities.

This conversation begins with two observations: first, the professional organizations—conferences and journals—need to play more self-conscious, activist roles in shaping scholarly canons. Second, whatever canon now presides over American higher educational history is an extremely tolerant one. So much of current scholarship seems to arise out of particularly local interests, narrow specializations, or anniversary celebrations. Even more, rich case studies of particular institutions often omit any connection with a wider discourse. Too many essays of colleges and universities with rather singular histories seldom probe current scholarly wisdom to assess how issues and generalizations might be changed because of their particular case. The cumulative effect of this scholarship “from below” tends to erode any general consensus on central problems. Should not the professional organizations hosting academic discussions probe this phenomenon and indeed suggest that subsequent scholarship explain the issues that their case illuminates? Should they not explain how their scholarship connects to existing scholarly canons?

As the political conflict over slavery's fate in the West intensified through the summer of 1849, Peter M. Wallace, editor of the Spartanburg Carolina Spartan, vowed that he was “utterly opposed now and forever to all political compromises” on the issue of slavery. Significantly, Wallace connected the success of such southern resistance to the improvement of South Carolina's free schools. The Carolina Spartan's columns, the editor explained, “will be open to the advocates of a more liberal but judicious appropriation of the public money” for common schooling because “an educated and intelligent people, cannot be enslaved.” Wallace was one of many antebellum Spartanburg leaders who linked schooling with southern nationalism and used slavery as a metaphor for dependence on northern institutions. In the process, these men espoused what historians often view as a very un-southern idea—liberal government support for public education—and contrasted it with an image central to the definition of southern white republicanism—the ignorant slave.

In June 1944, a delegation of African-American leaders met with New York City school officials to discuss a central focus of black concern: history textbooks. That delegation reflected a broad spectrum of metropolitan Black opinion: Chaired by the radical city councilman Benjamin J. Davis, it included the publisher of the Amsterdam News—New York's major Black newspaper—as well as the bishop of the African Orthodox Church. In a joint statement, the delegates praised public schools' recent efforts to promote “intercultural education”—and to reduce “prejudice”—via drama, music, and art. Yet if history texts continued to spread lies about the past, Blacks insisted, all of these other programs would come to naught. One book described slaves as “happy”; another applauded the Ku Klux Klan for keeping “foolish Negroes” out of government. “Such passages… could well have come from the mouths of the fascist enemies of our nation,” the Black delegation warned. Even as America fought “Nazi doctrine” overseas, African Americans maintained, the country needed to purge this philosophy from history books at home.