Those who think that the job of an intelligent agent of Mr. Paryski is limited to selling his books [and] his newspaper, collecting the money, attending to business and never showing up again are wrong indeed…. The true, intelligent agent of “Ameryka-Echo” has the responsibility to visit as many Polish families (or Lithuanian, Slovak, and Russyn) as possible, to encourage them to learn, to facilitate their learning through providing them with suitable inexpensive books and newspapers, getting to know their problems and needs, and giving them appropriate advice so that people can be brought out from their misery and degradation…. Whoever wants to effectively work for the people, needs to go among the people, get to know the people and then to begin the Positivist work (praca pozytywna).

On September 18, 1890, an enthusiastic and portly man on a train from Chicago to New Haven scribbled in a notebook. The man was William Rainey Harper, and the contents of his notebook would become the plans for The University of Chicago. Upon arriving in New Haven, he wrote a letter to John D. Rockefeller, who would finance Harper's vision for a university. Harper wrote,

During World War II, female students at the University of California, Berkeley—then the most populous undergraduate campus in American higher education—made significant advances in collegiate life. In growing numbers, women enrolled in male-dominated academic programs, including mathematics, chemistry, and engineering, as they prepared for home-front employment in fields traditionally closed to them. Women also effectively opposed gendered restrictions on extracurricular participation, filling for the first time such influential campus leadership positions as the presidency of Berkeley's student government and editorship of the university's student newspaper. Female students at Berkeley also furthered activist causes during the war years, with the University Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) serving as one of the most popular outlets for their political engagement. Historically rooted in a mission of Christian fellowship, by the 1940s the University YWCA held progressive positions on many of the nation's central social, political, and economic issues. Throughout the war years, women dedicated to promoting civil liberties, racial equality, and international understanding led the organization in its response to two of the most egregious civil rights violations in U.S. history: racial segregation and Japanese internment.

Women's colleges in the 1970s and 1980s faced highly uncertain futures. Soaring popularity of coeducation left them with serious enrollment downturns, and challenges from proposed equal rights legislation threatened to render illegal their single-sex admissions policies. These perilous external conditions drew together the presidents of U.S. women's colleges in new ways as they sought to preserve and strengthen their individual institutions and to secure a future for women's colleges as an institutional type.