So we have an advertisement for a post at Lombard College in Galesburg, Illinois. The number of recitations, the candidates were told, would be about five per day. Many other problems existed as well. Southern schools were reluctant to hire northerners, northerners were reluctant to go south, and so on. I will cite one case study by way of illustration, because I am a historian by training, although I have lived most of my professional career with economists.
Historians know that one good story is worth many, many statistical tables.
So I will talk to you about a man named Selman Waksman, a microbiologist and the inventor of streptomycin, as an illustration of what public higher education made possible. Waksman came to the United States from the Ukraine in 1910. As an immigrant and an outsider, he was the kind of person for whom public higher education was a great boon. Not only did private colleges cost too much, but admission decisions were constrained by preference and prejudice. In certain scientific disciplines, furthermore, attitudes unfavorable to people of Waksman's background prevailed.