Wayne J. Urban

In Black Scholar, Wayne J. Urban chronicles the distinguished life and career of the historian, teacher, and university administrator Horace Mann Bond, illuminating not only the man and his accomplishments but also the many struggles that confronted those involved in black education during the middle decades of this century. A graduate of Lincoln University and the University of Chicago, Bond wrote six scholarly books and numerous articles and remained committed. Throughout his life to the concerns of black education. In his early research, he became involved in intelligence testing and argued in his writings (some of them published in W.E.B. Du Bois's journal the Crisis) for the primacy of environment over heredity in the interpretation of test results. During the 1930s, he published his two most notable books, The Education of the Negro in the American Social Order and the prize-winning Negro Education in Alabama: A Study in. Cotton and Steel which marked him as a scholar of great promise. Also early in his career, he worked for the Julius Rosenwald Fund and began a two-decade-long acquaintance with its president, Edwin Embree. Unfortunately, Bond's early promise as a scholar remained largely unfulfilled. Because segregation kept him from finding a permanent academic home that could facilitate his research, he became an administrator at several black institutions, including Fort Valley State. College, Lincoln University, and Atlanta University. He felt considerable frustration as the demands of administrative work hampered his scholarly endeavors. In addition to his work in this country, Bond traveled frequently to Africa during the 1940s and 1950s, striving to encourage relations between Africans and African Americans. The affinities between these groups--one struggling to break free from colonialism, the other from segregation--were great, but again Bond. Met with frustration as well as fulfillment. Politics and economic interests complicated the academic and cultural ties that he sought to promote. Horace Bond, who died in 1972, is today best remembered as the father of the civil-rights activist Julian Bond. Revealing the elder Bond as a significant figure in his own right, Black Scholar also reconstructs an era in which numerous black people of great academic promise found few outlets for their talents.

""The National Defense Education Act broke a logjam of opposition to federal aid to elementary and secondary education in 1958. Many believe that the launch of the Soviet's Sputnik satellite enabled the bill's proponents to get it through Congress. But historians have pointed out that the scientific community's pressure for science and math education started long before Sputnik. Now Wayne Urban's exciting new book takes that argument a big step further. He argues that we must see this in the more general context of the agendas of politicians like Congressman Carl Elliott and Senator Lister Hill, white liberals from Alabama, to achieve federal education aid in any form, for whatever reason. They allied with President Eisenhower and the young Assistant Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, Elliott Richardson, to move the NDEA through Congress, each for his own reasons.^ Urban's assessment is loaded with fresh insights about the meaning and legacy of this act for the various players, including also the scientific community and the National Education Association. Bravo." --Carl Kaestle, Professor Emeritus of Education, History, and Public Policy at Brown University"Urban fills a critically important void in our scholarship on the history and development of federal education policy in this book. He has drawn upon his deep understanding of the history of federal legislation and national education policy development to chart the dramatic expansion of the federal role in education, and what it has meant, and what it still means for the issues and interests of today." --Stephen G.^ Katsinas, Director of the Education Policy Center, The University of Alabama"The passage of the National Defense Education Act broke the dam of a hundred years of federal inaction in American education; its passage was an essential precursor to the landmark legislation of the 1960s and transformed the federal role in education in America." --Mary Allen Jolley, Legislative Clerk to Rep. Carl Elliott, House of Representatives Subcommittee on Special Education, 1957-58Sparked by dramatic Soviet achievements, particularly in nuclear technology and the development of the Sputnik space orbiter, the United States responded in the late 1950s with an extraordinary federal investment in education. Designed to overcome a perceived national failure to produce enough qualified scientists, engineers, and mathematicians to compete with the Communist bloc, the effort resulted in the National Defense Education Act of 1958 (NDEA).^ Representative Carl Elliott and Senator Lister Hill, both from Alabama, and Assistant Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Elliot Richardson were the prime movers in shaping this landmark legislation.More Than Science and Sputnik analyzes the papers of the three leaders to describe the political process that established the NDEA. The book illustrates what the assumptions of th"--BOOK JACKET.

"Urban provides an intellectual history of Harvard presidency of James Bryant Conant (1933-1953), situating it within the broader international landscape and drawing out the implication for the current state of higher education with reference to specific leadership policy issues in the sector. Throughout this volume, Urban explores the ways in which Conant achieved largely successful attempts to modernize Harvard by upgrading both its student body and its faculty. He explores the intellectual excellence agenda that Conant pursued both with students and academics, and the ramifications of this. He also considers the nature of Conant's part-time handling of the role of president, the way he delegated campus control to his Provost, Paul Buck, and the ways the two operated together and separately. Urban also looks at Conant's own intellectual breadth, as scientist and humanist, which showed itself prominently in his activities in pursuit of general education reform. Conant's combination of intellect and agenda was unusual for a president in his own time, and is exceedingly rare, if not completely missing, in contemporary university presidencies. In exploring this innovative president's time in office at Harvard, Urban offers pertinent ideas to today's leaders of higher education."--