Scott M. Gelber. The University and the People: Envisioning American Higher Education in an Era of Populist Protest.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In an era when market-driven imperatives seem to dominate the agenda in higher education, it is easy enough to forget that policymakers ever proposed an alternative set of values for the American university. Exploring the brief period of Populist ascendancy in the Gilded Age, Scott M. Gelber reminds us that this was indeed the case. In a tightly organized, effectively written, and prodigiously documented analysis, he subtly suggests that the Populist era offers a potential corrective to our own. Focusing on Kansas, Nebraska, and North Carolina, states where Populism briefly gained a political foothold, Gelber challenges the stereotype of Populist anti-intellectualism. “Contrary to popular wisdom,” the author writes, “the movement was not uniformly hostile to state colleges and universities” (p. 15). The few Populists who gained influence over the groves of academe may have championed free tuition, broader access, and vocational education, but they also defended the social sciences and humanities. They wielded menacing rhetorical axes, but Populist legislators usually protected and even enhanced state funding for higher education. They also expanded state facilities for white women and poor farmers. What motivated professors such as Thomas E. Will of the Kansas State Agricultural College and administrators such as James Hulme Canfield of the University of Nebraska was not the opportunity of tearing down elitist institutions but the chance to transform them into more egalitarian sites of critical thinking and social improvement (p. 168).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".