Normal Colleges as National Development Tool in the United States: From Schools to Universities

• In Event: Roundtable Group 16
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: Turning to the past and to the future of higher education

Proposal

Relevance - Normal colleges have a significant global history related to the massification of education and the professionalization of teaching. They originated from the French model of École Normale, which aimed to train teachers to educate students according to specific cultural or societal standards, or "norms," during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Ogren, 2005). Some countries, like China, still retain the label "normal" for their universities (Allen & Liu, 2016). The United States had a robust “normal” college network, but they have all changed names, shedding their educational roots.

Theory - The expansion of mass education has been a global phenomenon for well over a century. Meyer et al. (1992) extensively documented this mass expansion from 1870 to 1980, identifying a pattern of diffusion. Borrowed from policy studies, the Lazy-S Curve describes this diffusion process, starting with a few early adopters in the slow growth phase, followed by a rapid increase in adopters during the explosive phase, and concluding with late adopters in the burnout phase (Steiner-Khamsi, 2016). This concept helps contextualize how and why educational policies spread over broad historical trends.

Inquiry - This research explores the transformation from "normal" schools to full-fledged universities using a dataset of 191 current US universities with "normal" roots. Building upon Ogren's (2005) dataset of these institutions, I have compiled information on name changes and dates for each institution, considering the timeframe, state, and region, to analyze the policy diffusion process. Following other comparative work (Lao, 2013; Steiner-Khamsi, 2016; Eta, 2021), this research visualizes the data to understand national policy diffusion (McMillan, 2021). My hypothesis is that the results will follow the Lazy-S Curve as described above.

Findings - The results demonstrate that these institutions followed a Lazy-S Curve when shedding their original labels. In the late nineteenth century, these institutions were often established as "schools" for teachers. In the early twentieth century, early adopters transitioned from "school" to "college." Concurrently, other institutions dropped "normal" from their names and changed to "teachers" colleges. Finally, in the mid-twentieth century, these institutions further evolved and adopted the name "university," reflecting the massification of higher education post-World War II. An example of this progression is illustrated below: Normal School of Arizona (1886) -> State Teachers College (1925) -> Arizona State College (1945) -> Arizona State University (1958).

Contribution - Despite their crucial mission to educate the masses, normal universities faced long-standing disrespect in the US (Ogren, 2005). They were considered inferior to traditional universities, partly due to the feminization of the teaching profession. In response to this disrespect, these universities protested by changing their names, asserting their importance as significant educational institutions. Unfortunately, some of the historical contexts behind these name changes have been forgotten, but many universities continue to uphold their missions of affordability, accessibility, and diversity to local populations, distinguishing themselves from elite peers—values reflected in the CIES 2024 Power of Protest theme. This roundtable aims to revive this history and connect US higher education's past to the global culture of normal universities.

Author

• Ryan Allen, Soka University of America