Cold War Laboratories.

During the 1960s the baby boomers — the largest generation of young Americans in the history of the nation — reached college age; and, as a result of the general affluence of the United States in the years following World War II, more potential students were in a position to take advantage of higher education than ever before. Between 1955 and 1970 the number of college students nearly tripled, from 2.4 million to 6.4 million; nearly half a million instructors and researchers were employed by the nation's universities by the end of the decade, up from less than 200,000 twenty years before. In large part the explosive growth of the nation's academic community was made possible by the financial support of the federal government, specifically the Department of Defense, for whom American schools were often the laboratories where the cold war battle for technological superiority over...