A few citations regarding Sanford

Nevitt Sanford (1969) was one of the first higher education scholars to argue the importance of institutional "community" and to note its absence in the contemporary American college or university.

It is fair to say that in most of our universities -- and in many of our liberal arts colleges – a majority of the students suffer from a lack of a sense of community, confusion about values, a lack of intimate friends, a very tenuous sense of self (including serious doubt about their personal worth), and the absence of a great cause, movement, service, religion, belief system, or anything else that they might see as larger than themselves and in which they could become deeply involved (Sanford, 1988, p. 3).

In his classic, Where Colleges Fail (1969), Sanford argued that colleges fail whenever they treat students as less than whole persons and that learning depends on the whole personality, not merely intelligence. He maintained that institutions themselves lack "coherence." He foreshadowed the later research of Astin (1977) and Boyer (1987) by calling for the "involvement" of students themselves in campus life and involvement of faculty in the lives of the students.

From: Barefoot, B, & Fidler, P. (1996). The Freshman Year Experience, Monograph Series Number 20. Available here

In the 1950's and early 60's he headed a major study of higher education, publishing "The American College" in 1962 and "Where Colleges Fail" in 1967. He wrote that an overemphasis on academic publishing in evaluating professors -- often called the "publish or perish" syndrome -- was leading to a deterioration in their teaching abilities.

"Dr. Sanford thought that graduate schools had become too narrow in their thinking, the problems they approached, and their student body," said Peter Dybwad, president of the institute.

From: Coleman, D. July 11, 1995. Sanford's NYTimes obituary. Available here

Perhaps the single most important contribution by The American College is its repeated emphasis upon the individual college student as a developing psychological being. He has a psychological history that opens him to such influence as the college may exert in the direction of intellectual expansion, esthetic appreciation, and individual and collective responsibility. The same history opens him to the encapsulating effects, within the college, of peer environments and to the alienating and deadening effects of routinized curricula, distant and unconcerned (or over-concerned) teachers, and "massified" college environments. Every college teacher and administrator should read the eloquent arguments in favor of viewing the aims of personal growth and liberal education as complementary.

Yet, the book reveals some peculiar myopias that should especially worry sociologists. There seems to be little awareness that college students - and college staff - have careers as well as psychological histories. Questions of the influence of such obvious variables as mobility patterns, class subcultures, and religious or ethnic backgrounds go almost entirely unnoticed. Considerable attention is given to the diversity among colleges in student intellectual ability. Unfortunately, other types of variation in student populations, many of which may have significant contextual effects, are not considered.

From: Bidwell, C. E. (1962). Book Review. American Sociological Review, 27(4), 559-560. Available here