Laurence Veysey

Laurence Russ Veysey (August 12, 1932 – February 22, 2004) was an American historian best known for his history of higher education, The Emergence of the American University. He also wrote The Communal Experience (1973), a study of anarchist and mystical communities in the United States.

Early life Veysey was born in Los Angeles, the only child of Robert and Betty Veysey. Around 1936 his parents became committed followers of a minor Hindu guru and bought an acre of land in Ojai, California; his father died there in 1939 in circumstances that a coroner's inquest left unresolved, after which Veysey and his mother returned to Los Angeles.

Education Veysey attended Yale University on scholarship, graduating in 1953 near the top of his class after studying in intellectual historian Leonard Krieger's seminar and writing a senior thesis on the streetcars of Los Angeles. He subsequently served in the U.S. Army Security Agency before beginning graduate study, briefly at the University of Chicago and then at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1961 under historian Henry F. May. His dissertation on the emergence of the American university, researched through archival visits to universities including Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Columbia, Yale, Clark, Harvard, and Cornell, ran to 1,169 pages.

Career After completing his doctorate, Veysey taught for three years as a junior instructor at Harvard University, where he taught introductory Western civilization and political philosophy courses. In 1966 he joined the founding faculty of the University of California, Santa Cruz as a fellow of Stevenson College, where he remained for nearly twenty years teaching the history of education and of utopian and communal movements. Following heart attacks in the 1980s, he took early retirement.

Works The Emergence of the American University Condensed from his doctoral dissertation, The Emergence of the American University was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1965 and traces the development of the American university between 1865 and 1910, arguing that the era's competing visions of higher education—discipline and piety, practical utility, and research and liberal culture—were absorbed into a bureaucratically organized institution rather than resolved. It received strong reviews on publication, including in The Journal of American History, Social Studies, and the Journal of Higher Education. The book is regarded as a foundational text in the history of American higher education; a 2005 special issue of History of Education Quarterly was devoted to essays reassessing its influence four decades after publication.

The Communal Experience Veysey's second major book, The Communal Experience: Anarchist and Mystical Counter-Cultures in America, was published by Harper & Row in 1973. Based partly on Veysey's own extended stays at contemporary communes, it compares the history of early 20th-century secular and religious communities with present-day anarchist and mystical communities in New York, Vermont, and New Mexico. The book received a mixed critical reception but was nominated for a National Book Award.

Other works Veysey also edited Law and Resistance: American Attitudes Toward Authority (1970) and wrote The Perfectionists: Radical Social Thought in the North, 1815–1860 (1973). His 1979 essay "The Autonomy of American History Reconsidered," published in American Quarterly, has been cited as an early call for the more international and comparative approach to United States history that later became known as the "transnational turn."

Personal life and later years Veysey married Sheila Veysey in 1964; they had one son and divorced in 1976. After his retirement, he gave away most of his possessions, donated his personal papers to the UCSC archives, and moved to Lahaina, Hawaii, where he lived reclusively, became a committed nudist, and pursued a lifelong interest in streetcars, compiling an annotated bibliography of streetcar videotapes. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1979.

Death Veysey died on February 22, 2004, in Hawaii.

Legacy Writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education in 2015, Kevin Carey called The Emergence of the American University "arguably the greatest book ever written about the American university," concluding that "fifty years later, the ideas Veysey developed in two years of white-hot scholarly intensity continue to shape our basic understanding of academe." Historian Thomas H. Bender similarly described it as "an indispensable work on American higher education."