A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendency of American Higher Education

From Someone Has to Fail to A Perfect Mess, David Labaree has long established his reputation for developing compelling, contrarian arguments on American educational institutions. He has an unusual ability to see nuance where others are reductionistic, to reveal paradoxes that the reader immediately recognizes as spot on. Few have difficulty seeing the messiness of the American higher education system, but Labaree is the first to call this a perfect mess. Not that he believes the system is perfect, but he does argue that the messiness is intrinsic to the nature of the system. Not only that, what appears as ‘messy’ is in large part responsible for the greatness of the American higher education system.

The arch of the book is evident in the subtitle: Labaree traces the unlikely ascendancy of American higher education, showing first and foremost that the system arose without a plan. He traces the historical evolution of a ragtag group of antebellum colleges that became a very robust higher education system by the early twentieth century. The book serves as a (brief) institutional history, a historical sociology of the evolving form of the American higher education system. It is, in a sense, a case study of one very large, very complex educational system: one that is unlike any other higher education system in the world. Because the system itself is the object of analysis, Labaree’s book does not closely mirror other historical books on American higher education, which tend to focus more on individual institutions (Veysey 1965; Thelin 2013). While Labaree draws on stories and examples of individual institutions to demonstrate parts of his argument, this is in service to his primary goal: tracing the emergence of the system itself and what makes it work.

Chapter 1 lays out some of the theoretical groundwork for his analysis, and between chapters 1-3 the author flies through a brief history of American colleges in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Labaree acknowledges that calling the eighteenth century colleges a system at all is a stretch but argues that what looked like chaos was, in fact, the infancy of the system we know now. The nineteenth century (chapter 3) marks the adolescence of the system: it was physically evolving much faster than it was intellectually maturing. Supply preceded demand, and while these scrappy institutions were barely recognizable to European visitors as colleges, Labaree identifies in them a set of characteristics which would prove invaluable as history played out: broad-based political support, large and multiple forms of revenue, institutional autonomy, and organizational capacity. His main point is that these traits emerged out of necessity, not intentionality. American colleges have always been market-based institutions; in some ways they looked and acted more like modern start-ups than their European counterparts such as Oxford or the Sorbonne.