"The third forty-year period of the 120 years following Stephen Penroses appointment to the presidency in 1894 is the subject of this third volume of Whitman history. Distinguished scholar and Professor of History David Schmitz interprets Whitmans evolution between 1975 and 2015 as a conservative transformation built upon Penroses foundation. Increasing professionalization is pervasive. Schmitz emphasizes the growing expectation for professional activity by professors, which was added to the expectation for teaching effectiveness. Teachers came to be distinguished scholars and artists. Administrators and staff members came more and more to be professional managers. Mom and Pop offices recruiting students and funds evolved into data-driven research centers comprising large staffs. Several factors contributed to the collegiate transformation Schmitz describes.

The intentionality constructed community envisioned by Penrose in a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century environment was re-envisioned during my tenure and those of my successors in a late-twentieth-century environment, and after the year 2000. A rare higher education experience for a small part of secondary school graduates in 1900 has become a competitive marketplace for a majority of high schoolers seventy-five years later. American society has become affluent, and its ambitious middle class regarded higher education as the path to even greater success for its children. The demographic bulge after World War II, fed by affluence, created a consumer appetite for amenities in the learning environment. The individualism in student rights defied traditional patterns of deference. New prerogatives were demanded, and new faces were prepared to take a place at the table occupied almost exclusively by traditional white males.--Robert Allen Skotheim"--Jacket.