Open gallery

Bruce Leslie

Professor Emeritus: bleslie@brockport.edu

Education

PhD, Johns Hopkins University, 1971
B.A. (cum laude), Princeton University, 1966

Areas of Specialty

American Social History

SUNY Distinguished Service Professor, 2013
Visiting Fellow, Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, 2011
SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Service, 2010
Program Chair, SUNY 60th Anniversary Conference, 2008-2009
Editorial Board, History of Education Quarterly, 2007 - 2010
Chair, AERA New Scholar Book Award Committee, 2003 and 2005.
Brockport Alumni Association, Certificate of Appreciation, 2004.
Visiting Scholar, University of Cambridge, 2003, 2005, & 2007-8.
Fulbright Senior Specialist Selection Committee, 2003 - 2008
Fulbright Scandinavian Selection Committee, 1999-2001.
Fulbright Professor, Institut for Engelsk, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark, 1996-97.
Reader, U.S. History Advanced Placement Exam, 1994 - 2001
Book Gentleman and Scholars: College and Community in the “Age of the University,” 1865-1917, (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993) included in Fincher, et. al., 100 Classic Books on Higher Education (Phi Delta Kappan).
Editorial Board, History of Higher Education Annual, 1991 to present
Editorial Board, ASHE History of Higher Education Readers, 1989 & 1997

Books
- John Clark, Bruce Leslie, and Ken O’Brien (Eds), SUNY at Sixty: The Promise of the State University of New York (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010) State University of New York at Brockport, Arcadia Publishing, 2007. [with Mary Jo Gigliotti and Kenneth P. O’Brien]
- Gentlemen and Scholars: College and Community in the “Age of the University,” 1865-1917. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993; Second Edition, New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2005
Articles
- ”The Surprising History of the Post-WWII State Teachers College,” Perspectives in the History of Higher Education (2017), 23-49
- “Emergence of an American Upper Middle Class, 1870-1940, The American Middle Class: An Encyclopedia of Progress and Poverty (ABC-Clio, June, 2017), 652-658
- “Dreaming Spires in New Jersey: Anglophilia in Woodrow Wilson’s Princeton,” in James Axtell (Ed.), The Educational Legacy of Woodrow Wilson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia Press, 2012), pp. 97 – 121.
- “The Curious Tale of Liberal education, Professional Training, and the American College, 1880 –1910,” History of Education [England] 40 (January, 2011), 83 – 95.
- “Rescuing State Teachers Colleges from History’s Scrapheap” [with Ken O’Brien] and“The Strange Career of SUNY History,” both in Clark, Leslie, & O’Brien, SUNY and the Promise of Public Higher Education (2009)
- “The Liberal Pan-Protestant Moment and the Emergence of the University,” Perspectives in the History of Higher Education (forthcoming)
- “Four Colleges and their Communities”, in Roy Lowe (ed.), The History of Higher Education (Routledge, 2008)
- “From Donnish Dominion to Economic Engine: Explaining the Later 20th Century Revolution in English Higher Education”, History of Higher Education Annual 23 (2003)[with John Halsey]
- “Two Scottish Dominies Logs,” History of Education Researcher [England] 72 (Nov., 2003), 74-83 (with Stuart Hood).
- “Britain’s White Paper Turns Higher Education Away From the EU,” International Higher Education 32 (Summer, 2003), 10-12 (with Professor Halsey).
- “A College Upon a Hill: Exceptionalism & American Higher Education,” in Dale Carter (Ed.), Marks of Distinction: American Exceptionalism Revisited, Vol. 32 of The Dolphin (Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2001), 197-228 (with John Halsey).
- “Where Have All the Academies Gone?” History of Education Quarterly, 41 (sum., 2001), 264-271.
- “German-Americans: A Case Study of Cultural Assimilation,” in Magdalena Zaborowska (Ed.) Other Americans, Others Americas: The Politics and Poetics of Multiculturalism, Vol. 28 of The Dolphin (Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 1998), 62-79.
- “1960ernes USA,” [in Danish] Passage 26 (1997), 9 - 23.
- “Richie, not Fonzie: The Real ‘Happy Days,’” Anglofiles 102 (June, 1997), 7-13.
- “When Professors had Servants: Prestige, Pay, and Professionalization, 1860-1917,” History of Higher Education Annual 10 (1990), 19-30.
- “The Family, History, & the Classroom,” Journal of Family History 11 1986)
- “Creating a Socialist Scout Movement: The Woodcraft Folk, 1942-42,” History of Education [England], 13 (1984), 299-311.
- “`Time, the Subtle Thief of Youth’: Historians and Youth,” Youth and Policy, 11 (Winter, 1984-5), 49-51.
- “Coming of Age in Urban America: The Socialist Alternative, 1901-1920,” Teachers College Record,85 (Spring, 1984), 459-476.
- “From Tumult to Benign Neglect: The Strange Career of the History of American Higher Education in the 1970’s,” Review of Higher Education, III (Spring, 1980), 3-7.
- “The Historiography of a Stage of Life: Youth in Western Society,” Foundational Studies, XIII (1979), 47-58.
- “Between Piety and Expertise: Professionalization of College Faculty in the ‘Age of the University’, Pennsylvania History, XLVI (July, 1979), 245-265.
- “American University as Gatekeeper,” History of Education Quarterly 18 (Fall, 1978).
- “Localism, Denominationalism & Institutional Strategies in Urbanizing America: Three Pennsylvania Colleges, 1870-1915,” History of Education Quarterly, 17 (Fall 1977), 235-56.
- “The Re-emergence of the American College: A Multiple-Case Study, 1870 - 1920,” Liberal Education, LXII (December 1976), 507-526.
- “The Response of Four Colleges to the Rise of Intercollegiate Athletics, 1865-1915,” Journal of Sport History, 3 (Winter, 1976), 213-222.
- “The Lost World of McGuffey’s Readers: School and Society in the United States, 1860-1920,” Contemporary Education, XLVII (Spring 1976), 135-140.
- “James McCosh in Scotland,” Princeton University Library Chronicle, XXXVI (Autumn, 1974), 47-60.

“Rescuing the State Teachers College from History’s Scrapheap,” (with Prof. O’Brien), Researching New York, November, 2009.
“Almost the Oldest Profession: Academic from Socrates to Silicon Valley,” Brockport 26th Annual RA Conference, November, 2009.
“Birth, Boom, & Bust: SUNY from 1940 to 1980,” Assn of SUNY Councils & Trustees, October, 2009.
“American Universities, Professional Schools, and Liberal Education,” Beyond the Lecture Hall Conference, Univ. of Cambridge, Sept., 2009.
“‘Two Systems Separated by a Common Language’: The Dilemmas of Cultural Exchange in Anglo-American Higher Education, 1890-2005,” History of Education Society Annual Meeting, Baltimore, October, 2005.
“An American looks at the White Paper,” University of Cambridge, June 2003.
“When the Past is Not Another Country: Perils of Histotical Research in Your Own backyard (i.e., University)” American Studies Center, Aarhus Univ., Denmark, April 2003.
“Repressed Deutschum or Successful Assimilation? The Fate of German America, 1871-1942,” British Assn. of American Studies Annual Conference, Swansea, Wales, May, 2000.
“This Side of Paradise”: Class, College, & a Case of American Exceptionalism,” Danish American Studies Consortium Research Seminar: March 17, 2000.
College, Culture, & Class: Creating an American Upper Middle Class, 1865-1929,” University of Newcastle History Department Seminar, February 14, 2000.
“The Death of the Academy” at the History of Education Society Annual Meeting, Atlanta, October, 1999.
Organized and participated in “Toward Writing the History of Post-WWII Colleges and Universities,” at the History of Education Society Annual Meeting, Atlanta, October 1999.
Organized and chaired “Teaching American Studies Abroad,” American Studies Center, University of Toronto, April, 1999.

Current Projects

Serving on the Boards of the Brockport Community Museum, Emily Knapp Museum, Seymour Library, Friends of Drake Library, and Princeton Prize in Race Relations.
Oral history projects at SUNY Brockport & Princeton University.
Research: case study of the emergence of the University, Henry Fine, Albert Einstein, and American’s rise to mathematical physics leadership.

Open gallery

Bruce Leslie

Education

Areas of Specialty

Awards/Recognitions

Recent Publications

Presentations

Current Projects