| The purpose of The Origin of Statewide Higher Education Coordination in South Carolina, 1945-1967: A Documentary History, is to illuminate, preserve, and transmit the origin of statewide higher education coordination in South Carolina through an examination of legislative committee reports, acts, and contracted professional studies produced between 1945 and 1967, when the South Carolina Commission on Higher Education was created. As a documentary history, each higher education's full or truncated text, or its summary chapter, is replicated in Volume II, while Volume I provides a historical narrative of the time period.;A number of acts, resolutions, reports, and studies are contained in the study, nineteen being directly related to higher education. On three occasions, between 1946 and 1951, South Carolina's legislature unsuccessfully attempted to create a higher education governing board, a system recommended by South Carolina's first privately contracted higher education study, Public Higher Education in South Carolina (1946). South Carolina's second contracted statewide higher education study, Higher Education in South Carolina, (1962) compelled the General Assembly to pass Act. No. 811 of 1962, enabling South Carolina's first statewide higher education organization, the State Advisory Commission on Higher Education (SAC).;By 1966 the unregulated expansion of four and two-year postsecondary institutions, and other cultural and federal influences, forced South Carolina's General Assembly to repeal Act. No. 811 of 1962, abolishing the SAC, and enabling the South Carolina Commission on Higher Education (CHE), established through Act. No. 194, on April 27, 1967. Though initially a weak coordinating commission, the CHE carried more authority among institutions than did the SAC, an advisory body, and provided the legislature with a platform upon which it could increasingly regulate postsecondary education.;In the terminology of George Counts, the period between 1945 and 1967 could be considered a "cultural watershed" for higher education in South Carolina. |
