Using the professional life of psychologist-educator Thomas N. McCarthy as a touchstone, Developing the Whole Person: A Practitioner’s Tale of Counseling, College, and the American Promise explores the achievements and difficulties of postwar counseling psychologists and psychologist-administrators in American higher education. They advanced a whole person development model for student life inside and outside the classroom, despite skepticism from faculty and other administrators and the emergence of a potent student freedom model in the late 1960s that insisted students were adults. These two models have persisted in tension with one another ever since.
Tom McCarthy is a professor in the History Department at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, where he teaches twentieth-century United States and world history. He holds a PhD in history from Yale University and an MBA from Columbia University. He was a Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities. He is the author of Auto Mania: Cars, Consumers, and the Environment (2007). Developing the Whole Person is based on his father's life and legacy.
List of Figures – Acknowledgements – Introduction – Poverty, Education, and Opportunity – Developing the Whole Person – A College and a Community – Counseling and Community – Competence – Psychologists and the Church – The College and the War – Redefining Community – A Place for Women – We’ll Know It When We See It – Students for Individual Rights – The Search – Epilogue – Index.
“A son examines his father’s impact on twentieth-century higher education and helps the rest of us understand—and perhaps make peace—with the person we became. Tom McCarthy’s book is a profoundly thought-provoking reflection on the people, events, and institutions that shaped us.”—Tom Curley, former President of the Associated Press (La Salle University, class of 1970)