Developing the Whole Person: A Practitioner’s Tale of Counseling, College, and the American Promise

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.

Table of Contents:
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.

About the Author :
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.

Review :
“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) “Like many proud La Salle graduates, I was the beneficiary of Thomas N. McCarthy’s generosity of spirit and commitment to realizing the dignity and potential of the next generation. This is a fitting and elegant tribute, not only from a son to a father but from one generation to another. It reflects the enduring power and purpose of higher education and its crucial role in sustaining the sense of possibility and mobility that animates American society at our best.” —William J. Burns, former Deputy Secretary of State and President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (La Salle University, class of 1978) “The growth of professional counseling services at colleges and universities since the end of World War II is highly significant. The reasons for this growth are complex. Tom McCarthy traces the challenges and changes in the profession through the long and successful career of a single individual as he reacted to alterations in the society, local institutional realities, and even the scope and meaning of professional counseling. It is a tale worth the telling.” —G. Dennis O’Brien, President Emeritus, University of Rochester “Developing the Whole Person: A Practitioner’s Tale of Counseling, College, and the American Promise explores the real ways in which a philosophy guided a student affairs leader—from the beginnings of the Student Personnel Point of View through in loco parentis, from single sex education to co-education, from a view of the student as a vocational product to that of a whole person. Each of these complex themes is covered using history as the framework and then explored deeply.” —Molly A. Schaller, Associate Professor of Higher Education in the School of Education and Faculty Fellow for Mission & Identity at Saint Louis University