The conclusion of World War II created anxiety about how to accommodate the return of millions of veterans and spurred the passage of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944--the GI Bill--that would ultimately send two million people to college. But in 1946, the second year of Truman's Presidency, there was an even larger political question. The world was turning to the United States for leadership to build and rebuild democratic societies. On July 13, 1946, Harry Truman appointed the President's Commission on Higher Education to consider how colleges and universities might assist the nation in navigating its future. The thrust of the commission's ensuing six-volume report was that America's colleges and universities should play a key role in shaping the postwar global order. The report called for generously expanding schools that already existed and the creation of a national web of community colleges that would be free of charge for "all youth who can profit from such education." The historical circumstances that precipitated the spectacular growth of US higher education in the late twentieth century are long past, but social scientists and academic planners have yet to fully recognize just how fundamentally the relationship between colleges and universities, government, and the American people has changed since then. In this article, the author explains how that came to be, and what it means for academic politics in the present moment.