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.
"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