Looking Back: When the Spanish Flu Upended Universities, Students Paid the Price

In the fall of 1918, Edward Kidder Graham, the president of the University of North Carolina, tried to reassure anxious parents. The Spanish flu was spreading rapidly, but Graham insisted the university was doing all it could to keep students safe. Weeks later, Graham himself contracted the virus and died. His successor, Marvin Hendrix Stacy, promptly succumbed to the epidemic two months later.

Many universities endured similar chaos during the Spanish flu, as I learned from reading a chapter in a forthcoming book on higher education, “From Upheaval to Action: What Works in Changing Higher Ed,” by sociologist and Brandeis University President Arthur Levine and University of Pennsylvania administrator Scott Van Pelt. (Disclosure: Levine was the president of Teachers College, Columbia University from 1994 to 2006, during which he launched The Hechinger Institute, the precursor to The Hechinger Report.)

But what really struck me was how many colleges’ experiences resembled those of the Covid-19 era.

During the 1918 pandemic, Harvard canceled lectures with more than 50 students. Yale shut down its campus after partial measures failed to contain the spread. Many urban colleges closed temporarily. Orientations, commencements and large public gatherings were canceled or postponed. At Iowa State University, gymnasiums were converted into makeshift hospitals as cases surged. At the University of Michigan, dormitories transformed into quarantine facilities after infirmaries overflowed.

And then came a second wave — deadlier than the first.

The Spanish flu ultimately killed about 675,000 Americans at a time when the U.S. population was roughly 100 million — nearly twice the proportional death rate of Covid-19, which has claimed about 1.2 million lives in a country more than three times as large. Unlike Covid, the Spanish flu struck hardest at young adults in their 20s and 30s, the very ages colleges relied on to fill their classrooms and new faculty seats. Yet, Levine argues, higher education never managed to help that generation recover — academically, socially or psychologically.

Instead, institutions moved on.

“We essentially aged out of it,” said Levine, speaking at the American Enterprise Institute in January about higher education’s challenges. “Pretty soon the people who were home weren’t in college anymore. It’s a relatively short number of years.”

There were innovations. In what we would now call remote learning, colleges expanded correspondence courses. In 1922, Penn State became the first institution to use radio for instruction. Female enrollment grew, particularly in nursing.

But there was little evidence of repair or recovery. Students who had seen their education disrupted by both World War I and the pandemic were depleted in number and altered in outlook. They would come to be known as the lost generation: disillusioned, cynical, psychologically scarred and searching for meaning in a world that had failed to make sense.

What prevented this loss from registering as a lasting crisis was scale. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, only about 5 percent of young Americans attended college. There were far fewer colleges and universities. And higher education was not yet central to economic and social life in the way it is today. When one cohort faltered, institutions simply admitted the next. Replacement took the place of recovery.

Still, the cultural effects were visible. Writers like Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald chronicled the lingering disillusionment of a generation shaped by war and disease. The Roaring Twenties, Levine argues, were less a sign of healing than a counterreaction that would be followed, a decade later, by the Great Depression.

Levine doesn’t romanticize the past. “Everything I’ve read makes it sound like the Spanish flu combined with World War I may have been a harder slog,” he said in an interview. “So many lives were lost — not only students but faculty and staff. Mental health resources were primitive.”

The parallels to the present are unsettling, but the differences may matter even more. Today, well over 60 percent of young adults attend college immediately or shortly after high school. Higher education has become a mass institution, deeply intertwined with economic mobility and social identity. And Covid did not just disrupt schooling; it imposed prolonged social isolation at a formative stage of development for teens and young adults. Levine notes that it is impossible to disentangle the effects of the pandemic from the rise of smartphones and social media, which were already reshaping how young people relate to one another.

Enrollment declines following Covid echo those of the Spanish flu era. But replacement may no longer be a viable strategy. When higher education serves a small elite, institutions can absorb loss quietly. When it serves a majority, the consequences of disruption are broader, more visible, and harder to outrun.

The lesson of the Spanish flu is not that young people inevitably bounce back. It is that institutions endured by waiting. A century ago, that carried limited cost. Today, with a far larger and more psychologically vulnerable young adult population, the price may be far higher.

This story about how the Spanish flu affected universities was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.