Franklin Eccher is a first-year doctoral student studying the history of American higher education, with a focus on liberal education and the experimental college movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Franklin grew up in a small town in Colorado and attended Yale College as an undergraduate, after which he spent four years in Sitka, Alaska working to build a place-based liberal arts "microcollege." Inspired by his work in Alaska, Franklin is particularly interested in the value proposition of higher education for rural and Indigenous students, and how the pursuit of higher education has variously furthered and impeded the self-determination of rural and Indigenous communities.
As an undergraduate at Yale, Franklin wrote an environmental history of fly fishing in the Mountain West and conducted a qualitative study of selective college admissions officers' efforts to boost geographic diversity on their campuses.
Advisors: Jonathan Zimmerman and Jared Farmer
B.A., Environmental Studies, Yale University (2019)
History of American education; history of American higher education; environmental history; Native American and Indigenous Studies; philosophy of education; experimental colleges; rural education
University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education - Education, Culture, and Society Program