Tom McCarthy

My interests are varied.  

Much of my work has explored--from different perspectives--the limitations and ironies of liberal individualism in the American experience.  In my Auto Mania project I examined the relationship between consumer behavior and the environment.  I showed how the multifaceted appeal of the automobile made it hard for twentieth-century Americans, not so much to recognize, but to address the myriad environmental impacts.

More recently, I explored in Developing the Whole Person the influence of psychologist-administrators who brought counseling psychology to post-World War II American higher education in the form of counseling centers and the broader student affairs movment.  These reformers argued that providing science-based mentoring  to regular students to foster whole-person development deserved equal importance in the university mission with classroom-based instruction.  The late-1960's student movement collided with these efforts when proponents rejected all forms of institutional paternalism in favor of student freedom and made liberal-individualism the predominant paradigm for institution-student relations.  The end-result was a de facto fusion of the student affairs and student freedom paradigms.

Some Catholic counseling psychologists also began assessing candidates for the priesthood after 1950, an initiative that illuminates a good deal about the Catholic Church, the priesthood, and the clergy sexual abuse scandal that came to light in recent years.

I am currently working on a project called Speak for Yourself, which examines how descendants of Mayflower passengers John Alden and Priscilla Mullins remembered and celebrated their Mayflower forebears.  This work is a microhistory that explores how Americans "do history."