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.

Tom McCarthy is a professor in the History Department at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, where he teaches twentieth-century United States and world history. He holds a PhD in history from Yale University and an MBA from Columbia University. He was a Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities. He is the author of Auto Mania: Cars, Consumers, and the Environment (2007). Developing the Whole Person is based on his father's life and legacy.