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.