Whence came academic capitalism? Not from the neoliberal turn of the 1970s, argues Ethan Schrum in this meticulously researched study. Nor did Cold War imperatives and funding structures produce the entrepreneurial, intensely practical bent of today's universities. Instead, Schrum traces this orientation back to the core assumptions of a “technocratic progressivism” that reshaped American politics from the 1910s to the 1930s and gained additional legitimacy from the World War II-era mobilization of knowledge and expertise. He shows that academic administrators and prominent researchers, operating in a receptive postwar climate, developed a new pattern in which leading universities addressed immediate social problems by providing useful knowledge and administrative expertise to outside patrons. The “instrumental university” of Schrum's title undertook large-scale investigations at the behest of various funders, often through organized research units that operated largely independently of the established departments. The instrumental university ideal, famously expressed in Clark Kerr's 1963 book The Uses of the University, spread far and wide in postwar American academia.
Schrum unfolds his argument through a series of interlinked case studies. He focuses especially on the institutional histories of the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Michigan, and the University of California—especially its Irvine campus, opened in 1965, which for Schrum epitomized the “high modern” belief that experts could effectively manage modern societies. The book shows that a host of key figures, including university presidents such as the University of California's Kerr and Penn's Gaylord Harnwell, redefined the long-standing ideal of social service to refer to the direct, immediate provision of assistance by interdisciplinary teams of university-based researchers, rather than the training of educated citizens and leaders by individual faculty members through their teaching and disciplinary inquiries. In Schrum's cogent summary, after World War II, “the land-grant model extended its influence beyond land-grant institutions to elite universities”—although the focus was now on applied social science, not agriculture—“while the German research university model waned in influence” (p. 216). The new instrumental university featured “procedural rationality, organized research, and project-based funding by external patrons” (p. 2).
As Schrum narrates this story, he excavates the histories of industrial relations, city planning, public administration, development economics, organization theory, systems theory, and other fields related to the ideal of societal management, as well as the broader behavioral science orientation that figured so centrally in postwar intellectual life. He also illuminates the origins of concepts such as the “knowledge economy” and details the growing dominance of what he calls “macrothought”: a tendency to view society in terms of large, aggregate categories rather than concrete individuals. And he connects academic developments to changes in American foreign policy, especially in an eye-opening chapter that explores how institutions such as Penn and USC collaborated with Point Four Program administrators to extend their influence around the world through ventures in such developing countries as Pakistan. More generally, Schrum deepens the recent tendency among historians of American higher education to connect internal debates over the purpose and structure of the university to the initiatives of governmental bodies, especially in a postwar milieu defined by anticommunism, the military-industrial complex, an intense focus on economic growth, and ambitious expectations of the global uptake of American values and institutions.
Like all architects of major interpretive revisions, Schrum sometimes presses his case too strongly. Even the evidence in the book itself complicates a number of his overarching points. For example, Schrum sees the spreading influence of an “American modernity vision” behind a broad array of postwar practices and organizations. He defines this vision as the spurious and self-serving fantasy that experts could rationally manage the world through a comprehensive, knowledge-based regime of social engineering. As Schrum notes on many occasions, however, the specific practices and institutions that he explores also reflected much more prosaic dynamics, including competition between elite universities, the search to attract federal dollars, and even personal connections. Any given research project could appeal to budget-conscious administrators as well as true believers in a rationalistic mode of social control. The book's portrait of the modernist sensibility also seems overly homogeneous. It might have been fruitful to explore the tensions between various styles of postwar liberalism and progressivism, given that their adherents often shared a technocratic belief in the capacity of experts to guide social development but advocated divergent economic visions, in ways that surely affected patterns of institutionalization in the universities. Many of the figures who envisaged “a forward march of scientific rationality that would cause unprecedented human flourishing” (p. 91) were nevertheless deeply concerned to tamp down the expectation, both at home and abroad, that central governments would undertake systematic economic planning.
Some historians of education might also question Schrum's sharp differentiation of the instrumental university model from the “classical American research university” (p. 104) that preceded it. Up to World War II, he contends, the prevailing ideal in elite institutions was that professors, freed from all social and political pressures, would follow individual curiosity and disciplinary advances as their sole guides. They would explore issues of “truth and the good life” (p. 222) while “forming students toward a vision of human personhood” (p. 192). But with the instrumental university, Schrum suggests, came a decisive shift from fundamental questions of “what is” and “why” to practical considerations of “how to” (p. 195). This before-and-after picture seems too tidy on both sides to fit the messy realities of twentieth-century higher education. The broad shift that Schrum analyzes clearly took place, but a welter of competing impulses and interests also shaped the universities at every point along the way. Moreover, many of the figures that he discusses expected their universities to undertake multiple activities at once, providing direct forms of service while also engaging in more conventional academic pursuits. And there were other extant conceptions of the university throughout the twentieth century that identified professors as neither the classical ideal's “nonpolitical” (p. 162) or “disinterested” (p. 200) ivory-tower dwellers nor the administrative specialists of the instrumental model.
Beyond such interpretive questions, Schrum might have explored a number of other historical connections as well. For example, the rise of the instrumental university clearly intersected with President Lyndon Johnson's mobilization of expertise under the Great Society rubric. But these are all minor concerns—and promising avenues for future research. There can be no doubt that the instrumental university model Schrum outlines figured centrally in postwar academic and public life, with powerful effects that still reverberate today. This is an invaluable, agenda-setting book for anyone concerned with the state of higher education, past or present.
