The Capitalist University: The Transformations of Higher Education in the United States since 1945

by Henry Heller

Overview

Can the ivory tower rise above capitalism? Or are the humanities and social sciences merely handmaids to the American imperial order? The Capitalist University surveys the history of higher education in the United States over the last century, revealing how campuses and classrooms have become battlegrounds in the struggle between liberatory knowledge and commodified learning.

Henry Heller takes readers from the ideological apparatus of the early Cold War, through the revolts of the 1960s and on to the contemporary malaise of postmodernism, neoliberalism and the so-called 'knowledge economy' of academic capitalism. He reveals how American educational institutions have been forced to decide between teaching students to question the dominant order and helping to perpetuate it. The Capitalist University presents a comprehensive overview of a topic which affects millions of students in America and increasingly, across the globe.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781783719761
Publisher:	Pluto Press
Publication date:	10/20/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Henry Heller is a Professor of History at the University of Manitoba, Canada. He is the author of The Capitalist University (Pluto, 2016), The Birth of Capitalism: A 21st Century Perspective (Pluto, 2011) The Cold War and the New Imperialism: A Global History, 1945-2005 (Monthly Review Press, 2006) and The Bourgeois Revolution in France (Berghahn, 2006).

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Birth of the Corporate University

In the first part of the twentieth century the influence of big business and private foundations over American universities steadily increased. These trends were already strong following World War I but became overwhelming during World War II and the Cold War. Businessmen and corporate lawyers came to dominate university governing bodies while private foundations acquired extraordinary influence over university-based research and the organization of the disciplines. In a more belated fashion the influence of government over universities expanded during World War II and the Cold War. Much university research was harnessed to winning the hot and cold wars while contacts between top academics and administrators and the state deepened. Following the end of World War II the government at both the federal and state level financed a massive expansion of university enrollments, infrastructure, and research.

Universities became an element in what has been called the ideological or non-coercive apparatus of the state. They came more closely under state control and their teachings helped to tie students more closely to the existing political and social order. At the same time the growth in the size and functions of universities made them more and more resemble private corporations even though many were public institutions. With their president and trustees at the top, provosts and deans, chairs of departments, ordinary faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, and non-academic staff, universities had a corporate chain-of-command and division of labor. The façade of the ivory tower, the disinterested pursuit of learning and the public good were nonetheless insisted upon even as the outside influence increased enormously. The fig leaf of university autonomy was maintained because it kept the government at a certain distance while serving the interests of private business overall, and fed the illusions of faculty about their intellectual independence. As the number of administrators grew the internal operations of universities multiplied and assumed a hierarchical character that reduced what there was of faculty internal self-government. The specialization of learning into departments largely separated from one another rewarded research and publication at the expense of teaching and the acquisition of a global view of knowledge. Marxism, which had acquired a certain limited influence during the Depression and World War II, was more or less proscribed during the Cold War. Communists or their sympathizers were silenced or dismissed.

Prior to World War II the middle class sent their children to colleges and universities in growing numbers. Between 1919 and 1941 enrollment quintupled from 250,000 to 1.3 million. Part of a process of class reproduction, the offspring of the middle class went to college to find prospective mates and make social contacts. In the course of acquiring higher learning students received a discipline which enabled them to manage and control those socially beneath them. As such they acquired the education necessary to become entrepreneurs, engineers, physicians, lawyers, managers, administrators, and educators. The number of institutions of higher learning in the United States was vast, numbering around 2,000 in the first part of the twentieth century, of which some were private and others controlled by state governments. Of the private colleges there were some of high quality like Williams, Wesleyan, Carleton, Oberlin, and Pomona, and a great number which were ordinary or mediocre. A few private schools with large endowments were among the elite, like Ivy League Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, which devoted themselves to educating the upper reaches of a ruling class that was increasingly recruited nationally. Indeed, attendance at these schools became a marker of upper class status — and still is. It was widely understood that upward mobility went with acquisition of a university degree and attendance at a prestigious school was particularly desirable.

Other colleges and universities that were mainly public institutions had clienteles composed of the sons and daughters of the regional business and professional elites. A few public institutions like Berkeley and Michigan were distinguished. Most of the top private and public schools at the beginning of the century have retained their dominant role to this day, having the largest endowments and attracting the most distinguished faculty and researchers. The upper tier of colleges and universities set the tone of learning and scholarship for less distinguished establishments. Universities benefited from their alma mater role, attracting the largesse of local and national elites based on loyalties formed through their networks of fraternities, team sports, and alumni organizations. The structure of the emerging American system of colleges and universities essentially mirrored that of the American ruling class. It constituted a mechanism for reproducing that class across the country.

Once upon a time the clergy and local politicians had had an important say in how institutions of higher learning, both private and public, were governed. But by the 1930s religious and local political influence was waning if not completely gone, and governing bodies, especially in elite institutions, were increasingly dominated by the business class and corporate lawyers who loomed over what was by now the phase of monopoly capitalism. Through their control of governance and the flow of philanthropic cash, from 1880 to 1940 large corporations assumed indirect control over the major research and educational institutions and harnessed them to meet their needs. This was simply a reflection of the overwhelmingly dominant position that business and private corporations had assumed in American life. The universities' connection with business needs to be underlined as it was extremely close and ongoing. The muckraking author and socialist Upton Sinclair, for example, described Columbia University, which he had attended, as "the political university of the House of Morgan, which sets the standard for the higher education in America." Stanford and the University of Chicago, two of the top 20 American universities, were created directly out of the fortunes of the Stanford and Rockefeller families. Universities nonetheless continued to enjoy a certain internal autonomy and there was lip service given to the pursuit of the public good and academic freedom. Such freedom was sharply qualified with respect to cases of sexual or political deviance.

Aside from training the managerial and professional class, a growing body of research activity in the social sciences, sciences, engineering, and agriculture was carried on based on grants from private businesses, foundations, and government. Research and graduate training at this point were confined to no more than 20 institutions in the Ivy League and major state universities like Illinois, Michigan, and Berkeley. The role of big business over the organization and research activities of American universities was extraordinary. Research in the humanities and social sciences was largely made possible as a result of the funding of private foundations. As a result, the influence of business over universities loomed even larger. Somewhat overshadowed by the greater role of government from World War II onward, the neoliberal period has seen a revival and even deepening of that influence.

The Role of the Foundations

Concerned by industrial and racial unrest at home and by the repercussions of the Russian Revolution abroad, foundations controlled by big business took the lead during the 1920s in creating an academic infrastructure to study what were considered obstacles in the way of the unimpeded global expansion of American capitalism. The Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie philanthropies proved most important, but they were seconded by the Brookings Institution, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Phelps-Stokes Fund, the Julius Rosenwald Fund, the Russell Sage Foundation, and others. These foundations had been created out of the fortunes accumulated by some of the great American capitalists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They helped shape the curriculums of undergraduate and graduate education, insisting on efficiency and the avoidance of duplication in programs. Part of the capital of these foundations was invested in the development of a new infrastructure based in the universities for the production and dissemination of social science knowledge. The funds made available were not aimed at making the social sciences more scientific for their own sake but rather at promoting social stability and developing more effective means of social control. In other words, the foundations were used by big business to finance the production of the social and technical knowledge necessary to their operations at home and abroad. As the skilled expertise needed to produce such knowledge was located in the universities the foundations funneled this money to a select number of universities designated as centers of excellence — Chicago, Columbia, Yale, Harvard, Chapel Hill, Stanford, Berkeley, and Pennsylvania. In this way they underwrote the vast majority of all social science research in the inter-war period. The Rockefeller Foundation, to take a key example, was created in 1913 to counter the hue and cry against the Rockefeller family's monopoly control of the oil industry and its brutal policies toward labor. In its initial manifesto the Foundation claimed to be interested in nothing less than the promotion of the welfare of the whole of humanity. Its stated mission was to develop solutions to the problems of sickness, poverty, underdevelopment, and ignorance in America and in the rest of the world. The

Rockefeller philanthropies alone poured some 50 million dollars into the advancement of the social sciences during the 1920s and '30s. Indeed, reflecting their worldwide interests, the Rockefeller Foundation and the other foundations were notably internationalist in a period when U.S. public opinion had generally retreated into isolationism following World War I. More significant than the funds allocated to specific projects was the new institutional framework created to support future research. Most important to the humanities and social sciences were the American Council of Learned Societies, founded in 1919 and heavily subsidized by the Rockefeller Foundation and other great foundations, and the Social Science Research Council (created in 1923), likewise a largely Rockefeller-inspired body. Through these institutions business was in a position to shape the kinds of knowledge produced by research in American institutions of higher learning. That these research bodies, which in other countries were state-sponsored, were the creation of private enterprise underlines the extraordinary influence of business over American society. The scholars appointed to the boards of these foundations and its funding committees were those who comfortably fit into the parameters of the existing political and ideological system. It was they who were in a position to determine which kinds of knowledge were acceptable and which were not. Academic careers at the highest level were made or unmade by these determinations. Setting up these foundations through which control could be exercised over research was a remarkably cheap way of buying the vast brain power of the United States.

The Professors

In elite private institutions like Harvard and Princeton faculty enjoyed limited autonomy based on tenure. Paid employees, academics were nevertheless able to appoint their own colleagues and had extensive say in establishing their conditions of work. In early twentieth-century America a professor occupied a middle position between a small businessman and a wholly dependent proletarian. This afforded professors some independence from the president and managers of the university. But autonomy was not extended, or not for very long, to free thinkers, socialists, communists, or those whose sexual behavior was morally questionable. Autonomy was yet more restricted in public institutions as their budgets came from state legislatures, and such universities remained under close scrutiny often from narrow-minded politicians. During the nineteenth century there had already been bitter conflicts over academic freedom. Prior to the Civil War, for instance, the question of slavery was a central political issue leading to the dismissal of faculty at various colleges and universities for taking one side or the other. The matter of religion proved especially controversial as skepticism toward religious teaching aroused the ire of clergy and local public opinion. The teaching of Darwinism in the latter half of the century was especially fraught.

The term academic freedom or teaching freedom (Lehrfreiheit) came into use toward the end of the century as part of the growing influence of German higher educational practices. Academic freedom was both a genuine demand for the right to pursue critical inquiry free of external pressure and a self-serving attempt to gain leverage over those who controlled academic employment. Freedom to teach had become an increasingly serious issue in the face of growing pressure to control the teaching of professors stemming from churches and local bigwigs but especially from big business. The teaching of economics proved notably controversial, especially the professing or espousal of socialism, which a few brave academics ventured. But the issue of racism also could arouse passion and led to the dismissal of faculty who challenged discrimination in the southern states. American higher education overall was plagued with insularity, a sense of American exceptionalism, and a general suspicion of foreign ideas. These were abiding problems that would not really be overcome until the 1960s.

Such conflicts as well as a growing sense of professionalism played a part in the creation of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and its issuance in 1915 of a Declaration of Principles of Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure. In its founding statement the AAUP defended academic freedom, especially underlining the threat from the tyranny of public opinion. It justified freedom of research and teaching as necessary to society as a whole rather than as the pursuit of an individual or institutional good. On the other hand, it cautioned against individual faculty speaking out, especially in public on issues beyond their competence. Moreover, in response to concerns expressed by prospective members worried about their middle-class status, it repeatedly affirmed that it was a professional organization and not a labor union. It is a commonplace that such anti-union feelings were prevalent among much of the American lower middle class including professors. The latter were fearful of proletarianization as well as committed to preserving their tenure, and such sentiments constituted a persistent barrier to unionization.

Such attitudes inevitably shaped the intellectual presuppositions among many if not all American academics interested in the humanities and social sciences who adopted an apolitical, neutral, objective stance in the pursuit of knowledge. A position of value-free neutrality or objectivity is useful as a method but philosophically can never be thought of as entirely pure nor considered the motive or goal of research. Such an approach did help to produce positive knowledge but was often defended with tell-tale vehemence. This reflected the denial of the fact that the academics' middle posture or position of objectivity in a class-divided society was itself an ideological position and, therefore, intellectually untenable. More often than not, what was being denied was the fact that the roots of this stance of intellectual objectivity lay in attempts to retain a middle-class status. Semi-autonomous employees like professors had little or no control over either investment or resource allocation, or over the physical means of production. However, even though such employees worked indirectly for the self-expansion of capital and even though they had lost the legal status of being self-employed, they can still be viewed as having occupied residual islands of petty-bourgeois relations of production within the capitalist mode of production. They ardently defended this vestigial autonomy by claiming an intellectually independent position. In their immediate work environment, they maintained the work process of the independent artisan while still being employed by capital as wage laborers. They controlled how they accomplished their work and had at least some control over what they produced. They enjoyed relatively high status in the eyes of the public, albeit commanding low salaries. In any case most professors made a point of keeping their noses clean by operating within the norms of so-called value-free knowledge. They were generally recruited from the lower middle class and for the most part they regarded their betters with deference and respect. In the final analysis, professors were indirectly intellectual retainers or subordinates of the capitalist class who were employed by universities to do intellectual work.

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Copyright © 2016 Henry Heller.
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Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction
1. The Birth of the Corporate University
2. The Humanities and Social Sciences in The Cold War (1945-60)
3. The Sixties
4. The Retreat from History (1980-2008)
5. The Neoliberal University
Notes
Bibliography
Index