Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education, 1894-1928

by Clyde W. Barrow

The modern university has been viewed by scholars as an oasis of academic autonomy that stands above or outside society and its political conflicts. Clyde Barrow challenges that vision with his conclusion that corporations and government have been the dominant social forces shaping the goals and structure of the American university.
    In particular, Barrow’s thesis is that a “scientific survey movement”—a broad political coalition led by business executives, engineers, private foundation staff members, and government officials—successfully transplanted many of the values and practices of corporate and bureaucratic administration to colleges and universities. As a result, Barrow argues that universities are best understood as a part of the state’s institutional structure designed to regulate academic intellectuals through a combination of market initiatives, bureaucratic procedures, and state coercion. In this manner, an ideological system has been constructed which is closely connected to the needs of the economic and political system.
 

350 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1989

Reviews

[Zach · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a historical account of the creation of the AAUP’s tenure policies as a form of class collaborationist that foreclosed a more radical affiliation between college professors and the labor movement, this is invaluable. I think it’s more flawed as an account of the attempts by capitalists to forge an ideological state apparatus around universities, mostly because for Barrow universities are basically the trustees, the administrators, the faculty, and occasionally the students. There is no mention of other university employees, some of whom were building their own labor organizations even during this era.