Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980

by Christopher Newfield

Overview

Emphasizing how profoundly the American research university has been shaped by business and the humanities alike, Ivy and Industry is a vital contribution to debates about the corporatization of higher education in the United States. Christopher Newfield traces major trends in the intellectual and institutional history of the research university from 1880 to 1980. He pays particular attention to the connections between the changing forms and demands of American business and the cultivation of a university-trained middle class. He contends that by imbuing its staff and students with seemingly opposed ideas—of self-development on the one hand and of an economic system existing prior to and inviolate of their own activity on the other—the university has created a deeply conflicted middle class.

Newfield views management as neither inherently good nor bad, but rather as a challenge to and tool for negotiating modern life. In Ivy and Industry he integrates business and managerial philosophies from Taylorism through Tom Peters’s “culture of excellence” with the speeches and writings of leading university administrators and federal and state education and science policies. He discusses the financial dependence on industry and government that was established in the university’s early years and the equal influence of liberal arts traditions on faculty and administrators. He describes the arrival of a managerial ethos on campus well before World War II, showing how managerial strategies shaped even fields seemingly isolated from commerce, like literary studies. Demonstrating that business and the humanities have each had a far stronger impact on higher education in the United States than is commonly thought, Ivy and Industry is the dramatic story of how universities have approached their dual mission of expanding the mind of the individual while stimulating economic growth.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822385202
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	01/21/2004
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	297
File size:	393 KB

About the Author

Christopher Newfield is professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in America and coeditor of Mapping Multiculturalism and After Political Correctness: The Humanities and Society in the 1990s.

Table of Contents

Part I. The Two Missions

1. Introduction 3

2. A Permanent Dependence 15

3. The Humanist Outcry 41

Part II. The Managerial Condition

4. The Rise of University Management 67

5. Babbitry and Meritocracy 91

6. Managerial Protection and Scientific Success 115

7. Grey Flannel Radicals 133

Part III. The Market Revival

8. The Industry-Science Alliance 167

9. Corporate Pleasure and Business Humanism 195

10. Epilogue: The Second Story 215

Notes 229

Acknowledgments 277

Index 279

Editorial Reviews

In this carefully researched study about the commercialization of the American university, Newfield (Mapping Multiculturalism) examines the rise of managerial culture in the university as well as the university's impact on modern society and the relationship among its science, humanities, and social science sectors. Maintaining that the 20th-century humanist is first and foremost an organization person, Newfield examines how institutional and social forces affect individual experience and demonstrates that humanistic tendencies contain both managerial and antimanagerial elements. His key argument is that corporate America and academic America have had a complicated but mutually influential relationship since the 19th century and that their powerful impact on each other is rarely acknowledged. This provocative argument certainly gives educators and researchers much to ponder. Public libraries holding Sheila Slaughter and Larry L. Leslie's Academic Capitalism, Industrializing Knowledge, edited by Lewis M. Branscomb and others, or Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class would do well to include this timely and clear discussion about a debatable topic.-Leroy Hommerding, Fort Myers Beach P.L. Dist., FL Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Christopher Newfield’s application of the management model and metaphor to the academic scene leads him into what is by far the freshest and most nuanced argument on the corporatization of the university that I can think of.”—Bruce Robbins, author of Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture


“In this compellingly argued book, Christopher Newfield puts current discussions of the corporatization of higher education in a completely new and historically informed light. As Newfield shows, the marriage of ivy and industry is both older and more complex than current critiques of the university have suggested.”—Gerald Graff, author of Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind


“Ivy and Industry makes a seminal contribution to the mounting debate over the role of marketplace values in higher education. In elegant and nuanced prose, Christopher Newfield argues persuasively that for more than a century the American university has both spoken truth to, and been the handmaiden of, power. Those committed to a revitalized liberal education have found their champion.”—David L. Kirp, author of Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education

From the Publisher