The Instrumental University: Education in Service of the National Agenda after World War II

by Ethan Schrum

Overview

In The Instrumental University, Ethan Schrum provides an illuminating genealogy of the educational environment in which administrators, professors, and students live and work today. After World War II, research universities in the United States underwent a profound mission change. The Instrumental University combines intellectual, institutional, and political history to reinterpret postwar American life through the changes in higher education.

Acknowledging but rejecting the prevailing conception of the Cold War university largely dedicated to supporting national security, Schrum provides a more complete and contextualized account of the American research university between 1945 and 1970. Uncovering a pervasive instrumental understanding of higher education during that era, The Instrumental University shows that universities framed their mission around solving social problems and promoting economic development as central institutions in what would soon be called the knowledge economy. In so doing, these institutions took on more capitalistic and managerial tendencies and, as a result, marginalized founding ideals, such as pursuit of knowledge in academic disciplines and freedom of individual investigators.

The technocratic turn eroded some practices that made the American university special. Yet, as Schrum suggests, the instrumental university was not yet the neoliberal university of the 1970s and onwards in which market considerations trumped all others. University of California president Clark Kerr and other innovators in higher education were driven by a progressive impulse that drew on an earlier tradition grounded in a concern for the common good and social welfare.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501736643
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	06/15/2019
Series:	Histories of American Education
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Ethan Schrum is Assistant Professor of History at Azusa Pacific University, and an Associate Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Instrumental
University and American Modernity
1. The Progressive Roots of the
Instrumental University: Public
Administration, City Planning,
and Industrial Relations
2. Clark Kerr: Leading Proponent
of the Instrumental University
3. The Urban University as Community
Service
Institution: Pennsylvania
in the Era of Gaylord P. Harnwell
4. "Instruments of Technical
Cooperation": American Universities'
Institution Building Abroad
5. A Use of the University of Michigan:
Samuel P. Hayes Jr. and Economic
Development
6. Founding the University of California
at Irvine: High Modern Social Science
and Technocratic Public Policy
Epilogue: Critics of the Instrumental
University
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

What People are Saying About This

David Hollinger

Ethan Schrum has given us by far the most informative and convincing study we now have of the history of American universities since World War II. This conscientiously documented, morally sensitive book deserves to be the center of the coming generation's debates about what universities can and should be.

Roger Geiger

Ethan Schrum addresses fundamental features of modern universities and, in that respect, this book could be the basis for a symposium. It is an important contribution to intellectual history, the history of social sciences, and the history of higher education.

Margaret O'Mara

Ethan Schrum has written a timely and necessary book, challenging many of our presumptions about higher education's postwar 'golden age' and persuasively demonstrating why these institutions must be placed at the center of modern America's political and economic history. Written with verve and researched with deep rigor, this is essential reading.

David C. Engerman

Ethan Schrum offers a sweeping, persuasive account of American universities. His book shows just how many leaders found new uses for the postwar American university—and the intellectual traditions they invoked to do so. Essential reading for historians and those who care about the state and purposes of American universities today.

Editorial Reviews

Ethan Schrum's book is an important contribution to the literature on the development of American research universities after World War II. He offers a useful corrective to the assumption that the increasing corporatization of American universities in recent decades is due solely to the rise of neoliberalism and to the imposition by constituencies beyond the campus, particularly conservative politicians and business leaders, of a narrow economically driven conception of the mission of research institutions.

The Journal of American History

A striking feature of this important chapter in the history of US higher education is how networked the leaders were: this was an upper-class boys club of policy-oriented academics. This detailed book is instructive and penetrating in examining how the current academic world came to be.

Choice

This is a fascinating, persuasive, and important book that provides a new perspective on history of the modern social sciences. It should interest anyone who wants to understand how universities got to where they are today.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

Ethan Schrum 's The Instrumental University dissects an important, understudied unit that blossomed between 1945 and 1970 – the university based 'Organized Research Unit,' more familiar by its abbreviation, 'ORU.' Schrum takes readers on a fantastic voyage to see how some influential university presidents in conjunction with leaders of major foundations and selected faculty members collaborated to incorporate this new entity as a fixture in the established academic structure still familiar today.

Society

Ethan Schrum 's The Instrumental University dissects an important, understudied unit that blossomed between 1945 and 1970 – the university based 'Organized Research Unit,' more familiar by its abbreviation, 'ORU.' Schrum takes readers on a fantastic voyage to see how some influential university presidents in conjunction with leaders of major foundations and selected faculty members collaborated to incorporate this new entity as a fixture in the established academic structure still familiar today.

Society

"Ethan Schrum has written a timely and necessary book, challenging many of our presumptions about higher education's postwar 'golden age' and persuasively demonstrating why these institutions must be placed at the center of modern America's political and economic history. Written with verve and researched with deep rigor, this is essential reading."

Margaret O'Mara

"Ethan Schrum offers a sweeping, persuasive account of American universities. His book shows just how many leaders found new uses for the postwar American university—and the intellectual traditions they invoked to do so.Essential reading for historians and those who care about the state and purposes of American universities today."

David C. Engerman

"Ethan Schrum has given us by far the most informative and convincing study we now have of the history of American universities since World War II. This conscientiously documented, morally sensitive book deserves to be the center of the coming generation's debates about what universities can and should be."

David Hollinger

"Ethan Schrum addresses fundamental features of modern universities and, in that respect, this book could be the basis for a symposium. It is an important contribution to intellectual history, the history of social sciences, and the history of higher education."

Roger Geiger