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.

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9781501736643

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Reviews

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, Yale University 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, University of California, Berkeley 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, The Pennsylvania State University, and author of <I>The History of American Higher Education</I>

Author Information

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.

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