Ivy and Industry
Business and the Making of the American University, 1880–1980
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- $39.99
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- $39.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Capitalism has always been one of America's signature attributes; its principles, rules and rhetoric are an essential part of the country's most vital institutions, including academia. Newfield's dense history shows that, beginning in the late 19th century with the rise of the university as an autonomous institution, the languages of the market and of the university have overlapped--to varying degrees of success and damage. That a force as powerful as America's market economy should have influenced the structure of the research university seems as inevitable as it is obvious; and so, though Newfield's accounting of this process is detailed and well researched, it is hardly groundbreaking. Newfield lays a foundation for exploring the technical relationship between research universities and the corporate entities whose financial support, governing models and culture have influenced them, but soon focuses in on his real target: the professional middle class. Research universities have served the needs of commerce by producing an educated managerial class, but as Newfield notes,"humanism and management are tied together in conflict." A professor of English by trade, Newfield offers a concise and thoughtful consideration of literary criticism's radical response to the industrial world, insightfully concluding that the liberal arts and business culture are also inextricably linked. The university, like the industry to which it is faithfully wed, has played a vital role in shaping this nation, and Newfield, by dissecting that relationship, has made a valuable contribution to the understanding of our culture.
