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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 February 2017
I first read The Emergence of the American University as a graduate student nearly twenty years ago while contemplating writing a dissertation on patronage and the post-1945 university. I have consulted it innumerable times since, and I remain impressed by its ambitious scope, careful research, and elegant prose. Lawrence R. Veysey did his doctoral work at the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1950s and early 1960s and I have always wondered if his interest in the history of the university stemmed from the changes that occurred on campuses in the years after World War II. As he acknowledged in footnotes, Veysey knew about such postwar developments as the creation of semiautonomous research institutes; although he did not mention it, he surely was aware that the federal government had become a significant new patron of the postwar university. But according to Veysey, the structure of the American university, its relations of power and the ideas that animated it had been set by 1910 and did not vary significantly after that. By that time, leading universities embodied elements from each of the four intellectual strands that Veysey argued had vied for institutional dominance at the turn of the twentieth century: utilitarianism, “pure” research, liberal culture, and mental discipline. They had become, according to Veysey, institutional hodgepodges. On any American campus could be found “pockets of excitement over research, islands of devotion to culture, and segments of adherence to the aim of vocational service,” Veysey wrote, and any institution's budget might include “boathouses, landscaping, student housing, and gymnasiums as well as “book purchases and library construction.”
Rebecca S. Lowen is the co-editor of the forthcoming The United States Since 1945: Historical Interpretations (Prentice Hall, 2005). She teaches at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, Minnesota.
1 Veysey, Laurence R. The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 58 and 178. Veysey also noted that, lacking an overarching idea behind which all members of the university could unite, the institution fractured into departments and interest groups which existed in constant tension and yet functioned remarkably well as a whole. See also pp. 332–337 for this discussion. Veysey's interest in how the university, despite its diversity, functioned so smoothly reflects the early postwar interest among social scientists as well as historians in explaining the remarkable functionality of complicated or messy institutions, such as universities and democratic political systems.Google Scholar
2 Kerr too expressed appreciation for how well the university functioned, given the disparate interests it contained; see Kerr, Clark The Uses of the University (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963).Google Scholar
3 Veysey, Emergence, 346. Veysey clearly believed that ideas mattered; he argues here that they function to insulate “distinctive groups” from the rest of society.Google Scholar
4 Ibid., 351, 355.Google Scholar
5 Ibid., 348.Google Scholar
6 Ibid., 354.Google Scholar
7 Kerr, Uses of the University, 53–55; Kevles, Daniel The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (New York: Knopf, 1978), 369, 386; Kevles, “K1S2: Korea, Science and the State,” in Galison, Peter and Hevly, Bruce, eds., Big Science: The Growth of Large-Scale Research (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 314, 320.Google Scholar
8 Kevles, See Physicists, for the story of the rise to prominence of the American physics. Also significant in the rise to world prominence of American physics were the European scientists who fled fascism in the 1930s and gained positions within American institutions.Google Scholar
9 This view, stated explicitly by Kerr, has largely been accepted uncritically by most historians studying postwar science and patronage. This may be explained in part because they have focused on the few “academic entrepreneurs,” whose experiences do fit Kerr's description, and because they have ignored university administrators. This is true even of those who have explored postwar science within the institutional context of the university See, for example, Leslie, Stuart W. The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial Complex at MIT and Stanford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).Google Scholar
10 See Galison, Peter Hevly, Bruce and Lowen, Rebecca, “Controlling the Monster” as well as other essays in Galison and Hevly, eds., Big Science, for discussions of post-war large-scale research.Google Scholar
11 As quoted in Lowen, Rebecca S. Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 121.Google Scholar
12 Forman, Paul “Behind Quantum Electronics: National Security as Basis for Physical Research in the United States, 1940–1960,“ in Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 18: 149 (1987): 149–229 offers a good example of a study exploring the way in which patronage shaped the content of scientific research; Galison, Peter “Bubble Chambers and the Experimental Workplace” in Peter Achinstein and Owen Hannaway, eds., Observation, Experiment and hypothesis in Modern Physical Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 309–373, examines the relationship between scientific equipment and the pursuit of knowledge. Both Leslie, Stuart W. The Cold War and American Science and Lowen, Creating the Cold War University discuss the creation of new scientific and engineering disciplines after World War II. For discussions of the cold war and the social sciences, most of which do not directly discuss patronage, see the essays in Simpson, Christopher ed., Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences During the Cold War (New York: New Press, 1998), and those in the Fall 1995 volume of Radical History Review edited by Michael A Bernstein and Allen Hunter and titled The Cold War and Expert Knowledge: Essays on the National Security State. Google Scholar
13 Veysey used the two terms interchangeably in Emergence.Google Scholar
14 See, for example, Galison, Hevly and Lowen, “Controlling the Monster,” 59, which describes how the proposal of Stanford physicist David Locke Webster for funding from the Office of Naval Research to continue his prewar work on electrons was turned down by the Office of Naval Research because, as Webster explained to a colleague, “The…problem had no visible naval application.” Lee Kleinman, Daniel and Solovey, Mark “Hot Science/Cold War: The National Science Foundation After World War II,“ in Hunter, Bernstein and eds., The Cold War and Expert Knowledge, 110–139 seek to make the case that even the National Science Foundation, generally thought to come closest to the ideal of a government patron providing support for “research for its own sake,” embodied a cold-war agenda.Google Scholar
15 As quoted in Lowen, Creating the Cold War University, 141.Google Scholar
16 That Kerr exaggerated in his description of the put-upon university president at the beck and call of the faculty is demonstrated most dramatically by the red scare of the 1950s during which university administrators fired (or in many more cases failed to hire or promote) faculty members with the “wrong” politics. The McCarthy-era repression was much more extensive than that described by Veysey in his account of the academic freedom cases of the turn of the century. Kerr, however, ignored the red scare in Uses, focusing instead on the postwar research economy in making his claim that professors had gained substantial power over university administrators. Schrecker, Ellen No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) remains the definitive account of the red scare and academia. See also Lowen, Creating the Cold War University for a discussion of the relationship between the red scare, the search for patronage and the reshaping of academic departments. See Wang, Jessica American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999) for a discussion of the red scare and the scientific establishment.Google Scholar
17 The way in which universities use and account for patronage, and more generally, their budgeting practices, remain largely unexplored topics. For a discussion of the origins of overhead payments and their uses by leading research universities, see Lowen, Creating the Cold War University, 58–65 and 104–105. See also Gruber, Carol “The Overhead System in Government-Sponsored Academic Science; Origins and Early Development,“ Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, v. 25/2 (1995): 241–268. On salary-splitting, see Lowen, Creating the Cold War University, 104, 152–155.Google Scholar
18 See Geiger, Roger L. Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research Universities Since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), is the one effort at a comprehensive treatment of the postwar history of the American university by an historian. The challenges just enumerated account, in some measure, for this volume's shortcomings.Google Scholar
