Review of *The Instrumental University*

While the history of American higher education after World War II has received a great deal of scholarly attention, Ethan Schrum’s book, The Instrumental University, organized around well-crafted case studies from three elite public and private research institutions—the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of California (specifically, the Berkeley and Irvine campuses)—makes several important contributions. This review highlights two: its examination of the “applications” of American social-science research, both nationally and internationally, under the influence of external financial patrons, and close its analysis of the lofty technocratic aspirations that drove the “instrumentalization” of elite American universities at mid-century.

First and foremost, Schrum’s wonderfully well-written volume adds to recent works by Jamie Cohen-Cole, Andrew Jewett, Christopher Loss, Mark Solovey, and others who have linked the institutional history of the American research university with the broader intellectual history of social science, especially behavioral science, during the postwar era. With a sustained focus on four key fields—industrial relations, city planning, administration (both public administration and business administration), and economic development (or development economics)—Schrum connects the early managerial optimism of Progressive Era reformers, New Deal state-builders, and WWII military-industrialists to a postwar “national agenda” of economic growth via scientific rationalization. Even as he acknowledges that each of the fields he follows emerged in some form during the late nineteenth century—and some would argue still earlier—he draws his reader into the astonishing over-confidence of mid-century university managers and “high modern” social scientists who persuaded both private foundations and public agencies that mathematical models and related methodological innovations could save the world.

And they literally meant the world. More than most other historians of higher education, Schrum deftly situates the postwar American research university in an international context. He devotes two chapters to overseas projects, with a special emphasis on South Asia—specifically, Pakistan (a valuable complement to others works by David Engermann on U.S. scholars and the Soviet Union, Zachary Lockman on area-studies programs in the Middle East, Benjamin Zulueta on academic relations with East Asia, and Ricardo Salvatore on U.S. scholars in South America during an earlier period). Part of an ongoing critique of postwar modernization theory, Schrum’s work builds on works by Nis Gilman, Michael Latham, and others who have documented the self-assurance of American scholars who believed their liberal (market) principles would bring peace and prosperity to everyone—everywhere. Schrum’s contribution is to show how elite American universities looked for ways not only to experiment with ideas abroad but also, with federal aid, to make a profit in the process. The result was an increasing dependence on federal aid to support universities’ base budgets. As in his domestically focused chapters, Schrum’s attention falls largely on inter-institutional conflict as university leaders struggled to satisfy patrons who sought quick results in the implementation of social-science interventions initially designed for very different contexts. While the voices of foreign partners take a back seat to squabbles among U.S. power-brokers, and while Schrum declines to label his protagonists academic imperialists, his implicit message is that, on balance, a “national agenda” in the hands of academic modernizers assisted U.S. universities more than it advanced the cause of international development.

Which brings me to his second important contribution. Schrum takes readers deep inside the seemingly malignant research culture that drove the steady instrumentalization of knowledge in the postwar university. He follows a truly amazing number of new Organized Research Units, or ORUs, including the IIR (Institute of Industrial Relations) at UC-Berkeley, the ISR (Institute for Social Research) at the University of Michigan, and the IUS, IPBA, UITS, and UCSC (Institute for Urban Studies, Institute of Public and Business Administration, University-Industry Technical Services, and University City Science Center) at the University of Pennsylvania (not to mention dozens more). Despite this alphabet soup, the larger point is crucial: the postwar university was gradually transformed by contract-based, service-oriented, non-departmental, applied research entities that were divorced from teaching and directly beholden to outside funders who set their intellectual agendas. In many cases—as Roger Geiger, Sarah Bridger, Daniel Kleinman, Philip Mirowski, Kelly Moore, William Rohe, Charles Vest, and others have also documented—these new entities dwarfed traditional academic units in budget and personnel, and even without formal governance roles, they bent their host institutions to their will. Contemporary theorists who held that disciplinary structures were static failed to see the profound reorganization of the knowledge economy that was happening right under their noses as “pure” research gave way to “practical” applications to serve any client able to pay.

Perhaps most notably, this change was neither undetected nor unwanted by academics themselves. On the contrary, American scholars after the war—and indeed since the Progressive Era and New Deal—actively embraced these new institutional forms as the best way to make the university more accountable to an ostensibly “democratic” polity and its demands. Others, such as Rebecca Lowen, Allan Needell, and Margaret O’Mara have documented similar changes. The problem, as Schrum reveals, was that “instrumental” universities came to prioritize the interests of a market-oriented state over the more critical inquiries that ideals of academic freedom were meant to protect. It was an old dilemma, but it’s one that Schrum believes took its current form in the rise of new behavioral sciences and their complicity with (arguably undemocratic) American state power and social control during the postwar era—a relationship reinforced by the G.I. Bill and, later, the Higher Education Act of 1965. Of course, today’s unanswered question is whether universities that find themselves starved for cash should attempt to extract themselves from this entanglement with federal patronage or whether such a move would place them in an even more precarious situation—directed into the open arms of corporate managers or driven to raise funds through ever-larger tuition hikes (subsidized by guaranteed federal loans held by private banks). As student debt rockets toward $2 trillion, can these American universities afford to become less “instrumental”?

This question brings me to Schrum’s narrative structure. As he spins a tale of the modern university’s ascent (or is it a descent?) and the ways in which academics embraced this process, he suggests that “instrumentalism” became so utterly triumphant as to be almost hegemonic, and he seems worried that any reference to critical views might spoil this developmental thread. He therefore saves most of his naysayers for his epilogue. The result is a book that misses some key opportunities for dramatic tension. Had the narrative introduced critics throughout, it might have made this era’s transformation of the American university an epic struggle for intellectual control. One could imagine a point-counterpoint approach in which each chapter might have featured a famous antagonist intent on piercing the ideological underbelly of Schrum’s instrumental beast. Perhaps his chapter on the University of Michigan could have noted that, three years before the foundation of the Center for Research on Economic Development in 1960, a young Tom Hayden arrived on campus, moved into a dorm with 1,300 other students, and chafed at the bureaucratiz-ation of the state’s educational flagship. Everywhere he looked, Hayden saw mid-level managers who cared more about tuition revenue than undergraduate learning. The irony, of course, was that Hayden and his classmates imbibed the belief that American universities should become more, not less, involved with “applied social policy.” As he and his fellow Students for a Democratic Society asserted, “They must import major public issues into the curriculum”—not least civil rights and nuclear non-proliferation. But instead of serving a national agenda that he considered rotten at its core, Hayden called in the “Port Huron Statement” (1962) for a radicalization of universities that would “consciously build a base for their assault upon the loci of power.” Here was application as activism. The instrumentalizers may have overstated their political disinterestedness, but for some of them, the next-generation ideological fissures that characterized what Daniel Rodgers dubbed the “age of fracture” spurred a sense of nostalgia for a mid-century golden age in American higher education.

Indeed, one can imagine a chapter in which plans to make the University of California-Irvine a center of social-scientific technocracy in the mid-1960s clashed with the contemporary arrival of Frankfurt School thinker Herbert Marcuse at the University of California-San Diego in 1965 (a year after his publication of his landmark One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society). A contest of worldviews between Marcuse’s critical theory and UC-Irvine’s planned Public Policy Research Organization, with its excited celebration of systems analysis, statistical modeling, and “scientific administration”—between the PPRO’s conceit of positivist value-neutrality on the one hand and Marcuse’s blistering critiques of late-capitalist dehumanization on the other—could have made for a truly revelatory battle of intellectual titans. Along the same lines, one is struck by the lost opportunity to pair Clark Kerr’s prominence at UC-Berkeley in the 1950s and 1960s with the coterminous presence of Laurence Veysey on campus, then at work on his Emergence of the American University (1965). Veysey’s masterpiece, while focused on the period from 1840 to 1940, was an impassioned jeremiad on the waywardness of American higher education during his own time. (Chapters titled “Benchmarks of an Advancing Scientism” and “A Minority of Dissidents” offered indirect commentary on Kerr’s multiversity and closely paralleled the criticisms that unfolded during the period of Schrum’s analysis.) From the marginalization of the humanities to the hubris of quantitative social scientists, Schrum might differ with Veysey on the exact origins of the instrumental university, but they agree that its costs equaled, if not exceeded, its benefits. Schrum’s terrific book provides a platform to contemplate the lessons of this history.