The Capitalist University

Henry Heller

Description

Can the ivory tower rise above capitalism? Or are the humanities and social sciences merely handmaids to the American imperial order? The Capitalist University surveys the history of higher education in the United States over the last century, revealing how campuses and classrooms have become battlegrounds in the struggle between liberatory knowledge and commodified learning.



Henry Heller takes readers from the ideological apparatus of the early Cold War, through the revolts of the 1960s and on to the contemporary malaise of postmodernism, neoliberalism and the so-called 'knowledge economy' of academic capitalism. He reveals how American educational institutions have been forced to decide between teaching students to question the dominant order and helping to perpetuate it. The Capitalist University presents a comprehensive overview of a topic which affects millions of students in America and increasingly, across the globe.
Preface

Introduction

1. The Birth of the Corporate University

2. The Humanities and Social Sciences in The Cold War (1945-60)

3. The Sixties

4. The Retreat from History (1980-2008)

5. The Neoliberal University

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• HISTORY
• EDUCATION
• Histoire
• USA
• United States of America
• Neoliberalismo
• Universidad Cornell
• Universidad de Columbia
• Universidad Harvard
• América del Norte
• University
• Liberalism
• Harvard University
• Cornell University
• Criticisms of Marxism
• Higher
• History of education
• McCarthy
• Cold War
• Student
• General officer
• Neoliberalism
• South
• McCarthyism
• Americas
• Stanford University
• Postmodernism
• North America
• Higher education
• History of the Americas
• Conservatism
• Columbia University
• Capitalism
• Central
• General
• États-Unis
• Mac Carthy
• Guerre froide
• Université Stanford
• Université Cornell
• Université Columbia
• Université Harvard
• Antonio Gramsci
• Administration

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 octobre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783719761
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

First published 2016 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright Henry Heller 2016
The right of Henry Heller to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 3658 9 Hardback ISBN 978 1 7837 1975 4 PDF eBook ISBN 978 1 7837 1977 8 Kindle eBook ISBN 978 1 7837 1976 1 EPUB eBook
To Ethan Heller
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
Introduction
1 The Birth of the Corporate University
2 The Humanities and Social Sciences in the Cold War (1945-1960)
3 The Sixties
4 The Retreat from History (1980-2008)
5 The Neoliberal University
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
Following World War II colleges and universities became key institutions of American society, second only in importance to private corporations and the military. Indeed, universities became closely tied to big business especially through the research sponsored by private foundations. At the same time, their ties to the military and to the CIA made them into virtual instruments of the U.S. state. In the Gramscian sense, they became a part of the non-coercive state apparatus. One of the aims of this book is to critically investigate their connection with the evolving capitalist political economy of the United States after 1945. A second core objective, however, is to acknowledge and celebrate the accomplishments of American scholarship and higher education, particularly in the humanities and social sciences.
The wealth generated by American capitalism provided the material foundation for the achievements of American higher learning during this period, but it was also responsible for its limitations. These limits took the form of a consistent bias in research and teaching against Marxism-and, indeed, against a historically based understanding of culture and society-in favor of defending liberalism, capitalism, and American imperialism. It was this ideological program which unified the humanities and social sciences. The student and civil rights revolts of the 1960s briefly helped to expose the ideological functions of higher education but did not fundamentally transform them.
Charting the development of academe will illuminate the economic, social, and ideological functions of the universities during the last part of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, and will help in sketching out their likely future. Doing so is important because the universities have reached a major crossroads and their future prospects are in serious doubt. Under the influence of neoliberalism the operation and purposes of universities are being transformed from serving the public good into approximating as closely as possible those of private corporations, thereby imperiling the possibilities for independent and critical teaching and research. In reaction students and faculty are growing increasingly conscious of this neoliberal attack and attempting to organize resistance in defense of intellectual and academic freedom. This work is meant to help to further that resistance by giving it a historical and theoretical context.
The early part of the book focuses on the period when American power was at its zenith. Higher education in the post-war years based itself on mass education and scholarly research which reflected U.S. global ascendancy. American universities became the standard bearer of higher education throughout the world. The narrative centers on the evolution of the humanities and social sciences with some side-glances at other disciplines like environmental studies. The humanities and social science disciplines proved highly prolific, accumulating vast amounts of positive knowledge which helped to reinforce the economic and political power of the United States. As such this text aspires to be a contemporary intellectual history of America, something curiously both grand and insular. Grand because the vast resources available to American universities made possible an unprecedented outpouring of new knowledge in fields like psychology, economics, literary criticism, anthropology, and history. Insular because the ideological biases that were institutionalized in American higher learning inhibited (though did not completely suppress) Marxism, which, globally, was entering a period of great creativity from which America cut itself off. As we shall see, hostility to Marxism is accordingly an important part of the history of teaching and scholarship in America.
This study, on the contrary, analyzes this increase in positive knowledge on the basis of a Marxist or critical perspective. The distinction between positive and critical knowledge needs to be underlined. Positive knowledge aims at so-called objective, disinterested, or value-free learning, while critical understanding sees this approach as necessary and valid but inherently incomplete and, at times, even illusory. It is not fully true because it assumes that the knowledge generated within the present capitalist mode of production can be objectively true in some ahistorical sense, whereas critical understanding views such knowledge as historically contingent or part of an ongoing and unfinished process. Critical analysis makes use of positive knowledge but sees it as constrained by the consciousness generated by the capitalist mode of production; it views existing knowledge from an open-ended and evolving perspective hopefully moving toward a future socialism. Positive knowledge tends to cloister knowledge into reified categories and specialized departments based on subject matter. Critical analysis takes into account disciplinary differences but analyzes their institutionalized boundaries from the perspective of their ideological contradictions and connects them to the greater totality of a materialist understanding and sense of historical progression. Positive knowledge assumes that the concrete and the particular are the starting point of knowledge of first principles. Critical understanding views the concrete and particular as the focal point of previous determinations by means of which these principles are verified.
It is our premise that the enormous scholarly achievements of American universities, the inter-relationship between the disciplines and their ties with American economic and political life, are historically noteworthy and especially worth understanding through a critical analysis. The more so as these university disciplines play an increasing role in what is called knowledge capitalism and are developing within institutions which are increasingly the site of important ideological and social struggles.
I wrote this account as a reflection of the fact that I was a product of American higher education s glory years during the 1950s, got caught up in the unrest of the 1960s and 1970s, and have lived through the epoch of postmodernism and neoliberalism. Throughout this entire period I have studied and worked in academe, and for most of it I have been mainly concerned with my own field-history-especially early modern religion and society, the beginnings of capitalism, the French Revolution, and contemporary history. While I kept an eye on other academic fields-it is incumbent on a historian to do so-I tried as much as possible to ignore the management of universities, mine included. In retrospect management reciprocated, seeming to prefer my indifference and that of most of the rest of faculty toward it, which allowed it more or less a free hand. In any case one could afford to adopt a blas attitude as the bureaucratic regime which controlled the university was a relatively benign affair for most of my career. As a faculty member I made my living teaching at the University of Manitoba in Canada, a perch which allowed me to observe the United States and its academic life from both inside and outside. Universities, like other institutions in Canada, are different from those in the United States. For one thing the prevalence of unions is much greater. Likewise, universities as public institutions are more important. On the other hand, the development of Canadian universities, including the University of Manitoba, has in other respects been modelled on that of the United States. Despite a veneer of faculty and student participation, the administration of universities in both countries, however paternalistic and enlightened, was essentially despotic.
But if one did not rock the boat, or rocked it only occasionally, it seemed that one was largely left alone to work as part of a community of scholars. This is what constituted academic freedom. Behind this screen of apparent openness, however, was the haunting memory of the purges of the McCarthy period. During the 1950s, the anti-communist purges had established the boundaries of academic freedom, with the near elimination of Marxists and Marxism from university campuses. Distinguished scholars like W.E.B. Du Bois, Philip Foner, Paul Sweezy, F.O. Mathiessen, Owen Lattimore, Chandler Davis, and Moses Finley proved beyond the pale of American academe. In the sciences there was room for the pursuit of a significant amount of pure inquiry, i.e., independent theoretical and empirical investigation, despite overall dependence on financing by government and business. But in the humanities and social sciences the parameters were more closely drawn and were backed up by fear of further repression setting definite limits on freedom of expression. Ideological considerations played a decisive role in the patronage of research by private foundations and government, and freedom of thought was clearly restricted. On the face of it this was simply a matter of banning Marxism, as the official ideology of America s arch-enemy the Soviet Union. Given the dogmatic quality