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Are colleges and universities in a period of unprecedented disruption? Is a bachelor's degree still worth the investment? What, exactly, is higher education good for? This book challenges the rhetoric of America's so-called crisis in higher education by investigating two centuries of college and university history. From the community college to the elite research university—in states from California to Maine—the book engages a fundamental question confronted by higher education institutions ever since the nation's founding: Do colleges and universities contribute to the common good? Tracking changes in the prevailing social ethos between the late eighteenth and early twenty-first centuries, the book illustrates the ways in which civic-mindedness, practicality, commercialism, and affluence influenced higher education's dedication to the public good. Each ethos, long a part of American history and tradition, came to predominate over the others during one of the four chronological periods examined in the book, informing the character of institutional debates and telling the definitive story of its time. The book demonstrates how two hundred years of political, economic, and social change prompted transformation among colleges and universities—including the establishment of entirely new kinds of institutions—and refashioned higher education in the United States over time in essential and often vibrant ways.

This book argues that Clark Kerr, Gaylord P. Harnwell, and other post-World War II academic leaders set the American research university on a new course by creating the instrumental university. With its emphasis on procedural rationality, organized research, and project-based funding by external patrons, the instrumental university would provide technical and managerial knowledge to shape the social order. Its leaders hoped that by solving the nation’s pressing social problems, the research university would become the essential institution of postwar America. On this view, the university’s leading purposes included promoting economic development and coordinating research from many fields in order to attack social problems. Reorienting institutions to prioritize these activities had numerous consequences. One was to inject more capitalistic and managerial tendencies into universities. Today, those who decry universities’ corporatizing and market-driven tendencies often trace them to the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s. This book suggests that a fuller explanation of these tendencies must highlight their deeper roots in the technocratic progressive tradition that originated in the 1910s, particularly the organizational changes within universities that this tradition spawned from the 1940s onward as part of the instrumental university.

Do business schools actually make good on their promises of “innovative,” “outside-the-box” thinking to train business leaders who will put society ahead of money-making? Do they help society by making better business leaders? This book asserts that they do not and they never have. In throwing down a gauntlet on the business of business schools, the book examines the frictions, conflicts, and contradictions at the heart of these enterprises and details the way business schools have failed to resolve them. Beginning with founding of the Wharton School in 1881, the book measures these schools' aspirations against their actual accomplishments and tells the full and disappointing history of missed opportunities, unmet aspirations, and educational mistakes. It then poses a set of crucial questions about the role and function of American business schools. The results are not pretty. Posing a set of crucial questions about the function of American business schools, the book is pugnacious and controversial. It argues that the impressive façades of business school buildings resemble nothing so much as collegiate versions of Oz. It pulls back the curtain to reveal a story of failure to meet the expectations of the public, their missions, their graduates, and their own lofty aspirations of producing moral and ethical business leaders.