The Capitalist University: The Transformations of Higher Education in the United States, 1945-2016

by Henry Heller

Higher education news today can more or less be boiled down to one the university is in crisis. Skyrocketing student debt, decreased public financing, the weakening of tenure, the rise of adjunct labor, battles over the value of the humanities, calls for skills focused instruction—all the problems besetting contemporary higher education in the United States are interrelated, and they can all be traced to one campuses and classrooms are now battlegrounds in the struggle between knowledge for its own sake and commodified learning.
            Henry Heller offers here a magisterial account of the modern university that shows exactly how we’ve reached this point. Taking readers from the early Cold War—when support for universities was support for capitalism—through the countless social, political, and educational changes of the ensuing decades, Heller reveals how American educational institutions have been forced to decide between teaching students to question the dominant order and helping to perpetuate it. And they’ve had to do so knowing that all the pressure politics and finance was pushing for the latter.
            Heller covers such key moments as McCarthyism and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, as well as contemporary struggles including the attempts at unionization of post-doctorals, the National Adjuncts Walkout Day in 2015, the protests in Missouri related to race, workplace benefits, and leadership, and the firing of Steven Salaita for his pro-Palestinian tweets, which sparked a huge controversy around free speech and academic freedom. The Capitalist University is a thoroughly grounded radical history of an institution whose influence and importance—and failures—reach deep into American political and social life.
 

Genres: Education, History, Economics, Politics, Nonfiction

264 pages, Hardcover

First published October 20, 2016

About the author

Henry Heller is a Professor of History at the University of Manitoba, Canada. Heller is a historian whose primary interests are the French Renaissance and Reformation, as well as early modern Europe.

Reviews

[Amanuel Anteneh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read for anyone who’s interested in the effects of capitalism on higher education in 20th and 21st century America. If you’re a college student that’s disillusioned with your higher education institution or want to better understand decisions made by school administration this is a must read.

[Macy Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

history book on the birth of the neoliberal university in America