Universities And The Capitalist State

Subtitled, Corporate liberalism and the reconstruction of American higher education, 1894-1928. Barrow (political science, Southeastern Mass. U.) argues (and demonstrates) that government and the private sector have guided the development and management of the university. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Leslie examine every aspect of academic work unexplored: undergraduate and graduate education, teaching and research, student aid policies, and federal research policies.

As colleges and universities become more entrepreneurial in a post-industrial economy, they focus on knowledge less as a public good than as a commodity to be capitalized on in profit-oriented activities. In Academic Capitalism and the New Economy, higher education scholars Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades detail the aggressive engagement of U.S. higher education institutions in the knowledge-based economy and analyze the efforts of colleges and universities to develop, market, and sell research products, educational services, and consumer goods in the private marketplace. Slaughter and Rhoades track changes in policy and practice, revealing new social networks and circuits of knowledge creation and dissemination, as well as new organizational structures and expanded managerial capacity to link higher education institutions and markets. They depict an ascendant academic capitalist knowledge/learning regime expressed in faculty work, departmental activity, and administrative behavior. Clarifying the regime's internal contradictions, they note the public subsidies embedded in new revenue streams and the shift in emphasis from serving student customers to leveraging resources from them. Defining the terms of academic capitalism in the new economy, this groundbreaking study offers essential insights into the trajectory of American higher education.

The wave of liberalization that swept world markets in the 1980s and 90s altered the ways that governments manage their economies. Reinventing State Capitalism analyzes the rise of new species of state capitalism in which governments interact with private investors either as majority or minority shareholders in publicly-traded corporations or as financial backers of purely private firms (the so-called “national champions”). Focusing on a detailed quantitative assessment of Brazil’s economic performance from 1976 to 2009, Aldo Musacchio and Sergio Lazzarini examine how these models of state capitalism influence corporate investment and performance. According to one model, the state acts as a majority investor, granting the state-owned enterprise (SOE) financial autonomy and allowing professional management. This form, the authors argue, has reduced many agency problems commonly faced by state ownership. According to another hybrid model, the state uses sovereign wealth funds, holding companies, and development banks to acquire a small share of equity ownership in a corporation, thereby potentially alleviating capital constraints and leveraging latent capabilities. Both models have benefits and costs. Yet neither model has entirely eliminated the temptation of governments to intervene in the operation of natural resource industries and other large strategic enterprises. Nevertheless, the longstanding debate over whether private ownership is superior or inferior to state capitalism has become irrelevant, Musacchio and Lazzarini conclude. Private ownership is now mingled with state capital on a global scale.

This book examines one of the key issues in the analysis of the capitalist state: its relationship with democracy. To what extent can a capitalist state be democratised? Where and how do democratic institutions intervene in the management and control of capitalism? These questions and more are the subject of this book.

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. Accessible in style, 'The Capitalist University' presents a comprehensive overview of a topic which affects millions of students in America and increasingly, across the globe.

For the first time in history, the globe is dominated by one economic system. Capitalism prevails because it delivers prosperity and meets desires for autonomy. But it also is unstable and morally defective. Surveying the varieties and futures of capitalism, Branko Milanovic offers creative solutions to improve a system that isn’t going anywhere.

This is an examination of the complex relationships among universities, states, and markets in light of the growing influence of globalization.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1987.

Higher education news today can more or less be boiled down to one sentence: 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 fact: 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.