Since World War II, the federal government and institutions of higher education have shared an unprecedented association. John T. Wilson is among the relatively few people who have played roles on both sides of this relationship. In this essay, he examines the substance of the relationship with an eye to the future, reviewing the policies and programs that have governed federal support of academic science and higher education during the past thirty years.
Examines government support for the sciences since World War II, argues that higher education should, again, be given a high priority, and discusses the importance of colleges remaining autonomous
This new edition explores current issues of central importance to the academy: leadership, accountability, access, finance, technology, academic freedom, the canon, governance, and race. Chapters also deal with key constituencies -- students and faculty -- in the context of a changing academic environment.
The rise of American research universities to international preeminence constitutes one of the most important episodes in the history of higher education. Research and Relevant Knowledge follows Geiger's earlier volume on American research universities from 1900 to 1940. This second work is the first study to trace this momentous development in the post-World War II period. It describes how the federal government first relied on university scientists during the war, and how the resulting relationship set the pattern for the postwar mushrooming of academic research.The first half of the book analyzes the development of the postwar system of academic research, exploring the contributions of foundations, defense agencies, and universities. The second half depicts the rise of the ""golden age"" of academic research in the years after Sputnik (1957) and its eventual dissolution at the end of the 1960s graduate education. When the federal patron soon reduced its largesse, university students took the lead in challenging the putative hegemony of academic research. The loss of consensus quickly brought the malaise of the 1970s--stagnation, frustration, and equivocation about the research role. The final chapter appraises the renaissance of the 1980s, based largely on a rapprochement with the private sector, and ends by evaluating the embattled status of research universities at the beginning of the 1990s.Research and Relevant Knowledge provides the first authoritative analytical account of American research universities during their most fateful half-century. It will be of critical importance to all those concerned with the future of higher education in the United States.
How the NSF became an important yet controversial patron for the social sciences, influencing debates over their scientific status and social relevance. In the early Cold War years, the U.S. government established the National Science Foundation (NSF), a civilian agency that soon became widely known for its dedication to supporting first-rate science. The agency's 1950 enabling legislation made no mention of the social sciences, although it included a vague reference to "other sciences." Nevertheless, as Mark Solovey shows in this book, the NSF also soon became a major--albeit controversial--source of public funding for them.
Over the past century, higher education in the United States has developed an increasingly powerful corporate ethos, as institutions compete for students, faculty, and funding. This book examines how the liberal democratic principles driving higher education often conflict with market pressures to credential students and offer knowledge that has a clear exchange value. Eric Gould, who has been both academician and college administrator, argues that the failure to structure the curriculum so that it integrates responsible social idealism and humanism with economic and cultural needs constitutes the moral crisis of the university. Gould analyzes the economics and politics of higher education, showing how student consumerism, culture wars, faculty alienation, trustee activism, and a split between the concepts of "culture" and "society" have all resulted from the unholy alliance between pragmatism, corporatism, and liberalism in higher education. He asserts that what is needed is a general education for undergraduates that promotes the ability to critique power relations (including those within higher education) so that students can understand how social forces--and their embodiment of ideas, ideologies, and claims for truth--shape contemporary public philosophy.
Editors Laurie Brown, Max Dresden, Lillian Hoddeson and Michael Riordan have brought together a distinguished group of elementary particle physicists and historians of science to explore the recent history of particle physics. Based on a conference held at Stanford University, this is the third volume of a series recounting the history of particle physics and offers the most up-to-date account of the rise of the Standard Model, which explains the microstructure of the world in terms of quarks and leptons and their interactions. Major contributors include Steven Weinberg, Murray Gell-Mann, Michael Redhead, Silvan Schweber, Leon Lederman and John Heilbron. The wide-ranging articles explore the detailed scientific experiments, the institutional settings in which they took place, and the ways in which the many details of the puzzle fit together to account for the Standard Model.
A state-of-the-field survey of historical sociology, Remaking Modernity assesses the field’s past accomplishments and peers into the future, envisioning changes to come. The seventeen essays in this collection reveal the potential of historical sociology to transform understandings of social and cultural change. The volume captures an exciting new conversation among historical sociologists that brings a wider interdisciplinary project to bear on the problems and prospects of modernity. The contributors represent a wide variety of theoretical orientations and a broad spectrum of understandings of what constitutes historical sociology. They address such topics as religion, war, citizenship, markets, professions, gender and welfare, colonialism, ethnicity, bureaucracy, revolutions, collective action, and the modernist social sciences themselves. Remaking Modernity includes a significant introduction in which the editors consider prior orientations in historical sociology in order to analyze the field’s resurgence. They show how current research is building on and challenging previous work through attention to institutionalism, rational choice, the cultural turn, feminist theories and approaches, and colonialism and the racial formations of empire. Contributors Julia Adams Justin Baer Richard Biernacki Bruce Carruthers Elisabeth Clemens Rebecca Jean Emigh Russell Faeges Philip Gorski Roger Gould Meyer Kestnbaum Edgar Kiser Ming-Cheng Lo Zine Magubane Ann Shola Orloff Nader Sohrabi Margaret Somers Lyn Spillman George Steinmetz
Before the Second World War, few universities in the United States had earned high respect among the international community of scholars and scientists. Since 1945, however, the distinctive attributes of American higher education—decentralized administration, pluralistic and research-minded faculties, and intense competition for government funding—have become world standard. Whether measured by Nobel and other prizes, international applications for student admissions and faculty appointments, or the results of academic surveys, America's top research universities are the best in the world. The Rise of American Research Universities provides a fresh historical interpretation of their ascendancy and a fresh, comprehensive estimate of their scholarly achievement. Hugh Davis Graham and Nancy Diamond question traditional methods of rating the reputation and performance of universities; they offer instead an empirical analysis of faculty productivity based on research grants received, published research, and peer approval of that work. Comparing the research achievements of faculty at more than 200 institutions, they differ with most studies of higher education in measuring performance in every academic field—from medicine to humanities—and in analyzing data on research activity in terms of institutional size. In this important and timely work, Graham and Diamond reassess the success of American universities as research institutions and the role of public funding in their developmentfrom the expansionist "golden years" of the 1950s and '60s, through the austerity measures of the 1970s and the entrepreneurial ethos of the 1980s, to the budget crises universities face in the 1990s.
