This book examines the harassment of the Johns Hopkins University sinologist Owen Lattimore during the height of the Cold War on campus. It moves from detailing the specifics of Lattimore's case to a discussion of the broader themes of academic governance that the case exposed. With his meticulous dissection of this major event in United States academic history, Lewis shows us much about the workings of academic governance.
"The most complete and intensiveanalysis of what [Lewis defines as the Cold War or what might be described as the inquisitionalonslaught by federal and state 'un-American' committees on the integrity and independence of theAmerican professorate during 1946-56." -Edward C. McDonagh, The American Journal ofEducation "Lewis's work reinforces a fundamental point.Administrators at over one hundred institutions share responsibility for actions that helpedstrike a tragic blow to academic freedom and intellectual culture during the 1950s. They wereparticipants in a campaign of political expedience and aggression-along with thousands ofnational leaders." -David R. Homes, Journal of HigherEducation
This book examines the harassment of the Johns Hopkins University sinologist Owen Lattimore during the height of the Cold War on campus. It moves from detailing the specifics of Lattimores case to a discussion of the broader themes of academic governance that the case exposed. With his meticulous dissection of this major event in United States academic history, Lewis shows us much about the workings of academic governance.
"When Power Corrupts details the conflict between the governing board and administration and faculty at Adelphi University in Garden City, New York, between 1985 and 1996."--BOOK JACKET.
There was a time when the faculty governed universities. Not anymore. The Rise and Decline of Faculty Governance is the first history of shared governance in American higher education. Drawing on archival materials and extensive published sources, Larry G. Gerber shows how the professionalization of college teachers coincided with the rise of the modern university in the late nineteenth century and was the principal justification for granting teachers power in making educational decisions. In the twentieth century, the efforts of these governing faculties were directly responsible for molding American higher education into the finest academic system in the world. In recent decades, however, the growing complexity of “multiversities” and the application of business strategies to manage these institutions threatened the concept of faculty governance. Faculty shifted from being autonomous professionals to being “employees.” The casualization of the academic labor market, Gerber argues, threatens to erode the quality of universities. As more faculty become contingent employees, rather than tenured career professionals enjoying both job security and intellectual autonomy, universities become factories in the knowledge economy. In addition to tracing the evolution of faculty decision making, this historical narrative provides readers with an important perspective on contemporary debates about the best way to manage America’s colleges and universities. Gerber also reflects on whether American colleges and universities will be able to retain their position of global preeminence in an increasingly market-driven environment, given that the system of governance that helped make their success possible has been fundamentally altered.
""It is often said that the American academic, protected by tenure, is free to do pretty much as he or she pleases. Lewis argues that this freedom is largely an illusion. Faculty actions are greatly limited by governing boards and the academic administrators they appoint, who control institutional resources. Although ostensibly independent professionals, in many ways faculty have no more autonomy than most employees. Indeed, what power they have derives from faculty-student relationships. Lay governing boards ultimately control how money is spent and who spends it. This volume addresses issues relating to current debates over the most appropriate and effective method of academic governance.When Power Corrupts details the conflict between the governing board and administration and faculty at Adelphi University in Garden City, New York, between 1985 and 1996. This conflict culminated in the removal of the Board of Trustees by the New York State Board of Regents. The new trustees in turn removed the president. Although the book focuses on board administration-faculty relations at one university, its findings have implications for almost all other institutions of higher learning in the United States. Lewis draws on the nearly 8,000-page transcript of the hearings of the Regents. These eleven volumes of exhibits include hundreds of documents obtained from individuals and organizations.Lewis suggests that academic administrators have more control of governing boards than is generally recognized. Besides influencing who is asked to join a board, administrators may largely determine the information boards receive and on which they must make decisions. When faced with decisions, boards often defer to academic administrators or acquiesce to a campus president's suggestions. Because conflict over governance all too often takes precedence over academic work on American campuses, the implications for higher learning are profound. Faculty, academic administrators, members of governing boards, college students and their parents, and general readers concerned about problems relating to American higher education will find this book provocative and informative.Lionel S. Lewis is professor emeritus of sociology and adjunct professor of higher education at SUNY/Buffalo. He has written more than 150 research articles, essays, and reviews. He is the author of Cold War on Campus: A Study of the Politics of Organizational Control and The Cold War and Academic Governance: The Lattimore Case at Johns Hopkins."--Provided by publisher.
The Cold War revealed, for the first time in human history, the logic of human togetherness, which indicated that it was not only necessary for nation-states to live together but also possible for them to do so. The necessity was because of the inescapably shared vulnerability of “mutually assured destruction,” not only in terms of security but more so in economic well-being and political stability. The possibility was due to the unipolar world structure sustained by the global governance web of interdependent partnership which worked powerfully “between” the power agents to ensure the best of all possible world. This latent governance system was both hierarchical and dynamic because its power was “connective” in the sense that power was rooted in one another and the ability to be interdependent by empowering other power agents and sharing vulnerability at the same time was the way of becoming the “nucleus” on the global web of interdependent partners and hence gaining power in transforming one another connectively and governing the world collectively. George Kennan’s patience in building up hard and soft powers “within” individual power agents of the web and Wilson/Roosevelt’s institutionalization of collective power “above” each power agents contributed to the construction of the system. The Soviet big-brotherly governing type was proven a failure.
As the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union escalated in the 1950s and 1960s, the federal government directed billions of dollars to American universities to promote higher enrollments, studies of foreign languages and cultures, and, especially, scientific research. In Cold War University, Matthew Levin traces the paradox that developed: higher education became increasingly enmeshed in the Cold War struggle even as university campuses became centers of opposition to Cold War policies. The partnerships between the federal government and major research universities sparked a campus backlash that provided the foundation, Levin argues, for much of the student dissent that followed. At the University of Wisconsin in Madison, one of the hubs of student political activism in the 1950s and 1960s, the protests reached their flashpoint with the 1967 demonstrations against campus recruiters from Dow Chemical, the manufacturers of napalm. Levin documents the development of student political organizations in Madison in the 1950s and the emergence of a mass movement in the decade that followed, adding texture to the history of national youth protests of the time. He shows how the University of Wisconsin tolerated political dissent even at the height of McCarthyism, an era named for Wisconsin's own virulently anti-Communist senator, and charts the emergence of an intellectual community of students and professors that encouraged new directions in radical politics. Some of the events in Madison—especially the 1966 draft protests, the 1967 sit-in against Dow Chemical, and the 1970 Sterling Hall bombing—have become part of the fabric of "The Sixties," touchstones in an era that continues to resonate in contemporary culture and politics.
This book tracks the dramatic outcomes of the federal government's growing involvement in higher education between World War I and the 1970s, and the conservative backlash against that involvement from the 1980s onward. Using cutting-edge analysis, Christopher Loss recovers higher education's central importance to the larger social and political history of the United States in the twentieth century, and chronicles its transformation into a key mediating institution between citizens and the state. Framed around the three major federal higher education policies of the twentieth century--the 1944 GI Bill, the 1958 National Defense Education Act, and the 1965 Higher Education Act--the book charts the federal government's various efforts to deploy education to ready citizens for the national, bureaucratized, and increasingly global world in which they lived. Loss details the myriad ways in which academic leaders and students shaped, and were shaped by, the state's shifting political agenda as it moved from a preoccupation with economic security during the Great Depression, to national security during World War II and the Cold War, to securing the rights of African Americans, women, and other previously marginalized groups during the 1960s and '70s. Along the way, Loss reappraises the origins of higher education's current-day diversity regime, the growth of identity group politics, and the privatization of citizenship at the close of the twentieth century. At a time when people's faith in government and higher education is being sorely tested, this book sheds new light on the close relations between American higher education and politics.
