The Rise of the All-Knowing Universities

Who knows best? And who do we trust to know best? In the years after World War II, America’s large research universities increasingly put themselves forward as the nation’s administrative experts, taking leadership roles in addressing big, complicated questions of economics and society. How higher education came to think of itself as the nation’s manager is the focus on Ethan Schrum’s 2019 well-argued monograph, The Instrumental University: Education in Service of the National Agenda After World War II. Schrum, a professor at Azusa Pacific University, spent more than a dozen years on the project. While the headlines about the growth of the major research universities in the postwar years may be well known, Schrum went deep into the archives to explore the relationships, dollars, politics and decisions behind the growth of the technocratic, instrumental university. Importantly, he highlights the elevation of administration as an essential part of the story.

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Schrum identifies the higher education’s intellectual tendencies towards expertise and efficiency in the the early years of the twentieth century, drawing from a strand of progressivism. Charles Merriam, who founded the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), figures prominently. A faculty member at the University of Chicago, Merriam was an organizer, a professor who mentored many influential scholars, and an entrepreneur who was able to secure government and foundation support, especially from the Rockefeller Foundation. Merriam linked academia and politics in a variety of ways, and one of his legacies, through the SSRC, was the professionalization of policy decision-making through social science methodology. The SSRC has been a major player in policy for more than a century. Schrum extends the line of inquiry through the Great Depression, noting FDR’s historic dependence upon academic experts, particularly economists.

With the ground work established, Schrum’s study takes off looking at academia’s relationship with the federal government after WWII. Here the focus is broader, at home and internationally, in support of a dominant and efficient pax Americana. Schrum is not concerned about the hard sciences and military, though they were vital to higher education’s growth. The book’s aim is on administration, industrial relations, urban planning and economic development. Attention, consequently, is on a few select universities and the men who led them: Clark Kerr at the University of California, Gaylord P. Harnwell at the University of Pennsylvania, Samuel P. Hayes Jr at the University of Michigan. Schrum details the tight knit network, between universities, funding streams, and government, that propelled a relatively small group of white male academic administrators into positions of tremendous influence. Issues of race and gender are noted but not deeply questioned.

Kerr played an outsized role. The founding director of Berkeley’s Institute of Industrial Relations before becoming Chancellor, Kerr regularly tapped external funding cooperative funding. His writing – especially The Use of the University – is a blueprint for how organized research units (ORUs) could secure dollars and increase the impact of the university in building a better and more profitable future. Funding was sought and obtained for domestic and international projects. Ford Foundation grants, as an example, were significant, dwarfing internal academic budgets. They reshaped actions within selected institutions and higher education’s prominence in establishing administration as an essential field of study. Many in government, from President Eisenhower to California’s governor Earl Warren, bought into the concept and Kerr’s thinking. The rise of the ORUs was swift and integral to the emergence of a “multiversity” – a Kerr concept – that saw the university as a collection of units, each seeking its own questions, answers, and funding, sometimes in alignment and sometimes in competition. What they all shared, Kerr famously quipped, was concerns about parking.

At Penn, President Harnwell’s focus was urban planning and community service. A physicist, Harnwell nonetheless championed the social sciences as central to the university’s contributions. Penn created a very influential city planning school and increasingly turned its attention to how the university could address local and national problems. Service to the community, direct and indirect, was identified and supported as an institutional priority. Schrum also categorizes many attempts, often successful, that from ORUs for international projects – and dollars – to increase their bottom line and influence. For example, Penn’s Wharton School and subsequently the University of Southern California had grants and influence in Pakistan with support from government and foundations. Assessing the effectiveness of individual projects and their collective impact is beyond the scope of the book. What is central here is how research was driven by funding priorities.

The chapter on President Hayes, Jr., at the University of Michigan links the creation of the Center for Research on Economic Development (CRED) and the Peace Corps to a similar set of impulses and connections. Schrum includes like efforts at other universities as well, demonstrating the shared desire of ORUs to obtain funding and influence. The book concludes with an overview of the creation of the University of California Irvine, an institution with a mission towards technocratic public policy. All told, The Instrumental University provides a powerful history about how academic institutions willingly remade themselves in a period of real opportunities.

Schrum offers a number of contemporary critiques of the changes universities were making. He avoids, though, a wider examination of the consequences of the development of the instrumental university. The book goes far in explaining how these men, with their small network at a few elite institutions, were able to gain so much leverage. Missing is the why and what that has meant for higher education and for American society over the long term. It is a fascinating question, particularly as the bureaucratization of higher education was taking place as the nation wrestled with a growing civil rights movement and demands for greater democracy. It does not take a crystal ball to forecast that the administration of policy by experts, self-selected and out of contact with everyday citizens, would be bound to lead to friction if not outright resentment.

I had not realized, though, until The Instrumental University, just how that happened. This book makes an important contribution to the history of the administrative state.

David Potash

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