Harry Targ
Purdue University announced on Tuesday that Lilly Endowment is giving it grants totaling $100 million for two separate university initiatives. The commitment represents the largest private gift in Purdue’s history.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2024/01/10/lilly-endowment-grants-100-million-to-purdue-university-its-largest-gift-ever/?sh=3dd917cb3566
The modern university system in the US developed at the turn of the twentieth century, as capitalism bounced back after a string of deep recessions.
Mergers created an economic system in which a few hundred corporations and banks dominated the entire economy. Interlocking directorates birthed a system of financial speculation and concentrated wealth. The government enacted pro-corporate and pro-banking regulations, allocated tax and other benefits to the wealthy and powerful, and used repression — as when President Grover Cleveland deployed the army to break the 1894 Pullman strike — on capitalists’ behalf.
During this period, higher education, which had been dominated by theological pursuits, refashioned itself to serve the modern economy. Corporations needed workers with scientific and technical knowledge, so educational institutions were established that could produce credentialed graduates.
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Theoretical work and classroom education inculcated in the young a reverence for capitalism’s blessings and the government’s conduct. Young people learned about the benefits of free-market economies, the United States’ long tradition of democratic institutions, and the glories of Manifest Destiny, which justified the American conquest of not only North America, but the Philippine Islands, Cuba, and Central and South America.
As Clyde Barrow documents in Universities and the Capitalist State, members of university boards of trustees came largely from corporations, banks, and law firms that served big business. In the Midwest and South, trustees who represented regional manufacturing and finance capital ran the universities. Their outlook paralleled the administrators at the Northeast’s major universities. Few representatives of non-elite groups, like labor unions, were ever selected to serve on these boards.
Trustees established an administrative class that both oversaw the university’s day-to-day operations and managed the faculty, who produced the school’s key commodities: education and research. They adopted managerial procedures to control mental labor in the classroom and the laboratory and institutionalized metrics that measured enrollment, publications, and university rankings to evaluate productivity.
Federal and state governments, as well as nonprofit organizations, stepped in to fund a national university system designed to serve the interests of twentieth-century capitalism. Major foundations generated studies, conducted surveys, and made recommendations that influenced both public and private universities’ policies.
Crises, from the depressions of the late nineteenth century to World War I, sparked critical analyses from some professors. Frequently, faculty faced discipline or even termination for challenging the economic system or the state. The university’s educational mission was to serve elites and the state, not provide a venue for debating important social issues.
Fast forward to today. The capitalist class has further consolidated its power in higher education since the Great Recession of 2008, the Occupy Movement of 2011, the protests around police violence in 2014, and in response to the police murdering of George Floyd in 2020. Today campuses are alive with debate about Israel’s war on Gaza and political influentials are seeking to squelch that debate.
Boards of trustees and their advisers in think tanks and political organizations have used economic and political shocks to demand greater control over and efficiency in the production and teaching of knowledge. Economically programs that are not justified as good “investments” have become vulnerable to termination. Humanities programs now have to prove their utility to the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) to survive. And, with the war in the Middle East, politicians, trustees, and administrators are once again interfering in the educational processes of the university. (The similarities with the McCarthyite period of the 1940s and 1950s are chilling).
Finally, just as academic critics of child labor, anti-union policies, World War I, and financial speculation a hundred years ago faced censure and unemployment, universities are being pressured to circumscribe accepted debates. While the higher-education system has extended academic freedom and provided job security for some through tenure, attacks on these provisions are spreading as the twenty-first century reconstruction of American higher education proceeds. From Florida to Indiana (the current SB 202 bill in the Indiana legislature would circumscribe tenure and what is taught in the classroom), politicians are committed to destroying the academic freedom, and the free exchange of ideas, that has made universities a haven for the pursuit of knowledge useful for the advancement of humanity.
