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The Instrumental University

This book argues that Clark Kerr, Gaylord P. Harnwell, and other post-World War II academic leaders set the American research university on a new course by creating the instrumental university. With its emphasis on procedural rationality, organized research, and project-based funding by external patrons, the instrumental university would provide technical and managerial knowledge to shape the social order. Its leaders hoped that by solving the nation’s pressing social problems, the research university would become the essential institution of postwar America. On this view, the university’s leading purposes included promoting economic development and coordinating research from many fields in order to attack social problems. Reorienting institutions to prioritize these activities had numerous consequences. One was to inject more capitalistic and managerial tendencies into universities. Today, those who decry universities’ corporatizing and market-driven tendencies often trace them to the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s. This book suggests that a fuller explanation of these tendencies must highlight their deeper roots in the technocratic progressive tradition that originated in the 1910s, particularly the organizational changes within universities that this tradition spawned from the 1940s onward as part of the instrumental university.