Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford

The "cold war university" is the academic component of the military-industrial-academic complex, and its archetype, according to Rebecca Lowen, is Stanford University. Her book challenges the conventional wisdom that the post-World War II "multiversity" was the creation of military patrons on the one hand and academic scientists on the other, Creating the Cold War University focuses on the crucial role played by university administrators, driven by ideology and by institutional needs for prestige and money, in making their universities dependent upon military, foundation, and industrial patronage. Effectively contesting the view that the "federal grant university" arose inevitably with the outpouring of federal support for science after the war, Lowen points instead to the Depression, which put financial pressures on universities and pushed academic administrators to seek new modes of funding. She describes how these administrators, with the help of some scientists, transformed their universities during World War II and the cold war to attract patronage from the military and other sources. The changes unfold in rich detail: academic programs in the natural and social sciences reoriented, the importance of undergraduate instruction minimized, "academic entrepreneurship" hailed as the normative behavior of university professors, and dissent to this transformation of the university relentlessly suppressed. With the end of the cold war and the rightening of federal budgets, universities again face pressures not unlike those of the 1930s. Lowen's analysis of how the university became dependent upon the state is essential reading for those concerned about the future of higher education in thepost-cold war era.