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Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980. By Christopher Newfield. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. 290 pp. Notes, index. Cloth, $32.95. ISBN: 0-822-33201-9.
I opened this book with modest expectations. We have some fine histories of the American corporation and of the American university, but books on their intersection tend to fall into ruts worn deep by decades of debate about the role of corporations on campus. Case studies tend to be deficient in scope; synthetic works generally are deficient in both empirical content and theoretical imagination. Newfield, however, is neither a truffle hunter nor a knee-jerk ideologue. A professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, he brings an outsider's eye to this history. While occasionally eccentric and sometimes preachy, Newfield conceives his subject broadly and challenges readers, whatever their a priori inclinations, to think anew about institutions that have been, and remain, vital to American society.
The university and the corporation have common roots in law and an interdependence that reaches back into the Gilded Age. Corporate wealth afforded universities essential capital; universities supplied growing corporations with technicians, managers, and scientific knowledge necessary for sustained growth. Newfield recognizes that the relationship carried mutual benefits, but his real interest is in the tensions it has engendered for the two kinds of institutions and for the middle class that was educated in one and often went to work for the other. These tensions were especially prominent in the history of the university, where...