The Autocratic Academy: Reenvisioning Rule within America's Universities

by Timothy V Kaufman-Osborn

Overview

Critics of contemporary US higher education often point to the academy’s “corporatization” as one of its defining maladies. However, in The Autocratic Academy Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn argues that American colleges and universities have always been organized as corporations in which the power to rule is legally vested in and monopolized by antidemocratic governing boards. This institutional form, Kaufman-Osborn contends, is antithetical to the free inquiry that defines the purpose of higher education. Tracing the history of the American academy from the founding of Harvard (1636), through the Supreme Court’s Dartmouth v. Woodward ruling (1819), and into the twenty-first century, Kaufman-Osborn shows how the university’s autocratic legal constitution is now yoked to its representation on the model of private property. Explaining why appeals to the cause of shared governance cannot succeed in wresting power from the academy’s autocrats, Kaufman-Osborn argues that American universities must now be reincorporated in accordance with the principles of democratic republicanism. Only then can the academy’s members hold accountable those chosen to govern and collectively determine the disposition of higher education’s unique public goods.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478017127
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	04/07/2023
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.94(d)

About the Author

Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn is Baker Ferguson Professor of Politics and Leadership Emeritus at Whitman College and author of From Noose to Needle: Capital Punishment and the Late Liberal State and Creatures of Prometheus: Gender and the Politics of Technology.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  vii
A Prologue in the Form of a Puzzle  1
I. Nibbling at the Crust of Convention
1. Imperious Regents and Disposable Custodians  11
2. The Neoliberal Corporation Debunked  30
3. Corporate Types   47
II. Contesting the Constitution of College in Early America
4. William & Mary Dispossessed  63
5. “The College of Tyrannus”  82
6. The Marshall Plan  105
III. A Bet Gone Bad
7. Psychasthenia Universityatis (or The Malady of the Academy)  135
8. “Shared Governance” as Placebo  163
IV. When Autocrats Meet Their Makers
9. Outsourcing Self-Governance   197
10. “Humpty Dumpty Sat on a Wall . . .”  231
Epilogue: Reenvisioning the Corporate Academy  255
Notes  273
Bibliography  307
Index  327

What People are Saying About This

Wendy Brown

“Through an erudite history of corporations and American higher education, Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn pillories the notion that corporatization rather than autocratic rule is responsible for wrecking universities and especially shared governance. This learned, thoughtful, and provocative analysis will be useful to faculty everywhere concerned with what the powers governing higher education have become, and might be.”

The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universityies and How We Can Fix Them - Christopher Newfield

“A root cause of higher education's spiraling crises is a governance system that’s radically antidemocratic. This book is among the few to attack the problem directly and is nearly alone in breaking with a century of failed compromises with academic autocracy. If you’re looking for a fascinating, easy-to-read organizational history or a deep solution to current university problems that uses the master’s corporate tools to dismantle the master’s house, this book is for you.”

Editorial Reviews

"The Autocratic Academy does not just critique the present condition of higher education in the United States; through its stories of resistance and its vision of an alternative, it gives readers something else to want. These glimpses of flourishing show us what the health of the body politic might look like. We can begin our convalescence now."

Joel Alden Schlossern Political Thought

"The book is extraordinarily important at precisely this moment when we need to think seriously about how dangerous our institutions’ bylaws are and how devastating it is that we never found a way to give shared governance doctrinal heft or to enshrine faculty control over curricula into law. The path to Commonwealth University—the name Kaufman-Osborn gives to his imaginary member-incorporated institution of higher education—is murky, but we can and should start to renegotiate our governance rules."

Academe - Jennifer Ruth

"The book is extraordinarily important at precisely this moment when we need to think seriously about how dangerous our institutions' bylaws are and how devastating it is that we never found a way to give shared governance doctrinal heft or to enshrine faculty control over curricula into law. The path to Commonwealth University--the name Kaufman-Osborn gives to his imaginary member-incorporated institution of higher education--is murky, but we can and should start to renegotiate our governance rules."--Jennifer Ruth "Academe" (12/12/2023 12:00:00 AM)

From the Publisher