The Advantages of taking the Long View: American Political Development and Higher Education
By Julie L. Novkov, University at Albany
Tim Kaufman-Osborn’s book (2023), The Autocratic Academy: Reenvisioning Rule within America’s Universities, is a powerful contribution to a growing literature on contemporary higher education in the United States. The field of critical university studies rests on a consensus that American universities are in a crisis provoked by a confrontation between timeless values and the exigencies of survival in a capitalist framework of education as a commodity (Boggs and Mitchell Reference Boggs and Mitchell2018, 434–36). Researchers warn that the higher-education system—once perceived as a critical mechanism for equality, economic and social mobility, and democratic enrichment—has collapsed into austerity and mechanistic models that privilege narrow calculations of return on investment (Fabricant and Brier Reference Fabricant and Brier2016). The Autocratic Academy takes a different approach, considering the path-dependent evolution of universities as corporate entities. What Boggs and Mitchell (Reference Boggs and Mitchell2018) called the crisis consensus—which locates the problems in the loss of an “ideal university” beginning in the late-twentieth century—instead stems from the institutional form of American higher education, itself the product of choices made early in the development of colleges as institutions in American history. Whereas late-stage capitalism produced historic inequality, intensified socioeconomic rationing, starved public agencies, and undercut the fundamental commitment to access that previously characterized American higher education (Fabricant and Brier Reference Fabricant and Brier2016, 20–33), Kaufman-Osborn (Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023) resists pointing to neoliberalism’s triumph over New Deal/Civil Rights Era values and commitments, interrogating a much longer institutional history.