Full article: Negotiating the Academic Social Contract

Americans’ use of higher education to build the nation-state, fight wars, and pursue social equity has entailed ongoing negotiations about what higher education is for and who should pay for it. The 20th-century Cold War created conditions for the globally unprecedented expansion of the academic social contract; the close of the Cold War and subsequent social change suggests the exhaustion of that contract. Revisiting the political circumstances of 1947 and contrasting them with those of the present day offers fresh perspectives on the dynamic. In the middle of the 20th century, the nation’s academic and political leaders made an historic bargain: colleges and universities would enjoy generous public subsidy and a good deal of autonomy over their own affairs in exchange for national service in the form of worker training, citizen uplift, and progress in basic and applied science. The Truman Report exemplifies this bargain. Called by President Harry Truman to rethink the role of science

Americans’ use of higher education to build the nation-state, fight wars, and pursue social equity has entailed ongoing negotiations about what higher education is for and who should pay for it. The 20th-century Cold War created conditions for the globally unprecedented expansion of the academic social contract; the close of the Cold War and subsequent social change suggests the exhaustion of that contract. Revisiting the political circumstances of 1947 and contrasting them with those of the present day offers fresh perspectives on the dynamic. In the middle of the 20th century, the nation’s a