Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford - Hardcover

Lowen, Rebecca S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520205413 ISBN 13: 9780520205413

Publisher: California University Press, 1997

Synopsis

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 created by military patrons on the one hand and academic scientists on the other and points instead to the crucial role played by university administrators in making their universities dependent upon military, foundation, and industrial patronage.

Contesting the view that the "federal grant university" originated with the outpouring of federal support for science after the war, Lowen shows how the Depression had put financial pressure on universities and pushed administrators to seek new modes of funding. She also details the ways that Stanford administrators transformed their institution to attract patronage.

With the end of the cold war and the tightening of federal budgets, universities again face pressures not unlike those of the 1930s. Lowen's analysis of how the university became dependent on the State is essential reading for anyone concerned about the future of higher education in the post-cold war era.

About this title

About the Author

Rebecca S. Lowen is currently Visiting Scholar in History at the University of California, San Diego.

From the Back Cover

"Lowen studies one particular case, carefully and with much new information, then suggests a general interpretation that is more penetrating than anything we have had before on the subject."--Spencer R. Weart, author of Nuclear Fear

"The scholarship is superior; Lowen has been both imaginative and rigorous. She deals with a place limited in size but with problems that are not limited, and she is able to show the connections between the specific and the general."--Sigmund Diamond, author of Compromised Campus

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford

By Rebecca S. Lowen

University of California Press

Copyright © 1997 Rebecca S. Lowen
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520205413


Introduction

With the end of the cold war, the features of American life associated with it—the arms race, a bloated defense budget, the "military-industrial complex," a political rhetoric defined by anticommunism—would seem to be things of the past, characteristics of a discrete period in the history of the United States. Historians of recent American history are already redefining their field, giving an end point to post-1945 U.S. history. Conferences on the cold war and American culture and books on such topics as the cold war and intellectual life and the cold war and American science are further indications of this scholarly trend—as is a book about the "cold war university."

But while America's research universities, just as American science and culture, were undoubtedly shaped by the more than forty years of cold war between the United States and the USSR, other forces, which are not neatly bound by the beginning and end of the cold war, were shaping them as well. The way in which universities, other institutions, and the larger culture responded to the cold war was determined not simply by the tension between the United States and the Soviet Union but also by concerns and conflicts that preceded the cold war. Moreover, many of the characteristics of cold war American society may not necessarily fade as the cold war recedes into history. It is improbable that American universities, for example, will revert to the status and roles that they played before the cold war began.

Despite the complexities of causation and periodization, it is clear that America's research universities were profoundly changed by the cold war, both in relation to their role in society and in terms of the

scientific and scholarly disciplines practiced and taught within them. Before World War II, America's universities were peripheral to the nation's political economy. They were committed to promoting the scientific method, to allowing academic scientists and scholars to discover and study "truths," and to developing the character of their students who were, for the most part, the sons of the nation's business and professional elites. While some universities included service to society as part of their mission, none of them conceived of this service as direct assistance to the federal government. Autonomy from the federal government was, in fact, central to the definition of the university as well as of the science and scholarship conducted within it. Similarly, the concept of autonomy from private industry and, more broadly, the world of commerce, distinguished the university from the mere technical institute. Universities were, in their own imagining, ivory towers.1

During the cold war, the nation's leading universities moved from the periphery to the center of the nation's political economy. To Clark Kerr, chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley in the 1950s and early 1960s and one of the first to herald publicly this shift, the postwar university was a wholly new institution, one that was uniquely responsive to the society of which it was now very much a part. Kerr recognized the significance of the cold war to American universities. Such military technologies as ballistic missiles, guidance systems, hydrogen bombs, and radar required the expertise of highly trained scientists and engineers. By the early 1960s, the federal government was spending approximately $10 billion annually on research and development, with the Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission contributing over one half of the total. Universities and university-affiliated centers received annually about one tenth—or $1 billion—of these federal research and development funds, more than half of which went to just six universities by the early 1960s. These universities, in turn, depended on federal patronage for over fifty percent of their operating budgets.2

But Kerr also saw the postwar university as the product of broader forces that were shifting the nation from an industrial to a postindustrial society, from an economy in which labor and raw materials were the essential inputs to one in which expert knowledge was the key to economic growth and prosperity. Nothing better exemplified for Kerr the centrality of the university to postindustrial society than the shifting industrial geography. High-technology companies were clustering around the Berkeley and Stanford campuses in the San Francisco Bay

Area, around Harvard and MIT in Massachusetts, and around the campuses and research facilities in the Chicago area. These "cities of intellect," or "science regions," as they have since been called, testify to the importance of the American university to the post-World War II economy as do the assiduous, although not always successful, efforts to replicate them.3

If the university's relationship to society changed after World War II, the university underwent internal changes as well. Large laboratories staffed with myriad researchers having no teaching duties and working in groups with expensive, government-funded scientific equipment became common features of the leading research universities after World War II. As the organization and funding of science changed, so did the kinds of knowledge produced and taught. Universities made room for new fields of study, such as nuclear engineering and Russian studies, which bore obvious relevance to the nation's geopolitical concerns. Traditional social science disciplines also shifted their emphases, stressing quantitative approaches over normative ones and individual behavior and cultural studies over sociological ones.4

Most commented upon, then and now, were changes in the education of students and in the role of university professors. As Kerr readily acknowledged, professional advancement in the postwar university depended wholly on research and publication, which in turn depended on the development of patronage. Thus, undergraduate teaching received short shrift as professors, not surprisingly, showed more interest in and loyalty to their patrons outside the university than to their own institutions and students. If the university before World War II was a community of scholars and scientists, the postwar university was, as Kerr described it, a loose collection of academic entrepreneurs—scientists and scholars perpetually promoting themselves and their research to potential patrons.5

That the nation's leading universities changed in the ways that Kerr outlined in the 1963 Godkin Lectures at Harvard (and published later that year as The Uses of the University ) has never been disputed. What has been a subject of debate, however, is whether these changes represented progress or degradation and decline. As is often the case with valuative questions, the generally accepted answer has tended to change along with shifts in the nation's political and cultural climate. In the 1950s and early 1960s, for example, the consensus was that the metamorphosis of the university was part of a broader progressive trend; The Uses of the University remains the classic presentation of this view. While Kerr

regretted what was being lost—a sense of the university as a community and a devotion to undergraduate education—this regret was over-whelmed by his appreciation for what was being gained. The university was no longer an ivory tower but a flexible institution with multiple constituencies, a "multiversity."

Kerr's views came under attack in the decade following the publication of The Uses of the University . To Robert Nisbet, a conservative sociologist who idealized the prewar academic community, the university had been hopelessly degraded by its emphasis on service and its relationship to the federal government and to private enterprise. Nisbet leveled his most searing criticisms at fellow colleagues, whom he accused of abandoning traditional, if unglamorous, commitments to teaching and scholarship to chase after money and fame. The multiversity was also attacked by the left at this time for its purported dehumanizing approach to education and its collaboration with the nation's war machinery.6

The end of the Vietnam War took much of the heat out of the controversy surrounding the university and its role in society, but expressions of dissatisfaction, often quite strident, resurfaced in the mid-1980s. The university was attacked from the right for neglecting undergraduates and introducing curricula emphasizing relevance and cultural diversity instead of transcendent values and traditions. As before, blame focused on university professors who, it was claimed, had been student radicals in the 1960s. Less attention was paid in these years to critics on the left concerned about the increase in defense dollars pouring into university laboratories and the connections between federally supported academic researchers and privately owned, for-profit businesses. Defenders of the cold war university also reemerged to stress the economic benefits derived from universities' collaboration with the federal government and private industry and to insist that state-supported (and, specifically, military-supported) science produced good, not bad, science.7

This book aims not so much to take sides in this long-running debate about the American university but rather to explore precisely how the changes that have provoked so much controversy came about. Thus, while this book is generally critical of the cold war university, it does not, for example, challenge the assertion that academic scientists who were supported with military funds were excellent scientists doing world-class research. My interest is not in evaluating the quality of the science conducted but rather in explaining historical change—in under-

standing why academic scientists began accepting support from the military, how they adapted their understanding of their roles as academic scientists to accommodate this change, and how this new source of patronage shaped the kinds of knowledge produced within the university.

Further, my criticisms of the postwar university should not be assumed to imply a preference for the prewar university, particularly the prewar private university, which was a deeply flawed institution. That institution's sense of community, for example, of which some critics of today's university have bemoaned the loss, derived in large measure from the concerted exclusion of Jews, African-Americans, and women from the faculty and the student body.8 Finally, I have declined here either to validate or criticize student activists, which is one reason that the history related here stops in the mid-1960s, before the campuses became scenes of organized political protests. It is specious to suggest, however, as have several historians and commentators, that those students politicized American universities. As this book will make clear, politics have always intruded into the affairs of the university, most notably during the Red Scare of the 1950s, but at other times as well, and almost always at the initiative of university administrators and professors, not students. Regardless of whether one approves or disapproves of the methods of student protesters, students clearly were recognizing and responding to, rather than initiating, the politicization of their institutions.9

Thus, neither critics nor defenders of the university will find their views fully supported here. Again, my interest as an historian is to understand how and why the university became a service institution, how this change was related to the university's new ties to the federal government and to private industry, and how these new relationships affected the way knowledge was organized, the kinds of knowledge produced, and the role of academic scientists, and more generally, university professors.

Addressing these questions is important to achieving a complete understanding of the development of the cold war political economy. Exploring how American universities changed may also enhance our understanding of American culture during the cold war. Historians have skillfully analyzed the construction of stereotypically gendered social roles and popular cultural presentations of anticommunism; they have also explored the "culture of anxiety" created by the atomic bomb and the arms race.10 But there has been a tendency both to conflate the 1950s and the cold war in discussions about culture and to overlook

less striking but perhaps more persistent characteristics of the broader period, including a pervasive scientism, the triumph of the idea of apolitical expertise, and the popularization of psychotherapeutic ideas and techniques. An exploration of these aspects of American cultural history cannot ignore the postwar university, which was not only the meeting ground of many of the defining features of the cold war but also, in its educative role, the transmitter of particular values and ideas to a younger generation.

My interest in historical context and human agency—in how and why American universities and the knowledge produced within them changed—necessitated an exploration of motives and the precise relationships among academic scientists, administrators, and university patrons. This, in turn, dictated a close study of one university, in the expectation that the details of how one university was transformed would elucidate the larger patterns and forces that affected all universities experiencing similar changes.

Stanford University was an obvious choice for a study of the "federal grant university," in Kerr's nomenclature, or what I am calling the "cold war university." During most of the cold war, Stanford was one of the top recipients of Defense Department patronage; it was also one of the first universities to forge close relationships to private industrial concerns, many of which were developing war-related technologies. By the 1980s, Stanford had become the exemplar of the cold war university. The subject of books celebrating the development of Silicon Valley, Stanford was also the first university to be audited by the federal government in the early 1990s for purportedly misusing overhead monies derived from federal contracts. The budgeting practices of Stanford administrators were hardly idiosyncratic, but the extensive attention that was devoted to Stanford suggests that Stanford is widely perceived as a model of the cold war university, of its purported excesses as well as successes.11

To regard Stanford as the archetype of the cold war university is not to claim that Stanford is identical to other leading research universities. As is every university, Stanford is in some ways idiosyncratic. It is a private university, for example, but unlike Harvard and Yale, was founded in the late nineteenth century with the fortune of a robber baron. In this respect, it is similar to Johns Hopkins University and the

University of Chicago. But unlike these universities, Stanford generally lacked prestige and influence in the early twentieth century. In fact, Stanford did not emerge as a prestigious academic institution until the 1960s, when it appeared on lists of the "top ten" universities in America as well as on lists of the handful of universities receiving the most support from the federal government. This swift rise to prominence, understood at the time as related directly to the university's defense contracts and to California's postwar economic boom (itself the product largely of defense spending), is Stanford's most distinctive characteristic. But even in this respect, Stanford is not unique. The University of California at San Diego, for example, experienced an equally dramatic elevation of reputation and influence during the cold war.

This particular combination of representativeness and distinctiveness made Stanford University particularly attractive for a study of the cold war university. Changes that were occurring at all leading research universities were occurring with great rapidity at Stanford; thus, at Stanford, it is possible to see in bold relief what was changing and why. Just as Stanford became a model for universities in the 1970s and 1980s that sought to increase their financial resources and improve their academic standing, Stanford's history offers a paradigm for understanding what was happening, albeit more subtly, at other leading research universities between the 1930s and the 1960s.

To take the institution of the university — rather than individual departments, laboratories, scientists, patrons of science, or a cluster of universities — as the primary object of study represents a departure from historiographic tradition. The history of individual universities has traditionally been left to retired administrators and institutional boosters and treated as a variant of hagiography. Professional historians, while occasionally studying a collection of universities, have generally focused on the professions and academic disciplines or on the relationships between science and patronage and between experts and the state, working around the edges of the university or ignoring it entirely.

The unintended effect of this intellectual division of labor has been to reinforce the reigning view of the multiversity as an institution with weak central authority, dominated by its scientists and scholars who respond not to internal institutional pressures but to their patrons and sponsors outside the university or to the imperatives of the disciplines

they practice. Beyond holding and serving the needs of these experts, the multiversity appears to be institutionally insignificant. Viewed as such, the history of the multiversity is conveniently synonymous with the history of the relationships among scientists, experts, and the state, thus helping to explain why professional historians have devoted little attention to the university itself. Further, the transformation of the university appears inevitable rather than problematic; it is understood simply as the natural outcome of the inexorable rise of a powerful, centralizing state increasingly dependent upon scientific knowledge and expertise, and of the attendant growth of a body of scientists and experts committed to professional autonomy and to influencing public affairs.

This was Kerr's interpretation, and historians of science and of the development of the state have generally worked within this framework. While some have traced the origins of the ties between experts and the state as far back as the Civil War and others, to the War Industries Board of the First World War, historians have more recently stressed the deep suspicions held by scientists and experts before World War II of any permanent alliance with the federal government. For most scientists, the relationship was seen as potentially threatening to professional independence, portending the subjection of their work to political agendas. In the years preceding the Second World War, scientists sought patronage from private industry, wealthy individuals, and private philanthropies. The federal government itself showed a distrust of experts whom it could not directly control, rejecting pleas in the 1930s, for example, for federal funding of academic science.

This wariness between academic scientists and the federal government dissolved, so this story goes, with the onset of World War II, when the government once again called upon scientists — most notably, the nation's physicists — for assistance. In the course of developing war technologies, both the military and the physicists recognized fully the advantages of a lasting association. The relationship was then cemented during the cold war, particularly during the Korean War, through federal (primarily military) patronage to academic scientists and through the involvement of these scientists as advisors to the federal government. While most attention has focused on the physics community, the general assumption has been that the relationship that developed between physicists and the state was eventually replicated by other academic scientists and social scientists. The federal government came to recognize the usefulness of a broad array of scientific and social scientific disciplines in fighting the cold war; the scientists, aware of the enor-

mous prestige enjoyed by the physicists, eagerly sought to emulate them by developing ties to state patrons.12

Implicit, if not explicit, in this interpretation, is the view that academic scientists and the military reshaped the university and the kinds of knowledge produced within it, pulling the university into a relationship with the federal government and rendering it subject to the interests of the newly empowered academic scientists. Debates among those critical of this development turn on whether military patrons "used" the scientists who accepted the proffered patronage or whether the scientists actively sought and developed military patronage for their own purposes. In either scenario, the university itself is rendered a passive institution, a passivity indicated in the very title — "the uses of the university" — of Kerr's commentary on the multiversity.13

This story changes, however, when the university — the home of the scientists and the institution into which patronage flowed — is placed at the center. Focusing directly on the institution and the relationships within it reminds us that although the scientists and scholars within its walls may be independent professionals by training, they are also employees of a corporate entity. This fact once disgruntled Thorstein Veblen, who fulminated against the leaders of American universities, the "Captains of Industry" and the "Captains of Erudition," as he called them, who insisted on treating professionals as mere employees.14 These Captains of Industry and Erudition did not simply fade from the scene in midcentury to be replaced by supine administrators who were controlled by patrons and scientists. Although some academic scientists and scholars did indeed gain leverage over university administrators by developing extensive patronage, most remained, to varying extents, bound by institutional constraints and rules. Just as in Veblen's day, university administrators, in their capacity to hire and fire and to distribute institutional resources, played a significant role in determining who gained a voice in the academic world and who did not, which kinds of research were emphasized and which were not. One of the arguments of this book is that the leaders of the nation's universities, along with patrons and some scientists, strongly influenced the creation of the cold war university. For both institutional and ideological reasons, they favored and promoted the development of heavily subsidized scientific work and stressed the production of knowledge over the education of students.

Making the university the context as well as the subject of study not only highlights the fact that universities are places of employment and institutions in which all do not have equal power. It also provides an

opportunity to broaden the study of science and patronage beyond a single discipline or type of patron to encompass the activities of professors in a variety of academic departments and to include multiple sources of research support. Expanding the focus in this way not only helps correct for the disproportionate attention that has been paid to the history of academic physics but also exposes the error of simply positing a mimetic relationship and imposing on other academic disciplines the pattern of development of postwar physics.15 At Stanford, for example, the statistics, electrical engineering, psychology, and philosophy departments were among the early, eager pursuers of federal patronage, as were some, but not all, of Stanford's physicists. And the physics department was the last, rather than the first, university department to permit faculty members to be hired with government, rather than university, funds. In the case of the social sciences, private foundations, rather than the federal government, were the most generous supporters of social science research in the early cold war.16

None of these findings is easily encompassed by the general theory that physicists established a relationship with federal patrons which was then emulated by other academic scientists. Again, the role of academic administrators, to whose authority all departments in the university were subject, must be considered. This study examines the involvement of university administrators in negotiating with research patrons — both the federal government and private foundations — and in pressuring scientists — physical, natural, and social scientists — to develop external support for their work.

By focusing on the activities of academic administrators, particularly in relation to the social sciences, it is also possible to bring together the literature on the postwar patronage of academic science and the literature on McCarthyism and American universities. The most recent work on universities and the Red Scare has stressed the role of top university administrators in collaborating with congressional committees or intelligence agencies in the establishment of intellectual conformity on the nation's campuses. Historian Ellen Schrecker has suggested that individual social scientists, responding to the general climate of repression, adopted "apolitical" and "scientific" approaches to the study of society to protect themselves from political controversy and possible accusations from red-baiters. Historians of science have also noted the prominence and popularity of quantitative and scientistic approaches to studying society in this period but have suggested that the interests of patrons explains this development.17

There is, however, another (and not incompatible) explanation that takes into account both patronage and the relationships between academic administrators and scientists and connects individual motivation directly to observable institutional pressure. University administrators clearly had a stake in eliminating potentially controversial teachers from their campuses, sometimes for ideological reasons, but also for practical ones — they sought to avoid controversies that might alienate patrons of the university. They additionally had a strong stake in maintaining (or achieving) national prestige for their institutions. With respect to disciplines such as political science, these concerns dictated an emphasis on quantitative and behavioral methods, which were deemed both apolitical and scientific and for which generous external support was available. Thus, while surely there were particular instances in which individual social scientists freely chose to adopt a quantitative approach to their work, this study shows as well how university administrators at Stanford sought to channel intellectual efforts to meet the concerns of trustees and patrons. This result was achieved not so much by coercing particular individuals (although this did occur) as by applying pressure in favor of quantitative and subsidized work at the departmental level through the exercise of administrative power over faculty hiring, promotions, and salaries. This shaping of the academic disciplines to reflect the interests and values of patrons cannot be seen in studies that look primarily at the relationships between patrons and individuals within the university. Similarly, by focusing on those periods of crisis when ideological conformity was achieved through selective dismissals of faculty members, we overlook the subtler but perhaps more consistent way in which intellectual channeling occurs.

In addition to examining developments across disciplines, taking the university as the context of study makes it possible to look at the prominent members of a discipline along with their lesser-known colleagues and their interactions as members of a common department. The tendency among historians of science has been to give a predominant voice to those scientists whose work and methods were deemed "nationally significant" or became the standard, and to highlight the activities of so-called academic entrepreneurs. Intentional or otherwise, this approach leaves the impression of inevitability and consensus. This is misleading. We need both to recognize the historical context of definitions of academic "success" and "national significance" and to listen to the voices of those who questioned these definitions.

Dissent is not a feature usually associated with the university of the

1940s and 1950s. A search for open political debate in this period, for example, and particularly for vocal moral opposition to the university's involvement in weapons research in peacetime, will yield little. But the university of this period was, in fact, riven with conflict. This conflict included occasional disagreements between scientists and their research patrons about control — over the direction of the sponsored research, over the workplace, over security restrictions. Most dissent at Stanford, however, focused on the university itself and, more specifically, on the institution's leaders. It was the university's administrators, rather than the patrons of academic research, who were accused of devaluing teaching and the life of contemplation, of seeking to impose upon the faculty the priorities of external patrons, and of violating professorial and departmental autonomy.

The dissenters, of course, constituted a minority of the faculty and were most often, but certainly not always, professors who were in some way marginalized within the university. Recovering the voices of those who were in open disagreement is important, however, for they make clear that the creation of the cold war university did not proceed smoothly. While its development may have been overdetermined, it was not predetermined. This study emphasizes the conflicts that occurred, not because internecine academic battles make for good historical gossip, but in the belief that illumination of these conflicts will clarify what those at the time believed was at stake and what would be lost as well as gained in the transformation of the university.

Finally, studying closely one university, rather than a group of institutions, makes it possible to understand better the relationships both within the university and between the university and its various patrons. Those studies, both historical and sociological, that have examined a group of leading universities have, because of their scope and the vast amount of data available, tended to rely on functional or structural analyses.18 While helpful in identifying broad trends, these works have been less successful in explaining the dynamics of change. The focus on functional groups — trustees, administrators, professors, patrons — as having separate and well-defined interests and spheres masks the shared interests, political ideologies, and even personal relationships that cross functional categories and link, for example, some trustees to some patrons and some administrators to some professors.19 Further, the emphasis on group identity as defined by institutional function masks disagreements within the group and inequalities based on access to external funding as well as on professional status.

This study makes clear that while academic administrators played an important role in transforming Stanford University, they were not acting alone. They worked closely with some scientists and scholars who shared their interests and goals (and in a number of cases went on to become university administrators themselves), as well as with the patrons of academic science. Had these groups not overlapped or shared interests and had professors, for example, strongly identified themselves as a distinct and separate group, the postwar university might have developed very differently than it did.

To illuminate why university administrators and some academic scientists would engage in transforming their own institutions requires an understanding not just of the opportunities provided by the appearance of federal support for academic science after the Second World War but also of the circumstances under which scientists and their universities operated in the decade preceding the war. Serious consideration of the earlier period presents a challenge to those studies that suggest that the collaboration of academic scientists and the military during World War II is in itself sufficient to explain the postwar transformation of the university.20 This book argues that the development of the postwar university cannot be understood fully without taking into account the responses of university administrators to the collapse of the American economy in the 1930s and to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

The Great Depression affected the nation's universities and their scientists; it was particularly devastating for private institutions. For the politically conservative leaders of most of the nation's universities, problems of finance paled in comparison to feared changes that the New Deal might impose on the nation's political economy. A number of university administrators, imagining the specter of federal assistance and control, sought to solve institutional financial problems by forging close alliances with private industry. Among this group were Ray Lyman Wilbur, president of Stanford, and Herbert Hoover, the former president of the United States, who was also a Stanford trustee and Wilbur's close friend and advisor.

Recognition of the constraints of depending on industrial patronage—limited interest on the part of industry and patrons' challenges to the scientists' professional autonomy—coincided not just with the mobilization of science for the Second World War but also with the

development of a relationship between American universities and the federal government based on the federal contract. Historian Larry Owens has perceptively pointed to the significance of the contract, both symbol and instrument of the marketplace, in bringing about an alliance between the state and institutions traditionally mistrustful of the state.21 While the contract alone might have sufficed to reassure wary university administrators that they could enjoy federal patronage and insulation from democratic control, it was the offer to subsidize the universities themselves through the payment of indirect, or overhead, costs—an offer made first by the wartime National Defense Research Committee, administered by the conservative Vannevar Bush—that proved irresistible to university administrators.

The generous contractual terms provided universities by the federal government during World War II made university administrators eager to perpetuate the relationship with the federal government after the war. Even so, the first years of the postwar period were not marked by the immediate emergence of the federal-university relationship that predominated during the cold war. The period between the end of World War II and the onset of the Korean War was one of negotiation, between universities and the federal government and within universities, over the form that the federal-university relationship would take, and particularly how universities would integrate federal contracts into their financial and academic structures. At Stanford and other universities that had not been sites of federally sponsored wartime laboratories, the acceptance of federal patronage after the war did not simply indicate a willingness to perpetuate a war-born relationship; it required an explicit decision.22

Among the advocates of untempered exploitation of postwar federal patronage was Frederick Terman, an electrical engineer by training and for most of his academic career an administrator at Stanford. As others have recognized, no examination of Stanford can ignore Terman's role in guiding the university along the path it took and helping bring it to national prominence. It is important to remember, however, that Terman was not solely responsible for reshaping Stanford, nor was he unique among university administrators generally. Moreover, it is inaccurate to view Terman simply as an academic entrepreneur. This is a much-used term but one that is inadequate for fully explaining the behavior of those members of the university who avidly seek patronage.23 First, the term creates the erroneous impression of an individual acting independently, making and seizing opportunities unconstrained by institutions. Most professors, however, engaged in entrepreneurial be-

havior precisely in response to institutional constraints. Terman and his counterparts at other universities, by contrast, may best be understood not simply as academic entrepreneurs but as administrators consciously working to make entrepreneurship the normative behavior of university professors.

Entrepreneur has also come to be used as a description of motivation as well as of behavior, implying that the academic entrepreneur is in search of personal or institutional wealth and aggrandizement. Undoubtedly true for some, this term is entirely insufficient for comprehending Terman and others who were strongly guided by ideological conviction. Recognizing the importance of ideology, Terman becomes much more than an administrator avidly seeking patronage in order to make Stanford the Harvard or the MIT of the West. By situating him within the historical context of Progressive Era and cold war ideas about politics and science, we can see how these ideas shaped his vision of the university and its relationship to society.

It is in this context that Terman becomes an interesting historical personage. An admirer of Herbert Hoover and the son of Lewis Terman, a noted developer and promoter of intelligence tests, Frederick Terman carried into the cold war particular features of corporate progressive ideology—a passion for quantifying and rationalizing behavior and processes, a belief in expertise, and a vision of social and economic organization in which independent experts guide and serve the needs of private corporations and advise those agencies of the federal government that promote and assist private enterprise.24 For Terman, the cold war provided the opportunity for realizing this model of society and for making the university an essential part of it. The university, he believed, should be a highly rationalized and efficient producer of scientific and technical knowledge and trained "manpower," autonomous from but essential to both private industry and the federal government. This was to be a three-way institutional partnership, or a "win-win-win" relationship, as Terman called it.25 The extent to which relationships among Stanford, industry, and the federal government after World War II conformed to the ideal society conceived by prewar corporate progressives was less an inevitable culmination of earlier, prewar tendencies than it was the result of powerful members of the university community seeking to build and develop such relationships as required by institutional needs and inspired by ideological convictions. These individuals made common cause with those within the federal government and industry whose interests meshed with their own.

The result, for Stanford, was national influence, academic prestige,

and wealth. For some, this is a story of one university's rise to "greatness," a tribute to a handful of resourceful and determined administrators and scientists. For others, it is a story of decline, of scientific talents misdirected by a warfare state, of greatness purchased at the price of dependence on the military-industrial complex. Perhaps, however, this narrative is best understood neither as the story of a rise to prominence nor as a fall from grace but rather as a story of evolving institutional contradictions, which assumed a particular form in midcentury and which, in the post–cold war period, will be reshaped rather than resolved.

Continues...

Excerpted from Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanfordby Rebecca S. Lowen Copyright © 1997 by Rebecca S. Lowen. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: California University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0520205413
• ISBN 13: 9780520205413
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 300