Universities and the Public Good: Research, Education, and Democracy since 1945

In recent years, universities have once again become the scene of political conflict. While social movements challenge traditional forms of teaching and research, governments, even in some democratic countries, have recently sought to bring universities under increased control. At the center of these struggles lies, not least, the question of who has the authority to define the social and cultural role of the university and its relationship to what is labeled as the “public good.” To understand these complex contemporary problems and their deeper historical dimension in the transatlantic world, one must look in particular at the history of the university after 1945, as Axel Jansen emphasized in his introduction. The conference at Herrenhausen Palace, sponsored by the Volkswagen Foundation, brought together about 50 researchers and practitioners to discuss how self-conceptions, expectations, and agendas of universities and of various societal actors vis-à-vis universities, had evolved and transformed in recent decades.

The opening roundtable, moderated by Axel Jansen and Charlotte Lerg, returned to this basic idea. In their opening statements, Suzanne L. Marchand, Julie Reuben, and Susanne Schregel introduced themes, sharpened key concepts, and raised questions that went on to provide an important conceptual framework for the conference as a whole. Their attempt to situate the historiography of the university made clear, first, that the diagnosis of a public trust crisis afflicting universities, which has intensified since the 1970s, represents a central interpretive pattern, but is by no means uncontested. Second, the social responsibility ascribed to universities has, in recent decades, shifted toward a utilitarian understanding of the university, while critical thinking and the capacity to imagine alternative worlds have come to be appreciated less and less. Third, the discipline of history is tasked not only with identifying such dynamics but also—in the case of neoliberalism or the emancipation movements since the 1960s, for example—with explaining them. Fourth, the roundtable drew attention to the sociopolitical impact of historians, who can decide which stories they wish to tell in order to strengthen public trust in institutions of higher education, for example.

The first panel, titled “Europeanizing Higher Education and Research” and moderated by Richard Wetzell, took up this basic idea and developed it further. In their joint presentation, Johan Östling and Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt focused attention on pan-European initiatives in higher education policy, such as the Erasmus Program launched in 1987, and interpreted the years from 1985 to 2000 as a phase of accelerated Europeanization. They showed that “Europe” could have very different meanings for different universities: whereas the universities of Lund and Ghent associated Europe with new funding opportunities, the University of Valladolid in post-dictatorial Spain understood Europeanization as a vehicle of democratization.

In a public panel discussion titled “Can Universities Save Democracy?”, which drew about 200 attendees, moderator Johannes Völz and panelists Ian McNeely, Shalini Randeira, and Till van Rahden continued the discussion of the opening roundtable in an explicitly normative register. In addition to the specific situations in higher education policy in the United States and Hungary, the central question concerned the social role that universities should play. The idea that the university as a “center of independent thought” (Robert Maynard Hutchins) occupies a central position in safeguarding democracy was a core theme of the evening, as was the consideration that critical reflection is possible only under certain structural and discursive conditions, which the university itself must continually cultivate. (Full review and a video recording of the panel here) 

The second conference day began with a panel on “Changing Missions of American Universities,” moderated by Charlotte Lerg. In his presentation, Ethan Schrum characterized former University of California president Clark Kerr as a proponent of a new and soon dominant conception of the university that emerged after the Second World War: the “instrumental university,” as Kerr envisioned it, did not aim primarily to cultivate critical thinking but rather to solve social problems with useful knowledge. With his genealogy of the “instrumental university,” implemented from the 1950s onward in the form of “organized research units,” Schrum offered an explanatory approach that traces contemporary market mechanisms in higher education not to the neoliberalism of the 1970s, but to longer traditions. Drawing on the example of Ernst Kantorowicz, Ariel Yinggi Tang reconstructed a normatively opposed, explicitly humanistic conception of the relationship between the university and the public good. In 1949, during the McCarthy era, Kantorowicz spoke out before the Senate of the University of California against the loyalty oath that required university employees to affirm their loyalty to the state. According to Tang, Kantorowicz understood the task of the university not as ideological self-commitment, but as rooted in “human dignity” and, as part of that, in academic freedom.

In the third panel, “Universities as Research Institutions since 1945,” moderated by Charles Dorn, Emily Andrea Steinfeld used the biographies of the two Austrian sociologists Herta Herzog and Marie Jahoda as a probe to explore the academic potential available to women scholars in British and American exile. Whereas exile opened up entirely new opportunities for Jahoda, culminating in her role in shaping the new discipline of social psychology, Herzog, as a woman working in the Office of Radio Research, was marginalized and therefore turned her back on academic sociology in favor of market research. Linda Eisenmann complemented this biographical approach with a quantitative analysis of the situation of women in academia and showed that the “golden age of research funding” in the United States after the Second World War largely excluded women. Despite measures such as affirmative action, women remained marginalized in the most prestigious research universities and research fields well into the late twentieth century, which Eisenmann traced to a combination of gender-specific career decisions and structural discrimination.

On the afternoon of the second conference day, a total of six doctoral candidates had the opportunity, within the framework of three sessions of the Junior Scholar’s Forum, to present their dissertation projects, each of which was commented on by a senior researcher. In the session “Ivory Tower in Context,” chaired by Richard Wetzell, Amit Kumar Sharma emphasized the role of postcolonial justice movements in democratizing German universities after 1945. He identified as a decisive promoter of this success story the “institutionalization of justice” in the late twentieth century in the form of gender equality offices, anti-discrimination agencies, and, most recently, thematic research centers. Next, Peter Simpson presented a “utility analysis” of those programs at the Harz University of Applied Sciences that, going beyond the traditional remit of teaching and research, explicitly serve social or economic objectives (third mission). Based on interviews with staff members of the Department of Business Administration, Simpson assessed how effective and efficient third mission programs are.

The subsequent session “Academia, Theory and Justice,” chaired by Axel Jansen and commented on by Charles Dorn, addressed the transformation processes in higher education after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Aaron Schulze challenged the thesis of “catch-up modernization,” according to which East German universities were simply remodeled along West German lines during reunification. Using the example of TU Dresden, Schulze instead demonstrated the intrinsic dynamic of East German universities, which he described as an interlocking of Humboldtian rhetoric with a neoliberal orientation toward third-party funding and management techniques. In his paper, Andrei Olteanu described the devastating consequences of the one-sided orientation of higher education toward the industrial sector in communist Romania after 1989: an elite of well-trained engineers and technicians suddenly faced no job prospects in the wake of economic collapse, left the country, and thereby triggered an unprecedented brain drain.

The third and final Junior Scholars’ Forum session, devoted to “Architectures of Innovation” and chaired by Karl Haikola, featured comments by Linda Perkins on contributions by David Bates and William Krause. Using the example of computer science at Stanford University, Bates reconstructed how an “outsider epistemology” and its specific form of “academic creativity” were institutionalized. He identified as the core of this process an “institutional hybridization” that enabled an open exchange of knowledge from which the wider public also benefited. William Krause took a critical view of the rhetoric of creativity in his paper on American immunologist Jonas Salk, who in 1960 founded the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, which became one of the most prestigious extra-university life science institutes in North America. In the mid-twentieth century, Krause argued, experts such as Salk himself fueled a “crisis of expertise” by placing in the public eye, at the expense of university contexts, the creativity of outstanding individual scientists at the center of narratives of scientific progress. In this way, Krause developed an alternative and refreshingly provocative explanatory approach to current diagnoses of crisis.

The second conference day concluded with Mitchell Ash’s public keynote entitled “Higher Education in the United States and Europe since 1945: Game Over? Multiple Transformations and the Current Crisis.” In his tour d’horizon of seven decades of higher education history, he cast his net widely in order to underscore all the more forcefully the new quality of the “current crisis.” The most recent attacks by the U.S. government on universities, he argued, are not simply part of yet another transformation in the long history of higher education. Rather, branding universities as the enemy marks a rupture with the postwar consensus according to which the state, as the leading agent of research funding, supports relatively autonomous universities. The public keynote and the ensuing discussion were moderated by Richard Wetzell.

The third and final conference day began with reflections on “Local Roles of Universities,” in which Inna Semenenko and Mark Freeman told two contrasting stories. Semenenko first reported on the recent, challenging history of the Volodymyr Dahl East Ukrainian National University, which, because of the war in Ukraine, relocated from Luhansk to Kyiv. Under the impact of the war, the university not only demonstrated “extreme resilience under crisis conditions.” As a displaced university, it also—so Semenenko argued—acquired entirely new roles for the local population: from coordinating the evacuation of Luhansk to serving as a point of contact for displaced persons. By contrast, Freeman spoke about the loss of local values. For a long time, adult education at the University of Cambridge was characterized by open access and the absence of certification and, after 1945, was regarded as part of a “Great Tradition.” Yet this regional dimension of the university became increasingly marginalized in the late twentieth century. As the subsequent discussion, moderated by Christina Morina, showed, the panel offered impulses to conceive the public good to which universities contribute not only in terms of research, but also with reference to their manifold functions for local communities.

The fifth panel on “Epistemic Turning Points,” moderated by Till van Rahden, opened with Gregory Jones-Katz’ paper on the transatlantic culture war on gender, postcolonial, and other critical theories since the late twentieth century. He distanced himself from those voices that hold “theory” responsible for problematic tendencies in left identity politics and instead advanced the thesis that conservative and far-right actors draw a substantively distorted caricature of “theory” in order to present the academic left as a danger. Adam Knowles argued in his presentation that analytic philosophy, with its atomistic ethics, presupposes a self-responsible individual and thereby excludes structural questions a priori. In so doing, he suggested, the currently dominant trend in philosophy implicitly and unreflectively makes itself an accomplice to neoliberal governmentality.

In the sixth panel, devoted to the “Plurality of Values,” Stefanie Coché showed how evangelical colleges, which did not understand themselves as part of the liberal consensus but rather as bastions of conservatism after 1945, responded to the challenges posed by the civil rights movement and the women’s movement. Coché emphasized that evangelical colleges such as Fuller Theological Seminary were, in the context of accreditation, remarkably open to diversity initiatives such as scholarships for ethnic minorities. In doing so, she demonstrated that the dichotomy between progressive movements and conservative backlash is sometimes too crude for the history of higher education. Michael Hevel examined the legal struggles for recognition waged by LGBTQ+ students from the 1970s to the 1990s. Focusing on George Hite Wilson, president of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual Alliance in Alabama, Hevel highlighted the significance of lawsuits brought by LGBTQ+ college students for the gay rights movement more generally. The subsequent discussion, moderated by Raphael Rössel, tended to interpret the two papers as an indication of a fundamentally successful liberalization of universities after 1945.

In the seventh panel, “Centers and Margins,” moderated by Jonathan Zimmerman, Christine Ogren showed how Lyle M. Spencer, the namesake of the Spencer Foundation, as a member of the university’s governing board, played a key role in ensuring that Roosevelt University in Chicago acted on the basis of an “equity mindset” in the aftermath of the Second World War. While most elite universities in major cities became more socially selective in the postwar period, Roosevelt University explicitly championed diversity, equal opportunity, and inclusion, thus becoming a precursor to the eventual democratization of universities. Ian McNeily presented his newly published book The University Unfettered, in which he recounts the recent history of a single (unnamed) public university in the United States between the financial crisis of 2008 and the COVID pandemic. At the same time, this case study served as the basis for developing a pointed thesis with general applicability: contrary to popular prophecies of doom, U.S. public universities, he argued, have emerged strengthened from the crises of the recent past. Their competition with private elite universities has only intensified their longstanding commitment to the public good. With this book, McNeily once again positions himself against the pessimistic interpretation of a current public trust crisis in universities.

The eighth and final panel of the conference was devoted to the “Transatlantic Connections” of higher education policy. In his paper, Ethan Ris showed how philanthropic and inter-university organizations such as the American Council on Education and the Ford Foundation influenced higher education policy in the United States and Germany after the Second World War. He argued that they were driving forces in the liberalization of higher education policy. Caitlin Harvey demonstrated that American foundations such as the Carnegie Corporation crucially supported the British government in the twentieth century in its efforts to establish colleges along Western lines in the British colonies. In particular, Harvey showed that London’s “special relations” scheme, launched in 1947, involved intensive cooperation.

The conference concluded with a discussion on “Past Transformations and Current Uncertainties for Universities” led by Charlotte Lerg and Jonathan Zimmerman together with their panelists Alexander Mayer, Ethan Ris, and Anoush F. Terjanian. While Terjanian, in view of looming global crises, regarded the displaced university as the model for the university of the future, Ris, in light of the success story of higher education since 1945, urged restraint in pronouncements about radical rupture. Mayer argued that future historiography of the university should pay greater attention to the perspectives on universities held by actors outside academia.

If the strength of the final discussion once again lay in the disagreement on its diagnoses, the interventions nevertheless made clear—and this applies to the conference as a whole—that current challenges can prompt new research questions. In debates about the transatlantic history and public significance of universities since 1945, the discipline of history can not only contribute to explaining current developments. In the discussions following the papers, conference participants repeatedly drew on history as a reservoir for developing alternative answers to the question of what universities should be today. Crisis periods, at any rate, do not seem to be the worst of times for the historiography of universities.

Selected conference panels will be published by the Gerda Henkel Foundation on its L.I.S.A. Wissenschaftsportal. 

Jonathan Holst (University of Gießen)

The conference is kindly funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.

Please note: This CFP addresses two groups. We invite scholars to submit paper proposals for a General Workshop. We also invite emerging scholars (doctoral students) to submit proposals to receive feedback on their projects by senior scholars in a special Young Scholars Forum set aside for this purpose during the conference. More on this below.

As the controversies currently engulfing colleges and universities around the globe indicate, institutions of higher education remain sites of conflict and contestation among competing social, cultural, economic, and ideological forces. These conflicts have deep historical roots. During the heyday of the so-called liberal consensus after World War II, universities on both sides of the Atlantic were celebrated as symbols of enlightened liberalism, promoting a democratic ethos and social responsibility. The 1960s saw these traditions tested and reinterpreted amidst generational conflicts over the ideals and realities of participatory democracy. By the early 1980s, higher education institutions faced twin challenges: a conservative backlash and the rise of neoliberal economic ideologies.

To better understand higher education’s role in the current international political climate, the proposed conference provides an opportunity to reflect on the history of colleges and universities in North America and Europe since 1945. Characterized as “world institutions” whose dedication to scientific and humanistic endeavors seemed to align with a universalistic liberalism, colleges and universities nevertheless responded to global opportunities and pressures from their own particular perspectives and perceived societal roles.

While universities have long facilitated academic exchange, the period since World War II witnessed three important developments. First, a new and unprecedented focus on science, and technology brought universities, as research institutions, to the forefront of public attention and policy considerations. Second, a resurgent discourse on democratic structures and civic engagement compelled universities to reassess their public mission in light of emerging concerns about elitism, accessibility, and public service. Third, with the advent of mass higher education, universities engaged in a new wave of globalization through academic exchange, the proliferation of study abroad programs, and international fellowship programs.

These developments provide a framework for conference participants to examine the relationship between North American and European universities as institutions, nodes of networks, and competitors in research, education, and funding within an evolving political landscape. As universities during the second half of the twentieth century became, according to sociologists David John Frank and John W. Meyer, “the centerpiece” of a globalized knowledge society, they were simultaneously shaped by local, regional, and national settings as well as by cultural and political expectations and demands.

The conveners invite contributions that explore the history of colleges and universities in the transatlantic region as centers of education and research since 1945. Topics to be discussed include:

• How have higher education institutions defined their responsibilities and roles for various communities, such as regional, national, or global communities? How have they responded to cultural and political criticism of their work since 1945?
• How significant has the transformation of universities in North America and Europe been since 1945? How substantial are contemporary claims to innovation, such as Clark Kerr’s designation of the “multiversity”? By becoming global players, have universities evolved into new and different kinds of institutions? What, if anything, ties them to older models? What models did they seek to emulate, and what models were actually implemented?
• How have universities navigated post-colonial social, political, and economic transformations, both domestically and globally? How have justice movements influenced institutional structures, policies, and purposes?
• What role have political initiatives played in shaping higher education, particularly transnational or global initiatives (e.g., the OECD, the EU, the Bologna Process)?
• What has been the relevance and impact of transnational emulation, such as striving to meet European or “American” models?
• How have intellectual, political, and managerial agendas shaped the national and/or global roles of universities, fields of research, and education?
• What is the history of the global expansion of North American and European universities abroad? What has prompted global expansion and cooperation, and what has been the effect on research, teaching, and the public standing and role of universities?
• What has been the impact of shifts in funding sources on research and education? How have economic crises and government financial policies affected universities?
• What has been the impact of management agendas and styles in universities on research and education, and vice versa? What are the trajectories of engagement between the different levels and functions of universities?
• How have universities balanced initiatives for science diplomacy, international student mobility, their commitment to research and reflection, and their responsibilities (including legal national security mandates) to protect key technologies and knowledge? What strategies have been developed to respond to strict oversight or outright hostility towards universities in autocratic and some democratic states?
• How have institutions, along with their students, faculty, and administrations, navigated populist challenges to the role of universities in society? How have universities been affected by the reinterpretation and appropriation of some of their core ideals (from academic freedom to liberal education or democratic discourse) by counter-movements, technological development, or geopolitical challenges?

The conference will bring together scholars from diverse fields, including history (such as the history of science and the history of education), sociology, and science studies, as well as related disciplines. We will also invite university leaders and policymakers to join the conversation. The conference will feature panels, roundtable discussions, and a keynote address. We expect to invite up to 50 colleagues to participate. The conveners aim to publish contributions as a special issue in a peer-reviewed journal or as an essay collection.

As part of this conference, three distinct paper sessions will be designated as a Young Scholars Forum, providing doctoral students with an opportunity to receive feedback on their pre-circulated papers from senior scholars. These sessions will offer emerging scholars a platform to discuss their work and network during a critical phase of their careers.

The conference will be held at Herrenhausen Palace in Hanover (Germany). The deadline for proposals is January 19, 2025. Please upload a paper proposal for the General Workshop or the Young Scholars Forum via this link. A proposal consists of single PDF file containing a brief description of the research project (up to 300 words), a brief CV (1 or 2 pages), and contact information. Successful applicants will be notified in February 2025.

Accommodation will be arranged and paid for by the conference organizers. Participants will make their own travel arrangements; funding subsidies for travel may be available upon request for selected scholars, especially those who might not otherwise be able to attend the workshop, including junior scholars and scholars from universities with limited resources.

Please contact Nicola Hofstetter (hofstetter-phelps@ghi-dc.org) if you have any difficulties submitting your information online or if you have other questions related to the event.