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.
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 Universitatis (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
