In The Instrumental University, Ethan Schrum provides an illuminating genealogy of the educational environment in which administrators, professors, and students live and work today. After World War II, research universities in the United States underwent a profound mission change. The Instrumental University combines intellectual, institutional, and political history to reinterpret postwar American life through the changes in higher education.

Acknowledging but rejecting the prevailing conception of the Cold War university largely dedicated to supporting national security, Schrum provides a more complete and contextualized account of the American research university between 1945 and 1970. Uncovering a pervasive instrumental understanding of higher education during that era, The Instrumental University shows that universities framed their mission around solving social problems and promoting economic development as central institutions in what would soon be called the knowledge economy. In so doing, these institutions took on more capitalistic and managerial tendencies and, as a result, marginalized founding ideals, such as pursuit of knowledge in academic disciplines and freedom of individual investigators.

The technocratic turn eroded some practices that made the American university special. Yet, as Schrum suggests, the instrumental university was not yet the neoliberal university of the 1970s and onwards in which market considerations trumped all others. University of California president Clark Kerr and other innovators in higher education were driven by a progressive impulse that drew on an earlier tradition grounded in a concern for the common good and social welfare.

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A striking feature of this important chapter in the history of US higher education is how networked the leaders were: this was an upper-class boys club of policy-oriented academics. This detailed book is instructive and penetrating in examining how the current academic world came to be.

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Ethan Schrum 's The Instrumental University dissects an important, understudied unit that blossomed between 1945 and 1970 – the university based 'Organized Research Unit,' more familiar by its abbreviation, 'ORU.' Schrum takes readers on a fantastic voyage to see how some influential university presidents in conjunction with leaders of major foundations and selected faculty members collaborated to incorporate this new entity as a fixture in the established academic structure still familiar today.

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Ethan Schrum's book is an important contribution to the literature on the development of American research universities after World War II. He offers a useful corrective to the assumption that the increasing corporatization of American universities in recent decades is due solely to the rise of neoliberalism and to the imposition by constituencies beyond the campus, particularly conservative politicians and business leaders, of a narrow economically driven conception of the mission of research institutions.

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This is a fascinating, persuasive, and important book that provides a new perspective on history of the modern social sciences. It should interest anyone who wants to understand how universities got to where they are today.