The Rise and Decline of the Anglo-American Public University

This chapter engages with the historical developments of the public university: it provides an overview of its rise in the post-war period and subsequent decline with the rise of academic capitalism in the 1980s. Post-war mass higher education set the society in motion towards something like a knowledge society, a society where knowledge is widely disseminated and no longer confined to the elite. Universities embodied societies’ democratic aspirations. Access to higher education was deemed a priority. Furthermore, it was an era where the institutional autonomy of university was respected, and there was a de facto commitment to academic freedom. Academic capitalism represents the contemporary era where universities have to prove their value to the world of practical affairs. Academic disciplines are re-stratified based largely on extra-academic applicability. In a nutshell, the theory provides an account of universities as we know them. England and the USA will be the focus of this chapter. These two countries represent some of the clearest trajectories of the public university. They also stand as pioneers in the world of higher education, subsequently trailblazing a model of the university which has been widely followed globally in recent decades.