The American Research University from World War II to World Wide Web: Governments, the Private Sector, and the Emerging Meta-University (review)

As president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Charles Vest publicly acknowledged MIT's history of gender discrimination in the sciences and supported reforms to correct it. He fought the Justice Department's challenge to the Overlap Group's joint agreement to avoid bidding wars for students by offering uniform need-based financial aid awards. When many other universities were jumping into for-profit online learning, Vest championed the MIT faculty's vision of offering course materials around the world for free through the OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative.

As such a prominent thought leader in higher education, it was fitting that Vest should be invited to serve as the 2005 Clark Kerr Lecturer on the Role of Higher Education in Society at the University of California; that those lectures would be published in a compact, accessible version, much like Kerr's own famous The Uses of the University; and that Vest would play on and update Kerr's famous coined term "multiversity" with his own 21st century "meta-university."

Vest is an unapologetic admirer of the American research university. He gushes, "I remain hopelessly in love with the residential university—with Clark Kerr's multiversity" (p. 91). Vest's is not, thus, a book for would-be reformers. Vest's meta-university does not replace or amend the multiversity, but rather layers "ever-expanding technological tools" such as "globally created and shared teaching materials, scholarly archives, and even laboratories" on top of the existing campuses (pp. 92, 108, 109).

An interesting contrast between Kerr and Vest is that Kerr, in 1963, was coming to terms with the role of the university in society: "We are just now perceiving that the university's invisible product, knowledge, may be the most powerful single element in our culture" (2001, p. xii). For Vest, four decades later, the role of the university in research and the economy was a given, and that is the most prominent theme of the book—covering everything from the role of "modern technology in the economic development of the state" to intellectual property and the growth of competitive research funding (pp. 24, 29, 47).

But also different is that, in Vest's words, Kerr saw: "As our universities evolved, they developed a complex web of purposes, which created increasing tensions between the goals of societal utility and academic purity" (p. 2). Indeed, Kerr (2001) himself wrote, "The university is so many things to so many different people that it must, of necessity, be partially at war with itself" (p. 7). Vest also sees a complex web; but where Kerr often criticized the multiversity, Vest admits that he was schooled in the research paradigm and embraces it as a "noble and enabling place" and as a "mosaic to be savored and celebrated" (p. 4).

As a compilation of lectures, the book suffers from the limitations of its genre. Obviously, one cannot cover every topic in detail in three lectures. But what this genre does so well, which will be of both contemporary and historical importance, is to present the reader with a leader's insights and with a snapshot of what the research university in the United States looks like today: how it is funded, how it is influenced by the private sector, how it interacts with local, state, and federal government, and how it confronts pressing societal issues. Indeed, Vest touches on topics ranging from endowments and faculty salaries to the privatization of public universities, 9–11, government earmarks, and Silicon Valley.

Several sections of the book are of special interest. Vest's overview of the federal government's waxing and waning interest in international openness and exchange, extending back to the 1980s and coming up to the post 9–11 environment, provides insights into some rulings...