Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford

In recent years, historians Stuart Leslie, Michael Dennis, Larry Owens, Bernard Carlson, John Servos, Daniel Kevles, and Roger Geiger, among others, have explored the development of American universities. Most have examined the amazingly rapid development of American research universities immediately following World War II, finding these institutions the focal point for a constellation of issues related to science, technology, engineering, and research. Rebecca Lowen’s book joins this distinguished body of scholarship and makes an important contribution to understanding both the growth of an important university and developments in American society during the cold war.

Lowen is interested in how American research universities changed during the 1950s. Thus she begins, as have Paul Forman, Stuart Leslie, and others, by asking how the cold war altered higher education as the federal government underwrote stupendous growth at research universities. But Lowen wants to know more than whether science was changed. Rather, she seeks to understand in detail how a single institution—Stanford University—changed after World War II. Correctly, she tells us that Stanford “was an obvious choice for a study of the ‘federal grant university’” (p. 6). Stanford forged relationships with federal agencies early and demonstrated perhaps better than any other university how federal contracts could turn a good school into a powerhouse research university. Most important, Frederick Terman, perhaps the best academic entrepreneur of the postwar era, was Stanford’s dean of engineering and later its provost.

Other scholars have recognized Stanford’s importance; Leslie, for example, used case studies from Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for his study of American science during the cold war. Lowen, however, examined the entire university in detail, beginning with Stanford in the 1930s as the school faced potentially severe financial challenges. Administrators and trustees found that funds from the government offered a means of survival, even as they feared that government money might bring a loss of autonomy. But through World War II and its aftermath, Lowen traces Stanford’s transformation as a new generation of administrators, especially Terman, embraced federal funds to realize their own dreams for developing a premier institution of higher learning.

Inevitably, Terman occupies center stage in the story, and the book offers a wonderfully nuanced treatment of his efforts at Stanford. He worked across the entire institution, from the hard sciences and engineering to the social sciences and humanities. His use of government research contacts to benefit the university and the local economy emerges very clearly here, as Lowen offers another recounting of the development of Silicon Valley. A central element, in her account, was Terman’s ability to connect corporate and federal funding in ways that let Stanford control the research enterprise. Similarly, Lowen shows how Terman used private foundation money in pursuit of growth, especially in the development of the social sciences. Moreover, her history fully demonstrates the consequences of this strategy for the whole university. Individuals and departments alike faced pressure to pursue research questions that could attract financial support from the federal government. The biology faculty, for example, was strongly encouraged to develop a research center analogous to the Scripps Institute; Terman scrutinized new hires in every department to insure that they were oriented toward his approach to research and funding. Older norms of governance, including departmental autonomy in the hiring of faculty and the appointment of department chairs, gave way before Terman’s imperative of developing large research projects. Lowen discusses the physics department’s unsuccessful rearguard action to control its own destiny in the wake of the Stanford Linear Accelerator’s appearance on campus.

It is easy to attribute change at Stanford to Terman’s domineering efforts—an interpretation he likely would have accepted. But a strength of Lowen’s work is her inclusion of other actors in the story, enabling her to demonstrate that change was not attributable simply to a top-down administration guided by Frederick Terman. Rather, she shows that the...