Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn, "The Autocratic Academy: Reenvisioning Rule Within America's Universities" (Duke UP, 2023)
b"Critics of contemporary US higher education often point to the academy\\u2019s \\u201ccorporatization\\u201d as one of its defining maladies. However, in\\xa0The Autocratic Academy: Reenvisioning Rule Within America's Universities\\xa0(Duke UP, 2023), 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.\\nThis 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\\u2019s Dartmouth v. Woodward ruling (1819), and into the twenty-first century, Kaufman-Osborn shows how the university\\u2019s 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\\u2019s autocrats, Kaufman-Osborn argues that American universities must now be reincorporated in accordance with the principles of democratic republicanism. Only then can the academy\\u2019s members hold accountable those chosen to govern and collectively determine the disposition of higher education\\u2019s unique public goods.\\nTimothy V. Kaufman-Osborn is Baker Ferguson Professor of Politics and Leadership Emeritus at Whitman College and author of\\xa0From Noose to Needle: Capital Punishment and the Late Liberal State\\xa0and\\xa0Creatures of Prometheus: Gender and the Politics of Technology.\\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices\\nSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law"