Capitalism Goes to College: A People's History of Higher Education in the U.S.

Higher education in the United States has been an ideological tool of the ruling classes since the first colonial settlements. This history has been masked by the liberal narrative of the ever-beneficent university stewarding public knowledge and providing skilled workers for the petty bourgeois of the future. This liberal narrative of higher education as a salve for the ills of society masks a rigid and repressive history, one marked by westward expansion, participation in the creation of the US war machine, and complicity with the establishment ideology. Importantly, higher education in the United States has also been marked by a series of social upheavals, beginning prior to the student uprisings of the 60s, but who's tradition continues today. We see a turn toward campus yet again as a hotbed for political activity, and it's time we trace the lineage of higher education in America to tell a real people's history.