If you’re interested in reading about the major events that shaped the evolution of universities in the twentieth century, then you could do a lot worse than invest a few hours in reading Elizabeth Popp Berman’s Creating the Market University: How Academic Science Became an Economic Engine.

Most histories of science rightly point to Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay “Science: the Endless Frontier” as the point at which the U.S. government definitively committed itself to funding university science in a big way. The logic was that academic science, which acted as a reservoir of ideas on which industry could draw, was a public good and needed to be supported as such. Berman argues that from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, the science-as-reservoir was replaced by a science-as-economic-engine logic that pushed American scientists to look at how the market valued their research and to seek out opportunities to work with outside partners to increase the value of their knowledge.

What distinguishes Berman from others looking at similar phenomena is her refusal to simply label this as an exercise in neo-liberalism. To be sure, she grants that some of the developments that pushed universities in this direction – notably the 1978 tax changes that favoured venture capital, the Chakrabarty Supreme Court decision – were rooted in free-market logic. But many others of them were rooted in the thinking of economists like Kenneth Arrow, who pointed out that markets on their own could produce suboptimal investments in R&D.

In fact, she points out the real shift in thinking happened not in universities but in governments. Dismayed by U.S. economic performance in the 1970s, state and federal governments began to focus on innovation as a key driver of economic performance. This led them to incentivize institutions to get their knowledge into the hands of American industry so as to make better products and produce more jobs. Far from the shift to the market being a result of government cutbacks (cuts, for the most part, happened in physics and chemistry, whereas the push to market was led by academics in biology and engineering), it was in fact the result of a shift in how governments thought about economic growth.

It’s a very American history, of course, but Canada went through a very similar process ten years later in the 1980s and 1990s, and most of the rest of the world followed suit as well. Indeed, thirty-five years on from the events Berman recounts, good market-focussed academic science is now the gold standard for universities everywhere. Well-written and admirably succinct, this tale of how the modern university acquired these market ideals is definitely worth a read.