Customer Reviews

Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford

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I agree with the book summary supplied by Amazon and with previous, favorable reviews/comments. This book gives valuable insights into how one university built up its resources to become prominent. Do not be put off by any suspicions you may have that the author is "biased;" while I suspect she looks with disapproval on right-wing Cold-warriors, the analysis is thorough and fair.

Let me cite a review excerpted on the back cover of this book, and then rephrase it from my own, perhaps less partisan viewpoint. A reviewer is quoted as saying, in part: "... subtle and meticulous account of the way in which Stanford administrators narrowed and deformed their university's educational and intellectual mission to accomodate cold war priorities ..." Now my partial restatement: "reshaped and targeted their university's educational and research missions to attract funding."

I was a graduate student in Political Science at Stanford in the 1960s, knew some people discussed in the book, and was funded (as a research assistant) by some of the agencies discussed by Lowen. I went on to become an assistant professor at another university, and there encountered some issues paralleling those at Stanford. I wish I knew then what this book has taught me about how faculty related (relate) to the administration and outside funders. I highly recommend this book.

With intelligence, clarity and humor, historian Rebecca Lowen shows what changed the Americanuniversity from an education-oriented to research-oriented institution anxious to grab a share of Cold War defense spending. Stanford University is her case study and its intriguing and famous staff and alums her cast of characters.

"Creating the Cold War University- The Transformation of Stanford" by Rebecca S. Lowen is an interesting book about how Stanford became wealthy in the 50's and the 60's thanks to federal money and industry contracts. Frederick Terman, often credited as being the father of Silicon Valley, called it a "Win-Win-Win" situation. The government funded basic and applied research (the difference between the two was often fuzzy) to develop military applications during the Cold War, the industry developed the products from the results of the research (and did not always have to directly fund the research), and companies like H-P, Varian, GE benefited greatly the effort. Finally Stanford became wealthy as well as excellent in research (which it was not in the 30's).

Lowen explains that "by 1960, the federal government was spending close to $1B for academic research and university-affiliated research centers, 79 percent of which went to just twenty universities, including Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech, MIT, Harvard and the University of Michigan" (page147). In the Shanghai ranking, Harvard is #1, Stanford is #2, Berkeley is #3, MIT is #5, Caltech is #6 and Michigan #18 only.

Money definitely helps. I had however reacted against the argument as military money can not explain by itself the entrepreneurial spirit that Boston and Silicon Valley developed. Caltech and its JPL laboratory never reached the same start-up activity. But the quality of universities and their wealth is an extremely strong ingredient for successful technology clusters.

A previous reviewer says this book describes the Cold War conversion of Stanford University "from an education-oriented to [a] research-oriented institution". Might just note that both Stanford's founder and its first president held strongly expressed views that research -- particularly including quite applied research -- was an essential element of university education. Stanford was research-oriented, as an essential part of being education-oriented, from day one, in 1891.