The Higher Learning in America: The Annotated Edition

Almost a century ago Thorstein Veblen analyzed how Big Business got down to the business of higher education in America. We are fortunate today to have Richard Teichgraeber's rediscovery of this classic work, enhanced by his keen annotations that help explain the wicked satire of this trenchant social critic. -- John Thelin, University of Kentucky, author of A History of American Higher Education The republication of Thorstein Veblen's The Higher Learning in America in this new annotated edition-which sorts out the allusions and citations in Veblen's highly allusive writing-will be a tremendous help to scholars, students, and general readers alike. -- Chad Wellmon, University of Virginia Reading The Higher Learning in America is an exercise in going back to the future. The dreary past of higher education described by Veblen in 1918 seems distressingly similar to its increasingly bleak future under the command of a new generation of leaders once mocked by Veblen as 'captains of erudition.' This splendid annotated edition will introduce a new generation of readers to Veblen's insightful work. -- Benjamin Ginsberg, author of The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters Richard Teichgraeber's new edition of Veblen's classic tract on the early twentieth-century American research university is a remarkable achievement. His extended Introduction not only explores the book's complex genesis and various levels of meaning, but it raises a host of important issues that confirm Veblen's continued timeliness as a critic and analyst of higher education. Teichgraeber fully restores Veblen's work to the academic culture and social values of the era in which it was written, but he also uses The Higher Learning to provide an erudite commentary on the state of the universities a hundred years later. -- John W. Boyer, University of Chicago Thorstein Veblen's odd, energetic, and idiosyncratic classic The Higher Learning in America, is more pertinent today than it was when it was published over a century ago. This new edition, with Teichgraeber's splendid introduction and deeply informative notes, reintroduce this book into debates it anticipated and still illuminates. -- Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Director, National Humanities Center

With a detailed chronology, suggested readings, and comprehensive notes identifying events, individuals, and institutions to which Veblen alludes, this volume is sure to become the standard teaching text for Veblen's classic work and an invaluable resource for students of both the history and the current workings of the American university.Since its publication in 1918, Thorstein Veblen's The Higher Learning in America has remained a text that every serious student of the American university must confront. Intellectual historian Richard Teichgraeber brings us the first scholarly edition of Veblen's classic, thoroughly edited, annotated, and indexed. An extensive introduction discusses the book's composition and publishing history, Veblen's debts to earlier critics of the American university, and the place of The Higher Learning in America in current debates about the American university. Veblen's insights into the American university system at the outset of the twentieth century are as provocative today as they were when first published. Insisting that institutions of higher learning should be dedicated solely to the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, he urged American universities to abandon commitments to extraneous pursuits such as athletics, community service, and vocational education. He also believed that the corporate model of governance-with university boards of trustees dominated by well-to-do businessmen and university presidents who functioned essentially as businessmen in academic dress-mandated unsavory techniques of salesmanship and self-promotion that threatened to reduce institutions of higher learning to the status of competitive business enterprises. With a detailed chronology, suggested readings, and comprehensive notes identifying events, individuals, and institutions to which Veblen alludes, this volume is sure to become the standard teaching text for Veblen's classic work and an invaluable resource for students of both the history and the current workings of the American university.